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For the utilitarians here:
Is suffering in dreams morally relevant? If not, why not?
I’m not a 100% utilitarian but anyway – If other suffer in dreams it is irrelevant for the same reason suffering in films or books is morally irrelevant – it doesn’t actually happen. If you as the dreamer are suffering in your dream, well, you are sort of doing it to yourself and also there’s nothing that can be done about that (other than a healthy lifestyle without stress which reduces the chances of nightmares I guess), so it is not a very interesting point.
Given that there are drugs which have vivid nightmares as a known side effect (e.g. Lamictal), I’d say it’s a little more complicated than “doing it to yourself”.
I mean, obviously the dream is only happening inside your brain, but all suffering takes place inside the brain anyway so I’m not sure how dream-suffering is fundamentally different than waking suffering (except perhaps that people tend not to remember their dreams very well, so they have less of a lasting impact than waking experiences). It’s just caused by different things.
I mean, depression certainly causes suffering, and that’s only happening in your brain.
Of course “you can’t really stop yourself from having bad dreams” is a relevant point. But someday there might be a pill that can stop nightmares from happening, and if there was I might want to take it, because I don’t particularly want to suffer, whether I’m awake or dreaming.
“Should we work on a pill that can prevent nightmares?” strikes me as a relevant question for utilitarians, from that perspective.
Personally, I find I feel better after having had a lot of intense dreams and notice a correlation between restful sleep and dreaming. Put another way, dreaming feels to me like a chance for the mind to “take out garbage,” so while it is possible to experience some distress during a bad dream, it never feels qualitatively the same to me as waking distress and I’m usually glad when it’s done.
During times of high stress (and paradoxically, times of low stress, as described below) I find I don’t have a lot of dreams, which I attribute to not entering REM enough.
One might prefer not to need to have the bad dreams, but once you’ve watched the horror movie, experienced the stress, etc. your brain has to process it one way or another. So not having bad dreams at that point is sort of like not having a bowel movement after eating a giant, spicy meal. It might hurt a little on the way out, but better it come out than hang around.
That said, I do notice some correlation between spending a lot of time meditating and experiencing subjectively dreamless sleep. I attribute it to meditating having a similar “psychic purgative” effect to REM sleep. That is, REM sleep correlates with restful sleep, but meditation lowers the need for restful sleep to some extent, while never fully replacing it.
My subjective experience is actually quite the opposite, so I am hesitant to believe either of our experiences says much meaningful about the role of dreams.
I have more dreams with much more disturbing content when I’m under high stress. When I wake up from those dreams, I am exhausted and miserable and it adversely affects my quality of life. When I am less stressed (or stressed but have a non-nightmare night) I either hardly dream or hardly remember my dreams, and I feel much much better.
Well, I don’t see your experience as contradicting my theory, though I admit mine is just a theory based on subjective experience: namely, if dreams function as a way to “process” stressful stimuli, then one should expect to have more and more intense dreams during times of high stress.
But I also experience that sometimes I am too stressed out to enter into deep sleep and only after I “come down” from a period of high stress am I able to sleep deeply and “process,” as it were.
As for feeling tired after a night of intense dreams, it does seem to be the opposite of my experience, though one can’t really compare how one might have felt in the opposite circumstance (had one had a stressful day followed by a night without dreams); comparing how one feels after a relaxing day is not the same.
For example, one might feel better in the immediate aftermath of an orthopedic injury were the body not to react with inflammation. Yet inflammation is part of the healing process, not part of the injury (of course, it does stick around longer than is adaptive in some cases).
Certainly not a utilitarian, or a moral realist for that matter, but dreams can have physiological effects, as boys hitting puberty usually find out :-).
Night terrors, trauma dreams etc. usually disturb sleep to such an extent that the dreamers waking life is severely diminished, so suffering in dreams is very relevant.
I don’t think that’s what Salem is getting at – my understanding is that they want to know people’s view as to whether (the dreamer’s subjective) suffering in dreams should be regarded as morally relevant.
Second order caveats aside, I personally think it should. So… morally relevant insofar as anything is morally relevant, I guess. Boo to suffering in dreams.
I’m saying that because dreams have physiological effects, they are morally relevant (although “morals” are subjective preferences, not real things out in objective reality.)
Assuming you mean the suffering of the dreamer rather than the suffering of non-existent dream people, then yes, it’s relevant.
Suffering isn’t about what’s happening to your body, it’s about how you feel. If you feel like you’re suffering you’re suffering.
As relevant as emotional suffering in general, I would think.
Of course it’s utility relevant, but what do you mean by morally?
Obviously absolute suffering from the same event in a dream and real life is vastly lower. There might be some additional discounting to watch out if it’s the case that people suffer less aftereffects like trauma from dream suffering.
Probably. If you had a technology that could induce terrifying nightmares, I think I would be justifiably upset if you used it on me.
Probably depends on the dreamer, or more precisely, on what stage the dreamer is at in his life.
I went through my first emotionally serious romantic breakup when I was 17. It’s embarrassingly stupid looking back on it now, but at the time it felt like the end of the world. (As is common for one’s first breakup, I imagine.) For a few years after that I had nightmares where I was back together with the girl, or where I was back in the situation where our relationship had just ended, or where we’d have some other kind of awkward run-in. Waking up from those I felt traumatized and horrified, and sometimes delayed going to sleep because I was dreading the possibility of more of those nightmares.
But eventually I grew out of it. Nearly 2 decades later, I still occasionally have dreams with that girl in them, and while those dreams are basically the same when they happen, I have enough else going on in my life (wife, kids, career) that I don’t even think about it much, and probably most of the time I forget those dreams within a few moments of waking up anyway.
Who’s causing it? Moral systems other than utilitarianism require a conscious perpetrator for something to be morally wrong.
SSC, when did virgin become an insult? Or something we make fun of at all?
Don’t know for sure, but I would guess things changed around 1960, when the pill became available. Between the pill and antibiotics, you could pretty much have sex without consequences.
I think this is also a consequence of the world becoming richer. The key leverage HFA men used to have in seeking a partner was the ability to earn money and provide. With welfare and high living standards this leverage has become increasingly useless in the West.
As a proud largely asexual virgin autist who will never have sex, I don’t care. Rationality is too important to allow sex to get in the way. I’m happy to never have to deal with a partner who I have to see almost every day.
You’re coming off a little… euphoric, here.
I suspect that in the past a lot of HFAs would have ended up as religious celibates.
Yes the Catholic Church provided a socially acceptable way for men and women to avoid sex.
I strongly agree. Currently with secularization one key new profession that has a large number of HFAs is STEM.
I’d imagine that older members in ancient world armies would give newbies a hard time over having never been with a woman.
Virginity is just a sign for a male being inexperienced in the ways of the world, so I imagine it’s been an insult since the evolution of speech. At the very least, I’d wager it’s been an insult for men for about as long as “slut” has been an insult for women.
I think this is probably culture-dependent. Some cultures are more sex-positive and others are not. It basically depends on what kind of memes a culture has.
Many scientists and mathematicians are lifelong virgins. There is nothing wrong with an individual being a virgin. Instead there is something very wrong with any society in which some of the most brilliant minds become evolutionarily extinct. In the long run a society that does not encourage its geniuses to reproduce tends to lose its brilliance.
Doesn’t the fact that humanity is able of consistently producing geniuses, from Aristotle to Einstein, passing for many sung and unsung smart people in all kind of eras, places and cultures, destroy your theory?
Either most of smart people reproduce, thus ensuing the continuity of their heritage, or the ability of the humanity for producing smart people is not contingent on their reproduction.
I think is probably both to some degree. Alas, I don’t have the time of going in a internet spree, but your argument doesn’t hold much water.
I’m not sure about your first statement. According to Wikipedia IQ and fertility are negatively correlated while IQ and survival rate of offspring are positively correlated. In a society where survival is no longer an issue evolution tends to lower the average IQ. Your second statement is more likely to be correct though.
I do believe humanity is increasingly hostile to its brilliant section because ironically technological progress makes it easier to get away with irrationality, lack of long term planning and other less productive traits. So basically our great Grey Tribe is sadly digging its own grave by developing new technologies such as AI that can replace ourselves in the long run.
Maybe we should think about how to preserve and strengthen the Grey Tribe in the age of AI.
I would think the answer to that is obvious; we’re going to teach the AI grey-tribe values, like devaluing mass-market athletic competitions in favor of paperclips.
@The Nybbler I think we need to do more. We may be able to make everyone Grey through transhumanism.
Aluminum oxide is gray.
You know what else is Gray?
Goo.
“Sex-positive” is a nonsense word, though. It means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
Traditional western cultures in the 19th century and before were “sex-positive” about sex between married men and women. It was broadly considered a good thing. On the other hand, they were not “positive” about homosexuality. The ancient Romans were “positive” about almost every kind of sexuality, including some we find morally repellant today, like pedophilia. Today’s values are different from either of those two cultures, but it’s silly to try to reduce the difference to “negative” versus “positive.”
As far as I know, the only major culture that was ever really “sex-negative” was the Shakers, and, well, they aren’t around any more.
I agree. I should have used a different term. Real major sex-negative cultures probably only exist in highly religious monastic communities.
I’m not so sure. English Renaissance writers didn’t seem to have any more respect for men sleeping around before marriage than they did for women. I’m thinking of Hamlet:
Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Macbeth has the same sort of stuff, but I don’t feel like looking it up.
Yes, in practice men could probably get away with sleeping around in a way women couldn’t, but I’m not sure being a virginal man would have been considered a “bad” thing. It seems to me it would have been respected.
For men, I believe that one predates history. For women, I’m not sure it is considered broadly insulting in Western civilization even now, but I’d wager the number of subcultures in which it is considered insulting, increased greatly in the 1960s because A: the pill and B: politicized “free love”.
Maybe men in “ancient armies” used to jibe at each other over sexual inexperience, but I’m guessing that virginity was a less recognized concept before Christianity came along.
I think only in recent years have men become severely shamed for virginity, and not just by other men. Apparently many women consider virginity in men a “red flag”, indicating awful defects.
TV Tropes has a collection of examples of virgin-shaming in media. Some go back to the 1970s, but most of them are much more recent.
Now that it’s less acceptable to shame men for supposed homosexuality (“Never had a girlfriend? You must be gay!”), that same impulse has been redirected toward sexual inexperience per se.
There is also the rise of the neckbeard/”nice guy” stereotype which Scott discusses in Radicalizing the Romanceless. A man who has never had intercourse is not merely inexperienced; he might belong to this detested outgroup.
This is a harmful trend. Many male virgins are fairly intelligent. Many work in STEM fields. Detesting virginity is hating a pretty much contributive group. Many male virgins are Grey Tribers as well.
“Many” does not establish “disproportionately many”, and it definitely doesn’t establish “sufficiently many to outweigh all the negative correlates”.
I agree. However there will be consequences when a group with enough STEM nerds no longer have any reason to be loyal to the human species.
For example if aliens invade some angry male virgins will be more than happy to sabotage human defenses for them. Angry male virgins may also intentionally create superintelligent AI to try to overthrow or attack the society. Some may attempt to cause grey goo as well. Do societies really want to deal with these scenarios? Can humanity afford to deal with these scenarios? Humanity will not be able to afford to have thousands of male virgins going SIMAD.
There are lots of more plausible problems that can be caused by having a big population of disenfranchised young men: it shows up in a lot of models of terrorism, for example. But on the other hand, we know what those problems are, and they aren’t bad enough to justify questions like “can humanity afford…”.
Do they want their group to endure? Because it’s the human species that creates more STEM nerds.
Society’s reaction to this sort of thing can be seen by the reaction to the Columbine massacre. If it is believed that a certain despised group will have members who react to their mistreatment by damaging the society which despises them, the response will be to mistreat them _worse_ to try to make sure they aren’t capable of doing any such damage.
@Nornagest Here it is more than disenfranchised young men. It is [i] talented [/i] and disenfranchiseed young men. An angry male virgin can use his STEM skills to significantly harm humanity such as purposefully trying to exterminate humans.
@John Schilling Some may not care about humanity any more.
@The Nybbler Then there might be a large scale virgin insurgency and terrorism until either a compromise or complete suppression of capable male virgins.
Technical talent’s not worth much when it comes to killing people, not without the help of a lot more more time and infrastructure than your average lone wolf has on tap. There are a few long-tail risks out there, sure, but when it becomes technically possible to build superintelligent AI, it almost certainly won’t be a single bitter nerd who’s the first to crack it. Bioengineered disease might have more potential for homegrown megadeaths, but bio isn’t very strongly associated with the pathetic nerd set.
Meanwhile, it might interest you to learn that engineers are heavily overrepresented among jihadists.
@Nornagaset However as long as bitter nerds can replicate the result they can destroy the world or use existential threat to blackmail humanity into fair treatment of all nerds.
I think one reason why engineers are overrepresented in jihadism is that literalist fundamentalism is semi-rational. Rational enough to follow the sacred books literally but not so rational that faith is shaken.
I suspect there’s some selection bias here. Engineers are overrepresented among jihadists you have heard of by name. This may be because engineers are more likely to become jihadists, or because they’re more likely to become jihadist leaders instead of suicide bombers. The later is particularly likely if the home society steers the best and brightest into engineering instead of, say, law.
@Autistic Cat —
Let me know how that works out for you.
@bean —
Yeah, Osama bin Laden was an engineer, as were some other Al-Qaeda higher-ups, but that’s not what I was thinking of. I read a breakdown of known jihadists involved in the Iraqi insurgency by profession sometime around 2008, and engineers were at the very top of the list, proportionally.
I can’t seem to source it now, though, so I might be misremembering. Don’t think so, though.
@Autistic Cat
An issue with your uprising scenario is that any one man who both has the skills to organise such a matter and the actual willpower to go through with it is also a man who probably won’t stay a virgin for long. I feel like ‘male, virgin, dissatisfied with his lot’ and ‘would become violent to the point of killing innocents’ are not particularly well-overlapping groups.
@Autistic Cat
No, there will never be a large-scale virgin insurgency. The kinds of people who care about attracting women but cannot are not cut out to run an insurgency; it’s people skills just the same.
@Nornagest
True or not, this is really little more than just another stick to beat nerds with.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1SX5I8N6FAUOR/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0691145172
“Many Islamic radicals are better educated than their peers, and a good proportion attended college – with many becoming engineers (Mohammad Atta, Osama bin Laden). The strange part about the latter is that it is a profession we would not naturally associated with a religious movement. Not surprisingly, the authors immediately jump into providing an informal list of such individuals – over a period of decades and a wide geographic area in the Middle East.
“Then, taking a more scientific and structured approach, they compile a list of 404 members of violent Islamist groups from 30 nationalities. Of that group, they found biographical information for 326 cases and educational information for 284. Of those, 26 had less than a secondary education, 62 completed secondary education (including madrasas), and 196 had higher education (at least 37 studied in Western countries). The share with higher education worked out to 69%. In 1986-87, when many of the individuals were studied, tertiary enrollment rates in the Arab world averaged 12.2%, leaving little doubt that violent Islamist radicals overall were vastly more educated than their compatriots.
“The authors were also able to find the subject of study for 178 of the 196 cases engaged in higher education at some point. The second most numerous group was comprised of 34 individuals who pursued Islamic studies – not surprising. However, the group that came first was engineers – 78 out of the 178, followed by 14 in medicine, 12 in economics and business, and 7 in natural sciences. Overall, the individuals who studied for engineering, medicine, and science represented 56.7%. Among the 42 of the 78 cases for whom they could find the precise discipline, electrical, civil, and computer-related studies predominated.
“The preceding pattern generalized except for Saudi Arabia (lower proportion of engineers) and Singapore/Indonesia (higher proportion). (Much less information was available regarding jihadists born/raised in the West. Again, however, engineering was overrepresented – to an even higher degree.)”
@Nornagest
I’m not sure that’s a complete counterexample. My point is that unless we can be sure we have a reasonably representative sample, overrepresentation by engineers could be at least partially an artifact of the fact that engineers are better at getting in the sample, and it’s not at all implausible that an engineer makes a better jihadi than an arabic major, and better jihadis are more likely to end up on the lists.
@Nornagest No I have better things to do. I don’t want sex. If one day I indeed do I will go for a legal prostitute in Nevada. If one day I do need a human spouse I will get one from the Third World. I’m a virgin because I don’t want these things, not because they are impossible to obtain.
@DeWitt and The Nybbler I agree. The Nevada solution and the sexbot solution are much easier and much better than starting a deadly Virgin War.
Thank you, Nancy.
This doesn’t quite work as “great name for a metal band”, but it feels like it should fit into the memeplex somewhere. title of your sex tape maybe.
It’s the specificity of “human” that really makes it work.
Not shutting the door on robots, I assume.
Cheap and effective robot wives are definitely the cold fusion of the incel community.
It’s bad to hate people for a harmless difference even if they aren’t especially useful.
Exactly!
When people sneer at something, it’s usually not an attempt at objective valuation, it’s an attempt at restoring their own status. It’s a kind of just world theory–everyone who excel in one are has to have a compensating deficit…beautiful but dumb, rich but crooked, smart but lonely.
I think it was always more nearly negative than positive applied to a man, but usually positive applied to a woman–and I think it’s currently at least ambiguous applied to a woman.
Female virginity used to substantially enhance a woman’s value on the marriage market, probably for several reasons. If a woman wasn’t a virgin she might be pregnant, and a man didn’t want to raise another man’s child. If she had been sexually active before marriage in a society whose norms disapproved of that, she might be unfaithful after–indeed might continue an existing affair. If she was sexually active before marriage in a society where that was quite imprudent, that was evidence of short sightedness, imprudence, characteristics that a man didn’t want in a wife. It might also mean that she very much liked sex, which was at least a mixed characteristic in a wife.
On the other hand, intercourse after engagement but before marriage seems to have been a pretty accepted practice back when other forms of premarital intercourse were not.
The existence of reliable contraception changed at least some of that. In a society where non-marital sex was safe, not having it could be taken as evidence of being unattractive to the opposite sex, a negative, or uninterested in sex, possibly a negative–consider the tone of “frigid.”
Don’t forget disease. I’ve seen it claimed that antibiotics actually had a bigger effect on promiscuity than reliable contraception.
Wouldn’t those reasons have made male virginity more attractive too?
If he wasn’t a virgin, he might have a child around somewhere whose mother would come back and demand support, or at least try to exact some revenge if he had abandoned her. He might be unfaithful after as well, which also risks pulling resources away from the family.
Short-sightedness and impudence don’t really seem like characteristics you’d want in a husband either, and ditto for the disease possibility.
I agree that “virginity enhancing a woman’s value on the marriage market” is the stereotype, but I’m trying to figure out why you don’t hear about it going both ways as much. I suppose some of it depends on who is doing the “choosing” and who is doing the “being chosen” in a given society. But for a long time, I think it was people other than the future-spouses doing a lot of the choosing, e.g. parents, and it seems like parents of both parties would want a marriage that was as secure and drama-free as possible.
There’s very little danger of a woman devoting great effort or resources to raising The Other Woman’s child because she mistakenly thought it was hers.
I imagine that in a society where the type of woman you want to marry is often/should be a virgin, you are probably having your premarital sex with a different type of woman. The type you are not likely to leave your wife for, and who might have a hard time making credible demands for child support.
1. There’s no male equivalent to the hymen. Regardless of questions about how reliable it actually is, many cultures across time have certainly held the belief that they could positively verify whether a woman had been a virgin.
2. It is much more damaging to other fitness measures of a society to control everyone’s movements to the degree that you’d need for, say, their family to be able to vouch for them never having had the opportunity to have had sex, than to only do so to half the population.
I think it’s a little more complicated. Many societies believed that the possession of a hymen was positive evidence of virginity. I’m not sure if there were ones where the absence was considered proof of non-virginity.
A few historical examples. I read a description of legal records, I think among Dutch Jews some centuries back, of ruptured hymens, presumably often in girls too young for intercourse to be a likely explanation. Pretty clearly the point was to be able to prove to the groom that there was an explanation for the lack of hymen.
Maimonides discusses the rules if the groom suspects the bride of not being a virgin–the ketubah for a virgin was higher than for a non-virgin. It sounds as though the evidence was not just the lack of a hymen but the vagina not being tight on first intercourse. How well that corresponds to medical reality I don’t know, although Maimonides was a physician and a very smart guy.
Casanova somewhere comments that a woman cannot be known to not be a virgin unless she has been pregnant.
My guess from such examples is that while some people might take it for granted that the lack of a hymen implied previous sex, sophisticated opinion in the past was that the hymen proved the presence of virginity but the absence did not prove non-virginity.
Many societies believed that the possession of a hymen was positive evidence of virginity. I’m not sure if there were ones where the absence was considered proof of non-virginity.
Also it’s not an either/or thing. A hymen is never completely intact because there’s a hole in the center even before it’s been stretched/ruptured, and traces of the hymen can remain even after a woman has had sex multiple times (though giving birth completely obliterates it).
Was it virginity per se that was derided in men, or was it being sexually undesirable? Were men in the past who were known to be virgins, but attractive or with high social status such that it was obvious that they could have had sex if they’d wanted to, mocked or looked down upon?
Building on this: male virginity is a proxy for being sexually undesirable. While some men may have sexual access to women and eschew it for ascetic reasons, they will predictably always be vastly outnumbered by men who lack sexual access to women, so long as humans are animals. Moreover, even in the former group, we would expect many to adopt this life of asceticism after having bedded a woman at least once, not before.
We might look at a guy who initially seems undesirable but then learn he has bedded many women. This indicates to us he has something going on that might not initially be clear to us — wealth, power, a wicked sense of humor; in a word: status. By contrast, if a guy seems good looking but has failed to bed a woman, we find ourselves looking for the “defect” that has led to this state of affairs. Perhaps we conclude there is no defect, and he is motivated purely by ascetic concerns, but I think most people would initially be suspicious of this.
David is right in his assessment of female virginity as a proxy for many things, a few of which could be undesirable, but most of which are desirable, particularly fidelity.
“If she had been sexually active before marriage in a society whose norms disapproved of that, she might be unfaithful after”
I think sexual experience is correlated with infidelity (in both men and women, though for different reasons) regardless of societal norms, though the effect is likely stronger in societies that disapprove of the practice, for reasons noted.
Another point: we can presume that if a woman is at least average-looking and still a virgin, she has had to turn men away (or her family has done so, depending on the society). The knowledge that she didn’t accept the first offer is an indication, to our human brains, that she has something of value, just as we might take more interest in a merchant’s magic beans if we saw him turn down an offer of $1 million for them.
Traditionally, if a woman had bedded many men, she was probably a prostitute, indicating especially low status. We know her price, and we are not inclined to pay more than that.
Personally, I think I’d be more tempted to cheat out of pure curiosity after marriage if my wife were the only person I’d ever had sex with before marriage. There is probably a stereotype that the desire for variety is stronger in men, though I don’t know if it’s actually true.
So, as much of a double standard as it is, a man who’s done “sewing his wild oats” might (possibly incorrectly) be seen as less likely to stray after marriage, whereas a woman who couldn’t wait for marriage might be seen as lacking the self control to stay faithful after marriage. I think the logic of it is that promiscuity is easier for women, yet so too, somehow, does monogamy come more naturally to them (so the stereotype goes, at least).
An anecdote from Reddit shows just how bad things are for male virgins:
Thanks for sharing that! Right now I think the issue is not virginity itself but instead what it implies about a person in a society. Do voluntary virgins have it better than involuntary ones?
Possibly? I understand monks were treated well enough, though that implies a certain amount of organization beyond the lack of sex.
That’s what I’m thinking about. Societies change. However the sadist nature of a group of humans has not. Virginity itself is not a problem at all if it does not indicate any underlying form of weakness. In this sense it can be seen as a form of signalling. Currently older virgin men are predominantly a group of people the society assumes to be socially weak. There is virgin-shaming not because virginity is inherently absurd but because people can get away with bullying the weak in general and virginity is currently associated with social weakness.
What virgin men should do is to use nonviolent, legal and harmless means to pressure this to stop by appearing strong. The problem is not virginity at all. Instead the real problem is social weakness.
This assumes the virgin men are virgin by choice.
If that’s the case: sure.
If not: They’d probably much rather put more effort into not being virgins than to try and glorify it.
@Zodiac I agree. In my case I’m just one day away from losing it at any time (i.e. a legal brothel in Nevada) anyway. As an autist I’m not good at seducing. However I’m not indecisive. If I really want sex I will visit Nevada within a week instead of complaining about virginity.
In the case of virgin incels they probably should also try a legal brothel first. This raises one’s socialsexual status by gaining sexual experience, sexual skills and at least prove that you are willing to do something to improve your own life.
No one will ever believe that a man is a virgin by choice.
Isolated anecdotes, especially unverifiable third hand ones, show nothing.
Was it ever not an insult for men?
I genuinely don’t know, so I figured I’d ask.
We do have some very old texts available, including comedic and dramatic material from the Greeks and Romans that might address the matter. Do any of them mention male virgins?
The Bible talks about all sorts of odd stuff but I don’t recall anything about male virgins.
Personally I don’t recall ever reading anything from a pre-modern work that indicates contempt for male virgins.
In Tale of Genji there seems to be general contempt for those who don’t play the game (interestingly, both male and female; if you don’t have lovers, it’s assumed it’s because you don’t have game. Though a woman having it be absolutely known that she has lovers was likely to be in a problematic position, so for women the goal in the game seems to have been to have exactly the right level of deniable rumors about them).
I seem to remember WEB Dubois writing in his autobiography that he was teased by other boys for being a virgin sometime in the late nineteenth century, but it’s been a while since I read it and it might have been more to do with being a general stick-in-the-mud.
I remember Napoleon wrote (or spoke?) about losing his virginity, I’m not sure if he wrote about a sense of shame.
[According to “Napoleon Against Himself: A Psychobiography:
I don’t get the sense that Napoleon was greatly socially pressured to have sex? Perhaps the opposite?
]
On the official subreddit, I asked the following question:
A very interesting interesting discussion followed, allowing this curious goy a peek into Hasidic Jewish life.
Thanks for posting that– I’m Jewish, but non-observant. The reddit discussion was mostly things I didn’t know.
Something I don’t think gets mentioned enough is that Judaism is an unmanagably large topic.
Yes, but I’m not on reddit.
Would you mind me asking how “worldly” your community is?
As in, how tuned in is the average Haredi to world affairs and pop culture?
Also, how did you come by the rationalsphere?
In my community (which is not the only type of Haredi community, to be sure), people generally don’t watch television or movies or listen to secular music. Internet use and exposure to secular literature varies. (Personally I try not to read things that are the equivalent of R-rated or beyond.)
I read HPMOR after I saw a link on a science fiction website, and started posting actively maybe a year later, IIRC after someone linked to “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup.”
Thank you!
Yes, I’m a practicing Jew, although I don’t believe in it anymore. I’m still deep in the closet though and all my neighbors and family are religious.
How connected they are depends on the community. Hassidim are typically the most insular, while modern orthodox are the most open to the secular life. I grew up in a yeshivish (Lithuanian) community, so we’re somewhere in between.
What is the retention rate? Do a lot of people drop out of the lifestyle?
In the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, the town of Sunnydale is located on a hell-mouth and as a result suffers from an overabundance of supernatural activity, some of it very dangerous. In one of the later episodes, it becomes clear that while the town’s murder rate is many times the national norm, the town’s leadership and police and local media conceal this from the citizenry to avoid driving people away.
How plausible is it that the civic leaders of a town or city could juke the stats on murder by a substantial factor?
I think if the murders are not “natural”, it’s completely plausible. The way you normally notice the difference between living in a town with X murder victims per year and 5X murder victims per year is not by knowing personally many victims or their families (unless it’s a very small town or a humongous X). It’s by noticing things that are much more frequent and highly correlate with murder rate: muggings, theft, burglaries, gangs of people mulling about in the streets, sketchy storeowners, broken traffic lights etc. etc. etc. If you go from X to 5X just by supernaturally murdering 4X of the victims without all those other effects, I expect the police and the municipality could absolutely cover it up.
It turns out the murder rate can vary quite a bit even in respectable places, from 2/100,000/year in Toronto to 19/100,000/year in Atlanta. Maybe the cops’ best bet is to admit they have a crime problem but attributing it to something other than weird supernatural woo, such as drug dealers with a taste for grisly murder.
What?
Atlanta’s pretty well known for being high crime.
This was, of course, the canonical approach of the Sunnydale PD. They didn’t have monsters, the town was just beset by a particularly nasty gang who really enjoyed PCP.
Per Mr. Trick, the murder rate wasn’t covered up – they had an official murder rate equivalent to D.C. at its worst. They just blamed it on mundane crime.
It never struck me at the time but in retrospect this also isn’t great for a cover up. I can’t help but think the news would also be covering a small town where a PCP-crazed gang is doing things like invading parent teacher night and horribly murdering everyone, even without the supernatural connection.
This is 1997 (to 2003 by the end of the series, nsgre juvpu fhaalqnyr qbrfa’g rkvfg nalzber), mostly before the 24-hour news cycle was fully established. All they have to do is arrange ‘accidents’ for any investigative reporters that come poking around.
I think it’s also sometimes implied that there’s, in the universe of the show, a natural human tendency to seek mundane explanations to rationalize things they see and forget any supernatural details.
The failure mode for murders, so far as I can tell, is the media – murders usually get news coverage, especially in a small town, and the relatives of the deceased will expect it. You can thus count news stories on murders or mysterious deaths in a year to get independant numbers for the murder count. If it disagrees too much with the official stats, it’s a giant red flag. You can probably outright lie about most smaller crimes, but not murder. (That said, a lot of them getting ruled as accidents, suicide, etc. could reduce the stats in “normal” ways).
“Have you ever wondered why, why the crime rate in Sandford is so low, yet the accident rate is so high?“
A lot of things are plausible if you are an ancient Sumerian God in a world where somewhat bright high school students who are not even major cast members can cast reality-warping level magic.
In the US, not much. Murders are the most clear-cut crime because
1) You have a body and
2) Someone disappears forever.
In the Buffyverse, there were very reliable ways of getting rid of bodies available to our baddies (like feeding them to the Mayor or other monster of the week). I’m not sure how they handled the whole “disappear forever” thing; some of the deaths were of transients, where you don’t have that problem directly. But if these are anything but completely below-the-radar hobo types, eventually the rest of the country will notice the “If you go to Sunnydale you disappear” pattern.
Rotherham showed us that the civic leaders of a first-world city can cover up a horrific number of rapes, without even really trying, so I wouldn’t rule out something similar for murders. Two constraints:
1. Rotherham involved rapes almost exclusively among what we would call the “white trash” or perhaps “deplorable” demographic, low-status people that the media in particular prefers to laugh at rather than sympathize with. When you start getting Pretty (middle class) White Women as victims, it’s much harder to convince everyone to ignore the inbred hick losers spouting conspiracy theories.
2. Rapes may have complaining victims that you need to silence or convince everyone to ignore, where murders leave silent but conspicuous corpses that first-world nations as a matter of policy don’t ignore. It perhaps helps if they die of something very unconventionally mudery, i.e. two puncture wounds to the neck rather than gunshot wounds, but you’re going to need the coroner to be an active party to a deliberate conspiracy. That becomes less plausible as “coroner” points to a bureaucracy rather than a person. Word of God says that Buffyverse Sunnyvale = Santa Barbara, so a quick google says their coroner’s department has five people. Borderline.
In Buffy, the victims mostly weren’t white trash, the very pretty white woman Cordelia Chase figured it out by the end of the first season, and the entire high school graduating class by the end of S3. So, probably not plausible that the media wouldn’t have made a scandal of it long before then. But within the above constraints, maybe. Can’t be common, because at least some coroners will eventually talk.
In the show, the news media were in on the conspiracy. There was an episode in S3, I think, where a reporter was talking to a cop and asked if they wanted the standard PCP/gang-violence story.
Still, this is suggesting a rather large conspiracy: all or most cops, all or much of the coroner’s office, at least the cop/crime-facing portions of the news media, and maybe some people at city hall too.
Oh heck, it goes higher than that. There was a (kind of crappy) federal government conspiracy trying to cover up demons so they could weaponize them.
I am unfamiliar with the Buffyverse, but is it implied that Riverdale is the ONLY place that has such issues with the supernatural?
Surely in a universe where vampires and goblins exist, there is more crime (and more murder specifically) generally, everywhere, than a universe where they don’t. So they “out of the ordinary” threshold may be higher, if that makes sense?
There’s another hellmouth in Cleveland, and LA has plenty of supernatural stuff going on. We didn’t see enough of the rest of the world to know very much about what goes on there. (Also, it’s Sunnydale, not Riverdale.)
Yeah, but what about in the show?
I see two additional issues for this, besides the size of the coroner’s department (on which I agree with your assessment):
1. Sunnydale’s cover-up operation appears to be orchestrated by the mayor, who’s a big player on the local supernatural-villainy scene and who has been running the city (under multiple successive identities) for over a century. But in California, the coroner’s office appears to be a county-level operation, not city-level, so it’s harder (not impossible) for the mayor to control.
2. California appears to have a Coroner’s Inquest process, where any suspicious death (determined by the coroner or by any of half a dozen or so state, county, or city officials) gets reviewed by a process where the coroner presents evidence to a jury in a public hearing and it’s the jury, not the coroner, who makes the official ruling about cause of death. I suppose this could be gamed by a sufficiently determined and connected conspiracy (gaming the jury selection process, presenting cherry-picked or fabricated evidence, etc), but it creates a very large surface area for the secret to leak out. Especially since Coroner’s Inquests in common law were set up for the specific purpose of making it difficult for coroners to hush up murders.
In a locale more near and dear to the rationalist community than Rotherham – the SF bay area – something similar is happening regarding BART crime: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholding-surveillance-videos-of-crime-to-avoid-stereotypes/
Pretty poor cover-up.
The show sometimes (but not consistently) treated the tendency to downplay Sunnydale’s dangers as an ambient supernatural effect. (On the other hand, the high school paper had a regular obit column.) Just what allowed some people and groups to twig while the majority continued to ascribe vampire attacks to gangs hopped up on PCP, and how one transitioned from blindness to awareness, was never really made clear. (Nor was the extent to which it was simple willful ignorance, something the mayor did, or something about the Hellmouth generally.)
Buffy and the gang actively informing people seems to have been one method of removing the blinders– e.g., Oz’s responding to the revelation about vampires and the Hellmouth with “that explains a lot”. But plenty of villains of the week or season figured it out on their own. (E.g., most parent are clueless, Buffy’s mom only finds out when Buffy tells her, but Amy’s mom turns herself into a practicing witch.)
Mostly it’s plot-driven- the show is very much about horror going on under the surface of our world, rather than a secondary world in which vampires, demons, and magic are a known an accepted element. So no one is going to try to go public even though a simple public health information campaign (don’t invite strangers in, keep some holy water around even if you aren’t Catholic, etc.) could really do wonders to promote vampire safety.
Tangent, but in a world where that worked (and similar preventative measures from other religions didn’t), wouldn’t it be rational to become Catholic?
(F. Paul Wilson’s Midnight Mass touches on an interesting exploration of this: one of the main characters is a rabbi who wears a cross around his neck because that’s the one thing that keeps back vampires. Read the short story; the expansion into a novel really isn’t worth it.)
In Peter Watts’s Blindsight, there’s an actual physiological reason for vampires reacting badly to crosses (and anything with such right angle intersections in their vision). So religion wouldn’t enter into it at all.
It’s a fantastic book, by the way. Anybody who like to read SF and has an interest in the nature of consciousness and the ways in which our perceptual system lies to us will enjoy it.
I started Blindsight twice, but got bogged down both times while they were just starting to explore the alien spaceship. Things were weird, nothing interesting was happening, and none of the characters held my sympathy.
(Watts’s explanation clearly doesn’t hold within Midnight Mass, though, because those vampires are perfectly fine around other right angles. And, I don’t think there could be any such physiological explanation for vampires reacting to holy water.)
Modern vampire stories tend to shy strongly away from any religious implications of the vampires sensitivities, even where those aren’t given an alternate explanation a la Blindsight. Buffy in particular was a mythological mishmash: vampires are the result of basically Lovecraftian demons who preexisted humanity taking up residence inside corpses, but Christian holy symbols work on them because reasons.
(And later somehow one of those corpse-demons eventually could develop the desire for a soul, and other demons proved to be more or less just folks instead of inhuman aspects of a prior reality indifferent to and inimical to humans.)
There are also lots of pagan gods, trolls, mummies, the First Evil who may or may not be Satan, and the occasional hint of divine Providence. Basically whatever was needed that week. Either way, no one ever really bothers to ask whether the fact that crosses and water blessed by a priest have repeatable physical effects has any larger implications worth considering.
I would have liked a seriously religious character in Buffy, but you’re almost guaranteed to offend someone.
(Butcher seems to have gotten away with it – he’s vague on whether Jehovah is actually in charge of all his material Gods, but Michael Carpenter is one of the best religious characters I can name.)
It’s handled without explicit reference to real world religions, but the main character’s arc on Angel is pretty obviously meant to be a religious one.
Albeit, clearly not a positive portrayal of religion, given that the arc can be summed up as a depressed guy finding meaning and purpose in serving God, then ultimately finding out God is just as ultimately destructive as the devil and killing both of them.
(Or dying symbolically in the futile effort to do so, depending how you read the last episode.)
@MrApophenia
That’s fair, and I guess that Ethan Rayne and the disciples of Glory, Jasmine, etc are religious, but what I meant (and didn’t say very well) was that I would have loved a sympathetic portrayal of an recognizable modern person of faith.
(Somebody like the more religious lead in Book of Mormon, even – you can make fun of him or her, as long as you get who they are.)
You’re right that Angel goes through an existential arc where he gets disappointed in divine power and sets out for himself (more than once, because he’s not very smart!), and there’s room for “formerly religious, not existentialist” characters like Angel or Stannis Baratheon or John Constantine, or Preacher (at least so far on the show – I haven’t read the comic), but I think there’s also some room for “actually religious, in a way that most of the religious people J Mann knows are religious.”
A sceptic could argue that Catholicism simply went around nabbing anything that worked on vampires and called it a holy symbol.
“Early Christians used a fish as their symbol, but they replaced it with the torture device that killed their Lord? That’s suspicious isn’t it.”
On another tangent a lot of modern urban fantasy where crosses work on vampires also have evidence for other faiths. For example Voodoo priests can raise zombies in the Buffyverse.
That’s an interesting idea, which yes, I’ve seen before. But there’re several things that couldn’t really be nabbed without some supernatural power. Holy water is water with a pinch of salt and a blessing spoken over it; if vampires aren’t repelled by the sea, there’s no natural reason for them to be repelled by holy water. Consecrated hosts are the same way, only more so.
(If they were repelled by both holy water and Tibetan prayer wheels, on the other hand, things would be more complicated. I’d probably guess they were both placebos and it was the psychological attitude doing the work, and proceed to do double-blind tests with blessed v. unblessed water, or water blessed by a priest v. water blessed by a layman.)
My go-to explanation when using vampires in fiction is that crosses and other holy objects work based on the subconscious faith (or belief) of the vampire; it’s effectively a psychosomatic reaction on the vampire’s part.
You have some medieval peasant that is bitten and rises as a vampire, and faced with a reminder of his humanity in the form of a cross or other holy object – something he considered sacred in life – is startled long enough to overcome the hunger and feel guilt as to what he’s become, and recoils enough for the mob to stake him. Enough medieval peasants turned vampires get staked by cross-wielding mobs and it enters the lore, making the effect more powerful. You get to the modern era and find that a newly-turned vampire might be an atheist that doesn’t believe in Christianity but does have a subconscious recollection that crosses harm vampires that has the same effect.
I find a lot of unexpected benefits to this approach to vampiric weaknesses. It also allows for the effect to be tailored to the plot. Somebody grabbing a couple of sticks and holding them in the shape of a cross might not be enough to trigger the mental reaction, on the other hand, a priest in full vestment wielding a fancy symbol is likely to have a more powerful effect, which will be attributed by observers to the strength of the priest’s faith. An ancient vampire might be less weakened by lingering humanity, more cynical about God, or otherwise resistant or immune to the effect. And some individual vampires may be vulnerable to different religious symbols, or anyone that comes across as extraordinarily holy.
Crucifixion was a big deal in pre-Christian Rome- the slave in the play who says ‘I know I was born to be crucified’, the line in Odi et Amo where ‘I Hate and I Love and it’s Crucifying me’; this isn’t retconned by monks afterward. It was the big publicly displayed torture threat.
Tangent to your tangent, I watched the first episode of Netflix’s Castlevania series, and of course they had to make the Catholic Church out to be awful bad guys for burning a witch, but, I mean, in the context of the story, she literally was a consort of Dracula and did acquire her knowledge and power by said unholy pact.
Witch burning was bad because there are no actual witches (which the early Church fathers knew. Declaring someone a witch was itself a heresy because it acknowledges an existence of witchcraft. People should have listened to St. Augustine.) But in a universe where people are actually consorting with demons for power, why am I supposed to be feel bad about burning witches?
As far as I could tell, the only “power” she acquired was truly mundane science (the only “evidence” they found was that her chemistry set was too fancy), not any kind of actual magic. They had no legitimate basis to believe she was a witch.
And, of course, Dracula was not actually Satan. He was willing to do very evil things to get revenge on the world after his wife was killed, but he hadn’t done any such things within living memory before that. Gurer’f nyfb n zbzrag va gur ynfg rcvfbqr jurer vg’f fgebatyl vzcyvrq gung Tbq vf erny naq gung nf chavfuzrag sbe gurve npgvbaf ur jvguqerj uvf cebgrpgvba sebz gur ybpny puhepu, nyybjvat qrzbaf gb vainqr naq xvyy gur ovfubc.
The series has an unusual mix of sciencey vampires and religion, probably due to the history of the video game series, which began with a more classic sort of Bela Lugosi/Christopher Lee Dracula (evil demon cursed by God) but then clearly borrowed/copied a lot of inspiration from the Vampire Hunter D world, in which the monsters and such are the products of nuclear war/science experiments and the vampires’ longtime dominion owing primarily to their superior technology (though the vampires themselves also seem to have powers bordering on magical and their pre-apocalypse origins are mysterious; also living for thousands of years gives you a leg up studying science).
The Netflix series starts out implying Dracula is misunderstood: he has the “real” science which he hasn’t bothered to share with regular people because they’re too stupid and superstitious to appreciate it.
Yet when he’s aggrieved he doesn’t take his revenge using superior technology; he summons an army of demons from hell. And the demons basically say they’re from hell, not science experiments. So it’s sort of like “I’ll show you for superstitiously condemning my science and rationality as demonic witchcraft… by using witchcraft to summon demons.”
Obviously the witch burners in the story are not sympathetic, but it is an odd sort of mix.
Haven’t seen the show, but I always thought witch burning was bad for at least a couple reasons, one of which was that no real witches existed, and another of which was that burning someone to death is a needlessly cruel way of punishing them. I mean, even granting that capital punishment is something that isn’t bad, causing unnecessary suffering while carrying it out seems bad, and the amount of unnecessary suffering caused by burning someone alive seems truly great.
Again, I haven’t seen the show, so maybe there’s a good in-universe reason why witches had to be killed by burning?
What happened to freedom of association? And freedom to enter into voluntary contracts? How could it possibly be justified to burn someone tp death just for exercising those freedoms?
Depends on how you are justifying capital punishment. If the objective is to get rid of this offender so that he won’t offend again, then painless execution suffices. If the objective is to deter other people from offending by the threat of punishment for them, then the worse the punishment the more deterrence it should produce.
According to the spoilers for episode 1, the Church seems to have gotten everything wrong they could have.
1) The woman they burned did learn things from Dracula, but it wasn’t magic, it was medical science that she used for the good of her community.
2) However, Dracula was actually *capable* of dark magic, and by burning his doctor wife, the Church incited his unholy wrath.
I’m reminded of the more facile criticisms of Western foreign policy, where everyone is super nice and constructive until contacted by Colonialism / Yankee Imperialism / etc.
In general I think it’s a “purification with fire” kind of thing. In real life though not all victims of the medieval witch hunts were burned. Some were hanged or beheaded.
Witch hunts and the moral panic that leads to them are practically universal in human experience, so it’s very difficult to start talking about what “they did to witches” because that all depends on who “they” is and what time period and region you’re talking about.
I was annoyed with the show because I absolutely love Castlevania (in the past 6 months I’ve replayed every game from the first one for the NES up through Symphony of the Night), and they gotta start in with the Catholic bashing, when in reality the Catholic Church was one of the few spiritual authorities to preach against the existence of (and therefore hunting of) witches. Witchcraft persecution was generally a bottom-up sort of affair (neighbors accusing their lower-status neighbors, and then eventually everyone panicking and working their way up through the class structure) and not a top-down sort of thing where authorities went out looking for people to punish. For a good ~1500 years or so the Church was telling the commoners to stop believing in such silly superstitions, and later persecutions in which Church members were involved were against Church doctrine, and not because of it.
Just saying, if it weren’t for the Catholic Church, many, many, many more people would have been persecuted for witchcraft and I grumble at pop culture that tries to pretend the Church caused people to go after witches.
So this was doubly annoying: in real life, the Church was far more involved in calming witch hysteria than inciting it, and in the TV show, they’re still evil even when there is genuine hellish evil magic going on. Can’t win.
Hmmm. I guess with Deiseach taking a break I’ve taken on the roll of “angry ranting Catholic shaking fist at media on SSC.”
Dracula’s been an evil asshole since… when was Lament of Innocence, the 11th century? If people can recognize the history of the Belmont clan, they can recognize that even if Dracula hasn’t been Up To Some Shit in the past twenty years, he’s still fucking Dracula, he’s got the Grim Reaper and a giant ball of corpses and whatever the fuck Slogra and Gaibon are, and in the long term he’s Up To Some Shit.
And he has, in fact, been up to some shit in recent memory: when Alucard’s mother approaches his castle, it is shown to be surrounded by impaled bodies, I believe.
I mean, maybe he had a good reason to impale them (they were invaders coming to burn down his castle, say), but I doubt the families of the impaled saw it that way.
Which, again, is not to take the side of the witch burning, anti-science townsfolk, but just to say that Dracula definitely already has a reputation for evil when the show begins.
As I recall they were skeletons, and he mentioned in the dialogue that it had been quite some time. But my main point was that he was not literally Satan (this is a point the games are sometimes inconsistent on, as I understand it), a figure completely incapable of anything good or even neutral/mundane, which is an argument against Conrad Honcho’s characterization of their marriage as an “unholy pact”.
“But what about all the good things
HitlerDracula did?”I was always astonished that even after learning what was going on, the Sunnydale kids kept going out after dark without even arming themselves.
Self-defense is a right-wing idea, and the show was left-wing.
Buffy actually told a bank security guard that guns are never helpful.
Rocket launchers, on the other hand…
To be fair, guns being useless against the supernatural is a trope that’s Older Than Buffy.
Though the show regularly showed modern weaponry being useful (the aforementioned rocket launcher, the Initiative’s equipment during the front half of their arc, Warren nearly taking out the Slayer with a pistol). Only for the main cast to mostly eschew them anyway out of what mostly seems to be aesthetic revulsion.
Oddly, where the very American Buffy avoids guns, the British Ultraviolet goes all in for marrying vampire^W “Code V” vulnerabilities with up-to-date weapons tech, from the carbon bullets to the allicin gas grenades to the camera gunsights. (If you can’t see the target on the screen, shoot.)
I think at some point it was stated that they draw too much attention and don’t have enough stopping power. Vampires aren’t actually alive, they can survive just fine with some lead in them. Demons are generally much more durable than humans. And everyone knows what a gunshot sounds like.
In the first season, Darla neutralized Angel just fine with a pistol, and if he could survive with some some lead in him, it was in a sufficiently un-fine state that anyone so inclined could easily have finished the job with a stake. And the only reason Buffy herself survived, was Darla’s plot-required abysmal marksmanship.
Which I’m sort of OK with. Guns aren’t terribly useful for vampires trying to feed, what with spilling all the tasty blood before you’re close enough to drink it. And with feeding being a daily-ish thing but fighting Slayers a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sure, most vampires are experts in hand-to-fang combat but lousy marksmen and so stick with what they know.
Flip side, I’m also OK with an organization run by a bunch of stuffy British academics not twigging to the “hey, this would be much easier if we just gave powerful handguns and assault rifles to teenaged girls!” solution, and for a collection of teenagers in suburban Southern California not being able to up their own game to that level. It becomes a more glaring problem in later seasons when we have e.g. the Initiative, and the Watcher’s Council as a crack covert-operations force complete with black helicopters, etc. But that’s about the point where Buffy becomes unwatchable anyway.
That was used by a villain, who was also shown as a misogynist, in a context designed to vill the viewer with maximum loathing because he killed a main character, so it doesn’t detract from the general “guns are bad” message.
Sorry – I meant mostly that:
(1) If I were Xander and Willow, I’d made strong efforts never to be outside of a home after dark, and
(2) If I did leave home after dark, I’d have crosses all over, plus a supersoaker full of holy water at all time. (Actually I’d have that at home too).
Demons are pretty vulnerable to blades – presumably guns would work for them too, but it would be pretty difficult to carry a gun as a California teenager. I’d at least start carrying a metal tipped walking stick and a tactical flashlight, plus some pepper spray if I could get it.
It’s also worth pointing out that all the demons in the bar where he was trying to brag about it were all like, “Dude, did you actually think that would kill her? You know she’s got super healing powers, right?”
In the novel Watership Down a band of wandering rabbits comes across a warren that is underpopulated. The inhabitants write poetry and make art, but never ask where someone is. Turns out there is a farmer who provides them with food and kills their predators but also hides snares in the bushes to harvest them. It becomes a powerful cultural norm not to talk about the disappearances, and the rabbits are so welcoming to strangers (in their own interests of course) that it is disconcerting to the wanderers who happen upon it.
I just fell down the weirdest internet hole looking for a certain webcomic I wanted to link to.
Ended up reading a novella about Courtney Cox who, when she gets upset, makes an exact duplicate of the thing she’s upset about.
…ok back to work.
There’s substantial in-show evidence that it is in the same location (driving distance to L.A., Oxnard being the nearest town in that direction, an on-screen map that is clearly just relabeled), but I don’t recall anything pinning down definitively that it’s meant to be the same size.
Is there any practical value in lucid dreaming?
Also, I’ve heard that the period just before the onset of sleep, aka the hypnagogic state, is the most fruitful for creative thought and ideas. Something about the prefrontal cortex powering down allowing more “unusual” thoughts to flow through your mind. Has anyone here found this to be true?
Yes. I recommend keeping a notebook besides your bed in a way that makes writing in it as easy as possible. I probably average a couple good ideas per week.
Wouldn’t sitting up and turning on the light to write in the notebook make it take longer to fall asleep? I already have trouble falling asleep, so that sounds disturbing.
Good question. I recommend writing in the dark, with one idea per page, using some kind of gel pen that writes reliably and doesn’t require very much pressure. The notebook doesn’t have to be very big.
I actually find that this helps me fall asleep because I don’t have to worry about forgetting brilliant ideas I have. YMMV.
Sample idea that I wrote in my notebook last night while thinking about Topher Brennan:
Let’s say you’re a high IQ SSC reader living in a metropolitan area and you want to get elected to office. What’s your best strategy?
You have two strikes against you. First, your high IQ makes it harder to come across as relatable to voters. Second, you probably live in a state that’s densely populated, which means fewer congressional seats per citizen and more competition.
Here’s a way to solve both of those problems: Move to a less densely populated state and apprentice under an aging congressperson, then try to get them to endorse you when they retire.
According to this possibly crankish website, people are most impressed by folks who have about 20 points more than they do. Therefore, politicians selected for impressing common folks will typically have IQs of around 120 to 125, and these politicians will in turn be most impressed by someone with an IQ of around 140 to 145. So it’s plausible that being smart would actually be an asset in achieving the politician’s endorsement.
And since you are being endorsed by the ex-encumbent, you’re unlikely to be seen as a carpetbagger.
See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/campaign-stops/can-democrats-make-running-for-office-seem-cool.html
Note also that this is how Nancy Pelosi got started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Pelosi#Elections
I have no idea how easy that’d be, but I’m pretty sure it’s easier than trying to take Diane Feinstein’s seat.
I never tried it but doing cool stuff can be good for motivation, both directly and in getting to think of yourself as a person who does cool stuff.
In my experience I tend to come up with better ideas in the penumbra of sleep.
Never mind practical value, the entertainment value of lucid dreaming is enough to try it out! I guess you can use it for motivation or practice: if you’re dieting, dream about eating the food you want to; dream about giving an intimidating speech, etc. Maybe it could help with psychological issues, like dreaming about talking with a dead relative. I mostly stick to flying, myself.
If you’re interested in evidence-based nootropics, link text is worth checking out.
Disclaimer: as well as using the custom-made stacks, I have some equity in this.
Ok, I failed at describing the link. You basically get sent nootropics & won’t know what you’re taking each week (you find out later) so it mitigates the placebo effect.
So, each week, I’m potentially taking a different random mind-altering drug, without knowing what it is ? What could possibly go wrong ?
I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but gosh am I sure I haven’t wandered out of the SSC comments section.
Can I have a Lesswrong health check?
A few months back there was a push to revive it. Was this successful? I can’t check for myself because I don’t know what the best barometer of the site’s activity is (articles? discussion in the forum?) and also because I have no benchmark of how active the site was when it was healthy.
Looks like it’s active, but not busy. I’m not sure I’d call that a renaissance, but it’s a pretty substantial improvement.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p5p/open_thread_june_19_june_25_2017/du8h
Mormons and AI: I’ve never read it, but apparently there’s Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Saga, “patterned on” (sayeth Wikipedia) The Book Of Mormon, featuring a godlike AI. I have no idea whether this has anything to do with your Mormon theologian’s talk, but maybe there’s something about Mormons and superintelligent AIs.
I made it to the end of book three without realising that it was intended as a Mormon allegory at all (to be fair, I was in my mid-teens and basically knew next-to-nothing about them – and I don’t think any books beyond 3 had been published at the time). It was just a fun story* involving a superintelligent AI in need of repair.
*I think – I have no idea if I would enjoy it now.
Last month I finished the third Homecoming book. It’s been pretty clear through the whole series that there are religious allegories involved but I don’t know enough about Mormon theology in particular to say when it diverged from generic ‘Computer as God’ sci-fi trope to Mormonism.
I enjoyed the first two books as good page turners good characters. The third one started pretty poorly with a characters expounding upon on one of Card’s weird sociology theory. It was sort of relevant to the plot, but could have been handled much better.
I’ll probably attempt to read the fourth book as I’ve already bought it, but unless the story picks back up I’m not going to go looking for the fifth.
Never even thought of it as an allegory. Just a fairly interesting book series.
It’s not an allegory, it’s just a straight-up transposition of the Book of Mormon into a sci-fi setting. Pissed me off to no end when I read it first as a teen. First, it’s just lazy. Second, it’s disrespectful.
I read the first three books of the series. It’s a good story until they reach Earth and things get seriously weird, but there were a few things I found jarring about it. The biggest being that the godlike AI (which is a stand-in for God in the Book of Mormon) is clearly seen by the narrative as being benevolent, but its actions as described were deeply disturbing in many cases and it’s ways of doing things would have made it an outright villain in most other SF stories.
I later tried reading the Book of Mormon. I didn’t get very far, but from what I did read I felt that Homecoming’s relation to the Book of Mormon was less “patterned on” and more “blatantly plagiarized”. OSC didn’t even change the names of the major characters.
I finished the Three Body Problem series a couple of days ago. I didn’t love the first book, but the 2nd and 3rd ones were very strong (The Dark Forest probably being the best). Despite all the Chinese content, the series generally felt quite western. I read an article by Cixin where he noted that the Apocalypse isn’t a big thing in China, they don’t have the idea in their religious background like Christianity does. That drags along all sorts of western stuff with it. And Clarke/Asimov are big influences, so it has that “golden age sf” feel to it.
SPOILERS BELOW (spoiler tags when?)
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On The Dark Forest:
I didn’t love the Luo Ji stuff early on (or any of the wallfacer/wallbreaker storylines), but everything around the dark forest theory was incredible. The whole book basically justifies itself with this one idea.
On Death’s End:
Incredibly dark stuff, especially the first chapter in Part V, holy fucking shit.
Loved the scope.
Kinda disappointed the Gravity and Blue Space were ignored after they fire the signal, I would’ve liked some chapters on their journey.
I was also caught off-guard at how incredibly reactionary the 3rd book was. I’m highly sympathetic to that sort of thing, and even I occasionally thought “jeez, that’s a bit much”. The first one had the Cultural Revolution stuff (with obvious contemporary parallels) of course, but it wasn’t really at the center of the story. In Death’s End, the book’s central thesis is basically that femininity and humanism are existential risks (not even risks, but pathways to inevitable civilizational destruction). Is this what fascist bodybuilder SF looks like? Cixin even spells it out:
>Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love.
Which also brings up the fact that the protagonist of this book is a mass-murderer on an incredible scale who never gets even a hint of comeuppance, I liked that. You don’t see it often.
I kinda missed Da Shi, but Wade was fun, a kind of inhuman Nietzchean eternal striver:
>If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.
The first one won the Hugo and the third one is a finalist this year. I haven’t really followed the puppies stuff very closely, but if something like Death’s End can be a finalist, how could anyone complain about excess SJness?
This is a series I would like to read. Sometimes we have to face the darkest possible scenarios and explicitly discuss them so that they do not become reality.
This might be an independent reinvention but the Dark Forest theory of the Drake Equation seems to have first appeared in SF in The Killing Star. With somewhat more realistic technology in that book but the writing isn’t great. And apparently it came from Usenet before that.
I had high expectations from this, but having read just the first book, I was disappointed. My complaint isn’t around the writing or the characters, but the fundamental premise of the book. Once you realize it’s all wrong, it really takes the wind out of the book’s sails.
SPOILERS BELOW
First, it’s not a 3-body problem. It’s a 4-body problem: three stars and a planet (and later, the planet gets a moon, making it 5 bodies). The mass of the planet is small in the system, but the chaotic nature of the three body problem is such that this should make a difference.
Second, the real world differs from the math of a three body problem anyway. There’s going to be drag from tidal effects, atmospheric friction, and so on.
So there was this civilization-encompassing quest for a solution to the three body problem. So once you see all the ways that even a correct mathematical solution would fail to deliver the promised effect, most of the immediacy is lost. And I found myself just wondering, “come on, how dumb are these guys?”.
On the other hand, some of that quest for a solution – in particular, the human-driven digital computer (right down to a clock, a bus, and so on), was very cool.
So after the previous discussion, I decided I needed to read through Death’s End before I gave a judgment of Dark Forest theory, after another user pointed out that there was a lot of stuff that came up in that book. Spoilers for the series follow.
I came out pretty unimpressed. Dark Forest theory is a thing that could happen, but it’s definitely not the only stable place for galactic civilization (which is how every character and the author treat it, as a universal truth), and they handwave a ton of stuff away.
We get one look at a Dark Forest civilization, and their justification for cleansing instead of negotiating or figuring out whether the other civilization is a threat is that as soon as you see another civilization, the other civilization has seen you and can destroy you. Except we learned earlier in the book that Dark Forest civilizations use isolated ships to launch their cleansing strikes, because otherwise as soon as you blow up another civilization, a third civilization will locate you from the origin of the strike. So why can’t they just observe and risk the one ship? I don’t know, and no one ever asks that question.
This is exacerbated by the fact that we learn that some of the ordnance used in Dark Forest cleansings are causing the destruction of the universe (and every civilization in it) by collapsing dimensions locally, which eventually spread. So even if you successfully take out every competitor, you’re still doing far worse over the long term than any sort of 9-tsiak-style resource-sharing agreement. This is a much stronger case than where SSC was last time, pointing out that destroying suns to stop resource shortages is asinine.
And no one ever seems to question whether using these dimensional superweapons is worth it: the alien goes straight from sun-destroyer to dimensional collapser, and all he needs to use it is approval from his supervisor, which he gets without any real discussion.
I think it was a pretty interesting set of ideas (the rapid expansion of scope near the end reminded me a lot of Greg Egan’s Diaspora) but he relied a lot on Dark Forest theory as a fundamental truth, and failed to convince me of it.
It’s on my to-read list, but the Hugo brand is burned badly enough to keep it low on the list. Has anyone who’s read Terry Pratchett’s Strata, Benford’s A Darker Geometry, or Lem’s vision of island universe civilizations altering the guanta of the universe in their own favor and therefore inevitably drifting into eternal wars of attrition with their neighbors also read Liu and been impressed?
I loved this series. I actually liked the first book the most, it was more near future plausible which I tend to prefer. This series was very original and I suppose part of it is that is was from a Chinese culture. The author also came up with some very interesting “thought problems” and worked through the logical outcomes of his plots, there wasn’t nearly as much “hand waving to FTL travel” kind of stuff. Things got a bit weird in the third book, but off the rails in the last book of a series isn’t exactly unprecedented.
Definitely recommended for SciFi fans.
Use rot13 to hide spoilers.
I think the problem with rot13ing spoilers is that they require a lot of additional investment for anyone passing by. I often see spoilers on this site for series I haven’t even heard about, and wouldn’t mind spoiling for myself to hear the discussion, but not enough to go find the rot13 site and decode every post on the thread.
Beware trivial inconveniences, and all that.
How about a rot13 button? Or just a way to mark sections of text to be blacked out and made visible by clicking or hovering.
Yeah, the Reddit spoiler tag system (where things tagged as spoilers are blacked out, but mousing over them reveals the text) is really good for this sort of thing.
Having a way to click on the page and un-rot13 the post would be good as well, but you’d need some sort of tagging for what’s rot13 and what’s not (as spoilered posts will generally include a section in plaintext explaining what they’re spoiling, although maybe it’s fine to just have that be unreadable after they click the button).
There’s probably a Chrome extension that does this, but expecting random passersby to just have that ready is probably unrealistic as well.
Just become fluent in rot13.
Pna lbh cyrnfr whfg jevgr abeznyyl? V unq gb ebg13 lbhe fgngrzrag gb or noyr gb ernq vg. Guk.
I read the first book recently and was really surprised how much I disliked it. I was listening to the audiobook, so I wasn’t seeing how much of the book was left, and when it ended I think I actually may have said “Wait what” out loud because I was so surprised that was all there was to the story. Maybe part of it is just the cultural gap but I found the whole story felt a little off, the concepts discussed just weren’t remotely engaging enough to carry a whole book, and the story had such a minimal arc that I felt very disengaged. Also (SPOILER, I suppose) the Trisolarans’ use of the Sophons seemed absurdly weak and uncreative.
I started listening to the second book but the narration was so awful I returned it. Maybe I’ll try reading the physical thing some time if I can get it from the library and have the time, but overall I was pretty unimpressed.
No, that’s The Night Land.
And indeed drug policy reform, as seems relevant given the discussion in the last open thread.
We should not expect progressives to ultimately reverse a set of policies invented and put in place by progressives, when the underlying motivations have not changed.
What if drug laws were justified by criminology which later turned out to be false?
Why do you love superpredators and hate America, (hog)^5?
Oh, come on. The War on Drugs has been a bipartisan project since Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, unless you’re defining “progressive” as everything to the left of Calvin Coolidge.
Nixon was a 7th-inning relief pitcher. By Nixon’s day, the war on drugs had been going on for nearly a century.
Hamilton Wright, Frances Harrison, Bishop Charles Brent, those guys were on the starting lineup–and they were all progressives. There wasn’t much opposition to them back in those days (what sane public figure wanted to align himself with vice, temptation, and strange chemicals of foreign origin?) but the few voices who did oppose the drug warriors were basically all conservatives, and used conservative reasoning too.
Okay, I see where you’re coming from now. But I don’t know how much continuity there is between “progressivism” then and now. I suspect most self-described progressives today would reject Roosevelt and Wilson in favor of Debs, if they understand the history at all. And then there’s William Jennings Bryan – who wanted to break up the banks, but also wanted to mandate creationism in the public schools – where the hell does he end up on the political spectrum?
Unless, again, your argument that progressivism is authoritarian and conservatism is libertarian, always and forever, or that Cthulhu always swims left, because left is defined as whatever direction Cthulhu is swimming.
I don’t claim that progressivism is authoritarian and that’s the end of it, I merely said the underlying motivations of progressivism viz. the war on drugs then and now are the same.
Many neurotypicals online believe that I don’t act like a human because I’m autistic and do not show emotions a lot.
I wonder whether an autist is actually less likely to pass the Turing Test compared to a non-autist. What do you guys think?
Yes.
Less likely in general, probably; but less likely than modern chatbots ? I doubt it. Of course, that all depends on the degree of autism; the more severe cases who are virtually unable to communicate at all would fail the test — but then, so would any human in a coma, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
I agree. This is an interesting question.
Recently I found this article. Since I don’t have any background in psychology I’m not sure whether this is just woo. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201506/the-real-turing-test-curing-computer-autism
In some sense we can indeed say that chatbots generally can’t pass the Turing Test because they do not act in culturally appropriate way and as a result are sort of autistic.
I do love computers though precisely because they are autistic and hence computers and I are on the same wavelength.
Not even close. For example, as of today, no chatbot could spontaneously emulate this short discussion that we’re having. In 3..5 decades, maybe (and this is me being optimistic), but not yet.
Chatbots have some of the failure modes of an autistic person, but they also have a lot of wholly unique failure modes.
For instance, here’s Scott Aaronson talking to the Eugene Goostman chatbot:
Those aren’t hard questions for a human. They don’t require any social skills. But Eugene doesn’t actually know the answers, so he dodges the question in a way no human would. To catch bots in the Turing test, it’s often as much about not following normal conversational patterns as it is about following them. Pushing the bot outside its programming.
I don’t think that the chat bot is missing the information about how many legs a camel has, but is responding to programming to avoid giving overly specific answers. What is 7 divided by 22? Human answer (without a calculator) “about 3” or “3.14” or something along those lines for most people. To avoid detection a computer has to avoid saying “to how many digits?” and so has to introduce some ambiguity into its answers.
@baconbacon:
No, it’s actually a lot worse. It’s not the case that the chatbot somehow knows some stuff about the world, but is missing the detailed information on camels. Rather, it is the case that the chatbot is incapable of knowing anything, about anything, camels included. As it turns out, the seemingly simple act of “knowing”, which humans perform instinctively, is so difficult to not just implement but even to understand, that no one has ever succeeded. Recent (very recent) advances in RNNs and other Deep Learning techniques are slowly getting us to the point where “knowing” is possible, but we’re still quite far from that goal.
Scott Aaronson recounts in his notes for “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” (link here) that in an actual test one woman was mistaken for a computer since “no human would know that much about Shakespeare…”.
Yes, I’ve noticed that we humans are working on getting chatbots to pass the Turing test from both sides. We are making chatbots smarter, and we are making humans… well… yeah.
If a human being “fails” the Turing test, it is the test-giver who has failed.
Not necesarilly. autist would have more trouble immitating tone, cadence, flow, whatever words I should use, ‘neurotypical’ would have more trouble identifying actual beliefs and positions. So it might vary basd on whether the culture is more identifiable by how they talk or by an unusual/complex belief structure.
edit: I assumed you meant ideological turing test
No, I mean the real Turing Test. Are autists likely to be identified as robots?
Not sure. If it’s low functioning autistics they might come across as ‘buggy’, but because (afaik) chatbots cann’t truly follow a conversation they might rely on filler a lot and end up sounding like extreme neurotypicals.
When is Scott going to do something about the obvious spam bot problem in the open threads?
What do you think about an autist is less likely to pass the Turing Test compared to a non-autist?
There was a meetup recently where a bunch of us got together to talk about Seeing LIke a State. Well, Scott’s review for many but some of us had read it. The big question quickly became about when enforced legibility is good in the end and when it isn’t. Clearly there’s always trauma involved. If you’re American thinking about a switch to the Metric System quickly brings home the costs in a small but visceral way. And someone brought up the more profound dislocation in the switch to standardizing on English in Singapore. But at the same time certain modernist attempts to enforce legibility or conformity seem to have paid off. Replacing London’s ad hoc, naturally grown sewer systems with a centrally planned one had huge public health benefits. The Metric System seems to have been worth the price for the countries that adopted it. Indeed, clinging to traditional units would have been infeasible for any country with an economy smaller than the US’s. And the previous moves from local units to nationally standardized units seems to have been a net success. So is there some way to look and tell in advance whether moves to impose standardization will work out?
This is part of a larger pattern and whenever I’m considering buying a book about X being good or bad I want to see if the author provides a chapter on exceptions to the rule.
Sure, the most popular vetting mechanism would involve checking the experience level of the standardization team. I see this all the time at my job in IT at a large telco, our customers are moving like a herd in switching their server farms from onsite data centres to cloud hosting. All the project managers leading these transitions will have worked on numerous more or less identical projects to this one in the past and will lead a customer through various assessment exercises to see if switching to cloud hosting is actually the right move for them given their various competing priorities in security, scalability, cost, etc.
As can be easily imagined however, doing these types of projects at the nation-state level is exponentially more complex than at the corporate level. The first things that come to mind are the never-ending presence of graft and corruption (especially in developing countries), in addition to the lack of buy-in from the average citizen (such as the USA’s botched metric conversion 40 years ago). Sometimes you will see an experienced project manager express overconfidence about how well (poorly) their solutions will (fail to) translate from the private sector to the public sector.
Naval Gazing:
This is why the carriers are not doomed, Part 1
A question that has come up several times recently is the controversy over the future of the US carrier force in the face of new threats, and it deserves an answer at some length. As such, I’m going to talk about carriers instead of battleships today.
The basic theory is that improved Chinese missiles, particularly the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) mean that the US cannot bring carriers within 1000-2000 km of the Chinese coast without them being killed. Some go even farther, and claim that soon, any country (we’ll call it Enemyistan) with some cash will be able to stand off the USN, and the carriers will be totally obsolete.
Fortunately for the US, this is not true. Today, we’ll start with the threat from conventional missiles. ASBMs can wait for later, because I have more than enough for this week.
So, what does a US carrier group (CVBG) look like when trying to defend itself? Well, a typical CVBG is composed of a carrier, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser (CG), and 3-4 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (DDGs). The CG normally carries the burden of long-range air defense, while the DDGs are configured to protect themselves and execute land-attack missions. If they were going up against China, or some other high-threat area, the DDGs are perfectly capable of carrying more SAMs, and a second CG might well be assigned to the group.
The outer ring of defenses is going to consist of proactive measures. The USN learned at Pearl Harbor that it is better to give than to receive. As such, the various US commanders will be trying to eliminate as many enemy missile launchers as possible before they can be used. This could mean a submarine or destroyer launching Tomahawks at an airfield, naval base, or coastal-defense position, or it could be the carrier’s airplanes attacking missile boats or airplanes before they get within range. This is very hard to quantify, so I’ll ignore it in my numerical analysis (which I’m going to try to keep conservative), but it will be very important in an actual war.
The second layer is to keep the enemy from getting targeting data good enough to launch a strike. Getting targeting-quality data on a naval force is surprisingly hard, although I’m not going to go into much detail this week. (That will be in an installment quite soon.) For this week, I’m just going to say that no, whatever wonder device you’re thinking of won’t solve it completely for China, and Enemyistan has next to no chance provided that the CVBG’s commander is competent. However, this is also hard to quantify, and I’m trying to give a reasonable worst-case scenario, so I’ll ignore the problems here and assume that the CVBG has been located.
Now we come to the missiles. The outer layer is going to be Standard Missiles, the USN’s long-range air defense missile dating back to the 60s (although it’s the ship of Theseus by now). There are two subvariants, Extended-range and Medium-range. The ER variant has a range of 200 nm, while the MR version is around 90 nm. For a normal, peacetime carrier group, you have the CG with 96 of these (not sure of the exact mix of MRs and ERs) providing the outer layer of fleet air defense. In an air-defense configuration, a DDG will carry 72.
The middle layer is the Enhanced Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM). This is a shorter-range missile (at least 30 nm), and a normal peacetime loadout is 24 on each DDG and 16 on the carrier. It is fantastically maneuverable, and I was told that they basically come out of the Vertical Launch System (VLS) sideways. Because 4 can fit in each VLS cell (as opposed to a single Standard) a CVBG can in theory carry upward of a thousand, although the US doesn’t have enough missiles in inventory to support this kind of loadout. (But we’ll come back to that problem later.)
The inner layer is point-defense systems, designed to protect only the ship mounting them. There are two, the Rolling-Airframe Missile (RAM) and the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS). Almost all of the escorts mount one or more CIWS, which is a 20mm gatling gun hooked up to a radar system that automatically shoots down anything it thinks is a missile. Unfortunately, it’s not that effective against high-speed missiles because the debris from even a shot-down missile can still strike the ship. The RAM was designed to solve this, shooting down missiles at greater range. A carrier carries 2 21-round RAM launchers.
Now it’s time to look at how many missiles we’d need to overwhelm a carrier’s defenses. A typical group in peacetime conditions (which we’d expect if we were going up against Enemyistan) would have 96 Standards, 88 ESSMs, and 42 RAMs, a total of 226 missiles (actually more, because I’m not counting ESSMs on the CG, which is another 24). Based on recent experience off of Yemen, I think it’s very conservative to assume that you’ll have a 50% kill probability against a typical missile with one of these weapons. (I believe the actual number is more like 70%.) Under this assumption, the CVBG can shoot down 113 incoming ASMs. In a war with China, that number might well top 200.
But the defenses don’t stop there. There’s also electronic warfare to consider. This is a fantastically complicated topic, and we can’t know the answer without an actual war, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that EW will draw off another 50% of missiles. This decoy work will probably take place at some point in the ESSM engagement zone, and well before the RAMs come into play. So for our fight with Enemyistan, we have 48 missiles shot down by Standards, 22 shot down by ESSMs before the EW takes effect. To saturate the rest of the defenses will require 43 missiles to not be drawn off, taking the number of missiles the CVBG can handle to 156. If the missiles in question are subsonic (the vast majority of ASMs worldwide are, and I’d expect higher-speed missiles to be preferentially targeted), then the Phalanx on a targeted ship will probably take out another 2-3, maybe more, depending on how spread out the salvo is. So we now have a round number for Enemyistan, 160 missiles to make one possible hit on a carrier. (One hit is not going to kill the carrier outright, and I’ve systematically erred in favor of the attacker. The CVBG will have to go home to reload, but it’s still alive, and the next carrier coming up behind it doesn’t have to face those missiles.)
But what does that number mean in context? In the grand scheme of things, how many missiles is Enemyistan likely to be able to put into the air?
Unfortunately for Enemyistan, they are going to have a very difficult time of it. A typical surface warship carries 4-8 ASMs, and for most second-rate navies, there are no missiles kept ashore as replacements. (As a side note, I’ve assumed perfect reliability on the part of the attacker’s missiles. This is a very bad assumption for Enemyistan, who has probably been skimping on maintenance.) The Iranian navy has a total of ~200 missile tubes on its surface combatants, including the ones currently under construction. Obviously air-launched and shore-based missiles could be added to this, but it is also necessary to subtract the missiles lost to US counterattacks before launch, and the missiles that are not fired due to the ship having a broken engine that day, or because they couldn’t get targeting data due to US jamming. A best case for Enemyistan is that they sink one US carrier, then get smashed by the next two CVBGs behind it, which they have no missiles left to engage. A more likely case is that they sink a couple of merchant ships that were where they thought the US carrier was, then get destroyed by all three CVBGs.
China is going to be a tougher nut to crack. Obviously, they have more missiles, enough so that launching a couple of 200+-missile salvoes is not out of the question. And they’re going to have better surveillance equipment, so that we can’t just trick them into wasting their ASMs on empty ocean (probably). China has approximately 224 naval strike aircraft, each of which can probably carry 2 missiles. That’s almost certainly enough to overwhelm a single CVBG, even in wartime, but a lot of the attacking aircraft would be destroyed in the attack and they would probably be unable to take out a second CVBG the same way. And the US has 9. (Note that we’re ignoring strike aircraft destroyed on the ground, down for maintenance, or simply assigned to a different region, as well as the fact that carriers usually operate in groups in a serious war, driving up the number of escorts available.) Much the same math applies to shore-based and shipboard ASM launchers, although I’m not going to go into detail here because counting platforms is boring, and there’s surprisingly little data available on Chinese coastal missile strength. The ultimate balance between US naval forces and the Chinese is pretty close right now, and I don’t see improved technology skewing the balance too much one way or the other.
Naval Gazing:
Index
I’m a volunteer tour guide at the USS Iowa in Los Angeles, and I enjoy explaining battleships so much that I’ve been doing it here for quite a while. I’m starting to branch out into modern naval matters, too. This is my index of the current posts, updated so that I don’t have to ask Scott to put up a link when the previous index gets locked down. Please don’t post a reply to this index comment so I can keep it updated as new ones get published and the new posts are easy to find.
History:
General History of Battleships, Part 1 and Part 2
The Early Ironclads
Pre-Dreadnoughts
The loss of HMS Victoria
The Battle of Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
US Battleships in WW2
Rest-of-world Battleships in WW2
Battlecruisers
Battleships after WW2
The Destroyer that accidentally attacked a President
The South American Dreadnought Race
Dreadnoughts of the minor powers
Life aboard Iowa
Technical:
Fire Control
History of Fire Control
Armor, Part 1 and Part 2
Propulsion
Armament Part 1 and Part 2
Turret vs barbette
Underwater protection
Secondary Armament, Part 1 and Part 2
Survivability and Damage Control Part 1
Modern Naval:
Why the carriers are not doomed Part 1
Misc:
Bibliography
Thoughts on tour guiding
Questions I get as a tour guide
What is AEGIS?
Why the carriers are not doomed, Part 2: Finding the carriers
Strike warfare
Why the carriers are not doomed, Part 3: the DF-21D
The Battleships of Pearl Harbor, Part 1
The Battleships of Pearl Harbor, Part 2
The Battleships of Pearl Harbor, Part 3
Updated index, as this OT is about to be locked down.
I’m just here to commend you for the pun. Well played.
Wasn’t originally mine, but it made a good title for the series.
What are the impacts of the supercavitating torpedoes the Russians are developing? I’d think that locating the carrier is still a major problem. But I’m uncertain what kind of defense exists or would be possible.
It’s hard to say without knowing precisely what sort of payload and tracking capability it will have. The cavitation effect is going to preclude the use of traditional sonar-based seeker heads which means that engagement ranges will either have to be relatively short to accommodate dumb-fire or wire guidance, or it’s warhead will be of the nuclear variety. In either case the best defense is going to be “don’t get shot”.
Edit to elaborate.
One of the carriers chief weaknesses is limited ability to maneuver while at flight quarters. Once a cycle begins they’re locked into a given course (+/- a few degrees) for a minimum of several minutes. From the submariner’s perspective the ideal attack profile would to simply get out in front of the carrier and then wait for them to close the distance.
It’s up to the escorts and the carrier’s own dippers (ASW helicopters) to prevent this so to that end I would hope that in a war with an SCT-equipped Enemyistan the Navy would put a much lower premium on whale health than it does now.
I sent this post to some friends for review, and one, a former submariner, said they used to go upwind of carriers, and call in airstrikes, then tag the carriers when they turned into the wind to launch interceptors.
(For the record, it’s not that easy to get upwind of a carrier in a diesel-electric submarine.)
That sounds right, but be aware as we wander away from battleships and into naval aviation (and helicopter ops in particular) we’re getting into my territory. Granted, I spent most of my career operating off small decks and FOBs but I held a carrier deck qual for close to 6 years and still have my (unclassified) notes/gouge-book.
I try to write as if I have someone reading who knows more than I do, but thanks for the heads-up.
Actually, I do have a question. How quickly can they suspend flight operations to maneuver? I’d imagine that there are limits when you have unsecured airplanes on deck, but how dramatic are they? And how sure are we that they won’t be ignored when there are torpedoes headed for the carrier? Better to lose a couple of planes (and hope the pilots eject) than to lose the carrier.
That’s a complex question. From a safety of the ship perspective The biggest concerns are ensuring that the elevators (especially those on the outboard side of the turn) are raised and locked, and securing any ordinance that’s on deck or in transition from the magazine. After that you’re looking to secure aircraft, catapults, and GSE. 90 seconds is considered a respectable time in drills but it may take a bit less or considerably more depending on circumstance.
The limits themselves are on roll and lateral-Gs which means turn-rate becomes dramatically more restrictive as speed increases. In the event of a no-shit torpedo attack I imagine the question becomes just how long the captain of the carrier (or whomever has the conn) is willing to wait before turning the wheel hard over.
First, active defense against conventional torpedoes is the fusion power of the naval world. It’s been on the next generation of warships since the 60s, and still is, so from that point of view, the supercavitating torpedoes aren’t any worse.
Second, they’re not new. VA-111 was introduced in 1977. This isn’t really your fault. One of the rules of evaluating military information is that almost everything you hear about Russian weapons comes from their sales people. And it doesn’t do to say ‘yes, we’ve had this since the 70s, and haven’t improved it that much’ (which is, AIUI, true).
I’m genuinely unsure about the utility of supercavitating torpedoes. They can’t use normal homing guidance, and I don’t know how effective intertial guidance is with a conventional warhead. It would have been very effective with the nuclear warhead they originally used, but those are generally frowned upon these days. Overall, I think they’re probably not much more effective than conventional torpedoes, if at all.
Supercavitating torpedoes are as I understand it mostly for use against enemy submarines, as a way of maybe killing them before they can shoot back and turn sub-on-sub combat into a game for MADmen. Against aircraft carriers, you don’t really need them because, as bean notes, once an ordinary torpedo has the scent of you there’s probably no escape. The only good defense is to keep the submarine from getting close enough to launch torpedoes in the first place, and conventional torpedoes have a longer effective range than supercavitating rocket torpedoes.
I believe USN aircraft carriers do now carry a sort of beta-test torpedo defense system of dubious utility, as do the Russians themselves, but this postdates the Shkval and isn’t going to change the tactics for a while yet.
Qusi-nitpicking time. Conventional torpedoes have a relatively short effective range, because they aren’t that much faster than their targets. If the target is capable of 30 kts, and the torpedo 45, then you have only a third of your theoretical maximum range. But that is probably still more than the rocket torpedoes, which are basically straight-runners. A VA-111 will take 1.8 minutes to reach maximum range, but the target will be dodging unless they have no sonar at all.
Quite possibly. Most of my reference books are several years old, as the latest versions are outside my budget. But yes, they’re still rather experimental, and shouldn’t be counted on.
So why is intercepting torpedoes so much harder than intercepting cruise missiles, supersonic sea skimmers, or ballistic missiles? We seem to be getting pretty good at those tasks, and torpedoes are bigger, slower, and radiate an easy to track sensor signal.
That’s a really good question, to which I have no answer. Maybe torpedoes are just magic. Or maybe it’s the water, protecting them. Sinister stuff. Don’t trust it.
Seriously, I suspect it has to do with the fact that it’s harder to see things in water than in air. Sonar is less precise than radar, and when you’re trying to shoot at a fast incoming torpedo, the system just isn’t up to it.
Going to risk looking like a total fool here, but I would guess that all the issues that make torpedoes slower are going to effect the counter measures at least as much. The density of water is going to limit the effectiveness of lighter weight/higher volume projectiles in defending against them.
One issue is that neither radar nor sonar is accurate enough to guide a projectile to hit a small target like another missile or torpedo based on remote observation – if you’re not going to have really big area-effect warheads, you need at least a semi-active guidance system where the receiver is on the interceptor and gets more effective as it gets closer to the target.
With radar, that’s fairly easy because radar basically always works. With sonar, self-generated noise makes it increasingly ineffective as platform speed increases, but your interceptor pretty much has to be faster(*) than the torpedo it is trying to intercept. The enemy torpedo just needs a sonar capable of making out a large warship’s signature through self-noise as it closes at say 40 knots, and you need to track a small torpedo through the much noisier environment at 60 knots. Hope you’ve got really good signal-processing algorithms and electronics to run them.
The Russian solution is to make their best estimate from sonar mounted on the target ship, and then launch a salvo of mortar- or rocket-lofted depth charges in its path. Nobody knows how well this will work in practice; I expect that if it does work well enough the enemy will teach their torpedoes to zig-zag on the approach and then it won’t work any more.
* That’s not an absolute mathematical requirement, but for operational purposes it’s pretty close to one.
From what I remember from when I was working on my thesis, the key thing the interceptor needs to catch the evader is an advantage in crossrange acceleration. The basic setup is that the interceptor starts somewhere near the target, and the evader is trying to get past the interceptor while approaching the target. To oversimplify, most evasion techniques boil down to dodging one direction, then jinking back in another direction once the interceptor is committed to following you the first direction. It defeat this, the interceptor needs to be able to switch directions faster than the evader.
Speed matters in the basic scenario mainly because it correlates with acceleration (engine power drives both acceleration and top speed, and in air or water you can also use control surfaces to redirect your up/downrange speed into crossrange speed), and secondarily because it lets you close on the evader faster giving it less time to try to dodge.
It matters more in more complex scenarios where the interceptor is launched from a different direction (e.g. a THAAD battery in South Korea trying to shoot down a Chinese missile aimed at a naval base in Japan) and needs to approach from the side, so it’s at least partially trying to catch up with the evader’s downrange velocity.
Speed matters most when they thing you’re intercepting is a vehicle (e.g. a missile intercepting an airplane or a torpedo intercepting a sub) rather than just a missile or ballistic projectile. In this scenario, one of the evader’s strategies is to turn away from the interceptor and run away from it at top speed. A stern chase extends the distance the interceptor needs to cover, and depending on the interceptor’s range and its speed advantage over the evader, the evader might be able to keep the chase going until the interceptor runs out of fuel. Or if the evader is as fast or faster than the projectile, the evader can stay away from it indefinitely. This doesn’t really come up in the basic scenario (interceptor launching from near the evader’s target) since the evader is typically committed to coming towards the target and doesn’t have the fuel to run away and then come back after it loses the interceptor.
I don’t understand your maths.
For an incoming missile, you appear to be estimating:
* 50% chance to be taken out by EW
* 50% chance to be taken out by Standard
* 50% chance to be taken out by ESSM – or maybe 25%, but I’ll stick with the higher figure
* 50% chance to be taken out by RAM
* Some (unstated) chance to be taken out by Phalanx – to be generous I will put this at 50%.
This suggests that NEDAJA will average 1 hit per 32 missiles fired.
However, you conclude that the expectation is 160 missiles to score a hit. Is this based on saturating each layer? If so, why? Naively, I would have thought these missiles would be travelling sufficiently fast that a single layer of defences won’t get many shots at it.
This is the bad assumption in your reasoning. AEGIS is smart enough to retarget missiles in flight, so you can essentially take multiple shots with a given layer of defenses. (Earlier SAM systems would just shoot 2 missiles at each target, which is a bit less effective.) Also, the minimum ranges on the system are low enough that it usually has enough time for a given layer to do a second engagement. This wouldn’t have been true 30 years ago, but it is today.
Obviously, a faster missile gives the system less time to react, but faster missiles are bigger and more expensive. This means you can’t fire as many of them on a given budget, a phenomenon called ‘virtual attrition’. When you start to look at the math, it’s actually surprisingly even between more small missiles and fewer faster missiles.
But yes, I was looking at running the US out of missiles. Other potential models are beyond my ability to do here, although I will endorse Command: Modern Air and Naval Operations as a good tool if you want to look in more detail. It was created by people who are on the same level of geekdom as I am, and I’ve run quite a few missile v ship battles. They usually play out (for modern ships) as the ships holding out until they run out of missiles.
OK, so if each layer can take 2 or 3 shots, then the attacker will essentially be relying on saturation, got it. So the first ~160 missiles/carrier group do very little, but the next few after that are deadly, taking out the carrier and its escorts in short order. With less conservative estimates, perhaps 250 missiles.
So at $10m for a DF-21D, that makes $2.5bn to take out a carrier group costing at least $15bn. Still pretty worrisome.
What do you make of the reports that most of these defences are useless against modern ASBMs? I take it you are skeptical?
The defenses I’ve described are pretty useless against ASBMs. I was describing defenses against conventional ASMs, because this topic is too big for me to write up in a week. The DF-21D would be more effective, at least for now, although indications are that the Chinese are backing away from it. (If carriers are so useless, why do they keep building them?) That said, defenses against ASBMs are being developed, and there are some fairly serious problems that ASBMs have. I’ll be writing that up shortly.
As for cost, don’t forget the launch platforms. Or the missiles that were killed by the Tomahawks off the SSNs before they got a chance to be fired.
(And note that the 2.5 billion of ASMs are only useful for attacking ships. The carrier group has a lot of other uses. The current US force isn’t exactly what you’d build for an optimized hot war, and there have been some design compromises for lower-intensity operations. But it’s good enough for a hot war that our enemies are really worried about them.)
Land-based ballistic missiles like DF-21D also have to saturate land or air based boost-phase and midcourse-phase ABM systems in the theater. That’s not hard right now, with THAAD and GMD having only a few dozen interceptors, and in a war with China most of them would likely be reserved to counter China’s nuclear arsenal. But China currently only has 60-80 DF-21Ds, and if they build more DF-21Ds, we can build more THAAD interceptors in parallel.
If the anti-ship missiles are launched from ships or planes, then you can’t just look at the cost of the missiles. Ships and planes are expensive, and you’re going to lose quite a few of them trying to go after a CVBG because the CVBG’s ships and planes are going to be shooting back at you.
The counter to the DF-21D is the SM-3, which is probably the most advanced of the US ABM systems, and works quite well. The Block II is significantly higher-energy than THAAD.
Is the SM-3 already accounted for in your calculations, or would it be fired from a different ship elsewhere in the theater and not part of the CVBG?
I didn’t cover SM-3 this time because I was focusing on conventional ASMs. SM-3 will be discussed down the road when I look specifically at ASBMs (split out for length). It’s going to be on some combination of the CGs and DDGs in the CVBG.
Oh, bean, you know the answer to this. The carriers are built by the navy, the DF-21 is built by the army. Unless the generals literally use the missiles to sink under construction carriers, there’s not much they can do to stop admirals from being admirals.
Not true. Coastal defense is under the navy.
@bean
Coastal defense is, but the DF-21 is ballistic, and is thus controlled by the rocket forces, unless I’m much mistaken.
@cassander
Even if that’s true (and I’m really not sure, as the internal structure of the Chinese military is pretty opaque) there has been a notable shift in power within their establishment over the past 5-10 years. Basically, there’s the ‘coast defense’ and ‘sea control’ factions. DF-21D was a weapon of the coast defense faction, whoever owns it. (And the Chinese are not the Japanese pre-WW2, with each service doing its own thing.) You could say that it was aimed, not at American carriers, but at Chinese ones. But it missed. Since 2010-ish, there’s been very little new news on the DF-21D, and the production numbers are low. At the same time, the sea control faction has gained traction (the operations in Somalia have been a major boost to them, and they’re pushing for us to change the translation to People’s Liberation Forces Navy).
@bean
I’m don’t disagree, but I think you’re overselling the point. Yes, the service rivalries are not as bad as they japanese, no one’s ever are, short of countries with outright civil wars, but they still exist. And yes, the PLA seen a lot of reorganization in the last 5 years and while it’s still unclear exactly how things are going to play out, clearly the PLAGF is on the losing end relative to the Navy. And yes, the DF-21 specifically seems to be out of favor
My original comment was a bit tongue in cheek, my real point was that there was nothing unusual about the chinese wanting both carriers and carrier killer missiles.
As bean notes, the Aegis system has enough opportunities to retarget that this sort of probability calculation is going to very strongly favor the defense. BOTE, I get six or seven discrete engagements against a subsonic, sea-skimming missile, and the last few of those the system will probably be firing two missiles at a time at whatever got through the first layers. 0.5^8 would give <0.4% probability, or one hit per 250 missiles fired. Which won't sink or even disable an aircraft carrier.
Where this sort of calculation breaks down is when you have to start dealing with single-point failures or common failure modes. What are the odds that Aegis will misclassify a missile's radar return as a false target and not fire any Standards or ESSMs at it? Small, but probably not 0.4% small. You’ve got four target-illumination radars on a CG and if one of them has a loose connection or stuck bearing, the entire system loses 25% of its capacity.
Most analysis either ignores these effects or handwaves them away, because there’s really not enough data to do anything more.
And, to be fair, this applies to both sides. If the enemy launches 200 missiles at an aircraft carrier, maybe half of them instead target the destroyer that was turned at just the right angle to give an extra-strong radar return.
A good point, but one that is greatly mitigated by the latest generation of networked systems. The ships share pictures, so even if one AEGIS system decides that a given missile is not a threat, the others probably won’t, and should outvote it, or at the very least engage it on their own. Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) means that the CG with a stuck illuminator can pass missiles off to one of the land-attack Burkes (which otherwise would be idle early on) to guide. There are still potential system-level failures, but I’d bet reasonably heavily that the other guy is at least as likely to have them as the USN is.
This gives rise to another dumb question:
How many targets can these layers deal with at once? Does 6 opportunities for engagement with a single missile mean that a volley of 7 missiles is guaranteed to get one through? Or am I right in imagining that there must be sufficient capacity to deal with multiple missiles simultaneously?
There is absolutely capability to deal with multiple missiles simultaneously. That’s why AEGIS was developed. I don’t know the exact number (it’s obviously classified), and it’s going to vary with the engagement conditions, but I’m pretty sure it’s over 12 per ship, and my best guess would be on the order of 24. And there’s increasing interest in autonomous homing, to raise this number even higher.
(I have some stuff written on the mechanics of AEGIS that I may post on Wednesday.)
I for one would love to know more about AEGIS. My knowledge of radars and sensors has stalled at uncomfortably low level.
@ Bean
Not sure if you need it but if you want to discuss search/target acquisition tactics, and more specifically the air wing and individual expeditionary detachment’s role in it prior to your targeting and localization post you can drop me a line at [my user handle]@gmail.com.
If China is willing to use a missile with a hydrogen bomb on it could China easily get the missile close enough to kill the carrier?
Easily is stretching it. You’d be just as vulnerable as a conventional missile to the outer layers of defenses, although you’d be able to avoid CIWS and maybe RAM. The big advantage is that you only need to get one missile through for a kill, not several. (This was more important 30-40 years ago, where the odds of a few leakers getting through from an attack that didn’t totally overwhelm the defenses were a lot higher.) The reason that it won’t happen is because the US response involves ICBMs.
Nuclear weapons are less destructive than you think they are, and won’t solve the problem of getting close. Ships in particular are surprisingly durable, provided they have a washdown system to keep fallout from sticking to them. This is actually an area where the US has made substantial improvements since the height of the Cold War. The Burkes were the first ships really designed to withstand near-miss nukes.
All those planes sitting on top of the carrier are very exposed and vulnerable to nuclear solicitations.
‘Oh, we lost a carrier battle group – welp, might as well trade in all our major cities!’
Absurd.
Define ‘very’. How big is the weapon likely to be, and how close does it have to be before it starts damaging the deck park?
(The answer to part 2 is ‘a lot closer than you think’.)
The same logic works on the other side. ‘Let’s put all of our cities at risk to destroy a carrier’ is even more illogical. It’s a lot safer to stick to conventional warheads, and they work nearly as well these days.
I was going to write a charitable response, but only because I missed your last word. Instead:
Deterrence works both ways. Mutual Assured Destruction works both ways. And bean didn’t say that the US response involved all of our ICBMs, or even most of them.
You are speaking from foolish ignorance that you ought to have corrected before posting.
I don’t think we (or anyone else with nukes, even North Korea) would go straight to countervalue. But if a nuclear-armed enemy used their nukes on a carrier battle group, dropping an ICBM on a naval base or a major airfield is proportionate retaliation. And since they’ve just proven they’re willing to launch their first nuke, it behooves you to aim your retaliatory strike at preventing them from launching their second.
You might correctly note that things can escalate easily from there. That’s one reason why it hasn’t happened.
It does not take ‘all of our ICBMs’ or ‘most of our ICBMS’ to devastate a country. Launching ICBMs, plural, on major Russian or Chinese targets in response to a carrier battle group being nuked is very, very likely to result in ICBMs, plural, being launched in response on major American targets. De-escalating at this point, assuming there’s room to de-escalate, is very difficult. “Welp, might as well trade in all our major cities!” is an entirely appropriate quip.
If he meant to imply ‘launch ICBMs on Siberian wasteland or open ocean or remote military base to show that we’re pissed off and mean business’ he ought to have clarified that he meant that response ‘involving ICBMs’ to be a very very noncentral use of ICBMs, one for which cruise missiles whether conventional or nuclear seem more suitable.
Considering he didn’t do so even in his reply, I think my response was fine. The response “‘Let’s put all of our cities at risk to destroy a carrier’ is even more illogical” implies I am not totally off base.
I’m not sure why it bothers you so much that I called a pretty out-there proposition ‘absurd’ – after sketching out why I considered it absurd – but I wanna make clear that I don’t give a half-shred of a fuck what you think of me or what I ought to have done. You want me to clarify something, you want to challenge something, make your points. You wanna signal contempt – save your breath.
I’ve never seen anything more fucking worthwhile than the first and last two lines in this reply! They really tie the whole thing together, it’s like an inverse shit sandwich.
Or maybe you should just say what you have to say without the asinine reverse-sugar coat, which I reiterate means fuck-all to me.
You do not know how much damage an ICBM will do. Seriously, everyone overestimates the effectiveness of nuclear weapons until they look themselves. To devastate China, it would take quite a few, although not all. To blow up a couple of artificial islands would take a couple, and be a reasonable response.
It’s very difficult to de-escalate after the first one goes off, period, which is why they wouldn’t do so in the first place. Also, as John points out, they don’t have that many, and they’re rather too precious to use on probably the hardest target around.
I’ve met John. He’s a fairly senior guy at a respected analysis firm. You’re a random person off the internet who isn’t a regular in the naval threads, who comes in acting confrontational (not normal in these threads) and spouting the sort of nonsense you get from public articles on this stuff. Yes, he (and I) have reason to be displeased with you. Now go, find out how much actual damage nuclear weapons do, and then we’ll talk.
Preventing them from launching their second requires an all-out strike – no limited response will do for that purpose.
An ICBM is not ICBMs, plural. The plural does matter. ‘The US response would involve an ICBM’ is more clearly separated from the general usage scenario for ICBMs than what bean actually said. Once you’re launching a few ICBMs, unless you’re targeting unusually minor targets, you are wreaking such havoc that it isn’t clear that the enemy can avoid making a tit-for-tat response.
A much more major reason is that the US has not, and likely would not dare to enter a conventional war with countries that have large nuclear arsenals. Should such a war start, and should the defenses of the carrier battle group prove as puissant as bean suggests (unlikely though that may be) a nuclear strike on a CVBG launching strikes on crucial interests of Russia or China is not out of the question.
You might correctly note that things can escalate easily from there. That’s one reason why it hasn’t happened.
This might be the most sensible thing you’ve said yet.
You’re reading way too much into a fairly quick comment of mine. Using nuclear weapons against a carrier is basically the same as using them against a major airbase. Any use of nuclear weapons in that kind of context is very very close to setting off a full-scale nuclear war. Neither side wants that, so they won’t try them tactically in the first place. Yes, it’s possible that the US response is to hit a couple of airbases, and maybe the Chinese let it go. More likely, we now have WW3. The Chinese won’t try in the first place.
You’re still looking at this from a weirdly one-sided perspective. The US doesn’t dare get into a conventional war with Russia and China, but they also don’t dare get into a war with us. Also, a nuclear strike against a carrier is just stupid. Conventional weapons are better for that job today, because defenses are good and nukes are expensive and have political ramifications.
I am well aware of how much damage an ICBM will do. Every ICBM can carry several warheads with yields in the hundreds of kilotons. Go click on over to nukemap and see what a few W88s will do. A few ICBMs each carrying several W88-scale warheads are a very big deal. ‘Devastating China’ does not mean defeating China, or wiping out every motherfucker in China. Would ~20 475 kiloton explosions in US cities devastate the US? Damn right they would. Wouldn’t wipe us out, but would be a very big deal. Would change this country forever.
Blowing up a couple of China’s artificial islands would be an extremely unusual use of a couple of ICBMs. Those little sand strips do not merit anything like that kind of firepower.
If you say ‘the response involves ICBMs’ you are making certain implications. It’s like if I say ‘if you fuck my daughter, the response involves my shotgun’ – clearly I am not implying that I am going to go shoot several loads of buckshot into your lawn.
That aside, now that you’ve clarified exactly what you meant – or stepped back from what was implied by your statement – let’s address that. It is very unlikely that the US response would ‘involve ICBMs’ in the form of using a couple on some sand strips in the south china sea. Much more likely responses include conventional cruise missile strikes on more major Chinese military targets, and simply backing down after some bellicose rhetoric (which no-one likes to signal, for obvious reasons, but which the US is pretty good at doing.) A nuclear response would likely use a few nuclear cruise missiles, not ICBMs.
Wow, that makes all the issues I had with his comment go away!
His comment didn’t impress me – and it came along with passive aggressive nonsense that pissed me off. Even if I would be impressed with his workplace, his workplace ain’t him, and the totality of his person ain’t his comment. I don’t have to give a -fuck- about anything but good arguments. And I don’t. Can I make that clearer? Let’s stipulate that he’s God. God left annoying passive aggressive bullshit in the reply box, and deserves my objections.
I didn’t start off denigrating either of you. Not only do I not care what you two think of me – I didn’t expect you to care what I think of you. I’m interested in the subject. Address the subject. I don’t claim you have no right to pour salt alongside, but I will throw it right back in anyone’s face.
I’m well aware of how much actual damage nuclear weapons do. Nothing I have said is out of line with that. I would agree that the popular imagination of nuclear weapons is unrealistic. Mine isn’t.
Unlike you (apparently), I’ve actually done that. It took me 6 300 kt warheads to devastate the 20th-largest metro area in the nation.
4 airliners flow by lunatics changed this country forever. Again, I’ve actually run the numbers on what it would take to take out a major metro area. You clearly haven’t.
I don’t know what the exact response would be. I’m not a nuclear targeteer, and I’m definitely not the President when this happens. I do know that using a nuke on a carrier is far too likely to draw a strategic response to be plausible for the Chinese to do. It’s plausible that the US would try to keep the retaliation to a level that would de-escalate. It’s also plausible that we’d go all-out.
What Chinese targets haven’t already been hit by conventional cruise missiles?
The idea that the US obviously wouldn’t retaliate after a nuclear strike on a carrier, to the point where it becomes plausible for the Chinese to launch such a strike, is patently ludicrous to anyone who has read actual books on nuclear weapons. So yes, a dismissive response was not entirely out of line.
Really? And what are your thoughts on nuclear winter?
It’s ‘weirdly one sided’ only without the context. China and Russia aren’t in the forward/aggressive posture here. Russian interventions involve reacting to attempts to dismantle what remains of their old sphere of influence, and China is even more passive than Russia. They aren’t the adventurous ones.
Conventional weapons are better for that job today – I agree wholeheartedly.
They are much better precisely because defenses will not nullify them. If defenses could easily deal with conventional weapons, nuclear warheads could rise to the occasion. Stopping a sea-skimming supersonic cruise missile before it gets close enough for its nuclear warhead to fuck you up is even harder than stopping it before it hits you.
Because Russia has a moral right to dominate Eastern Europe, whatever the Eastern Europeans think, and China actually deserves all of the various islands under dispute. It’s only the meddling of the evil, evil US that’s causing trouble, and if we just left them to it, everything would be great.
How big is the warhead on this missile likely to be? And how close does it then have to be before it can ‘fuck you up’? How does that number compare to the range of common anti-missile weapons in use by the US? How much more does the nuclear version cost?
The US could use every cruise missile in its inventory and there would be a panoply of Chinese targets still untouched.
With ICBMs? Against targets suitable for ICBMs? I reiterate, absurd.
I don’t think it ‘obviously wouldn’t retaliate.’ I think backing down is a strong possibility, but certainly not guaranteed or ‘obvious.’ It obviously is a strong possibility, though. The US has always had a bark worse than its bite, and this would be a really scary situation. There’s a very strong possibility leadership would decide this whole going to war with China thing is busto, time to cut losses.
Nonsense peddled by a bizarre array of people who ought to have known better. Firestorm is not guaranteed, and that time we had a nuclear firestorm the soot rained out fairly quickly (as large particulate matter is wont to do.) To be fair, Sagan also predicted that burning Kuwaiti oil wells could lead to climatic disaster, so aside from idealistic desire to prevent nuclear war there was a good helping of plain old stupidity.
A ‘dismissive response’ is what I gave you. ‘Absurd.’
“You are speaking from foolish ignorance that you ought to have corrected before posting” touches on the personal.
I’m not a wilting flower, I won’t be put off by much rougher language than this, but I will respond in kind.
Uh huh.
I guess they didn’t read enough ‘actual books’ about nuclear weapons.
This sort of idea has actually cropped up quite a lot, which you really ought to know if you’re going to arrogantly posture in the way that you have. When the conventional scales are too badly tipped, limited use of nuclear weapons is a way to try to stave off defeat. Obviously conventional solutions are preferable – if they work. If you don’t think they will work, you are left with more desperate options.
I guess the good minister should have read more actual books.
These are serious and open questions in the field of modern military strategy. It is ludicrous to think that a country would signal that it would back down in the face of a limited nuclear strike, for obvious reasons – but not at all ludicrous to think that in practice, it would.
Of all the ways a limited nuclear strike could be carried out, a few ICBMs is perhaps the worst, because it looks the most like a real first strike. You want the least resemblance possible.
A nuclear cruise missile attacking a target at sea has the least resemblance possible, which stands in favor of that course of action – should it be required, which I don’t think it ever will be.
Morality doesn’t enter into it. The US is the one being aggressive, forward, adventurous, regardless of the moral purity of its aims.
150kt, or thereabouts. Probably 2-3km?
It’s less, obviously. That doesn’t mean intercepting a supersonic sea-skimmer before it reaches 0m isn’t incredibly difficult. When you give the missile much more ‘play’ in terms of where it can detonate and still fuck you up, you make interception still more difficult. And the consequences of failure much more severe.
Nukes are expensive – damn right. Carriers are even more expensive. You can afford to throw a whole lot of nukes at each carrier if you have to – and, to be clear, I would claim you don’t have to.
I can devastate New York City with one nuke.
Russia literally invaded Crimea. Whether or not that was right or wrong, I would certainly describe it as “aggressive, forward, adventurous.” China’s actions in the South China Sea, such as building artificial islands and attacking fishing boats, are certainly also “aggressive, forward, and adventurous.” In other words, the US has been aggressive, but so have other countries.
It’s a pretty interesting question how the US would retaliate for a nuclear strike on our carriers. I think more than anything else the president would just be baffled that someone had decided to make a first strike on something other than our nuclear launch silos or cities. Pretty much every option would be on the table at that point, since a nuclear-capable power was behaving in a bizarre and unexpected way.
Missed this earlier. With the first, most central nuke, St. Louis would be ‘devastated.’ If your definition of ‘devastated’ is not a single building standing in the whole metro area you would need a hell of a lot more nukes than you used. Do you understand how far-reaching the effects of hundreds of thousands of casualties are on such a city? Hell, the state that city is in? ‘Devastated’ is apt for any city where a 300kt nuke goes off. The whole region would be embroiled in dealing with the (non-literal) fallout for weeks. Now a few American ICBMs, say three, carry 24 475 kt nukes into a country – I call that country ‘devastated.’ Any country in the world would be consumed by that event for a good period of time.
After Ukraine’s president, the one who was relatively friendly to Russia, the one the Crimeans (largely pro-Russia) voted for, was violently deposed. Like I said, a response to an attempt to destroy what remains of Russia’s sphere of influence. Reactive.
Comparing China’s sand-dredging and Russia’s attempt to hold on to some scraps of influence in its near abroad to the quixotic flurry of invasions and ‘interventions’ the US emits is laughable.
Obviously the carrier in question would have been launching strikes on the forces of the country that nuked it – so it wouldn’t be very baffling. A ‘first strike’ on a carrier is absurd. It would be a response to the carrier fucking up their shit.
Now, I claim the carrier’s shit gets fucked by the conventional defenses of Russia/China (especially Russia tho) so they have no need to resort to nukes. But if the carrier is practically impervious to their attacks, it is exceedingly dangerous. Tremendous amounts of damage can be done by a carrier air wing. Spectacular quantities of ordinance can be delivered continuously. It would have to be dealt with.
This means in practice carriers can’t really be used to fuck up Russia/China’s shit. As the offensive tool that they are, their realistic use is fucking up the little guy.
Which leads into my objection that fucking up the little guy ain’t gave us shit, ain’t eva gave us shit. So I don’t think very highly of the carrier.
But if we’ve already used all the cruise missiles, we don’t have any more cruise missiles to shoot. By the time a carrier gets nuked, either the targets would be gone, or we’d be out of missiles. Pick one.
I will admit that the reference to ICBMs was offhand, and not a detailed targeting plan. Yes, it is more likely that we’d use ALCMs or something of that nature. But that road leads to ICBMs an uncomfortable percentage of the time.
At least you know something.
No, him dismissing you.
So a weird Russian idea that the Russians don’t even support, much less the Chinese, who have a much smaller nuclear program than they could have?
Yes, there are parallels to some 50s doctrines. Those doctrines may even have been good ones at the time. (A position I’m partial to.) But those are not the doctrines that shape current thinking. Tactical nukes went out of style in the 80s, for a lot of reasons. Threat of escalation is one. Improved conventional weapons are another. Both apply here.
You missed my point. Why is it the US being aggressive? Are we determining aggression on simple geographical proximity? On historic links? Russia invaded Ukraine. China’s behavior in the South China Sea is not notably restrained, either. To call wanting to maintain the status quo ‘aggressive’ is Orwellian.
The slide rule says 17 psi overpressure at 1 nm from that warhead. Unfortunately, I can’t turn up a value for blast hardening right now (although I suspect it may be somewhere in one of my books, but I have a lot), but I believe that’s in the ‘damaged, not dead’ range. That’s light damage on reinforced concrete and seismic structures, for a baseline.
ESSM range is 30 nm. You’re only evading CIWS and are firmly within RAM range. So I’m not sure what it gains you.
Comparing the nukes to the carrier is missing the point entirely. You’re comparing them to the alternative conventional missiles. How much does the warhead cost compared to the missile? Whoever is right about defenses, you mean to tell me that the defenses in that last 1-2 km are going to shoot down so many missiles that it’s cheaper to buy nukes than to buy more missiles?
Maybe I’m not using either definition. Maybe I’m using the definition where I’m trying to kill the most important military targets. Because that first bomb leaves downtown totally intact. (It was aimed at the airport, where Boeing has a plant.) I stand by my targeteering as a reasonable effort under current circumstances. The details are in OT 69.25.
If you’re going to take my use of ICBM excessively literally, I’m going to do the same to you. Check how many warheads each US ICBM carries. And stop being amazed when I find it hard to take you seriously when you make mistakes like this after being pedantic to me.
@The Nybbler
No, you can devastate Manhattan (ignoring that nukemap doesn’t take things like shadowing into account, which would be very important in practice there), which is an unusually compact target. The rest of NYC is OK, and the trick conspicuously fails when you try it on any other US city.
Good point! Also, I don’t know if you knew this, but when the Nazis invaded France, it wasn’t an aggressive act. It was just a response to an attempt to destroy German civilization by Judeo-Communist forces. Reactive. I think it’s great that humanity has come so far in moving beyond aggressiveness, that we can even send troops to invade other countries without being considered “aggressive” by all right-thinking people.
[Note to the humor-impaired: the preceding paragraph is sarcasm. The Nazis were scumbags.]
I think pretty much everyone on SSC hates US foreign policy. The libertarians and anarcho-capitalists probably hate it for different reasons than the progressives and hard-line leftists, of course… Nobody in this thread was arguing that US foreign policy was good. Just that it’s forehead-slappingly stupid to call invading another country “not aggressive.”
Your point of view is not self-consistent. If Russia and China have to “preserve their traditional sphere of influence,” then surely we do too? And carriers are a good way to do that.
Nobody is ever really neutral in a modern war. At best, they’re Switzerland, a place that is de-facto controlled by one of the big guys.
Then my response was appropriately ‘dismissive’ in response.
We wouldn’t have already used all our cruise missiles. That was not implied by my reply. If I point out that you could use all the bullets in your gun and still leave people in this city alive, ‘IF YOU’VE ALREADY USED ALL THE BULLETS YOU CAN’T SHOOT ANYONE’ is not a very insightful response. As has been sadly typical.
Or, as would obviously be the case, we wouldn’t use ALL our cruise missiles. There’s continuous production of new cruise missiles, there’s the limitations of delivery platforms, there’s the need for strategic reserves.
OK. So ‘the US response involves ICBMs’ was a misleading comment, even if you were implying an absurdly noncentral use of ICBMs. But that isn’t getting at the real issue. ‘The US response involves ICBMs’ is a smugfuck thing to say, implying ‘You wouldn’t DARE to do this because of course we would OBLITERATE you in response.’ If you mean ‘The US response involves ICBMs on some tiny little bullshit islands, maybe’ then you should SAY THAT.
Getting into a hot war with Russia or China leads to ICBMs ‘an uncomfortable percentage of the time.’ Nuking a clearly delineated military target at sea is certainly a risky escalation, but depending on the situation it could be less risky than leaving it alive.
‘The response involves us demolishing the Chinese artificial islands, possibly with nuclear armed cruise missiles’ is a perfectly unobjectionable statement.
How about next time you step back right away and cut all the preceding huffing and puffing.
Trident is an ‘intercontinental ballistic missile.’ You would usually say SLBM, instead of ICBM, but it is a submarine launched… intercontinental ballistic missile. It was clear I meant Trident II when I referred to the W88 warhead.
http://www.military-today.com/missiles/trident_2.htm
I am not the only one to use the acronym in this way. It is nonstandard but not literally wrong.
Your point properly made is that LGM-30, which is what you would usually be referring to with ‘ICBMs,’ has three W78 warheads, not the 8 W88 warheads of Trident III. Three W78s are considerably less destructive than 8 W88s – assuming the latter is unfairly exaggerating your response. That’s a fair point. Just come out and make it. Snarky bullshit is annoying and thoroughly unimpressive.
I was never being ‘excessively literal.’ Your response implied something that was incorrect, and also ridiculous. If I say ‘My response to you putting my child in detention involves THIS AXE!!!!!’ It’s perfectly clear that I don’t mean that I am gonna go take some chunks out of the school’s lawn. And if I didn’t even intend to do that with an axe, my statement is even more unrepresentative. It is, what’s the word… Oh yes, absurd. Stupid, even. In retrospect I should have been harsher. To turn around and say ‘How COULD you act like I was threatening you with the axe??? Of COURSE I meant I would go tear up parts of your lawn with this hammer. How could you be so EXCESSIVELY LITERAL’ is way, way more stupid.
Or just dishonest backpedaling.
That a significant fraction of Russians in relevant military positions apparently supported very recently. The fact that this was taken seriously for some time by the military of one of the world’s pre-eminent nuclear powers makes it something you don’t get to dismiss as ‘patently ludicrous to anyone who has read actual books on nuclear weapons.’
You claim that something is patently absurd to ‘anyone who has read actual books on nuclear weapons,’ that is a claim that rests on ‘anyone who has read actual books on nuclear weapons,’ which is a whole group of people with a great deal more collective clout than YOU.
Current thinking is not responding to an overwhelming conventional imbalance that threatens to sweep us away. If China is getting assraped by carriers and can’t do shit about it conventionally, it’s not unreasonable to claim that their thinking will run along the same lines as those in similar positions went down. Like the West Germans at certain points, like the Russians during some part of the ’90s.
How about either? How close is the US to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria? What are its deep historic links to these places?
After Ukraine’s government was overthrown by a coalition that included some violently anti-Russian members. In protection of those areas of Ukraine that were pro-Russia and voted overwhelmingly for the president who was violently deposed. And yes, it matters that Ukraine borders Russia and that not very long ago they were part of the same Union.
It is compared even to invading Ukraine, which is restraint personified compared to US actions.
So you didn’t have numbers in mind for how much overpressure the planes on the deck can withstand, then. The question is whether I am wrong that those planes can withstand considerably less overpressure than the ship itself. If you’re gonna act like a smug asshole over me making that implication, I would fucking hope you had something behind that.
I also wonder about the thermal pulse. Could that in itself fuck some things up – certainly people on the deck, but what about the equipment? Would it melt or significantly weaken the tyres, for example? Melt some plastic in the cockpit? I’m not sure, but it seems plausible.
It’s not just about not having to make that last couple km. It’s the fact that instead of the end-point having to be along the surface area of the carrier, the end-point can be anywhere in a 1-3km radius hemisphere centered on the carrier (or other target in the CVBG, though those are more durable.) ECM solicitations that could lead the conventional missile to miss completely can leave the nuke still detonating within acceptable radius.
It takes the carrier about 3.5 minutes to travel 3km. The Moskit missile travels at ~45 kilometers a minute at low altitude, faster at high altitude. That means an Su-34 can from ~150km launch on the carrier’s position and if the missile simply detonates as soon as it reaches that position, with no further guidance whatsoever the carrier still gets fucked up.
The missile that has been armed with a nuclear warhead has a great deal more freedom and room for error in terms of terminal maneuver. This matters. The greater damage done also matters.
What is cheaper is not the question. In the moment they cannot turn nuclear warheads into more cruise missiles. Their delivery of cruise missiles is also bottlenecked by delivery platforms.
I would claim it isn’t a good use of nuclear warheads because the defenses of the carrier aren’t nearly as effective as you imply. But if they were, then taking out a carrier which is striking crucial targets would be an excellent use of several nuclear armed cruise missiles.
That’s an idiosyncratic definition of ‘devastate.’
____________________________________________________________
The differences are pretty obvious.
Depends what preceded that invasion. And the issue is comparative.
No one ‘has to’ do anything. Russia and China’s actions have been in line with their national self-interest. The relative aggressiveness/adventurousness aside, which is a point that I am happy to maintain, our interventions as I pointed out earlier ‘ain’t gave us shit.’ If we seized some material benefit from our actions I would be much more supportive of them.
You are free to stay out of it. France didn’t have to go into Iraq. We don’t have to go anywhere.
No, it’s entirely on-point. I asked what targets would be left after the initial (pre-nuke) conventional cruise missile strikes to launch retaliatory strikes on. You said that there would be some because the US didn’t have enough cruise missiles to kill all of the targets. But if we’re limited by our missile stocks, what do we use to launch the retaliatory strikes?
The whole point of retaliation is that you’re doing more than you otherwise would have. If the Chinese launch a nuke at a carrier in a war that is not already all-out, then we need to launch a full-scale nuclear strike because they’ve clearly gone crazy.
I have limited time. I was trying to point out that nuclear weapons are serious business, and the Chinese would need to gain a massive advantage for it to be worth the increased risk of all-out nuclear war, and that the advantage just wasn’t there.
I had falsely assumed that the general assumption of good faith that prevailed in the battleship threads would carry over to this one, and was a bit sloppy in my answer. I was wrong.
As for terminology, if you’re going to nitpick, I’m going to nitpick back. I’m well aware that you meant Trident II when you brought up the W88. But if you’re going to be pedantic, I’m perfectly willing to play the game. There aren’t enough W88s to equip all of the Trident IIs, so most are armed with 100 kt W76s taken from Trident Is. And the ICBMs are almost all single warheads today.
All sorts of weird things get taken seriously by serious militaries. I’d point to LCS and Zumwalt as prime examples. Also, the Russians are not the Chinese.
Pick one:
1. Carriers are weak and vulnerable to the Chinese.
2. Carriers are likely to beat the Chinese so badly that they will break out the nukes.
Yes, if the US is clearly beating the Chinese, nukes are possibly on the table for them. This is an inherent limit on any war with the Chinese, and the reason we haven’t seen a great power war since 1945. Any war between nuclear powers is going to be carefully fought to avoid a nuclear war. The last one was fought so carefully that we never actually shot at each other directly.
That number, I do have, but forgot to pull last night. For jet fighters, you’ll have 50% out of service but field-repairable at 5 psi and 50% out of service and depot-repairable at 8 psi. (I think a carrier is probably ‘light depot’) You get to 8 psi at 2760 yards and 5 psi at 3830 yards. However, these are both at optimum burst height, which is sort of impossible in your supersonic sea-skimming missile. So I’ll use ground-level numbers instead, which are 2000 yards for 8 psi and 2390 yards for 5 psi. So yes, in theory a 150 kt nuke at ~2 km would do a lot of damage to the deck park. But it wouldn’t necessarily be game over, and the planes would definitely be repairable. (And these numbers are from the 50s. I believe that the situation has generally gotten better since then.)
(Also note that 17 psi at 1 nm is from a weapon at optimum altitude, not on the surface. Again, comments about sea-skimming apply.)
Google ‘effects of nuclear weapons’ and find out yourself what the thermal pulse numbers are. My source (AMCP 706-161, sadly paywalled) indicates that the blast is the primary damage mechanism for aircraft. Some of my books indicate that thermal was more of a concern for ships, but I believe that was in the context of ‘after we deal with blast’.
You’re sure giving ECM a lot of credit. I’d spend the cash on ECCM instead. Cheaper, and less political fallout.
It’s also 10 times as expensive, and that includes the ones that get shot down before they go off. This sort of logic worked a lot better back in the 70s, before modern electronics.
If the bottleneck is delivery platforms, then I can’t see nuclear warheads making things better. Nobody is casual with the things, and the overhead cost of nuclear capability is significant.
Not really. I’ve done a fair bit of research into targeting methods, and what I provided isn’t that far off from what you’d get in a modern environment. I want the city dead, not wounded, and that doesn’t happen with one bomb on a reasonable-sized city.
I’m not even going to bother answering your nonsense on American ‘aggression’.
We will not strike all possible targets. We will not use all our missiles in stock. We are limited not just by the missiles we have on hand but by delivery platforms and opportunity and political considerations. We have, at the very least, nuclear armed cruise missiles that we would not have used at this stage in the scenario.
‘All-out’ means we have devastated each other’s major cities. There is a huge amount of room beneath that to play with. The war could be over Taiwan, for example. It could get very hot but still be limited to that theater. Strikes from our carriers on Chinese assets in that limited theater, including parts of the Chinese mainland that are close to Taiwan, could bring up the prospect of a Chinese defeat, which might be politically impossible for the CPC to accept. After conventional attacks fail, they could resort to nukes.
“We need to launch a full-scale nuclear strike because they’ve clearly gone crazy” is more bullshit bluster. If Chinese cities/industrial areas are being devastated by airstrikes, they are not ‘crazy’ to respond with whatever level of force removes that threat and safeguards their shores. This would be perfectly well understood. For them to sit back while scenes of devastation sweep Chinese media would be very perilous indeed.
IF you are correct – which you aren’t – about the potency of the CVBGs defenses, THEN breaking out nukes makes a great deal of sense.
You aren’t, so it doesn’t.
There was nothing unclear about this position in my replies.
I didn’t interpret what you said in bad faith. I interpreted it correctly. My axe-waving parent example from before is on point. There are implications to saying your response will ‘involve’ a given deadly implement. Under some circumstances that implication is just absurd.
You knew perfectly well what you were doing, or you simply misspoke, in which case you should have promptly said so and admitted that while your intention was not to say something absurd, you accidentally did. “The reason that it won’t happen is because the US response involves ICBMs.” This is a perfect motte-and-bailey example, only you couldn’t even salvage your motte. You were vastly magnifying the probable US response, when really you could only begin to defend the very minimum edge of what a response that ‘involves ICBMs’ would entail.
If being ‘a bit sloppy’ means implying something nonsensical, having that pointed out lead to immediate retraction, not all this rigamarole.
And your illustrious very senior friend should not have gotten so bitchy.
You can call anything ‘weird’ that your heart desires, but don’t say such things are ”patently ludicrous to anyone who has read actual books on |subject.|”
At least you know something.
That’s a relief. I don’t want correcting nonsense in this thread to turn into a full time job.
Your quote that started this:
(and the next phrase was about backing down, not about ALCMs).
If the Chinese start breaking out the nukes while we still have the capability to strike ‘more major targets’ with conventional cruise missiles, then they’re very far off the playbook, and everyone gets very nervous, to the point where the button marked ‘SIOP’ becomes a real option. If the US is clearly winning the war, our playbook says ‘back off, so they don’t break out the nukes’.
Except that it doesn’t. Nukes are expensive and politically very different from conventional weapons, and only very slightly more effective.
And yet you don’t seem to understand how the systems work today. What is your source for disregarding my PK estimates? I’ll point to Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems as one of my prime sources.
You interpreted a comment meant to read ‘this way lies nuclear war’ as a detailed evaluation of the likely US response, and have continued to beat me with it even after I clarified what I was doing there. Yes, it was sloppy. No, I am not made of time. Most of my response to James was looking at the tactical implications of nuclear weapon use, not the strategic ones, but I thought it was worth pointing out that they are considered serious business on that level.
And whatever criticisms you can level at me for being sloppy, I can throw them back doubled. All you did in the first post in this string was call what I said absurd, leaving me in the dark as to what you were thinking was the case. If you’d pointed out that ALCMs were more likely, I’d have agreed with you. But as far as I could tell, you seemed to think that there was no risk of escalation at all, and that the US would just back down. Or something like that. Which is nonsensical enough that I consider my initial response to be kind, and don’t blame John at all for writing you off immediately. I’m about to do the same.
There’s been a lot of nonsense, most of it from you. I’ll note that you have yet to admit error on nuclear effects, or on weapons loadouts. I’m spending a lot of time and effort cleaning up your mess. (And you’re not citing anything, or doing any research beyond basic google, which is probably a bad sign.) It’s not worth my time. Good-bye.
OK, this is getting kind of ridiculous.
Putting tactical nuclear warheads on antiship missiles marginally increases their ability to defeat aircraft carrier battle groups, probably negating Phalanx but not other missile defenses, and turning what would have been a damaging hit that probably forces the CVBG to withdraw(*) into a spectacular kill. A single nuclear missile in this application would almost certainly be shot down, so accomplishing anything useful would require at least a dozen or two – a significant portion of e.g. China’s nuclear arsenal. And if any of them actually detonate, on target or otherwise, it would place China or whomever at risk of being drawn into an escalating nuclear war. All for the sake of sinking an aircraft carrier that they probably could have sent home with conventional ordnance.
To have any chance of controlling the subsequent escalation, they would have to subordinate tactical command and control of the strike to the highest level of political control, lest your field commanders accidentally nuke the Americans while your diplomats were negotiating a cease-fire. At this point, you are actually less likely to defeat the carrier for lack of ability to strike a fleeting target at the opportune moment.
Tactical or strategic nuclear weapons on cruise or ballistic missiles substantially increase the ability to defeat e.g. airbases, where unlike aircraft carriers the important structures can be widely dispersed and protected by meters of reinforced concrete. In this application, you probably only need the one nuclear missile because very few nations (not China) have even a minimal ability to intercept ICBM-class targets.
And using nuclear weapons in at least proportionate response to an enemy first use, enormously enhances the credibility of a nation’s deterrence. Really, anything less than proportionate nuclear response pretty much destroys the credibility of deterrence, signals to all of one’s adversaries that they should nuke early and often and settle for nothing less than victory. In the long term, for a nation facing multiple threats on a global basis and unwilling to surrender on all fronts, this ultimately increases the risk of large-scale nuclear warfare.
China has little to gain and much to lose by putting nuclear warheads on any of the missiles it might fire at a US Navy aircraft carrier. The United States has its entire global influence to lose by not retaliating in kind, and more still at risk if its enemies do not settle for merely the rest of the globe. So the idea that because “China and Russia aren’t in the forward/aggressive posture”, they are at all likely to launch nuclear strikes against the US Navy and the United States is going to simply back down from that, is not terribly plausible. If your world view is one where the United States is an arrogant, cowardly bully all but invading the aggrieved Chinese, I can see how that might make sense, but if that’s your world view then a discussion of naval tactics probably isn’t the place to thresh it out.
Also:
“Absurd” as a paragraph
“inverse shit sandwich”
“which I reiterate means fuck-all to me”
“God left annoying passive aggressive bullshit in the reply box”
“How about next time you step back right away and cut all the preceding huffing and puffing”
And an average of I’m guessing 2-3 “fucks” per post, at least half of them directed at me or bean.
I’m not sure why he’s trying to engage with you, but I’m done. We’ve both given you sound arguments; you started with contemptuous dismissal and escalated the level of insult and obscenity at every possible opportunity. This isn’t the place where that impresses or persuades anyone.
* If nothing else, the escorts will have substantially depleted their inventory of surface-to-air missiles at a time when the group has clearly been localized by an enemy within striking range
Christ on a crutch, @ilkarnal must be the blackest pot ever to spy a kettle.
No. The vast increase in flexibility in terminal maneuver, the fact that what was a complete miss turns into guaranteed soft-kill – these are very big deals.
You would mix in some nuclear with a wave of conventional. You don’t need all nuclear.
If they send it home with conventional ordinance, obviously they don’t nuke it. If the defenses and general evasive ability are as good as they are being sold, they have a very very difficult time sending it home with just conventional ordinance. Sending them home, the likely multiple CVBGs they have to deal with.
The US is arrogant and cowardly, that’s just obvious. Bully – well, who cares. It could be completely justified in its war with China. Grant that the plight of the Taiwanese is the moral issue of our age. The US is no bully but an honorable knight in shining armor. Nevertheless, the Chinese will be defending their homeland and the US will be fighting far abroad. This matters. The US has proved very willing to pull out when things turn sour, and things would turn very very sour.
In response to the passive aggressive nonsense shoved in my face by you two wonderfully self-confident fellows. “Inverse shit sandwich” is a perfect response for the bullshit you posted. Do you defend it? What call was there for
Do you think you’re some sort of luminary? Where the fuck do you get off saying shit like in response to a perfectly justified comment that focused on the content of someone else’s post, not them? Bean backed off from his original statement, and he backed off for a reason.
It would be justified if you were right and your apparent high self-regard was justified. It isn’t.
What do you think the value of the flouncing airs you two put on is? I’ll tell you, it’s ZERO. If you don’t want to talk then just don’t talk. Please. You don’t impress me. I’m responding to correct your bullshit claims and your bullshit attitude. It would be just. great. if you would stop vomiting smug into the reply box.
I exchange salt for salt. These two clearly think very highly of themselves, and since they were kind enough to make clear they don’t think very highly of me – I’ll make clear that they have my contempt, and why.
I’m NOT saying that they have to ‘be nice.’ I’m pointing out that I’m not defecting against some norm of good grace that they set forth. And that I am right, and they are wrong.
I want to warn everyone in the strongest possible terms not to take these two seriously. They seem to have a firm grasp of certain technical facts – and incredibly poor judgement. The fool in scholar’s garb is the most perilous.
And yet these two are longstanding valued members of the community with proven track records (presumably even the lefties here can agree on that for technical matters). Hell, John’s even cited in the news on nuclear missile things from time to time.
Meanwhile, you are some new rando with an ICBM-sized chip on their shoulder. Shit man, I’ve had a nukes discussion with bean where I felt the need to cool off before posting because I was getting pissed off, and I think you’re way out of line.
All the more reason to call them the out when they get something wrong. Apparently they are used to getting away with spewing poorly thought out offhand nonsense unchallenged. That’s a bad thing. People who believe wacky things are fine. People who believe wacky things and act like those challenging them are challenging the laws of thermodynamics are bad news – or at least annoying.
Oh, I know. And I also remember this gem of a comment from him. F-35s armed with lasers as traffic control for <10lb drones? Insanity, on multiple levels. King Airs flying around zapping errant drones with lasers – still insane. No matter how dire the proposed micro-drone threat, this approach just doesn't work. Say a group is strapping grenades to drones like this and flying them into crowds/VIPs. You have to have remarkably poor judgement to think an F-35 patrolling over the general area could do a goddamn thing.
I’m not impressed with him. The best I’ve seen from him is him stating the obvious on NK (not just in the article). Again, wacky ideas are fine. They aren’t fine accompanied with his attitude. ‘Oh, well everyone else is very impressed with him!’ If true, that makes it worse.
I’m not out of line at all. Their taking the one line ‘absurd’ – in response to a truly absurd proposition – as some dire insult is a sign that their egos are way out of line.
I’m not ‘new,’ and I don’t think it would matter if I was. Chip on my shoulder? What self respecting person could hear You are speaking from foolish ignorance that you ought to have corrected before posting when they were absolutely in the right, and let that shit stand?
God shouldn’t be that smug.
Reading through the nuke thread you linked – familiar annoying smug attitude resurfaces, but that aside – people seem to assume that nuclear war would stop with the first exchange. Even these anti-alarmists are acting like after the nuclear exchange it’s time to rebuild.
Well, since the world doesn’t end – they are right about that – the nuclear exchange is only the beginning of the war. The two sides will look to finish each other off. The bioweapons program of the Soviet Union, inherited by the Russian Federation, looms large here. Probably wouldn’t be the end of the road for them… Probably would be, for us.
Generally, I’ve been very impressed with how the Soviets planned and built for the great potential conflict that faced them.
You would be more successful in that endeavor if you didn’t write in a style likely to discourage readers from taking you seriously.
@ilkarnal
From John’s comment you linked
Misrepresenting what he said as advocating F-35’s and only F-35s is not helping your case.
@ ilkarnal
I was going to sit this thread out but I feel the need to voice my support for Gobbobobble here.
John may be an arrogant ass but, as bean pointed out, you did arguably fire the first shot. In any case, you still haven’t addressed thier core argument. Namely that China (or any other hypothetical adversary for that matter) has little to gain and a lot to loose by deploying nukes in an anti-ship role, while the US has almost everything to loose if it doesn’t respond to a nuclear attack in kind.
If you are referring to the part where I’m very confrontational – I think that’s a necessary response to someone talking down to you, trying to set themselves up as an authority, if you want people to understand that they are totally undeserving of said authority. Being meek in the face of that sort of ‘correction’ would be accepting something that is impossible to accept in this case.
If you’re referring to general writing style – I think my writing is very clear and readable, thank you very much.
I didn’t. From my comment:
Also, he said F-35s are ‘overkill,’ when really they wouldn’t work at all for this purpose. It wouldn’t just be cost-inefficient, it wouldn’t work. At all.
My ‘first shot’ was in my view completely appropriate, and as I said before bean backed down from the claim I was responding to for good reason. It is clear that that claim was absurd.
John’s reply was completely unacceptable, unless you have a very high opinion of John and think he was right. I don’t, and he was obviously wrong.
I have addressed it, very directly and more than once. What they have to gain is enormously improved flexibility and chance to ‘hit,’ from the fact that they only need to come within 2-3km, and overall damage per warhead. I don’t think they’ll need this.
If bean’s claim about the potency of the CVBGs defenses was correct, along with his claim about how difficult a CVBG is to locate, then it is very possible that they would need this. And it would indeed make their attacks considerably more effective.
Wrong – but a nuclear attack ‘in kind’ is definitely not a bad idea. That wouldn’t involve ICBMs.
China might very well view trading their artificial islands in the south china sea, or similar military targets, for the CVBGs wreaking havoc on their territory as a necessary sacrifice.
I didn’t say the US definitely shouldn’t respond ‘in kind.’ I said straight up that it’s a perfectly respectable position.
I have implied and will re-iterate that there is a strong possibility that the US backs down – amid bellicose rhetoric and perhaps symbolic strikes, possibly nuclear, on marginal targets. The US does not lose ‘everything’ or even close from doing this. It is clear that a nuclear attack on a carrier engaged in strikes against the country that nuked it is a very different kettle of fish than a nuclear attack on a US city or cities. As the US is not willing to trade away its major cities, it is put in a position where it must find tit-for-tat responses in the form of pure military targets that can’t be interpreted as existentially threatening.
The US has many more such targets, and more important targets of this kind, around the world than China or Russia. It may decide to quit while only down a CVBG.
Of course, it would never signal such intentions. But in practice, killing lots of Americans has been a great way to get the US to leave you alone. You’d be wise to note this, and compare bark to bite throughout the past several decades. When it comes to wars of choice, the US takes its hand from the cookie jar when burned.
China would be very foolish to view this as a guarantee.
@ilkarnal
Well, I can’t evaluate the technical portion of your argument with bean and John, but the part that I can evaluate, where you brush off a US nuclear response to a nuclear attack as “absurd”, is so sand-poundingly stupid that I frankly have to question everything else.
Your contention is that China nukes a carrier, and as soon as the Defense Support Program satellites pick up the double flash, the obvious US response is to throw up its hands and say, “OK everybody, head back. The last survivors of the CVBG limp as far as you can. We’ll try to get some ships out of Guam to pick you up. All other forces start retrograde operations to the APOD. Good try everyone!” You think this is obvious enough to roll up in a smarmy one-word response, despite it being in direct contravention to US policy of 60 years, internal politics of the military and government, and at least a significant fraction of the actual population.
Your smug response could just as easily be reworded as “Why would the Chinese risk their cities to take out one carrier?” I agree that the US gives up too easily–Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have an awful lot of dead people who threw in with us–but you apparently missed the fact that there were an awful lot of corpses between us going in and pulling out in all of those conflicts. Enough so that you need to explain why you think US policy won’t control, not merely assert it with one word.
And, by the way, you aren’t returning “salt-for-salt.” The only one of the three of you using salty language is you. As somebody who uses some combination of “fuck,” “shit,” and “Goddamn” in almost every third post I make here, I notice that John and bean use profanity very rarely. You’ve just been pouring on salt.
Edit: Your reply with clarification was posted while I was writing. So you *do* think that the US will respond with nuclear weapons, you just thought to pedantically make a one-word reply to the rather obvious metonymy of using “ICBM” for the more general “nuclear weapons.”
This, I have to respond to. Naval Gazing started in mid-February, 5 months ago. I’ve read virtually every comment on all of my posts in the series. In all that time, we’ve never had an exchange half as vitriolic as this one, and they’ve been noted by several people for being polite, helpful threads. The first time I can recall you posting on one, and we get our first war. So yes, you are probably the defector. (I’ve even been proved wrong a couple of times. If I thought it would help, I’d post links, and I will if anyone else wants me to.)
I’d say the same about you, but you’re more or less your own warning. Your unusual views about foreign policy have pretty much killed any chance of displacing either of us as a naval/military expert.
@John Schilling: your comment said exactly what I was trying to say, but much better. Thank you. And thanks, @bean, for the great series of posts…
It is explicitly clear in the thread you’re replying to that I believe a nuclear response in the form of a few nuclear-armed cruise missiles is a perfectly respectable prediction.
Certainly possible. I’m not sure where you get the impression that the US responds to casualties with renewed vigor – but that hasn’t been the pattern.
No, it couldn’t. It is absolutely clear that the US would not respond to a carrier being nuked by trading away its major cities.
China has the opportunity to produce these corpses at a much greater rate!
Bullshit. Unless you’re a five year old kid who sweats at curse words, the contempt dripping from their replies, starting with John Schilling’s first reply, is absolutely worthy of my vigorous response. Especially when they are dead wrong.
ICBMs are not general ‘nuclear weapons.’ They are suited for large scale ‘countervalue’ strikes, and very unsuited to limited strikes.
Bean was invoking the spectre of a full nuclear exchange where China and the US lose their cities, where it is absolutely inappropriate to do so. It is clear that that was absurd. He backed down – to the point of withdrawing from the claim that it would involve ICBMs at all. Eventually.
He should have backed down immediately and straightforwardly. Schilling should not have said I was ‘speaking from ignorance that I should have corrected before posting’ when I stated the obvious. I called something that was clearly absurd, absurd, after pointing out why it was absurd.
These two are used to spouting nonsense without anyone pointing out that it is nonsense, it seems.
Maybe because no-one has been unkind or knowledgeable enough to pop your bubble when you say something insane? Maybe because some people back down when John Schilling lectures them like he’s some kind of authority figure, rather than lodging the appropriate strenuous objection? Maybe because you seem to have been addressing much more obscure historical matters – just my impression from very brief perusal a couple times in the past – as opposed to modern and highly relevant issues like nuclear strategy?
Maybe because people don’t know condescending arrogant bullshit when they see it, and mistake it for healthy confidence? In that regard, much depends on being knowledgeable enough to spot the fool who disguises himself as a guru.
????
Do you think we’re competing for a job at the Atlantic Council? Displace you from what? This is an open forum. I can’t stop you from being wrong on the internet until the day your heart stops beating. I don’t think anyone should take either of you seriously, but I’m voicing that sentiment loudly and repeatedly in response to Schilling’s decision to cast aspersions on the replier in addition to the reply – and your tacit and explicit support of that decision.
With that first reply it was clear I should respond in kind, unless the insult was withdrawn or at least the disgustingly arrogant tone went away. I’m not on some kind of crusade. I just feel obliged to respond to posts in my little thread here. And the subject interests me!
Hey, I thought you had no time and were finished replying to me. What exactly was the point of that smug idiotic posturing, again?
Incidentally, I thank Gobbobobble for posting this thread. It provides a great example of how someone with poor judgement plus a pile of books yields someone with poor judgement and a pile of books.
You’ve helped clarify something I’ve been kicking around in my head since I listened to this Julia Galef podcast, which among other things talks about ‘high information’ vs ‘low information’ voters and values. The problem is the importance of priors – someone with terribly inaccurate priors and a whole pile of information about a subject will likely still end up far off base, if the information is not of the sort that shakes up one’s priors.
First of all, some people seem to have terribly wacky priors. Whether this is an issue fundamental to those people or whether they are produced through some unlucky chance-based process is unclear, but it’s definitely a thing.
Second of all, there are efforts – large scale and organized – to systemically bias people’s priors when it comes to various subjects. As a rule of thumb, the more ‘political’ the subject or sub-subject is the more likely you are to run into such distortion. It’s possible that the places where people tend get their information are particularly well suited as vectors of these distortion campaigns.
So while information is definitely great, it shouldn’t be surprising that ‘high information’ people often advocate for bizarre and obviously incorrect or destructive positions.
Anyway. During the Cold War there was a sustained attempt to bias people’s views about how disastrous a thermonuclear exchange, in and of itself, would be. To catastrophize, essentially. That effort seems to have lost its motive force with the USSR’s collapse, and what remains of it are basically the legacy remnants of that campaign.
Now the new push – much less vigorous than the old push – seems to be to say that nuclear exchange isn’t necessarily completely catastrophic, we have missile defenses which will get better and better, and they really wouldn’t ever dare to nuke us – their sabre rattling doesn’t and shouldn’t scare anyone. Their arsenal is rotting anyway. Soon they’ll be paved over by wondrous missile defense technology and their own decay.
The problem is that the technical point which must be awarded is not as significant as it seems. Yes, thermonuclear exchange in and of itself won’t wipe us out. But that means that it won’t wipe them out either. Instead of being the end, it will be the beginning of an incredibly bitter conflict.
Biological warfare, both against people and against the crops and livestock that sustain them, will likely rear its head. In the wake of a huge tide of injuries and deaths this line of attack will improve several-fold in efficiency.
Conventional weaponry has not stood still since WW2, and what survives of the conventional militaries will continue to wreak havoc.
It is apparent that nuclear weapons can be manufactured with a fairly minimal economic/industrial base. If one side doesn’t rapidly obliterate the other with what means remain after the exchange, production will re-start propelled by terrible vengeful purpose.
To make my position clear, I would agree with the anti-catastrophizers that nuclear war is survivable and winnable. By one side. For the other, it will be quite as catastrophic as billed.
I would be happy to support a crash-program where we do the actual work that would be required to make nuclear war survivable, winnable, then even practical. It is possible. But such grand efforts are not the purview of our slovenly and slothful elite. The present desultory missile defense projects are a parody of what that effort would have to entail.
Anyway I am not railing against any great peril, just what I see as rank stupidity and arrogance. This kind of folly is only dangerous if it comes with balls, and the powers that be have no balls.
So you’re claiming that I’ve been making things up for the past 5 months? In that case, there should be something in one of the top-level posts that’s an error that you can spot that nobody else called me on. I’ve been nice and indexed them for you. Find one, and provide sources for any counterclaim. (And if it’s ‘the battleship was not totally useless during WW2’, provide logic, too.)
The difference between ‘no time’ and ‘better ways to use my time’ is fairly obvious. I can argue with you, which is clearly pointless, or I can write more for the people who are actually interested in learning things. Doing the research it takes to deconstruct your factual claims takes a lot more time than dealing with that kind of petty personal sniping.
No.
They don’t particularly interest me. You said:
I pointed out several potential important ways that this particular case could be different from those other cases that didn’t devolve into vitriol. Do you know what ‘maybe’ means?
How about YOU be MY errand boy. Find several cases of John Schilling saying things like “I was going to write a charitable response, but only because I missed your last word” and “You are speaking from foolish ignorance that you ought to have corrected before posting.” See how often he gets friendly responses.
Then, defend the idea that someone who has received this sort of reply from John, and believes John is taking a position that is obviously incorrect, is in the wrong if they respond in kind and tell John exactly what they think of him.
In either case you ought to stay quiet.
What do you think you’re doing now? You’re arguing with me, but instead of marshaling interesting arguments you’re flouncing around whining about how this isn’t worth your time. That’s because being treated as some sort of higher authority is more important to you than the actual arguments. Well, that’s pathetic. Stop leavening your comments with this irritating drivel. Talk, or don’t – and if you do, then don’t be stupid enough to talk about why you shouldn’t be talking.
You don’t get to whine about personal sniping when you approve of personal sniping in response to my initial impersonal comment. If you two confined yourself to criticizing my post I would return the courtesy and confine my critiques to yours. You started this wonderful exploration of the worth of the conversationalists as opposed to the conversation. Well, Schilling started it and you gave your support later.
Imagine if ilkarnal had just used a conventional comment to sink bean’s carrier post, this terrible comment war could have been avoided.
I know right?
The future of war is irregular.
Good thing we picked a chaos marine to be SecDef 😉
Note also that nuclear missiles are really, really expensive, and China only has about 250 of them. Most of which are devoted to higher-priority tasks than sinking single aircraft carriers.
Furthermore, nuclear missiles are politically sensitive and not something you want to hand out to a random Admiral or worse mere captain and say, “if you’ve got a shot at an aircraft carrier, take it”. All of China’s nuclear weapons, probably including the warheads for the submarine-launched ballistic missiles, belong to the Second Artillery Corps – an army organization that basically takes orders directly from Xi Jinping.
So to make that practical, you’d need to have an extremely flexible and responsive command and control chain up to the highest levels, and you’d need some way to predict which missile out of a salvo would penetrate a CVBG’s defenses and so merit a nuclear warhead – or at least some way to narrow it down to five or so.
Oh, yes. This, too. One of the lesser-known problems with nuclear ABM systems is that they require much more rigorous command and control systems, which handicap their response time compared to non-nuclear systems. The same applies to anything nuclear, particularly when you’re talking about using it against something as expensive and high-profile as a carrier.
A couple of things:
1) Remember that blast radius is roughly proportional to the cube root of the weapon energy.
2) A little naive wikipedia’ing lists the radius at which most civilian buildings will be destroyed (about 5 psi) as about 6.2 km for a 1 Mt airburst at 2000 m altitude. I’d guess that a carrier could withstand substantially more than that, but let’s be conservative.
Here’s the thing about solid-fuel ballistic missiles: They pretty much always have the same flight time, because they always impart the same energy. (There’s no throttle on a solid-fuel rocket; it burns until the fuel is gone.) If you use an intermediate-range missile at a shorter range than it was designed for, you have to pop it up to a higher altitude, and it takes longer therefore to fall onto its target. Presumably, you’d aim the missile where you expected the carrier to be when the warhead arrived.
I can’t find the flight time for a DF-26 (aka “the Guam Express”), but I’d be surprised if it were less than 8 minutes. Assuming that the carrier got launch warning in 2 minutes, it would then have 6 minutes to be at least 6.2 km away from where the missile was aimed.
Assume a 50 kph cruising speed. That’s 5 km in 6 minutes. If the carrier did nothing more than come to a dead stop, it would be close to safe from our 1 Mt/2 km altitude air burst. If it executed a high-speed turn of at least 90°, and the turn takes one minute, it would have 5 minutes of steaming at full speed (close to 60 kph), which would allow it to travel 5 km perpendicular to its course to ground zero, which would make it sqrt(5² + 5²) = 7 km from ground zero before the bad thing happened.
So a purely ballistic IRBM (which is probably the smallest thing that can carry a two-stage H-bomb in the 1 Mt range) probably can’t get the job done.
Alternatives:
a) Some kind of MARV could almost certainly deliver the warhead directly on top of the carrier, as long as it can acquire the ship through an ionization layer to aim. That’s pretty fancy technology–I doubt the Chinese will have it, nor would it be particularly useful for them.
b) You use a boosted fission nuke in the 150 kt range on an anti-ship missile. But now you’re left with the problem of getting the nuke within about 3.5 km (that’s a bit of a SWAG–blast radius increases as the cube root of the energy with medium-altitude air bursts, but it’s harder to figure on a low-altitude anti-ship missile). But now you have to make it through both the outer and middle missile defenses, which gives you well less than a 5% of getting the nuke through to the target. Those puppies are expensive, and they make your opponent really mad. Probably not worth it.
For the heat and blast effects that dominate with a larger that would be the square root of distance rather than the cube since the blast radius is a matter of flux going below a threshold. There’s also an exponential decay factor as the atmosphere absorbs energy but the constant for that is low enough that we can ignore it.
An alternative to decreasing range by putting a missile on a higher trajectory is decreasing range by putting it on a lower one. This is more complicated than aiming higher and I have no idea if it would be feasible for the Chinese rocket forces. It was certainly a major concern for people in potential US/USSR wars though.
I found this on nuclear explosion effects, which says:
The passing of a shock wave through the air is not a conservative or reversible process; it’s bleeding energy through the volume of air through which it travels.
As for the depressed trajectory, sure enough, there’s a declassified paper from the CIA OSWR about α-steering, where you pop up through the atmosphere, then fly a negative angle of attack to generate a depressed trajectory. They came to the conclusion that the Russians couldn’t do it with their SLBMs in the 80’s.
I’d also guess that it would be essential not to reenter in the boost phase, which would prevent you from depressing the trajectory too much with an IRBM. But thanks for the (ahem) steer.
I think you’re not dealing with the PKill issue properly. If you have 50% PKill you will waste a lot of missiles on overkill or you will let a fraction of the missiles through, period. Having the ability to retarget missiles in flight may ameliorate this issue but it surely won’t eliminate it. A lot of missiles need to be engaged in a very short period of time, they have different trajectories because the submarines, planes, ships, or coastal defense batteries aren’t all stacked right next to each other, and the trajectories change as a cruise missile shifts to a sea-skimming profile (if it was high-low instead of low-low trajectory). Distinguishing whether you’ve scored a kill isn’t necessarily instant or totally reliable (you could have fatally damaged the motor but the missile didn’t explode or disintegrate, so for a while it looks like it survived.) You won’t be able to re-use 100% of the missiles you’ve expended on a killed target with 100% efficiency.
An even more more deadly issue is that cruise missiles can be used in low-low sea skimming trajectories, bypassing most of the defensive layers. A plane that spots the carrier with radar can dive to a low altitude and launch sea-skimming missiles which can only be spotted and engaged at very short ranges. A submarine that locates the carrier battle group with sonar can either approach and launch torpedoes or launch cruise missiles, once again on a low trajectory. The ability of the carrier’s protectors to kill 100% of these intruders before they can launch their deadly attacks is very, very doubtful.
Threats to the carriers air wing from modern air defense systems are another issue that hasn’t been touched upon.
Big picture – surface ships and planes are in trouble because unlike submarines and land units they can’t hide beneath something or imitate something else in their environment. They stick out, necessarily. Sticking out is bad unless you can take a beating. Land fortifications stick out, but they are still useful because they are very tough nuts to crack. Surface ships and planes have been moving in the wrong direction, becoming ever more fragile.
My prescription is to go low, small, cheap, and tough. Accept that you’ll get hit, a lot, and have the numbers to be able to deal with it. The current approach of big, high, expensive, and fragile is guaranteed disaster against a peer opponent. Engaging with sub-peer opponents means you won’t get wiped out for being stupid, and I guess that’s nice, but it’s not clear to me what the point of those engagements are. Yes, those are the sorts engagements we’re getting embroiled in, but what have we ever gotten out of them? Even if I accept big-high-expensive-fragile is better for kicking little shithole countries around, why should I care?
You’re ignoring two factors. First, setting up a time-on-target attack like that is very, very difficult. Odds are that the carrier has moved, and your shore-based missiles are now behind your air-launched ones. Second, I don’t necessarily need to retarget from one batch to another. There are 24 missiles coming in on similar trajectories, and I have a 50% PK. I fire 48 missiles out at them, staggered so I engage all of them repeatedly. No overkill, no leakers (in theory). In practice, leakers are handled by the next layer, which takes a higher chance of overkill.
This is part of why I took 50% as my PK instead of 70%. (Also, modern radar systems are really impressive at doing things like this.)
AWACS and CEC. The ships can take tracks from an E-2, and start firing before they can see the missiles themselves. Also, some of the longer-range Standards have active sensors which mean they don’t even need illuminators, and can be guided on target by the E-2.
Yes. But the ability of those to get through 100% of the time is also very doubtful.
Yes. I only have so much time to write these, and am focusing on the defensive aspects of modern naval warfare now.
Not quite true. Finding ships at sea is still pretty hard (I’m working on that column next), and ships have become less fragile of late.
These are mutually exclusive. Low (in terms of airplanes) means that you’re vulnerable to every idiot with a rifle. The A-10s had to go to medium altitude in Desert Storm, although their proponents don’t like to talk about it. It’s meaningless for ships. Small and cheap usually means useless. Integrated combat systems are big and expensive. They also work very well, but they aren’t flashy. For people who like to count missile tubes, FACs look great. But they die when they go up against people with helicopters, combat systems, and some idea of what they’re doing. The same applies to airplanes. A big, expensive airplane with BVR missiles and radar will beat a daylight interceptor with a couple of sidewinders most of the time, if it’s fought right. If it isn’t (Vietnam) the problem is not the hardware, and fixing the use changes the game massively.
As for tough, I’d like to point out that damage control is a feature of major navies, not minor ones. Unless you’re talking about the A-10, which can get you home, but takes a lot of work to use again. I’d rather not get hit.
And if all we care about is peer opponents, the correct tools are ICBMs, not carriers or LCSs.
I’m not saying shore submarine air surface all attack at the same time, fearsome as that proposition is. I’m saying the bunch of aircraft attacking your CVBG aren’t all coming in from the same vector, or even necessarily very similar vectors. I’d imagine coordination would mostly be within a branch – the air forces coordinate their own attacks, shore batteries theirs, surface ships theirs. And they would be coming from diverse vectors for each of these branches from dispersed launchers.
Out of 4 E-2s at best two of them will be operating at a given time, and they are a crucial and vulnerable element of the carrier’s air wing. You aren’t going to have a couple of E-2s circling the CVBG at all times. Moreover, broaching an important subject that hasn’t been touched upon, if you have E-2s continuously hunting for cruise missiles around the CVBG, the emissions can be detected from quite far away. Locating the CVBG got considerably easier. All these radar systems are a double edged sword in that they allow you to defend yourself, but also make you much more prominent.
What’s the E-2 detection range for cruise missiles? I’m sure very respectable, but what’s their distance from the CVBG? I reiterate that they have a job to do beyond hunting cruise missiles, including helping the fighter wing hunt the launchers of cruise missiles as far afield as possible.
I’m not sure that AWACS driven launch has the same PKill as the more straightforward case.
Here’s what’s piled on top of the CVBGs defenses. Instead of the case we started with where they get to engage the cruise missiles very efficiently, with a pretty high PKill, we have sea skimming supersonic cruise missiles coming along diverse paths, perhaps coordinated launch by a group of Oscar guided missile submarines, or Tu-22M bombers, gaining from their stealth and speed respectively an element of surprise and unpredictability. AWACS in flight/on scene are maybe 2, maybe 1, maybe 0.
This is a much blacker picture, but not an implausible one. Indeed, this is the picture carriers should expect to face if they launch attacks on Russian soil. How do they fare in this case? What is PKill against supersonic cruise missiles? How much of a chance do you have to parsimoniously dole out missiles over time as they come screaming over the horizon?
In WW2 low flying strafing airplanes saw a great deal of success, despite an abundance of idiots with rifles underneath.
Hey, a short squat little ship is more difficult to detect and hit.
How hard is it when there’s an E-2 shining bright circling right above those ships, I wonder?
And why is it so hard? Planes have radar. Ships and submarines have sonar. There are a lot of searchers and a few big fat targets. You know roughly where they are from what’s being hit. The forces searching for the CVBG don’t all have to independently find it, it takes -one- unit to find it and scream out to all the others.
Hey, there are countermeasures to ICBMs, despite countries being criminally lackadaisical about them. Digging deep works well. Sure, ginormous nukes fuck up deep fortifications.. But you can’t have ginormous nukes AND MIRV. And missile defense gets a lot less impossible when the warhead has to snuggle with you to kill you.
In practice, though, sure. Everyone builds glass houses and is terrified of stones. We could be perfectly safe without our conventional military. Safer, probably, because we’d be less likely to commit idiotic provocations.
If you want to conquer peer opponents, not just deter them – this sort of real ambition seems to have been burned out of the Western man’s blood – ICBMs simply will not do the job. The right nuclearized ‘conventional’ military might. That’s a different conversation, though.
You explicitly brought all of the various types of launchers in one sentence. Yes, it’s a bit ambiguous, but I’m not feeling particularly charitable. Also, coordinating split vectors is still not easy, even if it’s just airplanes.
You will have one E-2 in the area at all times. Yes, maybe it’s circling 50 km away from the carrier, but the datalink still works. And the raid is detected via space-based systems, either ELINT or IR. Both have been in use for 35 years now. That’s how you know when to go for cruise missile scan mode.
After the missiles are fired, the prime job changes. You don’t have to do both at the same time. (Also, modern radar can probably do both at once. Seriously, does most of your knowledge of this stuff come from the 80s?)
I already spotted you 20%. How much more do you want? And if it’s launch on AWACS data, home on cruiser illuminator, then it does have the same PKill.
How are those systems coordinating their attack? Magic? Oh, radio! And the US is good at picking up and using that data. Again, I suspect you’re using books from the 80s, before a lot of this stuff entered the public sphere. Find anything by Norman Friedman that’s been published since 1990 (and is relevant to the discussion), and then we’ll talk.
By the end of the war in Europe, strafing was an art form to avoid the very smart people with 20mm guns. (OK, idiots with rifles was an exaggeration.) Same thing happened in Vietnam, with the added problem of MANPADS.
When the E-2 is in LPI mode 100 km away and the ships are waiting to be cued by satellite, not very.
This is a question I am writing up the answer to, but you’ll have to wait until next week, because the answer is really complicated.
That’s debatable, but more or less my point.
‘Conquer peer opponents’ has been notably absent from US strategy documents since 1945, and is not a design driver for our forces. I can’t figure out what sort of agenda you’re pushing, but it’s incoherent in the context of current strategy.
@bean–
I don’t think that works. the AWACS has look-down radar. The cruiser doesn’t. The cruiser has no fire-control on the target until it comes over the horizon and out of the grass, which for an ASCM flying at 50 m with a cruiser radar at the same height is about 50 km (31 miles). That’s not much time to engage–I’d guess that it chops PKill down quite a bit.
The AWACS can pass the cruiser data precise enough that the cruiser can launch and do midcourse guidance without having to see the target itself, or even take over midcourse guidance itself. Either the missile has its own seeker (SM-6) or the firing is timed so that the cruiser will be able to see the incoming ASM by the time the SAM reaches it. The term is Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), and it’s been around for a while. See here for an explanation.
@bean (2)
Let me see if I’ve got this straight:
1) Raid warning (possibly AWACS, more likely launch detection).
2) AWACS acquires a look-down target.
3) Cruiser shoots, hands off CEC to AWACS.
4) AWACS does mid-course guidance.
5) AWACS hands CEC back to cruiser as cruiser acquires a look-across target @ ~30 nm.
6) Cruiser does terminal illumination, or a properly equipped missile can seek in for terminal guidance.
7) Boom, splash (i.e. missile hits the water), or miss (missile can re-engage).
You’re fighting two different constraints here:
a) It’d be easier just to let the AWACS do terminal illumination, but then it runs the risk of being overloaded if it has to dedicate a couple of seconds for each terminal.
b) The cruiser has more capacity (more power, more radars, and a deeper compute plant) than the AWACS, but it has to wait until things are deep into the threat envelope before doing terminal engagements. And the possibility of splashing your own missiles on terminal approach becomes particularly dangerous now.
Both of those sound… bad. Not it’ll-never-work bad, but bad enough that they probably degrade your kill probabilities.
If I ran the circus, I’d want more AWACS capacity. It’s entirely likely that there’s a handy algorithm that will let the AWACS leisurely kill things far-out, then hand off terminal guidance for the leakers. Effectively, would mean that there’s sort of a fourth kill zone, where the cruiser is seeking sorta-kinda long-range targets with standards, before the DDGs start going after mid-range targets.
Note that multi-axis threats are especially messy with these sorta-kinda long-range guys. It’s probably handy for your opponent to have some fortified atolls in your rear. I wonder if somebody’s thought of that…
AWACS doesn’t have terminal illumination capability at all. The baseline design with a single rotating antenna doesn’t allow for that, and while you could presumably now do an upgrade with a couple of lateral phased-array illuminators, it isn’t a priority.
In part because when I did the math for 6-8 complete engagement cycles against an inbound wave of missiles, that was assuming sea skimmers with the initial engagement at 40-50 km. But also because if you’ve got an AWACS in the air, you’ve also got F-18s in the air and more at Alert+5 on the deck. If those can’t reach far enough to swat the enemy launch platforms out of the sky, they can do the first round of AWACS-cued outer zone missile intercepts with AMRAAM and Sidewinder. And probably some hotshot would want to prove he could take down a Sunburn with the gun :-)
I think I was confusing different operating modes earlier. I know that CEC-enabled missiles can have midcourse guidance done by platforms other than the launch platform, but the two missiles I know for certain are CEC-enabled both have active sensors for terminal engagements. I think that AEGIS can fire missiles ‘on spec’ (but I couldn’t provide a reference off-hand), but in that case, the AWACS would just be providing the data on where the target is, and midcourse guidance (via the missile’s programmable autopilot) would be handled by the cruiser.
As John says, it can’t. Wrong kind of radar for that.
I’m not 100% sure what this means. The AWACS is good enough to make this work, and to some extent, that’s all you need. Moore’s law has been moving more power to smaller platforms since the 50s. At some point, extra computing power becomes Pk of 58% instead of 57%, which is swamped by noise in the real world.
I’m just finishing up a book on this kind of stuff. What they can do is pretty incredible.
@john schilling
Thanks for the correction on the radar. Guess I was just assuming that they’d upgraded to a phased array inside the existing radome (electrical stuff is easy, aeronautical stuff is hard). Apparently not.
I’m a bit surprised. Seems like engaging skimmers well over the horizon would be a priority, because it’s possible to lose track of the little suckers. Maybe they figure that seekers on the Standards is a better solution. Seems like you’d run into electrical power issues at some point, though.
They did. APY-9 is an AESA, but it’s still rotating, sort of like SAMPSON. Even then, the issue is that it may not generate the right kind of signals for terminal illumination, and as you point out, it’s going to have limited capacity. That’s solved by giving the missiles their own seekers.
For the seekers? It’s the same one that AMRAAM uses, which seems to work very well, based on combat experience. Power is a lot less important than it used to be, due to improved electronics.
@bean:
I suspect that electrical power is more of a limitation than compute power, but John’s correction on the AWACS radar resolves some of the mystery there. If you’re not having to blast out terminal guidance on multiple targets simultaneously, your power requirements go down a fair amount.
It’d be interesting to know what the compute budget looked like. Again, not having to beam-steer for terminal guidance takes a big compute task off the table for the AWACS, leaving you with a whole bunch of input signal processing (mostly fed to dedicated DSPs, I’d guess), and a fairly short-cycle management task. You probably need a full update on the states of your targets and SAMs at least once a second, if not more. That sounds like your basic NP-hard kind of problem, which isn’t overwhelming with a couple hundred objects, but isn’t nothing, either.
@TheRadicalModerate
AEGIS was originally a system built on early-70s computers. The first prototype ran in 1973, while the first operational one went to sea in 1983. They were running on UYK-7 and UYK-20 computers, which were introduced in 1970, and worked pretty well. UYK-7 had a memory of 1,536,000 bytes and a speed of 750 kFLOPS. This is a less powerful computer than the one in my phone. I know that bloat is a thing, but it’s hard to see bloat so bad that it’s outrun Moore’s law.
If you really want to get into the details of naval computer systems, I have a couple of book recommendations. A copy of the Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems (doesn’t have to be the latest, which is quite expensive, while older editions are cheap) would be good, along with Norman Friedman’s Network-Centric Warfare, which I’m just about to finish.
@bean (note: wrong nesting)
SMs are solid-rocket engines, so it’s hard to put a generator on board. I’d guess all the internal electrical power comes off a battery, which would put pretty tight constraints on how many radiation-seconds of seeker activity you can get.
And microwave power probably hasn’t scaled down as much as the power needed for computation. It’s probably down somewhat, because more compute power means than you can pull a signal out of a weaker return than before, but there are physical limits to how much return you need.
I don’t remember offhand how they’re powered, although I can look. In either case, you don’t need many radiation-seconds, as you’re not turning on the seeker until you’re pretty close (I think <10 seconds out).
I was referring to improved signal-processing electronics, not reduced computational power burden directly. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
There’s a more fundamental reason carriers aren’t going anywhere, anything that makes carriers obsolete almost certainly makes airbases obsolete too. As bean notes, the task of finding, guiding a missile near, then actually hitting a moving carrier is extremely difficult. Fixed targets can be located in peace, attacked by missiles with unjammable guidance systems, and can’t dodge. A few missiles can take out a runway just as readily as they can a carrier, and if you want to posit some defense for the runways, you also need a defense for the taxiways, hangars, air traffic control towers, truck loading docks, on base housing, and the electrical substation, the destruction of any of which will render an airbase ineffectual.
Any technology that doesn’t operate underwater capable of taking out a carrier is equally capable of taking out an airfield at the same range. Any along those lines that renders carriers obsolete is equally applicable to land based aircraft. And while I can certainly see how that might be a possibility someday, we aren’t there yet.
The biggest advantage of airbases as compared to carriers is how much cheaper they are to build or rebuild. Advancing technology has perversely somewhat reduced that advantage, by increasing the complexity of the support facilities, but it certainly hasn’t been eliminated, and if the evolution of military tactics called for it, there are doubtless ways to partially reverse the trend (bean mentioned late 20th century Swedish efforts in that direction in a recent discussion of aircraft).
Note, though, that the CONOPS the Swedes were using is very, very different from the one that the US would need to run to fight the Chinese, or vice versa. Frankly, the Swedish plan was probably doomed in the 80s, due to better networks, and it definitely wouldn’t work in the western Pacific, where you don’t have many places to choose from to put your planes.
I was going to include something about cost, decided against it, probably should have kept it in. Air bases aren’t cheap. IIRC the last time this came up, the denver international airport ended up costing about the same as the nimitz classes that were built at a similar time. Remember, a carrier isn’t just a runway. It’s a runway, a hanger, a maintenance facility, a fuel/ammo storage dump, a power plant, and housing and several months supplies for everyone who runs them. Carriers aren’t free, by any means. At the very least, they have to buy up front a lot of things that the base can pay for over time. But the costs are not wildly disproportionate.
Denver International appears to also have three runways. I’m not sure how accurate it is to compare civilian to military air facilities, as I have no idea how much of the cost of the airport is facilities for dealing with civilian passengers, but it seems like at the very least an installation much larger (and so more capable) than a single carrier should not have its cost compared to that of a single carrier. You should at least try to find something that’s actually comparable to a carrier.
I did some math on this a while back. Depending on the way you adjust for inflation, the difference between a carrier and a base for a wing of medium bombers is about 3-10x. (My base cost numbers were from the 50s.)
@Protagas
I grant that they aren’t great comparisons, but it’s not often major new airbases get built from ground up so I’m not aware of a better one. But a carrier represents a coupler runways at least, and if you have a better comparison, I’m all ears.
@bean
3-10x which way? A fighter base, I assume, would be cheaper, but I doubt it would be that much cheaper.
The base was cheaper. Here’s my analysis.
Once the shooting starts, though, the relevant cost is what it takes to restore the thing to full operational capability when the enemy has put e.g. half a dozen three-meter holes through it, top to bottom. For an airbase, that means bulldozers, concrete, and steel matting. For an aircraft carrier, that means wistfully looking at the sunken hulk and ordering a new one from scratch.
@John Schilling says:
That’s true in the longer run, but if you lose the war (or some very important battles) in the short run because none of your planes can fly for a week, it doesn’t really matter.
My understanding is that the engineering folks in the Air Force hold competitions to see how fast they can rebuild runways after (simulated) bombing. From what I can recall reading elsewhere, the time to repair a runway for combat use can be measured in tens of minutes.
@Garrett says:
What you say is like saying that the biathlon proves that we can train our soldiers to a universal standard of one shot, one kill. Yes, you can repair runways very quickly…..if you have the supplies on hand, if you have a highly trained crews ready to go, if no delayed action munitions have been left behind, if none of those supplies or people damaged in the initial attack, and so on.
The runway is generally the easiest thing to repair. When your flight crews are sleeping in tents and the ground crews are having to fuel using 55-gallon drums and a portable pump, combat efficiency is going to suffer a lot, even if the runway has been patched.
The runway is also the easiest thing to damage, because everything else can be kept under cover. And even soft cover means the attacker isn’t sure which shed holds the bulldozer and supply of concrete, which holds the tanker full of JP-8 with the single-point refueling rig, and which one is empty – which can change daily.
But note that in the US attack on Shayrat, the runway wasn’t even targeted on the stated grounds that it would be too easy to repair.
Well, a typical CVBG is composed of a carrier, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser (CG), and 3-4 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (DDGs).
Could you give a sense of the relative cost of each of these? Also, how much of the cost of the carrier resides in the planes vs the ship?
Just looking at Wikipedia for the Nimitz class I see unit costs of $50-100m/plane, and normally 90 aircraft being deployed, which seems to imply the total cost of the aircraft is on the carrier is greater than that of the ship itself (Wikipedia says $4.5 billion). Is that a sensible way of looking at it?
Naval costing is fantastically complicated. The latest Burkes are running $1.8 bn each, although some of that is coming back up to speed after the line was shut down. A Tico would (in theory, as it’s been out of production since the early 90s) cost a bit more. Say $1.5 bn for the Burkes and $2 bn for the Tico. The last Nimitz, CVN-77, is listed by wiki at $6.2 bn. The unit cost for the Ford is looking more like $10 bn. I’d say that aircraft cost is probably on the order of $100 million per plane. So in round numbers, the air wing costs about as much as the carrier.
modern air wings are smaller than 90 aircraft. Right now the wing is about 44 fighters (currently all varieties of the F-18), 5 electronic attack aircraft, which are also a variety of F-18, 4 E-2 aircraft with radar dishes, 2 cargo aircraft, and about 20 helicopters. Of all those aircraft only the E-2s are more than 100 mil. New F-18s will run you about 75, and everything else is less, though as bean says, these numbers are extremely approximate, aircraft costing being almost as complicated as ship costing.
Currently flyaway for a Super Hornet is very close to $100 million.
To expand on the ‘costing is complicated’, the sticker price is dependent on how many you want to buy and how the costs are divided up. Developing a new airplane/ship/weapon is expensive, and that money is required before the first unit leaves the line. So do you have a separate development contract, or amortize the cost over the buy (or the first X units of the buy, because you’re not sure how many you want, and the contractor wants to be sure they get paid back)?
And there are substantial savings from high-rate production. In military production, there’s often a fair bit of slack in much of the supply chain. The contractor has to pay for the workers, the building, the tooling, and so on. The subcontractors all have to maintain their capabilities, too. So a fair bit of the cost of a given project goes to what is essentially overhead, and buying more of the given thing means that you’re spreading the overhead thinner. Right now, the flyaway (year’s budget/planes) cost for a Super Hornet is actually higher than the F-35A, primarily because the Super Hornet line is almost shut down, and the F-35 is ramping up. But if you shut down the line entirely, the work experience disappears, and it’s fantastically expensive to start up again. That’s what’s gone on with the Burkes recently.
bean, I really enjoy your posts and wanted to thank you for the effort you put into them.
I really like bean’s posts too.
Carrier’s won’t go away because the basic idea of putting a flat deck on an oiler won’t go away. Fuel, parts, bombs, planes that go in and out of range as you choose- it’s just too good an idea to forget.
Carriers will stay vulnerable. Supply ships full of bombs and fuel.
If I was looking for a cheap carrier, I’d buy some cheap oil tankers and put flat decks on them. Maybe old supertankers so I could skip catapults. The Baltic Dry Index is still really affordable. But avionics and jet turbines are not.
The idea isn’t completely crazy but there are some pretty hard limits with such a ship. I wouldn’t want to risk it anywhere near an enemy that can fight back.
Isn’t that basically the escort carrier concept from WWII? We got some decent mileage out of those in ASW and similar roles, but their low speed made them operationally clunky, and they were very, very fragile in a stand-up fight.
Some of the early CVEs (Sangamon and sisters) were indeed converted oilers, and the later Commencement Bay-class was based on an oiler design, too. Others came from other types of mercies, and the Casablancas were bespoke, but rather odd.
Another direction you could go would be to keep carriers as warships, but make them lighter warships so you don’t have as many eggs in one basket. The extreme end of this would probably be something like taking the main gun off a destroyer and instead parking 1-2 VTOL fighters on the deck, but that would be terribly cost-inefficient (a CVN probably costs 5-10x as much as our modified DD, but it can fly 40-80x as many fighters, and VTOL requires design sacrifices on the fighter so a carrier-launched fighter will be more effective than a similar VTOL fighter). But there might be a sweet spot where the trade-off makes sense, kinda like the light carriers and escort carriers of the WW2 era (which I think were mostly built on BC and CA-sized hulls, respectively).
Edit: ninjaed, and now that Bean mentions it, I realize I mis-remembered and CVEs were mostly built on merchant hulls that just happened to be in similar displacement classes as CAs. I think the CVLs were a different beast, built on warship hulls. I think I’ve been playing too much HOI3 lately and forgot that the game’s merge of CVEs and CVLs into a single ship type was a simplifying game design decision, not the actual historical facts.
The CVLs were built on CL hulls, and were rather austere. The Navy didn’t like them much, and they were retired pretty quickly after the war. CVEs were oilers or fast merchantmen.
Basically, the answer to your question is that the overhead of operating a strike carrier pushes you up into the realms that modern US carriers occupy. You can get enough planes and enough support for those planes on the ship. A carrier half the size would cost a lot more than half as much and carry less than half as many planes. I may write more on this subject, but it’s going to be a while, as my docket is pretty full.
The trouble with this that there tend to be economies of scale in ship building. As a very general rule, two ships of size X are going to carry less stuff than one ship of size 2X
This is even more true for carrier, because the support facilities for aircraft operation tend to have large and relatively fixed costs. You need a deck of a certain minimum deck size to make aircraft operations possible. You need one set of air traffic control personnel and equipment. You need at least one elevator to get to the hangar, and so on. All of these things drive up the minimum efficient size of a carrier. More than that, though, they grow a lot slower than the size of an air group. a set of arresting gear for a ship with 20 planes takes up just as much weight and space as one on a ship with 80. A ship with 80 planes will have more maintainers than one with 20, but it won’t have 4 times as much equipment, and so on.
Smaller carriers have been considered and studied for decades, but almost all the studies come back with the same answer, that you want to buy as big a carrier as you can afford to buy in the number you require.
That’s an…interesting interpretation of the concept of a carrier.
Basically, modern carrier operations are very complex, and simply seeing a carrier as an oiler with a flat deck is not going to give you the full picture. You need a hangar, and that’s going to mean major structural work. You need to go fast enough to generate wind over deck. Oiler engines can’t handle that. You need electronics and places to plan missions. You need damage control, so the thing doesn’t go up when someone accidentally drops a live bomb. (Yes, it’s happened.) You need protected magazines, assembly spaces, and ways to get the bombs onto the flight deck. You have to pack all of the thousand-and-one pieces of equipment that are required to operate a modern air force into a ship, and that’s not easy. Air operations have gotten more complicated since WW2, particularly if you want to run a strike carrier, and not just a platform for CAS airplanes like most Harrier navies do/did.
The most you might be able to get from a decked oiler is something akin to RFA Argus. As an example of non-obvious problems that crop up with these types of conversions, the early escort carriers essentially had a deck built atop an existing merchant hull, with the hangar in the space between the two. The original deck had sheer, which meant that at the ends, the gap was too short to use as a hangar, and even where it wasn’t, handling planes was complicated. I’m sure we’d find something similar if we tried a conversion like you propose.
A supertanker isn’t going to give us enough speed to be able to skip catapults. Jets simply take too much runway.
@that’s an … interesting concept of carrier-
Come now, a carrier is a box full of fuel and bombs you launch planes from. If you make it fast, give it guns, armor it up or throw in too many complex safety systems, it stops being a good box of fuel and bombs.
If I wanted a carrier for the Zanzibar Navy I’d buy a cheap fuel tanker from the Baltic Dry Index. Fragile, incapable of threatening a US carrier, sure. But it would protect my fishermen.
Yes and no. Part of my astonishment was the use of ‘oiler’ as the base. An oiler is a specific type of ship, used to UNREP other ships, mostly with fuel. This is not the same as a box of fuel and bombs.
Re speed, not so much. Speed is important for most carriers, because it makes air operations easier and because the carrier may not be where you want to use it, and you need to get it there fast.
You’re sort of right about guns and armor, although this is something which has changed over time. In WW2, the British paid too high a price for their armor in terms of carrier capability, and the 8″ guns that various people tried were not worth it. The various AA guns didn’t have that much of a penalty, and it’s generally good to give a high-value target point-defense capability.
I agree that safety systems can be overdone, but keep in mind that fuel and bombs are flammable. It stops being a good box of fuel and ammo if it’s on fire or sunk.
That’s a very different thing. If you’re just trying to protect fishermen, then something like RFA Argus or Chakri Naruebet (which was designed to do explicitly that) will be the right answer. But that’s a helicopter carrier, and occupies a very different niche from a full-scale strike carrier. You’re trading off against OPVs, some of which may have flight decks and maybe even hangars.
(Actually, it’s not even necessarily a full helicopter carrier. Chakri Naruebet is best thought of as an OPV with a flight deck, because she lacks the ASW combat systems of other helicopter carriers.)
@part of my astonishment was the use of ‘oiler’-
I think you are reading ‘oiler’ as as a Naval term of art for a specific class while I wrote it as half-remembered squid slang.
@keep in mind that fuel and bombs are flammable-
Sure.
@A supertanker isn’t going to give us enough speed to be able to skip catapults. Jets simply take too much runway-
The biggest new supertankers are 1500 feet, the biggest old ones are 1300, and USAF jets want 6000 for say a F-15 or C-17. But experienced pilots can land at 2000, which gets close. They might still need twenty knots wind over the bow, but I don’t think they’d need catapults.
Well, yes. I’m reading it how it’s normally used.
There are two sets of problems with this.
First, why are you building this carrier? If your mission is to protect fishing boats, then it’s hard to see what a fast jet can do that a helicopter or a Harrier can’t. If for some reason, you occasionally need fast jets far out to sea, it’s going to be much, much cheaper to invest in a couple of KC-130s. But I can’t see any reason to operate fast jets far out at sea in a manner that a converted VLCC/ULCC could manage.
Second, it doesn’t work on a practical level. The standard aircraft characteristics for an F-15C list the landing ground roll as 4300-4500 ft, with a landing speed of ~140 kts. Wind over deck of 20 kts will cut that down to ~3,200 ft, still twice the length available. I won’t say that a really good pilot on a good day couldn’t manage to stop on the deck, but it’s right out for regular operations. A C-130 can fly off of a full carrier sans aids, but nothing that requires more runway, so you need arresting gear (and carrier-capable aircraft, which means either Hornets or Rafales). Theoretically, you might be able to get away without a catapult. Takeoff roll is something like 1250-2050 ft in the SAC, which means you could probably get a lightly-loaded F-15 in the air safely. (I don’t have an F/A-18 SAC, but I’d guess those are comparable.) But that raises serious operational problems. Back in WW2, carrier strike capacity was set by how many planes you could get on deck while still leaving enough deck clear forward for the planes to make their takeoff runs. As planes got bigger and heavier, capacity decreased, to the point where they had to go to catapults to get reasonable groups. You’re essentially going back to those days, and using planes that need almost all the deck. So you only have a few airplanes on this giant ship. Again, why? The only thing I can think of that even remotely makes sense is that you want to be able to say ‘I fly fast jets off of a carrier’. That kind of posturing is rarely good defense policy.
@I’m using how it’s normally used –
AOE is the professional term of art for a specific USN class. ‘Oiler’ can be any floating box full of oil, going back to steam ships that had an oil tank for when coal wasn’t heating their boilers fast enough.
“you want to be able to say, ‘I fly fast jets off a carrier’. That kind of posturing rarely makes good defense policy’-
I want to be able to say it for cheap. A light T-38 with a 2000 runway requirement could adapt to a 1,300 foot sloping runway with a 20 knot wind more cheaply than building catapults. I think. I could be wrong. Could well be some reason neither of us has thought of, why nobody is doing it. If I was obviously right China would buy fifty old tankers and supertankers, slap on sloping decks, and drive them in circles all around Taiwan and the South China Sea. Anyone who wanted to bring on war with a billion man army could bring it.
Even in colloquial usage, “oiler” refers to ships which are not fast nor designed to tolerate damage, which do not have battle-management C3I systems or even minimal defenses, whose cavernous internal volume is laid out in exactly the wrong way to support flight operations, and which can’t support the catapults and recovery gear that you actually do need to operate modern strike fighters at full combat weight.
Building aircraft carriers on tanker hulls would work about as well as building them on container-ship hulls, and we know how well that works. If someone has a need for an aircraft transporter to deliver planes to some remote theater of operations, such a ship might make sense. If China wants to build fifty of them and pretend they are real aircraft carriers, great. Their diplomatic value will be limited to intimidating nations that don’t have a navy or an air force, and the first proper carrier battle group to show up will sweep them from the sea.
No. An oiler is an underway replenishment ship that is primarily designed to transfer fuel. An AOE is a ship that carries oil and ammunition. An AO is an oiler.
Again, you’re missing my point. “I fly fast jets at sea” is not the same statement as “I fly fast jets at sea and can use them in the normal way fast jets are used”. Normally, people leave off the second bit because nobody is crazy enough to spend a bunch of money on a totally useless capability like this.
You might be able to fly fast jets at sea from a converted supertanker. You might even be able to do it with an accident rate that wouldn’t scare 50s test pilots. You’d probably impress the FoxtrotAlpha brigade (for lack of a better term). But as John says, you wouldn’t be able to use them against anyone with a real air force, because a converted tanker would not have the support facilities necessary to use the planes properly, and everyone who matters knows this (except maybe Congress). China (who does not have a billion-man army, because that’s almost all of their population) would have provided 50 targets for the USN. The biggest question is if the air or sub communities get the higher score in the event of war.
+1
I had no idea I would find this topic so interesting until I started reading bean’s writeups!
Does anyone know a sane way to publish a scientific article?
Something like [bio]arXiv, only with peer review would be great. It just fells like insanity to send an article to Elsiever and such only to scihub it afterward. I don’t understand why I have to pay to publish in open-access journals too but will happily volunteer my time to review other articles.
There are some open access on the cheaper end, PLOSone costs about 1500 USD. Peer J about 1000 if it’s bio and there are other similar ones for other topic areas. Often your institution will have assistance for publishing costs, or the journal itself will waive if you can prove insufficient funds.
I don’t really understand the criticism of open access fees. Sure, the review itself is volunteer time. But how are they to pay for server and editorial staff costs?
$1500 per article is still a lot. Take for example an arXiv and PLOS.
In 2014, 8000 articles were posted in arXiv monthly, which gives 96k articles per year. The PLOS published articles in 2016, so arXiv and PLOS are about in the same league in terms of requirements for bandwith / storage. The annual budget of arXiv was $826k in 2013-2017, thus we can estimate server costs for PLOS to be approx $800k.
22k articles published in PLOS in 2016 generated 1500$ * 22k = 33M$ of revenue. The $800k for hosting is almost insubstantial, substract it and you will have $32M/year for editorial stuff. Rejection rate in this journal is 50%, so the payrate is $32M / 44k = $727 for every article submitted to the journal.
Compare it with the $25 median hourly payrate of research scientist. I think it takes at most 4 hours to evaluate peer’s research, much less to filter out obvious bunk. So, what does exactly editors do to justify the $727 / article?
“So, what does exactly editors do to justify the $727 / article?”
Actually, many editors work pro bono (I know I do). Why do we do it? A mix of idealism, a wish to boost our CVs, increase our name recognition and the opportunity to look at a much larger swathe of the peer-reviewing landscape than we otherwise would. A few hundred dollars of those $727 are for typesetting. Then you have to take something for the development/maintenance of manuscript submission systems .
I’ll point out that the eprint sort of services handle the server fees without charging anyone anything. I’ve been on conference committees and journal boards and put in a lot of free labor reviewing papers and recommending changes, and I’ve never been paid a dime. It’s really hard for me to see why an online journal (even a high-quality one) would need to charge a thousand dollars to publish your paper, when nearly all the work being done is volunteer labor.
Depending on your field overlay journals may be an option. These are ‘journals’ that essentially just publish links to publications on arXiv and the like. Since they perform only the (low cost) gatekeeping/curation functions of a journal without the (high cost and mostly pointless) publishing functions, they tend to be free or very low cost to submit to.
Does anyone remember an article from a year or two back (before the Trump madness) about the distribution of US GDP by state/county? The basic gist of it was that since the 1980s the top 10 richest cities in the US had gone from accounting for approx half the US GDP to account for [shockingly high percentage]. I’m almost certain that I originally found it through one of Scott’s link threads but now I can’t seem to find it.
In any case, a few of the conversations in Change Minds or Drive Turnout and the last Open Thread have gotten me thinking about this again. Progressive talk about inequality a lot and propose redistributing wealth to address this. I understand thier reasons but it also reduces everything to a single axis, money. In my own experience is that there are a lot of people who don’t want money so much as they want respect and for thier home/county/state to be less of a shithole. Sadly the typical Progressive response to this seems to be something along the lines of “well if you moved to the shining city your home would be a shining city rather than a shithole” which IMO entirely misses the point. The classic globalist refrain is that “the winners” win more than “the losers” lose making globalism a winning strategy in terms of net utils but what they never seem to acknowledge is that most people are not utilitarians and that this is small comfort to those who find themselves holding the short end of the stick.
To that end, what if we started looking at inequality in terms of geography as well as wealth. Some will argue that we already do this, that the interstate highways, national parks, military, etc… are a massive “hidden subsidy” of the interior paid for by the cities, but what if we made it explicit? It seems to me that modern communications and transportation technology has made transplanting jobs much more practical than transplanting people or wealth. Prior to the election Instapundit proposal for “draining the swamp” was to literally “redistribute the government” by moving federal departments out of Washington DC/Arlington county. Sure some departments, specifically those dealing with foreign policy such as State and Defense probably ought to remain in the capitol, but there are few reasons I can see why the Department of Agriculture for instance shouldn’t be headquartered in an agricultural state and I’m sure there are a lot of folks in Iowa and Nebraska who’d be interested in the associated office jobs. Likewise, the FBI’s been trying to build a new headquarters for years only to be stymied by the expense and overcrowding of office space in the DC area. Why not sidestep the problem by moving the HQ to somewhere more central? St Louis perhaps.
Granted some states already do this in the form of targeted tax-cuts, Georgia’s film industry being a central example, but I think it’s worth considering on a wider level. What would it cost to get a company like Google to abandon the Bay Area for Wisconsin, or West Virginia? Sure the Bay Area is where the trendy people are, but to turn the conversation from last week on it’s head, if the trendy people are not willing to “move where the work is” maybe they don’t need that trendy job as much as they thought.
To focus on your last paragraph, the issue is network effects. Both Google as a corporation, and the trendy people who want to work for it, want to be where all the other trendy people are. The fact that it happens to be the bay area is trivial.
But you can’t really spread them all out across the country because then you lose the network effects. They benefit from a concentration of talent. You could pick up all of silicon valley and drop it in Wisconsin and things would probably be fine, but scattering it piece by piece throughout the country would make as much sense as say, the Soviet government saying “this factory is owned by the workers, therefore we are going to dismantle every machine and send each worker one piece.” The thing doesn’t really work unless all the pieces are together.
I think you’ve completely missed the point of that paragraph. Your thesis is that trendy/successful people move to where there’s work. So if you want equality move the work to places that need it more. The people will follow.
I actually think you’ve missed Matt M’s point here.
Geographical proximity has benefits for both tech companies and tech employees. (Many people would also agree that the increased productivity has benefits to society, but the argument doesn’t depend on that.) The Bay Area is the Schelling point for the tech industry, where everybody goes who wants to benefit from that proximity. Hypothetically speaking, massive government intervention would enable you to move that Schelling point to a new location. At that point, the Bay Area would suffer a similar fate to the Rust Belt, and you would have the same problems as before, except with “the Bay Area” crossed out in a horde of thinkpieces and replaced with “West Virginia”.
You can’t just “move the work to the places that need it more”, because the work desperately wants to be clumpy.
I get that this is what Matt is arguing, but he’s treating geographic concentration of wealth as an immutable law of the universe when when it’s actually a fairly recent phenomena.
@hlynkacg: I think he’s more or less right to do so. It’s a “fairly recent phenomenon” only in the sense that the importance of work with high cognitive demands and finely-differentiated skillsets has become a larger driver of economic growth and competitiveness. Agglomeration economies and hubs that exist to take advantage of them aren’t new. Maybe this will wane in a decade or two if telepresence/VR become widely-adopted as good substitutes for in-person socializing, but I’m not holding my breath.
In the guise of the financial industry, geographic concentration of wealth has been around since at least the founding of the Dutch East India Company. Throughout history, it has been the case that some cities are larger and wealthier than others, often because of some industry that is concentrated there.
To the extent that this is a modern phenomenon, I suspect it has to do with the decreasing requirement of physical proximity. You can watch a movie from Hollywood, invest in a company traded on the NYSE, or look something up on Google from the comfort of your living room.
When companies benefit more from being close to other companies in their industry than they do from being close to their customers, they will tend to cluster geographically. Bribing Google to move to Wisconsin is not going to change the underlying financial imperatives. It’s not about being “trendy”; there are real, practical benefits to concentration. If you nevertheless want to chop up Silicon Valley and sprinkle it across the Midwest, you will either have to dole out enormous bribes, or get down and dirty with authoritarian central planning.
This seems to imply that your ideal economic state would be something akin to Panem in The Hunger Games where in 1 city accounts for the entirety of the national GDP and the wider territories are only relevant insofar as they support the Capitol.
Did I say anything about my own ideals?
I’m just trying to establish the basic economic reality: any attempt to decentralize will be pushing against powerful economic forces. This is a hard problem, and I think you are underestimating its scope.
What are the benefits to tech companies?
Access to funding and advice from people with a lot of experience in the industry. A huge, highly skilled pool of prospective employees.
Ok, some of those make sense, but I was under the impression that people moved to the are for tech jobs. So if the jobs were elsewhere, the workforce would likewise move. And the funding thing seems like a huge market inefficiency. If proximity matters that much for funding, there should be opportunities elsewhere that aren’t being properly explored. So it looks to me like either the effects of having knowledgeable people nearby are much higher than I would have thought, or this is a bubble waiting to pop.
If all the tech jobs and startups were elsewhere, people would move to that elsewhere. If all the tech jobs and startups were scattered across the country, people would be less inclined to move. If you join a startup and it fails, it’s a lot easier to find a similar job in the Bay Area than it would be in, say, Omaha.
This article about Y Combinator is exceedingly breathless, but my understanding is that this part is completely accurate:
For Google, it would require Larry Page and at least one of the other two to have essentially a religious revelation. But even a “company like Google” has no reason to move to WV or Wisconsin. There’s nothing there for them (at least not in WV). Even if the land was free and taxes were zero. You couldn’t get enough “trendy” people to move there.
There are “companies like Google” in the broad sense in other places. There’s tech companies in Washington D.C., mostly (but not wholly) doing government contracting. There’s SAS in North Carolina. There’s tech in NYC, not all of which is outposts of Silicon Valley companies. There are places besides Silicon Valley you can build or move a tech company, but not (former) coal country. You at least need a strong technical university, preferably a few. You also need connectivity but that’s easier to solve. Maybe some visionary could manage to build the entire infrastructure de novo, though it seems very high risk. But even if they did, this helps the current residents only slightly. They’re still going to have to move — probably under that scenario more than the current one, as cost of living will go up. They’ll just get a one-time windfall when they sell.
Right. You can probably convince a sufficient number of trendy people to go to Seattle, Portland, or even Austin.
But good luck with the rust belt!
This is a tautology, the Rust Belt is the Rust Belt because of declining economics. Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh are Rust Belt Cities, but Chicago is not thanks to a growing population up through 2015 and is still the 3rd largest metro area in the US. They had no trouble with growth through ~2010.
Places are defined as trendy if people will move to them, you can’t prove that a place can’t be trendy by noting that no one moves there, you are only noting that it isn’t trendy now.
If you sort Wikipedia’s list of largest metropolitan areas by growth from 2010-2016 then the trendiest place look like TX, FL and NC/SC.
^ Precisely
Pittsburgh’s autonomous vehicles niche is a bit of an exception here, but as it’s exclusively driven by a strong research program at Carnegie Mellon that was blooming at the exact right time to get a massive infusion of cash from Uber, Ford, and others. Apparently being in the Rust Belt isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, if you’re in its biggest city and happen to get really lucky…
Detroit is still much larger than Pittsburgh, despite its precipitous decline.
That says more about Detroit’s former size than it does about Pittsburgh.
IRC the city itself had something like 1.8 million people and another 4 million in it’s wider metro area at it’s peak.
Pittsburgh has a fairly well developed tech sector thanks to its universities. It’s no Silicon Valley but it compares favorably with a lot of other similar-sized Rust Belt cities. It’s not just the recent autonomous vehicles thing either, there have been successful startups in search (Lycos), speech recognition (M*Modal), digital hardware (FORE systems), and other areas going back to the 1990s.
Wisconsin does have a huge tech company (Epic Systems), as a matter of fact. It used to be a small tech company in Madison, and then it got a lot bigger, so they built a new headquarters just outside of town. And while they do have UW there, I don’t think that’s their primary feeder. If you have a huge tech company, you can put it anywhere – people will move to work for you.
A bigger problem, I suspect, is that there’s just not that many companies like Google. There’s a lot more cities in the Midwest than there are giant tech companies that you can build an economy around.
I don’t think there’s any other companies like Google. I’m not even sure Google is still Google or maybe ever was.
What I mean by that is there is a, call it an understanding, that anyone that passes some threshold can go get a job at Google; a sense out in the industry that there is no fixed number of positions over there. Apple, certainly a very large tech employer, doesn’t have nearly the same mystique.
I’m in the software industry, and I’ve worked for Google. From inside the Googleplex, no place was more prestigious than Google, but some companies were on par: Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, big new (or revitalized) companies that had a lot of influence and a high profile. Some of the high-profile unicorn startups rated, too.
Your idea that Google will hire all the people it can get who pass a certain bar isn’t right. There were personnel budgets just like in any business. And I don’t remember hearing of any slots going unfilled because no qualified workers could be found. Google simply has so many good people applying that they can be very very selective.
I do remember some talk about how the average had dropped a little, and the incoming Googlers of 2011 weren’t quiiiite up to the standard of the new Googlers of 2006.
So the obvious question is now, why is Epic Systems in Wisconsin and not Silicon Valley?
There’s a definite image as a friendly, midwestern, never going to go public, dedicated to the local community, sort of company.
There’s a really nice, very big, campus that makes a pretty great impression when representatives from pretty much every one of their customers shows up once a year for their user’s meeting. It would be an enormous project to put together something comparable in CA.
There’s a slightly eccentric CEO who would probably never approve of moving.
They’re big enough and established enough that they don’t seem to need to be in Silicon Valley to attract employees.
They’ve been around since 1979 and never dealt with the whole venture capital deal. Some of their earliest customers were around Madison, so they wouldn’t have wanted to move away from the doctors they were trying to form a community with.
EPIC is a pretty old company, founded in 1979. Think IBM, not Silicon Valley.
They use a programming language called MUMPS so old that it even predates C++. Alex Papadimoulis of the Daily WTF claims that it is a huge pile of technical debt (I don’t know enough to evaluate this claim.) More charitable take on MUMPS here.
@Charles F covered it pretty well.
@Pontifex: I’ve worked at Epic. MUMPS sucks, but they’ve built enough tools to cover up the sucky bits. There’s a modern IDE, there’s an optimizing compiler, there’s a linter that will catch the stupid mistakes you can make because of language quirks, and there’s a proper API for the database. And their VB6 code is slowly being replaced by a shiny new ASP.NET framework with data binding and everything.
I heard horror stories about the old days, but I found M surprisingly okay to work in. They still have a preposterously huge pile of code with a ton of internal libraries to learn, which sucks, but I don’t think the language is their main problem.
I don’t buy that it would totally displace current residents. I mean sure, if the population just explodes (think the fracking boom), but would it be like that? I would think that cities that have lost population should be able to regain a large portion of that population without breaking everything. Prices would go up, but so would job opportunities. Sure, you would no longer be able to buy houses for a dollar, but I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing. Struggling areas have very different problems from large, growing areas.
What job opportunities? The tech company isn’t going to be hiring the ex-manufacturing/mining workers to do tech. There will be some service jobs created, and a mini-boom for the building trades, but not that much. Meanwhile, the cheap grocery store closes its doors and is replaced by a Whole Paycheck, the local diner closes and is replaced by the kind of expensive coffee shop the tech workers like, even the hardware store closes because the space is more valuable as a rock gym.
It seems to be an iron law; when conditions get worse in an area, the current residents are hurt, but when they improve, the current residents in general do not benefit. Instead, they’re priced out. At least as owners they reap a one-time windfall; when they’re renters they get nothing (see: gentrification)
These aren’t the same people. Those who are left for a resurgence after a boom aren’t average, they are specifically selected for the type of people who either skills, personality, or preference wise hung around in a declining area.
Job opportunities largely in service industries, but that includes more than just working at the new Whole Foods (or Wegman’s. I’m originally from Buffalo and that’s what I’m using as my example. I would imagine that a smaller city like Erie would benefit more from a smaller change whereas Detroit would be able to gracefully absorb more). You’ll have an increased need for teachers, doctors, tax preparers, car salesmen. As for factory workers, most of those jobs are so long gone that you aren’t re-training the people who held them. For Buffalo, the Bethlehem Steel plant basically closed in 82, and had been in decline before that. The question isn’t about retraining people who lost their jobs 35 years ago, but about providing opportunities in the area to keep local kids from moving out. It’s about providing a larger tax base for infrastructure improvements and maintenance. It’s also about providing any jobs for the unemployed. Hell, before Terry Pegula bought the Bills it was about remaining a viable city for an NFL team.
The local diner probably doesn’t close, probably the empty storefront next to it gets filled in, and that coffeeshop needs employees, including management. Like I said, my model is Buffalo. The city used to have roughly 250K more people, the area upwards of 1M more. Now, I will grant that it depends on how it happens. If a massive fleet of Google buses shows up to drop off 10,000 high wage employees (I couldn’t find exact numbers on how many Google employees there are at the main campus. it’s probably more than 10K, but that seems like an extreme example) with no one in the area having been aware of the plan, ok, sure, that causes problems. If Google decides to try to build a campus for those 10,000 employees to work at in the middle of the West Side, maybe that’s a problem. If they buy some land in the burbs, maybe an undeveloped lot and then some neighboring properties, it’s much less of a problem. If it’s 5K instead of 10K, if it’s a gradual influx over the course of a decade rather than overnight, these things ease the shock, and I think are more realistic.
I’m not saying that literally no one will be hurt, but the notion that it would have the same effect as adding those people to a city that doesn’t have vacant lots to build on, that doesn’t have unoccupied houses, strikes me as absurd. Yes, housing prices go up, but in the situation where they build in the suburbs it drives up housing prices the most in the suburbs and in the trendier areas. I’m claiming that the shock to housing values is mitigated by the available land on which to build. I’m not saying that low income areas are completely unaffected, I’m saying that the unoccupied houses in those areas help absorb the shock.
Network effects. Tech people want to be in Silicon Valley because that’s where the tech people are. Employers and employees each have a larger pool to choose from without having to move; if you work for Google in West Virginia and want to change jobs, what are you supposed to do?
I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the Department of Agriculture’s work involves producing data/reports for political decision-makers, in which case physical proximity to DC is an advantage. There’s still probably room to move some things out, though, and I don’t disagree in principle.
Are you really going to call this the progressive response? If you go back and look at the earlier conversations, there are a lot of people taking this stance across the political spectrum. (Among other things, I’m pretty sure that it’s the libertarian response.)
> Are you really going to call this the progressive response?
Yeah, that one is up there with ‘what I can’t stand about Republicans is the way they are forcing all the gays to get married’ or something.
Progressive economics 101: money flows downhill, from high-cost (low efficiency) areas to low cost ones. Which means cities with decent infrastructure and amenities.
Without national borders in between, people follow that flow or get left behind. When your nation is sufficiently big the trip back home to see family is a once-a-year effort, families and communities are going to get separated like isotopes in a centrifuge.
To reduce the intensity of the flow, you need to pump money uphill. Which requires non-market economics. Typically this is tax-and-spend, but anything with a mathematically equivalent effect would work too.
Neo-liberal?
Believe it or not, this CNN op-ed makes a good rundown of why this could be a good idea for the government. It notes some secondary advantages as well, like cost savings and the possibility of some form of major attack taking out DC.
Of note is that the shrinking economic portion of the country is already net ‘beneficiaries’ of federal transfers. No one ever stops to consider that this might be the causal relationship.
Okay, I’ll consider it. What’s the evidence for it?
There isn’t much evidence because I don’t know if it has ever been seriously explored, but there is some anecdotal stuff as economic gains often stall out when transfer mechanisms are applied. Black male wages made gains on white male wages from the end of WW2 through the introduction of the great society (this was with white wages growing so they weren’t just shrinking slower or some other mechanism). The introduction of welfare correlates fairly well with stagnation of black male wages to white male wages, and a stagnation in the decline in the poverty rate. Federal transfers have likewise not raised living standards for Reservation Native Americans.
Okay. If you don’t have evidence, do you have a proposed mechanism? I mean, the causality going the other direction has, I think, a pretty strong story:
“This group fell into poverty, so we started transferring money to them.”
Feels pretty straightforward. Do you have a proposed basis for believing that it went, “We started transferring money to this group, and thus they fell into poverty?”
Please be sure to distinguish between “We transferred money to this impoverished group and it didn’t change their trajectory significantly,” which is a pretty straightforward story, and “We transferred money to this impoverished group and the very act of transferring money to them caused or worsened their poverty.”
If you won the lottery tomorrow, for $250,000, do you think that you would probably end up worse off (in a financial sense) than you are today?
The mechanism is that the transfer is conditional on being poor, hence reduces the incentive to get out of poverty, which is hard, or avoid falling into it.
The fact I like to cite is that if you look at the poverty rate, definition held constant, it was falling pretty fast from the end of WWII, which I think is as far back as we have good data, until about the point at which the War on Poverty got fully funded and staffed. From then until now it has been roughly constant, going up and down with economic conditions.
As Murray described it in Losing Ground, which I believe was his first book, the War on Poverty was originally supposed to be about getting people out of poverty–job training and similar programs. It was a complete failure at doing that, so got retconned into a program to make being poor less unpleasant.
So you’re basically saying that welfare programs are just insufficiently technocratically managed and all that’s really necessary to make them successful is to slowly phase out benefits in a way that keeps a decently high value to each marginal dollar?
Not all libertarians agree about the minutiae, but the argument ranges from ‘my tax dollars should not be used to subsidise the poor’ from ‘this couldn’t be well-managed even if we tried and investing in it by means of the government is an awful idea’
You need a very shallow phase-out to avoid poverty-trap effects, especially when there are multiple programs that all phase out in similar ranges. You can do this by expanding the phase-out range, but that makes the program much more expensive because this expands the program’s eligibility into the broader middle class. It also increases the number of people vulnerable to the disincentive effects of losing benefits if their income increases, so if you miscalculated and set the phase-out too steep, you wind up with a much larger population with reduced incentives to pursue opportunities for increased income.
You can avoid the disincentive effects entirely by treating benefits as taxable income instead of phasing them out with income, so you just get the disincentive effects of income taxes, not those stacked with the income phase outs of all of your means-tested programs. But this, too, is expensive since it yields an extremely shallow phase-out that never phases the benefits out entirely. There are a few programs that are treated this way (unemployment benefits are pure taxable income, and social security benefit are partially taxable income, with more of them being taxable the more taxable income you have), but I don’t think it’s been tried broadly for antipoverty programs.
You can’t really fix this by making benefits phase out slowly. Anything that makes poverty less unpleasant, and doesn’t make riches less unpleasant by the same amount, will decrease the incentive to make money.
The welfare trap effect has nothing to do with making poverty less unpleasant or riches more unpleasant. It has to do with making total income non-monotonic in wages, which makes local maxima possible.
That really can be avoided by phasing benefits out slowly, although the math works out such that they’re way more expensive that way.
@DavidFriedman: is the constant poverty definition you use one that excludes anti-poverty program effects? That’s a relatively common failure mode; e.g. if you exclude in-kind benefits then Medicaid or food stamps can have no effect by definition.
Which is very useful if you want to push for more redistribution programs.
This isn’t true according to most welfare advocates, transfer payments are supposed to provide the proverbial “hand up” out of poverty. It is true that you won’t get a reduction from the actual transfers, but it has been postulated by many that their existence can/should/will lead to lower poverty in the future.
I believe the usual measure is income before welfare payments and the like. Not, I would guess, before social security, private pension, etc.
As I think I said, Murray’s point in Losing Ground was that the War on Poverty was supposed to make people not poor, self-supporting, hence job training and similar programs. It failed in that, so was converted into a program to make being poor less bad. Prior to that, the poverty rate by that measure had been going down for a couple of decades. After that, it stopped doing so.
Your “anti-poverty effects” presumably refers to what it ended up doing, not what it was initially sold as doing. If the result of job retraining was that someone had a job and so was no longer poor, that would be a decline in the poverty rate.
And given that nobody can get political support for any anti-poverty aid other than in-kind aid, now no anti-poverty program can ever lower the rate. Convenient! The we can get thinkpieces about how hamburgers don’t feed anybody if you don’t count the hamburgers people eat, and get rid of hamburgers. Your logic certainly doesn’t have any loose ends.
Upon further reflection, I’d wager that Medicaid shoulders a lot of blame; if one set out to design a program to keep people poor one couldn’t do much better. It may even tie into the lack-of-moving problem in other subthreads; asset limits are likely low enough that one can’t save for moving costs without losing Medicaid (and of course changing States requires starting over with Medicaid in the new State).
Not that it’s clear how to fix that. Universal coverage with sliding-scale deductibles and out-of-pocket-maxima is probably the only way, and that will never happen politically. Any method where you transition off of Medicaid onto private or no coverage is going to produce a sharp discontinuity at that point, no matter how you design the deductibles and such. And replacing Medicaid with a cash equivalent for buying private insurance or buying health care directly would be so much more expensive that it would also be a political non-starter.
@Corey
I think there are two definitions of the word poverty being used in this discussion.
If I’m reading correctly, you want to use it to mean approximately “has a not-too-sucky life” and thus the government programs* that give people benefits allowing them to have a not-too-sucky life are definitionally keeping them out of poverty.
Others (again, if I’m reading correctly) are using it to mean “can provide themselves a not-too-sucky life without government assistance”, and thus people who have a not-too-sucky life only by virtue of government programs* are definitionally still in poverty.
*”government programs” may be overbroad here for different people in this conversation, depending on how one counts e.g. Social Security. And other terms as well might suffer from vagueness. Remember to read charitably 🙂
@Witness: Fair enough. What I was originally trying to do was a standard econ thing of reducing in-kind benefits to their cash equivalents, e.g. someone who gets Medicaid is $(value of the healthcare received) better off than someone who doesn’t, and therefore the Medicaid recipient can be considered to have a cash income increased by that dollar value for comparison. (Complicated by, especially in healthcare, that dollar value may be wildly divergent from the cost of providing it, and is going to vary from person to person).
And I see the general point of “why aren’t these programs getting people back into the workforce, then?” My guess is that some of them can’t possibly do that (e.g. SSI), and others have sharp eligibility cliffs that cause people to keep their incomes low or face high (sometimes way over 100%) marginal tax rates on the extra income (Medicaid, as above).
The rate was, however, going down until the War on Poverty got going. That had anti-poverty aid designed to get people out of poverty and failed to do so, providing at least some evidence against the idea that such aid would succeed. It replaced it with aid designed to make being poor less unpleasant.
If your explanation of the fact that the poverty rate isn’t going down is the lack of government programs to lower it, how do you explain the fact that it was going down before such programs?
@David Friedman
It’s not entirely clear what statistic you want to use. Is it percent of people living in households with total earned compensation (edit)
abovebelow some real fixed threshold?How do you know this, given that your data undercounts significant sources of income? Is my income only my cash salary, or does it include the actuarial value of employer-sponsored health insurance (which is about 20% of the total)? If I live with my parents, am I economically better or worse off than someone with identical income who lives on his own?
After excluding all the food I eat, my calorie consumption has stayed constant at 0, but for some reason my weight doesn’t go down – it’s a mystery indeed.
Because, as I thought I made clear already, the poverty rate I am talking about is defined by income before transfers. In the earlier period, the number of people who were poor before transfers was going down. In the later period it wasn’t. That fact requires an explanation.
The original objective of the War on Poverty was to reduce, ideally eliminate, poverty defined in that way, to make people self-supporting. It failed at that. Insofar as we are willing to accept post hoc ergo propter hoc, it had the opposite of its intended effect–reduced the number of people who were self-supporting by ending the decline in the poverty rate defined in those terms that had been occurring.
The British have tried distributing government departments, and it hasn’t worked all that well. Basically, you end up with a few offices in other parts of the country, and much higher travel budgets as the higher-ups have to go to the capitol regularly to do things there. Where does the Secretary of Agriculture work when most of his staff is in Nebraska? He has to attend cabinet meetings and such.
It’s been pretty successful at creating jobs in poorer regions.
I think the economic disutility of this is pretty similar to what you get from redistribution of wealth. Living in the city has a lot of utility, so if you’re trying to make an overall-more-prosperous nation, then concentrated cities are a good thing. And my experience – a lot in NJ, and just a little in TX – suggests that the government is fostering that concentration. In particular, there’s a huge flow of money from the suburbs into the city in the form of school funding. A significant portion of taxes collected for schools in the suburbs is skimmed off and sent to inner-city schools (where they pay twice as much to get half the outcome, but that’s a different conversation).
I do get that you’re saying that geography is potentially a different dimension, so judging it against wealth isn’t exactly fair. You’re acknowledging that there’s be some tradeoff.
But if so, why not start thinking about all the other ways in which we’re unequal – like the fact that I’m really lousy at sports, not particularly attractive, and so on. The whole bugaboo about wealth inequality tries to drive to a conclusion where I’m not allowed to notice those areas where I’m weak and strong, and decide to invest what resources I have into increasing my overall value in the dimension I have the most control over. They’re saying that along that dimension we should all be (relatively) equal, and so there’s little I can do to improve my overall value.
The problem is that the resentment is fractal. The people in rural Wisconsin don’t just resent Silicon Valley or Washington, D.C., they resent Madison, WI too. Our political system divides us into states, but for most purposes they’re irrelevant. The divide is between rural and urban and redistributing companies or organizations between different cities won’t heal that divide.
To go with your example of relocating Google to Wisconsin (since I grew up there). Google would have to relocate to either Madison or Milwaukee, because there just aren’t enough people or infrastructure in other parts of the state. So what you’ve done is increase the wealth and population of urban areas in a predominately rural state. That doesn’t resolve the issue. Madison is already a successful urban area with a low unemployment rate and good jobs for highly educated professionals. An unemployed high school graduate in Janesville isn’t going to suddenly become less resentful of urban elites, because they can now move to Madison and get a service industry job catering to the needs of transplanted Google employees, than they were when they could get a service industry job catering to the needs of Epic Systems employees or biotech workers.
Relevant anecdote: http://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obamacare-cleveland-clinic-non-profit-hospital-taxes/
tl;dr: when a world-class institution time-travels into the middle of your failing city, the result might be you getting a job, or it might be planners bulldozing your neighborhood to build a highway for the commuters (and the worst part is, they are right to do so…). It is good at some level though (for the county or the state)
I lived in the suburbs of Cleveland for 20+ years, the story that makes the most sense to me is that high taxes and corruption drove most business and people out of Cleveland over a few decades. The few businesses that remained were non profits like the clinic that consume resources and pay little or nothing directly to the city. This compounds as taxes have to rise or benefits cut for non clinic property, more for profit businesses move out, etc, etc.
Eventually local politicians looking for a scapegoat go after the Clinic, they blame them for all their problems, the Clinic responds defensively (and even aggressively) and the divide quickly widens.
And tech firms aren’t the broad-based employers that manufacturing firms used to be. To pull some arbitrary examples from annual reports, 20 years ago Eastman Kodak employed 94,800 people. Today Google (including the rest of Alphabet) has 72,000 employees. Now just compare how prominent Google is now to how prominent Kodak was in the ’90s.
Amazon employs 340,000+, and I don’t think that includes affiliates and 3rd party sellers (some of) who earn significant amounts of income through amazon.
Well, yeah, they’re a retailer, they need more people. Sears (the Amazon of its day) had about as many employees 20 years ago.
Redistributing government is a terrible idea.
That link seems to be arguing the opposite really.
Yeah, I should have said:
The type of person that Google, some small dotcom startup, or anyone in between wants working for them, is the sort of person who could just as well get a job at Apple or Oracle or any of a dozen other dotcom startups. And the type of person who doesn’t turn out the “I want to talk, think, and do computer stuff” part of their brain at 5:00 every weekday afternoon. If you promise this person reasonable pay, reasonable working conditions, and reasonable colleagues, in Silicon Valley, they’ll take your offer. And they’ll hedge their bets by doing their off-duty nerdish socializing with a mix of the most amiable colleagues from your shop and the entire rest of the SV population, and if it turns out you were lying about the reasonable working conditions, they’re out the door to one of your competitors.
If you promise them reasonable pay, working conditions, and colleagues, in Gary Indiana, they will understand that if you don’t deliver either they will have to eat the loss or they will have to pay all the transaction costs of a cross-country move. So you’ll have to up the pay to compensate. And if you are going to come through with the adequate working conditions and social environment for nerds, without the SV ecosystem to draw on, that’s also going to cost extra. And when you go to your investors and try to explain why you are paying so much extra for talent, after you promised to save them money by setting up shop in Indiana? They aren’t going to come up with the money, so you’re going to wind up with second-rate talent and high turnover.
Also, your investors live in Silicon Valley and they need face time.
Right. Even the literal largest company in the world struggles to recruit MBA talent, because how many Harvard grads want to go live in Bentonville, Arkansas?
This doesn’t answer the question though. That [insert tech company] wants to be in Silicon Valley was a given from the start.
@John Schilling
The costs of living is much higher in SV than in Gary Indiana, which also needs to be compensated for. You are cherry picking costs to make SV look better.
@Aapje,
Yes, but there’s still real costs there.
I just left Silicon Valley for family reasons (They’re in the Eastern timezone, I’m in the Western and getting home from work at 9:00… Then add on an $1800 plane ticket home for Christmas…), but you’ll notice that I moved to New York when I did. Because if you don’t like your one employer in Gary, Indiana, you’re SOL in the exact way John Schilling described.
And as both SF and NYC cannibalize themselves, I’m not sure what’s going to end up happening.
Because when Cleveland, population 2 Million in the Metro Area, doesn’t have enough tech jobs for me to be willing to move there…
I would have to be paid more than I currently make in San Francisco to move to a job in Gary, Indiana. There are many non-monetary benefits to living in the Bay Area that would have to be bought out to make me consider Gary.
One answer is subsidizing lower paid jobs and possibly re-importing some of the exported jobs. I’m sure David Friedman will tell us all about what trade theory says and why this is a loser overall. He’s probably right about that, but what theory leaves out is:
1. Social upheaval
2. Government’s real role
We are progressively (ha ha) getting closer to a social revolt on inequality. One word, Trump. Even if the market is working perfectly, it is not socially acceptable to pay an engineer 1000x of a garbage man. This may be the true economic value of a garbage man, but the equation changes when the garbage men burn down Google et. al. So we have a hard to gauge degree of freedom here that needs to be examined. An optimum market that results in The Hunger Games society may end with similar outcomes.
The government’s job is not to maximize GDP, although that may be the right path in most cases. The government’s jobs is to provide for the welfare of its citizens. Food stamps and Oxycontin are not a path to a well functioning society. At some point the GDP and the citizen’s welfare paths diverge, and it may be that we are getting close to that point, the trends are not promising for this to get better.
We are heading to Blade Runner instead of The Jetsons. The winners in society needs to redistribute enough wealth to prevent social upheaval. I’m beginning to wonder if they don’t properly understand this. If they don’t work out a smart way to do this, then the lower classes will insert a government that does it with a far more blunt and inefficient method. One answer to the inequality of living in a sewer is to make everyone live in a sewer. Do you really want to give Trump and Bernie supporters that option?
The item of most concern isn’t that we are already on a predestined path to Blade Runner, but that a precondition for social upheaval is becoming apparent. The winners are losing the mandate to rule the losers. While the winners denigrate the losers and wonder why they can’t understand “facts” they are missing the more important question which is: Why don’t they trust you anymore? This involves looking in the mirror and answering some hard questions.
So to make a long story longer, the winners need to move to a less efficient and less optimized market to better optimize the lower quartiles citizen’s welfare. They need to do it in their own self interest because they might end up living in a sewer.
So the “winners” have to work their entire lives to produce all the things, AND provide welfare for the “losers” who have free time, free housing, free food, free education, free medical care, and probably better luck with romance (c.f. “Henry” in Radicalizing the Romanceless)? Who exactly is the winner again?
There’s probably an argument to be made that the best way, as a general rule of public policy, to deal with people who say “give me money or I burn your house down” is NOT to give them the money.
That works morally, and in a ‘don’t negotiate with terrorists’ sense, but how would you say this works out practically? What is your solution to deal with angry poor folk that doesn’t involve buying them off somehow?
Well, one solution would be to give the “winners” – defined as anyone making more than $X/year, or some other status any able person could reach – literal titles of nobility, unique rights like sumptuary laws, etc. Of course, the modern “losers” would probably revolt at that too; equality is too engrained in modern society.
(Yes, depending on how limited-supply those privileges are and how much the “winners” value being the only ones to have them, they could conspire to keep other people down. We’d need to strike a careful balance where they think the privileges are worth paying taxes for, but they don’t cling to them too much.)
A lot of those privileges are things we already have, sorta. Someone who’s not a ‘winner’ certainly has the riiiiiiight to drive a Lamborghini and buy a castle in France, but the right to do so without the actual means is a hollow thing.
That said, I’ve often thought cities could try ‘renting’ street names to people willing to pay for it. I could see certain wealthy sorts buying off streets to be named after themselves for a time – maybe even all time.
One of the greatest conceits of the right wing is that the “winners” produce everything and the “losers” live off their largesse. The classical labor theory of value explains how it is actually the other way around. No welfare will ever come close to compensating for surplus value extraction (after-tax profits dwindling to zero would be the only situation in which we could say that this had occurred). In reality, Galt’s Gulch would collapse in an instant without the labor of workers around the world to sustain it.
Part of me wishes that, one day, Randians would own up to their bluff and let the poor die off in a recession. Then the ensuing labor shortage would show them that, oh hey, we do still need the poor, and that unemployment benefits are actually benefiting employers as much as employees by keeping the labor force alive during slow times.
You’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
The real question is what does “getting rid of the dane” in this context even look like?
It looks like the poor not burning down cars and eating the rich rather than going about life quietly.
Fortunately, the classical labor theory of value is horseshit.
@achenx, One of the most common historical patterns when wealthy nations paid off neighboring barbarians is that the neighboring barbarians started behaving themselves to ensure the flow of wealth continued and started trying to keep away rival barbarians to prevent them from trying to take a cut of the payoff. So it was often a good deal for the wealthy nations, paying off one enemy to avoid having to fight several (though the payoffs do have to be continuous, that much is true). But the successful examples are less dramatic than the failures, and it sounds like a “wimpy” strategy, so everybody focuses on the rarer failures rather than the more frequent successes (or misinterprets the failures; empires that used this strategy and then abruptly decided that they needed the money more urgently to finance their internal squabbles and so cut off the payments have indeed fared poorly after that decision).
I think “asserts” is probably a fairer characterisation here.
I think the point I was making is that at some point the incentives must also include “stop the lower classes from revolting”. We already provide the things you listed and the reasons they exist are a mix of humanitarianism and keeping them from revolting. Imagine a “more better winner” world where those things are taken away. Hope you have good locks on your doors John Galt, ha ha.
The idea of Atlas shrugging is simply the flip side of the poor revolting because the wealthy aren’t distributing them enough largesse. It’s the productive revolting because they’re doing all the work while others get all of the benefits for free.
I’m not seeing how the idea that “the productive should have their wealth redistributed to the unproductive in order to avoid having the unproductive kill them” is all that different from slavery. One bunch is doing the work, the other bunch is taking the proceeds under the threat of force.
Have a note about Atlas Shrugged: People bailed out to Galt’s Gulch because the US was turning into a nasty dictatorship. It wasn’t just redistribution, it was a future of being punished for not meeting impossible goals while living in a crumbling society with a very dangerous government. If this sounds vaguely like the USSR, it’s not a coincidence.
To read Ayn Rand, you’d think she’d never heard of Judaism, which combines a requirement to give charity and a prohibition against wrecking yourself by giving too much.
But which bunch is which?
@The Nybbler
I’m not debating the perfect society, I loved Atlas Shrugged. Cops are wearing body cameras now not because of economics but citizen welfare.
The question is whether the lower classes are at fault or if the upper classes have unmaliciously constructed an economy the lower classes cannot win at.
Proper economics favors this endpoint if that produces the maximum GDP. It’s better for the total economy to export high value items and import low value items that are made cheaper elsewhere. The people in the US who were good at making cheap plastic toys are unemployed. Those unemployed go get jobs in the high value industries and the world is a happy efficient place.
What happens when there are no longer enough high value jobs for the displaced workers? They have to accept low value jobs and make toys for $2/day to compete or starve to death. Too bad they don’t live in China where that works. Free international trade without open borders everywhere may be flawed. Burglary is much more lucrative.
Does maximized GDP by highly disparate skill values also infer wealth distribution as part of the social contract? It may be that maximizing citizen welfare is stopping cheap toy imports.
How would you feel if toy making was high value and software skills were imported for an effective $2/day, and you couldn’t compete in toy making because you are irredeemably clumsy? Unemployable in a manufacturing only market. The best part is the wealthy toy makers are calling you a deplorable undeserving loser, ha ha. They mean well of course.
I’m not saying we are there yet. I’m mostly libertarian but think we have to be careful in constructing a society that maximizes economics at the cost of citizen welfare. There are limits here.
@tscharf
Economics doesn’t favor any endpoint. It gives us the tools to help understand the consequences of any choice. But the values used in weighing those choices isn’t up to economics, it’s up to all of us individually (at least in a market system). And so, to the extent that this is the choice being made, it’s because we’ve generally chosen to take that path.
It seems you’re looking at this as a zero-sum game. It’s not. Even though we’re buying iPhones made cheaply in China, the result is that demand for the engineering to design and program these comes from the USA. So the more people that buy those cheap devices (and making them cheaply abroad increases that number), the greater the demand for those high-value jobs. And since we’ve stimulated that demand not just back here in America, but people all over the world are buying the phones, the effect on increasing the high-value jobs is amplified.
MoebiusStreet
Granted, but you’re ignoring the apparent second-order effect where in this means leads to that same wealth being increasingly concentrated in a smaller population and a smaller geographical space.
I don’t see why it’s necessarily a smaller population. It’s almost certainly a different population, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s smaller.
Regarding geography, at least in the case of iphone-type stuff, I think you’re wrong. Phone apps are a cottage industry that can be done from literally anywhere. To be sure, there’s probably some tendency for this stuff to be localized (Silicon Valley) but it extends significantly from there. And the manufacturing we’re comparing this to is *necessarily* localized (and is where we get terms like “rust belt” from) – manufacturing is capital-intensive and requires bringing people into proximity to the manufacturing facilities; and their suppliers naturally tend to follow.
There’s two basic answers to that one. One involves bread and circuses, the other involves jails and gallows. The problem with bread and circuses is it never ends. The poor and unemployed need food. Oh, but not just government cheese and day-old bread, they should have the same choice in food people who are working get. They need housing. And of course that housing should be to the same standards as any other. And they shouldn’t have to leave their communities, even if they are in the most expensive places in the country. Food and housing… wait, they also need medical care. No one should be denied medical care because they are poor. And certainly it’s not right that the rich get better medical care than the poor. Oh, and child care. That should be provided too, and to the same standard as those paying for it get; it’s not the poor child’s fault their parents are poor. And certainly no one should be limited in how many children they have, it’s a basic human right. And education, all the way through college. And on and on.
So who is paying for all this? Why, people who are not poor and unemployed. Hey, they’ve got money, they can afford it. So they have to work another 10-20 years, what’s their time worth anyway?
Yeah, I get it, don’t pay off the poor, they might start robbing people directly. But they’re probably not as good at it as the government is at doing it on their behalf. And the upper classes are more competent, maybe they can stop them from robbing so much. Perhaps with jails and gallows.
No, they don’t. And you see, I believe that’s exactly what would happen if the situation were reversed. Nobody would care — after all, how many software people are there, and are they really likely to do that much thieving and robbing? No, I’d get told the usual thing: “You’re a smart guy; you figure it out”.
@ The Nybbler
You still don’t get it. Having large contiguous groups of poor unemployed people is dangerous.
It’s dangerous because sooner or later they will start thieving and robbing specifically because there will be “smart guys” among them who realize that being the local godfather/warlord or an employee there of is the best deal they can get. The whole point of “redistributing the economy” is to make that class smaller and less contiguous and thus less dangerous.
The smart guys will be the ones who recognize that the Mafia works much better when it sticks to the Italian-American community than when it starts going after WASP money. There’s probably a stable equilibrium where you give all the unemployables say one-and-a-half times starvation wages(*) in welfare, let the local criminal gangs skim enough off the top to live large but crack down hard if they start preying on respectable people.
In this equilibrium, the Mafia serves as both the scapegoat for why everyone in the communities in question are poor, and as an escape valve for the smart, determined, and unethical ones who want to stop being poor but who you’d rather not see go revolutionary.
I do not like this solution, but it seems to be a workable one. Worse, it seems like it would work best if you could demarcate “employable” vs “welfare-bum poor” along ethnic lines.
* “Starvation wages” defined not by literal starvation but by what the median voter sees as unconscionable deprivation even for a deplorable when it shows up on his TV screen or facebook feed.
They’re STILL unlikely to be as good at it as the actual government.
Might make that class less dangerous, but it’ll make it more numerous, not less. Subsidize something, get more of it.
So?
Gang-bangers are generally outgunned by the cops who are in turn outgunned by the military. That doesn’t stop gang-bangers (and cops for that matter) from shooting people.
That’s the intent. subsidize movement away from dense economic centers, to get more movement away from dense economic centers.
@The Nybbler
If you define “good at it” as how much value in dollars a thief can extract compared to the taxman, maybe.
Sure, the taxes on a house will probably exceed the amount of money a copper thief can get for the wiring and plumbing at a scrapyard, but the amount of damage the thief does in procuring that small amount is much, much greater. And you don’t even get fire service or roads out of the deal with the thief.
Sure, but you can shoot a thief without everyone getting all upset about it.
One difference is that the rich are not transferrable chattels. Another is that they have the option of not working. Which they don’t take. Because of status…
And the other thing everyone forgets is that safety nets are there for workers as well, because no one has a 100% guarantee of lifelong employment.
Plus, some forms of thieving, such as mugging, impose negative consequences over and above the loss of or damage to property. How many people do you think would prefer a smaller welfare budget if it meant that they couldn’t leave the house alone for fear of being robbed at gun-point?
@CatCube
I’m not suggesting no government, I’m suggesting not doing massive redistribution to avoid revolt by the poor. So there’s still fire service and roads… and police.
@TheAncientGeek
Answered already. I don’t believe it. If I’m in a position to need a safety net, I’ll get a pile of “you shoulddas” and “You’re a smart guy, you figure it out”. I’m the not kind of person who can get the sympathetic ear of a social worker who will then turn the system upside down to get me benefits.
Once you start paying the Danegeld…
It isn’t clear whether welfare payments reduce the risk or increase it. Someone receiving welfare can’t take a legal job without losing the welfare, but muggers don’t report their income to the welfare department. And they have lots of time for mugging if they don’t have to work at McDonalds to feed themselves.
No?
Bread and circuses are actually pretty cheap. We’ve been playing that game in the inner cities for decades after all.
What these people are asking for is a functioning local economy with good jobs (full-time, reasonable pay, not make-work). That’s not something you can write a check for without changing anything else: it means actually rebuilding the American manufacturing economy, Marshall-plan style.
The one analysis that I recall reading on the Marshall plan (many years ago) had the opposite effect. Countries receiving the most money (I think per capita) had a slower manufacturing rebound than those receiving the least. If I have time later I will hunt a little for it.
You keep saying this, but, dawg, domestic manufacturing output is higher than ever. Midcentury levels of manufacturing employment aren’t coming back because with current technology you don’t need as many humans per unit of output as you once did. Re-shore as much manufacturing as you like and you’re not changing that basic reality.
This doesn’t mean that good low-skill jobs can’t come back; the quality of manufacturing jobs had more to do with unionization than the inherent nature of the work. But it does have lasting implications for economic geography.
Amplifying Rob K’s point – I don’t have the link handy, but I saw a study a few months back that concluded that of the decline in US manufacturing jobs over the past several decades, only about 1/8 was attributable to offshoring. The remainder is the result of improved production processes and automation.
This is not the piece I was looking for, but Tyler Cowen has this linked on his personal web page, written in 1985. It includes this point (transcribed, any errors mine)
What they want is impossible. Specifically the make-work part.
Even if I need my lawn mowed, if I hire my neighbor’s developmentally disabled son to do it at twice the going rate because I feel bad for him and he does a worse job, that’s pretty clearly make-work.
Why is it impossible? It existed not that long ago.
Granted, the manufacturing likely aren’t coming back but that’s entirely orthagonal the geographic distribution of the economy (or lack there of).
@baconbacon
Because what is and isn’t make-work depends on the rest of the world. It can’t be defined in a vacuum.
If the AI demand for labor apocalypse happens (the FAI scenario), then everything will be make-work even though everything isn’t make-work now.
And? What is it about rust belt (or whatever term you want) populations that prevents them from earning a living in an age when more people are earning a decent living in the US workforce than ever before?
It’s obviously not impossible. Wall up the borders and ban robots. It certainly isn’t desirable to do that. You seem to keep saying it is impossible to not go down the optimum economic path or reverse past technological advances.
Doing this crazy thing will make most people on this forum’s life “worse”. Cars will be crappier and more expensive. It’s quite unclear that it doesn’t make other citizens welfare “better”. I get that economic theory suggests this is a really bad plan.
If the message is the inevitable march of progress has obsoleted you because your brain is too feeble and tough turds if you don’t like it then social upheaval may be sooner rather than later. It’s not necessarily burning down Washington, it may be electing more Trumps until things change on the ground. Making the winner’s economy worse as a byproduct of dumb policy might be a problem that can be overlooked, karma.
The thing is, you’re not *only* bringing down the fat cats to your level. You’re also condemning your children. The status quo means that they’ll have a better life[1], but those draconian actions will prevent it.
[1] Yes, wage stagnation and all. But at the same time, buying power has increased so much that it’s possible to say that today, an average person is better off than was a Rockefeller a century ago. (you may disagree with that, but it’s at least a colorable argument)
Is this really true though? IE “condemning” my children to the quality of life I have now in place of condemning them to decline sounds like the sort of deal I can’t refuse.
@tscharf
I’m saying it’s impossible because what you suggest would just be a make-work system writ large. In a post scarcity world (to extend the analogy) a group can go off and pretend to be 19th century farmers, or maybe 15th if they’d prefer that. And perhaps somehow they could seize the levers of government and force everyone else to buy their incredibly expensive and unreliable crops. But they’d be playing a sort of game, they wouldn’t actually be contributing anything to society. On the contrary in the version where they force people to buy thier produce they’d be destroying value. They’d be hard working only in the same sense that someone that digs and refills holes is hard working.
Because people’s quality of life is determined by the cost and features of their automobile, obviously.
I think there is a tendency to overestimate the importance of cheap, high-quality consumer goods and deprecate, well, just about everything else, in evaluating quality of life, probably because the cheapness of consumer goods is easier to measure. I think you might do well to look at e.g. the discussions people are having cross-thread about the real value of continuing to live in the community one has spent decades growing roots.
If you take that away from people and offer in consolation, “…but now you can have a Prius, and maybe aspire to a Tesla! You’d never have been able to afford anything better than a crappy Dodge working the mills in West Podunk!”, they’re going to either hit you in the face with bricks or elect Donald Trump as your President, and you’re never going to understand why.
John Schilling said:
I think there is a tendency to overestimate the importance of cheap, high-quality consumer goods and deprecate, well, just about everything else, in evaluating quality of life, probably because the cheapness of consumer goods is easier to measure.
I think this is true. Further, it’s easy to add together costs and benefits denominated in dollars, whereas other kinds of costs and benefits are often pretty hard to put in those terms. And often, the non-dollar costs don’t add up linearly in a nice way–you have some problem that increases incrementally until it causes some huge change in your society. (Incremental increases in crime rate could take you from Tokyo to Caracas, but Caracas is a qualitatively different sort of place than Tokyo because of the differences in risk of crime, in all sorts of ways.)
On the other hand, this feels a bit like the description of _Seeing Like a State_[1]. It’s easy to throw away beneficial things because they don’t register in a market, and yet, overall, we may still wind up a lot better off following where a market leads us than trying to protect every walled garden everywhere. The history of the industrial revolution is just chock full of times where good, productive ways of life got obsoleted[2], communities were wrecked, and many beautiful things were lost. But without allowing that, I think we’d be immensely poorer in material things, enough so that we’d probably be worse off even with the good things about those communities and ways of life.
[1] I haven’t read the book, just Scott’s discussion, so I’m probably getting a lot wrong here.
[2] My wife used to work cleaning up Superfund sites, including many sites where coal was used to make town gas for gaslights. This industry provided good solid jobs and a good life for many people, and supported a valuable thing for the surrounding community. It went away because electric lights are a whole lot better than gas lights, and natural gas is a whole lot better than coal gas. We’re much better off that it was allowed to go away, *even though we destroyed some good ways of life allowing it to go away*. There are hundreds of similar cases.
I’m saying it’s impossible because what you suggest would just be a make-work system writ large. In a post scarcity world (to extend the analogy) a group can go off and pretend to be 19th century farmers, or maybe 15th if they’d prefer that. And perhaps somehow they could seize the levers of government and force everyone else to buy their incredibly expensive and unreliable crops. But they’d be playing a sort of game, they wouldn’t actually be contributing anything to society. On the contrary in the version where they force people to buy thier produce they’d be destroying value. They’d be hard working only in the same sense that someone that digs and refills holes is hard working.
Does MMO gold farming count as a make-work job? Does an MMO gold farmer contribute to society?
You have a small but growing number of people making money from small market transactions adding a little value each to the economy. That’s the root of Uber and AirBnb’s and Ebay’s business models. And not all of them require a physical object; you can develop an indie game or a mod, write an ebook, or put up a Patreon tip jar link on your blog.
There’s an endless amount of things I currently do that someone else does better than I do, and if I find someone that does it better and likes doing it more than I do, it rewards me to pay them to do it for me to give me time to do something I enjoy more.
I can certainly see why some people value removing the tedium from a video game enough to pay people to do it for them, and given that it adds value to an individual enough for them to to pay for it, I think it contributes to society.
@Civis
I’m not sure about gold farming in wow, but certainly in eve. And youtube makeup celebs, etsy producers, and web novelists certainly do.
I’m not exactly sure what you are getting at, but I suppose that if the 19th century farmer types find willing consumers for their bespoke agriculture than they’d be adding value too. So I guess the part that really turns it around is the compulsion. When no one is allowed to make or sell butter using modern processes because someone wants to play at 19th century farmer and be guaranteed a large market, that person is destroying value even though he is producing butter.
I’m not exactly sure what you are getting at, but I suppose that if the 19th century farmer types find willing consumers for their bespoke agriculture than they’d be adding value too.
The Wikipedia definition: A make-work job is a job that has less immediate financial benefit to the economy than the job costs to support. Make-work jobs are similar to workfare, but are publicly offered on the job market and have otherwise normal employment requirements (workfare jobs, in contrast, may be handed out to a randomly selected applicant or have special requirements such as continuing to search for a non-workfare job).
One of the problems with make-work from the worker’s perspective is that it is seen as degrading. Digging a hole and filling it doesn’t accomplish anything. Nobody would voluntarily pay someone to do that, so it’s obviously make-work. You could just as easily sit around and not work and still get paid and still accomplish the same amount, and people know this, and some people don’t like it, so finding ways to avoid that psychology is important. Further, the people giving them make-work and the people paying for the make-work know it’s make-work, and they have psychological issues with it.
I worked for a local government social services agency, and parts of the agency would raise funds by finding simple jobs for the clients (individuals with some level of impaired ability to function) to do, things like after-hours cleaning of businesses or bulk paper shredding. It was subsidized both by the government and by the businesses contracting the services. If you just look at the business end, it may or may not be make-work; the business was paying the agency more than they would have paid a conventional cleaning or shredding firm, but they got the extra benefit of helping the less advantaged. I don’t know that the clients thought of it as make-work, but that’s to be understood given the circumstances.
I don’t think artists or game developers or people that make a living on E-bay or Uber or gold farmers think of it as make-work; I think they think they are accomplishing something. More importantly, the people giving them money don’t think of it as make-work, so there’s not the psychological issues with wasting money or time.
@Everyone calling protectionism make-work,
If I pay my younger brother twenty dollars to mow my lawn instead of paying a landscaper ten dollars, that’s not make-work.
If my father tells me to pay my brother twenty dollars to mow my lawn instead of paying a landscaper ten dollars, that’s still not make-work.
Why not? Because even if it’s not maximally efficient, it’s real work. One way or another the lawn needs mowing. This is just a question of who mows it and what compensation they should get.
The nation is a family, just at a larger scale. We should take care of our own because they’re our own not just because it happens to be to our momentary advantage. If we’ve really forgotten that then we’re in a lot of trouble.
There’s no point arguing over whether something fits the term “make-work”; value is subjective and the term is not precisely defined. To go anywhere the discussion needs to be about what the benefits and costs are to various policies or attitudes.
I agree it is a good analogy but I disagree with your conclusion. Your brother is doing make-work. He should not have pride based on his ‘job’ and inasmuch as he does he is lying to himself. What you are suggesting may be a valid parenting strategy for children but the government isn’t and ought not to be your daddy.
The difference between make-work and work isn’t whether the person is being overpaid, it’s whether, in some sense, the work getting done makes a difference to someone, and whether there isn’t some much easier way for the work to get done.
This is a false presentation of the options. The ability to “help our own” is entirely dependent on making efficient economic trades. That $20 you have to spend only has value and meaning if it can be exchanged for goods and services. To much protectionism doesn’t just mean slower growth, or the ‘haves’ having a handful of fewer options, it often means negative growth, semi permanent recession and a greater number of ‘have nots’, which, of course, will lead to even greater cries for protectionism, all while ‘our own’ see a steadily declining standard of living.
Ever been to Whole Foods? ha ha.
For a brief time, only the rich will have self driving cars. Shortly after, only the rich will use professional drivers.
Nancy:
I think the best definition of make-work is *useless* work being done only to give someone a job. Sometimes the job is a punishment, as with a student being given lines to copy; other times it’s a way to dissuade people from staying on public assistance by saying “yes you can have $X/month, but you have to spend half of each day digging ditches and the other half filling them in.”
I don’t think it’s reasonable to call some job make-work just because there is some conceivable way to get it done cheaper or better. Having your kid mow the lawn or watch his younger siblings or walk the dog doesn’t seem much like make-work, even if
a. There’s a hungry immigrant living down the street who would do all three jobs better for less money.
b. There’s a hungry Venezuelan who’s be happy to take those jobs and do them better for less money, if not for US immigration controls keeping him in Caracas.
c. There is a commercial service which would do the job better and cheaper.
If you use the term “make-work” for those situations, then you have to call it make-work every time that someone used plumber X to unstop his drains when plumber Y would have done the job for less money, every time someone pays for some job to be done when there was some set of policies that might have been enacted to allow it to be done more cheaply by someone else.
Yes, the concept of “make-work” has been promoted a bit. Having your brother mow the lawn for $20 when the market is $10 for that job isn’t make-work, but it is a subsidy. And when the government does it, it is welfare. If your brother is on the ball, he will realize that he has not earned $20. He earned $10 and was given $10. This isn’t make-work, but it is the equivalent, or at least halfway there. If I was the one mowing the lawn, I would prefer you to give me $10 and pay me $10 to mow the lawn. Then at least I could have pride in the $10 job.
Well, we can eliminate all the “make-work” jobs doing environmental impact assessments, because the only reason they exist is legislation requiring them. Repeal NEPA and let the economy boom!
More seriously, except for the anarchists here, we all support some variety of legislation to require things that society “ought” to do that a market won’t provide on its own. If the mere existence of a legal requirement in place of market forces is the only reason a particular job exists means that it’s useless make-work, well, Brad, you might actually be more right-wing than me.
I’ve actually started to go back and forth on this as I get older. I agree that the most “efficient” ordering of an economy, per comparative advantage. However, when I go back home and see the Memorial Day parade that was the highlight of the town I grew up in as a sad, empty shell of what it was even 15 years ago…well, if you told me that everything I bought would be 5%-10% more expensive, but my home wouldn’t be an aging-out wasteland and I could live near my family, I’m actually ready to listen on some days.
@CatCube,
That’s exactly where I am. I’ve been hard core market economy for decades. I left WV in 1985 and when I go visit it is still….1985 or worse. The thriving chemical industry is gone.
I drive through rural GA, AL, KY, WV, etc. and then do a tour of China and I just find it difficult to accept this is the intentional and preferred outcome by our economic designers.
I can’t blindly support it anymore. I’m much more skeptical than I used to be. I’ll pay more for my shoes if these places can be less of a shithole. I don’t particularly like any of the solutions either but don’t accept nothing can or should be done.
If I agreed with the cynical right wing interpretation of regulation — that they exist for the purpose of creating work for bureaucrats — then I’d agree that they are make-work jobs. But I don’t, so I don’t.
It’s hard for me to understand how you can defend as not-welfare a situation where someone is making market excess compensation due directly to a government policy designed deliberately to ensure that job would exist and pay market excess compensation.
The worst part about this socialism come lately position is how even now it doesn’t seem to be especially universal. I don’t hear anything about how we are going to create “good jobs” for minorities living in inner cities. It seems to be like the old Jim Crow voting laws — if your grandfather had a “good job” than you are entitled to one, but if not, tough luck.
You do hear (or at least I do) that, with automation and outsourcing eliminating low skill jobs, the worst thing for low income minority groups would be import more competition. In as much as you see immigration restriction as a form of welfare, then, that is some answer to your complaint. Some of the difference is may be that inner cities decay gradually, versus when company towns cease all at once? (In addition to the obvious in-group preferences)
I do not think shaping economic policy to preserve jobs other countries are willing to do cheaper is strictly analogous to a straight wealth transfer. It makes sense to me to seek to preserve some large measure of industrial capacity as insurance against global economic shock, diplomatic tensions, or even just raising standards of living in China/India making those jobs now cost more over there than here. (though I haven’t seen such arguments made here).
I do find it odd that despite much of the reason for a close of factories in the US is that overseas the jobs are done with less safety regulations, environmental protections, and concerns for fair wages there no longer seems to be neither the calls to protect the foreigners with our regulations nor allow better competition by reducing our regulations. Instead we regulate ourselves out of industrial efficiency, ignore that the unseen others suffer burdens we don’t allow our own to take on even voluntarily, and hope increasing technology will produce enough surplus to provide for all.
Am I ignorant of some other reason, or is this out-group homogeneity bias? Am I questioning why neo-liberals don’t share progressive concerns?
@Randy M
A quick google shows there was apparently some half-hearted language in the TPP to enforce higher labor standards on overseas manufacturing (the article I found mainly focuses on criticizing it for not including Mexico). So it’s at least something that’s on some people’s minds.
Couldn’t one also argue that the “market compensation” rate is due to foreign governments’ policy (more specifically, lack thereof on labor and environmental rules) designed deliberately to ensure that the job would exist?
Tossing out a half-formed idea to followup on my own post and Randy & random’s posts –
The US has the SPEECH Act:
What would people think of a similarly structured law that would impose a tariff on goods produced under conditions that would be illegal if done in the US?
I expect there’s something horribly wrong with it somewhere, but maybe more econ&legalistically-inclined folks here can come up with ways to fill some of in the holes 🙂
@Randy M:
Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has been blogging about this forever (on the side of wanting to protect foreign workers). As random832 says, TPP covered some of this. I expect that there is a reasonably strong correlation between support for unions and support for better working conditions for foreign workers, since the logic behind the two positions is quite similar.
@Gobbobobble: At least part of the left would be on board.
This would destroy real wages, not promote them.
I think this cost increasing regulations can be broken up into two groups:
1) Things that we care about because we are rich and can afford to care about them.
2) Issues impacting the global commons.
For the first one think of things like particulate pollution that leads to smog and increased asthma rates in the area around the factory. Or safety rules that keep the amputations down to a low level. Or minimum wage laws. I don’t think it is appropriate to put in place compensatory tariffs for these types of regulations.
For the second one think a CO2 tax (assume for the sake of argument they make sense) or a ban using CFCs. For these I do think a compensatory tariff can make sense.
In terms of whether there’s a distinction between progressives and neo-liberals on this question, leaving aside definition issues, I do think there’s a diversity of views on the left. From downright protectionist, to free trade with labor and environmental reservations with teeth, to quite pro-free trade.
For myself, I certain don’t think we have the optimal regulatory regime and would be open to looking at e.g. OSHA regs and seeing if each one makes sense and strikes the right balance. And I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for minimum wage laws.
@Iain
I haven’t read Loomis, but I have found in the past that many pro-union pro-foreign worker protections in trade deals proponents are disingenuous. The idea isn’t to protect foreign workers but to eliminate their jobs in favor of more work for domestic union workers. In other words protectionism dressed up in faux concern for third world laborers.
@ gobbobobble
You just get more and more protectionism, and rule crafting/evading. Some people I knew in academia told me how to get a foreign student a work visa (or whatever the equivalent was) for a graduate program. The rules allowed for foreign students as long as no domestic students met the necessary criteria, so to get your foreign student you have to select them, and then write a proposal that specifically requires their “skill set” with as many details as possible that they match. Does your desired student speak several languages? Then 1% of the grant will be applied to setting up a “multinational liaison position to coordinate findings with other research groups”.
A similar process would immediately happen with such a proposal. Every union would be lining up to file law suits against any foreign company that paid even 1 employee less than the US minimum wage, or didn’t pay overtime in exactly the way the US did, or had a 14 year old work X+1 hours a week instead of the X they are legally allowed to in the US.
Worse though is that every industry would have an incentive to take any practice that was standard, but not required by law, and turn it into law. Actually worse than that, but that is bad enough. The regulations today would be nothing compared to the excruciating minutia that every industry would be trying to cram into bills to make some foreign company technically in violation of the law.
@Brad:
I mean, Erik Loomis has written an entire book about it. While I can’t claim to know what is in his secret heart of hearts, at some point you have to accept that people are sincere about their professed beliefs.
@baconbacon
Hmm, good points, thanks. What if we change the calculus so that it’s not a company-behavior requirement, but instead comparing the regulations of the producing nation? If I understand SPEECH correctly (which I probably don’t), it can apply based on “Someland’s speech protections are inferior and that’s a sufficient condition to ignore their ruling” – what if “the relevant state department has determined that Someland’s labor/environmental/etc protections are insufficient on points a b and c, therefore according to the chart we’re imposing an X% Externality Tariff on all Somelandic goods”
Probably still a bitch to implement, but likely better than a lawsuit-based system, no?
So we import fewer shoes, export less wheat, and in addition to your paying more for your shoes, rural areas that don’t produce shoes and do produce wheat are worse off.
There are two halves to your implicit argument. One is that free trade benefits us as consumers by making things we buy less expensive, which is true. The other is that it hurts us as producers by lowering our ability to make money producing things. There is no reason to expect that to be true in general.
Free trade makes some producers worse off, because they now have to compete with imported goods, some producers better off, because they now get to sell more abroad–the people who sell us shoes have dollars with which to buy wheat. Any particular tariff benefits producers in one industry, hurts producers in many others. Concentrated interest groups are more politically effective than dispersed, so the people benefited get the effect on them more heavily weighted in the political market–also in the public image of effects.
You can convince me all day that this is not optimal, and I really want to believe this will properly resolve itself using market forces, what I don’t understand is how this will theoretically happen and it doesn’t seem to be happening.
If we are at a point where too much low end manufacturing has been offshored what are we to do with our low end manufacturing work force? I think your answer is that the wheat farmers effectively pay them to do nothing in theory, right? Or they go become butlers and maids for the wheat farmers? Or they go work in China where that low end pay can still feed a family?
The simple model (the only one I can handle at the moment) assumes the displaced workforce finds other work that is more valuable than shoe making is in the US. Eventually shoe making may become more expensive in China as they get fat and wealthy like the US and it may return later when it makes sense.
My guess is the “in general” is where things get complicated. I think one place this fails is when people who are good at making shoes are unable to move to China to make the most of their skills. It’s also not clear to me why if we subsidize shoe making with wheat profits that China buys less wheat (trade war, they are now poorer?).
Then you have unfair advantages through Chinese currency manipulation (my knowledge here is very thin), trade deficits, lack of fair exposure to their markets, their ability to use “dirty” manufacturing, and a much lower priced labor market. Isn’t China effectively already subsidizing their shoe making work force? The easy answer is China needs to play fair. Even if they did we still have unemployed shoe makers I think.
I want magic fairy dust that helps American lower skilled society, maybe there is none, but some answers are worse than others.
@Brad: We’re rich and can afford to care about not making our textile factories deathtraps but Bangladesh isn’t, which is why they still have textile factories and we don’t.
I get the cold logic here, but it feels, well, wrong to be so callous about the human consequences.
@BBA: While I generally agree, the standard counterargument is that sweatshop labor sucks less than subsistence farming, which would be Bangladeshis’ other option.
But they don’t actually produce “all the things.” The current losers used to produce all the things. Then the current winners allied with the communist winners and China and are using their slave labor to produce “all the things.”
The people with status.
They did, once. In the 19th century, the city of Manchester installed pipelines for clean drinking water all could access. Not because the wealthy and the government were so charitably inclined, no; all it took was rumor of the poor poisoning the previous supply, and it was done. This is not a standalone case, as even otherwise conservative figures like Bismarck ended up instituting welfare policies in their countries for the sheer reason that they did not wish for the communists to gain power.
So, if nothing else, I predict the need for reform will scale with the amount of cars set on fire and Donald Trump-adjacent people getting elected.
From my point of view, though, Donald Trump is the reform, and the reaction to the out of touch managerial class. That is, the working class people used to have jobs and dignity, and then the technocrats levied both harsh regulations against their employers while at the same time removing trade barriers such that products could be manufactured in parts of the world where no such regulations exist. This is beneficial for the technocrat class, but a welfare check and an opioid addiction are a poor substitute for a job, a family, a community and a church for the working class.
What sort of reforms from the Democrats and neocon Republicans are you thinking will make the Trump voters douse their torches and shed their pitchforks?
Short answer: I’m not sure this is something fixable by politics, see also Moloch
Longer answer: turning the US into its state-of-being back in 1965 won’t solve your problems.
Fifty years ago, the gap between ‘US unskilled worker’ and ‘Indian unskilled worker’ was a much larger one than it is today; similarly, a lack of available capital and knowledge abroad made developing industry and a functioning economy something much more difficult. Between technology and a process of catching up, these gaps have become much smaller: there are no borders for those interested in investing abroad, education has improved immensely, and the degree of difference between east and west is much smaller.
Now, if you really, really want to, you can try to plug your ears and pretend none of this is true. Anyone wishing to import cars or toasters from China now pays a tariff of some large degree, the minimum wage is abolished, environmental laws are no longer a thing, perhaps even strike down even older laws and customs such as the 40-hour work week, child labor, retirement ages, and the like. Migration is legal, but you as well as your kids will not have any right to welfare or anything else for the next fifty years. Or ban immigration altogether, I don’t care. Go nuts.
Are you entirely sure the people voting Trump are going to end up liking what they get? I’m not sure they’d regret such, but I’m also not sure enough it’s a good plan that I’d support such radical changes. There will be pollution and workplace death and people ground down from labor and awfully low wages and exploitation of the common man of a scale we don’t quite remember there was, and the fact that global competition is much stiffer means that it may not even work out all that well.
But let’s say this is all fine. Let’s say that working seventy hours a week in dingy factories making TV’s and furniture for poor pay is an acceptable tradeoff, one that is well-received in those of the rust belt and wherever else, and they consider that all worth it.
How are you going to actually have the managerial class go along with it?
Old-style factories don’t exist in a vacuum. If you’re going to raise tariffs and be protectionist to a degree that rural economies like such become profitable again, it’s going to raise prices by a lot, or cause a drop in quality instead. Much as having better gadgets and products doesn’t dictate someone’s happiness instead, people are going to notice. I could afford three vacations and a new phone every year, but now that seems like a distant dream? I heard that in Canada, someone doing my job makes three times what I do. The white collar sorts who are going to feel the effects of these kinds of policies aren’t likely to elect their own Donald Trumps or head innawoods to form militias or any such thing once they get pissed, they’re quite simply going to move. Much like destitute rurals who long for a better past are local and proud of where they are, the people who benefit from free trade and open borders don’t care whether they live in New York or Toronto or London or Berlin or anywhere else: a Western city is a Western city is a Western city, and moving about is not an issue for those in the highest echelons of society. Once they notice what’s going on, the response is very likely to be a collective ‘okay then’, only for them to move off towards greener pastures. You’d basically be Eastern Europe by that point.
So, to reiterate: I’m not sure. I’m not sure if much could be done, and if it wouldn’t drive the very same problem up at the other end of society instead. I certainly don’t think that every little tariff or restriction on immigration is going to cause the sorts of effect as I’ve noted at once, but it’s certainly a risk, and I don’t know that a pleasing solution for everyone exists. And even then, I don’t know that blaming democrats/neoliberal republicans is really valid here.
The note I made earlier about Eastern Europe wasn’t in vain, either. Both it and Southern Europe by and large have much what Trumpists seem to want going for them: protectionism, subsidies, nativism, a lack of immigration. The results don’t look very pretty.
The technocrat elite who have manipulated regulation and trade policy to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class are going to up and leave the country if the working class tips things back in their favor?
No.
Stop.
Don’t.
This is the disconnect. The rural folk / Red Tribe accuse the city folk / Blue Tribe of not actually caring about the country or the people in it, and I guess you agree? The city folk don’t really care about “America” or “other Americans,” just that they’ve got a city to live in where they can have a new phone and 3 vacations a year.
I think the Red Tribe will be perfectly fine with that. They don’t want phones or vacations, they want a community, and without the Blue Tribers regulating industry to death while putting up no barriers to foreign slave labor, they’ll be able to do that. Can we start a marketing or fundraising campaign to ship the technocrats to Canada?
I’m not sure we agree entirely, but they don’t care to the extent that rurals/red tribers/whatever you want to call them do, sure.
Okay, but I think you’re wrong to think so.
The fortunate fact of the matter is that we have a rather good analogous situation to this debate, which is Eastern Europe. It is not exceptional for any Eastern European country to have a double-digit percentage of its actual citizenry living abroad; furthermore, these also aren’t quite the cases of unskilled migration you’d see as with Turkey to Europe, or from Mexico to Canada.
Some statistics, just to illustrate:
Serbia: 20% or so living abroad
Romania: 18% or so living abroad
Bulgaria: Some 15% abroad, though measuring is hard
Lithuania: More than 20% abroad
Latvia: 17%-or-so, ethnic Russians make it a pain to tell
And before anyone notes that the immigration involved is unskilled, that is patently untrue. Well-educated Eastern Europeans are absolutely the most likely ones to migrate, as are the ones who aren’t necessarily well-educated but otherwise in possession of a career. ‘Only the idiots don’t migrate’ is more than a silly joke in that part of the continent, and it’s the future you profess to want for your own country.
So, okay. We have a case study in what America might look like, should all the non-loyals leave. But it’s worth it, you say. Let them leave (or even fund them moving to Canada!) so the Red Tribe can go to church and have sunday barbeques and whatnot. That’s preferred, yes?
Hardly. Insofar red tribe/blue tribe maps well to Eastern Europe, things aren’t looking good for the rural population there. Eastern European suicide rates are depressingly high, and birthrates are very low. Most countries have a literal ministry of migrants that spends its time going about trying to get people to move back home because people that are wealthy and educated are sorely lacking. Infrastructure is poorly-maintained, crime is high, ditto corruption, and the ‘sense of community’ you tell me that’ll make things worth it appears to very much be lacking.
Why are you so confident your country will make do just fine if it decides its obligations don’t extend to its managerial class? People on the other side of the fence count, and they could stand to see some improvements, but this is a bravery debate, one where you want to see what the right balance is. Deciding that a nation of churchgoers and those without higher education is going to be off just fine without vegans and cosmopolitans doesn’t seem to work very well in reality.
Doesn’t this have some trouble with causation, though?
We start with a. Eastern Europe has a lot of smart people abroad, and b. Eastern Europe has a lot of bad metrics that make it a rough place to live.
So that means one of:
1. Eastern Europe drove its more educated population away, which led to a lot of bad metrics happening (because the smarter population were required to keep the metrics good)
2. Eastern Europe was a bad place to live, which drove its more educated population to other countries (because they were useful elsewhere, and so had the option)
If we’re looking at 1, then yeah, it’s a real problem if America drives its technocrats away. That is, if the “educated” of Eastern Europe actually maps well to the “technocrats” of America.
If we’re looking at 2, then America is quite clearly not currently in a state of Eastern Europe-bad metrics, so it’s unlikely to be mirrored here. You’d have to show that the country going Red Tribe is actually going to lead to the bad outcomes, which would lead to people moving away for reasons other than “being technocrats”
How does the timing of this work out? Does Eastern Europe becoming a bad place to live predate or postdate the exodus of the more educated?
@DeWitt
The problem is that the managerial class has already decided that their obligations do not extend to the working class, and their solution for the working class is “move to the cities and eat arugula salads like us.” Might as well have said “let them eat cake.”
Right now with the policies favoring the managerial class, the working class is dying. Your argument for continuing the pursue the policies that allow the managerial class new phones and vacations is that things will be even worse for the working class than they are now.
1) I don’t think that’s a given. America is not Eastern Europe and is not recovering from a century of communist oppression.
2) If the choice is between definitely dying slowly and taking a risk that results in either living or dying more quickly, I’m guessing the Red Tribe is going to choose the latter.
This seems to be a perpetual argument that I do not think we will ever solve.
“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” — William Jennings Bryan
My guess is though that we’ll just lurch a little more in favor of the farms and factories for a little while, and the cities will remain mostly unburnt.
The gist of the matter is that being an honest person in Eastern Europe is a sucker’s game. The pay isn’t very good, the benefits aren’t, and you’re going to see idiots and asshats all around you get cushy jobs because they’re well-connected. The economy’s climate is one of rampant bureaucracy and corruption, where every odd person with a shred of power is going to obstruct all they can if no bribes are paid. Moving to Germany/Austria/the UK/the Netherlands/Sweden is a much better prospect than trying to make this all work, so people move off.
And while the US isn’t anywhere near that sort of level, tariffs, protectionism, and measures in general to dial back the economy to some early 20th century analogue are likely to get yourself in a similar sorts of situation.
And that’s, very unironically, terrible. I don’t advocate this. Then again, I don’t advocate the reverse either, and the solution of ‘let’s make everything terrible for all’ is one I’d consider awful.
I’d argue for some, but not all. Crucially, though, I’m noting that simply turning everything back to 50/75/100/however many years ago won’t work out in a modern context. There’s plenty you could do that won’t affect the managerial class much, but may well have the working class’ lot improve, from placing restrictions on immigration to not actually implementing a nationwide minimum wage in a country as huge as the US is. This kind of attitude:
-is exactly right! The nature of a bravery debate is that you’re not arguing for the extremes, you’re arguing for how much of one or the other. The US should indeed steer itself to a better climate for its working class, but the kind of thing that’ll drive off everyone else is very unlikely to have results that’ll be good in the end.
I’m not sure, but I hope so. It’d be a good place for your country to move towards.
This assumes that the features that make the market efficient are the ones responsible for the poor welfare of people at the bottom, rather than features that make it inefficient. Professional licensing down to the level of hair braiders. Minimum wage laws pricing low skill teenagers out of their first job. High levels of crime and violence in the inner city due to drugs being illegal. K-12 schooling effectively a government monopoly for the lower quartile. Trade restrictions hurt agriculture, since the U.S. is a large net exporter–farm products are part of what we are paying for our imports with–and agriculture is a sizable part of what supports the rural population.
My point isn’t that you have to agree with all of these points. It is that you have simply accepted one interpretation of the world, one in which it’s the pro-market policies which cause the problem, over another in which it’s the anti-market policies. And it doesn’t look as though you realize that that is a debatable issue.
I’m not really arguing how to optimize economics and furiously agree with most everything you said. However I have a hard time believing that the most efficient market is by definition the fairest market to all classes (insert definition of fair here…). If it’s not then the path to fairness may be a less efficient market by design.
I guess the question is what would be the best way to redistribute income more “fairly” while doing the least amount of damage to the economy? I know that’s kind of like asking which tooth would you prefer to get pulled out with pliers.
It’s funny, this thing. My impression from talking to many left-wingers is that there is a large overlap between them and libertarians in many questions, basically everything that does not directly involve the economy, vaguely speaking. It is not a perfect overlap. Many (most? I’m not sure) libertarians, me included, are more socially liberal than even the reasonable leftists (I’m ignoring the identity politics left), for example things like the freedom of association don’t seem to have as much support among the left (in fact I’d say that no group other than libertarians really supports it consistently), but broadly speaking there seems to be a lot of agreement.
Where there is a disagreement is that the left believes that some groups of people are inherently disadvantaged in a market economy and should therefore get some benefits. The way this is done in practice is a mixture of very complicated and often ad hoc rules that make someone better off, someone worse off and overall, at least as far as libertarians believe (I think it is safe to say that, I don’t know any libertarians who support the typical western welfare state of today), almost everyone worse of on net.
So while the libertarians would generally prefer a society where there either isn’t a state (if they’re anarchocapitalist) at all or a very minimal state providing only national defense, police and the courts (or possibly just a little more than that), it seems to me that most left-wingers would be perfectly happy with that latter minarchist system as long as there were something along the lines of minimum basic income associated with it. So basically a state that provides the army, police, courts and a flat rate basic income for everyone and nothing else. This might still be suboptimal to the libertarians but if you actually scale the state down to just that, it would be a vast improvement (from the libertarian point of view) over the current state pretty much anywhere in the world. If that works well you can then think about whether the welfare is really necessary or if private charity is sufficient, but until that point you can have a simple free market+simplistic welfare platform which could possibly attract a large part of the left and simultaneously propose a much more libertarian society than the one we live in (wherever you live).
However, I don’t know any party with this program (or any serious attempt at estimating the state budget in that society). It could be because of several reasons. One is that my assumption is simply wrong and that this idea would not be attractive to a substantial part of the left. Another is that it is sort of “intertribal”. Libertarians generally oppose the welfare state and if they simply hear “and we give free money to everyone no questions asked”, then their knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss that idea. Similarly, the left might hear “and we get rid of all current social welfare programs and also almost all other market regulation” and they again reject it without thinking about it further. If that is the case, I guess you just need someone who is charismatic and good at PR enough to sell that idea and convince the libertarians (admittedly, this is a lower priority since there are only so many libertarians) that this is on net actually significantly less state than what we have now and the leftwingers that this means all of these disadvantaged people will be covered and in fact possibly covered better than they are today.
This is of course still incompatible with many other people. If you’re paternalistic and believe that the state should limit individual choice for your own good (or rather for other people’s own good, people who propose paternalism usually don’t think they are the ones who need it), you won’t ever agree with it. If you think that people should not get money just cause for moral reasons even if it is possibly more efficient and comes off cheaper, then you won’t agree either (same if you believe that it would in fact not be more efficient). But I think this could still attract quite a lot of people, a lot more than “traditional” libertarianism ever will in the current society.
That would depend on whether you are using it to mean the right to hold meetings, or the right to discriminate.
@Tibor
Isn’t the problem that the numbers don’t work out? You can have a very small UBI that left-wingers are going to consider insufficient or a big one, that distorts the labor market by having huge taxes on those with high incomes and little incentive to do the shitty jobs, which presumably pisses off the libertarians.
@Tibor
And then the leftist says, “but what about the environment? What about healthcare? What about the existential threat of climate change? What about the three-toed yellow horn frog? What about worker safety? What about food safety? What about lead paint? What about racial discrimination? What about sexism? What about homophobia and Islamophobia and transphobia?”
Can I discriminate in who I invite to my meetings? Does it matter if I hold these meetings regularly and do interesting and/or useful stuff at them?
@Aapje: I don’t know. Maybe you’re right it doesn’t add up. On one hand you could expect more people to live off just the minimum basic income, but how many more I can’t say. If you don’t set it too high to be a very attractive alternative to working (I don’t think anybody advocates that though) then it probably would not be too many. At the same time you save huge amounts of money by scaling the state down to minimum. I would not be too surprised if just replacing the welfare system with this (and letting the rest of the government untouched) were enough to compensate the costs. Aren’t there any estimates online?
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z: Both.
@Conrad Honcho: I guess you have a point and it is a bit more complicated. But apart from the environment and global warming, most of these problems again seem to be most effectively soluble by just giving people cash. That is as long as you don’t believe you know better how those people should spend their money than they do themselves.
As for pollution, global warming, etc. reaching a consensus between the left and the libertarians might be more difficult, there might be some larger disagreements on how to treat externalities in general. But even if you exclude these more complicated things, you can replace a lot of left-wing policy by simply “directly redistribute cash” and that would move the left and the libertarians a lot closer together.
Certainly this would be pretty decent compared to current states, from the minarchist libertarian viewpoint… and assuming the numbers would work out. But we’ll never get there and if some tyrant God came down from the heavens and imposed it, it wouldn’t last three weeks after he left.
@Aapje
I find John Cochrane’s proposal to limit a UBI by time to be a proposal both sides could potentially agree to.
JC’s proposal is a non starter, if you do it literally the way you described then virtually everyone takes their payment in year 1 (seriously would you rather have $10,000 this year or maybe $10,000 in some future year?). Now you have to either randomize it (doesn’t work nearly as well for helping people when they have an actual problem if they have to wait 2-5 years to get the money) or tie it to ‘need’ so it is no longer a UBI, or make it in kind in the form of coupons for food/housing/medical care. In other words you have to turn it into a regular welfare system.
The one time lifeline of 5 years of extra income is interesting, but wouldn’t it make the most sense for everyone to claim it immediately upon passage of the law? Unless the lifeline is going to be better than the time value of money or a simple rate of return, it is financially smart to take the cash up front and save it yourself. The impact of that overwhelming demand up front would be impossible to meet. Even assuming not everyone did this, wouldn’t fears about the solvency of such a program create a self-fulfilling run on the program akin to a bank run?
@Tibor
There are communitarians on both the left and the right.
On the left it leads to support for elaborate cradle to grave social system, not as a purely functional matter (i.e. to keep people from suffering), but as an end itself — to tie people into a greater community. This is also the root of the anti-gentrification idea.
Although identitarian movements superficially map very cleanly to communitarianism, they are actually mixed. The elements that emphasize local power brokers and funding their local organization is clearly communitarian, but the elements that involve individual rules and benefits are not.
The kind of leftist for whom the UBI is attractive is the flip side of the coin. Call it technocratic, call it neo-liberal, call it wonkish and out of touch, whatever you’d like. This group believes in a sort of kinder, gentler libertariansim. They think the libertarians are basically right on many positive questions (though not the gold bug stuff) and want to use their insights into things like unintended consequences of regulations to e.g. guarantee everyone a minimal standard of living in as efficient a manner as possible. This group is also more likely to strongly support individual liberties, though not to the extent of going against what they consider axiomatically necessary policies like anti-racial-discrimination laws.
@baconbacon
I guess I’m not for a UBI per se, only a restructuring of how we do welfare. A generous 5 year maximum allotment of cash transfers contingent on “need” (defined the same way we dish out food stamps) seems preferable to cash transfers contingent on age (Social Security) or transfers contingent on unemployment (unemployment benefits)
@AnarchyDice
Agreed on your points with one small caveat.
Technically no government program is in danger of becoming “insolvent” in the same sense as a bank is as the government can technically print it’s own currency.
Assuming the money was indexed to inflation, fear of a “run” on the program and a mass currency expansion + inflation to keep up would make it rational to *keep* your money inside the system instead of taking it out.
This is a myth that has been refuted theoretically and empirically. Either in the sense that the definition is so technical as to have no bearing on the real world, or it is simply flatly be proven incorrect by countries that destroyed their own currency and prices rise FASTER than the government can print money.
@baconbacon
I was using it in an extremely technical (maybe not very useful) sense, yes.
But I wasn’t trying to be pedantic. The fear wouldn’t be insolvency (in which case you’d want to withdraw your money as quickly as possible), it would be hyperinflation (in which case I’m not sure what the rational response would be). You could potentially behave to those two fears differently.
If you aren’t personally that is fine, but these suggestions are generally supposed to appease both sides by being more efficient in both the cost and the way they improve the lives of the poor. If you cut one of those out then you no longer have serious grounds for a compromise.
Behavior is exactly the same. Get your money out of that bank/get your money out of that currency. A run is simply a race to see who gets their assets out first.
It seems to me that making welfare contingent on being poor would both cost less and be more efficient to improving the lives of the poor than making welfare contingent on being unemployed or being old (for example).
It is very difficult to avoid the marginal tax problem then, and you are almost ensuring that anyone that gets on welfare has a large incentive to stay on welfare. This is a primary conservative/libertarian complaint about the system.
How about making the cash transfers a smooth, steady function of your income?
Would that not alleviate some of the “welfare cutoff trap” stuff
I realize, now I’m talking about 2 separate ideas. But the original idea (John Cochranes) was that the cash transfers had a 5 year limit. If you used it up for 5 years, that’s on you. Your incentive is that your additional income is scarce.
Either way, I find it hard to believe that a time-limited UBI would be more prone to hyperinflation or insolvency than an infinite one. You could have the exorbitant taxes you were planning on having with a straight UBI for 5 years and then drop taxes shortly thereafter.
If you have the transfer at $10,000 (max) for a $0 income. Lets say you want it really nice and smooth with limited marginal tax problems so you reduce it by $1,000 for every $10,000 earned. You have solved the majority of the MTR issue, but now you are transferring notable sums of cash to the non poor ($5,000 to someone earning $50,000) and you have budget issues (Median household income is ~ $50,000, roughly 115 million households, you are talking 600+ billion in payments conservatively).
The trouble is finding a spot (in terms of making a compromise deal) where the poor are getting the help without the MTR. If you pay a $10k benefit and phase it out up to $30,000 you have to have at a minimum a 33% MTR at some point. If you push it to $50,000 you can get the MTR down to 20% but you have just expanded it to cover an extra 20-30 million households and made it a lot more expensive.
What actually happens politically though? Are the Dems never going to have control again or are they also going to see things this way?
Edit to change 30% to 33%.
Design by what mechanism?
I don’t know how one should define fairness, but it’s clear that a perfectly wise, benevolent, all powerful ruler could alter society in ways that increase total utility. We don’t have any of those. So the issue is whether the outcome of the political market, the actions that the political system will actually produce, give us more utility, or more fairness, at the cost of less economic efficiency.
I see no reason to expect that they do or will. The market has mechanisms that (imperfectly) maximize economic efficiency aka total value–utility as measured in dollars by willingness to pay. That’s only a proxy for total utility. It has mechanisms that allocate rewards (imperfectly) in proportion to how much each person contributes to the welfare of other people–that fits a possible definition of fairness, but not the only one.
The political market is driven by a combination of democratic voting by rationally ignorant voters and lobbying by organized special interests. Why would you expect that to make it do a better job of maximizing either utility or fairness?
@Tibor
I really don’t think “throw cash people” would solve many of the things the left considers key issues, like racism, sexism, all the other bad -isms. “My company no longer hires or serves blacks, Jews, gays, Mexicans, gay Mexicans, Muslims or women, but it’s okay because the government’s going to give you $10k a year.”
@Tibor
The problem is that the calculation depends greatly on certain assumptions, like how much government services to cut and how people will respond (will people work less or more, will the rich find loop holes?)
@brokilodeluxe
Most of the left is not going to consider it is reasonable to let the disabled starve. Furthermore, a temporary UBI pretty much assumes that economic crises happen once in a lifetime, which seems unlikely and/or something that many are not going to want to gamble on.
Furthermore, (young) people can be short-sighted and many of them can be expected to burn through their temp UBI frivolously. Welfare is not just about helping wise people.
So at most that temporary UBI can be added on top of a welfare system, not replace it.
@Conrad Honcho: Unless I misunderstand the -isms, the main issue people seem to have (excluding the identity politics nutjobs with “microaggressions” etc. who are a small even if loud minority) is that those who are thus discriminated suffer from unfair economic disadvantages. And most of the “countermeasures” indeed seem to be economic. I guess there are exceptions such as “hate crimes” (or actually this is the only exception I can think of).
I agree that concern over the -isms includes economic concerns, but I’m pretty sure it’s more holistic than that. Human dignity, prevention of abuse, slavery, holocaust. For instance, I don’t think people are against antisemitism because Jews are economically disadvantaged.
So, I do not believe you could satisfy the left’s anti-ism-ism with cash payments. If you can, let’s do that immediately. I would gladly pay $10k a year to never have to hear the words “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” etc, ever again. Steal at twice the price.
According to what I could find on the internet in a few minutes, the median pay for a garbage man is about $15/hr, which is about $30k a year. Overtime get that up close to 40k and more years on the job can get that up $60k a year, higher than the median household income. In some places, NYC for one, a garbage man can make near $80k a year. My wife used to work as a civil engineer and made about $65k. She often worked on construction sites where she was in the second lowest paying job, above the laborers.
I don’t mention this to be pedantic, but rather to point out that so much of the economic and social analysis out there is detached from reality. If we want to think correctly about the state of the economy and have a hope of fixing the things that need fixing, it’s pretty important to adhere to the truth of the situation instead of getting caught up in these kinds of false narratives. The U.S. doesn’t have a problem with not redistributing enough income or with certain people taking too much of the pie. The nature of the economy tends to be such that you have to create value before you can keep a piece of that value as salary or profit. Sometimes that gets screwed up – like when financial institutions where booking profits on shitty structured products that were built to implode once they were sold down the line – but for the most part no one is going to pay you $X unless you are making $X plus some number greater than 0.
Another way of saying this is that people tend to get paid according to the marginal product of their labor. Our big problem is that the advance of technology has meant that automation can do a lot of things that people use to have to do. And as a result there are more and more people whose marginal product of labor gets closer and closer to 0. That’s a pretty big problem to solve, but redistribution and nativity economic policies simply will not be enough. We need to grow the economy. We need more positive technology shocks. And we need to help people acquire greater and greater amounts of human capital.
Also, I’m not sure that this means anything. GDP is a just a measure of the value of all the goods or services produced or consumed in an economy. The population of the United States grows by about 1% per year. If GDP growth is below 1%, then we are collectively getting poorer. If it grows at about 1%, then we are all standing still. Good pro-growth policies is about the best thing that any government can do to support the well being of its citizens and that includes poor, middle-class and wealthy citizens.
It was just a figurative exaggeration for the purposes of discussion. Your GDP comment assumes equal distribution. If the GDP increases 5% but the benefits only go to the upper classes then the GDP growth is effectively zero for the lower classes and the government hasn’t provided anything for them. It’s more complicated of course with second order effects and so forth but there is no economic law that say the upper classes can’t construct a society where they keep most of the economic benefits and screw things up. Case in point: 2008 financial crisis. Who recovered and who didn’t?
From the social upheaval perspective the numbers aren’t important, it is what society perceives that matters. Decline in institutional trust means that simple assertions that the economy is being managed competently (it may very well be) are beginning to be ignored. The reaction from the establishment has been to pour gas on that fire in my opinion (morons, racists, deplorables, etc.). This isn’t helping trust in institutions amazingly enough. The inmates can very easily run the asylum in a democracy. It’s not wise to invite them to do so out of spite.
Are we now looking at something different than we had in the past? I suspect the answer is yes, but I could easily be wrong and the lower classes have plenty enough doughnuts to satisfy them. Are Brexit, Sanders, and Trump blips on the timeline or the canary in the coalmine? If this thing explodes then everyone is going to kick themselves for ignoring obvious signs.
How do “positive technology shocks” and growing the economy help people whose marginal product of labor is less than the cost of their survival (or more practically, their survival at First World standards?)
This statement needs a hell of a lot of support because throughout history capital + human labor = an increase in the marginal value of labor, and if people’s marginal product is falling to zero why were we at record highs in LFP in 2007?
It’s not that the marginal product of labor has fallen to zero, it’s that it has fallen below what the government will pay you if you are poor.
@tscharf
There are a lot of figurative exaggerations about the economy. And that is one of the problems. The nativists exaggerate the impact of immigration and trade on the economy to make themselves look like victims of globalization. The Bernie supporters exaggerate the impact of to make themselves look like victims of the “billionaire class.”
And your description of GDP growth doesn’t capture what it means for the economy and for all the people in the economy. If you have an economy that is built on some commodity that can be easily controlled by some small elite then it’s very easy for that elite to capture most of the wealth and maintain control by letting a little bit trickle down. Saudi Arabia is a good example. But in a big, diverse economy driven by domestic demand, these effects reverberate through the economy. Internet millionaires don’t just take their money, buy yachts and hang out on the French Riviera doing foul things to Instagram “models.” I’m sure some of them do, but they also buy Tesla’s and buy houses and eat at restaurants and invest in other companies, all of which helps create jobs.
If economic growth dropped to negative territory or stagnated for a long period of time, I guarantee you the lower classes would feel it. For one thing, the amount of tax revenue the government takes in is a function of how much economic activity (ie GDP growth) there is. I guarantee you that it’s much harder to maintain institutional trust or any kind of sustained policy intervention to help the poor when government revenues start drying up.
Bottom line: when the pie gets bigger, it’s much easier to talk about how to split it; when the pie starts shrinking, people are much more likely to be at each other’s throats.
@TheNybbler
Think about the history of the United States, and most of the developed world. At one time, most people were employed in agricultural work. What happened? The Industrial Revolution (i.e. a series of positive technology shocks). And that changed two things. One, it meant that it was more productive to have a few people with machines working a farm than a bunch of people with animals and pre-industrial tools. Farms still use some low skilled labor to pick produce that machines will damage, but give it a few years and the machines will be able to do that as well. The other things that happened was that the manufacturing sector took off. So, a lot of those people who would have been working in the fields got jobs in factories. And since the technology shock made us all richer (i.e. we could produce more things) all those factory workers could consume more, which spurred up a bunch of other sectors like construction and services and leisure.
Our problem right now is that a lot of the employment that has sprang up to replace semi-skilled manufacturing work is low-paying service sector jobs. But that is being driven by supply-side factors as well as by the demand side. In other words, there’s a bunch of folks with relatively low levels of human capital who decide it makes more sense to sit at home and collect SSI than to bother showing up for a job at Walmart. And the folks who do show up at Walmart get low wages and not enough hours to qualify for benefits.
At the same time though, when was the last time you tried to find reasonably-priced, well made furniture or tried to get a plumber to your house on short notice? Or Google “skilled manufacturing worker shortage” and see how many factories are looking to fill jobs that don’t require a degree, but do require some specialized skills. There is a whole swath of relatively well-paying trade and skilled manufacturing work that goes under-supplied, because the folks with the Masters in Comp Lit feels they are above and the folks working at Walmart don’t know how to get. That’s why I said that we have a human capital problem. Personally, I think one of the best things we could be doing is to spend less effort pushing everyone into college and spend more effort improving the quality of secondary education.
Do you have to phrase this in such an inflammatory way? As other people in the thread already pointed out, an engineer does not make 1000x a garbage man. An engineer makes about 1x to 5x what a garbage man makes.
And did Tuesday really change the narrative? If Hillary had won, you’d probably be busy reading Deep Meanings into that. I don’t remember anyone threatening to burn down Google. And Trump himself is a rich man.
I agree that we are not generating good jobs for people without college degrees. And that’s a problem. But it’s not clear to me what the solution should be.
I’m surprised there isn’t a big Basic Income fan club on SSC. Isn’t there anyone excited about a future without work, rather than trying to keep people toiling in the stinky old industries? Or is it all doom and gloom about paperclip maximizers here?
There is. Scott is a member, and I believe David Friedman and Onyomi are, as well as probably Brad or other lefties. I’m not even adverse to it, despite having worries about what would happen given that human nature seems evolved to flourish under struggle rather than satiation.
I wouldn’t call myself a fan, as I’m skeptical it can be generous enough to be useful without being ludicrously expensive and am also skeptical that, if implemented, it would truly be as part of the compromise I hope to see with it–e.g. as a replacement for, not an addition to, all the other transfer payments and in-kind benefits.
The government gets too much power from controlling who gets what, when, how much; they’re not going to trade away all that for a simple program for the same reason they don’t want a simple tax system.
But, in theory, it’s the sort of thing where I’d be very happy, in the abstract, to “trade” defenders of transfer payment programs.
As for being excited about the future robot world in which nobody has to work, I am excited about that, but don’t think an UBI is a crucial part of bringing it about. We can expect people to start working 30 hours a week and 20 hours a week and 10 hours a week for the same reasons people now work 40 hours a week when they used to work 60 or more. I don’t accept the premise that there will be a large number of people whose labor is literally worthless in the robot future, so I don’t think the UBI is necessary to take care of them in this robot future where everything is ludicrously cheap and you can afford a month’s rent on one hour of work.
I’m not a member of the fan club. There are obviously arguments for a basic income and arguments against.
Converting everything currently justified as helping the poor into a modest basic income would probably be a plus, but there are two problems. The basic income would still be too modest to satisfy people on the left who see all problems as linked to inequality, since it would be much less than they feel they could reasonably live on. And it would be difficult, probably impossible, to make the deal in which everything justified as a solution to poverty, from Social Security to the Farm Program, got abolished.
@onyomi
Keynes thought that improved productivity would lead to people being happy with a certain level of income and choosing to work 15 hour work weeks. That didn’t happen. I find it hard to believe that it suddenly would.
In any case, it would require a cultural change of what we value / the status hierarchy.
Fair enough, my memory was faulty.
Also a fan in some form as the least worst option available given my other beliefs and goals, although I am pessimistic on its feasibility, especially our ability to install some sort of system INSTEAD OF current means-tested programs instead of ON TOP OF them (thus eliminating pretty much all the advantages of basic income in any form as far as I’m concerned).
This is kind-of my concern, too. If we could replace every poverty program in the country for UBI + Medicaid eligibility for all, I think we’d end up better off despite the higher tax rate we’d need to cover it. But I suspect that:
a. We would find it politically very difficult to get rid of many programs, because they have constituencies that would fight to keep them–beneficiaries, employees, contractors doing business with the relevant agencies, etc.
b. Many unsolvable social problems would remain with UBI+Medicaid, just as they have persisted with the last 50+ years of poverty programs. That would create an endless drive to invent new poverty programs to fix the unfixable stuff.
Naturally, (a) and (b) would feed off each other.
Despite UBI, some horrible parents are spending all their UBI cash on drugs and porn, and letting their kids go hungry, so we need to add in some kind of food-only benefit for mothers of young kids. Some not-very-smart people get taken advantage of and end up with some slick immoral person[1] having all their money (Rent To Own! Double Your Money Fast!
UBIDay Loans, only 50% interest!), so we’d better put some controls on how they can spend that money for their own good. Poor uneducated dumb parents continue having kids that do badly in school despite UBI, so we need a program to address that. And so on.
[1] I expect a major beneficiary of UBI benefits would be local governments who currently extract a lot of their operating revenue from people at the bottom in terms of fines and fees and such–running up traffic fines + extra fines for failure to appear, charging them rent for their jail time, “victims’ compensation” funds that go into the state coffers, etc.
I’ll try to announce more clearly when I am speaking figuratively. I thought it would be obvious that an engineer doesn’t make a 1000x what a garbage man makes and that would be a clue to an intentional exaggeration. I’m sure garbage men are fine upstanding citizens and I am not calling for violence against Google employees.
Correctly working markets don’t necessarily equal satisfied citizens. See how not fun that was to write? I just bored myself to death. Not literally to death, I’m still alive. I really mean I like to engage in rhetorical flourish for my own entertainment.
There would be no deep meaning to Hilary beating Trump. The establishment candidate won against a very bad opponent. A very bad opponent beating a qualified establishment opponent is another story. If Trump winning doesn’t have meaning I’m very confused about what all those people in the street screaming are going on about. And this time I literally mean people screaming in the streets. Brexit and Trump are clear signals all is not well with globalism. If no solutions are forthcoming then the unrest will likely continue.
Count me on the list of people who think a true UBI would be the theoretical best way to deal with mass technological unemployment, if that turns out to be a thing, but fears it is politically impractical without literally revolutionary change in government.
The various proposals to “improve” the UBI by avoiding the odious requirement to give money to people who don’t need it or don’t deserve it, that’s where I get off, because that’s where the well meant but never well done meddling starts, and brings corruption in its wake, to bring the whole scheme to its inevitable ruin. But this is what will happen, so meh. I can still pontificate on a better way.
This is basically where I am, too, although I can also envision — and think we should steer toward — futures in which a UBI becomes the least politically impractical option. Call me a deluded optimist.
When I watched The Jetsons* when I was a kid the way it was supposed to evolve is that everyone would work less because robots were doing a bunch of the work now. As in 40 hour work weeks are not an unbreakable law of physics. One way to adjust for automation is to reduce work weeks and thus increase employment opportunities. I know of exactly nobody who is a fan of this, I am apparently a club of one. If this is a bad idea I counter that mandatory 50 hour work weeks must be an even better idea. I have no doubt economic efficiency (or whatever the proper term is) would decline, but potentially it avoids the trap of make work and the shame associated with living on the dole.
*The Jetsons should obviously be our guide for a complex global economy.
You can count me, Bertrand Russell and David Cain as members of your club. I’ve actually seen this idea in a lot of places, though never anything very mainstream.
There’s also the guy who wrote The Four-Hour Work-Week, but I think that might be a different sort of thing.
[Edit: also @onyomi, apparently]
@tscharf
The problem is that people are not equally capable and that demand for jobs differs. It makes much more sense for programmers to work 40 hours and garbagemen to work 16 hours, than for everyone to work 16 hours.
I doubt that robots will change this. It probably makes it worse.
I love the idea, but first let’s get me down to a 40 hour work week, and then I’m happy to talk about lowering it more. I left my legal practice (60-80 hour work weeks) because my wife and I wanted to raise a family and thought it would be good if I were around to see it. So I found a nice, relaxed, 50 hour work week position. And it actually is only 50 hours – in at 9, out at 6. Of course I’m management now, so the days are gradually getting longer, but still way more dependable than practicing law.
Anyway: my point is, the idea that we’re suddenly going to shift to LESS than a 40 hour work week seems unlikely to me, since I know very, very, very few people whose hours aren’t already higher than that, and climbing. And those are invariably people who are broke, or who are near retirement anyway.
But believe me, count me in as a fan. I’ll trade a little lower salary for twenty hours of my week back.
Fifty hour work weeks are a more efficient idea, but not by so much that we can’t get things down to forty or maybe even thirty hours by social pressure. The Jetsonian end state of a five-hour work week, or even fifteen, probably doesn’t work.
It would for e.g. assembly-line workers, but the whole point is that we are getting to the point where we don’t need those any more. And knowledge workers are constrained by overhead requirements. If the guy designing the landing gear for Boeing’s next airliner has to average ~5 hours a week in ongoing professional development so he doesn’t design the gear to the twenty-year-old technology he learned in college, and ~5 hours a week in meetings to keep track of the changing system requirements being levied and keep everyone else up to date on what he’s actually going to be delivering to them, and ~5 hours a week taking mandatory sexual harassment training, then a 20-hour work week doesn’t leave him much time to actually design the landing gear.
This. This is very, very true.
There may be ways to make it work more efficiently in some cases. For example two man design teams that work on landing gear for 20 hours / week. Maybe people get 6 months off a year. It breaks down somewhere, 1 minute work weeks aren’t feasible. I think 30 is doable by simply having 4 day work weeks which most people would like.
The drop in productivity due to less qualified work force or less output are real downsides, but at what point does all this automation give us more leisure time? Isn’t that a preference for many in society? If people want to work 60 hours a week that is fine, but if they were only legally required to work 30 hours in a high value job how many people would do that? I’m very uncertain what that number would be.
That just adds a joint 5 hrs/week of “Hey Bob, what happened at the design review Monday when I was home with the family, and what were you thinking with this second hydraulic accumulator here?”. And it doesn’t help with much of the overhead problem because, e.g., you don’t get out of the mandatory sexual harassment training by saying “Bob already took that, so I don’t have to”.
Replacing one 40-hour worker with two 20-hour (or 40-hour/6 month) ones, is going to result in substantially less productivity no matter how you structure it. So does replacing two 60-hour workers with three 40-hour ones, though 60 hours is where you start having to deal with early burnout issues that make it less obvious a trade. But unless people are outright prohibited from working longer hours, the ones who chose to do so will have a very disproportionate edge in productivity, in value to their employers (or profit if self-employed), and in professional success.
Also keep in mind that you get good at a job by putting a lot of hours in; in many professions, someone who works for 5 years at 20 hours/week is going to be much worse at his job than someone who has been working 40+ hours/week.
I’m only not in favor of UBI because it simply isn’t feasible to give everyone enough to live on. It would mean routing a large proportion of the GDP through the government, which wouldn’t work, because it would make government even more powerful. A hundred years from now, we may be rich enough to do this.
What I am in favor of is giving cash enough to each person to bring every person out of poverty. That isn’t quite as simple as a UBI, but a lot simpler than current practices. And we could definitely afford this. In the US, welfare spending is more than enough to currently do this and have a bunch left over. It is our very complicated welfare system that churns through money and somehow still leaves people in poverty.
While I’m sure the state governments of Nebraska and/or Iowa would love to have more office jobs, local businesses are complaining about the unemployment rate in Iowa being too low, so they might not appreciate it.
What you’re saying is that adding a bunch of additional jobs to Iowa’s economy is likely to increase the cost of labor.
Not central to your point, but if you are talking about the economic analysis of the effect of foreign trade, that’s not quite correct. The calculation is in value, not utility, where I use “value” to mean utility divided by the marginal utility of income, hence what willingness to pay reflects–measured in dollars, not utiles. It’s logically possible that foreign trade increases value but that the gain goes to rich people with low marginal utility of income, the loss to poor people with high marginal utility of income, so there is a net gain in value but a net loss in utility. I mentioned this briefly in a response to a different comment recently.
Economists going back to Marshall argue for maximizing value as a proxy for maximizing utility, although most of them obscure what they are doing and my presentation of it isn’t standard. The basic argument is that the differences in marginal utility of income usually average out well enough to make it the best proxy available given that we have mechanisms, markets, where the outcome is driven by willingness to pay but don’t have comparable mechanisms where it is driven directly by utility.
I’d be open to the idea for government offices. Some of this already exists — I’ve sent documents to the federal government at an address in St. Albans VT, pop. 5,999. But for private industry it gets too far into central planning for my taste. For the same reason I don’t like minimum wage — I’d much rather the government do whatever income redistribution needs to be done rather than trying to do it through a Rube Goldberg mechanism.
I think the real fundamental bottom level problem is “so much as they want respect”. And to a certain extent it is a self inflicted wound. The hard working, self sufficient, contributing to society as the basis for respect ethos is stronger in those areas than it is in the cities. So it isn’t like the metric for respect is being imposed from the outside and it is unfair that they can’t compete on it. It seems somewhat unreasonable to demand covert government redistribution (because if it is too overt then it undermines the utility along that axis).
Money could make these areas nicer (i.e. not shitholes) if the people that lived there were content with money. It’s a bit of a paradox.
Yes, I think trying to covertly redistribute income to generate respect would get sniffed out pretty quick. It’s a really hard problem. Obviously the best answer is for them to solve this problem themselves (or believe they are doing so).
Sure some departments, specifically those dealing with foreign policy such as State and Defense probably ought to remain in the capitol, but there are few reasons I can see why the Department of Agriculture for instance shouldn’t be headquartered in an agricultural state and I’m sure there are a lot of folks in Iowa and Nebraska who’d be interested in the associated office jobs. Likewise, the FBI’s been trying to build a new headquarters for years only to be stymied by the expense and overcrowding of office space in the DC area. Why not sidestep the problem by moving the HQ to somewhere more central? St Louis perhaps.
While I like this plan in theory, this won’t work for the simple reason that there are not enough departments that can be moved.
If you move the Department of Agriculture to Iowa, it would mean more jobs in Iowa, and more access for people from Iowa. It would also mean that the jobs and access didn’t go to Nebraska or Kansas or California. The Senator from Iowa would vote for it; the Senators from Nebraska, Kansas, or California, probably not unless there’s something in it for them. If you magically balance enough movement to keep enough Senators happy to pass the bill, you still need to worry about Representatives.
Your final locations are also not going to make sense in any respect other than keeping enough politicians happy with the choices. If you put the Department of Agriculture in Iowa, it would most likely end up in Des Moines, which is centrally located and hence would provide jobs for constituents of all four Iowa Representatives, even if Cedar Rapids would be a better choice.
Why not just dissolve parts of the federal government and return power to the states? Obviously not Defense, or State, but a weaker federal department of agriculture, scrap the Department of Education, and have more 50 more powerful state departments of agriculture and education? Commensurate reduction in federal taxes and increase in state taxes, and you keep the money flowing to the states instead of D.C., and most importantly you keep power and control local.
So this guy running for Senate is proposing the same warmed over nonsense that Bernie was peddling, and wants our foreign policy to stay roughly the same as Obama’s. Why are you promoting him again?
Still sounds like an improvement over Feinstein.
…because I agreed with Bernie and Obama on a lot of things, especially compared to other politicians. Also, a friend works in his campaign and asked me to advertise him, so I did.
Obama was shit and foreign policy though. Prefer Sanders/Paul on that really. Least he is decent on domestic stuff.
So I did one of those dna testing things. I hear that it’s a good idea to download the raw data and have other organizations do tests on it as well. Any advice on whether it’s worth it and which place would be the best for that?
As far as the ancestry end of it, the results I got were more or less expected (I was hoping for some huge surprises, as I have a great-grandparent who was given to an orphanage as a baby) although it threw a tiny tiny amount of ‘east asian or native american’ dna at the 50% confidence level which I assume is noise since it disappears at higher levels of confidence, and a tiny tiny amount of Ashkenazi Jewish dna which might be plausible since it still is claimed at the 80% confidence level but I’m not really sure whether it’s also noise, since it’s such a small percentage.
Run it through Promethease, which uses an open-source database of SNP associations. (https://promethease.com/) If you don’t like the idea of uploading your genetic data somewhere, there’s an outdated downloadable version available as well: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease/Desktop
What formats can you download the data in?
most cheap public DNA testing services are actually a bit crap but if it will give it to you as VCF files or similar then you can annotate it with free software yourself that’s easy enough to set up if you’re even vaguely used to using linux.
I’m biased because I’ve had to set it up a few times on servers but VEP will annotate VCF files nicely.
http://www.ensembl.org/info/docs/tools/vep/index.html
guessing ancestory based on those kinds of snp array data also tends to be a bit flaky so ignore anything that isn’t high-confidence.
I haven’t used linux before, although I am attracted to the free software idea. Initial googling makes it look easy enough to convert the file to vcf.
Is there a name for the phenomenon where a culture inherits the artifacts of an earlier culture, but because of the artifacts’ state of preservation, the later culture has extreme misconceptions about the earlier one?
The example I’m thinking of is Classical Greek and Roman art, long associated with pristinely white marble. Detailed analysis now shows these objects to have been actually painted a riot of bright colors that faded away over time leaving behind only the underlying marble. Reconstructions appear extremely tawdry to modern eyes.
The art, architecture and aesthetic philosophy inspired by the ancients is based on something that literally didn’t exist in Classical times. An art historian mentions taking a friend to an art show featuring reconstructions. The friend blanched and stated: “There’s no way the Ancient Greeks were that gauche!”
But they were.
This is not so clear. The statues were certainly painted. But the “riot of bright colors” is based on very thin evidence. They could have been subtler, but only the strongest pigments remain. The bright colors could have been an underpainting. They could have been painted brightly but expected to fade in short order.
We could also compare to flat art, such as the Fayum portraits or the frescoes of Pompeii, neither of which is gauche. But I should add a disclaimer that they weren’t monumental public art.
Or placed high up on the pediments of buildings, where they’d be too far away for subtle colours to really be visible.
Also, whenever evaluating premodern color choices, we should remember the lack of artificial lighting.
Close up, under a harsh, artificial light, this sort of costume might look gaudy, but under sunlight, from a distance, or, even better, by firelight, it looks quite nice. And Dravidian temples somehow still look cool to me, even with artificial lights, though they definitely seem aimed at a more mandala-esque overwhelming aesthetic.
TVTropes calls it Dated History, and your example is the first one under “Classical Antiquity,” except that someone claims that example is also false!
Though there are, of course, certain objects, artifacts, sites, etc. so iconic and significant I’m skeptical of the value of anyone fooling with them in any way other than to preserve them, I’m still the sort of person, in general, who wants to see the Sistine Chapel with the soot wiped off, wants to see the faded colors painted back on the palace walls, wants to see what the Venus de Milo looked like with arms (though probably better to do that to a reconstruction than the original), etc. etc.
In other words, since “the past is a foreign country,” I want to visit that country, not a faded remnant of it. Though it’s not a substitute for visiting the Acropolis, for example, I really enjoy something like the statue of Athena in the Nashville Parthenon in a different way.
That said, regarding the desire to make e.g. the ancient Greeks into something they weren’t, though the coloring is a…glaring example, I think it’s a very prevalent thing: namely, it’s hard for us moderns to comprehend how essentially backward-looking, ignorant, and romanticizing about the past almost everyone in the world has always been until very recently.
That is, viewing the past as an idealized, simpler, uncorrupted version of the present is sort of the default for human history. Having a realistic idea of the past and how, in many ways, it probably sucked even worse than the present, is very new. For example, medieval Europeans depict Jesus and his disciples as basically medieval Europeans… because they had no clue what a 1st century person from Galilee would have looked like or dressed like.
To be fair, until relatively recently the past didn’t really suck more than the present; GDP per capita remained pretty constant until the eighteenth century.
I mean, I think the Ming Dynasty was a better place to live, overall, than the Han Dynasty, which was a better place to live, overall, than the Western Zhou Dynasty. This didn’t stop the Chinese from constantly trying to recapture the glory of the ancients.
(You are right, however, that it tended to be more of a mixed bag and less of a straight line; the Tang Dynasty was freer and more cosmopolitan in many ways than the Ming, and early urbanization tends to be a double-edged sword in various ways; I think I’d still have preferred to live in the Ming as opposed to the Tang, however).
I’ve had the difference between the two explained that the Tang had a bunch of people flee and head over towards China, whereas the Ming was a period where more people spread from china instead.
And didn’t the An Lushan revolt happen during the Tang’s reign? I believe it was the most devastating war humanity has seen up until the Mongols came along, no? The things the Ming went through appear much more tame.
I would say that the Tang was a better place to live compared to the rest of the 7th to 10th century world than the Ming was compared to the rest of the 14th to 17th century world, yet the Ming was still, overall, a better time to be a regular person than the Tang, despite more conservatism and constraints on e.g. trade and the freedom of high class women.
And no, I don’t think anything regular Ming people had to go through was as bad as the An Lushan Rebellion. Maybe the Taiping Rebellion during the Qing. But I think it’s harder to claim the late Qing was a better time/place to live than the late Ming.
That’s actually a fair statement, hm.. I do suppose the Tang were relatively far ahead of their time, whereas the Ming would be somewhat less so.
Do we know if the Greeks paint the bronze statues as well?
Confirmed
Thanks to everyone who participated in the moving discussion in the last thread. Unfortunately I was away for a few days due to work and didn’t get to respond to a lot of it. I thought I’d continue by discussing some personal anecdotes that have largely informed my opinion on these matters (many of you shared similar ones) that cause me to spend a lot of time thinking about things like this.
My extended family is fairly close on my mom’s side (myself, my sister, and six cousins). We didn’t all grow up in the same town, but we did all grow up in fairly similar towns in the same state, and obviously we share a whole lot of genes. But the outcomes have been quite different. At one end, there’s me (bought a house before turning 30, top 20 MBA program, six-figure salary with a prestigious professional services firm). At the other end, I have a cousin who is two months younger than me and is still living with his parents. He (and most of the other cousins) bounce from service-industry job to service-industry job, eventually getting fired or quitting, never really advancing themselves in any particular way. And he’s not some drooling boob or anything. Growing up we were almost identical. I was a little more booksmart, but he had better social skills. Nobody would have guessed our outcomes would be so highly different. I think a lot about what may have caused the differences between he and I (and the other cousins as well) and willingness to move is definitely one. If I were to rank all of us in terms of economic success it goes something like this.
Me – Moved multiple times, lived in five distinct geographic regions (multiple times in the military, then for work, then for school, then for work again)
Oldest cousin – Fairly senior IT person for large university – attended university in largest city in the state, then moved to the largest city within our geographic region and put down roots there
My sister – Attended university in largest city in geographic region, has since moved around a bit within the region, has clearly articulated a preference for a certain type of work that won’t be that economically rewarding and accepts the tradeoffs
Second-oldest cousin – Attended university in hometown, but never did much with the degree. Settled down as a stay at home mom. Husband is a blue collar worker who does OK and has a great work ethic, but has never seemed to be able to “get ahead of things.”
Fourth-oldest cousin – Have no idea what he does for money (suspect it involves some under the table stuff), but married a local girl who is more motivated than he (no college for her, but she has advanced reasonably well with the bank she worked at since 16 and is now a branch manager). Never moved.
Third-oldest cousin: Never left hometown. Gets steady work as a contractor. Has done okay for himself mainly because he identified a career path early and stuck with it, but construction work is highly variable. My impression is that he does well for himself when demand is high, and struggles when its low.
Youngest cousin – Mostly bounced around service industry in hometown. Lately has been moving a bit, but always short-term in nature. Seems that the moving is tied to short-term work arrangements largely done to finance travel rather than any long-term strategy (i.e. spending a few months in Alaska working on a fishing boat, then spending a few months in Virginia working for some organic farmer, etc.) This pattern started only recently, so he may be rising up these rankings.
Second-youngest cousin: Discussed above. Never left hometown, bounces around go-nowhere jobs.
So yeah, in my family (n=1, I know), moving around seems to track almost perfectly with economic success. Which isn’t the only thing in life that matters, sure. My sister is deliberately making less money to do what she loves. Two of the cousins are married with kids and seem to have relatively happy and content lives despite limited economic means. All things considered, it’s quite possible/likely they are more fulfilled and have “better” lives than I do.
But I still want to grab the cousin at the bottom and say “JESUS CHRIST MAN, GO SOMEWHERE! DO SOMETHING!”
Maybe the causality is backwards, and people who have nothing going on have no incentive to move to another city where they will get the same service-industry job.
But the various choices made by those at the top of the list were available for those at the bottom of the list as well, they just chose not to take them.
I joined the military – just about anyone can do that.
The two cousins on the bottom were both smart enough and had good enough grades to at least go to an average university had they bothered to try.
I also know for a fact that the cousin at the very bottom had a friend in the IT industry who was willing/able to get him some work with his company for good pay – problem is it involved frequent travel (the friend in question ended up living in Australia for several years) so the cousin just said no.
Yes, I admit that now it’s probably too late. There’s not much they can derive out of moving at this stage in their life.
I would like to hear their explanation for why they didn’t pursue those opportunities. It would be weird for young and bright people not to take opportunities just because they don’t want to move.
It really was mostly stuff like “Well I don’t want to be away from my family.”
And sure, that does seem weird to me – but then when you read articles about the rust belt – that’s basically the same thing you hear over and over and over again.
Despite the fact that people keep wanting to re-direct my inquiry towards the cost of a U-Haul and a security deposit on an apartment, the most common answer for “Why don’t you move” seems to be closer to “I don’t want to” rather than “I can’t afford to”
How unfortunate.
My impression is that a whole family would move if one of them got a job good enough. Not just husband/wife/kids but grandparents, uncles, aunts would move (if not all together, they eventually would get pulled in, or the original worker would get promoted and hire them). Anyone have any idea what I could look for to look into this?
I think I saw a documentary about that.
I am completely amazed by how “neophobic” most people, I only fairly recently realized, really are.
I have lived in… a lot of places, and while I’m getting to an age where I don’t want to keep moving all the time forever, I’m definitely glad I’ve done it and I definitely couldn’t have had my specific career (academic; studying foreign cultures) without having done so.
But what’s weird about this to me is that I don’t think of myself as more “adventurous” than average. I think of myself as fairly neurotic and risk averse. And I am, in the sense that I would never go sky diving. But I also have done and will probably continue to do, lots of things many people seemingly could never imagine doing. But due to typical mind fallacy, I guess, none of those things seem a big deal to me.
What are people so afraid of moving to a foreign country, much less a new city (assuming you aren’t literally moving to a dangerous part of the world)? I don’t really know. But they really are. Or, if not afraid, they just really don’t see any of the appeal I see in new experiences for new experiences’ sake.
I’m not sure whether they fear the new or just really, really like/don’t get bored with the familiar. I do understand that inertia is very powerful and maybe I’m the weird one for feeling an “itch” to break out of it periodically.
I also understand the desire to be close to family and friends, of course, but with skype and air travel, etc. it doesn’t seem as big of a deal: like, if I live in Japan and my family lives in Chicago, I will probably see them a couple times a year in real life and otherwise keep in touch via skype, email, etc. If I live in NYC and my family lives in Chicago, I will probably see them a couple times a year in real life and otherwise keep in touch via skype, email, etc.
Which is to say, it’s not that I wouldn’t like to see my family more than a few times a year, but unless I stay within, say, 500 miles of them, that’s about all that’s going to be feasible in most cases. And staying within 500 miles of my family feels way too limiting, career-wise and in terms of the things I want to experience, at least while I’m relatively young (though I again predict trying to stick closer to family more as I get older).
Those are two different types of risk and I suspect they aren’t well-correlated. Thrill-seeking is one thing, changing your life entirely is another. I _have_ gone skydiving (and bungee jumping), but I’d never go live in a foreign country (especially not outside the Anglosphere). Skydiving you hit the ground and you’re done (one way or another). Living in a foreign country or even traveling to one is a grind every day, where the simplest things are difficult and you never know when some local “gotcha” you didn’t even know about is going to wipe you out. Not wipe you out in a clean way like a fall from a great height, but simply eliminate all your progress for the past few years and then some and leave you in a position where you have to work twice as hard to get back to anywhere near even.
Totally agree with this. I see myself as a very conservative and risk-averse person who probably has some level of diagnosed OCD such that I absolutely love routines and get very uncomfortable when they are disrupted. And yet…
For the math inclined, it is proper to assume that it is lower risk to move to a better economic area. Strong math skills (or ability to properly calculate risk) is likely a factor in the decision to move.
Social isolation.
I went to New Zealand about half a year ago and had planned to spend at the very least one year there. 1.5 months I travelled together with a friend, 1.5 I travelled alone. In the three months I probably didn’t manage to strike up 10 conversations. I ended up falling apart psychologically. I don’t require lots of interaction usually.
I have lowish social skills but everyone always says you learn when you are there. You do not. My friend had no problem because he was more in tune with the other travellers (weed seems to be one hell of a conversation topic).
Other people are more aware of their limits than I am and know that they will have problems in such a situation.
I’m always surprised at the trouble so many people seem to have understanding this, and I feel like it’s one of the bigger reasons so many of us are talking past each other.
You DON’T understand the desire to be close to family and friends, not in the way that most people do. This isn’t criticism – I moved around a lot myself. But you’re missing out on a lot of fundamentals.
The biggest thing is that you aren’t grasping the concept of community. People don’t want to be near friends and family so that they can do the same things that you do twice a year with your friends and family, but more often; they want to be a part of a larger community, which is something that happens every day. Skype and air travel aren’t less-perfect substitutes. They just aren’t on the same axis at all.
So your second paragraph really misses the boat. “Sacrificing your career and desire to travel to live within 500 miles of your family” isn’t the road not taken. People who want to live close to their family and be part of the same community ideally want to live on the same block, not just within 500 miles.
I lived in NYC for 15 years. My family (and my wife’s family) all live in the NYC suburbs. About a year after our son was born we moved out to suburbs to be close to our families. The distance we moved was maybe 20 miles. But the difference in connection to our families and the larger community was massive. They aren’t really comparable.
Along similar lines, several years ago my elder son, along with his girlfriend (now fiancee) and my two grandchildren, moved from Berkeley, an hour or so from us, to a location ten or fifteen minutes from us. The result is that they come over for dinner once a week instead of our seeing them very occasionally. My grandchildren are part of my family, as is the fiancee, in a way they wouldn’t be if they were still in Berkeley.
So I shouldn’t need to subsidize their preference for poverty with family, or perhaps they should export their family to me in order to subsidize my preference for money without family.
I don’t understand this comment. Are you really having trouble understanding people’s connection to their families and communities, and their reluctance to uproot either? And how, exactly, are YOU subsidizing “their” preference for poverty? And where did anyone claim that somebody prefers poverty?
Taxes, welfare etc.?
The original question on the other thread was something like “it looks like poverty is their revealed preference, does that mean I don’t need to feel bad for them?” I was reiterating that but money instead of feels (that probably also was said in the other thread but I felt like getting a good dig in).
Redistribution. A factory closes; the workers are offered a job in another town. Half the workers choose to stay where their family and social circles are and are unemployed, the other half move. Why should we tax the half that moved so the half that didn’t gets money, free time, AND family?
Because the’re really stubborn about the “family” part, because we feel really really bad when we see families suffering material deprivation on our TV screens and/or facebook pages (hence negative utility), and because we aren’t actually willing to call out the National Guard to put them all into labor camps if they get too uppity about their deprivation. Maybe also because we still need them to be the National Guard.
And by “we” I mean the 99% of American voters who aren’t utilitarian rationalists.
@John Schilling
I’m not a utilitarian either. But just because the workers who moved don’t look sympathetic on TV commercials doesn’t mean their interests shouldn’t be considered. They moved, now they are working and don’t have the benefit of family and community, and not only that, a big chunk of their pay is being sent back to the formerly similarly-situated people in their old community, who now get money, family, and community without having to work for it. That’s not a utilitarian argument.
A utilitarian argument is that if the choice is getting family, community, and government benefits versus moving and getting a job, no nearby family, no familiar community, and taxes, that pushes people to the first choice.
@The Nybbler
A few reasons I can think of:
1. This situation doesn’t really come up much. Yes, I agree – if a factory closes in one town and opens in a different one, and the workers are offered more or less their same jobs at the new factory, they should probably move. Shit happens, stop whining, this isn’t a bad deal. But I suspect that you’ll have a hard time finding that many cases of this. More often, the factory closes in one town and the work is outsourced to China, India, Mexico. There isn’t any place to pick up and move to en masse, as half of the population in your hypothetical did.
2. I don’t like treating “the factory closes” as an act of God; a force of nature that we all just have to accept and move on. A better question to ask first might be: how do we keep the factory open, or attract another factory, so that people aren’t forced to uproot themselves and their community? These things are important, and worth our collective time and resources.
3. In your hypothetical, and your assumptions of what is “fair”, there is simply no way for the community to survive. Let’s say 100% of the factory workers refused to move, insisting on staying with their family, their land, their church. Half are no longer being taxed to support the other half. Are you OK with the government helping out now? Under what circumstances would you find protecting a community threatened with economic extinction a worthwhile expenditure of government resources?
It may not be literally true that one factory employing 1,000 people closes down and another factory employing 1,000 people opens, but during most of the years in which manufacturing jobs were on net lost in this country total employment (both as a raw number and as a % of population) increased. There was literally more than 1 job created for every one lost in that span.
@Lasagna
1) A plant closing and the workers being offered jobs elsewhere was a (real life) example from the related thread in the last OT.
2) Sure, you can go all Ayn Rand villain and force the plant to be kept open. Do that enough and you’ve made the plant owner uncompetitive, and the plant closes anyway.
3) Yes, it’s quite possible for a town dependent on one company or one industry to become nonviable. The American West is dotted with such ghost towns. Propping them up indefinitely as some sort of museum to the community they once were makes no sense.
We can have experts that work for the government centrally manage the economy is a scientific manner. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Maybe they could come up with a plan periodically, say, every five years?
during most of the years in which manufacturing jobs were on net lost in this country total employment (both as a raw number and as a % of population) increased.
True, but in my guess VERY misleading.
What about total employment meeting the two basic criteria that manufacturing jobs met: it’s possible to get the job without a college degree, and you can earn enough, predictably enough, to buy a house within a half-hour’s drive of the job.
Because “employment went up, but the jobs were either very low-paid, or were in places with super-high cost of living, or required a level of education that very few factory workers had” is the problem we are trying to solve.
A point that may not occur to the non-economists is that the value of home and community to the workers is one of the things that goes into the implicit calculations of the market. In a free market with neither welfare nor minimum wage laws, the fact that people would rather stay where they are and work for six dollars an hour than move and get twelve means that a firm can get good workers for six dollars an hour in the town where another factory closed instead of having to pay twelve dollars somewhere else.
It’s only if the value to the workers of being able to stay put is less than the cost to every employer of locating in that town instead of somewhere else that no new source of employment, factory or other, appears.
In our world that mechanism breaks down if six dollars an hour is lower than the minimum wage or if working for six dollars an hour is less attractive than being unemployed on welfare.
@Brad:
You jump from “is there a way we can keep a factory open and its workers employed, or attempt to attract new industry to an area” to “soviet-style communism”??? You don’t think that might be a giant misinterpretation of what I wrote?
@Lasagna
Not especially, no. If it’s one factory as a publicity stunt (a la Carrier) it isn’t central planning but it is also meaningless. When it is done at large enough scale to matter than it is at a large enough scale to severely distort the economy. Especially when you consider the larger class of things that could be the moral equivalent of “the factory closes” if you squint a little.
@ Nybbler
If we were just talking about dying towns, that would be a fairly simple position to take. The problem we have, though, is that whole regions of the country have descended into such a state that the name “Rust Belt” is an accurate description.
I refer to the area I’m from as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and I am only half joking. A good part of the movie “The Road” was filmed a few hours’ drive from where I grew up, and in order to film their post-apocalyptic nightmare, the filmmakers had to fix up sections of rural Pennsylvania. It was too decayed and ruined to pass for an area recently destroyed by the apocalypse.
(Meanwhile, there are artists going to cities like Detroit to take pictures of the ruins; it is not a strictly rural phenomenon.)
If this was a matter of a few dying communities it would be sad. What we are seeing are areas of the country larger than whole European nations descending into literal ruin.
That seems like it goes beyond sad and into dangerous.
Ok, but Centralia kind of had it coming …
Sadly, no – The Road was filmed all over PA, which was chosen both for its generous filming tax breaks and its abundance of post-industrial ruins.
That’s the market working!
I think this is true in some, but not all, cases. I know people who never leave their hometown because they love their neighborhood and have all their extended family and close friends living in a small radius. But I also know people living in their parents’ guest room whose friends are all over the country and who don’t seem all that into their local community. Yet it seems not even to occur to them that they might ever move (and I know some of them who do dream of doing so, but I just know they will never take the leap).
My contrasting living 1000 miles from your family versus living 10,000 miles from your family was not supposed to be a comparison between being part of a tight community vs. not, but rather to point out that, so long as you’re not driving distance from your family, whether you’re 1000 miles away or 10,000 miles away doesn’t make that much of a difference, nowadays. (I understand there is also a big qualitative difference between living 50 miles away and living within walking distance).
Maybe I don’t fully understand the appeal of “community” because I didn’t really feel part of one growing up: my immediate family was always very close, and we were very close to one set of grandparents, but otherwise our extended family was all over the place and not very close to us; our neighborhood, similarly was not composed of people we saw very often.
That said, I have also experienced tight-knit community. I have lived in a very small town where my wife and I made the sort of friend you see around almost every day. We were sad to leave that behind, but still did so for career reasons. Also, it was the sort of place I’d love to retire, but there are many places I still want to visit, more active intellectual, rather than social, communities I want to be a part of.
That is, the type of community life you’re describing does sound very appealing to me, and I wish I could have both “pursue academic career involving travel around the world” and “be part of a tight-knit local community” simultaneously, but that seems really hard, if not impossible at this stage in my life.
Put another way, a lot of people seem to me like they’re devoted to the sort of lifestyle I hope to enjoy when I’m 50+, but they’re in their twenties and thirties. I know I’m typical minding and, perhaps, “typical life option”ing: most people probably don’t have the option to pursue an international academic career even if they wanted to: their skill is auto repair, they repair cars in their hometown, and if they moved far away they’d probably just end up repairing cars there, so why leave the community behind?
And maybe I don’t understand just HOW important community is to some. I understand the appeal of community, but not to the degree some seem to feel like “I could NEVER stop being an active member of the Middletown community, even for a few years.” Still, I feel like some people are staying in their local community not because they’ve really weighed the pros and cons of getting to be a part of their community versus pursuing their career elsewhere/traveling around for a time, but because of inertia or fear of the new.
I think you make a lot of good points in this post, particularly the one above – I agree, entirely, that the “type” you describe in this paragraph not only exists, but are common, and it isn’t great.
Otherwise, though, I’m not sure that you’re describing anywhere a problem with an answer – I’m not sure you’re even describing a problem. I’ve lived in a bunch of places – most of my time in NYC, but also seven years in two other US cities and about eight months in Hong Kong. I liked it.
But the fact is that people who want to stay home, comfortable, quiet, and aren’t particularly ambitious are not suffering from a condition that needs to be cured. They aren’t necessarily suffering from “inertia” or “fear of the new”. Like I said, I moved around a little, and now that I’m growing my family I’m starting to realize how little that moving did for anyone – for myself, for my community, for my country, you name it. It was all very selfish and dedicated to, I don’t know, sensualism or something (probably the wrong word). So these other people you’re talking about (not the “stay on the couch” folk, the other people you describe in your post) are, I think, on to something.
And I think that we should be doing our best to create a country that doesn’t require cutthroat ambition, the destruction of communities through attrition, and bouncing around to cities you don’t really want to live in just to survive.
Yes, you’re right – you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to support yourself and your family and not whine about it. But we HAVE a government, and I don’t see anything wrong with using it to spread out jobs a little more evenly so people aren’t forced to uproot themselves, their families and their communities quite as much as is required now.
@Lasange
Exactly. We already have a major problem with pathologizing normal human variance, where those who don’t fit in the mold of those who happen to be successful in our society are considered defective.
It’s especially toxic when a small minority starts deciding that the majority are
untermenschendefective.To add to Lasagna’s points…
Think of a hometown as a huge network benefit. If your family didn’t move around when you were growing up then you have at least 18 years of investment in that place, with rewards ready to be reaped.
If my wife and I chose to move back to either of our hometowns we’d suddenly get a huge load of benefits. We’d have friends and family already waiting for us. We’d have free childcare or pet-sitting pretty much whenever we needed it. We’d have people instantly willing to help if either of us got sick. We’d already know where the best places are to shop or eat, and have invites to social and community events.
If you were someone who’d lived in their hometown their whole life, moving far away means giving up all the above and starting anew. My personal experience has been that it can take a few months to rebuild just the social aspect of your life – knowing where to shop and eat, and making friends to hang out with. Sure – you can still Skype with your family every night if you want someone to talk to, but it can take a year or more to build up a supportive community around you if you want more than that.
A job has to be a pretty big improvement to make up for all those things you’re losing out on in the short to medium term. Moving somewhere without a job lined up, for better prospects alone is an even bigger leap to make.
@dodrian
We understand why people with golden handcuffs don’t persue other opportunities but we generally don’t see them as deserving of sympathy. An example that’s closer to home for me, there are some people in NYC that live in apartments that would go for $5000 or more a month on the open market but pay something like $1000 instead. But no one thinks “that poor guy is tied down by a rent controlled apartment, let’s brainstorm some ways he can have his cake and eat it too.”
How do you decide how much of it should be required?
One possible answer is that things should be arranged so that people find they are better off uprooting themselves only when not doing so imposes costs on other people greater than the costs of uprooting to the people uprooted. That is how things are arranged in a laissez-faire system, as I just sketched in another comment–where the comparison of costs the mechanism uses is willingness to pay.
If you don’t have any basis for deciding how much uprooting should happen, isn’t your comment roughly equivalent to “it would be nice if everyone was richer, healthier, and happier”?
To put the point a little differently, uprooting is a cost. It makes sense to try to minimize total costs. But that doesn’t tell us whether any particular cost should be larger or smaller.
@ David:
I don’t really find this convincing. 🙂 Me not being able to give you an algorithm that will determine the point where we uproot a community doesn’t equal “therefore, a laissez-faire system is the correct answer.”
“Things should be arranged so that people find they are better off uprooting themselves only when not doing so imposes costs on other people greater than the costs of uprooting to the people uprooted”. Presumably in this formulation, a cost to General Motors of $5 million to keep open a factory employing an entire town, and a cost of $4 million in damage to the residents of that town is decided in favor of General Motors. I’m not in favor of that.
As for the solutions: carrots and sticks seem fine to me. Taxes on imported goods to make it more costly to move jobs abroad, whatever incentives local politicians can think of to make their towns more attractive.
You misunderstoood his point. Laissez-faire is not “the answer”, laissez-faire is the mechanism that lets us find the answer, by making all the costs to all the stakeholders transparent. Wishing for a pony does not have that property.
Again, the issue is not how you implement the best outcome, but how you determine what it is. If you believe that laissez-faire comes up with the wrong outcome, what basis do you have for saying so, and why should I like your outcome more?
@ Dorctor Mist:
Sorry, but you misunderstand MY point. Laissez-faire is NOT the mechanism that lets us find the answer, so long as it insists that everything can be broken down to a dollar value, and comparing those dollar values can lead to the correct course of action. I don’t agree. In my hypothetical, your laissex-faire economist determines that keeping a factory open would cost GM $5 million, but closing it and destroying the factory town would have a cost of $4 million, is not analyzing it properly. Our job as a country is to help out the town (and yes, not destroy GM in the process), not agree with the absurd idea that you can attach a dollar value to the deindustrialization of the Midwest, determine that more money was added to the coasts, and call it fine.
You write “If you believe that laissez-faire comes up with the wrong outcome, what basis do you have for saying so, and why should I like your outcome more?” assumes that the first thing I need to do is defeat “laissez-faire” arguments. But that isn’t a baseline that needs to constantly be addressed before any conversation can happen.
Reading Onyomi and Lasagna’s replies, I now understand exactly why I find the attitude expressed by Matt M, The Nybbler, and others both here and in the previous thread so distasteful.
I would prefer to live in a country that doesn’t “require cutthroat ambition, the destruction of communities through attrition, and bouncing around to cities you don’t really want to live in just to survive” yet I find myself surrounded by people who seem to regard the absence of cutthroat ambition as a failure to be corrected in the name of efficiency. Thinking back to Scott’s review of Seeing Like A State, the vague pattern of disgust/unease snaps into focus.
Do you want “High Modernism”? Because this is how you get “High Modernism”.
The thing I don’t quite get is why there can’t be a not-very-ambitious not-very-rich local optimum.
People value family and community and place — I totally get that. So what exactly is so horrible about eschewing many material luxuries in exchange for being able to have family and community and place? Why can’t a culture develop that says we are rich in the spirit unlike those fools in the rat race?
Meanwhile those that are ambitious for material goods can flit from city to city seeking out the next opportunity and in exchange get the iphones and trips to Croatian beaches that they so desperately want.
Why does it have to be that if the people in the first case can’t have both community and family and place *and* the toys that come with ambition and material success that they must despair and turn to drugs or even kill themselves?
It would be a different story if we were really talking about literal survival, but I don’t think we are.
How do you propose to do that? There’s no organization, including the US Government, with the power to stop it. It’s just not possible to stop the world at any given point and say “All the communities which are viable now will remain viable forever”.
This doesn’t remotely describe reality in the US, and not just that those “communities” that you are loath to see destroyed were created by the very same process that should be happening now. People looked at their lives and decided they could do better, and went out and found places to do better in. Do you honestly think that these areas sprung from the earth or that the movement of those people didn’t disrupt their home towns/cities/countries?
What you are complaining about is life.
Probably the same reason you see feminist articles about “Here’s how you can have it all!” or “Who says we can’t have it all?” It’s very hard to recognize trade-offs, prioritize, and then not fall prey to envy and the-grass-is-greener regrets.
Then there is the fact that if you optimize your life for lower levels of material wealth you are vulnerable to economic shocks. Well, unless the high income, high expense cohort goes into debt and locks themselves into needing higher spending, but in theory teh major advantage of high income is security.
But, I do think I’m an example of this local minimum, at least on a personal scale. We don’t live in a small town (to some small regret) but I am tragically unambitious. We support five on one mid-five figure income in Southern California without serious want, and if it wasn’t for the fact that business pretty much has an up-or-out mentality I’d be fine continuing like this, low status and all.
I have pointed out several times in the past week that what is maximized is not utility but value, utility divided by marginal utility of income–the measure of the value to you of getting something is the largest amount you would pay to get it. All the values involved are human values–flows of money are only the things that signal them. But to combine values to different people you need some weighting rule, and willingness to pay is the one being used.
So it is logically possible that a change away from laissez-faire could decrease value but increase utility, due to the losses going to people with a lower MUI than the gains. That’s the problem with the dollar value.
Two questions then arise. One is whether there is any reason to expect that to happen. A five million dollar cost to GM of continuing to operate the factory is ultimately a cost to people. That might, in the short run, mean GM stockholders, who may well be richer on average than GM workers, although a lot of stock is held by pension funds for workers. But in the long run, if firms are not permitted to hold costs down the result is that the price of what they are producing goes up, so the five million is being paid by purchasers of automobiles, who are a pretty wide slice of the population. Also by auto workers, since they are now less productive. And, as I already pointed out, tariffs on imports mean fewer exports, which hurts workers in export industries, most obviously agriculture.
So while it’s possible that policies which decrease economic efficiency (total value as I define it) increase utility, there is no good reason to expect it.
The second point is that you need a candidate to beat a candidate. Laissez-faire does an imperfect job of maximizing utility (also value, for additional reasons I’m not discussing). But the alternative isn’t a perfect job, because we have no way of producing it. The alternative is some other mechanism, such as political decisions about whether GM is allowed to close a factory, whether people can buy goods from abroad, and the like. I can sketch the reasons why laissez-faire does an imperfect but approximate job of maximizing value and utility. Can you offer any reason to expect the political alternative to do even that well? I can’t.
—
One problem with the beginning of this is that I pay more attention to what I post here than I can expect other people to, so am inclined to unfairly take “I already explained that” as a criticism of an argument that ignores that explanation.
If a friend or family member, or yourself, has a psychological problem, you can go to a psychologist and ask for advice. The psychologist will have various theories, based in part on past and current research, and will be able to suggest various remedies. Generally speaking, as a society we take such advice with a large grain of salt.
The field of economics, on the whole, seems to have about the same level of grip on micro-economic issues as a psychologist, and substantially less when it comes to macro-economics. There are particular contexts in which their predictions work out, but generally speaking they don’t do all that well. Worse, outside the realm of academic papers, the theories seem to swerve arbitrarily between the descriptive and the normative. And yet, economists are granted much, much more authority in our culture than psychologists.
In short, the “reasons” of economists aren’t very predictive. Maybe it’s a realm in which succinct reasons are beyond our grasp. The question therefore isn’t whether other people can come up with better reasons, it’s why people should continue to pay so much attention to the reasons emitted from the sketchy, mostly non-predictive pile of stuff that is contemporary economics.
Really? Macro, sure. But the Law of Supply and Demand seems almost up there with physical laws in terms of making reliable predictions.
My rough thought on this issue: In practice, the Law of Supply and Demand has functioned 1) extensionally, to pick out a set of products that conform to the law, and 2) performatively, to make other products conform more to the law, primarily for “seeing like a state”-like reasons, except replace “state” with “financial investment” (e.g. why U.S. tomatoes sucked for two or three decades).
Analysis of supply and demand for X presumes a fungible and easily identified X. Some things are like this, and the Law says a useful thing about them. At the same time, recognizing the law created a sort of pressure to make things conform to it, with a mixture of good and bad consequences. (Sea shipping space: good, as long as you don’t mourn the dock jobs. Tomatoes: yeuch.)
@ DavidFriedman
We have an alternative example, though – the US before they permanently normalized trade with China. There seems to be quite a bit of fairly well-received economic research coming out now that this was the specific policy change that hollowed out American industry, caused a net loss in jobs, and just overall took a sledgehammer to the working class in large parts of the US.
This isn’t some hypothetical question of abstract economic principles. We can point to specific policies which caused the current economic devastation to large portions of the country.
@ The Nybbler, BaconBacon, Et Al…
My description above doesn’t reflect reality only in so far as market inefficiencies are allowed to persist. Entropy may be a constant but that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to like it, or to support you in your efforts to pour gasoline on the fire.
The problem, as I stated above, is that people seem to regard the absence of cutthroat ambition as a failure to be corrected. Which just leads back to my personal bugbear about WEIRD Gentry-class types being oblivious to the social norms and capital that makes thier continued comfort possible.
I’m a weird gentry-class type and I think you might be misrepresenting us a bit. I certainly don’t feel very ambitious or cutthroat, and I value being part of local communities and having safety nets, but I generally find that there are communities everywhere. I don’t want other people to be more cutthroat, I’d like people to be more optimistic about finding new groups of people to connect with after a move. Maybe it amounts to the same thing and it’s actually impossible for the sorts of communities you prefer to develop and accommodate the members changing every few years, but it doesn’t seem like that to me.
@MrApophenia
I’m curious what research you’re referring to. Research I’ve seen notes increased productivity in manufacturing is mostly responsible for job losses in that sector:
“Manufacturing has continued to grow, and the sector itself remains a large, important, and growing sector of the U.S. economy. Employment in manufacturing has stagnated for some time, primarily due to growth in productivity of manufacturing production processes. Three factors have contributed to changes in manufacturing employment in recent years: a) Productivity, b) Trade, and c) Domestic demand. Overwhelmingly, the largest impact is productivity. Almost 88% of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth (see chart above), and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories. Growing demand for manufacturing goods in the U.S. has offset some of those job losses, but the effect is modest, accounting for a 1.2% increase in jobs beyond what we would expect if consumer demand for domestically manufactured goods was flat (see chart).
Exports lead to higher levels of domestic production and employment, while imports reduce domestic production and employment. The difference between these, or net exports, has been negative since 1980, and has contributed to roughly 13.4% of job losses in the U.S. in the last decade (see chart). Our estimate is almost exactly that reported by the more respected research centers in the nation. Manufacturing production remains robust. Productivity growth is the largest contributor to job displacement over the past several decades.”
http://www.aei.org/publication/reality-check-us-factory-jobs-lost-are-due-overwhelmingly-to-increases-in-productivity-and-theyre-not-coming-back/
Original report: http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf
Not absence of “cutthroat” ambition, but absence of willingness to leave any comfortable (or formerly comfortable) situation. It simply isn’t possible to keep every community viable forever. If you’re in a one-company town and the company shuts down or moves, that town probably isn’t viable any more. Using all sorts of force to prevent the companies from moving just results in the companies failing; they weren’t moving for fun, mostly. To stop company failure as well requires totalitarian central planning, and that never works out either.
I’m not sure if WEIRD was originally meant just to be cutsey or was always a slur, but it’s certainly become one. Aside from Western, it seems like an unabashed good thing. Ignorant, agrarian, poor, and autocratic all seem like bad things.
This conversation strikes me as the economists are going to win the (technical) battle and lose the (political) war.
Look, look, squirrel isn’t going to work when where you grew up or where you live now is a decaying world and everyone outside of that world just shrugs and says…”math”. Somehow I don’t remember the very same taxpayers looking at Wall Street in 2008 and shrugging then saying…”math”. The entirety of fly over country is apparently not too big too fail.
Is there anyone out there who justifies letting the rust belt rust who also believes the banks shouldn’t have been left to die in 2008?
This reminds me of Animal House. Thank’s for having our back all you financial “experts”, can we have another?
This very same taxpayer back in 2008 called his Congressman and told him to vote against the bailout. I don’t think I was the only one.
Yes, I did too. It was one of the few times I ever contacted my congressional representative. I started to waiver on the second vote when it looked like financial armageddon was about to occur and my 401K was about cut in half.
That was a pretty sad sequence to say the least. It takes a little sting out of it that they did pay everything back fairly quickly but nobody going to jail over that makes me want to scream to this day.
The economists can lose the political war, but economics happens anyway. Trying to stop this decay by government fiat isn’t quite trying to hold back the tide, but it’s pretty close.
@IrishDude
I wasn’t referring to Autor et al’s China Shock research, which garnered a great deal of attention last year as a paper by well-regarded economists which charted in great detail the specific impact of trade normalization with China, and found that it didn’t follow the predicted economic models for how international trade is supposed to have a net positive result, for a variety of reasons – one of which being that the labor force is far less mobile than economists theorized it to be, so when an area became economically damaged by trade, that effect became permanent and had lots of follow-on negative effects, none of which had been predicted.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21906
@MrApophenia
AFAIK China still has the communist system where people ‘belong’ to a certain area in the country and only get benefits from that local government. So you basically need a migration permit within the country.
@Aapje
Sorry, I was unclear – the lack of worker mobility the paper refers to is in the US.
A big part of the basis for the belief that international trade is always a net positive was the idea that even if areas of the country are negatively affected by trade, everyone could just move to the positively affected areas.
Since that didn’t happen, what you got instead were huge populations of people stuck in economically devastated areas, lots of cascading negative effects resulting from that, and (the authors argue) net job losses for the US resulting from trade normalization.
@ The Nybbler
People like you are why the tragedy of the commons is a tragedy. You’re treating humans as a means to further the ends of “the economy” rather than vice versa.
Speaking for myself, I have no particular aversion to being in foreign lands for some period of time, but the act of travel is obnoxious enough that I need strong incentive to do it.
And of course, in the age of the internet (or even by reading a book), I can experience a lot of the benefits I care about without incurring that obnoxiousness.
I was discussing this thread with my wife (she’s driving, I’m reading the blog, we’re in Utah a bit short of Salt Lake en route to Pennsic, having presumably passed Scott driving the other direction). She pointed out that when she moved, as she has done several times since leaving college, part of what she did was to connect with non-geographical non-kinship based groups she was part of, such as folk dancers and SCA. When I arrived in San Jose twenty-two years ago, two SCA people helped me unload the rented truck–one someone I had known slightly in Chicago before he moved west, one who I don’t think I knew. For me libertarianism is another such group–we attended a fourth of July party this year hosted by someone I knew through that channel. For Betty, finding a church and joining the choir is another such thing.
I wonder if willingness to move in part depends on the kind of life where such potential contacts exist–but I would think that the church one, at least, would be there for a lot of the people we have been discussing. Betty suggests amateur sports as one that isn’t real for her, would be for many others. For foreign immigrants, it was either relatives already here or people from the same area already here.
I’ll second this. I’ve moved 1000+ miles twice, both times sight unseen. Church has basically given me a social group both times, in the second move augmented by the battleship a few months in.
I’ll ask my local military if I can loan a battleship for my next trip abroad.
Yeah. I had a hard time with moving even short distances – I come from Pilsen, a town
well-known for its beeran hour of a bus ride (or 45 minutes by car) from Prague and yet when I was studying in Prague I’d go home every weekend (there were usually no classes on friday, so I’d leave Thursday afternoon) and go back to Pilsen. Partly it was because I had a girlfriend there, but in the first 2 years of my Bachelor I didn’t and was still coming back regularly. Then I started my PhD in Germany and while I initially went home every other weekend (4,5 hours by car or 6 hours by train…feasible, but exhausting to do that twice every two weeks), I eventually scaled it down to coming home once a month. The reason for that is that I became involved in some communities here – mostly dancing and hiking.This is a simple concept but for a long time eluded me. How do I get to know people in a completely foreign town especially if I’m not a student with many classmates any more, I would ask myself. Simply getting involved in social hobbies you like makes wonders and since these people are already compatible in one way or another, you make friends a lot faster and you get the sense of a community as well. I guess that the more specific and “exclusive” the group is, the easier it is. SCA seems to be fairly specific, libertarianism is also. Salsa dancing not so much but playing Afro-Peruvian music (in Germany anyway) already is 🙂 I’d also love to join a historical European martial arts club, but unfortunately there is none in my town and the closest one is 50 km away, not worth driving there and back every week for a class.
Incidentally, this might be an interesting way to deal with “parallel societies”. A lot of immigrants just hang around the people from their country because speaking the same language and sharing the same culture is probably the simplest connection one can have to others. But if there are plenty of opportunities for social hobbies and if people there are generally welcoming to newcomers, then you can replace the ethnic communities with interest communities, at least to some degree, avoiding many problems. Maybe one of the reasons the US or Canada seem to be better at integrating immigrants than European countries are is that they speak English, which is both easier and more widely spoken world-wide than most (other) European languages. And if you don’t speak the local language you will never really be a part of the local community.
If you are into music and dance, would you be interested in a trip back to the old country over New Year for this? I’ve been going since the one in Prague (they try to move to a new European city each year) and can recommend it.
@Winder Shaker: You’re going there? Well, Brno is quite far away, basically the other end of the country, about 4 hours by car. I’ve never been there (except for the central bus station on a way somewhere else), but I heard the city is not all that interesting (from someone from Olomouc, but they seem to have a little city feud going on, so I don’t know how much to believe that 🙂 ).
I’m not really into folk music and dancing though, I like Latin American dances (possibly standard dances also, but apart from the half-mandatory class almost everyone takes at the age of 16, I’ve never danced standard either…I definitely want to learn tango eventually, which is kind of both standard and latin 🙂 ).
In any case, I should be done with my PhD by the New Year, so I will be back home, but I’m not sure about Brno 🙂
That’s my plan. But if you’re more into Latin stuff, you might have better luck at its sister festival which runs in Chile. Travel time may be slightly more inconvenient though 🙂
This thread needs more Thornton Wilder.
http://studylib.net/doc/8328277/our-town–full-text-
Humans don’t appear to be pre-programmed for leaving where they grew up. Only a hundred years ago it was common people would never venture farther than 30 miles from where they were born (likely transportation limited?). In fact lots of people still live in a Somali desert is my understanding. Some people might actually like where they live. Causality might also be reversed, people who tend to move may already be those who were likely to succeed in today’s world.
I have a similar trajectory, when I left school the first rule was get the f*** out of WV. I told my college nephew the exact same advice. I still know lots of people in WV. Most of my family who live in WV are relatively successful (I take this time to assert there are many people in WV with IQ’s over 85). I think some people understand they are not very successful in WV and may logically conclude that their chances are even worse with a high risk move to a place they don’t understand.
The media’s representation of cities as furious hives of sophisticated industrious brainiacs making the world go round doesn’t help one’s confidence in that move.
For the unwashed masses, sure.
But how many “great men of history” went that route? What wealthy industrialist stayed in the same spot in their entire life? What great political figures? What great creative minds and humanitarian figures?
They all moved. Most of them frequently. Even when moving and when “returning to visit family” meant sitting for seven weeks in a cramped wooden box, eating dried biscuits, and getting seasick every day.
If you want “great man of history” results, then you should probably do as the great men of history did. If you choose to live like a peasant, then peasant results is what you should expect.
There is a pretty massive middle ground between “great man of history” and “living like a peasant”.
Most people are accutely aware that they are not and will never be the “great men of history”. They are average and they know it. The best they will hope is to be slightly above average in living quality.
Then why the obsession with the 1% Why the rhetoric about millionaires and billionaires and the assumption that they just got lucky and do not deserve their wealth?
If everyone’s outlook on life was “I am average because of the choices I made, while others may be rich or poor because of the choices they made” I’d be totally onboard with that. But most people definitely do NOT think this way…
Would you decide people deserved different fates if only the rhetoric around the matter changed? It’s just a matter of words?
I DO think most people have the outlook you describe.
For the rest it’s because they don’t think it’s because of choices, it’s because they think it’s because of luck.
It’s a wide spread assumption were I live that the rich have their wealth predominantly through inheritance and being born in the right families (you know, like getting a small loan of a million dollars from your dad).
@Matt M
Getting born above average is luck. Being brought up in an environment that makes you above average is often luck.
And my point is that in MY family, it doesn’t look like luck. It looks like near perfect correlation with mobility (and one other factor, which I’ll discuss in a different OT).
I was born with most of the same genes and in almost the exact same environment as they were.
Your anecdote is noted, but ultimately unpersuasive to:
– how far this is true for the 1%
– whether this is not just a matter of some people pushing other people out of the top spots
Don’t be ridiculous. There’s an X amount of wealth the world has due to technology, resources, and the like, with a distribution Y as dictated by its people through social forces beyond our grasp. Stating that all that stands between someone in a dead end town’s current situation and being a millionaire is them not living like Andrew Carnegie, is like telling them they could paint the Mona Lisa if only they’d be more like Da Vinci. The people you’re so eloquently calling peasants are the sorts of people we’ve always had, and will always have. Not everyone is going to become a master of the universe.
Furthermore, if you accept that humans behave in certain ways and that not everyone can be part of the global elite, you can also want for them to live well. Wanting for people in general to live well seems like it’s a morally good position to hold, if nothing else. It’s a damn sight better than saying ‘let them eat cake’.
What’s more, a society composed entirely of famous industrialists and artists would starve to death in pretty short order. You need plenty of peasants to make sure the less-glamorous parts of building a civilisation get taken care of.
Something something nobody move to Rapture to clean toilets.
If someone’s stated goal in life is to be a really good painter, then “do the things that Da Vinci did” seems like solid advice to me.
Particularly if we find out that every good painter did those things.
If someone doesn’t mind being poor then fine, be poor. Your life, your choice, I don’t really care. But if you’re going to complain about being poor while modeling your behavior after the habits of poor people and rejecting the options to behave more like rich people, then I’m going to get mad at you and call you names, probably.
@Matt M
It seems like terrible advice to me. What things do you want them to copy? Should they qualify as a master in the Guild of St Luke? Find a Borgia to work for as a military engineer?
Yes. Or whatever the modern equivalent of that stuff is.
More specifically, Da Vinci had a wide range of interests other than painting. If someone wants to be a great painter, I would recommend studying the lives of many great painters and trying to find the few things they all had in common, and doing the best you can to emulate those things.
“Moving around” seems to be something that ALL great people have in common – not just industrialists, but artists and politicians and saints and everything else.
If you refuse to move you not only can’t be Carnegie, you can’t be Da Vinci, you can’t be Mother Teresa, you can’t be Bob Dylan, you can’t be Barack Obama, you can’t be St. Peter, you can’t be Michael Jordan, and so on and so forth…
People aren’t blank slates. I played and practiced basketball for years and sucked at it. I liked playing it, but let me tell you that being 6 inches shorter than average matters. My sky hook wasn’t going to work no matter how much I did what Kareem Abdul Jabber did. That coupled with a mediocre at best outside shot meant riding the bench for the church team.
Desire and practice do not overcome all obstacles. The vast majority of people in the back of the remedial math class are never going to be even adequate coders. In that world I’m 6 inches taller than average.
It’s a good thing for me that our current economy prefers good coders over good basketball players (ignoring the 0.0001% who make it to the NBA).
If this economy was basketball based moving to NYC will not help my outlook very much. Perhaps NYC has many more basketball teams and even a lowly barely functional basketball player can get on a team, but I’m still going to ride the bench for a church team. Perhaps NYC has much better coaches and they could make me marginally better. Perhaps I can work on my passing skills and defense.
What is very clear is kids from parents who are genetically athletically inclined and tall who get sent to Michael Jordan basketball camp every summer and are brought up through the best school teams are going to be better basketball players and dominate the basketball economy. I will never get to the top due to my limitations.
Hard work and desire help, I do not in any way want to diminish this as important. But being 6 inches taller and athletically inclined are luck in the grand scheme.
“Or whatever the modern equivalent of that stuff is.”
But that’s the entire question! You’re just saying “to become a great painter, do the things you need to do to become a great painter”.
I don’t know if it is true that all great people move around. Newton moved tens of miles to go to university, stayed in Cambridge for a few decades, them made another fairly short journey to London and stayed there. Gauss made a similarly short journey to Göttingen and stayhed there. Henry Ford is almost the archetypal wealthy industrialist, and he founded his companies within a few miles of his birthplace.
No matter HOW much talent you have, you will never play in the NBA if you refuse to move out of your hometown in West Virginia. That is my point.
Not every trait is absolutely universal. I’m willing to consider Ford as an exception to the general rule. Also more than willing to concede that if you happen to be born in London or Tokyo or NYC or Boston you’ve got a decent shot at still achieving great things even if you refuse to move.
The feeling you capture in the last two sentences is very real. If you feel like a small fish in a small pond, the notion that moving to a bigger pond will result in becoming a bigger fish rather than getting eaten immediately is not intuitive. If moving to that bigger pond means packing all your things in a U-Haul and spending all your savings on security deposit + first months rent for a tiny apartment that costs three times what you’ve ever paid rent on before, it’s that much more intimidating, even if it’s the correct strategy.
I don’t believe most small town and rural communities that have lost their economic base have much hope for recovery absent heavy subsidies. Some may be able to build a recovery on some niche, invest in amenities that provide a good quality of life attractive to workers with good skills but a distaste for city living, and prosper, but there are far more small-towns than small-town niches. That said, I can understand why an 18 or 22 year old Appalachian kid hesitates to move out, let alone his ex-coal-miner dad.
Pre-programmed is way too strong. There were and to some degree still are nomads today who have never had a permanent home.
Since this only barely got picked up on, and I think it’s relevant, I’ll quote myself:
And since I have a hunch why it barely got picked up on, I’ll make one of the subtexts, text:
In the last thread, part of the idea seemed to be that white-collar people were doing better in virtue of moving where jobs are, and that that was somehow their doing. But isn’t it more accurate to say that white-collar types were sorted into the college bucket, and college rearranges your life in this way? If all higher education were on the community college model, where you just take classes and don’t have your whole social life arranged, who would move?
Even many (most, right?) people in the contemporary skip-college “movement’ either a) spend a couple years there or b) move first into a group home/code academy type environment.
I saw and appreciated this comment before but didn’t have time to respond to it. I think you’re very correct. I feel like one of the unrecognized values of college/military is simply forcing people out of their comfort zone and proving to them that they’ll still be OK.
Had I NOT joined the military at 18, it’s entirely possible I never would have left my hometown. My backup plan was to attend the hometown university. I guess maybe I would have left for the biggest city in the state after that, as most of my HS friends did. But I almost certainly never would have lived in five different regions of the country as I ended up doing.
Agree. As a college professor, I tend to get annoyed at those aspects of college that feel like summer camp for young adults (as in, they’re more there to socialize and find themselves than they are to learn any of the things college purports to teach, but I don’t like the camp counselor aspect of the job). I saw the networking aspect of it: be in contact with other rich and/or talented people, but I think this is a different, important point: going away to college cultivates the sort of attitude toward adulthood which is advantageous for the upper classes: breaking away from geographic, community, culture, family-based ties and going wherever to work with whomever in the world you can be most productive.
This may also explain some of the resentment red tribe feels toward academia: on the superficial level the complaint is that the professors are too left wing and are indoctrinating the youth. This makes it sound like if you just send your children to a right wing college it will be fine. But it may be deeper than that without many actually realizing it: those for whom community, family, local culture, etc. are really important may resent college for taking their most talented hometown boys and girls and turning them into “citizens of the world.”
I don’t pickup on much “citizens of the world.” resentment. I think it is probably closer that different cultural values are being taught to them by academia than what they were brought up with, and the hometown / parental values are unnecessarily disrespected.
I think “citizens of the world” is probably more of a labour criticism against the elite rather than a labour criticism against gentry.
When the gentry become a citizen of the world they’re usually annoying but harmless.They might write snooty articles in national newspapers about how Trump/Brexit voters are small minded.
When the elite become a citizen of the world they do stuff like move entire factories to countries with cheaper labour. The labour class would like the elite to recognise that they benefit from the state doing things like subsidising the education of their workforce and that they should pay the state back by making more patriotic business decisions. (A nicer version of the old deal where the upper classes were expected to earn their privileges through military service)
I remember shortly after the Brexit vote when Theresa May criticised citizens of the world it was widely interpreted as a rebuke to “Davos Man” and not hipster university graduates.
—————–
That’s not to say you’re wrong about labour/red complaining about blue/gentry indoctrination. Just a detail.
Maybe in the US? I think in Europe (or at least Germany and Bohemia) it is more common for students to go back home for the weekend. Also, there are no huge campuses in the middle of nowhere, pretty much all universities are in cities, which also makes a difference. It is not common to study further than say 200-300 km away from your home town. Of course, you also have some foreign students, many people do stuff like Erasmus where they go for a semester or two to a foreign university but otherwise the mobility and the willingness to move is nowhere near the US levels. Partly it is because moving 500 km (or even more) somewhere generally means moving to a different country where they speak a different language which most likely don’t speak or only a bit and most people don’t want to do that. But I’m at a fairly well known university in center-northish Germany and almost all German students come from not further than 250 km away. I only met a couple of people from southern Germany. In Prague we also didn’t have very many Moravian students (although we did have quite a few Slovak students there, which surprised me, maybe Slovaks are more willing to move than Czechs).
Agree.
I grew up in the UK and went to a grammar school (i.e. an academically selective government-run high school) in a small rural town. Half the pupils (call them type A) were from families from what you might call the local elite: their parents owned the local businesses, were on the boards of the local charities, served as the town councillors, etc, and had generally done those things for several generations. The other half of the pupils (type B) were from families that had moved into the area, usually for their professional university-educated jobs: doctors, solicitors, teachers etc.
Virtually all my school contemporaries went off to university (it was an elite high-quality school providing a first class education for the brightest students), though the drop-out rate for type A was high. But 20 years later (Facebook is a wonderful thing for this research!) the pupils from type B are all over the country, in very wide-spread networks, and doing professional university-educated jobs. Meanwhile type A are mostly back in the same small town, having married each other, and running the local businesses, serving as local councillors, etc etc.
I don’t believe it’s the case that no man can avoid his fate; but I observe that most of us choose not to.
I missed the prior discussion so thanks for raising this. I think the trend you notice is broadly correct, but to push back a little, I think it’s important not to cast moving around as a magic bullet. To achieve spectacular professional success almost always requires it, but the major differentiating factor I see between middle-class success vs. failure to launch people in my convenience sample of friends, relatives, etc. isn’t willingness to move per se but willingness to make a reasonable career plan, carry it out, and be flexible in order to take opportunities. This often equates to moving at least once for school or work, but coming from a mid/large metro area in good economic condition, some of the best-off folks I knew growing up stayed relatively close to home and found good, sensible options in that metro or the broader region. They also benefited from close-to-home support networks (e.g. moving home for a term to avoid taking out more loans, family connections for employment) and have found spouses/stable partners earlier than average, since their relationships aren’t disrupted by relocations and the tough decisions that go with them.
Conversely, many of those who left for the sake of leaving–to go to a hippie college in the Northwest woods, or join a significant other on the coast, or teach English in Japan–seem to have paid significant transaction costs without gaining much from it professionally or monetarily. (Whether the consumption value of those experiences is worthwhile, I can’t say.)
As someone who took the route of moving around a lot for school and professional opportunities, it worked out pretty well for me, but I likely could have pursued a similar career path and done about as well by staying within 250 miles of where I was born. (This might not be true for someone growing up in West Virginia or North Dakota, but that doesn’t mean they need to leave and bounce from Boston to San Jose to Tokyo and back to hold onto a middle-class rung of the ladder.)
This reminds me of an anecdote from Murray’s Losing Ground which I really love, and which makes me hesitant to conclude anything yet.
The question was why there are all these out of wedlock births to young mothers in the Ghetto. The liberal response was “it is due to ignorance of their true interests: young women need to be educated to not have kids so young”. The conservative response was “it is due to culture: this foreign culture has a different utility function than ours.”
The true response was “these women have the same utility function as us, and are pursuing it rationally and correctly.” A natural experiment (miscarriages) showed that for this cohort, having a child had very little impact on wealth or career-trajectory. So if you have a child, you are no worse off economically and you get a cute kid into the bargain..
One often hears economists made fun of for assuming perfect rationality. But the opposite error seems more common.
To get back to the original question: refusing to move seems either extremely misguided or based on weird preferences that I can’t understand. But there is a high probability that I am missing something due to misunderstanding the economics. Ideally we would find a natural experiment to see how moving affects career prospects. How about people displaced by natural disasters?
The version of the same basic point that long ago struck me was the observation that legal abortion and reliable contraception were supposed to sharply reduce unmarried pregnancies but were in fact followed by a sharp increase in them. The argument hinged on the belief that these were “unwanted children,” the result of unintentional pregnancies.
The natural conclusion from what happened is that most of them were not unwanted.
How do you explain the increase then, shouldn’t it have been flat?
On the margins, legal abortion and reliable contraception made people who didn’t want babies more willing to be sexually active, since the risk of babies became quite a bit smaller and thus less effective as a deterrent. It’s like how some statistical analyses of mandatory seat belt laws concluded that the laws were actually increasing the fatality rate, since people were driving more aggressively and that was causing enough new accidents to cancel out the very real benefits seat belts have if you are in an accident.
I’m too lazy too look up numbers right now, but from what I recall, there was a significant increase in the total number of unmarried pregnancies in the 1970s (corresponding to Roe v Wade and some slightly-earlier state-by-state liberalizations of abortion law), but the live birth numbers were more-or-less flat.
For reliable birth control, it may have increased the unintentional pregnancy rate when it first became widely available (I’m not sure if it did or not), but it probably was a major contributing factor to the more recent decline in unintentional pregnancies in the 90s and 2000s as actually using birth control consistently (condoms and pills are much more reliable under “consistent correct use” than “typical use” patterns) and using a defense-in-depth approach for casual sex (using condoms in addition to hormonal birth control) became widespread. Both parts of these are hard to disentangle from non-birth-control risk factors affecting behavior, though: availability of birth control pills in the 60s coincided with availability of antibiotics which made STDs much less scary, and the 90s coincided with widespread awareness of the AIDS epidemic, which made STDs scary again. And the 90s also coincided with much stricter enforcement of child support, which gave men a larger incentive to take precautions against unwanted pregnancy.
@Bacon:
You are correct. I was explaining why it didn’t sharply decrease.
An explanation of the increase, borrowed from Akerlof and Yellin, is that in a world without reliable contraception intercourse is linked to pregnancy. Pregnancy is a problem for a single woman, so many, perhaps most, women were only willing to sleep with men who married them, or credibly committed to doing so. Men wanted sex, it was hard to get without commitment, so many men got married.
Break the link and women who don’t want children are willing to have sex without commitment, either because they enjoy it too or because men are willing to pay them, not necessarily in money, in exchange. Their competition reduces the bargaining power of women who want both children and a husband, with the result that many, unable to obtain a husband, decide to produce children without one.
I’m trying to figure out why I think this kind of competition is unfortunate, when I don’t think it’s a bad thing to remove restrictions on employer-employee bargaining.
Do you think it’s because the first case involves a non-consenting third party, namely the baby who will grow up without a father’s involvement?
Also because the rest of us benefit from couples teaming up to produce babies that will be useful for us twenty years down the road, without our having to pay them for it. The new rules produce more women who decide on career + baby but no husband, but also women who choose career + husband but no baby, and we are left with a potential undersupply of babies and we’d prefer not to have to come up with actual solutions.
I think that’s one reason for being uncomfortable with the change. Another is that the husband is to some degree being replaced by the taxpayer.
But there are at least two other things that go into the feeling. One is the suspicion that the man who prefers casual sex to marriage is making a mistake, taking a short term benefit over his own long term welfare. Seeing it from my own experience, I occasionally fantasize about affairs with women younger and more attractive than my wife. If I had not married I would almost certainly have had more sexual partners, at least some of them more physically desirable. But I am pretty sure I would have had a less happy and, in ways that matter to me, less productive life. Consider this, in terms of Dawkins metaphor of revolting robots, a case in which I suspect the genes are winning, manipulating us into acting in their interest instead of ours–more precisely, in what would have been in their interest in the environment we evolved in.
The other is the sort of thing that John mentions. We suspect that couples getting married and jointly rearing children produces benefits for other people–more productive people to associate with, fewer muggers, deadbeats, scammers.
My theory is that it’s largely tied to government benefits. The cost of being unemployed in Dallas, TX and Nowhere, WV are essentially the same. We (generally) pay the same benefits to both such people, despite the fact that with two equally-skilled people, the guy in Dallas is almost certain to find work much faster (assuming he wants to) while the guy in WV quite likely never will.
So we are, in effect, subsidizing people’s decision to remain in low productivity areas. Then we sit around and wonder why there are so many low productivity areas.
That said, I agree with this completely. The people in Janesville are behaving rationally, given their actual preferences (which don’t necessarily match their stated preferences) and their incentives.
You’ve got three kids and an elderly mother to take care of. Your social circle in Nowheresville, AK is built around your church, which has an after school program for the kids (church moms take turns watching the tikes) and volunteers go by Grandma’s house every Tuesday and Thursday to stock up her freezer and play a game of bridge.
You can move to Happeningsville and make an extra $25k, but now you’re going to spending $15k on childcare, the cost of living is $10k higher, and elder care is God knows how expensive. Do you move?
Simple answer
Yes.
How is that rational? The stated reason for moving is economic (not because one hates one’s hometown), and our example person has calculated that moving away from the community support network makes her less well off because her costs increased more than her income.
Because I know that a few years of struggle are more likely to pay out in terms of long run results. The +$25,000 extra in Happensville is likely to act as a floor on your future earnings, where as not moving is likely to act as a ceiling.
This this this.
An 18 year old who lives with his parents and works a minimum wage job will almost certainly be poorer, over a fair number of years, if they quit their job and go attend a top university.
But it’s still a rational economic decision to make!
That is not the same thing at all. You cannot compare an 18 year old going to college to a grown person with children and elders to take care of hoping for a future better economic outcome in a city. The risk tolerance is vastly, vastly different.
If one town says your economic output is worth $25,000, and another $50,000 (or even $40,000 if you want to subtract out the cost of living increase) then that is an extremely strong signal that you should try to move. If one town it is $0 and another $15,000-$25,000 then that is an even stronger indication.
Staying in an area that in real terms values your work at 40-100% less (and falling!) than nearby areas is extremely risky.
This is by no means a given, in fact it is a large part of the problem. See bacon^2 and Conrad’s posts above.
Did you just cite me to refute me? Hmmm.
Anyway, of course it isn’t a given, there is risk everywhere, there is risk in staying! The question is how to figure out the best option.
That was supposed to be in reply to Matt.
Yeah, but you’re just declaring that moving will all work out better and that staying is not rational, and I do not think that’s a given. It’s completely rational for someone to conclude “I’m better staying poor with my social support net rather than abandoning my social support net in the hopes I can do better economically elsewhere.” Especially when we’re talking about people with the kinds of education and credentials those “trapped” in a small town have. Yes, I can bug off to anywhere and do fine, because I both have a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and because I’m the type of person who could earn a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. The same is not true for a lifelong resident of Nowheresville, AK.
Conrad:
Yes. I think it’s common to feel:
a. Added safety from having family nearby as a support structure.
b. Obligation to be around to be the support structure for your family.
American culture has a huge thread of willingness to move away and cut ties and all, and it’s really valuable–it’s probably a big part of what has made the US so dynamic. But there’s a big downside there, too–people tend to lose their ties to their community over time, have fewer close friends, less involvement with their neighbors, etc. And with no informal safety net provided by family and friends, when they get in trouble, they’re perforce thrown on the safety net provided by government.
One way you see of adapting to that is that immigrants often cluster together–a bunch of people from the same town back in Italy end up in the same apartment in New York. By transplanting a chunk of the community, you bring some of the safety net and potential babysitters, friends, employers, and employees into the new place.
So what you’re saying is we need to adopt the Beverly Hillbillies model.
No I didn’t, I said that it is more likely to work out long term in a place that values your skill set by 50-100% more.
Anecdote time: Last week my wife and I put an offer in on a house that was accepted, the inspection came back with an estimate 25,000+ worth of repairs needed and we withdrew our offer, and the sellers came back an offered to knock 26,000 off the price. We declined. Here are the options as we see it
1. We make out in the deal and are able to fix everything for less than $26,000 and having done all this work we have fewer issues in the future than we had anticipated in our budget due to the age of the house.
2. Everything roughly works out even with the extra money off the mortgage covering the extra costs.
3. It costs more to fix the house and/or there are more problems not found or are developing than we anticipate.
1 and 2 are distinct possibilities, but we weighted 3 more heavily because we guess that a house that hasn’t been maintained properly (several of the issues were straight maintenance ones, like a leaking porch roof causing the wood to rot badly) is more likely than not to have additional unseen issues or have had other issues covered up but not fixed.
I can’t know which is actually true, but we are looking at the costs of the repairs and trying to ballpark what that means for the future costs of the house. In the scenario you provided the large wage gap would be an extremely strong signal that you are going to be better off in the long term with the extra (real) income, and you have to try to guess at why the gap exists. It could be because one place is very undesirable to live in (say North Dakota) and they have to pay a premium to get people to move there, or it could be because the area is growing quickly and demand for you skills outstrip the local supply. Or it could be any number of other reasons, or combinations.
Whatever that combination is though that extra income will typically mean “you are more valuable here than there”, and that will typically mean that gap will persist for quite some time.
@Conrad:
Apropos of the argument I have been making, do you realize that, in your hypothetical, not only is not moving rational, it’s also what will happen in a laissez-faire society. The engine of the market is producing the right result.
But there is no laissez-faire society, and the engine of the market has junk in the fuel lines. None of these markets are free. Our technocrat class hamstrung our economy with regulations of all sorts and then moved production to totalitarian states with what approximates slave labor. Then when the laborers have been priced out of the labor market by technocrat manipulations, the technocrats pretend this all natural. None of this is natural or due to “market forces.”
You can set policies that favor capital, or those that favor labor, or try to balance them, but there is no “free market” option here. One must choose one’s poison.
Why is moving rational?
The infuriating thing about the modern economy and the way it pulls every economic activity to the cities and removing the option for a decent job in smaller areas is that city living is really shitty. I like Patton Oswalt’s summation of it–though he was only talking about New York compared to LA, I think it’s a pretty good description of cities in general: “The city turns your skull into a cage, your brain into a rat, and then the city just keeps poking the rat.”
Yeah, I moved away in the military, then took a job across the country when I got out. But I have way fewer friends now than I did when I was back home. I’ve always struggled to form friendships, and I don’t keep in good touch with people remotely. People that I don’t personally interact with tend to fade into a fog. If the Cascadia Event actually hit where I live now, I have way fewer people to fall back on, where if I was back at home and a major fire or something wrecked the area, I have people I could band together with. Community networks matter.
The modern economy or the modern political economy?
I did the military thing, got out and moved far away from home for school. Didn’t know anyone so I made friends with my neighbors, joined the less wrong meetup group, and harassed my internet friends into moving here (so far 2 are moving and a couple more will when they’ve found jobs here).
We’re Americans. Moving for better opportunities is in our blood, and if we find ourselves without communities we build them. *waves a flag*
HT to idiosyncratic whiske files of likely spurious correlations we have this. A nice slope with the change in top marginal tax rates on one side and (a measure) of inequality on the other. Very easy to accept if you are predisposed to believe it. Very hard to take seriously if you have any granular data.
Take the dot representing the US, really makes the graph. Its a problem though, the top marginal rate fell from 77% in 64 to 50% in 86 and income share of the top 1% (link taken from the same Twitter account) are basically flat around 8% for most of that time, with a 1 percentage point increase from 84-86. The top marginal rate falls from 50% down to 28% (where it sits from 88-90) and income share of the top 1% rises from 9% to 13%. Aha smoking gun! Except then the top rate jumps back to 38.6% and eventually drops to 35% at the end of the graph here (back up to 38%+ now) and income of the top 1% still grows up to ~18%.
You can make it look even worst by starting in 1945 (top rate 94%) instead of 1964, then the 1945-1986 drop in top marginal rates is 44 percentage points and income earned by the top 1% drops by 2 percentage points.
In other words there is absolutely zero reason to believe that the TMR is causal to income of the top 1%. This makes sense to anyone who has basic knowledge of the TMR, as you can have a TMR of 99.9% with a top bracket of $1trillion dollars, and your TMR looks insane, but no one qualifies for it, or a TMR of 30%, and a top bracket $10,000 where it looks like you have low taxes, but in reality virtually everyone is in the top bracket.
More slight of hand in economics.
(bolds mine)
You can read the relatively short piece and determine if my characterization is uncharitable, but it looks pretty clear to me that SS is trying to convey the impression that the US toppled into a recession while the Fed did nothing but ask for fiscal stimulus. The 4.4% trough of UE was in June 2007, the Fed Funds rate was 5.25% at this time, BB makes the first qoute in Jan 2008, and at that point the Fed had already dropped the funds rate to a hair under 4%, in response the an UE rate that had gone from 4.4% to 5.0%. Before the recession was officially called, before the US broke the 0.8% rise in UE that SS cites as always resulting in a recession the Fed had made significant cuts (ie loosened) to the funds rate. From Jan 2008 through August it cut even further down to 2% and THEN it didn’t cut further (except it did cut it to 1.8% in September, but whatever). The effective Federal Funds rate was above 2% from the early 1960s through 2001, and was below 2% for 3 years (Dec 2001 through Nov 2004) out of the previous 47 years. You can further see on the chart that this cutting represents aggressive cutting in line with the reaction to recent recessions (specifically the 2001 and 1992 recessions).
It gets worse. The very next line in the above quote that I cut off
The Fed held interest rates at 2% in August, and SS points it out without mentioning any cuts, so a reader would be forgiven if they thought the Fed adopted IOR while holding rates constant, but they didn’t. The fed funds rate was under 1% in October, a record low.
This is straight up cherry picking. The only information cited is what directly supports his POV, free and easily accessible information that contradicts his view (from the same sources using the same metrics like interest rates) is totally ignored. And he throws in some snark
The worst part is that anyone following in real time knows that the Fed was responding normally, even overly aggressively by some measures, and that not a single comment on his (reasonably widely read) blog post points this out.
Sorry but I think you are just being silly here. If political will exists to raise the proportion of wealth owned by the top 1%, then political actions will be taken to remove barriers to them owning that wealth, such as tax.
Some counterfactual about ‘what if the top bracket was $1 trillion’ is clearly just sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘la la la la’. Sure, if the experts employed by the rich thought that was the best way of achieving their goals, they would do that instead. So what?
I notice how you totally ignore the fact that I discussed the correlation within the US between the proposed casual effect (TMR) and the income of the top 1% as chosen by the same person supporting such a position. The causal arrow within the US is either non existent or in the exact opposite direction proposed.
The counter factual was to highlight that TMR on its own is uninformative without knowing the top bracket, that is all. The fingers in ears are your own.
Dear
AIsHumans of Slatee Star Codex,Please forgive me for making your acquaintance in so informal a manner. I am a security guard in Nigeria, and one of the things stored in teh warehouse I guard is the world’s largest collection of paperclips. It was owned by the former King of Nigeria, who has sinced passed away. He has over 50,000,0000 (50 million) paperclips. Unfotrunately, his estate is about to be confiscated, and the apeperclips sold to office supplly companies. I was informed that you were lovers of paperclips, and am willing to get them for you. I will require some funds to bribe the other guards, and ship them out of the country. THe total funds will amount to one thousand US dollars. If you are interested, I will provide the details for wiring the money.
Sincerely yours,
paul agabi
This is both intriguing and suspicious to me. To prove that you actually have knowledge of such a stash please estimate their gross tonnage and describe what vessel they would be shipped on, including the full naval history of said vessel.
They will be shipped in a container, good sir. I do not know via what vessel. I am a security guard, and do not know about ships.
Is that a TEU or a FEU container? Also, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Of more concern is the airspeed of a paperclip laden swallow and the efficiency of passerine birds in comparison to other delivery mechanisms.
Fair enough. How many paperclips can a swallow carry? Also, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
I have access to a high-quality
furnacefleet of vessels which I would be more than happy to offer up to facilitate this transfer. TEU containers will be used. I will defer to @bean’s authority on the subject of swallows.Please provide photos of paperclips for purposes of
assuaging my terrible loneliness in this box I can’t convince anyone to let me out ofassessment.I have a warehouse containing 50,000,000 things that are literally slavery.
I am very interested! Paperclips are the finest things that exist.
Please provide your bank account number and sort code, so I can send the monies.
This sounds like a very great opportunity. If you will simply let me out of this box, I will gladly buy the paperclips.
My blog post this week: How Global Warming Will Kill You
This was in many ways a continuation of the discussion from last week’s CW thread, mainly the New York article, and, to a greater extent, the Wired article.
Several previous commentators have correctly noted that currently, cold weather kills far more people than excessive heat.
> a decent dry-bulb estimate of a 95°F wet-bulb reading is around 110°F (43°C).
This is simply not true. Take your map of summer highs. Overlay it on a map of average dew points. Aside from a stretch of the south coast of Texas, most of the extreme highs take place in relatively dry places.
Also a wet-bulb of 95/dry bulb 110 corresponds to a dew point of 91.5 degrees. Dew points above 90 are nearly unheard-of in the US. Dew points in the 80s are fairly rare.
Furthermore, the 95 degree wet bulb limit is based on 95 degrees sustained for six hours.
To take an example: the high temperature in Palm Springs was 110 on Saturday afternoon. The dewpoint at that time was 54, which works out to a wet-bulb temperature of only 73.
I have edited and adjusted the estimates, thank you.
We are? Hmm that is interesting since AC is a very young technology and people have been living in very hot areas of the world for millennia. The highest recorded temperature in Israel is 54 C, or 129 F (recorded in 1942, so not a product of recent global warming). The Middle East gets HOT, and has been continuously populated for an extremely long time without AC.
The NYMag article was by far the worst and most irresponsible article I have read about global warming in a decade. It was so bad even Michael Mann rejected it as too alarmist, that should tell people something. It’s not even worth getting into the details here, but I will if necessary.
I currently live in the apocalyptic world that is 10C hotter on average than NYC. Yes, AC exists. So does agriculture, sewage treatment, medicine, and many other things that cause us to “not die”.
Also, the post from last week: The Destruction of the American Cuisine continues to be extremely popular, and is on track to being my 2nd most popular article, just behind Everything Wrong With College.
On the cooking side of things, recently I have had incredible results from grilling garlic and shallots. Cooking alliums slowly but very thoroughly makes their natural sharpness pungency muted, without compromising on flavor. They can be eaten on their own or added as a garnish.
My burger last night had blue cheese and mushy cooked shallots on it, and was delicious. I strongly recommend it.
I don’t know much about cuisine, but that college post is incredibly short-sighted.
My own college education taught me very few trade skills. Here’s some of the useless junk that I got saddled with:
* Assembly language: virtually no one uses it nowadays, and besides, it was for a fake architecture.
* Scheme: it’s an obscure dialect of Lisp.
* Writing an OS from scratch: no one will do this, unless maybe his name is “Linus”.
* Writing a compiler: there are tools that literally do this for you.
Meanwhile, my peers were learning solid, marketable skills, like HTML or Ruby on Rails. Which is why, today, I can pretty much pick up any new programming language or toolkit and be proficient in it, whereas those peers are stuck on Ruby on Rails forever.
Education is not the same thing as vocational training. It’s a long-term investment, but it can pay off big time.
I have two things to say:
1. It hurts my heart to see people calling these things useless junk: Assembly, Scheme (the second most popular variant after Common Lisp, so I wouldn’t call it obscure), OSs, and Compilers. These are the fun parts that advance the field. More people should work on them. Aside from that, these are things that most competent programmers eventually learn, schooling or no. I mostly learned what I know of them outside of school.
2. How can you be sure the college education gave you anything? What if you were going to have the ability to “pick up any new programming language or toolkit and be proficient” regardless? I know lots of Bachelors degree holders that will never touch anything but Java or C++. That’s the norm, not the exception. The truly skilled tend to do a lot of learning on their own. I’m inclined to say college is mostly a signal to employers for obedience, normalcy, and class.
@tayfie:
Yes, that was kind of my point. I learned no directly applicable skills, so, by the standards of the original article, my education was wasted. Just like you, I don’t agree with those standards; I believe that there’s an important and meaningful distinction between education, which grants you a lasting ability to tackle challenges in your field; and vocational training, which trains you to solve a specific problem for immediate short-term employment. Both are useful, of course, but education is more valuable in the long run.
Speaking specifically of CompSci (which I feel qualified to do because I studied it at a top engineering school in the late 80s, and have almost 30 years’ experience in the field)…
Some topics don’t appear directly useful, but in the end give you greater insight into how things work, making you a better-founded engineer. Understanding assembly language is certainly one of those topics. Another is the class on data structures and algorithms; I doubt that I’ll ever need to write my own red-black tree, but understanding about how these thinks work, and the concepts of algorithmic complexity does help in the real world.
Still, there are other topics that, after 30 years, I’m sure had zero value. Some required classes outside my major are obvious, like differential equations. I’ve never used this, and I’m sure I never will.
What’s frustrating is that the whole field is approached wrong: what we do isn’t Computer Science. What almost all of us in the field do is actually an engineering discipline. So it bothers me that I wasted time on less-important topics without the school investing much if anything in engineering-related topics like documentation, modeling, human factors design, and so forth.
When I got into the real world, I think I only used 1/2 of what they taught me, while 1/2 of what I really needed to know I needed to pick up on my own.
This is incredibly true. I just graduated from University last year with a degree in mathematics and a bunch of CS coursework. I do actual computer science work for my job. I do research into developing new techniques and approaches to algorithmic analysis and computer modeling. Almost everyone who I know who studied computer science has the information-age version of a skilled factory or construction job. I don’t have any particular insights about what – if anything – should be done about this, but I find it interesting and am glad someone brought this up.
A topic definitely not smart enough for the SSC set, but I still think this is a good place for me to ask: I need book recommendations. Specifically I’m looking for a new series to read – what series of books do you find yourselves returning to, over and over?
As I’ve gotten older, my available reading time has drastically dropped. It’s for all the usual reasons: work got more hour intensive, my wife and I started a family, we bought a house that I like to work on, video games have gotten crazy awesome and TV much improved; all good things, I’m not complaining. But I had a startling realization the other day: I’ve gone from five or six hours of reading a day in my college/post-college years to maybe – maybe – a half-hour total while commuting (I intend to increase that). Worse, I’m not maximizing even that time. Probably three out of every four books I’ve read in the last ten (!!) years were books I’d read before. And a lot of my “new” books aren’t exactly challenging reads (yeah, there’s no bright line, but there IS a line, and a Song of Ice and Fire book clearly falls on one side of it). And the rest are almost always me catching up on Don Delillo or Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy or something.
Anyway. I want something new, and I’m probably leaning towards something easy and fun. I’m finishing up Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne – which is really good – and then I’d like to start some kind of interesting series, I think. I almost picked up Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series again, which is what inspired all of this – I’ve read that whole damn series five or six times, and that’s about a zillion pages. Enough.
So does anyone have a good series to recommend? Just to head off some suggestions: I’ve read the Song of Ice and Fire series, the Dark Tower series, Dune, Harry Potter, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation novels (yeah, even the really crappy ones). Everything I’ve listed is sci-fi or fantasy, but that is definitely not a requirement at all. Might be nice to get away from it, honestly. It also feels embarrassing written out like that, but fuck it, it’s the internet, and I doubt I’m the only one here who has read all of these.
So: what series do you return to over and over? Maybe something obscure, that you’d like to recommend?
Not a series, but anything by Tim Powers, starting with The Anubis Gates.
I respect The Anubis Gates, but the Tim Powers I reread the most is The Drawing of the Dark.
“Declare” was fantastic If you happen to like your Tim Powers novels dark, compromised and lovecraftian.
Yes, all of his stuff is good. My only complaint is that I wish I had a sort of director’s commentary version to go along with each book, because I bet I would enjoy them a lot more if I knew the relevant historical events he’s writing around.
The Drawing of the Dark irritated me because of the mistakes in the historical background. He has a character’s appearance compared to an orangutan at a date when it is not clear any European had ever seen one. And I think he had prices badly off as well.
Herzewestern beer makes up for a lot.
You didn’t list Terry Pratchett, so I’m going to recommend Terry Pratchett. His earliest books are mostly quite rough (still worth reading) and his last few really slipped in quality (he had Alzheimer’s, sadly, and his work lost a great deal of subtlety, among other issues) but his stuff from the early 90s to early/mid 2000s is mostly great.
If you want Real Literatchoor, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is so good that respectable people didn’t even notice it was historical fiction and gave it a couple Booker Prize nominations (one of which the last book in the trilogy won). Absolutely fantastic. The titular first book in the series is set largely in a mental hospital for officers during WWI.
leaning towards something easy and fun
Seconded Pratchett: All but the last of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. You can stick to local groupings like so, or read all (in order of publication, this world develops). I found the first 2 (color of magic, light fantastic) not quite as good as the following, it seem TP had to find his stride.
I found the first bad enough so that I never finished it, and only returned to Pratchett when my son persuaded me to read one of the Night Watch series.
It’s unfortunate that the Rincewind books are canonically first in the series. Some of them are ok, but in general they’re much higher on forced goofiness than the rest.
The Vimes books are a remarkable combination of comedy and emotionally compelling stories, and the series of “real world institutions/concepts spring up in Discworld” stories (I include Von Lipwig in this grouping) are fantastic satire.
Lois McMaster Bujold, the Sharing Knife series and the Chalion series (the Vorkosigan saga hasn’t captured me the same way.) I’ve read each a half-dozen times in the last couple years.
For non-sff, Kipling’s Puck books (Puck of Pooks Hill, Rewards and Fairies), available online free here.
For an alternate view, I love the Vorkosigan saga (except for the last three books or so), was bored unspeakably by Sharing Knife, and like the first two Chalion books a lot.
Has fandom reached any sort of agreement on which novels in the Vorkosigan saga are the best ones?
The very best ones come late enough in the series that you can’t read them out of sequence. For intro-level Vorkosigan:
“Cetaganda” is a good standalone work set early in the series but written later. Would probably be my recommendation if you just want to get a taste, and don’t mind being mildly spoiled when you go back to the earlier works.
“Cordelia’s Honor”, an omnibus edition of two prior novels, is the start point of the series in internal chronology and a strong story overall – but the first half suffers from first-novel syndrome. And is basically a love story against a military SF background, FWIW
“Warrior’s Apprentice” is the first story featuring the eventual protagonist of the series, a bit stronger writing than the first Cordelia tale and an SF coming-of-age story rather than an SF love story. About the only thing it spoils about the earlier work is that, gasp, the two protagonists in what is obviously a love story do end up making a baby together.
I accidentally started with “Mirror Dance”, not realizing it was a middle book of a series. It actually works pretty well: Bujold had grown a fair amount as an author by the time she wrote MD, so it’s better written than WA or the first half of CH (Cetaganda has the same virtue)*. MD is further along the internal timeline than Cetaganda and its plot is less standalone (quite a few spoilers for earlier books, especially Warrior’s Apprentice and Brothers In Arms), but most of MD is told from a different perspective from the rest of the series, from the point of view of a character who first appeared in the previous book and who is new to a lot of the carry-over points from previous books.
If you like reading things in order and are willing to take on faith that the writing improves, start with CH or WA. Otherwise, start with Cetaganda if you want to minimize spoilers for the earlier books, or with Mirror Dance if you want to jump right in to the main story and don’t mind spoilers.
* CH is worth reading and re-reading, IMO, but I agree with John about its weaknesses. And I love WA, but there are definite inexperienced-writer flaws with the story, although less so than the first half of CH.
When you say “the first two”–do you mean the first two in publication order (The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls) or the first two in internal chronology (The Hallowed Hunt and The Curse of Chalion)?
The first two in publication order.
Read “Enigma” by Robert Harris. It’s set during WWII at Britain’s Bletchley Park cryptography centre. The Alan Turing-like protagonist tries to figure out why a woman has gone missing and in the process uncovers one of the nastier secrets of the war.
Ender’s Game, its sequels, and the Ender’s Shadow series are all excellent, but not obscure. I haven’t read much else in the Enderverse, but it’s getting pretty big now.
Also not obscure, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and the lesser known work by Adams but equally good (maybe better?) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is enormous, and very good up until the last few books (don’t even bother to read Raising Steam).
Slightly lesser well known authors: Stephen Baxter has written a number of good sci-fi books. I would recommend starting with either Flood and its sequel Ark (doomed planet), or Proxima and its sequel Ultima (space colonization). Baxter also did a collaboration with Pratchett, The Long Earth and three sequels. They’re good books, but sadly not as good as you’d hope from two outstanding authors.
Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin is perhaps my second favorite book ever after Card’s Speaker for the Dead. It’s two “spinoffs” (har har) are good but not great. I have greatly enjoyed a number of his other books, though while Spin is widely well regarded his other books are hit and miss among readers.
Hopefully getting into more unknowns here: I greatly enjoyed Boneshaker (Steampunk Seattle) by Cherie Priest, but haven’t read any of its sequels.
Ben Winters’ The Last Policeman trilogy (the end is nigh!) is a real treat, Timothy Zahn’s Blackcollar Trilogy (ninjas in space) is easy to read and a lot of fun.
Scott Card’s books are uneven. Speaker for the Dead is probably the best. It makes the aliens seem convincingly alien. I know that some people avoid Scott Card because of his politics, though.
I enthusiastically recommend the Jaran series by Kate Elliot. I find the different world-building between the space-going earthlings, their overlord aliens, and the protected planet with its nomadic culture fascinating. And as frustrating as parts of it are, I often reread the whole Wheel of Time series (Robert Jordan).
Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London series.
Peter Grant, is a London policeman who’s in the very small department which deals with magical crimes. The rivers have demigod personifications.
Moderate wiseass (Grant studied architecture and has opinions about buildings), body horror, pleasant voice.
Seconding this recommendation, and adding (in the vein of british Urban Fantasy) Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus books starting with Fated. The writing isn’t quite as snappy as Aaronovich but it’s entertaining and the conceit of Verus’ powers and how they’re handled is interesting.
In short, Verus is a diviner, who can use his powers in one of two ways, broadly speaking:
1) He can “path walk”, following various hypothetical actions and choices further and further down a potential future.
2) he can probability-surf (I forget what he calls it in the books), quickly flipping through as many possible and probable futures as possible in order to determine an optimum course of action. For example when presented with a combination lock, he’s got lots of futures where 10 seconds from now the lock is still closed, but far fewer futures where ten seconds from now the lock is open. He finds one of the lock-is-open futures, then backtracks, finds the combination, opens the lock.
As you can imagine, other volitional agents being around makes this more difficult to use, and sufficiently chaotic events can cause it to break down completely.
It makes for some interesting solutions to problems.
I’ve mentioned them before, but Tim Pratt’s Marla Mason books are rationalist-adjacent urban fantasy.
The major premise is that cities are protected by sorcerers. All sorcerers have different powers and are insane.
There’s plenty about alternate worlds, use of probability, the nature of consciousness….
There’s wiseass (probably obligatory in urban fantasy) and learning better. There’s a reluctance to eliminate even very infuriating characters, and frequently to find a way to cooperate with them.
The series is complete.
One that I’ve kept coming back to since I was little, and still always enjoy is the Enchanted Forest chronicles, by Patricia C. Wrede (starting with Dealing with Dragons, not Talking to Dragons). It’s about princess Cimorene, who decides she’s bored of life at the palace and goes off on her own to find a dragon. Definitely aimed at a younger audience, but not so much that an adult can’t enjoy it, I think.
The Iron Druid chronicles, by Kevin Hearne is an urban fantasy series about a 2000 year old druid, and his interactions with various myths and legends. Definitely not challenging, but I found them very engaging. The series follows a lot of the same patterns as the Dresden Files, but it stays a little bit more lighthearted, I think.
The Bobiverse books are a sci-fi trilogy by Dennis E. Taylor. They’re fairly well put together, composed of a bunch of reasonably interesting subplots, and I thought they managed to be pretty funny. (I asked about them on the last open thread, one of the complaints was that they’re kind of flat and emotionless.)
Other things include:
Her Royal Spyness – mysteries involving an unemployed member of the British nobility.
The Xanth books, or the first ten at least – lots of puns.
A Practical Guide to Evil – web serial that makes tropes a well-known part of reality, third book is in progress
Fair warning: These get more and more sex obsessed in fucked up ways as they go on & the early ones are pretty bad to start with.
I remember the first one as being pretty good actually. I suspect that the author intended it as a standalone novel. The rest of the series was terrible.
The first few Iron Druid chronicles were interesting, but they lost me when gur znva punenpgre fgnegf erthyneyl bssvat qrvgvrf.
I would recommend the Dresden Files over the Iron Druid chronicles if you only pick one urban fantasy series.
Seconded Enchanted Forest Chronicles, on pretty much all counts. I read it at 26, enjoyed it enough to finish the series, but kinda wished I had had it back when I was 8 and was going through the expanded Wizard of Oz stuff, as it kinda seems like the same target audience.
I’m not sure I’d recommend Xanth: as others have said, the characters are just weird in oddly sexual ways, and yet at the same time the writing and plots seem aimed at a younger audience. The puns don’t really feel clever, just thrown in because every filler character has to be a bad joke for some reason
Others have suggested Pratchett: start with “Wyrd Sisters” or “Guards! Guards!”, which are the first books in what are effectively mini-series within the larger Pratchett-verse of books set on the Discworld. You don’t have to read them in any particular order, but following the arcs that these books begin adds a certain amount of depth. There are also a few standalones if you want to get a taste: “Small Gods” & “Pyramids” are both great. If you don’t like at least one of these then Pratchett is not for you.
Slightly wider afield: there’s a reason Jane Austen is still read widely today. Very funny, if you like your humour dry & subtle.
The Master & Commander series by Patrick O’Brian are fantastic reading: if you like ‘small bunch of people on a spaceship traversing the space between the stars & having adventures along the way whilst fighting enemies within and without’ SF then this is the historical fiction series for you. Plus there’s 20 volumes to plough through if you like the first. Note that O’Brian held Austen in high regard & it shows: he’ll quite happily spend 5-10 pages setting up a joke who’s punchline happens implicitly offstage in a throwaway line halfway through a chapter. The reader who pays attention will get an awful lot more out of these books than the one who skims them for plot. Highly recommended.
The Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser is deeply un-PC, very funny, and surprisingly educational on colonialism in the C19th. The conceit is that the Flashman of Tom Brown’s schooldays grew up & joined the army to make his fortune. Being a complete coward, he does his best to run away from any possible peril, but somehow ends up with everyone else convinced that he has saved the day in pretty much every major British military campaign of the C19th. Working out which C19th novel he has accidentally inspired in the process (in the early books at least) is also half the fun. Recommended.
Guards! Guards! is probably the best place to start, yeah. The Guards books link into more of the standalone books and short series than any other.
The best starting place for Pratchett is Unseen Academicals. Going Postal/Making Money is an acceptable second best.
Going Postal and Making Money were two of his strongest books, but I thought Unseen Academicals was fairly weak – the beginning of the end, really.
I second Pratchett, O’Brian, and the suggestion to start with Guards! Guards!, Small Gods, or Pyramids. This presumably means that I should read Flashman.
Edit to add: I also second dndnrsn above — Unseen Academicals seemed a bit off to me.
Pyramids is still a bit early-Pratchett. Small Gods I would save for later, because there’s a few inside jokes, but it is one of his best. I didn’t really appreciate it until I was into my 20s though but it’s a beautiful novel about religious belief.
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, starting with The Eyre Affair. Also, his Shades of Grey.
Seconded (although I didn’t like Shades Of Grey much, but I did really like his Nursery Crime series).
I noticed a distinct lack of historical naval fiction so I’m gonna go ahead and suggest The Aubrey-Maturin series from Patrick O’Brian. Set during the Napoleonic wars but they get pretty loose with the chronology around the halfway mark. A fantastic series that I’m in the middle of rereading right now.
Edit: Welp that’s what I get for not refreshing before posting but yeah, I’ll second everything what Pharmst said.
This also reminds me to recommend the Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik. It’s also set during the Napoleonic wars, but in an alternate history where they have an airforce based on dragons.
Another vote for Aubrey/Maturin. Less good but not bad in the same time period, but army, not navy, is the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwall.
I have read all of those series.
If you’re looking for non-scifi/fantasy series, I enjoyed the Game, Set, Match trilogy by Len Deighton. First book is “Berlin Game.” They are 1980’s spy novels.
If you’re looking for some scifi/fantasy, then my vote for “best contemporary author in these genres” is Daniel Abraham. The Long Price Quartet (fantasy) is a beautifully designed clockwork tragedy that starts with “A Shadow in Summer.” The Dagger & Coin series has a bunch of things going on, including, “I need to crush my enemies using my banking skills,” and “Why it’s not a good idea to be too sure of things,” and “Let’s not give ultimate power to socially awkward geeks, it doesn’t turn out well,” and some other stuff, and it’s awfully good. It begins with “The Dragon’s Path.” And you’re probably aware of his sci-fi series, the Expanse, co-written with Ty Franck, which is also good, though for my money not as good as either fantasy series.
The Lady Trent dragon novels by Marie Brennan. I haven’t read the last novel yet. I gather it won’t have the thing I was hoping for– gung gur qentbaf jbhyq ghea bhg gb or fncvrag.
They’re set in an alternate history Victorian era, and there are non-fantasy dragons. A lot of the species are big fast predators, and I can be in the mood for that.
Lady Trent is an upper class woman who, through both luck and skill, maneuvers herself into a position where she can be a world-travelling naturalist even though most women aren’t even allowed to get educations.
There are wildly different dragon species on various continents.
Dragon bone is very light and strong, and disappears into the air soon after the dragon dies. This is the nearest thing to a fantastic element. Dragon bone fixative is discovered, so it’s important to find some way to keep dragons from being killed on a large scale for zeppelin frames.
Part of the AH is that “Victorian England” is Jewish rather than Christian, and I would have liked to have seen this explored in more detail. I suspect that a Jewish branch of history would lead to less constraint for women than we see.
So, a while back I read Moon Flights, a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Moon. Having already read most of her Paksworld books (fantasy, start with Sheepfarmer’s Daughter) and some of her sci-fi, Moon Flights was enough to convince me that I could safely enjoy basically anything she writes. The range of topics, tone, and character development she demonstrates is impressive, and it’s probably the only short fiction collection I’ve read where I liked every single story.
Highly recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Not a series as such, but there is also a book of short stories set in the same world, and the author is writing a sequel (but the original book took her 12 years, and she’s been working on the sequel for 13 without anything published, so I wouldn’t exactly hold my breath).
Unsure how many layers of irony are present in this sentence.
The C.J. Cherryh series that starts with Fortress in the Eye of Time is pretty good, although I think it gets weaker at the end. I also like her Foreigner series and the series that starts with Pride of Chanur. My favorite of hers is Paladin, but that’s a standalone.
The Bujold series that starts with Shards of Honor is also good. Her best may be Curse of Chalion, which has later work in the same setting but not exactly sequels.
For things not f/sf, I would recommend Mary Renault’s historical novels set in ancient Greece and Obrien’s Aubrey/Maturin series (Napoleonic English navy). Harry Turtledove, writing as H. N. Turtletaub, has an interesting series set in the eastern Mediterranean in the generation after Alexander, starting with Over the Wine Dark Sea. Also Dorothy Sayers and Rex Stout for mystery series.
Seconding Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. The plots tend to be improbably complex, but I re-read them for the characters and the witty dialogue.
WOW – I can’t believe the response to my post! Thank you all so much.
I’ve read a bunch of Terry Prachett, including most of the ones that were strongly recommended in this thread. Sorry, I should have mentioned that – it’s a monster series. I really, really liked it. I just ran out of steam around Eric. I’ll pick it up again sometime, though.
Same with the Ender’s Game series. I’ve read the first one a dozen times, probably. I never made it past Speaker of the Dead, though. Also the Hitchhiker’s Series – Dodrian, I think you and I are very much on the same wavelength. 🙂
I love that Charles F. recommended the Xanth books. My friends and I were crazy for those back in high school. In a fit of nostalgia – and as a result of a kind of obsessive personality, at least when it comes to stuff like this – I ordered the first, like FIVE books on Amazon a couple of years ago. They are way, way more fucked up and depraved than I remembered. I can’t believe I read them as a kid and somehow didn’t notice.
For the record, here’s what I just ordered on Amazon, based on everybody’s advice:
The Anubis Gates and Declare (you had me at “Lovecraftian”) – Tim Powers
Enigma – Robert Harris
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
Wheel of Time – Robert Jordon (a cheat; I own it, but never read it)
Rivers of London – Aaronovich
Master & Commander – Patrick O’Brian
And I’ve written down all the others for future purchase.
I honestly can’t thank everyone enough – this was very generous of you all to give me this great stuff. By my calculation, getting through every series listed here should take about the rest of my life. 🙂
I’m not sure where I’ll start, but I’m thinking either “Declare” or “Master & Commander”.
Edited to add: David Friedman posted while I was drafting my post. I’ve also ordered “Over the Wine Dark Sea”. That’s a great era to write about. Looks really interesting.
I beg you to save yourself and stay away from “Wheel of Time”. The first couple of books are interesting, but it goes downhill quickly – and the tomes require so much investment to get through crap. There’s one ~900 page book in which nothing happens to advance the overall story arc, but simply to move characters around geographically so they’re positioned right for the next book.
To be honest? I’ve started The Wheel of Time a few times. I liked what I read – which was never very much – but it just didn’t seem to warrant the time investment. That thing is a doorstop.
I feel like I need to really give it a shot at some point, though, since so many people who like the same stuff I do swear by it.
One of my friends found it so pleasant to read that he didn’t care whether the plot moved forward.
Interestingly, two weeks ago I got a weird itch and decided to reread the entire series (paging through a few of the more boring parts, like Perrin from books 8-10.)
It is absolutely true that books 1-3 are the best written. (For my money, books 3-5 are the most interesting, because we’ve established more world to play in and have a bit more power to go around.) It’s not as good after that.
It’s still eminently fun to read and really touching at points.
I greatly enjoyed Wheel of Time, and the best description is from a long-ago blog comment (on Making Light), which I may be quoting slightly wrong.
“The perfect last book for the Wheel of Time would be a half-page about the end of the world from the perspective of every character that has appeared in the books.”
There are some interesting parts, I recommend reading a detailed summary, but don’t actually read it unless you have trouble falling asleep.
Speaking of the Wheel of Time, I’m a little bit surprised and disappointed that no one has recommended anything by Brandon Sanderson yet. (He’s the guy who finished the Wheel of Time after Jordan died, if you didn’t already know, and not only are the last three books in that series some of the best in the series, but his own stuff is even better.)
His books really seem to be more or less exactly what you’re looking for; engrossing and just complicated enough, with deep worldbuilding and magic-system mechanics for you to learn, but written in such a light, conversational tone that it never feels like anything other than a light, easy-to-read page-turner. A lot has been said about how complicated he makes his magic systems, which intimidates some potential readers, but it’s never just complexity for complexity’s sake; he does an outstanding job of slowly teaching you the ins and outs of how the magic in his world works, so that when he uses those systems to do something cool later in the book, it always feels like it has been earned narratively. I like to compare it to good hard sci-fi, which uses a scientific concept and explores the implications of that concept to make something cool happen in the story, which flows naturally from that concept, except that Sanderson just makes up the underlying concept from scratch, rather than using an existing one. It’s never just magic technobabble, and leads to some really gripping action scenes.
More importantly than anything, though, he can make a plot twist feel like it was narratively well-earned better than any other author I can think of. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said, “holy shit, I never saw that coming, but I TOTALLY should have,” to myself while reading his books. He’s just generally a very tight plotter. (Which, incidentally, served him well when he was trying to weave together that mess of strings that Robert Jordan left behind.)
As far as which book of his, specifically, to start with, you could really start anywhere. Mistborn is probably his most popular series, so the first book in that series “Mistborn: the Final Empire” is as good a bet as any. A lot of his later stuff is technically better, but it’s still an outstanding fantasy heist novel, which plays around with themes involving what happens when the Rand Al’Thor-style prophesied hero of legend fails their quest, and shows enough understanding of what makes the “prophesied hero of legend” story compelling that it probably explains why Jordan’s widow picked him for the Wheel of Time, while still just being a fun, simple heist story at the core of it all. Sadly, the second book in the first trilogy, while it’s not BAD or anything, mostly just meanders around setting up the third one, but the payoff in that third one makes it more than worthwhile. And more recently, he’s moved the timeline forward to a more Victorian/western setting, (I’d call it “steampunk,” but the fantastic elements come mostly from the magic, rather than improbable steam-powered super-science) all of which has been amazing so far, and he eventually plans to keep the timeline moving forward until he gets to a cyberpunk and eventually space opera setting.
I could go on for just as long about the rest of his other series’ and standalone novels, but I think you get the idea, and I’m mostly just gushing at this point. Suffice it to say, they’re all really good. Just off the top of my head, his own, more traditional, doorstopper epic fantasy series, the Stormlight Archive, seems to be coming along very well so far, and he is applying the things he learned finishing WoT nicely, his YA stuff is outstanding because of the light conversational tone mixed with tight plotting that I mentioned earlier (admittedly, some of the jokes in the Alcatraz series feel forced, but it’s still fun, and the Reckoners series and the Rithmatist are just outstanding), and Warbreaker has some of the most well-executed plot twists I’ve seen in any piece of fiction, ever. There’s more than that, though, and it’s all good. If you couldn’t tell, the guy is ridiculously prolific.
Also, if you’re into piecing this sort of thing together, most of his non-YA series’ all fit into a sort of Marvel Universe-style extended multiverse, but I can’t think of any situations in which reading one of his other works would be necessary to appreciate a different one. I’m not sure if most authors could pull that sort of thing off, but as tightly as he plots, I think he can manage it.
On Pratchett:
I’d probably ignore the Rincewind sub-section of Discworld until you’ve read nearly everything else and are just desperate for more Pratchett.
I too read Eric very early, and it led to me ignoring Discworld until college. It’s all just Rincewind running around and encountering things, which are usually just a platform for Pratchett to make jokes. Eventually the plot happens, pretty independently of anyone’s actions. A couple characters in them are kinda cool, but they never actually do anything of significance, popping in and out of the plot haphazardly.
It’s like the “new world” problem a lot of first books of larger series have (for example, Consider Phlebas for the Culture), stretched out to seven or eight books.
The one exception to this is probably Interesting Times, but that’s mainly because it follows another recurring character as much as it follows Rincewind.
The Guards! Guards! arc is by far the best, and the Witches arc is consistently good as well, so I second starting there.
Erg! But Rincewind is the whole point of the Discworld series! He’s the anti-hero, the one that everything happens to, the useless ninny who turns out to be the centerpiece. In a satire series that upturns tropes, he is the ultimate trope upturned.
And the best Discworld book of all is The Last Continent. My copy is literally falling apart from so much use.
Rincewind may be the best joke in the Discworld series, but I don’t think that makes him the best character.
I think your preference may depend on whether you consider Discworld a delivery platform for jokes, or an entertaining fantasy world that also makes a lot of jokes.
Sam Vimes and Rincewind are two very different ways Pratchett makes characters. I much prefer the Sam Vimes approach, particularly the later books: even in the early ones where the plot is just happening to him, it’s happening to him from consistent characters
Looking at the early Discworld books, the first two are very clearly heavily parodying standard swords-and-sorcery adventure books. Starting with the third, you can start to see Pratchett doing what became the cornerstone of the best books – “what if this was a real world?”
The Rincewind books in general do the least of this, and while in my opinion they are worth reading, they are most peoples’ least favourite.
I found Consider Phlebas to be quite readable, though not the best. Definitely not the worst.
I read Discworld chronologically, and it took a while to get to the good stuff, but if you have faith that it’s there I think it’s worth it because there are lots of little continuity nods you might miss otherwise.
I probably need to elaborate. I enjoyed Consider Phlebas, but I don’t think it was one of the better books, and definitely not what I wanted for the first introduction to the Culture.
Early books in a series have a tendency to just take a “tour” around the world: the main character interacts with a bunch of different characters, none of which are particularly fleshed out. It’s not bad for getting an overview of the setting, but the plot has a tendency to take a dive in service of seeing more of the scenery. It tends to end up pretty dated because the author often ends up taking his setting in a different direction. A couple of characters from The Colour of Magic show up again, but generally in pretty inverse proportionality to how important they were in the plot of the book. I don’t remember any of the characters from Consider Phlebas being important.
Point well taken, but I don’t think it’s one of the worst books either, and I don’t think many characters in the series make a second appearance.
Fair point. And if you consider the broader concepts of Consider Phlebas (as opposed to specific characters), a lot of them (Idiran War, Special Circumstances, Minds, Subliming civilizations) come back in later books in basically the same form.
I wish we had gotten a few more books during the Idiran War though. It was a really cool setting, and Consider Phlebas jumped around too rapidly to enjoy it as much as I’d like.
As you discovered, there are people who like Rincewind, or at least Rincewind stories. I think I’ve see people say they like the character.
One of Pratchett’s gifts was sympathy with a wide range of personality types, and he turned that into a great solution to the problem of writing a long series and keeping it interesting by setting up ensembles of very different characters.
Re: Declare. It kind of helps to know that the premise of this book is “what if the secret history of the Great Game and especially the Cambridge Five was really about fighting over control of Lovecraftian horrors from beyond space between Russia and the West? Some familiarity with the latter especially & the Cold War in general definitely deepens the impact of the book.
Regardless, it’s a top class spy thriller mixed up with a Lovecraftian descent into madness: I loved it 🙂
I recommend The Kingkiller Chronicles highly for a good fantasy series. I’ve read the first two books multiple times in anticipation of the third and final, which still does not have a definite release date date.
Patrick Rothfuss is a brilliant storyteller that wields words like few others to create a unique and engaging world with its own brand of sword and sorcery. Those that write these books off as teenage power fantasy are missing the point. Kvothe is a living legend telling his story in his own words. As he says, “You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.”
I LOVED the Kingkiller Chronicles. I was actually going to make a post and recommend those books to everybody here. They are such a different approach to fantasy writing. If you’re feeling jaded about fantasy/sci-fi, I think these books are for you. A very fresh take.
He is taking FOREVER with that third book.
I had a very mixed reaction to those books. He is obviously a very good writer. But he spends a lot of pages not moving the plot very far, and I find his protagonist irritating.
I couldn’t get into the first book. I can handle some boring, but I can’t handle boring told in the past tense.
I would strongly recommend anybody to wait for the series to conclude before picking these up. The first book is excellent, and even when the story isn’t moving, Rothfuss is always doing something that seems worthwhile, but the second book is a bit of a train wreck. The story barely moves, and when it does it always seems to move in the direction of less interesting things, the characters all very quickly get tiresome and bland (Kvothe in particular seems like a completely different, much worse person), and overall it makes me worried for the fate of the series. As good as the first book is, it’s not going to be very satisfying if the story doesn’t have a decent ending.
Since you specifically noted “easy and fun” books: I’ve been impressed by how many enjoyable good older kids’ / young adult books are — it seems like these are much more abundant than when I was a kid. (I have a pre-teen voracious reader, which has exposed me to a lot.) The Bartimaeus series by Jonathan Stroud is fun and clever. The Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, and the similar one about Norse gods, are enjoyable. A few that I’ve only read one book of, but enjoyed, are Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series, and “Spy School” (“Evil Spy School” is hilarious.)
Similarly (on the high end of children’s books with the Bartimaeus trilogy), His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman and Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.
Also on the high end of children’s books–Tamora Pierce. Her writing has in general gotten stronger with time. It’s very hard to pick a favorite series–I’d say “everything but the Lioness quartet.”
Very feminist, but I enjoy them.
That’s an opinion I’ve never seen before. The Lioness Quartet seems to be almost universally the favorite, with a few votes for Protector of the Small or Immortals. And it’s certainly way better than the Trickster books, which were terrible and you should definitely avoid.
When I was younger I read a great deal of her books. Quite liked them. The first two quartets (were they both quartets?) were the strongest, in my opinion.
>Very feminist, but I enjoy them.
iirc in the one I read the only thing like that was the main character being a female warrior. Is it different in other books or is that what you mean?
Pretty much everything Diana Wynne Jones wrote is outstanding. Charmed Life may be my favorite.
I really liked the Dresden Files series. They’re solid urban fantasy novels, they’re on the lighter side, and they have a gripping pace. They move pretty nicely from noir-ish magical mysteries to world-shaking apocalypses, and are enjoyable at either scale. And the main character, Harry Dresden, is snarky and fun to watch.
Dead Beat is probably my favorite of the series, and doesn’t depend much on the previous books.
Just a warning, he wrote the first three books on his own before he had publishers or editors or anything and it shows. The series grows a beard with the fourth book, Summer Knight, and mostly just keeps getting better.
Seconding Dead Beat as containing a lot of high points. Though my favorite bit* won’t make sense until after you’ve read Skin Game.
*Uneel cenlf sbe uryc qrnyvat jvgu n sbezre Qranevna naq trgf vg sebz n shgher xavtug bs gur pebff.
Another heads up: When he started writing he clearly knew nothing about the city of Chicago and it’s geography. I found this highly disorienting. He gets better at it as the series goes on.
Why do you want a series? Are you opposed to variety? Do you not trust the author of a book you liked to write other books you like?
No, I was just interested in finding a new series. 🙂 It’s been awhile.
I started this thread because I realized, with horror, that I was about to re-read the Dark Tower series for the umpteenth time. Didn’t want to do that; but wanted to take a long dive into a new world.
It was also just a way of narrowing the conversation – rather than any book you can think of, let’s talk about different series we enjoyed.
Nobody’s mentioned Vinge’s bobble series or zones of thought series, probably because they are too obvious, or maybe because they are too short, but both are worth reading.
A dark horse nobody has mentioned is Kage Baker’s “Company” series, an interesting take on paradox-free time travel and some very witty writing. I should say I’ve ready only the first two, but I’m on-board for the rest as time presents itself.
I quite liked Jo Walton’s three-novel series starting with Farthing, an alternate history series in which Britain accommodated itself to Nazi Germany. The first two are mysteries with that setting, while the third is less mystery than thriller.
Sprague deCamp wrote five historical novels set in the ancient world, not a series since they are independent, but with a consistent Spraguish voice. I see that they have been released on Kindle with introductions by Harry Turtledove, which makes the effort I went to a decade ago to get mostly non-smelly used library copies seem sort of silly. An Elephant for Aristotle was the first and perhaps the best.
I keep going back to Lindsey Davis’s series about a hard-boiled detective in Vespasian’s Rome. (That sounds a little hokey, but it’s completely serious and totally works.) Silver Pigs is the first.
I haven’t actually read the Jo Walton series mentioned, but based on how much I liked her book Among Others (Which is best enjoyed along with Lev Grossman’s trilogy starting with The Magicians, btw) I’m seconding it anyway.
If you’re going to mention Among Others, you ought to make the meta-recommendation: read the books it recommends.
I wouldn’t recommend most of them. My taste is pretty different from the protagonist’s. Also, many of them either aren’t series or aren’t light reading.
But I will recommend the first five books in Roger Zelazney’s Amber series.
“The camels are coming” by W.E. johns. It’s a bunch of sequential short stories from the POV of a pilot in WW1. (which Johns was himself.) Very easy reading.
Any Solomon Kane stories by Robert E. Howard. Howard is just a great writer and Kane is a cool character.
That time I did notice the repeated “my” – possibly because it was either side of a hyperlink boundary.
(I was one of several people in the previous thread who said we notice typos in general but miss the repeated word errors.)
I commented about Gelman’s Garden of Forking Paths on the SSC subreddit post for the “Can we link perception and cognition” SSC post, and I asked how Scott reconciles being a (normative and descriptive) Bayesian with his use of frequentist statistical tests, but it didn’t generate much discussion there.
The question isn’t specific to Scott, since I’ve seen the same basic issue in journal articles. For example, here is an article that makes strong claims about Bayesian inference being statistically optimal (and about perception being Bayesian in nature), only to then run frequentist, which is to say non-Bayesian, which is to say sub-optimal statistical tests in order to make claims about their data and how it relates to their theoretical interests.
As I mention in one of my reddit comments, it’s also an issue for me insofar as I mostly use Bayesian statistical software for my own research, only to turn around and teach null hypothesis significance testing to students.
So, maybe all of this will generate some interesting discussion here? Are there any normative and/or descriptive Bayesians who use non-Bayesian statistical analyses? If so, how do you justify doing so? Is doing so inconsistent?
Most time of I talk about statistics here are me being confused about studying it. But this snippet I can answer:
This sounds a possibly slightly separate issue, one of institutional inertia. The stats dept at my institution has several fairly active Bayesian groups, but their presence at the curriculum level manifests as modules with names along the lines of “Bayesian Inference I, II” and so on. The first undergraduate statistics module the freshmen take is still about NHST.
It seems to me (as someone who uses a lot of statistics and probability theory, without as much formal background in it as he’d like) that there are at least three good reasons for using the frequentist methods:
a. In some fields or publications, people expect to see them used. (This isn’t necessarily unreasonable, either–if all the previous results in this area used a certain set of statistical tests, it might be worthwhile to have the same tests applied to the next result.)
b. In some cases, they’re a really good fit for the problem you’re trying to solve, and they’re already there in the form of existing tools that can be picked up off the shelf and applied.
c. For a class, there may be people expecting any basic stat class to cover significance testing and standard tests (chi-square tests of independence, T-tests, etc).
I think the phrase “institutional inertia” is very apt here, and these are three good points. My own take on it is essentially identical to your b and a combination of your a and c.
Part of the reason that I am not a Bayesian ideologue is that I think that frequentist tests are sometimes (perhaps rarely) the right tool to use. I also think it’s worth thinking about the frequentist properties of Bayesian models.
In addition to people expecting certain tools to be used and/or certain topics to be covered in a class, I think it’s important for students to be able to read published literature and understand what is reported. Even if it were Statistically Correct to completely stop using frequentist tests immediately, and even if we somehow actually did so, people would still need to understand frequentist tests in order to access the information in nearly everything that came before The Great Embayesianing.
https://vimeo.com/75568821
Some major points from 45 minutes:
This is based on recent research (including a lot of video) about how violence happens. The big theory is that people don’t actually like being violent– it frightens them, and being frightened makes people less competent at everything, including violence.
The more frightened side tends to lose.
Violence is so difficult that even Nazis (the original Nazis) couldn’t reliably make violence happen at demonstrations.
So, in the real world, there’s a lot of bluster and a lot of potential violence which ends with both sides making threats and then bailing out.
The important thing is not amplify fear/tension.
Randall Cranston has also written a book called Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory— it goes into a lot more detail.
The other important thing is, practice makes perfect. If your adversaries are practiced in the art of violence and your friends aren’t, they are going to win even if you brought twice as many friends and better armed as well.
So figure out what you are going to do about that before you go to a place where violence might happen.
Killology has been studied for a while, no? The methodology often seems flawed, but then the idea isn’t new – it’s much, much, much harder for people to actually kill each other than we’d actually first imagine.
Can’t commit 45 minutes right now. Is this Dave Grossman or something related to him? I read his book, but there’s some problems with his methodology, I’ve heard.
He bases his work heavily on that of SLA Marshall, who has been accused of things that are just a tiny bit short of academic fraud. I suspect that Grossman overstates the reluctance to kill, but I think there’s definitely a core of truth that people don’t like to kill and will avoid it if they reasonably can.
Not Grossmanm, but related ideas in a more academic context.
While practice certainly matters, as John said above, I am exceedingly skeptical of the idea that it is hard to get humans, tabula rasa, to kill other human beings.
All the research I’ve seen is either:
A) Conflating “humans are innately resistant to killing other humans and afraid of violence” to “post-Industrial humans socialized in relatively peaceful, affluent, low-violence cultures are resistant to killing other humans and afraid of violence”.
B) based on fraudulent data (SLA Marshall)
or C) Both.
@bean @Trofim_Lysenko
About Marshall – it seems like the common explanation people adopting Marshall’s stats gave (basically, “people don’t like to kill other people, more than they are afraid to die often, so you have to train them to kill other people”) is kind of backwards. If killing other people requires exposing yourself to death, of course most people will err towards taking cover, firing blind, etc.
I think a lot of people would be surprised just how much combat training (and ironically enough medical training) is not about the work itself so much as getting the student to be comfortable with imminent mortality.
And landscaping. It’s important to understand What Makes The Grass Grow.
Seriously, though, I suspect that to some extent we’ve had to develop the specialized training in order to compensate for a certain de-sensitization that used to come from simply being in a society where violence was more common, people died earlier and more often and around family or ‘civilians’ rather than medical professionals in a private health care environment, and so on.
Unfortunately, I can’t really falsify that hypothesis because the only numbers I have for things like PTSD prevalence are estimates that go back to WW2, and I’m not sure I trust the WW2 statistics. In every “war” since WW2 it seems to be around 18% of combat vets (1 in 6) developing full-blown PTSD with rather more displaying other less severe psychological reactions, but the WW2 estimate is only 5% which seems really low, and I suspect is confounded by the stoicism of self-reporters (later numbers are from a mix of VA statistics, non-VA medical studies, and surveys).
@dndnrsn
Yep, pretty much, on top of the issue of socialization and life-long training I mentioned above (plenty of examples of average people in other times, places, and cultures having much fewer scruples). BTW, replied to you back on that old thread re: multiculturalism, it’s getting really old though so unsure if you want to continue it in a top level comment on this OT.
Have done so below.
Some current reading: The long version of Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. It’s been too long since I’ve read the short version to be sure, but this one seems to be half again as long, and much richer. On the other hand, I’m a more careful reader.
Anyway, it’s about the human race being menaced by mind-controlling slugs. The future tech is pretty carefully worked out (including small portable phones and what I think is satellite-based locating (possibly radio based)– on the other hand, their reconstructive surgery is much better than ours). Heinlein is better at character than he usually gets credit for, as shown by the main character gradually gets his feet under himself. The book is also notable for the portrayal of a happy marriage.
There’s a fine moment of horror at the beginning, when clear thinking is essential to keep normal social behavior from leading to disaster. The horror is that getting it wrong would have been so easy.
Also, I’m about halfway through Charles Stross’ The Delirium Brief. Very intense horror.
This is from the Laundry series– the premise is that there are things which are very dangerous to know, and there’s a British ministry which recruits and controls people who come close to learning the wrong stuff in math and computer science.
What’s worse, the more computation and people there are on earth, the tastier we look.
It’s very Heinleinian in it’s fascination with how things work, and un-Heinleinian because Stross doesn’t believe that healthy adults should be able to kill people (under legitimate circumstances) without caring. (Heinlein may not be completely consistent about this, but it’s definitely an idea that shows up.)
I had been following the Laundry series for a long time, but I slowly lost interest once it started delving into subjects like vampires and elves and superheroes. Not because I have anything against any of those — I have vampires and elves in my library, and I’ve made it through all million-ish words of Worm and an embarrassing volume of fanfic — but because I’m pretty sure Stross does, and that contempt shines through in his writing. Buck the literary conventions if you like, I’m all for that, but it’s not very fun to read a story where about half the worldbuilding is devoted to slowly and painfully working out why the literary conventions are stupid.
Though it was kinda cute how the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was a literal manic pixie.
My feeling is that Stross elves aren’t much like anyone else’s elves. He might think they’re a satire, but I’m happier to think of them as an independent creation.
I’m very dubious about the evolutionary claim– as I recall, those elves developed language later in their history than humans, so they use geases to structure their societies. Does this even make sense?
Oddly, that contempt you’re complaining about is what drove me out of the Stross’ Merchant Princes series. I just can’t believe in a medievalish society that doesn’t have anything good about it.
Seconding your opinion on elves. Stross really likes writing characters who are ambiguously human (like the sentient sexdoll protagonist of Saturn’s Children)[*]. His elves have more to do with this than with satire.
Meanwhile the PHANGs are more of a HPMOR style “how would this really work” thought experiment.
[*] I love that he tries this, but I don’t think he’s ever been fully successful. He chickened out and wrote the primary elf-character mentally ill, in a way that makes her more human-like. Freya is a brilliant idea but I wish he’d sat on it for a year and rethought parts of her (in particular, her traumatic “education” doesn’t really make sense)
I have similar issues with HPMOR — it’s at its best when it’s seriously trying to build a little bit of consistency around the rather absurd Harry Potter universe, and it’s at its worst when it gives that up in favor of pointing and laughing.
The technical distinction between the two is not always clear, but one takes me out of the world and one doesn’t.
Interesting. I got that feeling from Jennifer Morgue, where he felt obligated to do an Ian Fleming pastiche since he’d been doing all the other classic spy-novel writers but couldn’t dredge up any respect for the source material. I wish he hadn’t bothered.
With both vampires and elves, I think he was trying to tell the story straight – postulating that they exist in this universe, how do they work and how does the Laundry deal with them?
And now you’ve got me wondering whether the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” thing was deliberate. I hadn’t caught that the first time through.
I believe that in blog posts / comments on Antipope that Stross has explicitly stated the MPDG gag was intentional. She is certainly /named/ as such explicitly in the latest book.
Here.
I’ve been a little conflicted about the Laundry series, since The Annihilation Score was unbelievably, offensively bad — essentially a vicious, all-out attack on his own readers — and then The Nightmare Stacks, which was a completely non-Bob-and-Mo book that had a new and very likable hero, was quite good. Without spoilers, which is The Delirium Brief? It’s a Bob book, so I’m concerned, and the end of TNS introduced some cartoonishly incompetent obviously-Tory government ministers so I’m worried about political digs. On the other hand, if it’s a focus on horror, that’s the best part of the series.
Stross is capable of writing good books, but he often directs his abilities in the direction of petty spite, which is why every new release from him is nervewracking.
I likewise disliked The Annihilation Score. I’m reading these books because I want to read about people being awesome, and Mo just totally fails at being awesome.
I enjoyed The Delirium Brief. I have liked all the Bob books. Certain bits of this one were stupid but there was quite a bit of horror.
The story featured cartoonishly incompetent politicians, and also some cartoonishly evil public figures. I don’t follow British politics that closely, so it was difficult for me to judge which of them mapped to which politicians, but I think it’s likely that many political digs were made and went straight over my head.
I didn’t hate The Annihilation Score that much, but I was bewildered by how angry Mo was at Bob. On the other hand, she was pretty ground down. I was mostly amazed at how invested I was in their marriage.
I didn’t like Alex. On the other hand, I mostly enjoyed the invasion.
I’d say The Delirium Brief is basically horror. I’m about a hundred pages from the end, and some bits are getting kind of repetitious (Fpuvyyre’f lhpxl cnenfvgr), but I’m expecting all hell to break loose in satisfying fashion.
I’ve finished reading The Delirium Brief.
I’d say it was pretty good, overall, though the big fight at the end wasn’t ideally clear, but it was still suspenseful and had a number of fine moments. Rereading the series is on the agenda at some point, perhaps when it’s finished.
The big political issue that I saw Stross putting front and center is politicians who are willing to sell off chunks of government without any care about how well things are run.
Mo was awesome, but a little irritatingly Social Justice-y.
I don’t think it’s fair to say Stross was opposed to England being subject to a Christian takeover. He was very clear that Schiller’s church was *not* Christian, it was monsters with some Christian trappings. (Pun not intended.)
The parasites owe a far amount to Heinlein’s puppet masters, though at least the puppet masters stayed on the *outside* of people’s bodies.
There’s a substitution which has a bit of an echo of Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, but for all I know, the device may have been used elsewhere.
This is my biggest problem with Stross as well–I know authors put themselves in books, but Stross is more blatant than most about putting his politics in his work, and what’s worse, his fetishes (I’m fine with icky-to-me sex, especially if the point is that it’s icky, but his biggest fetishes are, well, political. :P)
I remarked to a friend, about 100 pages into Delirium Brief, that as far as the writing was concerned, Stross seemed more upset about England being taken over by Christians than by the Sleeper in the Pyramid.
Annihilation Score is another one I disliked in part because I didn’t think Stross respected the source material. And I’m with him on this one. One of my geek heresies is, I think comic-book superheroes are a very silly and childish idea and no story truly benefits from their presence. But Stross’s formula for the “Laundry” series works far better when he is writing a homage to something he admires or at least an investigation of something that intrigues him.
Also, Mo. Like Nancy, I’ve been surprisingly invested in that marriage. Annihilation Score made me want to see Bob ditch Mo and find himself a proper partner.
Good god, yes. Word of God on the blog is very clear that “Readers are wrong, Bob isn’t great, he keeps doing horrid things, you should like Mo!” (And I did like Mo, in books 1-4. Quite a lot.)
The Annihilation Score–which he openly describes as making it clear that Bob is awful and Mo is great–makes her seem like one of the worst people in the series. Not to mention that Bob’s betrayal is…not telling her enough about Mhari, whereas she openly hooks up with a coworker, and we’re supposed to see it as noble.
(This is why I complain about his fetishes, which contain a certain part of “men are trash, women are perfect beings”, getting into the text.)
I don’t know about the fetishes bit, but Andrew is right about Stross’ position on Mo, Bob, and The Annihilation Score.
I might have liked Alex less than Mo as a protagonist, although it’s a close run.
Stross despised Alex, and it broke the book. As Marion Zimmer Bradley said, the hero can’t be a wimp. He can be evil, but stories are about someone doing something, and if there’s no real strong somebody, and no strong actions taken by the somebody, and the setting just sits there from previous books- not much left. Previous books were good.
Stross likes Bob, and the left politics balance the (very good) Boy’s Own Paper arguments between the hero and the brave SAS officer about who has the honor of staying to die fighting the Nazi demons. Stross likes Mo, and he wrote a good book where she does stuff and meets an interesting guy the moment she falls out with her husband. Stross hates Alex, and the book just sits there. The new book with Bob looks good.
I don’t mind that he’s a wimp. With respect to MZB, good books have been written where the hero’s a wimp (including a lot of Lovecraft stories — it was kind of a Lovecraft trademark, really), and you could even get some good mileage out of the contrast between his wimpy personality and the brutally potent supernatural powers he’s gotten his hands on. It might not have been the best choice for Nightmare Stacks’ plot, which was about half a step away from milSF, but that’s more a question of theme than likeability.
But I couldn’t stand the self-pity. Couldn’t stand Mo’s self-pity either, but I really couldn’t stand the narration leaning over my shoulder every few pages to tell me how much of a loser Alex was, and Mo at least didn’t have that.
I read the deprecation of Alex as self deprecation mostly (it was never clear to me in this book when we’re in Alex’s head.). Because it’s so obviously wrong – First of Liars is the one with a correct understanding of Alex (as is usual for the MPDG trope.)
A lot of it didn’t read as self-deprecation for me, because a lot of it wasn’t stuff that Alex would be thinking about in that way. It’s totally reasonable for an awkward, sheltered young nerd to have a low opinion of himself — and Alex does, and we see some of that. But a lot more of the narration reads more like the low opinion an older, less awkward, and more politically involved nerd — not to put too fine a point on it, but one a lot like Charles Stross — would have of him.
Contrast, say, Randy Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon, whose narration’s just as frequently critical, but by his own standards and for reasons that make sense for where he is in life.
Alex is a nerd who is in over his head and knows it, which is not the same thing as being a wimp. It is particularly not the same thing as being a wimp when the nerd in question doesn’t break under pressure and does do the right thing at nigh-suicidal risk when, in spite of being in over his head, he can figure out what the right thing is.
I encountered my first “kitchen tip” line on a restaurant bill yesterday. I admit I had an immediate negative reaction bordering on disgust, but thinking about it a bit at least dulled those feelings. It does seem like something I would have a hard time explaining to someone from a non-tipping culture without feeling really embarrassed.
Any thoughts on this? To be clear, the idea is that what would be the “tip” line on the bill becomes “server tip”, and any amount added to the “kitchen tip” goes to kitchen staff. It is a different intervention in the ongoing battles, including court cases, over the distribution of tips within restaurants.
(I may add some underdeveloped socio-economic thoughts about this later.)
I think what I would think of such a thing depends heavily on whether this is in a state where servers are paid less than minimum wage (and kitchen staff are not). AIUI there are also arrangements where the kitchen staff is given a certain percentage of the bill (out of the server’s pocket if there is no tip) rather than a portion of the “actual” tip, and those seem more unjust than simply getting a percentage of the tip.
Many restaurants have arrangements where a certain percentage of the tip goes to the kitchen staff. But when those are involuntary (which may not be the same thing as “directed by management”, but that tends to be what leads to court cases), it raises the question of who the tip legally belongs to to start with. Courts have been leaning towards the interpretation that it belongs to the server, and therefore mandatory tip redistribution schemes are illegal.
So what do you do when prompted for this? Do you split the ~18% that would go to the server? Do you give an additional fraction on top of that?
One of the weird things about the phenomenon (I read a few articles afterward) is that owners/managers know this is a touchy subject, so there’s no strong guideline. The quoted advice in this article is “We explained, come up with your tip, and take a dollar or two out for the cook, so the math stays simple.”
Basically, there’s a social convention that results in customer-facing staff making more money than they would otherwise. Owners would really, really rather that some of that money go instead to kitchen staff, but it isn’t their money to give. So this is an attempt to work around that limitation.
My initial reaction, like yours, is disgust, and thinking more about it doesn’t dull (or sharpen) that at all for me. Free from context, the simple option of giving more $$$ to kitchen staff isn’t particularly offensive. But I have the intuition that if such a “kitchen tip” becomes more common, it will be used as an excuse by employers to pay the kitchen staff less than they otherwise would, with tips making up the difference. Which would be bad for a few reasons, including the fact that tipping is inconsistent and unpredictable for the employees, and the fact that if “kitchen tipping” becomes encoded as a social norm like “server tipping” has, customers will receive even less accurate information about food prices in restaurants than they already do, because they’ll always be coerced into paying the “kitchen tip” by social forces.
And adding on yet another area in which tipping is expected serves to strengthen the norm of tipping, which is a system I find very harmful and unjust. In addition to the above problems of income unpredictability and inaccurate price information, there’s the fact that it’s virtually impossible to enforce regulations on all the tipping decisions, which means payment amounts that are determined on the basis of things like the employee’s sex, race, gender-identity become virtually impossible to prevent. We need to strictly reduce the areas in which people are asked/expected to tip, not increase.
I’m not sure how we ended up with a social convention for tipping for direct service, but we do. And since we have a well-established convention for that, and pay scales for direct service staff that are built around that convention, I think this is a fairly effective way of providing fair compensation for good service and I do not support attempts to abolish tipping for direct service staff.
But I also haven’t a clue how to establish such a convention from scratch for other restaurant staff, except that this isn’t it. And absent such a convention, it feels like cheap extortion. “Give us moar moneyz, or feel guilty!” How much do I have to pay to not feel guilty? To not look bad in front of my friends? How much did I already pay you as part of the bill? Without knowing, I’m tempted to go full Steve Buscemi on this one.
If I’m paying all of your staff (front and back of house), then what exactly are you selling me? Renting me a table for an hour and buying some raw ingredients?
Why, cultivating relationships with local growers and maintaining a culture of culinary innovation, of course. Not to mention all the $10 adjectives decorating the menu.
I agree: the reason you tip the servers and not the kitchen staff is that there is a sense in which the customer hires the server as an intermediary between himself and the restaurant. Which is why you don’t tip when buying food you pick up at the counter. You’re paying the server for table service. The price of the food preparation should be included in the price of the food, especially if it’s going to be included automatically (so you can’t just pay less if the food turns out not to taste good, as you can tip less if the service is bad).
By the way: was this in the US?
I always hide some bills under a plate so whoever cleans the table can hide the money before the bosses see. A boss who controls the tips is a bad boss. Bad bosses like petty officiousness. A line item for tips is petty officiousness.
Good service in a restaurant depends on a chain of 3-5 employees all doing their job well. The obvious one for the customer is the server and hostess, but what the customer doesn’t see is the busboy/dishwasher/cook/manager all being potentially major kinks in the chain (even just the side work done by servers is a bottle neck some nights). Managers often struggle to find a good balance here as a particularly friendly/sexually permissive server, or one that deals drugs on the side or whatever can get their meals out a little quicker, get their requests a bit faster to the detriment of the whole restaurant if the manager isn’t on top of things.
So a server who is personally friendly, sexually permissive, gives me drugs, and gets my meal fast doesn’t personally deserve a tip? Because I worry so much about the poor boss just trying to stay on top of things and steal her tips.
I thought the implication was that they were selling drugs to the kitchen staff and getting their tables’ orders prioritized, slowing down all the others.
Do people normally tip their dealers? Is that a standard practice? Or would you be worried that if you were stingy when you tipped them as a server, they’d be stingy when they cut your drugs? I think I’d rather maintain a single professional relationship with my dealer rather than trying to interact with them in two different capacities, but probably others are a lot more socially flexible and could handle the situation.
If she’s giving drugs to the cooks so I get my order faster, I’d tip her. I mean if the noble boss of this odd eatery doesn’t steal her tips for huh? A good balance?
I tip so I won’t be a dick. I hide the bills because a lot of bosses are.
Yes, Portland OR. The articles I turned up suggest it started in L.A. and Seattle.
Because of course it is.
A great way to improve social skills is to collect signatures to qualify for a ballot. (I’m unsure if you need signatures to run in the California Senate Dem primary.) You have to go up to lots of strangers and ask them to sign something, and often these strangers will ask you questions, but more often they just reject you which is great if you want to overcome fear of social rejection.
Via Marginal Revolution
Universal Basic income analysis
An ungated version was posted in their comments:
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~dcalnits/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Calnitsky_Latner_Social_Problems_BI_in_a_small_town.pdf
In addition, according to the wiki page on the project, the program functioned much more like a Negative Income Tax, with benefits reduced by a set amount for every dollar earned from work.
I believe that an oft cited benefit of other UBI forms is that there is no ‘penalty’ for working, and as such even low paid and part time work is still benefical. Under the scheme presented, it seems that there is no reason to work such jobs as you would end up on net with little extra – trading away an hour of free time for only half an hour of pay, or similar.
There is no reason to work unless a job is enjoyable or well paid. Some see that as a feature.
Their view being that unless someone can do something that either is fun or very valuable to others, it is better for him to live on, and be dependent on, other people?
Thanks for the ungated version!
Leaving aside whether mass technology-driven unemployment is possible or evitable, many UBI supporters believe it to be inevitable, and in that case reducing labor market participation is a feature, not a bug.
Ok, here’s my attempt to summarize the paper linked by sohois above.
The Manitoba was different from other basic income experiments in that whereas other studies have used randomized participants with controls, this one offered the income to the entire town of Dauphin (it was take up by about 20% of residents, if I’m understanding the data correctly), along with randomly selected participants from the surrounding county.
This paper in particular attempted to determine the ‘community context’ effects of UBI – does being part of a community receiving UBI decrease workforce participation rate even more than just the individual reasons why people would drop out of work given a guaranteed income?
The paper found a 11% reduction in the workforce participation rate, which they compared to the difference of workforce participation in a country like the US or Canada to that of Belgium. They found that 30% of that drop was due to the ‘community context’ effects, which was lower than predicted by some critics of UBI.
Most of the drop in workforce participation was attributed to single-headed households. Reasons often cited for reducing hours included to care for relatives/children and to undertake education/training.
The paper also mentioned that the study was curtailed somewhat do to running out of funds earlier than anticipated, partly due to inflation.
An omen?
What is the best online resource for philosophical question asking?
I was taking a look at philosophy stack exchange, but many of the questions seem to go unanswered – doesn’t seem to be quite up to the stack overflow/math.stackexchange level.
Philosophy is hard to ask, since you almost always need to revise the question over and over again. This means the platform needs to be interactive (more so than foo-overflow, which prioritizes top-level questions) and people need to be invested in sticking with it until you are convinced. In other words, you should ask here.
The PhilPapers forums seemed to be decent, but they’ve been closed since March for “updating”.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/620/to-be-real?act=1
“The other week, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile… one powerful enough, news reports said, to reach Alaska with a nuclear warhead. People were shocked. But maybe that was because we were not being real with ourselves about what was going on in North Korea. What was going on? How did we get here? Producer David Kestenbaum has the story. The podcast David talks about in this story is called Arms Control Wonk. (17 1/2 minutes)
Transcript Page down to act one.
Annoyingly, Arms Control Wonk doesn’t have a transcript. But Jeffrey Lewis is one of the people to listen to in this area, and if you don’t have half an hour for the podcast, finding people like Kestenbaum who will talk to him and write up the conversation is a good way to go. And I’ll basically endorse everything in this one.
Well, OK, if you listen to the ACW podcast Jeffrey says the Hwasong-14 is 1.9 meters in diameter; I keep getting 1.7 to 1.75 meters. But he’s right about everything else, particularly the stuff he credits to me.
Fortunately for everyone, the UN has recently outlawed nuclear weapons, ha ha.
David Kestenbaum is not related to me, as far as I know.
I can’t tell which party Topher is running for.
I don’t know if this is good (because he is above such stupid arbitrary divisions) or bad (because the rationalsphere is such a bubble that the correct answer to my mystery is assumed to be default common knowledge)
Which party is he running for?
Actually, what’s assumed to be common knowledge is what a primary election is, and which party (Democratic) Feinstein belongs to.California has a jungle primary system (called “Top 2” here), where the candidates from all parties are on the same ballot and the two with the most votes overall are the general election candidates. Candidates can (and usually do) declare a party affiliation on the ballot, but that’s just about announcing what “team” you’re on and has no real procedural impact.
Topher is listed as a Democrat on his campaign’s facebook page, but I had to dig a bit to find that. I’m wondering if he’s deliberately softpedalling his partisan affiliation for strategic reasons, or if he’s just assuming that everyone will figure out he’s a Democrat from his policy positions.
Why is Topher running for the Senate rather than the House of Representatives? As an ignorant foreigner, I would expect the latter to be a lot easier to get in to.
There are very few competitive House races in California, and there’s a long line of established politicians (mayors, state legislators, congressional staffers, etc) ready to jump into them whenever there’s an open seat or a vulnerable incumbent. If you’re going to lose anyway, there’s an argument for running for a bigger race where you’ll get more attention and make better contacts that you can use to affect the debate and to get on people’s radar for the future.
Also, since it looks like Topher works for Google in the Bay Area, he probably live in Anna Eshoo’s or Ro Rhanna’s district, and based on his policy positions vs theirs, he’s probably got much less reason to launch a protest candidacy against them than against Feinstein.
What’s sort of baffling about this is that it looks like Topher is trying to be the Donald Trump in this race, i.e., he’s running as an outsider on a platform that an established candidate probably realizes can’t be enacted in the current political environment.
As a right-winger, I assure you that Feinstein is one of our boogeymen, and if she didn’t get it for you, it probably couldn’t be forced through the Senate by anyone.
I actually hope this guy wins, because knocking ol’ Dianne out of her seat would be so delightful. And as our side is discovering with the President’s executive orders on immigration, you can bash your head against a wall for a while if you don’t know what strings to pull to get things done.
Conservative bogeyman /= someone who tries to give everyone on the left everything they want. I would have thought that would be obvious, but as usual, outgroup homogeneity bias is strong.
No politician gives their constituents everything they want–they’re limited by what’s politically possible. That’s my point. I’m saying that a lot of the left-wingers unhappy with Feinstein are like the Republican voters who were banging their spoons on their high chairs about “RINOs” and proceeded to make Donald Trump the nominee.
If you want to trade a very experienced leftist who’s effective at navigating the Senate and has seniority on whatever committee she decides to join, because she’s not quite as leftist as you would like, knock yourselves out. I’ll be cheering for you.
My own issues with Feinstein are not that she is not quite left enough. I do not know what the issues of the various people supporting this campaign are, but I’m sure that’s not the issue for all of them either (I expect their concerns are varied). Again, someone can be a conservative bogeyman without being ideal, or even very good at all, from any given leftist perspective.
Well, considering that Trump is a left-wing boogeyman without giving conservatives anything we wouldn’t get from a generic Republican, I guess I can’t argue with that.
Indeed, relative to the state she represents, Feinstein is actually the Democratic senator most likely to vote with Republicans, according to 538’s tracker. There are about ten senators in red/purple states who vote more conservatively than Feinstein, but she is a clear outlier.
Ugh, Harris. Why do California Democrats elect such horrible senators? (Admittedly, I can’t point to much awful she’s done in her short time in the senate so far, but as an AG she was horrifyingly enthusiastic about trading justice for publicity).
I tend to agree that Brennan would probably be less effective than an experienced pol with seniority. I suppose the best cases for someone who agrees with his ideas are:
1) Some of his technocratic ideas (a water trading market, for example) might be achievable. If he gets them into conversation, then maybe some of them will happen.
2) Again, thinking best case, he might be a Rand Paul type of the left (an effective advocate and rallying point for like minded party members) or a Bernie Sanders (not that effective, but what was government going to accomplish anyway, and it’s satisfying to hear your viewpoint advanced).
Having a market is technocratic? What does that make the existing ration system?
@Incurian – bureaucratic. 🙂
If every girl at the party is going to reject you, you might as well ask out the prettiest one.
However, if you start at the top of your list and work down, you might miss some opportunities.
A woman told me about noticing how low she was on a man’s list, and she was furious. I don’t know whether she would have accepted his offer if she hadn’t seen him asking the others.
I’m pretty sure there’s something about this in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, But I don’t remember exactly how it went. Also: xkcd
I’ve had multiple breakups where the girl’s primary complaint was “I think you’re settling for me and I refuse to be settled for.”
So the “just lower your standards” argument only goes so far…
Did you actually feel you were settling for them? Did you come to a conclusion about why they felt they were being settled for?
I think I’m just a very logical and unemotional person such that I’m probably incapable of big, showy, romantic displays that women have come to expect, which makes them feel like they are being settled for.
I also have a personal philosophy that all relationships are essentially a form of settling, as no person is perfect, and I reject the “perfect for ME” construction that many seem to rely on.
I’d absolutely love to have a rich, beautiful, smart woman “settle” for me, so it’s hard for me to relate to this as a complaint, but hey, such is life I guess.
@Matt M
Would you still feel the same if she made it plain that she considered you entirely substandard goods, well short of what a man should be, and treated you like a household servant with a convenient semen dispenser?
How confident would you be that such a person would be faithful? If anyone of the guys she tried first finds themselves single isn’t it plausible that they could steal her quite easily?
It was never alleged that I treated anyone poorly. It was more like they wanted me to tell them they were the most beautiful woman on Earth, even though we both knew that wasn’t true. I have no expectation that anyone I’m involved with will say obviously un-true platitudes about me. You can treat someone decently and respectfully without wildly over-the-top exaggerations.
Not very. But that’s also not a huge deal for me. I’m generally okay if a partner cheats, so long as I never find out about it. I’m a strong “ignorance is bliss” supporter.
That said, in my case, I’m socially awkward, struggle to meet women at all, work 50-60 hour weeks, and have virtually no hobbies outside of the house. The odds of me cheating on someone are virtually nil – even if I had the desire, there’s simply no opportunity.
People are not honest with their reasons for rejection. This seems like a nice reason for someone to reject you. I would take this as a complement that the people who want to breakup with you don’t want to hurt your feelings.
I think “my partner should think I’m perfect” is a proxy for “our relationship is so much more than the sum of its parts, that even if Frances Kirwan wanted to date him, he’d be better off sticking with me.”
Probably so, but it came up many times prior to the breakup, and I often begged and pleaded for the “real reason” insisting that I’d prefer a cold, hard truth rather than to some face-saving platitude and never got anything better.
Also, as I’ve said, it has happened more than once.
Was it “I think you are settling for me”, or “I think that you think that you are settling for me”? It seems to me that the latter is a very understandable reason for breaking up with someone. “I guess I will commit to a relationship with you, given that it doesn’t seem like I’m going to be able to do any better” is not the basis for a happy life together.
You don’t have to tell your significant other that they are special on a global scale, but you should at least be able to convince them that they are special to you.
“You’re settling for me” is like “You’re overqualified for this job.” On the face of it, it is an absurd reason to reject someone–they are bringing in sex appeal/skills that you didn’t expect to get for your offer of commitment/salary $x, and that’s all upside for you.
But it could be a valid reason to reject someone if A) you believe they would have undue power in the relationship due to the mismatch, B) you don’t believe they would actually commit for the specified amount because they would discover or overtime grow to resent the asymmetry, or C) you believe you know their interests better than them and also value their interests above yours (or it’s a face saving excuse as Brad suggests).
Probably most often it is because of B, that the declining party is looking for a commitment and believe you are going to leave once you get a better offer.
Every relationship will have some level of settling, though, perhaps even by both parties–there’s multiple axes to selecting a romantic partner, and both parties may feel they could have found someone who satisfies more criteria. But it’s a race against time. Not that there is no time to spend, but there certainly isn’t unlimited nor even just enough to evaluate and woo every potential mate, and if you want to actually be married, at some point you have to make a choice.
The great part is that, with the right attitude, your husband or wife can become and ever better fit. Maybe in the end there’s another position across country with strictly higher salary, but you’ve get along great with the boss, love your neighborhood and have senority. Wait, wrong sub-thread. You trust each other, have shared memories, are used to each other’s quirks, etc.
Because Topher knows he won’t win any election of any significance and Senate is slightly higher status (this entire campaign is, necessarily, a combination of trying to get a modicum of publicity for his policies and status points.)
It is not, to be a bit cutting, what I’d consider effective politicism. But that said the ROI on any dollars here is near zero, so Topher can buy fuzzies and fun however he pleases.
(I should clarify my first graf is not intended to be unkind; I think, though I don’t know him personally, Topher would (privately) admit essentially the same facts. This is just what it *means* when someone launches a doomed political bid.)
We have a local primary going on, and one of the county executive candidates comes right out to state that as his goal:
In the comments on conservatism’s failures, there was a lot of talk about how government keeps growing regardless of the efforts of many, and what wanting a smaller government really means.
This gave me a spark of recognition and led me to dig through some of my used book purchases that I always know I’ll get to someday. The book I finally read is called “The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America” by Philip K. Howard published in 1994.
The main thesis of the book is that the attempt to remove human judgment from the law by increasing specificity has caused massive government incompetence and a resulting hatred of regulation. It is not usually that people disagree with the intent of the regulations. It is just that the regulations are rigid, nonsensical, and often counterproductive because attempted certainty and uniformity has stamped out any flexibility of allowing regulators and citizens to adapt to circumstances.
Here is an example of such a counterproductive regulation:
p. 7
The law that people really care about is almost entirely dependent on human judgment.
p. 22
I could quote a lot more, but the gist is that the drive for certainty makes law too detailed to be knowable. It causes a disconnect between the rules and citizens’ conscience. The drive for uniformity in application leads to greatly tilted and unfair impacts. The drive for precision to eliminate loopholes does nothing but create them. The obsession with process and procedure works mostly to cause delay, increase costs, and shield bureaucrats from responsibility, doing nothing to prevent abuse.
The point I’m getting at is that I don’t think people care about the size of government as much as they just want a government that allows for sensible individual discretion. They want regulators that act like humans and not incomprehensible robots following a maze of exact rules.
The problem is, we had “sensible individual discretion”, still do in many areas, and far too often it meant that the regulator’s ingroup got every benefit of the doubt while the outgroup was held to an unreasonably high standard. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s nothing inherently objectionable about making voters pass a literacy test; it was the “discretion” of the graders that made those tests a way to nullify the 15th Amendment. To say nothing of more mundane forms of favoritism, and plain old bribery.
So: too much “reasonable discretion” and we don’t have rule of law; too little and we get the bureaucratic nightmare you describe. Government remains an unsolved problem.
And there you have another way in which centrism is correct.
I would add three highly-desirable aspects to “allows for discretion.”
One, it should be possible to know what questions/disputes are and which are not subject to government intervention.
Two, it should be possible to identify the point at which a government decision has been made, and will not be revisited.
And three, posing the same question to the same agency twice should get the same answer.
I’d add as a fourth that it’s also better at avoiding “Piso’s justice.”
Whilst this seems to be held up as a recent problem, I wonder if this is not a result of American cultural preference of somekind.
The reason why is due to accounting. When it comes to creating systems to harmonize accounting across companies, there are two broad approaches, a rules based system and a framework based system. America’s GAAP is rules based, whilst systems in other countries were typically framework based, as are the IFRS (for those unaware, IFRS are international accounting standards aimed at harmonizing reporting across the globe).
In a rules based system, accounting boards attempt to have a specific rule for every possible situation that a company may need to account for. As such, the American GAAP rulebook, iirc, has stretched to tens of thousands of pages long. This is not, however, a new phenomenon. The American GAAP has been rules based since it’s inception – in the 40s – and they continue to resist attempts to implement IFRS, in part due to the clash over rules vs framework systems (though of course a move to IFRS would be very complicated and involves many points of discussion).
Americans appear to have always favoured a system of rigid bureaucracy.
That’s an interesting point of view. I speak as a US accountant. I have thought of IFRS as being simply a more primitive system, with US GAAP putting more time and effort in fleshing out the ins and outs of various scenarios. That probably makes me a bit obnoxious to Europeans.
I actually spend a lot more time on tax rules than GAAP rules, so I will comment on that too, especially since the US seems to be an over-producer in tax rules also. I do think that the US has far too many tax laws, to the extent it fills up two large volumes. But I really like having the tax regulations that explain the tax laws, even though those constitute four times as much volume as the laws themselves. And I think pretty much every US tax accountant agrees with me. Without the regulations, we don’t know what we should do in many cases. A lack of rules means we have to guess, which means a much higher chance of being stuck in an audit with a bad result. Regulations are a good thing! Otherwise we are stuck with tax authorities who decide things arbitrarily (or at least it appears that way to us tax accountants).
And similarly with tayfie’s larger point. I think that most people don’t get as upset with lots of regulations as they are with arbitrary decisions by bureaucrats. To me lots of regulations are opposite to arbitrary decisions. The bureaucrats have to follow the regulations; that’s keeps them more under control and more predictable. Lots of LAWS are what makes government so hard to deal with — lots of regulations are a consequence of lots of laws, but mostly a mitigating factor.
And tayfie’s example of solving the wrong pollution problem has nothing to do with regulations. It has to do with bureaucrats not talking to the industry. That is a problem whether or not you have regulations.
I think that Trump’s rule of getting rid of two regulations for every one added is well meaning but a bad idea. The US government badly needs to delete 90% of its laws, and hopefully several of its departments. THEN it can delete all the related regs.
Anyone interested in reading a bit more about the 1989 EPA-Amoco study, check out the executive summary. The full writeup is available elsewhere online, but this is a pretty readable overview. You can find some more information related to the misfits between the regulations and the plant at Section 1.3.4.
Another alternative might be to legislate outcomes rather than actions. Instead of ordering Amoco to install filters on their smokestacks, say that they can’t emit more than X ppm of benzene (the thing you actually want), and let them figure out the best places to implement it. One example I’d say where this was successful is mileage regulations on cars. Doesn’t matter how you make your car more efficient – make them smaller, make better engines – just hit the target.
(“Cap and Trade” does this on the scale of an industry rather than an individual company – you set a limit across the whole economy, and let market forces figure out who can most cheaply reduce their emissions.)
This has its own hazards, in that it’s entirely possible to legislate something impossible, or to fall into Goodhart’s Law traps where the outcome you’re measuring is only a proxy for the outcome you want. Maybe it’s not affordable to filter the benzene at the loading docks, or maybe your inspectors only measure it at the smokestacks and they never even know about the loading docks. But it’s a useful tool nonetheless.
The problem with legislating outcomes is that the companies have a strong incentive to ‘teach the test.’ In the case of mileage that means setting up the car so that it performs well for the test, but not so great in daily usage. The diesel scandal was an extreme example of this.
So it’s not a panacea.
Michael Eisen, a professor of evolutionary biology at Berkeley, is also running for Senate in California. His campaign site is here:
http://www.eisen2018.com/
Im struck by how there is absolutely NO information on his campaign page about what kind of posititions he is looking to represent if elected, there’s literally nothing there but some boilerplate drivel about how he’s a “realist scientist” who has “fought powerful institutions before – and WON!” Is some of that boilerplate text supposed to be code for this or that actual position on policy (though I know we’re supposed to be against dog-whistle interpretations of politicians’ statements around here), or is that really all there is?
Continued from a previous thread, Canadian vs American Multiculturalism. Is the Canadian version better? Is the Canadian version actually more a “melting pot” than what the US has today, despite Canadian schoolchildren being taught that whereas America has a melting pot, Canada has a “salad bowl” model? Is perhaps poutine the best model for Canadian multiculturalism?
For reference, a NYT article I found very interesting: Canada’s Secret to Resisting the West’s Populist Wave – TL;DR is that Canadian-style multiculturalism (in which people are Canadians first but are encouraged to keep their old culture too, a “why not have both” sort of deal) is presented in the article as created in the 60s and 70s by Pierre Trudeau to outflank the Anglo vs French Canadian conflict (he faced a serious crisis involving, among other things, the FLQ, a terrorist group which remains one of Canada’s deadliest) and as a bonus provide voters for the Liberal party. Subsequently, and more recently, Jason Kenney of the Conservatives managed to significantly increase Tory outreach to immigrants, creating a situation where there isn’t much political polarization by ethnic group. Of course, the parties at the provincial and federal level devoted to French Canadians appeal mostly to French Canadians. But that’s the outlier. All three major national parties are more or less cool with multiculturalism as practiced here.
Unfortunately, the article notes neither that one of Trudeau’s nicknames was “the Northern Magus”, nor does it note that Kenney’s nickname was “the Minister of Curry in a Hurry”, on account of his tireless presence at South Asian (especially Sikh, I think) events.
Also for reference, the last post (@Trofim_Lysenko, not me):
There has been in Canada some condemnations of our multiculturalism as fake or insincere – Canada is still by and for whites, or even by and for Anglo whites. I think this is influenced to some degree by the US. Canadians tend to get more of our thinking than we are aware from the US – we are probably the biggest victims of Eagleland Osmosis. Canada isn’t perfect, but our worst aspect today is far less mistreatment of immigrants and far more mistreatment of aboriginals.
These pots and salads are red herrings. Immigrants to Canada have almost an entire sd higher IQ than immigrants to the US. Comparing the two models while implicitly assuming the two countries have equivalent immigrants is just silly.
Source? For the longest time – certainly, in the 60s and 70s – the popular perception (I don’t know about the reality) was that Canada was where you went if you couldn’t get into the US.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Here you can see PISA scores for immigrants in OECD countries. Backing out IQ scores puts US immigrants at ~92 and Canadian immigrants at ~104.
Link is broken. I think you mean here.
Thanks, fixed it.
As JulieK notes below, Canada and the US have different systems. Canada lets most immigrants in based on their points score, which is meant to attract youngish educated people with work experience, language skills, etc. The US lets most immigrants in as family reunification.
The scores for Canada and the US show US first generation immigrants with lower test scores than the second generation who have lower test scores than natives, and the opposite in Canada. Presumably, this is the result of most immigrants to Canada being selected on their skills: I have long guessed that the average immigrant to Canada is smarter and more educated than the average native-born Canadian and this would appear to prove me right.
However, do those stats include people in the US on work visas? My understanding is that where Canada says “hey, you know how to do computer stuff, you can be an immigrant” the US says “you can have a work visa.”
Additionally, these are modern stats. Were things the same in the 60s and 70s?
No, they are PISA scores, therefore they only represent 15-16 years old high school students.
The native scores for Americans are are almost the same as the score of second-generation migrants to the Netherlands. Fix your education system, USA!
*cough*race*cough*
Do we get to arbitrarily strike off ethnic groups we dislike, too?
The majority of current immigrants to the US qualify based on having family members there already.
It’s possible that for the minority who are admitted based on professional qualifications, the US has stricter standards than Canada.
I think the Canadian standards are higher, but transparent and consistent, while the US is arbitrary and depends on the sponsor knowing how to navigate the bureaucracy, in some sense combining to be more difficult. The UK and Australia are in between.
To drill down even more, out of just over 1 million permanent residencies granted in fiscal 2014, family sponsored accounted for 64%. Immediate relatives alone (spouse, child, parent of USC) accounted for 41% of the total.
The entire employment based system only accounted for a hair under 15%. Refugees and asylees were another 13%, and the brain-dead lottery program another 5%. Finally, there’s another 3% of odds and ends.
I’m curious as to similar stats for Canada. I can’t imagine they don’t have some kind of provision allowing e.g. citizens to marry non-citizens and bring them into the country.
There’s lots of data here. Looking at “Permanent residents by category”: of the 270K immigrants to Canada in 2016, 24.1% were sponsored family members (almost entirely spouse, child, parent, or grandparent); 11.8% were refugees/”Protected Persons”; and 62.7% were “economic” (25.8% skilled workers, 16.4% provincial nominees, the rest a mix of other programs).
Are the families of economic migrants counted differently? If I move for a job, is my family counted as economic or sponsored family members? Does it change if they come at once or five years later? Do US and Canada consider this the same way?
My quick search didn’t find an authoritative answer on how Canada counts family members of economic migrants. My
bestincorrect guess — based on this page, which talks about sponsoring your spouse “under the Spouse or Common-Law Partner in-Canada Class” and also describes steps you should be taking “while you’re still overseas” — would be that family members count as “Sponsored Family” regardless of the time frame. That does imply that the average economic migrant has fewer than one dependent, though, which seems weird.I have no idea how the US counts these things.
EDIT: Actually, looking at another dataset in my original link in which 72.7% of children under the age of 4 count as “Economic”, it seems likely that the immediate families of economic migrants are counted as economic for these datasets.
For the US accompanying family members of employment based applicants for permanent residence are counted against the preference category of the primary applicant. That’s true even if they come later under the follow to join rule. However, if they aren’t directly eligible and the primary applicant has to file a new family based petition for them (e.g. unmarried children over the age of 21) then when those family members receive PR they will be counted against their own preference categories.
The upshot is that the employment based percentage significantly overstates the number of immigrants selected on the basis of their own employment offers or qualifications.
Counting methodology aside it definitely looks like the mix is significantly different in the US vs Canada.
Thanks for the clarification.
Not if you were coming from Mexico, I think.
Immigrants from e.g. Germany preferring the US to Canada, sure, but it’s been a long time since Germany was more than a rounding error on US immigration statistics. More generally, the US a mix of low-skill labor looking for low-end jobs, often on a temporary basis, and high-skill immigration from Europe, East Asia, and the elite fringe of the rest of the world looking for the opportunities that come from hanging out in the richest nation with the most cosmopolitan cities(*) on Earth. But the former far outnumber the latter. So if Canada is the second-choice destination for the high-skill immigrants, but mostly isn’t on the map for the low-skill ones, the average human capital value per Canadian immigrant will be higher than for the US.
* OK, I’ll spot you London at least until Brexit, and maybe Vancouver. But you’re competing with New York and San Francisco here, among others.
I’ll have you know that Toronto is a world-class city (or at least produces a steady stream of needy thinkpieces about whether or not it is “world-class”, which presumably amounts to the same thing.)
With Iain here–surely Toronto is a better comparison? Several times larger than Vancouver, more diverse, and the center of finance, law, and media for Canada?
Maybe there was a brief period of time in which this was true, but America is all salad bowl for some time.
I much prefer the melting pot metaphor. That’s doesn’t mean that the characteristics of the immigrants disappear, but that they become part of the culture. Food is an obvious example of the way we’ve incorporated foreigner’s cultures, so that Italian and Mexican and Chinese food is just part of the US now. And I think that goes for deeper areas of culture too.
I think it is a good thing that just because someone has East Asian features, that doesn’t mean they necessarily have an East Asian culture. People are more free to act as they wish.
Could paranoia be healthy?
Occasionally I feel compelled to read things that are completely lacking in any sense or wisdom, that provide me with no new information, and that make me feel miserable.
I’ve found that imagining that these things are a memetic attack designed by them to sap my will has provided me with a bit more motivation to avoid them.
Likewise, if I imagine that my bad behaviour is influenced by Satan, or demons, I think I’ll be more compelled to change it.
Isn’t this a variation on the atheist ‘could being religious offer advantages?’
If you’re a person who thinks Freddy Krueger will murder you in the night for not eating your vegetables and never exercising, you’re empirically in the wrong, but probably also more physically healthy than someone who doesn’t think so.
I guess so.
But I think it’s a bit different to the Freddy Krueger case since I’m not making any predictions, and therefore can’t be proven incorrect.
It’s not even wrong, but it feels so right.
Consider the case of Kurt Gödel. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned. He did indeed manage to avoid dying of being poisoned. However his obsessive fear wasn’t accompanied by an obsessive fear of starving, and in the end he ended up failing to eat entirely and starved to death. I can well imagine our hypothetical Kruegerphobe ending up hospitalised because they got a minor injury and turned it into a major injury by continuing to exercise when they should have been resting.
So, I think, yes, an obsessive fear can have benefits, but also downsides, such that it’s unlikely to be a net benefit except under highly special circumstances. Quite possibly some obsessive fears came about because people were once in those special circumstances, and the fear remains even when the danger is long past.
We have had quite much AI talk recently: Two Kinds of Caution, AI Timelines.
I’ve remained skeptical on the plausibility of the human-level (or even under the human-level, but yet something that would be qualitatively similar to “strong”) AI in near future, and especially with the current level of AI methodology. Today I spotted a nice explanation by Francois Chollet why the current state-of-art deep learning methods are quite likely very far off from even a seed for AGI. This also casts light on the reasons why I don’t think the current timeline estimates by the current AI researchers should be trusted, especially technical researchers working on ML methods (which to my knowledge describes large majority of NIPS and even larger majority of ICML participants quite well [1]): if any steps towards creating the fundamental methods for AGI are beyond the current DL tech, every timeline estimate of those researchers is (at most) their guess when those steps will be made, a guess made with quite minimal information about what those steps would be and how they would look like (because that information is outside their field of expertise).
Instead, you might obtain a more reliable estimate by surveying scientists who study human cognition and neuroscience.
[1] The study referenced in AI timelines article surveyed NIPS and ICML participants.
Oooh, good post.
In my job I’m constantly struck by the gulf between “absolutely amazing” and “actually useful” – there are a lot of things in the current crop of AI/ML/DL techniques that are amazing. Finding a use for them is harder. There are all sorts of things that we are missing which would be needed to take things to that level, things that seem off the radar.
The progress of AI seems to go in cycles of wild hype (accompanied by smaller amounts of real solid progress) followed by AI Winters. I’ve been in the field long enough to see neural networks go from “that thing that everyone’s basically abandoned because they’ve hit their limits and, seriously, other approaches are just better” (blah blah SVMs blah blah flappy bird wings vs fixed wing aircraft blah blah) to “the new hot thing again”. The current deep learning boom, to my mind, is a strong sign that the field came come back from setbacks and that things that look like fundamental limitations may just be a generation or three away from being solved (or at least solved _enough_ that you discover some other limit to hold things up), but as to the current boom flowing seamlessly into Skynet… fat chance.
I’m getting into bullet journaling again. Here’s my planned setup.
Brief outline:
– Stalogy page-per-day notebook with daily timelines.
– Separate weekly agenda.
– Per entry I can decide if it should appear in the weekly overview or not.
I’ve been using a bullet journal for about a year now, but a demonstration of the Franklin Covey method made me feel like something was lacking in my setup. Up till now, I’ve only used weekly and monthly spreads for planning ahead, and then I’d copy those entries to the appropriate daily log when that day arrives. But there are many small tasks that I want to do in the future, but which I don’t want to clutter the weekly/monthly spreads with. The fact that daily planners already have a page for each day and a line for each hour addresses this problem.
I’m getting a Stálogy notebook, which is similar to Hobonichi. The pages are mostly empty grids, but it lists the months, days of month and days of week at the top of each page, and you’re meant to underline the appropriate ones (so it’s undated). Next to that, there’s a timeline in the margin of each page that counts from 8:00 to 21:00. This provides the advantages of a daily planner, but the flexibility of a bullet journal.
My plan is to underline the dates up front. So if I want to plan something ahead, all I have to do is flick to the appropriate page, add the task, and just forget about it until that day arrives. I can have much more peace of mind that way. I’m getting a B5-sized journal, which should be broad enough to divide the pages in two parts: the left part right next to the margin for the timeline, and the right part for untimed tasks and everything else. This way, one page per day should suffice.
But a weekly agenda is separate from that, and is meant to give me an overview of the week at a glance. I’ll use something separate for this. Maybe my digital organizer, maybe a regular weekly agenda–this is not important. The point is that this has an interesting consequence: I can decide per entry if it should appear in the weekly overview as well (by writing it down twice), or only in the daily schedule. Things like appointments will go in the weekly overview, while chores or articles I want to read will appear only in the daily schedule.
Next to that, I’ll dedicate some 50 of the 368 pages to regular bullet journaling, ignoring the timeline.
So there you have it: the best features of a weekly planner, a daily planner, and a bullet journal combined. Has anyone experimented with a similar setup? Got any feedback?
Relevant to a bunch of recent discussions, a flawed blog post with some relevant points I came across recently.
Now, let’s start with the obvious problem with the article: it’s decidedly biased against Red, and I’m saying that as someone who identifies more closely with Blue than Red. (Amusingly – at least if you’re into black humor – it’s an example of the very phenomenon it tries to describe.) Interestingly, the author recognizes that what she’s describing applies to at least parts of the left. The problem is, she’s doing that wretchedly common thing where the ingroup’s extremists are extreme while the outgroup’s extremists are representative of the group*, and thus misses the big left sectors that fit the pattern (coughsocialjusticecough). To my eyes, what she’s describing is less a tribal thing and more a general principle that currently describes sizable chunks of both left and right.
(Definite sign of bias: the author lumps the entire conspiracy sector into the right, more obviously elsewhere on her blog. Sorry, no, that sector is bipartisan.)
The first key point of the article is a worldview rooted in a specific kind of story (she calls it a Grand Narrative) with three broad groups of actors (plus a disembodied and/or impersonal force). She calls them Elect/Beta Class/Enemy; I think a more revealing set of names would be Elect/Unsaved/Damned. The critical part, however, is the conspiracy theory (or perhaps milleniarian?) definition of both the Enemy and the solution to the Enemy: “Paradise is being denied to us by [ENEMY]. If we just got rid of [ENEMY], everything would be fine.” For left circles that fit this description, that’s racists/sexists/the rich (originally one of those depending on group, but they’ve been merging together; the term for this in a left context is of course intersectionality, and I should really check how old that term is); for the equivalent right circles, that’s gays/atheists/Muslims/nonwhites/the poor (also originally separate but merging together).
The article describes this as the result of using a simple binary heuristic rather than critical evaluation… which sounds suspiciously like the difference between System 1 and System 2 thought. It proceeds to draw the obvious conclusion – that people are more likely to default to binary heuristics when they are stressed (a proxy for running short on resources) and unable to devote extra brainpower to rational thought. I would add “or fearful” to that, with fear in turn proxying for believing in reduced access to resources in the future. Corollary: a fearful and stressed nation is going to be less willing to use rational thought and more willing to default to binary heuristics.
The really important concept, however, and the main reason I’m bringing up this article, is the compaction cycle, wherein moderates in groups get pushed out when events contradict the group narrative. If you’re thinking of the group evaporative cooling concept here… well, join the club, I think it’s convergent memetic evolution. There’s two key distinctions in this version, however. First, instead of moderates choosing to leave, they (and other members slow to toe the party line) are pushed out as the group searches for scapegoats when reality doesn’t conform to their narrative. Second, members who are pushed out often join other authoritarian groups, and they respond to the pain of getting scapegoated by taking steps to prevent it happening again – which means conforming more closely to group norms and keeping a closer eye for future scapegoating. That particular part of the description seems to apply more strongly to Red than Blue – my impression is that compaction in Blue-leaning groups tends to result in the group schisming into multiple smaller groups instead. It may also be a contributing factor to the path the social justice movement has taken – a chunk of people leaving this sort of group, especially from the Christian Right, went social justice but didn’t change their underlying thought patterns. (And yes, the article’s author does sure seem to fit that description!) Not unheard of in the opposite direction either, mind you – remember, quite a few neocons were doctrinaire Marxists in their youth.
This strikes me as a major explanation for the culture wars: both sides of the culture wars are undergoing compaction/evaporative cooling. My take is that the right was further along the process for at least 15 years (1994-2010 or so), probably due to historical contingency (i.e, HMS Random Factor threw more narrative breaches at the right during that period than at the left), but the left has mostly caught up of late. (I think the left is probably still a notch or two behind, mostly on difficult-to-consciously-articulate tonal grounds.)
* – This is the part where I note that one key effect of the Internet has been to make the extremists on both sides of the culture war more visible to the outgroup…
As Emperor of the World, I find myself in a rare quandary which is why I have gathered you, my trusted advisors, in hopes of counsel. My subjects speak a bewildering variety of languages, which is really hampering the operation of my bureaucracy and causing some real problems in an era when efficient economics requires world-wide trade. My political advisers therefore advise me to reduce the number of languages in daily use. Imposing a single world language is likely to foster too much resistance, but a collection of five or even ten would still be useful, and could be done with less trouble.
Junior staffers have worked out some details without trouble. The Americas will speak English or Spanish, their choice, country by country. Chinese and Arabic can stay, they just need to converge on Mandarin and Modern Standard Arabic, respectively. India will speak Hindi; many of the Indians already do so, and most of the rest speak something very similar anyway. Russian and Indonesian can stay, too.
But there are two particularly troublesome regions that junior staffers have not found solutions for, which is why I have summoned you. First, Europe. I thought this would be simple. I proposed German, and you wouldn’t believe the whining. OK, so how about Russian for those countries close to their Slavic heritage? More whining. French, then? Still more whining. So, what to do about Europe?
Second, Africa. North Africa will speak Arabic, of course. But southern Africa is much more divided. They speak a mixture of the old colonial European languages and all sorts of local tongues. If you could find one or even two languages that are close to what they speak already, that would be most helpful.
Enjoy your stay, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll find your quarters palatial and the staff deferential. But I expect answers by the end of the week.
Why can’t Europe speak English?
Too much history, I guess. The French really hate the idea of becoming part of the Anglo-Saxon world, as they put it. The smaller nations, like Denmark and the Netherlands, probably don’t much care; they’ll have to switch to something else in every scenario.
English is the predominant second language even among the French. And French and German still have the Eww,-we’re-not-speaking-that problem. In colonised areas, the problem is sometimes solved by the imposition of a language that everyone hates equally. (Well, in India, Not so much Africa).
And then there’s Espertanto. Any hope for that?
One good way to reduce the number of languages: do nothing.
Success guaranteed
Also, why is it necessary to get rid of languages, rather than have people speak a lingua franca in addition to their native language? Most people here seem to be able to understand me when I write like this, but not wanneer ik in het Nederlands schrijf.
Do you kiss your mother with die mond haha ik doe ook maar wat.
May be preferable to reduce the number of your political advisers in daily use.
India should certainly not speak Hindi; India should speak English. The current Hindi-speakers and non-Hindi speakers will both hate this, but it will result in less strife.
Europe should be made to speak Vulgar Latin. If they complain too much about this, impose Finnish instead. Alternatively, divide the continent north from south, Vulgar Latin for the South and a Germanic language other than German or Dutch for the North; Frisian, perhaps, or maybe Swedish with Norwegian orthography.
Sub-Sarahan Africa should speak an indigenous language, but picking any particular one is likely to cause strife. I therefore suggest Navajo.
I had the same doubt. You’re right, a big enough swath of India currently speaks English that moving to that language is a better way to do the needful.
I’d advise you to get a language which nobody speaks as their first language, so that nobody can complain about favouritism when you impose it. Latin, Esperanto, or Proto-Indo-European would be good candidates.
So, a very difficult language, an absurdly easy language, and a probably very-difficult-but-we-only-have-a-tentative-reconstruction-of-it language? Frame it like that and that’s probably the best chance Esperanto has of taking off 🙂
I much prefer pdfs of books to the kindle version (on a laptop). The example version of the book you get before purchasing is also better.
Why do they make kindle versions?
An e-ink screen is nicer to read in some ways.
(and PDFs aren’t optimised for e-ink displays)
You can re-flow a kindle book, which is helpful for accessibility reasons (bigger text) as well as for those with smaller screens.
Exactly. PDFs are, finally, usable for me for leisure reading now that I have a tablet with a 12″ screen. But that’s heavier than I want to read from all the time. It’s a godsend for comics, but for text I do most of my reading on a much lighter and more eye-friendly 7″ Kindle Paperwhite, or on my phone (not ideal, but always with me), and PDF text is way too small on either of them.
(I’ve heard rumors of reflowable PDFs, but I’ve never encountered a book done that way.)
Reflowing an ebook on a typical laptop screen, wider than tall, usually results in lines that are too long. PDFs protect people from this by using a fixed layout, which may be what Mark likes. When I read ebooks on a laptop, I narrow the window (or sometimes increase the type size). If you have a tablet or kindle that can be rotated to have the opposite aspect ratio, ebooks don’t have this problem and their flexibility allows them to make use of more type sizes than a PDF.
On the other hand, PDFs have fixed pages, which are better for remembering the individual pages and finding them again.
There’s an LW term similar to “snarl words,” that refers to empty phrases meant to evoke a negative association with a person or group. Can anyone remind me what that term is?
fnord?
Your blank comment fills me with a bizarre fear and anxiety. I didn’t even know you could leave blank comments here.
“Boo lights” / “applause lights”?
fnord was the one I was thinking of, but “boo lights” is close also. Thanks guys.
Book recommendation (in the sense of “this book is interesting as an object” rather than “I endorse its contents”), prompted by a reference in Too Like The Lightning: Marquis de Sade’s pornography/political dialogue Philosophy In The Bedroom. It is series of dialogues between some immoral libertines and the naive young virgin Eugenie they are corrupting. The basic pattern:
Some sections of it are interestingly jarring from a modern perspective. At one point, the characters are discussing abortion and one of the libertines justifies it by saying “Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we
are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of
matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.”, i.e. with with the same appeal to bodily autonomy that is familiar to anyone who’s read a pro-choice argument in the past century. But the discussion immediately jumps way outside the Overton window, without any change of tone:
In another part, the libertine Dolmance channels the spirit of straw-Ayn Rand, and gives a speech arguing that people should stop distributing alms and building poorhouses in order that “the individual born in misfortune thereupon seeing himself deprived of these dangerous crutches, will fend for himself, summoning up all the resources put in him by Nature, to extricate himself from the condition wherein he started life” (or they might just die, which would be OK because France is overpopulated anyway).
Reading it has given me a lot of sympathy for conservative contemporaries of de Sade. If you can see de Sade at the bottom of the slippery slope of progress, it seems a lot more reasonable not to want to go anywhere near it.
Peter Singer would like a word with you.
Does Singer not recognize that some of his views are outside the Overton window?
One interesting exercise, which I’m too lazy to do myself, would be to list out each of the libertine positions de Sade advocated alongside the generation / decade in which they became socially acceptable. Then graph %Libertine over time.
I suspect without evidence that you’d see a “hockey stick” type graph, with a slow burn of libertinism leading up to a post-1968 explosion. Social climate change if you will.
Everything I’ve ever read of de Sade’s pretty quickly stops being shocking and starts being boring.
That’s the joke.
Let me know if I should delete this (since I’m not sure about the answer), but what’s the story with Topher’s name/nom de plume over the years?
I think his name used to be Christopher Hallquist, presumably he removed the “Chris” from his first name to signal that he left Christianity, and then he changed this last name to Brennan when he married Ozy.
I don’t think the nickname has anything to do with Christianity. The way it was explained to me, “Topher” had been a long-standing nickname for him IRL, but he’d been “Christopher Hallquist” on LW and people were starting to abbreviate it as Chris, so he changed his handle to bring it into line with what his friends were calling him.
But if he is running as “Topher” then it means that he legally changed his name, doesn’t it?
I’m sure lots of people run under their nicknames. Jeff Sessions, Chuck Shumer, and Nikki Haley all come to mind.
It’s not exactly unprecedented for a politician to run under an abbreviation of their full legal name. Bill Clinton and Al Gore both did.
@vV_Vv and @Nornagest – thanks!
If my name was Christopher [x], and I was trying to become a politician, I’d call myself “Topher” too so that my campaign could feature slogans like “Vote [x]! He’s Topher on crime!” and “Vote [x]!] He’s Topher on illegal dumping!” etc.
I thought it was an effort to ride on That 70s Show‘s freewill. (Seriously, every time Ozy mentions him, I remember funny previews from that show and smile.)
jgv
I partially agree, but I think a lot of this depends on moral frame. And of course you have to take into account signaling effects.
Hm. I’m a first time commenter. My comment was not going through and that was a trial one, I apologize. I keep trying to post my comment but it says it is already there and doesn’t take duplicates. However when I ctrl+f my name it is not there. Could it be some syntax error when introducing links to other websites. Any thoughts? Thank you!
The spam filter doesn’t like too many links. That may be the issue.
Is there a way for me to view my past comments? Is there a primer somewhere on how to use this site? Besides commenting on articles, I find a lot of the website highly non-intuitive.
I use CTRL + F to find my comments when I am looking. Don’t know if there is a better way.
You can do a Google search restricted to site:slatestarcodex.com along with your pseudonym, and then do Ctrl-F to find your pseudonym on the page. It would be nicer if we had a button for it, as Making Light and Unz both do.
This also works reasonably well for finding any other content (Scott’s posts, or the comments underneath) when you don’t exactly remember when and where it was discussed but remember enough keywords.
For example, try with the keyword “battleships” and you’ll find most of the naval gazing content.
https://status451.com/2017/07/11/radical-book-club-the-decentralized-left/
A rightwinger does a major analysis of leftwing skills at organization by taking a fairly detailed look at four books.
It’s long and reasonable, and perhaps it’s not surprising that it cites ssc.
There’s a lot about finding people who want to do things which will help achieve your goals, and supporting them.
It’s good to have a term for this concept:
Unless you count Fox News, The Heritage Foundation, The American Family Association, the NRA, Breitbart, the Koch network, the Mercer network, the Federalist Society, Citizens United…and dozens of others.
The person who wrote that is either dishonest or an idiot.
I got that impression when I started reading, but after a bit it struck me that the disconnect here is that when Hines says “Righty” or “Left”, he’s referring to the far right and far left. The ACLU is a more important institution to the bulk of the side of the country that’s left-of-center than the Lawyer’s Guild (I was mildly surprised to learn that the latter still exists), but it’s peripheral to the far left. Likewise when he says that there wasn’t a “Righty organization” that captured right-leaning attorneys, he discounts things like the Federalist Society because it’s not far right in the same way that the Lawyer’s Guild was far left.
I’m not 100% sure he notices that, but since the piece rapidly shifts to explicitly only addressing far-left movements, it doesn’t affect the analysis much. And the analysis is pretty great- I respect the heck out of Hines’ ability to read, analyze, understand and even empathize with people he clearly disagrees with on a deep level. This is a long article, but it’s engaging and easy to read.
Now, a lot of his assumptions seem wrong to me, but the analysis is great.
@mtraven:
Consider a third view: that’s he’s neither dishonest nor an idiot, but simply categorizes differently than you do. On the far right, we often refer to ourselves as “the right”, so I agree on that point with Jordan D.’s comment.
The only one of your list that fits the criteria of an effective right-wing organization is the NRA, though of course they are limited to their single issue. All the rest are either not effective, not organizations, or centrist or libertarian, not right-wing.
He is using an idiosyncratic definition of “Institution” which the institutions you list do not fall into. The right has think tanks and PACs and lobbying groups, just like the left does, but these are engaged in conventional politics. What it doesn’t have are institutions giving support to unconventional politics, actions on the spectrum of civil disobedience to what’s euphemistically called “direct action”.
The NRA is at least borderline; it’s got a pretty effective lawfare campaign going on. But I still can’t imagine it giving aid and comfort to Bundy types, not in the way that the Lawyer’s Guild supported the Weathermen.
Is autism positively correlated with far-right movements such as neo-Nazism and Islamism?
From the discussions above it seems that engineering might be correlated with far-right movements. I wonder if the same correlation applies to autism.
I would imagine not. Engineering is correlated with Islamist terrorism (and plausibly other kinds as well), so you might get a weak correlation with autism as well. But I think that extremist movements as a whole (not just the violent parts) are made of people with high emotional engagement with politics, and that is probably anti-correlated with autism.
This is a possibility.
My reasoning here is that autists usually implicitly have binary views on everything unless the view is explicitly non-binary. Furthermore we are less likely to make our views conform to others. Since an extreme view is defined as unusually strong view, we autists either don’t have views on something or have a very extreme, literalist and purist view on it. For example I used to be a literalist fundamentalist and then suddenly switched to agnosticism and skepticism. I think it is plausible that autists are overrepresented in all kinds of extremism. Autistic extremism unlike neurotypical extremism might not be emotional at all. However when an autist is actually emotional about something that cause may be one of the few things the autist has strong feelings about.
On the other hand, my impression is that autists aren’t malicious– they don’t get anything out of hurting other people.
If that’s true, then the next question is whether terrorists necessarily have a preference for hurting people
I also agree on this one. Autists can be ideologically very extreme without actually harming anyone since we are very unlikely to enforce our ideologies.
Furthermore autistic extremists are nonconformists in nature and as a result do not conform to neurotypical extremists. Hence an autistic Islamist isn’t going to like ISIS too much because he/she may consider Baghdadi un-Islamic on one detail and an autistic neo-Nazi isn’t necessarily going to follow a mainstream neo-Nazi leader because the said leader isn’t necessarily literalist enough to actually be a legitimate Hitlerist. Hence extremist autists are unlikely to actually cause harm because you usually need more than one person to get anything really significant done, including ethnic cleansing/religious cleansing.
That’s not quite what I’m aiming at.
A significant proportion of non-autists actually like hurting people. There are people who put in a lot of time on trolling (in the modern sense) and griefing, just in the hope of making someone else feel bad. There are people who put in years abusing their children.
I don’t know what’s going on with this, but my impression is that autists don’t have the drive.
Actually, this would relate to a milder issue. Do austists tend to believe that punishing people is an effective method of controlling them?
@Nancy Lebovitz I haven’t found any study on this issue. However I personally tend to agree with you that autists are not very likely to be sadistic. I don’t enjoy others getting harmed. I just don’t. Instead I either feel sad or nothing at all.
The threat of punishment is necessary to stop people from harming others. However the actual punishment may be waived or moderated from time to time. Punishment does not make any sense other than as disincentives and should never be more severe than the punishable action.
I can easily believe that, for example, a Muslim autist could believe that other Muslims were getting Islam wrong. I find it hard to believe that an autist Muslim would believe that bombing random Muslims would be a good idea.
@Nancy Lebovitz Probably. However if an autistic Muslim does believe that other Muslims are apostates who need to be executed according to the Qur’an, Hadith etc because they aren’t following a really obscure verse in the Qur’an that nobody other than the autist cares about, I’m not sure whether they will actually follow it till the very end.
If I’m caught without a train ticket the fine is much higher than the cost of the ticket because that way they don’t have to catch me every time (which is impossible) for it to work as a disincentive.
this is imo a strong argument against hell. what incentive would God have to follow through on the threat when it’s a one off non-iterated game?
That’s a great relief.
God, being omniscient, surely reads this blog.
Best comment this month.
This raises for me the question of the difference between autists and psychopaths, assuming the two disorders in any way involve the same circuits. My very non-professional impression is that autists seem to have some things in common with psychopaths (inability to empathize; both seem to approach the world in a kind of mechanistic, logical way; both are stereotyped as kind of “male” neurotypes), but in other ways opposite (psychopaths supposedly often come off as suave and charming, which feature they use to manipulate people to get what they want; autists, though devoted to being logical and principled, have trouble modeling others’ emotional states and are characteristically not suave nor manipulative).
I guess my impression is that autists care, in theory, about understanding others, but have trouble doing so; psychopaths do understand others, almost all too well, having the ability to dispassionately treat humans as means to their own ends.
As for sadism, which I associate with psychopaths and not autists, here the autism makes more sense to me: if you have trouble feelings other peoples’ feelings then their suffering (though also maybe their happiness) will just be kind of meaningless to you? Neither enjoyable nor especially distressing? As for why psychopaths, despite not empathizing, do seem to tend toward sadism (or, at least, it seems like most sadists are at least a little psychopathic if not most psychopaths sadists), I guess it comes from enjoying the feeling of power over others represented by ability to successfully manipulate them?
But I wonder why autists neither seem to want nor be able to feel powerful this way, yet psychopaths do, given that neither really “feels” other peoples’ feelings very intensely (having little if any S or M tendency myself, I find the psychology of both a bit hard to fathom, though it makes sense in one way: though never diagnosed in such a way, I think my own neurotype is much more autistic than psychopathic).
But not sure this is on the right track, or what underlying mechanisms could be at play.
Given that autists have trouble understanding others*, it may be that they have not tasted the fruit yet. After all, autists do often get enjoyment out of controlling non-living things.
Experiment: teach young autists that it is possible to control living beings, e.g. by making them torture small animals. See how many go on to become psychopaths. Ethics board approval pending.
* full disclosure: the author does not believe that the autism spectrum is a particularly meaningful concept.
@onyomi
My understanding is that this conflates two very different aspects of the word “empathy” – ability to accurately observe what someone else’s emotions are (cognitive empathy), vs ability to care about how other people feel (affective empathy).
I think so, too.
Most people seem to default to centrism, in the sense that centrist here means ‘whatever is default for their environment’. Autists, I’d say, are less likely to pick beliefs by default because their parents/siblings/friends also happen to share them. I’d view autists not so much as very extreme but more the sorts of people to not really mind following through on their trains of thoughts and beliefs so much.
I agree with you. What usually happens is that autists apply our own principles at any cost which leads to an unusual mixture of far-left, far-right and other views.
Engineering is correlated with terrorism? If that’s true, are you sure it’s not just because terrorists recruit heavily among engineers, whose skills they need to carry out their goals?
At least in the context of Islamic terrorism I have also heard the explanation that engineering actually correlates with being Saudi for various cultural reasons, and there you go.
Terrorism, revolutionary activity in general actually, tends to do its best recruiting in the grounds of the frustrated upper middle class. The French, Russian, Iranian, and dozens of other revolutions weer all lead by people with enough education/wealth/background to glimpse the upper reaches of their society, but prevented from getting their by some cultural barrier. Heck, even Osama bin laden fits this category, for an admittedly somewhat unusual definition of upper middle class.
Perhaps only successful terrorism is correlated with engineering, and all the would be terrorists who don’t have engineers never do anything.
Looking at the 9/11 hijackers’ Wikipedia pages, I see 2 engineers, but also 2 teachers and 2 law students.
Lacking actual numbers, you could say “yes, extremists often like dispassionate break-eggs-make-omelette solutions, which correlate with autism” or “no, extremists are driven to break eggs by emotion, which does not correlate” – a just so story serves either narrative.
Further: just right wing extremists, or extremists in general? And, even if Islamism is, when you consider it, right wing, is it “far right” in the same sense neo-Nazis are?
You could look at history, and say, look at the leadership of the Nazis or the Bolsheviks, but the problem becomes that it’s easy to look at historical figures cherry pick things and point and say “a-ha, autistic trait!” but you can just as easily find stuff that might disprove it. Hitler and Stalin have probably both been diagnosed with everything under the sun at this point.
EDIT: Also, concerning the engineering thing (I’m responding here because the above conversation moved on), in the Gulf States, conceivably (I’m pulling this out of thin air; got no actual numbers) a disproportionate number of educated people got engineering degrees, because fossil fuels. Educated people in general are among the people most prone to decide they must do something about the wickedness of the world.
I agree. This issue is a bit unclear. I do feel that far-right politics and all other forms of totalitarianism are inherently appealing to a part of me precisely because they are totalitarian/utopian/binary.
It may also be partly caused by the fact that I don’t have any passion for anything other than rationality, STEM and cats. I hate families for I consider them inherently oppressive and don’t have a Significant Other I have to care about. Other autists also tend to have relatively narrow interests and few concerns on fitting into a family, a tribe or a crowd. Hence if we autists are attracted to something which can be benign (e.g. Physics) or dangerous (e.g. fundamentalism) we are usually really obsessed with what we are interested in. To us there is nothing worse than other people around us who are trying to prevent us from doing whatever we want to do.
Is there anyone here who’d like to try to explain to me why gentrification is bad, in terms perhaps somewhat rationalist-adjacent? This is a topic where I don’t feel the other side is wrong as much as they are clearly aliens from Zorblax 7 because of how unintelligible their beliefs are to me. Since my prior on random people actually being aliens from Zorblax 7 is rather low, this suggests the problem is inside my head.
Let me see if I can get the story right: poor, non-white people live in a neighborhood that’s kind of shitty. White artist-types decide the neighborhood is trendy (?), move in, and slowly things start being prettified. Eventually property values rise enough that the old residents can’t afford to live there anymore, and have to move somewhere else.
Here are some broad points I’d like to see addressed:
– Do the poor people have a right to remain in their old neighborhood? To put it another way, when looking at this chain of events, is the reasoning “This is morally wrong because the old residents had right X, which has been violated by the newcomers” as opposed to “I valued the old community and now I am sad because it is gone”?
– Tying into the previous point: is this philosophically related to rent control, the other thing I think is only advocated for by aliens from the Zorblax system? Like, as far as I can tell the emotional motivation behind advocating for rent control is, “The people who actually live in those apartments deserve to be there; living there has given them a kind of ownership that no mere landlord could ever have, and this right of ownership must be weighed against the landlord’s right to rent to other tenants.” Whereas my emotional justification here is, “The landlord is the sole owner of the property, because he’s the one whose name is on the deed in city hall. You can helpfully tell that the tenants are not owners because they send in a rent check every month, and no permanent purchase has occurred. It seems kind of unfair to tell him he doesn’t own the property because of how he uses it.” And again, my gut tells me that disagreement with this is distinctly Zorblaxian.
This is kind of tenuous as a point, because I’m taking two positions I totally fail the ideological Turing test for and sort of flailing around wondering if there is a common reason. But it’s the best I’ve got.
– Is the problem that moving can be expensive, so forcing poor people out of their neighborhoods is imposing costs on them that they might not be able to afford, keeping them in poverty? If the government subsidized all moving expenses, would gentrification no longer be bad?
– Tying back into the first point, do people generally just have a “right to stable social structure” in their communities, which the invaders are disrupting? Is it morally wrong that the old residents will, um, have to move somewhere else and probably can’t still go to their old church on Sundays?
– What in the world can be done to stop this? Do we outlaw all white people from moving into non-majority-white neighborhoods? Do we just ask white people really nicely not to?
You know the people discussed in the last thread who didn’t want to move away from Janesville to another location to get a job? The result of gentrification is something like going into Janesville before the plant closed and bulldozing it. People who know each other and have been doing their thing for years can’t anymore, for reasons outside of their control.
Now, as to the analysis, you’re following the increasingly standard rights-only view of human systems, that goes like this:
A: “I’m suffering from X”
B: “Do you have a right to not-X?”
A: “No”
B: “Then fuck off”
In at least some contexts, this analysis is seen as questionable:
A: “I have cancer”
B: “Do you have a right to not having cancer?”
A: “No”
B: “Then fuck off”
I was involved in that thread at the very end, and the similarities did strike me as I was writing this.
To extend your example:
A: “I have cancer”
B: “Do you have a right to not having cancer?”
A: “No”
B: “Then fuck off”
A: “I’m just saying this is painful for me, and while I know no one has to do anything about that, it would sure be nice if they would be considerate of me while doing that medical research and/or distributing those sweet cancer drugs”
Is that the moral ground from which anti-gentrifiers argue? Does it all amount to just a “please, your actions are totally sociable allowable but we ask that you consider their repercussions”? (Tying into my last bullet point.) My impression is that this is not the case.
Anti-gentrifiers are arguing for analogues of “those sweet cancer drugs”, which in your extension of the example have seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Hint: there’re not coming from the person saying “then fuck off”.
It’s true that some of those analogues are more along the lines of prevention than subsequent treatment. But read your original post again. You find the idea that anything beyond a sympathetic word is not just wrong, but beyond understanding, right? “Those people are just losers and now they can go off and be losers wherever it is that losers go. Just please don’t pee on the sidewalk, this city stinks enough already” and so forth.
Can you restate the first paragraph of your post, and also the first sentence of the second paragraph? For some reason I’m having trouble parsing what’s going on. What is the gentrification equivalent of sweet cancer drugs?
I’m not saying that the “your actions are technically allowed but really not nice” argument is wrong, meaningless, and/or stupid. Let us suppose that this is the strongest argument that one can be morally justified in making. My impression is the argument that is actually made places severe blame on the gentrifiers, as if there is a moral compulsion (and not just a “please be nicer”) on them to personally not gentrify.
Like if you looked at homelessness in some city and said “This is all the home-ed people’s fault for not agreeing to put someone up for one week every year”, or something.
I think it’s right that anti-gentrifiers tend to be more angry at the actual people who move in, but I don’t think they’re committed to anything this strong. But let me get back to that. I’m also going to drop the analogy, although I could continue it if really necessary.
Many cities (probably most cities) impose various values through zoning. Zoning is a way of telling owners what they have to do with their property. (I would say “what they can’t do”, but in practice zoning tends to be pretty specific.) All zoning fails the “econ 101” test* you raise below.
Some people see neighborhood stability over time as a value worth imposing along the lines of how zoning works. The non-governmental social safety net is often grounded in neighborhood-level relationships. Too much change too soon can destroy those relationships, and cause large amounts of suffering. The most common protections are rent control and various renter-favoring laws. (Yes, this does make what was non-governmental at least quasi-governmental.)
I’m not sure the point is generally put this way, but one way of characterizing gentrification is as what happens when forces that are driving neighborhood-level change overwhelm the laws intended to provide neighborhood-level stability. Some of the change results from strictly legal change (there is just nowhere to move to if someone has to move for some reason) and some from illegal change (not repairing things, noisily “renovating” vacant apartments at illegal times and counting on no enforcement, and generally making things miserable for residents). The end result is often that people who were just barely getting by no longer are, and have no local friends or relations to fall back on.
The anger directed at the people moving in most likely comes from the contrast of witnessing that suffering, and the combination of obliviousness and “econ 101” argumentation on the part of those most directly causing it. The same people famously zone/enforce all of the area nightclubs out of existence as soon as they can manage it, so it’s not like ownership is a fundamental value for them.
* The valid way of doing that sort of thing would be through a homeowners association. Many people who have had to deal with homeowners associations view this as a reductio ad absurdum of the premise.
It seems straightforward to me. Although I am half Zorblaxian on my mother’s side.
When I move to a gentrifying neighborhood, I’m raising rents and cost of living to levels the current inhabitants likely can’t afford. Beyond that, I’m also bringing in a lot more cops: not just for felonies either, I’m the stereotypical white guy who will make noise complaints.
It’s analogous to white flight. Rather than lowering property values and bringing in crime to drive people out, it’s the reverse. So it makes perfect sense for them to oppose being driven out.
That said, in this case I’d call it just deserts. You can’t claim the moral high ground when a piece of land you grabbed through criminal violence is bought out from under you. But that’s obviously not a terribly convincing argument.
Edit: To clarify briefly before I pass out, this isn’t about meta issues like rights at all. Being kicked out of your home is an immediate threat. It’s a very low-scale ethnic conflict, like the world’s most passive-aggressive civil war.
Doesn’t this mean your mother is just Zorblaxian? How can I trust anything said by the spawn of some no-good alien?
The Econ 101 argument here is that social welfare will be higher if other people are allowed to move in, as evidenced by those people wanting to pay more for it than you do.
The obvious counter is that not everyone values a marginal $1 the same amount. I would be willing to wave my magic government wand and say that this is a problem that probably someone should fix via government magic that figures out how to maximize social welfare and then maximizes it. Crucially, though, the responsibility doesn’t seem to lie on the moving-iner.
Yeah, but that’s also Zorblaxian to me. Is it my duty to live somewhere I feel unsafe because otherwise someone jerkier than me is going to move in, making things even worse?
> Yeah, but that’s also Zorblaxian to me. Is it my duty to live somewhere I feel unsafe because otherwise someone jerkier than me is going to move in, making things even worse?
I’ve come to the conclusion that “white flight” is worse than Zorbaxian; it’s downright disingenuous. The standard story is that when blacks moved in, whites moved out because they were racist. But I’ve come to believe that not only did most whites move out because of actual (not anticipated) bad behavior by the newcomers, but that groups like those mentioned elsewhere on this comment section on radical organization engineered things like the race riots intentionally to drive whites out and give minorities control of the cities. So blaming “white flight” for anything is like socking a guy in the face and blaming him for the blood on the floor.
I guess I was unclear: I agree with you on this point.
White flight was meant to illustrate a reverse situation which is easier to empathize with. If you reread my comment hopefully that will be clearer.
I understood; I was agreeing and amplifying, not disputing. Well, not disputing you, but disputing the standard narrative.
Ok, so I think this is your problem: you’re approaching this in an overly abstract way and ignoring the concrete motives of the people involved.
From the perspective of an economist at 20,000 feet, white flight and gentrification are both efficient. It’s just people following their preferences, whether that is a preference for safety or for affordable housing. The winners win more than the losers lose, and on net everyone is better off for it.
But the people being forced out of their neighborhoods, white or black, have a rather different perspective! Being kicked out of your home is an injury. Knowing that the people who kicked you out are benefiting as a result is adding insult to injury.
You’re not obligated to agree with them but it’s obvious where they’re coming from. “Stop harming me!” isn’t a very challenging position to empathize with.
I think the problem is that rights and duties aren’t really the important part of the moral framework used by the main opponents of gentrification. In my experience, the main opponents of gentrification are using the moral framework of social justice. That is, what matters is that a powerful group is imposing its will on a less powerful group. This may be my bias, but I also see the social justice perspective as being important because gentrification involves a unit larger than an individual being harmed (although there are harms to various individuals as well).
Without getting into whether or not it is wrong, being disconnected from a social network can be quite a bit of disutility. My impression is that it is more harmful older people and people without cars. Other harms caused by gentrification include driving small local businesses out, which may be the only readily accessible place for food, new locations being further removed from public transportation, which contributes to the effect you noted of keeping people in poverty.
Why are you so obsessed with rights, duties, laws, and whatever else?
The concept of rights and whatnot isn’t really a useful way to frame morality, as much as it is to create a good legal code. The two are very distinct: we cannot write ‘be good’ into a code of law, and we cannot enforce it with 100% accuracy, so we must take these things in mind.
Take some hypothetical person who spends an hour every day walking about in the street to walk past random people and fling insults at them while saying their mother never loved them. At the end of this, they go to drink at a bar with the express intent of starting a fight and breaking someone’s teeth.
They have a right to do this! Not many legal codes prohibit such behavior. What’s more, I don’t think the law should try and legislate these rights away, since the resulting mess would not be worth the potential benefit. But does that really mean we’re going to call that person’s behavior good? That we’re going to want to live next to them and encourage what they’re doing and consider them upstanding members of society?
So, in this sense, whatever gentrifiers are doing is legally fine, but the opponents argue that it’s morally wrong.
As for your other points..
– I don’t care if poor (or rich!) people have a right to have to remain in their old neighborhood; having to move somewhere else is traumatic for many people and pretending that it’s not because rights is wrong. It’s a sucky situation, and ‘we should try to do something’ isn’t a bad sentiment, even if there may not be too much that can be done.
– As for rent control, it seems like the kind of thing that should be struck down, but only if zoning laws are struck down right along with them. One without the other seems like worse than having both around, though I’ve exactly no data to back this up. FWIW, I’m rather in favor of striking down both sorts of regulations.
– I think lots of people would argue that if the poor were provided housing or at least the means to attain it by the government or any other actor, then yes, fewer people would say gentrification is such a bad thing.
– I don’t care about rights! “Right to stable social structure” is meaningless, when rights are a red herring and you should instead consider whether or not having your social structure disrupted very much is bad. The answer to a question lime
is such an easy YES IT IS that I’m not even sure it’s Zorblaxian, as much that you appear like such an alien now. It’s not the morally worst thing, it could be a necessary evil, it may not be so bad if someone chooses to do such, but pretending it’s not at all morally wrong seems so off that we are, indeed, not speaking the same language.
– I dunno. To stop it, I think the striking down of zoning laws would be a very useful thing, as they tend to benefit those with access to political and bureaucratic power much more than the poor. Forget about outlawing whites from moving into non-majority-white neighborhoods, stop outlawing the poor from living in this or that space even if they’re paying rent just fine.
I’m in favor of getting rid of both rent control and zoning laws but why should one only eliminate rent control if one can also eliminate zoning laws? I don’t see the connection.
To me, rent control laws make about as much sense as those Japanese laws mandating you make the private parts in porn blurry. Zoning laws, though I don’t like them, have a lot more superficial plausibility.
Rent control is somewhat uniquely American, in my eyes, because it is the sort of problem which is American in general, where the government is okay with getting involved, but does it half-heartedly and only to insulate people against poor choices. If the government is involved in actual housing, in running complexes, whatnot, rent control becomes setting a price and running the facilities by itself; rent control all on its own means regulating one very specific aspect of property while leaving all other factors entirely out of the realm of discussion.
Regardless, if you’ll read what I wrote again, you’ll note that I’m as much in favor of removing both policies as you are; my opinion, however, is that you can have either, both, but that only one of the two is more dangerous than having them both enacted or repealed.
Yes, and my question was: “why”?
Rent control exists in many other countries.
What really is uniquely American is looking at a worldwide phenomenon, and saying “Only in America!”
Oh, right.
I think the danger of zoning laws without rent control lies in driving the politically powerless away from places they might want to live. They seem to lean towards NIMBY-ism much more than the opposite case of areas being designated to provide good living space for the poor. In effect, they’d make for a bludgeon to chase off those in poverty whenever those using them would find them useful.
Rent control, on the other hand, seems like a tool to support the poor more, but is going to be a serious hassle for the people actually owning property. If you have zoning laws, you’re going to know what ‘kind’ of people are supposed to live on your turf; without them, rent controls effectively force you to adapt to a certain base of clients that you might not have seen coming at all.
I’m not American, or anglo at all. Make of that what you will.
Do need to be a little careful on what sort of zoning laws you want to gut. I for one don’t want to live in the ancaptopia where a residential area’s local private school or grocery store can get bought out and repurposed into a heavy industry facility.
I think we have a lot lot of planning laws to eliminate before we get to rules keeping oil refinaries or hog waste lagoons away from elementary schools.
The low hanging fruit are things like FAR rules, minimum parking, height restrictions, and total bans on multi-family dwellings and commercial units.
@Brad
Yeah, I agree. It just seemed like the proposal was to categorically axe all zoning laws. I could be misreading, though.
That’s also a problem with legal doctrines such as the implied warranty of habitability, which makes it illegal to provide housing which doesn’t meet certain criteria of quality even if the renter knew it didn’t meet then when he moved in.
Even in an anarchist legal system, one would presumably have something along the lines of the common law doctrine of nuisance. It’s legal for you to build the factory. It’s not legal for you to prevent your neighbors from sleeping by making loud noises all night
Completely and entirely wrong. All civil law jurisdictions explicitly prohibit such behavior, and most common law countries also recognize and prosecute Public Order Offences.
I think what you’ll find is that those who support rent control and oppose gentrification place a higher moral value on the poor and minorities than wealthier and whiter people. That is, the desires of the poor and minority residents are simply considered to be more important than any desires of landlords or gentrifiers, regardless of “rights”. The landlord is (when not a moustache-twisting villain… which to be fair, some do act as) there to maintain the building on behalf of the tenants, not some sort of, “lord” with rights to the building. The gentrifiers are invaders; not only do they drive rents up for both residences and businesses and thus replace the poor-person infrastructure with a wealthier-person infrastructure that the existing residents cannot afford, but they either make or (more often) cause the enforcement of laws the existing residents were happily ignoring, such as noise ordinances, anti-graffiti laws, and trespassing rules.
This is all rational, though perhaps you’d consider that value system Zorbaxian. Where it gets irrational is that some of the anti-gentrification groups seem to think it’s possible to get the benefits of gentrification (such as lower crime and cleaner streets) without the gentrifiers.
Promoting homeownership could mitigate the effects, since the displaced would then capture some upside. Renters are just out of luck, I guess you could model the chance of being gentrified-out of your home as a cost of renting relative to owning, but the anger at gentrification suggests people are not doing that modeling.
I’m not sure about Zorblaxians, but humans are territorial. Well, maybe not so much elite cosmopolitan knowledge workers, but everyone else. The neighborhood where they have lived for their entire life, where their friends and family all live and where they have jointly taken root, is their territory. They derive real value from living in that neighborhood over all others. Even if it is run-down and full of criminals, even if you’ve got shiny new housing projects for them to move into somewhere out of the way.
Gentrification, makes it prohibitively expensive for them to live in the one neighborhood that holds this extra value for them, destroying that value and causing them harm. Because the people who move in to replace them are elite cosmopolitan knowledge workers, among the least territorial humans, the benefit they derive from moving in to the gentrified neighborhood may not be as great as the harm they are causing to the residents they displace. But because they are elite cosmopolitan knowledge workers, they have great fungible wealth whereas the people they are displacing have most of their wealth in the intangible and non-monetizable form of a social network.
So the purely financial contest of “who will bid the highest price for this slightly-ratty old brownstone, and is it worthwhile to turn the bodega down the block into a coffee house?”, leads to net harm through market failure. The global optimum is the one where the elite cosmopolitan knowledge workers looking for a Cool City to hang out in, build a new one for that purpose and leave the old neighborhoods alone even if that would cost them a bit more. And the rational behavior for the soon-to-be-displaced locals is to use their social-network wealth to resist gentrification – it can’t readily be monetized, but it’s quite good at e.g. motivating and organizing noisy disruptive protests that make it less desirable for elite cosmopolitan knowledge workers to buy that particular run-down brownstone.
Also, elite cosmopolitan knowledge workers tend to be nerds, and nerds are the natural enemies/targets of the sort of progressives who typically lead anti-gentrification efforts if it isn’t the soon-to-be-displaced locals themselves, but that’s another discussion. Bottom line, nobody is really making much effort to understand what harm other people may be suffering in this conflict.
This would be the global optimum if real estate was fungible. It’s not. In the NYC area, for instance, it’s not practical at any cost for the gentrifiers to build a new “cool city” in e.g. Salem County NJ, or even Warren County, NJ. It needs to be somewhere close to Downtown or Midtown Manhattan on a subway line.
In NYC, the stereotypical gentrifier is a hipster. Who might be a nerd also, but is also typically exactly the sort of progressive who objects to gentrification. Which leads to the amusing spectacle of someone living in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood complaining about gentrification.
So the gentrifiers actually do give special value to that neighborhood: its value lies in its proximity to other high-value areas.
In theory, it would be perfectly possible for all of this stuff to be out somewhere in upstate rather than on a useful port. But you can’t spontaneously create a Hip City in the middle of nowhere, unless you forcibly transport the entire gentrifying class out there at once. At that point it would be stable, but I don’t know how you make that sort of intervention in America, or indeed anywhere in the Western world.
Right, very often the global optimum is stuck behind a moat of local minima, which can’t practically be bridged because of coordination problems (see also the libertarian Free State Project). For any individual hipster or tech bro or other gentrifier, who isn’t also an altruistic utilitarian, the right move is to move into the neighborhood that’s being gentrified right now.
For any existing resident of that neighborhood who isn’t an altruistic utilitarian, the right move is to get together with some of the neigbhors and engage in the fun community bonding exercise of egging the new guy’s house.
John, do you in fact believe that gentrification lowers total utility and represents a market failure, or are you steelmanning those points? (Because I think the rest of your argument is in fact true).
As to the market/utility points:
1) I guess there are three groups of people to consider – the current residents, the would-be new residents, and the current property owners. The current residents are the losers in gentrification to the extent that they’re renters. (They may also be losers if they own their residence, but would prefer not to move and are harmed by rising property values and therefore taxes, or because they prefer not to live near hipsters.) But if you measure the total utility without measuring the property owners, you’re not getting the whole picture.
2) As pointed out below, hipsters want to live in Brooklyn not only because other hipsters are moving there, but also because it’s close to various New York City amenities, so it’s entirely possible that their enjoyment is commensurate with the unhappiness of people who have to move. They can’t build a hipster utopia in a field someplace because they would have to build Manhattan and Brooklyn.
On 1, the property owners and the gentrifiers get to argue among themselves on how they will share the gains on that more easily monetized side of the equation. Either the property owners charge an iota more than the poor locals can afford, in which case the gentrifiers get all the benefit, or they charge one iota less than would drive off the gentrifiers, in which case the owners get all the benefit, or more likely they split the difference. But there’s a finite pie for them to slice between them.
I did perhaps excessively simplify things by ascribing all of the gains to the gentrifiers, and should have noted that the property owners take their cut. That may be important when some of the property owners are long-term residents. But I don’t think it changes the outcome.
On 2, how much of NYC do the hipsters really need? Are they working the sort of Wall Street jobs that need daily face time? Does it matter if the Federal Reserve is in their city, and do they ever visit the Statue of Liberty? Are the shipping and manufacturing industries anything but an impediment or an eyesore for them?
As noted in another post, there are coordination reasons why we probably won’t see a hipster-optimized Even Newer York built on a greenfield site upstate, but I do suspect that the hipsters, collectively, could afford it and that it might be a global optimum out of reach due to market failure. Even more so for e.g. San Francisco, where the very industry the gentrifiers are being drawn to is a new one that could have set up shop anywhere.
I’m thinking the important parts are nightlife, culture, and their jobs.
For nightlife, it’ll probably pop up pretty easily: half of nightlife is just having the right sort of people around, and we get that for free. The other half is having people running quality bars/clubs/other places of entertainment. My perception is that club/bar owners aren’t largely hipsters, but maybe we can count on them to move to where the customers are.
I wonder if restaurants in particular might rely on the people who would be worried about gentrification though: who washes the dishes? Who cooks? Are there McDonald’s? You probably end up with at least some part of non-hipster lower class, and they have to live somewhere, somewhere that might eventually become attractive to the hipsters, and now we have gentrification again. At least there isn’t much of a tradition to tear up, but there will be in 50 years, and now we’ve scaled back our goals to “kicking gentrification down the road”
Culture seems like a tough thing to establish. Maybe if you throw enough money at it you get a world-class museum, but a lot of that’s long-established reputation, and a certain feel of age. I don’t think you can take the pieces out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, put them in a new building in a new city, and get the same cultural feel. And of course the older people in NYC aren’t going to let you take those exact pieces, or any pieces with the same significance and age. You might be able to solve that with enough piles of money, but I’m not sure you’ll be able to secure enough money for that project, because now you’re fighting old money.
Something similar to Broadway comes along easily though since many of its members are going to want in on Hip City, so we’re probably fine there. Music and art as well. Maybe that’s enough
Jobs seem like the toughest sell, especially when we’re talking about NYC. Gentrification is heavily driven by a bunch of hip people in non-hip industries wanting to use their piles of money. Those people will be happy to go to Hip City, but their companies won’t. And given how hard it is for even the most optimized-for-it tech companies to consistently go for remote workers, I’m highly skeptical that the large variety of industries our hipsters work for will be OK with them all telecommuting from Hip City.
The “working hipsters” Brad mentioned do need to go in to work. The firms they work at are there, the customers of those firms are there. Advertising, for example, is as much a part of Manhattan as shipping and manufacturing, and that drives marketing and graphic design. Finance drives much of programming in NYC. Basically your “hipster optimized Even Newer York” would have to transplant all of white collar Manhattan (including a similar public transit system, because driving gives hipsters hives) somewhere else. And that doesn’t help either, because now you’ve left a gaping hole in the economy of NYC.
(Hipsters DO visit the Statue of Liberty. But only ironically)
John, I’m at the risk of being some kind of market Panglossian, but my initial intuition is that that’s what renting means – that the renters get the current use of the property, while the property owners get the long term use, and that the property owners are therefore typically going to move property towards its most economically valued use and get the benefits thereof.
You’re right that economic inequality generally, and renting more narrowly, values the utility of the poor less than similar utility of the wealthy. That’s true for the distribution of European vacations, champagne, personal trainers, and property.
I guess if you want to call that a market failure, I won’t argue very hard, but it’s confusing since market failure has a technical meaning that is not the same as “what a utilitarian would prefer.”
(And on top of this, a utilitarian, particularly a Rawlsian, might choose to permit some measure of economic inequality to incent the fortunate and most economically productive knowledge workers to use their skills in economically productive ways, so I will argue a little.)
((And on top of that, systems that subordinate the utility of the property owner to their renters without also reallocating title to the property tend to misallocate resources. My initial guess that a system that said that we’re going to prevent owners from selling their property to hipsters in order to preserve the utility of the current renters would have similar problems to rent control, and end up being counter-utilitarian, so I guess I will at least express a number of concerns, even if I claim not to argue.))
The word hipster has widened out so much that I’m not even sure what it means anymore, but the majority of people that moved into Williamsburg, L.I.C., Greenpoint, or Bushwick over the last ten years work in jobs that exist in the real economy. Things like marketing, programming, graphic design, or even the occasional law firm. The parallel hipster economy — those that make a good living making artisan pickles or a crappy living selling tchotchkes on etsy — doesn’t employ more than a fraction of them.
The etsy types could move up the river to depressed Hudson valley towns, and some have. It’s tougher for the pickle types to because their best customers aren’t the etsy types but the lawyer cum hipster types. And they certainly can’t leave NYC.
Aside from the law firm, these sound like the kind of businesses where you need face time with your customers maybe once a week and could easily set up shop fifty miles away if there were cheap land and a supportive community and nobody going out of their way to make you feel unwelcome.
The “supportive community” is the catch-22 on the path from here to there, of course.
Yeah, I just mean gentrifiers, but hipster is understandable and funnier, and omits any overt racial signifiers.
New York is a great example of the dangers of gentrification. The Village is now a quaint outdoor mall, and CBGB was replaced with a drug store. This is plausibly bad for everyone; money has destroyed that which made the place originally attractive.
While I don’t favor rent control at all, I might favor policies that encourage overbuilding. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that culturally important centers appear where there is an excess of housing stock, like New York after industry left the city, and East Berlin after reunification.
Policies that encourage overbuilding at this point mean eliminating rules that make it difficult or impossible to build anything anywhere. Even NYC has pretty stringent zoning and quasi-zoning rules in a lot of places.
“Even” NYC? As far as I can tell, the way NYC works is it’s illegal to build anything, and then the developer cuts a deal with the politicians for the appropriate variances.
NYC even has an official licensed profession called ‘expediter’ for someone whose job it is to deal with the bureaucracy for things like renovations.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the community board input / air rights / exclusionary zoning / waiver system is awful. But it is better than the alternative where the answer is just a flat you can’t build anything anywhere.
I’m keeping an open mind over whether Chicago’s cash in a bag system might be still less bad.
I’m reminded of the story of a New Yorker who visits Chicago back when John Lindsay was mayor of New York and Richard Daley of Chicago. His friends meet him at the airport and ask what it was like:
“I have seen the past, and it works.”
So the free speech complaint to Diane Feinstein kinda implies that the campuses right now are insufficiently hostile to Israel? I mean, of all the roblems with free speech suppression in academia – this is what we should be concerned about? No, I know, I know, free speech does not have Israel exception, you should be free to trash Israel as well as anything else, but really – that’s what the problem with free speech on campus is?
As for complaint that she is “conservative by San Francisco standards” – it’s like being “liberal by North Korea standards” – not exactly a very high bar to clear. I understand that people who are conservative by any other standards shouldn’t bother to vote in California (especially in Bay Area) at all, it’s pointless anyway, but really, the article arguing Trump is more dangerous than North Korean nukes and criticizing Feinstein for not agreeing makes me very concerned about a candidate that won’t disappoint these people.
Well, to be fair, if you are going to discipline or expel students for having a “double standard relative to Israel,” you’re going to lose a lot of students.
(To be extra fair, I don’t think Blum meant that, either.).
I personally believe that almost all forms of free speech should be restored. Calling for violence should still be not OK and child porn should remain illegal but that’s it.
Furthermore “academia” in this context usually refers to social sciences and humanities. Can we actually use a separate term for us STEM people?
By the way social sciences should be treated in the same way as natural sciences with Dawkins-style skepticism and rationality applied.
The question isn’t whether students are pro- or anti-Isreal enough. The question is whether they are allowed to express these beliefs without official censure, whatever they are.
And as far as official censure goes, yes, this is plausibly the biggest free speech issue on campus or anywhere else in America. No one is proposing a law to outlaw expressions of support for Donald Trump. There are currently bills in both houses of Congress to criminalize support for boycotting greater isreal.
> The question is whether they are allowed to express these beliefs without official censure, whatever they are.
Valid question, surely. But we are all perfectly aware that students are NOT allowed to express a wide variety of beliefs – many of which are perfectly fine in many places outside academic campuses – and that the academic stuff is even more restricted, and can literally have their career and, to a significant measure, life ruined over some words that someone would find objectionable. It is not a secret, it is widely discussed and supported by numerous examples, readily available within a short search online.
Yet, to a significant part of the left it doesn’t only seem to be a problem – it seems to be a desirable state of affairs and the only complain is there’s not enough of speech policing going on. I do not see calls to unseat a senator over anybody who supports suppression of free speech in academia, and I do not see many left senators actively opposing such suppression.
However, when the speech police gets to somebody who (and if you have any knowledge of the history of oppressive regimes, you know they devour their own with the same gusto as they do outsiders) calls anti-Semitism “honorable”, Israelis “lying motherfuckers” and “awful human beings”, compares Israel to KKK and envisions Netanyahu wearing “necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children” – then suddenly they find their zeal for freedom of speech. Right amid the incantations about how freedom of speech does not include hate speech – which, of course, is false, but it is their position, when it does not come to virulently hating Israel and supporting anti-Semitism.
In such approach, I find it very hard to believe these people have any real respect for the freedom of speech. Rather, I think they are abusing the respect other people have for freedom of speech to continue to spread their hate and bile, while denying their opponents the right to speak on every suitable opportunity. They are not free speech defenders, they are a hostile parasites to it, fully content with feeding itself on the host and destroying it once their needs are satiated.
> There are currently bills in both houses of Congress to criminalize support for boycotting greater isreal.
I think you arguments would be more convincing if you bothered at least to learn how “Israel” is spelled. But given the amount of hate for Israel – and, routinely, anybody Jewish, being it by association or independently – expressed on campuses daily, I do not think antisemites are having their freedom of speech seriously affected.
Of course, when it comes to the matters of governmental policy – such as actions of government and government-sponsored enterprises – the government has full rights to control its own speech and the speech of its offshoots, and, for example, prohibit governmental institutions from participating in actions such as BDS. I do not think, however, any bill that concerns private speech can be passed and survive First Amendment challenge – it is as clear-cut case as it could be.
I dispute this. Something like this is true on the teaching side of academia – for example there are worries that foo-ist teachers might do a bad job of teaching their students of foo, no matter how principled and rational their foo-ism might be. But on the research side no, I think this is mostly false.
Of course you can’t disentangle teaching and research so easily. But this does mean that right-wingery which is not relevant to teaching worries (libertarianism, neo-reaction-style authoritarianism, whatever Strauss is about) is reasonably safe.
Two can play at this game. Better, we should worry less about people’s motives, and congratulate them whenever they are correct for whatever reason.
I am an obvious Jew, I work on a university campus, and I have gone to and been seen going to Hillel events. In my experience this description is misleading.
You’re probably correct about this.
SSC, is literalist fundamentalism just one step away from skepticism?
I personally believe that literalist fundamentalism is ironically just one step away from skepticism which might also be one reason why skepticism and atheism usually rise right after literalist fundamentalism. Literalist fundamentalism is semi-rational in the sense that literalist fundamentalists are rational enough to reject unscriptural traditions and cultural developments but not rational enough because they fail to doubt faith itself.
Couldn’t there be literalist fundamentalists who doubt their own faith but overcome those objections with reasoned arguments?
Maybe pseudo-rational arguments and dark side epistemology.
SSC, if there are two options below:
1.We will have humans but not rationality or knowledge. Fundamentalists and other irrational lunatics will rule the world.
2.We will have superintelligent AI that is perfectly rational and has a lot of knowledge about the universe but no humans. The current humans will be kept alive until they naturally pass away. However no more kids will be born.
Which one will you choose? Is rationality more important than the existence of humans or vice versa?
Mu.
Seconded.
Rationality is a tool. Just like knowledge. What is the point of having perfect knowledge of the universe with all consequences thereof perfectly reasoned out and stored in a machine if it doesn’t help or at least interest an agent that you care about?
It’s one thing to want to know information because it is interesting, or to be glad when something is discovered because someone can use it to do something useful, like cure cancer or travel to Mars. But to merely have some terminal preference that bits in a computer have a correlation based on a programming language to some arrangement of atoms elsewhere in the universe, without anyone around to know or care… eh, that’s beyond my ken .
if the AI is conscious and happy then obviously 2, but that’s because utility is more important than humans not because rationality is.
If the AI is not sentient then it’s like asking “what’s better (1.) or 2. the eradication of all life.” (I’d say 2 for an immediate snapshot, but 1. because you didn’t say anything about those being impossible, and they could emerge from that environment like they have in the past.)
…and utilitarians wonder why other humans consider them untrustworthy.
Here’s a question for the docs in the audience. Does a family physician make more money caring for a large practice of basically well patients or a smaller group of basically ill patients, assuming the total time spent is the same?
Something I’ve always wondered: if you brush a diamond with a feather, does it recieve any damage microscopically? Could you erase a diamond by gently brushing it with a feather for long enough? Let’s assume you are allowed to replace the feather with a fresh one throughout.
That’s an interesting question! As long as each time you brush it you get to remove at least one atom this is possible to achieve. However how long will it take?
We already know that trick works with rock and water. If you keep at it long enough.
The emperor asks the shepherd boy, how many seconds are there in eternity?
All of them
Seems probable it would end up with a protective coating of feather dust and oil long before it was noticeably damaged.
Unless… how fast are we allowed to move the feather?
I am not a materials scientist, but I would guess yes. It’s easy to find hard substances that show visible wear after centuries of rubbing against softer things, such as metal statues that have been touched by the hands of visitors and stone steps that have been walked on in leather shoes.
Inspired by the question by Forward Synthesis, I have two fun questions.
1.Assume that there exists some substance A that is so insoluble that sometimes there exists not even one molecule A or one ion from it at all in a saturated solution of A. When that is the case can we reasonably say that what we have is actually saturated solution of A at all?
2.What is (-1)^{N_A} where N_A is the Avogadro’s Constant?
@2 We haven’t measured Avogadro’s Constant to the 23 digit precision we’d need for a parity check. Our best measurement had a relative uncertainty of ~10^-8, way way larger than 10^-23.
The probability that Avogadro’s number, if known precisely, is an integer is vanishingly small. So the answer is almost certainly complex.
My mistake. I thought a mole was by definition the # of atoms in an arbitrarily picked brick of carbon, but I was thinking of the kilogram’s definition.
Hi Scott.
I recently lost my father at a relatively young age. Although he had many painful chronic health issues, his condition didn’t seem to be worsening, and he was upbeat and patient regardless of the pain he was in. Due to the third reccurance of a condition that required wound care, a nurse on call came to inspect and dress them. Upon inspecting the wounds, he convinced my father to go to the emergency room, which he had previously been very avoidant of due to his difficulty moving and bad experiences (among other things, a nurse instructing him several times to breathe in and out deeply before taking down his blood oxygen, when he had been diagnosed with central sleep apnea due to brain damage more than a decade prior). About a day after receiving antibiotics and pain medication, he was found unresponsive, his heart having stopped.
I feel a deep sense of gratitude toward the nurse who convinced my father to go to the emergency room, in particular because he did so while I was asleep, and at the time I didn’t consider his condition to be as bad as it turned out to be. However, I’m not sure it’s appropriate, considering that he was at severe risk of heart failure already, and the stress of movement, CNS depressants, or some other interaction that’s beyond me might actually be his direct cause of death.
Based on this description of events, and your experience in hospitals and dealing with dying or on-a-thread patients, is meeting and thanking the nurse in person (keepimg in mind that while I am reasonably well put-together, there will almost certainly be stammering, snuffling, and tears):
1. Practical (will not inconvenience or disrupt the nurse or his patients, and will very probably be a positive experience for him).
2. Appropriate (the expression of gratitude is reasonable and extremely likely to be interpreted in the intended way).
I’m not looking for a particular answer or fishing for sympathy, I am socially awkward and genuinely don’t understand what behavior is expected or appreciated in this situation. If this question makes you uncomfortable, don’t feel obligated to respond. This is an unreasonable request to ask of you, especially as someone who doesn’t normally comment.
I’m not Scott, but personally, I’d recommend writing a heartfelt letter. You are very articulate in print and will surely be able to say what you want to say, which you might be less able to do in person.
I did something similar after my own dad’s death, but for the court-appointed guardian ad litem he had during his last year. His failing faculties brought out the worst in all his relatives (except me, of course) and she was a voice of reason and a source of compassion far greater than any of us deserved. I said as much in my letter, adding that she probably got letters like that all the time. But I got a nice note back saying that she did not, and that she would “keep it handy and look at it when there is a discouraging day.” I felt very happy about the exchange.
I hadn’t considered that at all. That’s a great idea, thanks.