Doesn't just wanting "change" mean something was seriously wrong?

Much of the rhetoric around Obama's successful election campaign, as well as the economic problems that are facing the country and world, can be summarized in one word: change. To take a representative quote:

Nobody knows exactly what they should, but anything is better than nothing.

This from New York City mayor Bloomberg, discussing government bailout of companies in the wake of the stock market crash, on the September 21 edition of Meet the Press.

Something really bothers me about this line of "thinking", and I think I can explain it with a little mental exercise.

Imagine a game in which the object is to get the highest score on a scale of 1-100. The game allows you to make "moves" when it is your turn; for simplicity, let's just say it's some set of moves numbered from 1 to n. What the moves actually *are* isn't important for this thought exercise. In fact, the moves are completely meaningless to the players: the game does not tell you ahead of time what the relationship between the moves and scores is. The game also does not tell you ahead of time how many moves you will get to make. All you know ahead of time is that each move gives you some score between 1-100, and to simplify the thought process a little, let's assume that the game also tells you that if you just randomly pick rules, your average score will be 50, that is, the distribution of scores is some symmetric curve around 50 (it's probably best to just think of a constant distribution, that is, every score from 1-100 is equally likely).

So, basically, it's a guessing game: you make a random move, you get a score. The game might end at that point; you don't know. Your score in the game is the score of your last move.

Note, however, that you don't *have* to make a different move. If you're happy with the score you have, you can keep choosing the same move and getting the same score.

So, let's consider playing this game. You must start by making some random guess, and you get back a score. When and why would you choose to make *another* guess? Clearly, if your score is less than 50, it is *always* a good idea to make another guess, because the expected value of your new move is higher than your old one, and you'd rather end up on a better score. If your score is already over 50, it only makes sense to guess again if you have some way of predicting how many moves the game might go on; otherwise, if you guess again and get a lower score, you run the risk of the game ending and thus ending up with a worse score. Since the rules of the game dictate that you *don't* have any way to predict how many moves the game will last, guessing when you are over 50 is at best risky, and perhaps suboptimal.

In either case, it's important to note the following conclusion: the *only* time when it makes sense to randomly guess a new move is when you are already below the halfway mark.

Now let's pull this back to "change": according to Bloomberg and the apparent social, government, and MSM consensus, *any* change right now is better than none at all. Any *random* change; IOW, they are advocating that in our game, we definitely should take another move and randomly get a new score. In the context of our game, this implies that the current "score" must be less than 50, must be less than "halfway".

Do you see the dilemma? Assuming of course that our game is a decent analogy for the "economy" and generally for "society" - and it's clear enough from centuries of failures, mistakes, tragedies, rise and fall of ideologies, etc, that the relationship between the "moves" that government can make and their "economic score" is nearly random (this follows mathematically from the highly nonlinear and thus chaotic nature of economic and social systems) - this means that either A) after 232 years of being "in charge", our government is still scoring less than halfway in this game, or B) random change is *not* the optimal move.

In either case, our government is failing us: either they have failed to achieve the halfway score that a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard to run the economy would achieve (the median of our distribution), or they are now embarking on a venture that is going to make things worse on average.

The point really is: change for change's sake is never a good idea unless you are in the total crapper.

I realize that Democrats will be happy to conclude that the economy *is* in the crapper and that it's the republican's fault, and thus random change *does* make sense. Sorry, you don't get a pass: economic momentum spans far more than the term of one president or congress, and includes the consequences (usually unintended: politicians don't have much incentive to think longer-term than the duration of their terms, unlike private parties who have incentives to think in terms of spans of time that are at least their lifetime long and oftentimes the lifetime of their children and children's children) of decisions made many decades ago. The current economy cannot be laid at the feet of Republicans or the Bush administration; it's a bipartisan failure, tracing some of its origins to events such as the imposition of the individual income tax and the creation of the fraudulent Federal Reserve system that go back almost a decade and which had the complicity of every congress and president since, Republocrat and Demopublican.

If I had hired "government" to run my economy and the solution they gave me after 232 years was "random change", well, they'd be fired.

And isn't that what the government is? People that work for us? Doesn't the preamble say "for the people"?

I say we fire 'em, and look for a group of people who has something better to sell us then "change". How about, you know, an actual *plan*?

Government, MSM still using fear to fool the sheeple

I used to have a particularly sensitive friend. The first time I disagreed with him about something, he told me politely that he understood that I had a right to disagree with him, but the way that I had chosen "was not the right way". Fair enough, said I, we're friends and I'll try a different way next time. So, next time I tried a different tact, and got the same message, perhaps a little less friendly this time: "that's not the right way". Over time, I tried several other methods, and got increasingly strident declarations that that was not the way to disagree with him. Growing frustrated, I started to ask "well, what *is* the right way?" He always avoided the answer and instead just pointed out the ways in which my previous methods were poor. Eventually, I started to realize the truth: there *was* no right way. All attempts had been tried and all rejected; no alternatives were left. He would never *say* this, though, there was always the implication that somewhere there *existed* a "right way", but I was just too dense to find it. I eventually came to the conclusion that this was just a way to keep me from ever disagreeing with him, that he was taking advantage of the courtesy and friendship that I was extending him to create an asymmetric relationship, and our friendship drifted apart from reduced trust and poor communication.

The point? I'm ok with being told that "X is not the right way", as long as, you know, there actually *is* a right way. You have to meet me halfway. If you take away *all* of the choices, then my failure to find a "right way" is not *my* fault, it's yours.

And this is exactly the way that the government and main stream media (MSM) are treating us, the sheeple. On many important subjects, they keep telling us "*this* is not the right way, this is something to *fear*", but then when you conclude "well, then the opposite way must be the *good* way, right", they take away *that* option too: "No, that is also the wrong way!"

Take for example global average temperature: the government and MSM are creating a huge state of fear about the possibility of global warming. They are spending tax money on "solutions", they are threatening "carbon taxes", they are punishing car makers for not making efficient enough cars, they are punishing citizens for driving by taxing gasoline for no other given reason than social engineering, and all in the name of "stopping global warming". Well, ok then: surely this means that global *cooling* must be good, if global warming is bad? Oh hell no. Global *cooling* would lead us to ice-ages, and be a move towards the thermodynamic death of the planet, etc. So wait: warming is the wrong way. Cooling is the wrong way. So what's left? Is staying exactly the same temperature really the *only* thing that doesn't justify sufficient panic and fear for the government to sieze more power? Is that even *possible*, given that temperatures regularly move around?

You haven't left any *right* answers, and that means it's *your* fault.

Now take the economy. Over in Reason, Jacob Sullum has a nice list of all of the things that used to be good but are now bad in connection with the economy. I don't really have much to add to his post, so I'll just copy some of it:

Loose credit is bad, and so is tight credit.

We were told that loose credit created the current mess; we're now told that tight credit is the thing to fear. Which is it? You can't take *both* of them and tell us they are *both* the "wrong thing". You have to leave an alternative, or else it's *your* fault.

Rising home prices are bad, and so are falling home prices.

In both home and retail prices, we were told that it's bad that prices are going up, usually with some tear-jerker about how some joe average can't buy a house or a glass of milk. Now that home prices are going down as are retail prices, we are told this is bad, usually with some tear-jerker about how mary-average had to lose her house or because falling prices mean that we'll have a recession. Which one is good??? If you tell me they are *both* bad, then you're just manipulating me because all you want is for me to fear.

Consumer spending is bad, except when it's good.

The current crisis was blamed on too much consumer spending. Now we are being told that the solution to the current problem is more consumer spending. Which choice are you leaving me??? Clearly, all you want is to make me fear what is going on *no matter what is going on*, because otherwise you'd leave me *an option*. You left me no options; that's not my fault, that's your fault.

Is this just pointless anger on my part? Is there an actual *result* of this?

Only if you count 700 billion dollars as a concrete result. Remember when the government and MSM told us that if congress did not immediately grant 700M dollars for the purposes of buying up bad debt that the economy would crumble immediately? Remember when the sheeple baaaed their acquiesence, frightened into accepting whatever we were told?

It would follow, then, that if those bad debts were *not* bought up, either the economy should collapse, or the government was full of shit, right?

But: the government has not bought a *single* bad debt. It's been 45 days, and yet, the economy hasn't collapsed: no lines at the grocery store, no tent cities in my back yard, no anarchy. Hmm, what happened? We *did* let the government print 700 *billion* new dollars, right? That's over 2000 dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country, right? They convinced us that they needed that money for a very specific purpose to prevent a very important and specific disaster from occurring, right?

What happened? After they got the money, they changed their mind:

In front of Congress, Paulson argued for the 700Bn to purchase *bad debt* *across the spectrum of financial institutions*, saying that purchasing actual institutions was the wrong way:

I'm saying that the model you are looking at is the model where we go to people that absolutely need to sell and say, "If you want to sell, give us something."

The model we're looking at is -- and -- and what we believe it takes to be successful here -- is to go to a broad group of institutions, and a very, very wide range of institutions that own these assets, and have them participate.

Shortly thereafter - after the fear caused by the government and MSM, not fear caused by anything except their own failure to *give us another alternative other than fear* - after receiving his 700Bn dollars, Paulson exhaled and changed his mind:

“Our assessment at this time is that this (the purchase of toxic assets) is not the most effective way to use funds,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a news conference.

Paulson said the administration will continue to use $250 billion of the program to purchase stock in banks as a way to bolster their balance sheets and encourage them to resume more normal lending.

Fucking slimeball.

And all I hear is "baaaaaaa". The sheeple get manipulated into giving 700 *billion* dollars and then sit back and baaaa while the baldfaced lie that generated the 700 billion is admitted by the person that asked for it.

To be clear, this is like my going to a family member and asking them for money because I have cancer... and then turning around a few days later and saying "nah, I didn't really have cancer, I'm going to Tahiti."

Baaaaa.

Another failure of government and "the commons"

One of the reasons often advanced for large government is management of "the commons": things that supposedly don't work well as privatized spaces, that must be managed centrally "for the good of all". This is the command-and-control "solution" to the "Tragedy of the Commons."

In practice, though, the history of government management of commons is pretty poor. Again, for reasons I don't fully understand, the psychology of the masses is that they give a pass to this poor track record while imagining far worse management under a private system. I'm not sure where this myopia comes from. All I can do is continue to catalog the list of failures.

In this article, the FCC's opening of the electromagnetic frequency band currently occupied by broadcast television is discussed. I'm sure that most people have never considered whether the government's management of the "frequency commons" has been good: it just *is*, I get my television on my rabbit ears, and that's good enough. But it has it really been good? Is this opening up a sign that government management of the commons works?

Or is it the case that *this should have been done long ago*? As the article says

The television industry's shift from analog to digital broadcasts will leave "white spaces" -- that is, unused portions of wireless spectrum.

IOW: *digital* use of the spectrum is *far* more efficient than analog use.

And yet: due to government management of the commons, inefficient analog use of extremely important parts of the spectrum has been dictated by government policy for *far* longer than it needed to be, and is *still* dictated in other parts of the spectrum, e.g. the spectrum used for FM radio. There is no technological reason to hog the current FM radio spectrum for analog digital broadcasts, and doing so is actually suppressing many potential technological/product advances.

Digital broadcasts over the EM spectrum could work just like internet communication and cell-phone communication: in terms of "packets" that have "addresses" that allow multiple communications to go on simultaneously on the same "channel". (The TV/Radio equivalent for cell phones would be if each and every cellphone had its own band of the EM spectrum, a situation that would allow for, oh, approximately 100 people to have cell phones). The government's inefficient management of the broadcast TV and radio spaces have suppressed interesting technologies such as personalized radio (in which each person receives a separate "radio station"). Look for example how many programming choices Sirius/XM pack into a single frequency for an insight into how many more choices we could have.

The obvious approach to problems of "Tragedy of the Commons" is to avoid "commons" altogether, via division of the supposed commons into pieces that can be separately sold and operated privately.

Clearly, some situations lend themselves more easily and readily to "privatization" than others. As someone said to me recently when I suggested that *if* there's a "problem" that needs to be solved in "global warming/climate change", that rather than advocating the usual government-control "solution" to a "commons" problem, perhaps the solution is to get rid of the commons altogether: "you want to privatize air?" While I certainly don't accept clever soundbites as a substitute for actual logic and rationality, I'll give that some things lend themselves more easily to "privatization".

Having said that: I don't see the EM spectrum as one of them. Particularly in the digital age, there's arguably not even a "commons" since multiple parties can share the same frequency. But even before that, there's no reason that parts of the spectrum couldn't have been sold. Different frequencies largely are independent, and different geographic regions of a single frequency are largely independent (with the exception being at points on the boundaries). The frequencies could have been sold by a reasonable geographic distribution. If this had been done, it would have incentivized individual owners to most efficiently use their frequency, which would have encouraged solutions like the digital mutliplexing *long* before now.

Does the near "tie" between Repubs and Dems mean anything?

I have a theory - and I've been too lazy to spend more than shower time considering it - that there's a fundamental reason that US elections come up so even election after election (yes, Obama is crushing McCain in the electoral college, but the popular vote is pretty close... and it has been pretty close - with some oscillation back and forth - for a long time), and that that reason is that basically that they are both equivalent. I don't think I can prove that this virtual "tie" *has* to be caused by this "equivalency", but I suspect that you could make an argument that *if* you had more or less equivalent parties, it would result in the election pattern that we are seeing.

Yawn

Today is one of those days where I get left out... kind of like the finals of the national hockey league: two teams are going for the championship and not only do I not favor one of the teams over the other, I don't even fucking care about the sport.

I have friends who are ready to party in the streets until midnight or cry in abject despair at the elections. I have seen people right poetic declarations about how the world has changed, how this is a great day for the world, etc.

Me? I'm looking for reruns of Family Guy. Yawn.

You know, the thing is: I'm jealous as hell. I get it, I really do. I was reading "the Uptight Seattlite"'s column in this week's Seattle Weekly and the emotion expressed there gave me a lump in my throat:

let us first take a moment to soak in the joy. We've become so accustomed to shame, fear, and anger these past eight years that joy may be an unfamiliar sensation. Do not be alarmed. On the contrary, sink into it like a healing bath after a long, cold day. Let it wash over you, the feeling that your country is a place where you belong after all. The relief that your fellow citizens have turned out to be not bigots crouching in the caves of ignorance, but patriots standing tall in the bright light of reason.

*This* is the way I *want* to feel. I envy those who feel it now. If my preferences in government were ever met, I think the feeling would exceed even this, for after all, democrats waited only *8* years to get one of theirs back into the presidency, they spent the last 4 of those with a congressional majority, and they've always pretty much held 50% of this country. Contrast that to those of us who champion civil society: we've *never* had a president, we've arguably only ever had one congressman (Ron Paul), we regularly poll about half of a percent in elections etc, and there is virtually *no* hope of an advocate of civil society becoming president in this country in my lifetime. Not that I hold "suffering" up as a noble endeavor, but if you'll indulge me for a moment: no democrat (or republican) has suffered like I have.

It's an emotional issue. I envy those who feel like this, and I want it, and its incredibly frustrating to know I'll never get it, and it takes a certain amount of heroic will or stupendous stupidity to somehow keep soldiering on knowing that.

And it sometimes requires some venting:

Like there's a fundamental difference between the Republocrats or the Demopublicans. Have either decreased the size of government? Have either balanced the budget? Have either moved in the direction of respecting individual's decision making over their own desire to run other's lives and make others' decisions for them? Have either advocated *anything* except "give me the power and I will solve all your problems for you?"

I know you Democrats thing that now things are going to "change", but I've got news for you: they aren't going to change in the *slightest*. The two major parties are just factions of the same party. The concept that there is a fundamental difference is an *illusion*. Please enjoy your day in the sun, your day of optimism, because it will come crashing down around you shortly in abject disappointment. Given the democratic majority's complete inaction on Iraq, I have doubts that Obama will do the one decent thing that he could do: end the fucking genocide in Iraq. Get us the fuck out. Stop pissing our money down a shithole. Even if he *does* do that, I expect that that will just be a prelude to sending the troops back out to every bywater that has issues, following the Clintonian fiction that the US military is paid for by the people so that he can try to play humanitarian and savior across the world. Hey, I'm all for humanitarianism, but it's a *private* matter, not one that our government should be attempting to do with a military that the people paid for *to protect them*. It's dishonest and theft.

And the scary thing is that Obama's *strongest* point is probably his approach to foreign affairs. The economic mess we have now? It's going to get far worse under increased socialism (I won't regularly make this kind of defensive statement here - it's my space, and I don't want to waste my time saying boring, obvious things - do not mistake my use of the term "socialism" here for some sort of McCain sympathy. I consider *McCain* to be a socialist for the most part, as both the republicans and democrats have increased the size of the federal government at the expense of individual decision-making. McCain's pathetic campaign attempt to discredit Obama as a "socialist" is purely coincidental to my use of the term).

For those who think that Obama represents Americans "coming together to help each other out": you can't *force* charity. By definition, if it was forced, it's no longer "charity". You can't force someone to do something voluntary; it's a logical contradiction. So while I understand the urge - my own advocacy of "civil society" *is* a humanitarian, "let's treat each other better" advocacy - it is unfortunately doomed from its conceptual start if the urge to be humanitarian is implemented via coercion.

It's the grand paradox of civil society, and one I will return to again and again until I fully understand and learn to harness it: the more you want to control things to be civil society, the more you have to resist the urge to control.

Trying not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg

Over in Reason, Ronald Bailey takes a first, partial step towards redeeming his awful recent record with respect to the global climate change issue. Bailey has long represented a voice of, well, reason, in the area of humanity's responses to scientific issues. In the last 6 months or so, he has done a dramatic turn-around on this one issue, throwing aside years of hard-won understandings and instead drinking the cool-aid of government intervention.

In this article, though, he returns to his rational roots. The article addresses a special issue of The New Scientist detailing "The Folly of Growth," whose general theme is "Economic growth is folly because "our economy is killing the planet."" Bailey outlines the insane extrapolations made by the authors in this issue and the extent to which they are willing to use those doomsday predictions to begin the lobbying now for stronger big-brother states, with some clearly laying the groundwork for a truly frightening big-brother *world* government.

But Bailey throws off his recent big-government costume and lays out the same fundamental arguments that are so devastating to his own foray into government control over carbon emittance: that we've seen these kind of doomsday scenarios before and careful monitoring and non-panicked action proved to be the best course of action; that the extrapolations made by these apocalyptic prognosticators ignore the demonstrated history of technological advance; that it is generally *non-privately* owned commons that have (predictably: there's a reason it's called the "tragedy" of the commons) suffered the worst degradations; and, most importantly, that rather than being a *cause* of environmental neglect, economic growth is the great *reducer* of environmental neglect.

On the issue of "shrinking forests", for example, Bailey says

It is true that tropical forests are shrinking in poor countries in which such forests "belong" to the government. However, a 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change."

That is, that economically advanced countries are *saving* forests, not shrinking them. In fact,

the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research points out that the "main threat to tropical forests" comes from slash-and-burn agriculture practiced by poor farmers who have no other option for feeding their families.

On the issue of technological advancement and previous "scares", Bailey does not explicitly mention the world starvation scare of the 1970s led by Paul Ehrlich, but he does refer to it obliquely:

Between 1980 and 2005, the world's farmers nearly doubled crop production while increasing cropland only 7 percent. If farmers around the world produced crops as efficiently as American farmers, global cropland could be cut in half.

For those with short memories, it is imperative to point out that the starvation scare of the 70s was just as prominent and highly touted as the current global climate change scare, and drastic measures involving the use of force to control behavior of the multitudes were advocated as the only way to stave off a pandemic that was predicted to kill as many as one *billion* people (the global climate change literature is actually pretty bereft of actual predictions of the damage that is supposedly to come as a result of their dire predictions, but nothing I've seen gets anywhere *close* to predicting a billion dead. It is something I'd like to understand better: what is the current state of analysis of the *consequences* of the global climat change scenarios, assuming that the change actually occurs? Mostly I've seen vague mentions of rising sea levels; while that clearly has some negative consequences to those living in low-lying areas, it's clear that these would be gradual changes, and so presumably would kill *no one* in any sort of eminent disaster way, right? If it takes 50 years for an area to flood, isn't that sufficient time to save those lives? Clearly at an expensive cost, but I still count lives as the most important resource). That we didn't panic and kill many people in the pursuit of saving more has turned out to be a *very* good decision. Technology improves rapidly and there's every reason to be careful about over-reacting before we've had a chance to let technology, and it's bigger brother economic growth, play themselves out. (I know for example that there are researchers working on ways to "sequester" excess carbon at the bottom of the sea through clever application of microbes to the problem. I have no idea if that is a promising approach, but the fact is, there *are* many lines of inquiry that can be made into these issues).

Kudos to Bailey for returning to his roots: reason, thought, and working together via civil society over panic and the urge to forcibly control.