The Ambrosini Critique

Try your mad geography skilz with this game. I got to level 10. Speaking of games, I got 6470 on Desktop Tower Defense last night (UPDATE: 6644 this afternoon… and I thought I was addicted to coffee).

This makes me think the sweet spot for fame — the peak of the popularity Kuznet’s curve, if you will, trading off exposure for income — is at a lower income level on the internet than in offline media. Legacy media, at this point in the transition from print to online, is welfare reducing:

[T]he blog has been a source of tremendous artistic satisfaction. I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially. I’ll just do it less often, especially over the holidays. It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.

If ever there were positive externalities that needed subsidies, they would be those provided by the Dilbert Blog!

I just think the idea that ethical truths are universal and timeless is just silly. Take this question from “Ask Philosophers”: “Once capital punishment was right and fornication was wrong. Now the reverse seems generally true. Is there any way that philosophy can prepare us for future alterations in our values, perhaps by indicating where they are likely to arise?”

Answer:

It is not at all obvious that captial punishment used to be morally permissible. What is obvious is that most people, or some powerful people, or something along those lines thought it was morally permissible (that is, “right” or “OK”). It may well be that it was always morally impermissible (that is, “wrong”), but people didn’t realize this. That would certainly be my view.

There’s nothing peculiar about what I’m suggesting. People used to think the earth was at the center of the universe. It wasn’t. They were wrong. People used to think it was OK to leave babies on the sides of mountains to die in the noonday sun. They too were wrong. Maybe the same goes for capital punishment. And even sex outside of marriage.

So philosophy can at least contribute that sort of clarification. And maybe a bit more: By examining our presumptions carefully, perhaps philosophy can help us realize that what we think, even what we really, firmly believe, isn’t right, after all.

Why was leaving babies on the sides of mountains to die in the noonday sun bad always; why is this a truth like the heliocentric solar system? Its not.

Infanticide is only wrong because we’ve coordinated on an equilibrium in which it is wrong. It didn’t have to be that way and some day we may migrate to a different equilibrium in which killing your newborn is ok. Some people call this “relativism” and scoff at the idea that ethics are “socially constructed,” but ethical truths are no different than economic truths like “little green pieces of paper of value and they can be used for trade.” There is no universal and timeless fact of nature that makes money valuable¹. We’ve just decided it is so².

Importantly, economic truths (and their cousins, ethical truths) are objective facts as much as physical truths are. I can’t just make up my own economic facts just like I can’t make up physical facts. Me wishing gravity pointed up doesn’t make it so and this piece of scrap paper on my desk is not money just because I really, really want it to be. Economic facts are facts. So what if the mechanism for making them so is human action (versus God or the Big Bang).

Similarly, ethical truths, while created through social processes, are nonetheless facts.

Ethical and economic facts are weird facts, though. They’re not immutable (you can’t kill your infant anymore), they’re hierarchical (”money” only makes sense in an “economic system”) and there may be two true facts that contradict each other (”murder is wrong” and “capital punishment is right”)³.

Frankly, physicists have it easy compared to us social scientists!

1. The time is coming when there probably won’t be paper money. [↩]
2. The interesting question is what the hell does this process entail? I mean, what does “we” mean? Does a majority of society need to agree with the fact for it to be true? Everyone? And what does it mean to coordinate? I don’t think voting or explicit political processes are enough… there’s too much implicit facts for them to be generated by explicit processes. [↩]
3. If you’re interested in professional philosophizing on these points, see Searle’s Construction of Social Reality [↩]

Prof. Lindert’s work on pre-modern inequality is discussed by Tim Harford in the Financial Times.

The US, as the richest society in history, is therefore potentially the most unequal in history. The US population could be kept alive for the cost of about $100bn a year.

If the elites had total control, that would leave another $13,800bn (the rest of US GDP) a year to distribute among friends of the president – almost enough to give a sum equal to Bill Gates’s lifetime wealth to a new crony each working day.

But the US is not remotely this exploitative, no matter what you may feel the next time you buy a copy of Windows.

In the newly coined jargon, it has a low “inequality extraction ratio”, meaning that the poor have much more than it would take to keep them alive.

That is faint praise for the US, perhaps. But it is interesting to observe that while modern societies are rich enough to be much more unequal than their predecessors, they show similar patterns of income inequality. Perhaps – I am speculating wildly – human societies have some hard-wired tolerance for inequality?

What would determine that “hard-wired tolerance for inequality”? Does it vary by society? If so, why?

All we sell in SantaLand are photos. People sit upon Santa’s lap and pose for a picture. The Photo Elf hands them a slip of paper with a number printed along the top. The form is filled out by another elf and the picture arrives by mail weeks later. So really, all we sell is the idea of a picture. One idea costs nine dollars, three ideas cost eighteen…
This evening I was sent to be a Photo Elf, a job I enjoyed the first few times. The camera is hidden in the fireplace and I take the picture by pressing a button at the end of a cord. The pictures arrive by mail weeks later and there is no way an elf can be identified and held accountable but still, you want to make it a good picture.

— David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice

(Funniest Comment I’ve Read Today)

First, you keep saying that “there are no human races. If you compare genetic variation within each of the so-called races with other populations, there is more vriation within group than between groups.”

I love this point. Such wisdom. But when I tried it out today on a fellow worker, I got confused. He happened to mention that men are on average a few inches taller than the average woman. What a know-nothing, I thought, and then I used your argument: “If you look at variation in height among men, you find some men who are 4 feet tall and others who are over 7 feet tall. Thus, there is more variation among men than there is between men and women.” Pretty good point, no? But my co-worker didn’t seem as shock-and-awed as I expected. He just said, “Sure, there’s lots of variation among men, but there’s still an overall average difference between male and female height, even if it’s comparatively small.”

I was stumped, and I have to ask for your assistance here. What do I say when some hack tries to suggest that there can be differences between groups even if each individual group has internal variation? I mean, clearly it’s a fact of anthropology that [variation within a group] = [no possible differences between that group and another group]. Just no way it can be. But I can’t seem to get that point across very effectively.

Maybe an analogy would help. Such as, “There’s more variation between inch 1 and inch 36 of a yardstick than there is between a yardstick and a meter. Therefore 1 yard = 1 meter.” Would a simple example like that help? Or maybe you can think of others.

— Commenter John Brown

You’ll have to read the post and the thread to get the full context, but its pretty funny. Also, look at the comment directly below the one linked to.

Sidr.

Tiny speak. I dunno, but here’s Lessig on Clinton:

But the part that gets me the most about Senator Clinton is the eager embrace of spinelessness. I don’t get this in Democrats generally. I never have, but I especially don’t get it after two defeats to the likes of George Bush (ok, one defeat, but let’s put that aside for the moment). Our party seems constitutionally wedded to the idea that you wage a campaign with tiny speech. Say as little as possible. Be as uncontroversial as you can. Embrace the chameleon as the mascot. Fear only that someone would clearly understand what you believe. (Think of Kerry denying he supported gay marriage — and recognize that the same sort of people who thought that would win him support are now inside the control room at ClintonHQ).

All politicians of course do this to some degree. And about some issues, I even get it. But what put me over the line with Senator Clinton was the refusal to join the bipartisan call that presidential debates be free. Not because this is a big issue. But because even on this (relatively) small issue, she couldn’t muster the strength to do the right thing.

Her failure here was not because her campaign didn’t know of the issue. I spoke directly to leading figures (or so they said) in the campaign. The issue was discussed, and a decision was made. And the decision was to say nothing about the issue. You can almost see the kind of tiny speak that was battered around inside HQ. “Calling for free debates might be seen as opposing copyright.” “It might weaken our support among IP lawyers and Hollywood.” “What would Disney think?” Better to say nothing about the issue. Better to let it simply go away.

and here’s why he supports Obama:

First, and again, I know him, which means I know something of his character. “He is the real deal” has become my favorite new phrase. Everything about him, personally, is what you would dream a candidate should be. Integrity, brilliance, warmth, humor and most importantly, commitment. They all say they’re all this. But for me, this part is easy, because about this one at least, I know.

Second, I believe in the policies…. You’ll read he’s a supporter of Net Neutrality… Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency — the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work.

Kings and Emperors were rich, but not all the Rich were Kings and Emperors. So, it follows that historical evidence showing Kings and Emperors had lots of kids doesn’t tell us much about whether or not the Rich had lots of kids.

Laura Betzig makes this error in her critique of Farewell to Alms (pdf). To counter the claim, falsely attributed to Clark, that England was the only place where there was a relationship between fertility and economic status, she cites a long list of Kings and their concubines in various other countries and eras¹. Its an interesting historical fact that some men in the past had hundreds (and some thousands) of wives and children, but this says nothing about what was happening in the society at large. While Nebuchadnezzar was stealing other Kings’ wives and I’m sure having many sons by them, who knows how reproductive his underlings and other members of the upper classes were.

By definition, Kings are different (they’re Kings!) so they simply can’t be a representative sample. Clark’s wills are as close to a representative sample of the whole population as one can hope for in historical data. Using this data, Clark shows English nobility, on average, had fewer children than their merchant-class counter-parts and he shows that while there’s a relationship between wealth and fertility no such relationship exists between social class and fertility. The data from England should make us even more suspect of previous studies that use the fact of a few highly fecund royalty to suggest links between fertility and economic status in the society as a whole. These guys were just outliers and we usually throw outliers out of the analysis.

This is a common mistake people make when they talk about Clark’s book. I think its caused by history being biased towards Kings. Pre-modern history, as it is taught, is populated by Kings and their loyal subjects. It is full of stories of their conquests (usurpations, wars and treaties). Most of history though, as it was actually lived, is populated with normal every day folk and their stories are more mundane². This means most of our historical data, and much of our historical thinking, is biased towards describing Kings rather than every day folk. If we want to test theories about every day folk, like Darwinian theories of the Industrial Revolution, we have to remove this bias.

1. Clark only conjectures the connection between fertility and economic status was stronger in England. He doesn’t provide any cross-country evidence support this conjecture, though. [↩]
2. Approximately 0% of the total humans that ever lived were Kings, but approximately 100% of pre-1800 history is about Kings. [↩]

ah-oh.