Biophilia

Star Wars and the hero's quest

2012-02-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

The Star Wars mashup as a way to psychological, even spiritual, health.

I found the recent release of a full-length mashup version of Star Wars, composed of countless (actually, 473) clips from fan reenactments and animations, endlessly fascinating. As the Salon article that brought it to my attention mentions, it is a gloriously expressive outpouring of love. But is it healthy?

From the very first, Star Wars was an extraordinarily cheesy Hero tale. A journey by the fair-haired Luke from Potter-esque anonymity to savior of the galaxy, with a bit of magic (force) tossed in at highly convenient plot points, with luck and coincidence playing starring roles. Then the franchise went steadily downhill, but I won't go there!

As a fan of Jung, I respect the intricacies of the archetypal theory that surrounds this sort of tale, which goes into enormous detail about the typical hero, the helpers in the quest, the father-figure, the role of the underworld and its tests, the initiation ritual, the magic tools, and so forth. All this has its role. But one thing missing in the theory is its point ... why are these hero tales so gripping and perennial? Why do they emerge in every time and cuture? Joseph Campbell tries to explain it in his classic, the Hero with 1000 faces:

"The passage of the mythological hero ... fundamentally it is inward- into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space, but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power." ...

"What, now, is the result of the miraculous passage and return?

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as the others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all."

In the spirit of simplification, what I would focus on is that the Hero tale, simply and plainly, is a way to model success. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success, and the psychological enactment of success- of reading the happy fairy tale, of cheering for a winning team, of watching the murder being solved on CSI, reading the superman comic book, and yes, wielding one's tin-foil light-saber, is more powerful than any Tony Robbins motivational pablum. Sure, actual success is the sweetest of all, but that is a rare experience, and anyway, we only know what to do with it and how to value it through the strenuous modelling of a childhood steeped in the hero tale (including Cindarella tales).

We are all by the nature of reality and life bound by countless fetters. Biological, physical, environmental, and above all social conditions hem us in on all sides. Life is an endless series of problems to be solved and desires to be satisfied in the teeth of implacable reality- even quite active competition & opposition. The mantra of "freedom" that rings through our political discourse is far from an existential promise, but a woefully limited proposition, relative only to our ur-political condition of total Hobbesian depotism. Now, we face, in political terms merely a tyranny of the majority, (or a majority of the money), moderated by a few constitutional rights, more or less observed.

Thus the sweetness and rarity of true success, where some magical tool or insight arises, perhaps spontaneously from the same place that is so insistent on the enactment of hero tales ... the unconscious, allowing us to cut an existential Gordian knot. While obedience to the ambient social norms may suffice for a "normal", discontented slave-like existence, we all aspire higher. Perhaps tragically, but also inevitably. The hero tale is the spur, the offering of hope, and the psychological preparation for that real quest.

How best to experience it? Clearly one gets out what one puts into it, psychologically speaking. Worst of all is the passive viewing experience, supine in front of a TV or theater screen. Next perhaps is the radio format, demanding substantially more mental attention and imagination. On par would be a live reading by a friend or parent, even if there are a few pictures involved. Somewhere in there would also come the solitary reading experience, which makes some imaginative demands, but is also a bit slow and dry. How about actual re-enactment and play? Here we get to some serious interactivity, intensity, mental involvement, and imagination. Indeed, the more crude the props and implements, the higher the imaginative involvement.

Lastly of course is actually carrying out a heroic experience, engaging in the hard work involved, the practice, the training, the schooling needed to be a professional musician, or join seal team 6, or cure cancer. But that takes forever!

One can easily imagine religion arising out of this process of devising and telling heroic tales. Adults and children alike thrive on such sagas. Perhaps one saga (Homer's, the Ramayana, the Mosaic tale, etc.) captures the mood and vitality of a culture particularly well, with close scrapes, awesome enemies, deep poetry, and triumphant successes. Perhaps, in its customary recognition of the overwhelming importance of the hero's unique inner resources (i.e. the unconscious), its heroes gain magical assistance or are themselves gods under mundane cover.

Perhaps this story becomes so psychologically compelling or ritualized in re-enactment that it turns from story into fact- a "believed" religious narrative. Some other ingredients may be added, such as a back-story about how the world is created, and some more or less rationalized doctrines about how the "super" powers and "super"-beings relate to each other to satisfy the more cerebral believers. But all these things can be added later on rather easily, as George Lucas has labored voluminously (if relatively vainly) to show. (L. Ron Hubbard had a great deal more success!)

And what about humor? In striking contrast to a story that evolves into religion, the Star Wars mashup is as much spoof as homage, yet is none the less loving for that. The original film used plenty of humor, particularly from C3PO, and the comically over-drawn villains. There are fine lines between modelling success and being successful, delicious in their plasticity. Also, fine lines between profundity and platitude, between bathos and tragedy, between meaningful myth and camp. Humor seems to signify our knowledge of those lines, our mutual conspiracy to experience greatness while wearing collanders on our heads. It also, in its better tenors, affirms existential hope over the various tragic means and ends of human life.

In this connection, Campbell tried to resurrect an ancient sense of comedy, far different from what is customary today:

"We are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable, as fun it is a pleasant haven of escape, but the fairy tale of happiness ever after can not be taken seriously; it belongs to the never-never land of childhood, which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough; just as the myth of heaven ever after is for the old, whose lives are behind them and whose hearts have to be readied for the last portal of the transit into night - which sober, modern, Occidental judgement is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. ... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
...
It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and 'unreal': they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs."

Hope, confidence, and togetherness- also the currency of mega-religion.
Inside the new hate.. or is it the same old hate?
Our government is corrupt.
Our media is corrupt too.
What we need in a new political/economic narrative.
Brief talk on place cells in the brain.
Could it be that banks are really getting cut down to size?
On the other hand, the Greek crisis generates even more financial innovation.
The CBC's look at Occupy concludes, with a rousing call to democratize capital and downsize the FIRE sector (segment 3, minute 47 to end).
Economics quote, from Robert Solow, via Bill Mitchell, speaking of conventional micro-based macroeconomic modeling approaches (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, or DSGE):

"An obvious example is that the DSGE story has no real room for unemployment of the kind we see most of the time, and especially now: unemployment that is pure waste. There are competent workers, willing to work at the prevailing wage or even a bit less, but the potential job is stymied by a market failure. The economy is unable to organize a win-win situation that is apparently there for the taking. This sort of outcome is incompatible with the notion that the economy is in rational pursuit of an intelligible goal. The only way that DSGE and related models can cope with unemployment is to make it somehow voluntary, a choice of current leisure or a desire to retain some kind of flexibility for the future or something like that. But this is exactly the sort of explanation that does not pass the smell test."

Neurons poised in meditation

2012-02-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

Cortical neurons show exquisite balance between inhibitory and excitatory inputs, typically summing to zero.

Life wouldn't be quite as sweet without homeostatic mechanisms. From blood chemistry to the hedonic treadmill, our biology keeps things stable so we can sail through life on an even keel. As yet we have only a glimmer of appreciation for the many homeostatic mechanisms in the brain- for mood, activity, weight, temperature, introversion, sleep, and many more. While people differ in their settings for many of these systems, those settings tend to be extremely stable through life.

It's gradually become apparent that the basic workings of the brain rely on another homeostatic mechanism on the level of neurons and neural networks. The ability to shift attention, superimposed on a baseline brain rhythm / hum, indicates that the baseline condition of much of the brain is quasi-stability. Such shifts are detected in functional brain scanning as metabolic variations, (higher blood flow, among other signs), so there is real physiological change that follows what subjectively seems like effortless shifts of mental state.

So, most of the brain operates on a knife's edge / default / zero state which can be roped into active, attentive, ever-changing coalitions of neurons from all over the cortex to bring us the many and various conditions of thought, sensation, vision, emotional engagement, planning, etc. that are well-known to engage various specific parts of the brain.

For this important property of nerve cells in the brain, a recent paper provides a cellular rationale, which is that all information-carrying neurons in the brain typically get automatically balanced inhibitory and excitatory inputs through a feedback mechanism to inhibitory synapses. The idea is that each neuron connects as much to inhibitory interneurons as to excitatory information-carrying neurons, and those inhibitory neurons adjust their outputs over time in response to what is going on in the target cell so that its activity stays mostly quiescent. Most neurons thus spend most of their time in a calm, meditative state.

The paper leads with simulation experiments, and follows with supporting evidence from actual cells and networks. The hypothesis appears to go substantially beyond current knowledge, where inhibitory neurons are a well known component, but not a functionally well-understood part of the neural / cognitive landscape. The hypothesis provides a rationale, based on a relatively mindless cellular mechanism, for why the brain doesn't explode with activity, but rather keeps humming within relatively tight bounds, and as noted above, with the sort of knife-edge stability that lets us think with some degree of both focus and roving attention.

The story starts with Donald Hebb, who came up with perhaps the key insight to how neurons can learn as a network. The rule is commonly expressed as "cells that fire together wire together". Which is to say that in a neural network of cells, those that fire coincidently (one to the next) within some window of time (say <10 milliseconds), engage in a molecular process that strengthens their synaptic connections so that in the future, the downstream cell responds more strongly to firing of that upstream cell.

This basically mechanical process is the soul of associative learning, where a bell, say, is associated with the appearance of food. But lest everything become associated with everything else, countervailing mechanisms are needed to inhibit those connections that are not active, and keep overall activity at a low baseline so that only unusual occurences create signals. In this general respect, the role of inhibitory neurons (which generally use the neurotransmitter GABA in their synapses, in contrast to excitatory neurons that typically use glutamate) has been appreciated for some time.

The present authors take the extra step of simulating in detail specific rules of Hebbian learning and inhibition that seem to accurately account not only for the actual sensitivity of cortical neurons but, on a larger scale, for the operation of memory as an example of how all this adds up to collective neuronal & brain function.

The secret is a rule that generates detailed balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs over time to each cell, leading the downstream (target) neuron to be mostly quiescent (also called by the authors asynchronous irregular activity, or AI). This rule operates on inhibitory interneurons that get the same upstream signals as excitatory neurons, adjusting their synaptic strengths towards the common downstream neuron.

A: Diagram of the inhibitory neuron (light gray), getting excitatory inputs and acting in parallel with excitatory stimulation to a balanced target (green). B: Diagram of simulations, where 25 inhibitory and 100 excitatory neurons with distinct signal trains, feed into a target neuron. C: Relation of the learning rule with time. Only coincident firing (inhibitory and target neurons) within ~20 milliseconds is supposed to strengthen synapses.

What's the rule?

∆w = µ( (pre * post) - (p0 * pre) )

w is synaptic efficiency, pre is the presynaptic activity, post is postsynaptic activity, p0 is a constant that targets the postsynaptic neuron to low average activity (zero most of the time), and µ is the learning rate: the key factor for how quickly coincident firing strengthens inhibitory synapses.

Course of simulations, where the net membrane current on the target neuron is green, the excitatory current is black, and inhibitory current on the target cell (from the inhibitory synaptic firing) is gray. Note that the target ends up (after) at zero most of the time.

Clearly this is a flexible rule, where constants can be plugged in to approximate what is empirically observed. Yet its simplicity, once set up, is very impressive. A time course of simulation samples is shown above. The inhibitory activity starts at zero, (before), and due to frequent co-firing of the inhibitory and target neurons, (due to their common excitatory input), their connections progressively strengthen to the point that net firing of the target cell goes down close to zero (after) for all but unusual excitatory inputs that vary faster than the rule-based learning rate.

Different values for µ, or the learning rate, (apologies.. I use greek mu in the text in place of eta) make relatively little difference to system behavior, after perturbing the excitatory input (red line), compared to the background activity (black line).

As the authors put it: "In the detailed balanced state, the response of the cell was sparse and reminiscent of experimental observations across many sensory systems. Spikes were caused primarily by transients in the input signals, during which the faster dynamics of the excitatory synapses momentarily overcame inhibition." Thus from a very simple cellular structure is born a sophisticated information processing system.

Comparison of simulation (lines) to experiments (blocks) cited from other researchers on rat auditory cortex single-neuron learning curves in response to a shift in sensory (sound) signal frequency. The X-axis is in minutes, and the Y axis is excitatory : inhibitory current ratio, taken from two different cells- a cell tuned to the prior frequency (blue) or a cell tuned to a newly introduced frequency (red).

Lastly, the researchers turn to what this kind of circuit / rule can do in a larger scale neural system, using memory as an example. They simulate a matrix of 100 X 100 cells made up of mostly excitatory cells (Ex in the figure below) and 25% inhibitory cells (In). Unlike the determined circuits simulated above, here the cells randomly connect to 2% of the other cells in the population. The researchers assumed that enough inhibitory connections would be sprinkled throughout so that, given enough learning time, the network as a whole would behave in the balanced way they expect.

The graphs above follow the evolution of this system in time, with A showing the initial state where all the excitatory cells fire at full blast, and the inhibitory cells fire randomly. After a simulated hour of internal learning, (B), the network has indeed settled down to a baseline balanced, or AI state of very low output activity, shown by the dark snowy pattern, despite the excitatory cells still firing at the original rate.

At time C, the researchers introduced a permanent five-fold increased excitatory synapse strength within two patches of the matrix (red and blue squares in A; the unaffected control patch is black). The graphs underneath sample a few random cells from either the red or black (control) areas of the matrix. The transient activation / recognition of the introduced signal is clearly apparent (C). Yet after another simulated hour, (D), the inhibitory circuits have adjusted and the overall network is back to a baseline, quiescent state. The patches of prior high activity are completely invisible.

No measure of ambient neural activity would detect a memory engram here. Yet when a quarter of the red patch excitatory neurons were driven with extra activity, the full red patch lit up again, (E), showing that a full memory could be re-activated from a partial input. The cleanliness of this process, not overlapping the blue patch at all, indeed forming a slight negative image over it, is astonishing. This constitutes an extremely interesting and promising model for how information can be tucked away and later retrieved out of our brains.. a loosely constructed tangle of neurons and their ~100 trillion synapses.

What can I add? Perhaps that simulation is an increasingly essential element in biology, as in so many other fields. We are dealing with such complexity that it is hopeless to formulate comprehendable representations of this reality in prose form, or even graphs, charts, or other tools of presentation. To get at the dynamics of complex systems, critical and simple insights like that of Hebbs and the inhibitory neuron balancing rule promoted here remain essential. But to demonstrate what such insights really mean for complex systems, mental extrapolation is not enough- computer simulation is needed.

What really counts? Love counts.
On objective morals & sin.
The new Islamism.. a nuanced view.
Beware of elites blaming education for joblessness.
What's our beef with Iran?
Obama administration, still shilling for the banks.
Canada's CBC looks at Occupy. (Excellent book cited: The Spirit Level.)

Redistribution is required

2012-01-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

Remember playing monopoly- how the rich get richer, and then the game ends?

Remember Monopoly? How one person with either luck or foresight bought all the railroads, milked the other players, and, towards the end, extended loans or gifts to keep their fun going a few more rounds? The end, however, was always the same- the game died because its mini economic system could not keep going if one person has all the money.

This seems an apt portrayal of our current economic seizure. An economy depends on the continual flow of money around, from one person's pocket to another's, and around again. The last two decades of rising income and wealth inequality meant that the mass of people have less money to spend, (and much of that money illusory, being debt), and the wealthy more. Since the wealthy tend to save their money, particularly as future prospects dim, we have the basic conditions for an economic heart attack- reduced circulation of money, and an even greater entrenching of the wealth divide.

Left to its own devices, and as we have seen over the last couple of decades, laissez-faire concentrates wealth upwards. A zealous and amoral focus on the rights of property and the fruits of economic success, however gained (think Bain) lead to a winner-take all system. Coupled with a political system beholden to money, it generates a spiral of entrenched interests and corruption. Only very rare crises of labor shortage (historically due to plagues) have historically reversed this flow within laissez-faire rules. The ultimate example is Rome, where the Senatorial class had massive land holdings, armies of slaves, and eventually exempted itself from any public duties, starving Rome of resources. It was a system that, for all its glories, was far less prosperous than our own, prone to revolt and ultimately, to rot.

What does laissez-faire accomplish by its concentration of wealth? For one, it forms the basic motivation to work.. whether to become wealthy or to keep body and soul together. For another, it is thought to put money into the hands of those best able to invest it productively (the vaunted "job creators" of GOP parlance).

Are those who have made a mint in our economic system the best investors for our common future prosperity? I think that logic has a few holes in it. Firstly, many of the wealthy are inheritors of wealth, and have no more economic accumen than a squirrel. I have proposed making the inheritance tax 100% to address this problem. Second, much wealth has been gained in the most amoral and unethical venues, (cf. Wall Street, board rooms elsewhere, and again Bain), full of self-dealing and cronyism. This hardly creates the forward-thinking, entrepreneurial venture creation and especially technical innovation we need to encourage.

And what are the harms of this concentration? Economically, as alluded to above, the wealthy may just sit on their hands and not invest their money, in which case the whole system grinds to a halt. On the other end, are the poor enlightened by their poverty, or have their character improved? Does this Darwinian system make them less likely to reproduce, in deference to their more successful betters? No, and no again. The immiseration of the mass of people serves no purpose beyond motivating them to engage in work- a point which we are obviously far, far, beyond. And of course keeping people persistently unemployed- the fruit we are currently harvesting from financial instability and unequality- is the exact opposite of what the whole mechanism was supposed to accomplish, which is employing everyone's talents to the best effect and for the general prosperity.

Politically, economic concentration leads to the very opposite of public good, as entrenched interests, (exemplified currently by the fossil fuel and financial industries, among many others), turn their wealth into corruption, buying legislators, elections, indeed burrowing into our very minds via the corporatized media.

So a modern economy needs some mechanism to counteract the natural course of laissez-faire. As a result, we engage in all the mechanisms of taxation, regulation, and redistrubution that now exist, from income taxes to welfare, Social Security, the military-industrial complex, and unemployment benefits. While the GOP harp about how evil these programs are and how they need to be "privatized", i.e. terminated, the last decades of rising inequality and, finally, economic breakdown, clearly show that stronger methods of redistribution are needed.

History provides countless mechanisms of economic redistribution, from the systematic to the catastrophic:

Extended families
Public works
Philanthropy
Circuses, staple food distribution
Educational programs
Dissollute gambling by the rich
Taxation
Old age pensions
Inheritance taxes, divided estates
Inflation, devaluation
Begging, alms, charities
Church donations, tithes
Markets and trade
Debt cancellation
Corruption, patronage
Land reform
Expropriation
Robbery, crime
War, plunder
Revolution

So the idea that "redistribution" is somehow inherently wrong couldn't be more misguided. It is why we have a society and culture in the first place. Better to arrange it systematically and productively than anarchically, but somehow, some way, a society's resources need to be and will be distributed to all members in some degree, by some method. The problem is really how to make flows of money through the economy optimally stable and equitable, while maintaining incentives that generate the original productivity.

The goals should be fairness, uniformity, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Markets have many of these characteristics, especially broad effectiveness, though we shouldn't kid ourselves that any market is truly "free". All are afflicted with unequal information, power, and other problems requiring ongoing regulation by entities superior to the market.

These desired attributes are present with a great deal more justice and redistributive power in a well-run democratic government and its universal programs of taxation, pensions, education, etc. These are far more fair and effective than relying on charity, gambling, crime, luxury spending, philanthropy, or other such miscellaneous methods of redistribution. They are also more macroeconomically useful, i.e. adjustable on a very large scale. When it comes to problems of common action, which describes this issue of regulating and counterbalancing the laissez-faire system, government is not only not the problem, it is the only solution, though dependent on its institutional quality.

Thus our moment of economic crisis, while temporarily strengthening the very forces that caused it, demands a conscious, long-term, and organized corrective response. Responses like taxation that is actually progressive in practice, not just in principle, strong estate taxation, increased outlays for education, a sustainable energy future, and a job guarantee for everyone willing to work.

Image of Andrew Jackson, the first president to do serious battle with the emerging corporate monster, here in the form of the specially chartered Second Bank of the United States, which he destroyed. "Biddle, thou monster, Avaunt!"

Martin Wolf on the critical and rising importance of public goods.
Martin Wolf gives his succinct economic prescriptions.
On the foolishness of low capital gains taxes.
More on the shady money behind Bain.
The status of the "corporations are people" movement.
Speaking of fights against the evil empire, an endlessly funny / loving homage to Star Wars.
Apple uses on quasi-slave labor in China.
At the same time, it doesn't care very much about its investors, either.
Leakers get screwed. Killers and torturers, not so much.
Warren Buffet as an object lesson in MMT economics.
Economic quote of the week, by Winston Churchill, via Bill Mitchell

"I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments … I am of opinion that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour. I am very sorry we have not got the railways of this country in our hands."

Show of the week: Alabama shakes.

Antarctica- when does it melt?

2012-01-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

The short answer: at 1000 ppm CO2.

Global warming has many consequences, most far more momentous for other organisms than ourselves. Whole ecosystems will die and regress to more primitive networks and members. But real estate agents have cause for concern as well, as sea levels rise and innundate low-lying areas. When and how high?

Sea levels have already risen ~20 cm over the last century. But far more is coming, as CO2 levels continue to rise along what seems to be a "business as usual" trajectory. The IPCC has offered various optimistic scenarios of international cooperation which have all come to naught. Coal is being burned at record rates. The critical graph is readings of atmospheric CO2, courtesy of Wikipedia:

From a pre-industrial level of ~285 ppm, already high by the standards of the last few hundred thousand years of the ice ages, we have broken through to almost 400 ppm. (ppm is parts per million, or 0.0001%, so the current percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 0.04%).

The atmosphere weighs about 5E18 kg, so each 0.01% or 100 ppm is about 5E14 kg, equivalent, in terms of wood, to 3.1E14 kg, which in terms of average forest density (~2400 kg per 100 sq m forest) corresponds to about 13 million sq kilometers of forest.

The land area of Earth is ten times that amount, which I hope offers some useful scale to the problem. About half our emissions are taken up annually by the oceans and forests, so the true scope is twice that size.

At any rate, where are we going? The IPCC graphs indicate that, barring action and assuming that CO2 emissions in 2050 are roughly double what they are now (scenario gray / VI), we would get to roughly 1000 ppm around 2100.

Click to see full size. The main point is the choice of remediation scenarios that get us (right graph) to various ultimate atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Brown and gray are the business as usual scenarios that we are currently following.

The prospects of serious sea level rise come from the various frozen forms of water stored around the world. The IPCC consensus has sea levels rising only about 70 cm by 2100, but to me the dangers seem far more severe. To learn what a full melting scenario would mean, the USGS helpfully supplies the details:

Greenland: 7m rise
Antarctica west ice sheet- 8m
Antarctica, rest- 65m
Other glaciers, etc: 0.5m
Thermal expansion- 1m

Sum = 80 meters, or 262 feet.

So if everything were to melt, we would be in serious trouble. Whole states would practically disappear. This is quite aside from the many other brutal effects of such climate change all over the biosphere.

"A sea-level rise of 10 meters would flood about 25 percent of the U.S. population"

Here is where a recent paper comes in, analyzing how Antarctica got so cold and snowy in the first place. We know that Antarctica iced over around 34 million years ago, but the precipitating circumstances (ouch!) have been in some dispute. Specifically, it is difficult to accurately estimate the atmospheric CO2 concentration from various fossil / chemical / geological traces. These authors focus mostly on better ways to deduce the CO2 record around this time, refining an estimate which indicates that atmospheric CO2 decline was the central driver of this process, and that falling below about 1000 ppm was the critical event.

This is the main graph, showing their inferred CO2 levels (colored circles) through the time at issue. The inset shows finer detail. Note that time goes backwards in the reverse direction, from recent to ancient. Obviously there is a noticeable decline around the time of Antarctic glaciation, and low atmospheric CO2 persists thereafter, lowering further (off the graph) going into our more recent epoch of ice ages. The gray lines are data from others, showing inferred CO2 levels from other analyses (∂18Oxygen in organic sediments, rather than the carbon isotope analysis the authors here focused on). The latter is more dramatic, but generally on the same trend.

Incidentally, Antarctica was pretty much in its current tectonic position by this time in Earth history. All this adds up to strong historical case that 1000 ppm CO2 is a plausible breakeven point for Antarctic melting. Such melting wouldn't happen overnight- it may take centuries, depending on how far over 1000 ppm CO2 we go. But clearly, among many other problems we are bequething to posterity is the likelihood that, if we continue along the business as usual trajectory, doing nothing about fossil fuel use, we will end up in hot water.

"The global direct subsidy for fossil fuels is around ten times the subsidy for renewables."
Some interesting notes on Milton Friedman and MMT economics.
Moyers on inequality. The "economy" is not a natural phenomenon- it is a political process and result.
Dodd: I won't be lobbying. ... How dare they use their freedom!
Who takes the biggest risks? Workers do.
Bain, at the public teat.
What's the deal with SOPA, PIPA, and the internet blackout?
Long view of the shortage of public goods.
Let's steal a few things from religion!
God makes the US exceptional, says Callista.
Economic quote: Salon on debt...

"The speculative bubble happened for many reasons. The most important reason, we think, is that most Americans weren’t making as much money. Median wages stagnated. People couldn’t borrow to invest in the stock market, but they could borrow money from a bank very easily to buy a house. People thought investing in the housing market gave them leverage to make money quickly."

Elect Gekko

2012-01-14T09:15:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney brings a campaign of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

The Republicans have a problem on their hands. After a marathon of more or less collegial debates, and on the verge of wrapping up their process and annointing their nominee prior to actual voting, it starts to become apparent that the one candidate who is not certifiably crazy, and has bought his way to the top in best Republican fashion, might not be the right horse after all.

The Occupy movement is in hibernation, but its memes have succeeded in turning the tea-party tide. The 1%, the 99%, "Occupy", and pejorative "Wall Street", have become guideposts in our discourse. Slowly the GOP is waking up to the fact that while being the party of the 1% is one thing, having a candidate and leader who is the perfect embodiment of 1%-ism is something quite different. Romney is that candidate, and may face an even worse election day than John McCain did four years ago.

Romney is of the 1%, is funded by the 1%, supports the 1%. He is using his money to buy endorsements, bury his opponents, and take small states like Iowa by storm. But money can't buy the general election, at least not yet (not when the other side is another well-funded front for the 1%, more or less).

At any rate, Romney's story may just be a little too brazen even for our jaded and corrupt age. His tax plan raises taxes on the poor and lowers them for the rich. This after several long decades of rising income and wealth inequality that have eaten into the very fabric of our country, and which Romney himself did a great deal to advance.

Much of his work at Bain was dedicated to "aligning" the interests of company executives with those of shareholders, and away from those of workers, with the result that executives, him included, made gobs of money while workers were shown the door, had benefits reduced, pensions taken away, and their companies bankrupted. 22% of companies he touched ended up in bankruptcy, but not before debt was taken on and enormous bonuses paid out. Much of this virtuous alignment had to do with high-risk leveraging, executive stock "participation", and a consequent focus on the shortest-term results. What has it left us with?

Economic efficiency is not always a bad thing, and Romney had every right to be a vulture / arbitrageur in the system. But making this out to be some kind of virtue and model for presidential leadership seems a little hard to swallow, even for his erstwhile capitalist-touting GOP opponents. John Stewart jokes that they suddenly see themselves as the 99% ... of the 1%. The list of Romney's targets and deals at Bain makes dreary reading- sundry consumer retailers and low-tech manufacturers whose innovations and efficiencies lie in reading spreadsheets, firing workers, offshoring, and putting slightly less ruthless retailers out of business. Sure, if we need a new Dunkin Doughnuts CEO, Romney might be the guy. But president?

Mammon plays a leading role in Romney's campaign as well. Who supports him? The rich, of course, for the most virtuous of reasons! So not only does he have his own fortune to run on, but as a tailor-made, say-anything representative of the plutocracy, money comes his way like manna, ready to buy endorsements, ads, and votes. His lack of a center is apparent in his spontaneous remarks, and also came out in his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts. His ambition was to solve problems, and he did a great job with the univeral health care program, as he had with the Salt Lake Olympics previously. But who knows what "efficiencies" and problems he will latch onto on the national stage? Everything we hear is cant and regressiveness.

It reminds me of another expert technocrat, doctrinaire capitalist, economic "modernizer", administrative wizard, and all-around rich guy in American history- Herbert Hoover.

Republicans become socialists- horrors!
Restructuring the US, Gekko-style. Sell off Alaska!
Lawrence Krauss gives a rather funny physics talk.
Our new chief of staff: "Deregulation had nothing to do with the crisis."
Haiti- not doing too well.
Prospects for reducing fuel use in transportation ... taxes are required.
"Necessitous men are not free men."
Economics note of the week:

Not actually a quote, since Bill Mitchell had no concise bon mot to offer. But he describes the perverse process by which neoliberal economics looked at lengthening unemployment periods (longer time taken to find a job) in recent decades after the Keynesian heyday of quasi-full employment, and concluded that workers were lazing about and decided to "prefer" jobless benefits to working. These economists & politicians then dedicated themselves to cutting unemployment and other welfare benefits to "encourage" job search.

Obviously, however, the data said something quite different, which is that along with the increasing specialization of work, which makes job matching increasingly difficult, (i.e. friction in the labor market), the overall higher unemployment rates made employers more choosy, allowed them to cut worker pay and benefits at the same time that unemployment benefits were cut, leading to overall lowering of demand, made up temporarily by consumer and real estate debt. At any rate, prodding more people to look for work via improverishment when no more work is offered can hardly solve the employment problem. But it does destroy people's lives and impair overall prosperity.

Thomas Paine, tea-partier, ur-blogger, socialist

2012-01-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

What would he write now?

Edmund Burke wrote a famous attack on the French revolution. While he thought King George's "American war" was unwise, he defended monarchy and all the peculiarities of the English government against the winds of rationalism and popular revolution blowing over the Channel (and from the colonies). Much of his vitriol was lent by the influx of French nobility who successfully stoked the fires of royalist counter-revolution throughout Europe. The later horrors of the French revolution certainly justified some of Burke's critique. And many aspects of his conservatism stand the test of time, such as the basic principle that measured reform (or even stasis) is often preferable to sudden revolution, out of humility before the many unknowns inherent in tinkering with a functioning social organism.

Yet the reply he got from Thomas Paine attained greater fame and influence. Paine's Rights of Man pursues multiple themes, including ridiculing Burke, defending the French revolution in rather glowing terms, (before the terror got underway), fomenting anti-tax revolt in Britain, and even proposing a comprehensive system of welfare and good works by an enlightened British government, using all the revenue left over once it had defunded the royal court.

Paine's surest avenue of attack is on Burke's defense of the English "constitutional" monarchy. In contrast to France, which had just written itself a constitution, Britain had none and still has none. Paine goes to great lengths to explain the difference between a proper constitution that explicitly sits above and controls the rest of the political system, and the regular laws and indeed unwritten customs & practices which Britain relies on to perpetuate its political system. Obviously what Burke meant as "constitutional" was the legal controls on the monarchy that had grown into the parliamentary system and continue to this day to progressively neuter the royal family. Especially Coke's Petition of Right. But without a formal consitution, it is hard to defend a "constitutional" monarchy.

More damning were Paine's various witticisms about royal government:

"Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it is must necessarily follow that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now takes, is fatal to every part of his cause. ... To use a sailor's phrase, he has swabbed the deck and scarcely left a name legible in the list of Kings; and he has mowed down and thinned the House of Peers, with a scythe as formidable as Death and Time. [i.e. the requirement that they embody wisdom]."

"As the republic of letters brings forward the best literary productions, by giving to genius a fair and universal chance; so the representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom from where it can be found. I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carryt he same idea into governments. An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary suthor. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons: but I will venture an opinion, that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them."

"It could have been no difficult thing in the early and solitary ages of the world, whle the chief employment of men was of attending flocks and herds, for a banditti of ruffians to overrun a country, and lay it under contributions. Their power being thus established, the chief of the band contrived to lose the name Robber in that of Monarch, and hence the origin of Monarchy and Kings."

And in a prescient word to the British...
"As it is not difficult to perceive, from the enlightened state of mankind, that hereditary Governments are verging to their decline, and that Revolutions on the broad basis of national sovereignty, and Government by representation, are making their way in Europe, it would be an act of wisdom to anticipate their approach, and produce Revolutions by reason and accommodation, rather than commit them to the issue of convulsions."

Thankfully, barring Syria, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, hereditary monarchy has mostly ended its reign on earth. Democracies rule the world. Are they doing a good job?

Paine represents an interesting blend of progressive and tea-partier. He rails throughout the book in best blogger fashion against the oppressive taxation that supports royal courts and their hangers-on, clearly trying to incite the British against their system. But in the most detailed part of the book, he proposes specifically that most British taxes be retained and their revenue diverted to various socialistic ends, such as old-age pensions, educational allowances, and publicly-sponsored factories where anyone without employment could be employed as long as desired, among others. Really, a very forward-looking program, much of which has come to pass. The employment guarantee is particularly interesting and appropriate to bring back into our present-day discussion.

"Civil government does not consist in executions; but in making that provision for the instruction of youth, and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one, and despair from the other. Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors, and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them."

"When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are no in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness; when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government."

"Revolutions, then, have for their object, a change in the moral condition of governments, and with this change the burden of public taxes will lessen, and civilization will be left to the enjoyment of that abundance, of which it is now deprived."

But what would Paine write about our current system? What is our moral condition? Despite all our progress, I think he would characteristically diagnose a deep and corrupting problem. Our representatives serve two masters- the voters, and separately, the moneyed and corporate class. As Lawrence Lessig has noted, our putative representatives spend about 70% of their time grubbing for money- from corporations, from the rich, from mass mailing missives, and the like. This time is not just lost from service to their consitutents and from cogitation on better policy, but is explicitly opposed to the public interest, as every payment is a quid pro quo, well understood by all sides, for favors that otherwise would not occur.

Right now, the financial industry has thoroughly corrupted both parties, forstalled prosecution and evaded regulation of its highly damaging gambling addiction, and indeed corrupted the economic profession itself through its web of consultancies. sinecures, and parroting institutions, to the point that the public doesn't yet thoroughly understand the basic nature of the crisis. Too big to fail, among many other ills of the financial casino, remains the law of the land, and another crisis is inevitable if nothing further is done, though it may take a decades to attain a sufficiently bubbly economic state.

To Paine, the proposition would be simple. Voters have been displaced as political actors in a system where our media and academic elite are for sale, or already owned by corporations with interests frankly opposed to the public interest, and where our erstwhile representatives sell themselves daily for the money they need, while contorting more (Democrats) or less (Republicans) to suit a publicly salable ideology of the public good. One might say that we support two wasteful and fawning royal courts- those of the two parties, each ostensibly vying for public favor while vying more energetically for funds from well-hidden and corrupting private interests. It is a constitutional crisis.

Paine's revolution was one of fairness- that state and politics should not be run by the few for the few, milking the many, but of the people, by the people, and for the people. In his world, money spoke loudly, but the media and elite leadership were not quite as thoroughly for sale as they are now. His media was not as technologically sophisticated, as pervasive, as distracting, as thoroughly corporatized, nor as powerful as it is today. We are a far cry from Benjamin Franklin's printing press and Paine's pamphlets.

The answer is to restore to the people critical levers of representative power, especially the lever of funding the nation's political life directly. Lessig's plan is to provide vouchers to all citizens that they can then contribute to politicians. All levels of government would disburse tax money to candidates in proportion to vouchers contributed by citizen supporters. Candidates would then be able to gain funds in direct proportion to their popularity, and cut their private money grubbing entirely. Perhaps vouchers could be dispensed continually, so that momentary swings in popularity wouldn't lock up a race prematurely.

We marvel at the amounts spent on modern political campaigns, but our political system is important and deserves generous funding, so that voters and candidates can interact effectively and learn each other's views. Systems of full and generous public funding will decouple our representatives from some of today's worst corruption.

But more needs to be done, especially to improve the media environment. Aside from campaigns, money now buys unlimited political speech and what is more, unlimited political flack-power from "think" tanks and other media / front / spin / astroturf organizations. On its own, that wouldn't be so bad. But where else can one turn for (balanced!) political coverage and insight if the rich own all the media megaphones? Our TV and radio spectrum is limited, and stations are sold to the highest bidder. Newspapers have become one-per-town monopolies due to the high-cost structure of the modern paper and to winner-take all network effects we have come to know so well from the computer and internet industries. Even if non-political commercial interests alone rule the airwaves, where does that leave citizens that advertisers are not interested in, like the unemployed and minorities?

While Paine would surely be pleased by the wide freedoms of the contemporary internet, he might be pained by the degraded and virtually inarticulate show of political soundbites, lying, and scare-ads that characterizes politics in the mainstream media (which masks the more salient hidden competition between moneyed interests). What to do? Here public interest and public funding should be advanced as well. Examples like the BBC and CBC show that major public media can be consistently neutral and effective in broadening access and raising the level of debate (excepting, for the moment, "Thought for the day", and also the entire Euro crisis political theater, and ...).

In short, public media deserves to be strengthened in the US. Ideally, all spectrum-using media would be compelled to provide commercial-free public interest programming, whether oriented to children, or to political coverage, or the arts. Secondly, public broadcasting support would be expanded so that second channels could be established nationally and coverage broadened. At our house, intriguingly enough, we get TV signals from stations funded by Russia and China, but the US government supplies only a pittance to fund our own public media- PBS and NPR.

Lastly, the loss of diversity and investigative motivation in newspaper monopolies could to be addressed by funding local newsgathering on a non-profit basis, perhaps as part of the above expansion of existing public media. With web publication as cheap as it is, minimal amounts of public money could create a grassroots investigative and newsgathering network that gives citizens important information and alternate perspectives on their local affairs, unencumbered by commercial imperatives. (This might be called the crank blogger employment act!) Obviously, there is risk in letting the government dabble in media sponsorship, but it has been done well, here and elsewhere, and the new media age provides enormous opportunities at relatively low cost, if the government is not otherwise corrupted.

Paine even had a prescient word about the EU:
"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything with appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?
Just emerging from such a barbarous condition, it is too soon to determine to what extent of improvement government may yet be carried. For what we can foresee, all Europe may form but one great republic and man be free of the whole."

Outstanding article on Roger Williams, who defended Rhode Island from invasion by Massachusetts!
For those not following Krugman's blog, Hungary is heading towards one-party rule.
We need global governance.
A late-breaking Xmas song...
Montana, at least is holding out against corrupt practices.
Economic quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"As I explained in this blog – 'Historically high budget deficits will be required for the next decade' – the reason that Japan continued to grow despite the “massive loss of wealth” is because the government stepped in and maintained the flow of spending."

Economic graph of the week- employment from Fed data.

Note how the proportion of the population employed is still at bottom at the end of 2011, and how the unemployment rate belies the lack of progress or recovery in actual employment, due to an imaginary decline in the "labor force"- we remain in a catastrophic situation for roughly 4% of the population, or ten million people, who are involuntarily unemployed, and whose situation has cascade effects throughout the labor markets.

Science and religion, version umpteen

2011-12-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

Science is the culmination of the Western religious tradition.

A striking thing about Eastern religions is their humility. They recognize that they are addressing human needs, which many other paths can also address. They are philosophically shy. Buddhism may be right, but if not, then no big deal.. it is just an offered solution to human suffering, and an expression of spiritual values and emotions that can take other forms. Hinduism offers more gods than you can shake a stick at ... take your pick and be happy. Shintoism has no truth at all, other than a conviction that nature, in its spiritual guise of Kami, is worthy of veneration- an almost pure biophilia.

In contrast, Western religion, at least in the monotheistic tradition as it developed out of late Judaism, (with additions of Greek philosophy), is obsessed with truth. We are right, our model of invisible reality is right, or else we will kill you. This appalling combination of spiritual and philosophical malpractice has led to monumental amounts of suffering.

On the other hand, this same obsession with correctness, truth, belief, and ontological competitiveness had one silver lining, which is that it led to Western science. At some point, crypto-theologians like Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Charles Darwin, who were interested in truth perhaps a little more than tradition and theology, struck out to new intellectual territory, away from received explanations and ontologies, and lo and behold! Truth with a capital "T" emerged, far more powerful and durable than the mouldering not even half-truths of theology.

It is terribly ironic that Western religions, faced with (let us call it Darwinian) competition from its offspring- a truthmaking tradition vastly more effective than their own, are banding together in hopeless ecumenical projects and rear-guard actions like conservative political tantrums and denialism, after having spent centuries evolving a kaleidoscope of divergent and often violently antagonistic confessions, each with its own "truth". I guess this is how it ends ... with a whimper.

Nevertheless, religion as a whole is surely not dead. What is dead are its claims to "philosophy", "knowledge" and "truth". As the Eastern traditions understand, (as do those few Western traditions that confine themselves to spiritual emotions), the human need remains for ministering, for belonging, and above all for deeply felt appreciation of the wonder of existence, particularly human value. All that remains, once all the "truth" has been burned away one way or another, is love.

Populism- the empty vessel.
More commentary on the South.
Crony capitalism thrives when laws are enforced selectively, at the discretion of prosecutors and regulators.
Economics quote of the week, From Michael Moran, on declining US influence:

"Longer-term, however, this [Japan and China denominating their mutual trade in local currencies rather than dollars] is a part of the long game played by Beijing. Since American financial “creativity” nearly threw the world into Depression in 2008, China, Russia, Malaysia, South Africa and others have called for the creation of a new global reserve currency not beholden to the dysfunction of the US political scene."

Brains a-building

2011-12-24T09:31:00.000-08:00

Just how does the self-constructing computer self-construct?

The brain is probably the most exciting and complex frontier of biology. How does it work? How does the mind happen in amongst those 100 billion neurons? However, before we get to all those questions, the brain has to develop, all by itself in the fetal and infant body, from the most minimal ingredients and from an extremely spare blueprint comprising some fraction of the 25,000 genes of our genome.

One is tempted to call it a miracle, except that it happens all the time, all over the world, more or less dependably and following, as far as our incomplete knowlege reaches, no script but those of the physical / biological world. A paper came out recently highlighting the varying role of gamma oscillations in brain development, which seemed worth reviewing.

Many people may not be aware that brain development involves vast migrations of cells, from one place to another in the developing brain. "So, most neurons migrate from the site of their last mitotic division, near the ventricle, towards the outer surface of the CNS, where they integrate into specific brain circuits." (From a very nice review of the field.) Doubtless this inefficiency reflects a long evolutionary history, as do numerous other weird anatomical paradoxes of the body. An idea that didn't seem so bad in the infinitesimal brain of a gnat becomes a bizarre marathon of long-distance cell treks in our own. Which is a little ironic, because after they get to their final position, these neurons spend the rest of their lives in one position, with their plasticity confined to forming or deleting synapses among their far-flung axonal and dendritic branches.

"Vertebrates show far more widespread neural migrations than previously realized. In general, these migrations can be seen as DV [dorsal-ventral] or AP [anterior-posterior] migrations, pathways thought to be prominent in lower organisms but not in vertebrates. Indeed, genes discovered in C. elegans and Drosophila provide molecular mechanisms for the DV and AP migrations in higher vertebrates."

Schematic of a few major pathways of cell migration in early brain development. Neurons in the cortex all come from stem areas near the core of the brain. MGE is the medial ganglionic eminence.

Indeed, inhibitory interneurons and excitatory neurons are distinct cell classes, and orginate from different stem locations and migrate by separate pathways, but migrate into close proximity to make up the final brain network.

Later on during development, the micro-architecture of the cortical layer (the side-by-side columns of cells with related functions, occurring all over the sheet-like cortex) refines itself through feedback from connected areas. For instance, the columnar arrangement of our visual cortex maps strikingly to our visual fields and other salient properties of vision- a mapping which forms soon after the eyes first open (the "critical period").

The current researchers looked at whisker sensing areas in the rat brain, which organize themselves similarly as the visual system, into columns of discrete function. "In the rodent 'barrel' cortex, each cortical barrel column receives a specific input, conveyed via the thalamus, from a corresponding whisker." In the critical period for this region, (days 2-7 after birth), this area doesn't communicate much with other areas of the brain, but only with its whisker inputs and perhaps with local neighbors.

These columns are further divisible vertically into layers that extend over most of the cortex. The cells of these layers are somewhat distinct at each level, and closely connected to each other up and down the column, while inputs and outputs to other columns and other brain regions are typically differentiated by layer. Which is to say that inputs to the column from one area of the brain may typically come to a subset of layers, while outputs to some other brain region may emerge from another subset.

The key topic is the "early gamma oscillation", or EGO. Gamma waves are famous as the highest-frequency brain waves, which are the leading candidate for "binding" mental contents over long distances across the mature brain. The interesting finding here is that, unexpectedly, in early development, gamma oscillations happen but seem to have a quite different and simpler function- that of binding a developing neural zone to its sensory inputs, and thus helping it self-organize.

Layers:SG- supragranular, G- granular, IG- infragranular, Pia- the pia matter, or innermost membrane surrounding the brain. LFP- localized field potential, MUA- multiunit activity (individual spikes), CSD- current-source density (overall conductance/resistance).

In this figure, a needle electrode is shown as it is stuck vertically into one column of a rat brain, with cell bodies stained in green and electrode points shown as dots along the electrode depth. The graph shows the associated recording, with the rat's whisker touched by the experimenter at time 0. The 50 Hz gamma oscillation is obvious over several layers. The researchers claim that these gamma oscillations had been missed previously because typical surface recordings wouldn't catch them.

What are they doing? Normal gamma oscillations coordinate large regions of brain activity, but these have only localized coherence- with the whisker input. The next figures compare gamma intensity from different stimuli and at different ages:

PW means principle whisker (the one directly innervating the probed column), while AW means adjacent whisker, which innervates nearby columns. LFP is "local field potential", i.e. the Y-axis, while GR is granular layer, the middle one shown above, and SG means supra-granular layer, the one over it, which the researchers find ties up to nearby columns during development. The next figure shows graphic summaries of the same data by electrode depth, at postnatal day 5 (P5) and day 33 (P33). The sequence is clear- that low-level, exclusively local and whisker input-driven gamma oscillations at early times are followed by more powerful oscillations located in higher cortical layers and driven not only by the innervating whisker, but by nearby ones to a high degree. One can truly see the knitting together of neural networks over time.

The experimenters also probed the thalamus, which conducts the signals from the whiskers to the cortex, showing that the signal timing is appropriate. The gamma peaks in the thalamus ("VPM") lead those in the developing cortex by about nine milliseconds.

Indeed, if they remove brains entirely and probe slices that retain the thalamus-cortical connection (shown below, H), they can simulate whisker stimulation by electrical stimulation on the thalamic area (VPM) which creates artificial early gamma oscillations (aEGO's) in the cortical region. If these are carefully timed to sync with endogenous cortical neural firing, they strengthen their neural connections, which can be assayed by downstream currents out of the cortical layer (excitatory postsynaptic currents; EPSCs- the red vs the black graphs below). By this method of artificial "learning", evoked EPSCs are significantly stronger after a bout of thirty induced aEGOs than they were before, using low levels of aEGO stimulation to test with.

OK- that was seriously technical. But the lesson is that by enough poking, prodding, and taking things apart, we are beginning, in baby steps, to understand that most intricate and delicate mechanism- the wetware of our minds.

Damasio on consciousness .. a bit boring/pompous, but topical.
Afghanistan, turning back to warlord-ism, under official acronyms.
Did we have a "Global banking glut", of the shadow banking system, not a savings glut?
The South continues as an ungovernable cross to bear.
Thank you, EPA.
For the love of victimization narrative ...
In finance, we are already a banana republic.
Economics quote of the week, from Martin Wolfe, about income and wealth inequality:

"What is to be done? That demands a huge agenda. It must cover employment, education, corporate governance and financial reform and, however difficult, also elements of redistribution. It will be unavoidably divisive. So be it. This debate cannot be avoided if western democracies are to stay legitimate in the eyes of their peoples. That may not be true in the US. It is surely true in the UK. Warren Buffett has argued that 'there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.' The remark has not made him popular with his peers. But he was surely right."

Burning bright

2011-12-17T09:21:00.000-08:00

The earth is still warming. We are still dithering.

A recent report on climate change had an arresting graphic, showing where New York State is migrating to, in climate terms:

NY starts in its customary position in the mid-atlantic in the mid-20th century, and already now occupies roughly the position that Pennsylvania used to. Easily within a hundred years, and quite possibly sooner, NY is going to land where the Carolinas used to be, climatically speaking.

Climate change is often spoken of drily, in terms of degress of average temperature change and the like. But to anyone who knows the climates of these two areas, the differences are stark. Unbearable summers, no-snow winters, and a completely different biome, all within the life span of a single tree. A recent Scientific American article pointed out that another extreme warming episode happened in the early Eocene. Geologists are astonished at its speed, but they are thinking in geological time. It was nothing compared to the speed with which we are changing the climate now, 150 times faster.

All this means that not only are we as humans going to be mighty uncomfortable, but animals and especially plants are not going to make the transtion- there just isn't the time. Biological diversity will continue to plummet via extinction, adding this global climate catastrophe to the localized habitat destruction, ocean fish-killing free-for-all, tropical forest burning, megafauna killing, and so many other catastrophes we have already authored. Just what kind of a world do we want to leave to future generations?

I'll close with another graphic, of CO2 emissions from power plants in the US. The task should be clear. The economic equivalent of World War 2 that we are waiting for to energize our economy is staring us in the face.

Some apocalypses are coming.. others aren't.
More dithering.
Pricing nature's services.
Exxon graphs out peak oil.
Postcard from Belgrade.
This blog is coming to you ... ... more slowly than necessary.
Lawrence Lessig on our government corruption.
Does private long-term care insurance make any sense? Not really.
Ode to the 99%.
Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"Imagine you had a headache and some economist tells you that you can cure the headache by bashing your head against a wall. So you duly bash your head against the nearest brick wall and not only does it hurt (perhaps drawing blood depending on the severity of the blow) but you note the headache is now worse. The economist then concludes you didn’t bash your head hard enough and instructs you to stick to the “rule” and give it another try – only this time go harder."
...
"As I have noted previously, other professions are held legally liable for their professional behaviour. If they consistently make large errors then they will be deemed unfit to practise.
The IMF economists are immune from these standards. They consistently make bold predictions and impose harsh austerity programs based on those projections. The predictions are consistently shown to be wrong when the data arrives."

Definitely not a dick-tionary

2011-12-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

Mary Daly's feminist Wickedary of the English language.

Is the job of feminism done? More women than men are now in college, and the employment prospects of men seem to have taken a particularly significant dive in the current economic crisis. Yet the upper reaches of our society continue to be addled by testosterone. Presidential contenders compete over how shamelessly they can sweep their personal misogyny under the rug. The economic downturn can be largely chalked up to an army of besuited males gambling, cheating, "innovating", and cronying their way into financial armeggadon, and thence into the pockets of the government for bailouts and bonuses.

Women were among the most significant and prophetic obstacles to this headlong descent into what Mary Daly might term our financial phalloclasm- such key officials as Sheila Bair, Brooksley Born, and Elizabeth Warren. The Occupy Wall Street movement might usefully consider a name change to Castrate Wall Street.

bored, Chairman of the: any bore-ocratically appointed bore who occupies a chair- a position which enables him to bore others all the more.

Dragon: Primordial Female Foe of patriarchy whom the gods, heros, and saints of snooldom attempt to slay over and over again; Metamysterious Monster, Original Knower and Guardian of the Powers of Life.

Her-etical: Weird Beyond Belief.

Mary Daly passed away almost two years ago, and the brief mentions of her life in the media piqued my interest enough to read one of her works- "Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, Conjured in Cahoots with Jane Caputi". A "Webster" being "A Weaver of Words and Word-Webs". Daly was a poet and wordsmith, a philosopher and theologian, curiously educated and employed throughout her life by Catholic institutions, at least until her refusal to admit men to her advanced women's studies course at Boston University finally brought a discrimination complaint and retirement in 1999. She was a creature of the liberal 60's and Vatican II, when the church's windows were opened and fresh breezes such as Jungianism and Feminism found a brief audience.

Papal Bull: the most sacred form of bull. Wholly, Holey, Holy baloney.

Incarnation, The: supremely sublimated male sexual fantasy promulgated as sublime christian dogma; mythic super-rape of the Virgin Mother, who represents all matter; symbolic legitimation of the rape of all women and all matter. See Sadospiritual Syndrome.

omniabscence: essential attribute of the wholly ghostly divine father, who is acclaimed by the the-ological reversers as "omnipresent"; attribute of the dummy deity who is never there, no all there, and therefore does not and can not care.

Daly was also a great humorist. Her Wickedary is a hilariously ascerbic re-valuation of all values, setting women as "Biophilic", "Shrewd/Shrewish", and many other positive, inverted, new-age-y attributes, while condeming the "snoolish", "bore-ing" daddy-ocracy with its daddygods and Big Lies that destroy not only women in a mire of silence and oppression, but the entire biosphere, as becomes clearer by the day.

Biophilia: the Original Lust for Life that is at the core of all Elemental E-motion; Pure Lust, which is the Nemesis of patriarchy, the Necrophilic state. Compare necrophilia N.B.: Biophilia is not in ordinary dictionaries, though the word necrophilia is.

Broom: Hag-ridden vehicle propelled by Rage, Transporting Dreadful/Dreadless Women out of the State of Bondage.

Her favorite symbol was the Labrys- the double headed axe of antiquity with which she notionally split phallocentric words into new and better forms, like her famous construction Gyn/Ecology, and which also carried feminist and lesbian overtones.

Naming: Original summoning of words for the Self, the world, and ultimate reality; liberation by Wicked Women of words from confinement in the sentences of the fathers; Truth-telling: the only adequate antidote for phallocracy's Biggest Lies; exorcism of patriarchal labels by invoking Other reality and by conjuring the Spirits of women and of all Wild natures; Re-calling the Race of Radiant Words.

patriarchy 1: society manufactured and controlled by males: Fatherland; society in which every legitmated instution is entirely in the hands of males and a few selected henchwomen; society characterlized by oppression, repression, depression, narcissism, cruelty, racism, classism, ageism, objectification, sadomasochism, necrophilia; joyless society, ruled by Godfather, Son, and Company; society fixated on proliferation, propagation, procreation, and bend on the destruction of all Life 2: the prevailing religion of the entire planet, whose essential message is necrophilia.

foolosophy: fooldom parading as wisdom. See academentia.

phallosophy: inflated foolosophy: "wisdom" loaded with seminal ideas and disseminated by means of thrusting arguments.

It isn't only in its word-smithing and attitude that the Wickedary excells, however, but also in Daly's introductory essays, which are prose poems of revolt by the Revolting Hags of Wildness. One might note in passing that she puts all the male attributes in lower case, while the transvalued female terms are excited into capitalized status. A sample:

"Wielding our Witches' Hammer, Websters Dis-close the Glamour of words, their magical/musical interplay as they Sound and Resound together in complex combinations. We Dis-cover connections, not only among words, but among the realities they Name."

"Daredevil dolphins, declaring and end to jumping through hoops, take Muses for Be-Musing rides. Mischievious monkeys mimic men of science. Denouncing the latter as "missing links to nothing," whose sadistic kinks require final solution, the foment revolution. Encouraged by guinea pigs, rabbits, and mice, they "deconstruct" cages, mazes, treadmills, and other shocking tools employed by evil "experts"/fools."

"Other Spirited animals also Denounce. The formerly baited and "dancing" bears, for example, dance rings around rippers who have used them for atrocious a-Musement. Viragos dance with them, proclaiming the end of such tyranny. Sagacious Seals, Denouncing their "training" in prestigious aquariums- the degrading institutions where they learned to bounce balls in return for a fish- Bark Out Loud their Seals of Disapproval and Distain. Bitches Bark with them, Outshouting the users of animals, women, and words."

"Spinsters Spinning Widdershins- turning about-face- feel/find an Other Sense of Time. We begin by asking clock-whys and then move on to counter these clock-whys with Counterclock Whys- Questions that whirl the Questioners beyond the boundaries of Boredom, in to the flow of Tidal Time/Elemental Time. This is Wild Time, beyond the clocking/clacking of clonedom. It is the Time of Wicked Inspiration / Genius, which cannot be grasped by the tidily man-dated world.

The man-dated world is clockocracy- the society that is dead set by the clocks and calendars of fathered time. ..."

One might think all this overkill, and Daly certainly took things to extremes. She was quite enamoured of the society of bees, whose males are barely tolerated and cast off with their one and only mating flight. For humans too, she proposed limiting males to 10% of the population. I take it all quite tongue in cheek, recognizing that when it comes to religion and values, literal belief and systemic seriousness are the most dangerous falsehoods. Daly knew very well that the Dolphins were not taking the Biophilic Revolting Hags for rides in the surf, but used this mythic poetry to open her listener's imagination to a trans-value system, while indicting and getting a rise out of her antagonists.

"... Brainstorming, Be-Spelling women Distemper in both of these senses, throwing bore-ocracy out of its odious order and smoothly working adjustment by Raising Hailstorms and Tempests and Otherwise Exercising Disturbing Elemental Powers.
To Be-Spellers overthrowing dronedom/clonedom it is clear that such disturbance/derangement is absolutely necessary. The Spelling of Soothsayers throws the old order out of order, Dis-covering New/Archaic Orders. In this Stormy atmosphere other women begin to Realize their own Ecstatic E-motional Disorder. Finding her Rage and Hope, a woman observes the melting away of plastic passions that had possessed her, blocking the flow of Elemental Communicating Powers. The old guilt, anxiety, depression, bitterness, resentment, frustration, boredom, resignation and- worst of all- feminine full-fillment begin to disappear. Seeing these as pseudopassions injected into her soul by the fathers of fixocracy, she flushes them away. As she exorcises these plastic parasites she begins Be-Spelling. She finds it especially efficacious to begin Spelling/Be-Spelling Out Loud."

Looking at societies like contemporary Afghanistan and Pakistan, where an unoppressed woman can hardly be observed without being beaten or raped, and where the incessent quest for "honor" among males has made their societies a living hell for everyone, her proposals might, however, not be so far-fetched.

Courage to Sin [sin derived fr. Indo-European root es- to be]: the Courage to commit Original Acts of participation in Be-ing; the Courage to be Elemental through and beyond the horrors of Obscene society; the Courage to be intellectual in the most direct and daring way, claiming and trusting the deep correspondence between the structures/processes of one's own mind and the structures/processes of reality; the Courage to trust and Act on one's own deepest intuitions.

Saudi malegarchy.
Archetype of the monster.
Speaking of which ... those communist Muppets!
Did Rome fall due to inequality and debt-bondage?
Too big to police? Corruption has won.
Church, coming to a public school near you.
Carbon spewage worse than ever.
Apparently Hayek wasn't such a big fish after all.
Afghanistan: $10 billion a year, or else we go all crazy again.
Poor children need better resources and teachers, not worse.
Intriguing view of the individual / institution divide.
Yes, Newt actually wrote a dissertation.
The cycle of authoritarian parenting, existential insecurity, and political extremism keeps turning.
On the role of Darwinism in economic inequality.

Do wages cause inflation, or does money?

2011-12-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

Oil, the Fed, and Stagflation ... or: 'twas Arthur Burns that done it!

There are two basic observations that Milton Friedman made on inflation, and which still today consitute the economic mainstream. First is that inflation is a monetary phenomenon- if you have too much money, prices will rise even while the real economy stays the same size as before. He also authored the NAIRU concept- (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment)- i.e. the lowest unemployment rate consistent with stable prices.

To a naive observer, these are contradictory ideas. If high employment can cause inflation, then it isn't a montary phenomenon after all. But if monetary causes are paramount, then the NAIRU is merely a symptom rather than a cause, and all the supply-side, trickle-down anti-worker economics of the last few decades have been a cruel as well as wasted effort.

Perhaps there is more going on, and that is what this post is about. Going by what we have learned in MMT economics, the main money-creating mechanism is not the government, (i.e. via net deficit spending, however important that is from time to time), but banks, which create money every time they make a loan, and extinguish it when the loan is paid off (or written off). The bank mechanism is what central banks control via their adjustment of short term (and long-term) interest rates. Only they don't always do such a great job, and this channel of money creation is prone to much more volatility than the government's channel, which in turn necessitates the anticyclical fiscal / monetary policies of Keynesian economics.

How could persistent inflation and high wage demands affect the bank mechanism of money creation? Another tenet of MMT economics is that most lending is demand-driven, in that banks generally lend to any worthy borrower who comes in the door. Every loan is an asset to the bank, and its only total / legal constraint is capital, which can also be raised if its past bets have been sound, perhaps in the interests of growth and the dream of becoming "too big to fail".

One theory would be that inflation is consistently under-appreciated when it is gathering steam. Thus real interest rates tend to not catch up to inflation as fast as they should, creating an incentive for borrowers to ask for loans. In effect, real interest rates in an environment of rising inflation tend to be lower than they should be.

Thus when competitive pressures press on a company, it may be more willing to make up the difference with a loan, and justify that loan with recent growth, even if that growth was only nominal rather than real. The whole environment may become skewed towards monetary growth, in effect.

On the whole, this mechanism seems relevant, but not very strong, given a central bank that is paying attention to real interest rates. It also does not provide a direct channel for wage demands to fuel inflation, since companies are faced with competing demands for money all the time. Being in a hot labor market might cause firms to alter the share of revenue going to wages, but can't automatically give them the power to raise prices.

If the entire labor market were hot, all companies might be faced with the same increasing labor costs, allowing them to raise prices in unison without a competitive penalty. And then perhaps the workers are realizing commensurate wage gains across the board, allowing them to pay the increased prices. It all makes sense, except ... where is all the extra money supposed to come from? That part is very hard to see, unless the banking system funds the general expansion by excess lending, which the central bank is supposed to explicitly monitor and prevent. Price inflation has to come from general monetary expansion.

Other effects may come into play at the margins. Perhaps a hot labor market may cause workers to spend more of their money and save less, increasing monetary velocity, and thus inflation. Perhaps a general "boom" atmosphere causes lending standards to decline, causing monetary inflation. Low unemployment might thus correlate with inflation without being particularly causal. Nor would a particular level of unemployment be strongly associated with a particular level of inflation, which is the lack of relationship that is empirically observed.

Incidentally, a resource shock like higher oil prices is also unlikely to cause inflation directly, since any money spent on oil is withdrawn from other uses (though perhaps from savings, which would be temporarily inflationary). Again, unless monetary expansion occurs, an oil shock can't cause inflation, and indeed if vast amounts of dollars are exported to overseas oil producers, such a shock should cause net deflation instead.

In this scenario, it is possible that an oil shock leads to economic recession, and thus to monetary loosening, which does indeed cause inflation when coupled with declining real economic capacity due to the resource constraint. But loosening during such a recession might be a misuse of monetary policy, as done in the 70's (a paper on the era has details). Incidentally, inflation can arise from dramatic declines in economic capacity, as in Zimbabwe, where the real economy collapsed, without the monetary system contracting in unison- another form of monetary error, though in fairness, this is a very difficult adjustment to make.

The point I am getting at is that inflation does not seem to be caused by high or low employment, but rather by errors of the monetary and/or fiscal policy in trying to control a somewhat chaotic and time-lagged system. Labor demands are only that- demands. If their counterparts lack the money to meet those demands, inflation can't happen.

The Phillips curve, which eventually gave rise to the NAIRU concept, (here is a brief review), showed a general correlation between employment and inflation- an empirical finding that remains true. But as we all know, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, and I think that is the case here.

Friedman's ultimate argument was that monetary expansion can't be effective as a continual policy to reduce unemployment, which also remains valid, I think. (Not that this was central to Keyensian policy.) Monetary effects on employment are temporary, though at times like the present such temporary measures can have very long-lasting consequences, to counteract effects of monetary and real contraction. I have to admit that my many statements over the last couple of years about the Fed's general role ensuring full employment in normal times are probably not accurate or wise. In normal times, it should regulate inflation, (and regulate banks properly!), and leave employment policy to other branches. It would also be nice if it gave positive and useful advice on fiscal matters, though its track record there is abysmal- the less said the better!

Yet on the other hand, the deeper point I am getting at is that the war on labor carried out in so many ways over the last few decades, by increased low-wage immigration, by NAFTA, by "supply-side" economics, by union-bashing, and by ending the overall progressivity of the tax system ... was never about inflation, though it was often couched in those terms. Efficiency and productivity were other rationales, though these also applied curiously only to the lower classes.

It was about something quite different. It was about about squeezing more from lower-paid workers while finding ways to pay executives more. It was about redistributing income from the lower classes upward to the rich, who became lost in a self-aggrandizing narrative which Milton Friedman did so much to popularize. It was about reversing the pro-labor policies of the New Deal and the anti-poverty policies of the Great Society, frequently under the cover of fighting inflation. It was a royal restoration of Darwinian, winner-take all economics over Keynesian economics.

It is surely a human weakness to look up to the rich and powerful, assuming that their good fortune arises from good works, divine favor, or at least the favor of natural selection. But mostly, quite unnatural selection is at work, whether through government corruption, financial chicanery, or simple inheritance. The adulation of the rich is part of the social and media complex that has made the Occupy movement so necessary, yet also so tenuous.

What has the Darwinian restoration gotten us? It has eroded the middle class, sapped overall economic growth, promoted gambling by the investor class in place of productive investment, mired the poor in debt peonage, and corrupted our social and political systems into the bargain. Not a pretty sight, in my estimation.

And while right-ists continue to look for inflation under every bed, it is dead. It is high time to put this fight against inflation on the back burner and attend to the suffering that the last decades have wrought. One step would be to create a jobs-for-everyone policy, offering modest-paying public service work to everyone who wants work. The analysis above indicates that despite in essence outlawing unemployment, such a policy would have little effect on inflation. Yet it would have a huge positive effect on our culture and future prospects, in concert with suitably large investments in infrastructure and education.

A few problems with Buddhism.
Whose side is the SEC on, anyhow?
Forgery begins to exact a price.
For Newt, economic statistics is a combat sport.
Securitize body parts?
"The 1 percent got a gift-wrapped bonanza, while the 99 percent got the shaft."
Citigroup gets an F.
For reliable focus on bad news in the US, with a few fabrications thrown in, turn to RT.
Afghan mafia terrorize Afghans. Where is the government? And, is aid = oil?
Skidelsky on the economic crisis:

"The most terrifying thing to emerge from the Bank of England’s reports is that the Bank embarked on its experiment without any macro-economic model specifying how money was to be transmitted to income. In other words, QE was launched on a wing and prayer."

Economic quote of the week, from Dean Baker, via Bill Mitchell:

"The European Central Bank (ECB) has been working hard to convince the world that it is not competent to act as a central bank." (Salon provides some background.)

... and Bill continues ...
"Further, I know it is twee for so-called progressives to keep telling us that the solution to the crisis for governments to “make the rich pay” but the reality is that might sound nice and be a useful policy on equity grounds but it is not the solution to the crisis.

The crisis is being extended because there is not enough aggregate demand to drive growth and income. Taking some purchasing power off the rich will probably worsen that situation although it would not be as damaging as taking cash off the lower income groups.

These distributional matters (whether the rich pay or not) should be separated from the main game – which isn’t to say I don’t support higher tax rates for the rich and lower tax rates for the poor."

Doublethink, religion, and the essential moral attitude

2011-11-26T09:02:00.000-08:00

Being human means not being materialistic, even though one has to be materialistic from time to time.

One hears it all the time as an atheist: "How can you be moral?". Plenty of replies can assert or show by example how baselessness the accusation is, but still, what is behind it? There is something much deeper than a matter of divine command.. that if one does not accept the ten commandments as divine and absolute, one is utterly lawless. There is something more important going on.

A way into this issue came up for me in George Eliot's Middlemarch, which describes the Victorian hinterlands as almost expecting their doctors to be more or less irreligious, indeed doubting their competence if they flaunt great devotion.

"The Doctor was more than suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted; conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill."

How intriguing! Is there perhaps a spectrum of interest, from the material to the spiritual, over which people of different temperaments are arrayed and in accordance with which they take up their professions and roles in life?

I had a science teacher in school who shocked us by stating that the materials of our bodies, if bought from the chemical supply catalog, would amount to only about $14 dollars worth, mostly in the calcium, I believe.

What is our value as humans? That is the central question of morality. Whether we see value in others, or conversely de-value and de-humanize others, is morally fundamental. Kant expressed this in his categorical imperative, that one should never treat a human as an instrument but rather as an end- a being of intrinsic and high value. The revolutionary ideas of human rights, civil rights, and all men being created equal ... these are not read from the book of nature, but from our sentiments and ideals, properly cultivated.

They also form the essential ground of modern society, where personal dignity, fairness and due process from social structures like corporations and governments are taken for granted (or demanded). One could describe this view of humanity as enchanted, as humanistic, or as religious, depending on one's taste.

Obviously, various professions and lines of work militate against such a well-cultivated view. Medicine comes to mind, as does economics, banking, insurance, business in general, being a dictator, and criminal pursuits more or less psychopathic. Human life has to be put into the scale from time to time and weighed against other, finite considerations. Like money. Insurers deal with the worth of a human life. Economists attempt to value all sorts of pricelss goods, like musical performances, life-saving drugs, food, paintings. Doctors violate our dignity all the time, certainly for higher ends and with practiced discretion, but the tension can be acute.

The enchanted and materialist views are highly incommensurate. So we live double lives, seeing each other, our dreams, and self-expressions as priceless, even as on the other hand these things must be priced out or treated roughly rather frequently.

Religion has been the institution dedicated to the spiritual - the infinite measure of value and connection, elaborating cosmic-scale myths of human value that, at their best, cultivate a virtually infinite regard for others, including, in many traditions, non-human forms of life, even for nature and the cosmos at large.

This is the point on which atheism is found so abhorrent- that it not only disbelieves the myth, but is thought to disbelieve the point behind the myth, which is the painstakingly erected conviction of human value by which societies live or die- the ground of all morals. That is why conventionally religious people tend to worry less which kind of religion one subscribes to, (excepting fanatics completely lost in the haze of their parochial myth), and more that one has a narrative of ultimate and overwhelming meaning to hang on to in the midst of our otherwise often dehumanizing existence.

But there is something lacking in this analysis. Do our feelings of meaning and value arise out of the myths we tell each other, or does it really work the other way around, that these myths express feelings already present, which are activated by a simple smile, or a feather found by the side of the trail? The many scandals of religion say quite clearly that its arts may nudge, but surely don't force its believers into consistently more humanistic practices and values.

We have developed countless ways to share and cultivate pre-existing and natural feelings of value and meaning, from Beethoven's 9th to the Zen Haiku. Religion, traditionally understood, has been one of these arts, and, as any art form, has had its fads, trends, ups, and downs. But it makes the audacious claim above and beyond its cultivation of human value that it also possesses special philosophical truth and scientific, or even more annoyingly, transcendental trans-scientific truth, which to the atheist is its downfall.

The absurdities of god, heaven and hell, regarded not as artistic expressions of our more or less primitive negotiation with existential finality, but as actual, scientifically valid propositions ... well, it is hardly worth talking about, except that people do indeed, in this advanced age, talk about them, write about them ad infinitum, get doctorates for making stuff up about them, and more. Unfortunately, brute insistance on such antiquated notions can do more to suppress true spiritual and humane feeling than any amount of irreligion.

Herewith, an example in poetry from the far-out feminist new age calandar WeMoon.

The Rapture

In the beginning there was relation.
In the end there's fear and separation.
Just the toll our soul takes, it's the shaking away
from the only god there ever was, the MotherGod-Nature
Patriarchy makes us hate her. Declares war on earth,

She birthed us and fed us throughout the green vastness of time.
Ecstasy's wet nurse,
She opened her purse of DNA molecules, fabulous rituals.
For a million seasons she planted a billion reasons for life to live
She was makin' Time

Once upon anti-entropic cycles of biologic time
deathless star breath inhabits every cell, tells us
we are mollusks and chlorophyl, iron and carbon,
we're memories of wilderness and earth- as essential as biology.

Swirling through Time from the first cell floating on the first sea
at the first outbreath of the world, that breath still circles,
chanting Yes! god is a womin who just says Yes!
and we gotta give Life support saying Yes!
And maybe these death throes are really birth pains
And maybe this chaos is labor, not apocalypse
And maybe what we need to do is push! Push through her hips.
Push! Push! Push through. The end of patriarchy is my rapture
And I ain't goin nowhere but Here.

Oak Chezar, 2006

Gazzaniga talks about brains, consciousness, punishment, and free will.
People in search of hope.
Occupy god!
Occupy needs to organize.
Cannibalism and rivers of blood- the first crusade.
Photo blog on Afghanistan.. considering the history, we are doing pretty well.
Just how does one exit the Euro?
The squid, driving Europe down the drain. Also .. running for president!
Is a second Credit Anstalt collapse coming?
Cheating- the dominant strategy in modern finance.
"I think our female desire is for emotional connection to transcend that inescapable loneliness of being a human being, and theirs is physical, so they go to these places where someone will touch them."
Economics quote of the week, Bill Mitchell, in a post that bears a full reading:

"The entrepreneurs are disappearing in American and being replaced by rapacious wealth shufflers who add nothing to productive capacity or general prosperity."
...
"Buying a government bond or a share in a listed company is not investing to an economist. Entrepreneurs invest, hedge funds rarely invest."

Occupy Parquet!

2011-11-19T09:01:00.000-08:00

A modest proposal for the NBA players locked out from the hardwood plantation.

As a casual basketball fan, I've been intrigued by the NBA lockout and contract negotiations. It shouldn't be a surprise that I side with the workers- the players, who have dissolved their union in order to attack the legality of the owner's lockout.

The players have been making 57% of the league's gross income. The owners claim that they have been losing money with this structure, and want more of the gross for themselves.

The players have certainly been doing their part, as the dramatic playoff and finals series last year showed. How have the owners been doing? Well, they say they have lost money. Which means that they aren't very good at math. They complain that free agency and lack of hard caps force them to over-pay / over-bid for players, as if someone had been holding guns to their heads. If the owners can't mount their infrastructure, marketing, dance troupes, and other activities with $1.6 billion, they should consider getting into other lines of business.

And when was the NBA supposed to be profitable enterprise anyhow? The whole point of having owners is that they are already rich and can give a little back to their communities (and massage their egos) by sponsoring contests of athletic skill that get endless free publicity and to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless schlumps that we are.

Perhaps the NBA has too many teams, and owners in smaller markets appear to struggle to keep their operations solvent. But the owners need to face up to this problem by revenue-sharing and philanthropy, not by taking it out of the player's hides. They are already a monopoly ... they should act like it.

Compared to the players, how much value do the owners add? Very, very little, in my estimation. The teams would be just as, or more, socially useful being publically owned or employee-owned. The current plutocratic ownership concept is a social construct that mirrors capitalist/philathropic relations elsewhere in the society, for very little reason or benefit, especially if the teams become profit centers rather than vanity centers. The fact that the owners can't properly manage a business monopoly and entrenched cultural institution hardly reflects well on them.

What I would recommend is that the players, now that they have disbanded from being part of the NBA structure, meet the lockout with a walkout. They should set up their own league and displace the NBA entirely. They should, in short, occupy the parquet themselves, as an employee-owned league. At first, they will be restricted to smaller venues and limited media, but I think in the age of twitter and youtube, they would gain the necessary buzz with ease, and become self-sustaining. The old franchises, like the ailing Warriors franchise that recently sold for a half-billion dollars, would consequently lose all value. If they gutted it out, the players would eventually be able to take over the old venues, including the classic Celtics parquet.

This conflict is just one small vignette in the larger economic narrative. The NBA owners clearly bought into the right-wing mindset that this would be a good time to crush unions and workers. The economic disaster that the 1% has authored has made them even more powerful over labor by way of extreme unemployment. But I'd suggest that the NBA owners ran into the buzz saw of the OWS counter-narrative, and the players have taken heart in a great deal of public support. The game is mostly mental, after all! The NBA is a uniquely worker-driven enterprise, with little rationale for capitalist ownership at all. The players may still cave, money managment perhaps not being their strong suit. But I think there is a better way, if they can hold out and boldly seize their future.

My suggestion for the new league name? HDL- Hoop Dreams League.

Prosecutions / indictments are beginning, finally.
I pay more taxes than GE does.
Slate chimes in on best live albums.
Dean Baker on the economics profession & unemployment, part 2.
Video of OWS and Bloomberg's army.
Are Americans a little insular?
"People" no longer really count. Other "people" are in charge.
Germany on the Euro- "it's all about me".
Economics quote of the week: Alan Minsky on the OWS meme, trickle-up economics, and related issues.

"The man who Mr. Obama asked to be his mentor when he joined the Senate was Joe Lieberman. He evidently gave Obama expert advice about how to raise funds from the financial class by delivering his liberal constituency to his Wall Street campaign contributors."
..
"Wall Street has orchestrated and lobbied for a rentier alliance whose wealth is growing at the expense of the economy at large. It is extractive, not productive."

Area blogger takes incoming plutocratic fire

2011-11-13T10:01:00.000-08:00

Original editorial. Replying editorial.

I doubt further commentary is needed.

But later correspondents added some conservative echos.

Though, come to think of it, perhaps a link to a recent New Yorker cover would be in order:

And, just to keep things light, a Roz Chast cartoon may be helpful as well:

Travels and meetings of ancient humans

2011-11-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

Australians branched from Out-of-Africans long before Europeans and Asians diverged.

An interesting caveat to the Out-of-Africa origin for modern humans is that perhaps 4% of our genomes apparently comes from archaic humans these modern African emigrants encountered in Europe and Asia- the Neaderthals and a recently discovered more eastern relative of the Neanderthals, the Denisovans of the Altai mountains, a bit south of Novosibirsk, of whom a couple of bones and DNA are known, but not much else.

Which parts of our genomes? Well, a recent paper claims that up to 60% of some modern immunological genes stem from these archaic genomes, suggesting that pathogens encountered outside Africa may have been novel and subjected emigrating humans to selective pressure that the resident proto-humans had already mastered, genetically speaking.

The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes are an interesting group in several ways. Their function is to expose small bits of pathogen-derived proteins that the leukocyte (an antigen presenting cell) has been chewing on on its outside surface, so that other parts of the immune system (like killer T-cells) can "read" what this first line of defense is seeing and responding to. It is a very elegant system, finely balanced between over-active auto-immunity and prompt action against foreign pathogens.

No single (HLA) protein is ideally suited to hold and display the large variety of foreign proteins that the immune system may encounter, so we have three: HLA-A, -B, and -C. These proteins are additionally highly variable through human populations and vary quickly with evolution, as the pathogens we meet change quickly as well. It is highly beneficial to have different alleles of each gene from one's parents (i.e., be heterozygous), and women are thought to be able subconsciously to detect whether the men they are mating with have different HLA alleles from themselves. Wow!

This kind of selection is called "balancing" selection, where the optimal genetic population structure is not one ideal allele of one gene, (i.e. the "perfect", or evolutionarily "best" gene), but a diversity of different alleles. This theme is likely to be highly significant in psychological characteristics as well as immunological ones.

At any rate, one research group recently used the available DNA sequences from Neanderthals and their cousins, the Denisovan archaic humans, to determine that some of their HLA alleles are not closely related to anything found in Africa today, and yet make up a substantial portion in many non-African human populations. Which is to say that humans today outside of Africa obtained significant immunological diversity from their mating with these archaic humans.

HLA-A 11	(Denisovan)	Up to 48% of populations centered on South China and Papua New Guinea.
HLA-B 73	(Denisovan)	Up to 4% of people in west Asia, centered on Afghanistan.
HLA-B 07:02	(Neanderthal)	Up to 17% of people centered on Britain and Scandinavia.
HLA-B 51:01	(Neanderthal)	Up to 18% of people centered on Eastern Turkey.
HLA-C 12:02	(Denisovan)	Up to 11% of populations centered on Mumbai and Japan.
HLA-C 15	(Denisovan)	Up to 19% of populations centered on Pakistan and northern Australia.
HLA-C 7:02	(Neanderthal)	Up to 30% of populations centered on Moscow and south China.
HLA-C 16:02	(Neanderthal)	Up to 5% of populations centered on Iran.

Geographic distribution of one archaic HLA human allele.

Once the recent African origin of modern humans became clear, many other questions arose- how, when, where, and who? Upon leaving Africa, which groups went where and when? A second paper gives quantitative evidence, from one partial Australian aboriginal genome sequence, that this group split off long before the Europeans and other Asians separated.

Geographically, one would suspect that, like the Native Americans and Polynesians, Aboriginal Australians would be at the end of the line of human divergence, separating at very late times from nearby groups in Southern Asia (model A). Morphologically, however, Aboriginal Australians don't fit this template at all, having closer resemblances with Africans than with the geographically intervening groups such as the Polynesians (model B).

The genetics bear out the latter story. These researchers used a museum sample of Aboriginal hair, apparently to evade problems of genetic contamination with Europeans, to sequence about 60% of one genome. They also sequenced three Han Chinese genomes and of course had numerous other genomes to work with by this point (about 1,220 individual sets of snp data).

The data took the form of snps- single base pair alterations/mutations from the common sequence that can be used forensically to track lineages, since descendents share the alterations of their ancestors than those of non-ancestors. All this data (14,000 snp sites) was thrown into a statistical program that spat out expected rates of snp identities under various lineage models.

The numerical differences / output are impossible for a non-expert to comment on, but they claim high statistical significance for their result that model B beats model A by a long shot. They also estimate the time from African/Australian divergence at 2750 generations, or about 70,000 years ago (using a generation time of ~27 years, apparently). In contrast, the European and Asian lineages diverged less than half as long ago, about 30,000 years ago. Indeed, this second divergence would seem to be an entirely different dispersal event that may have swept previously resident Australian-lineage peoples from all areas of Asia other than the far reaches of Papua New Guinea and Australia which become isolated about this time by rising sea levels. (And the Aeta in the Philippines.)

The global map they offer is:

Lastly, these scientists are also very excited by the possible mixing of Neanderthal or Denisovan genomes with those of the future Australians. Interestingly, they find the same degree of Neanderthal mixing in their Australian genome as in European and Asian genomes, indicating that, rather than mating with the final Neanderthal holdouts in Southern Europe, the mixing we observe genetically took place soon after the first migrations out of Africa.

For the Denisovan DNA, they find higher amounts of mixture (unspecified, but probably ~4%) in their Australian genome than in virtually any other group, indicating that this early migration had especially close contact with these archaic humans.

It is fascinating to see our origins come into clearer focus through the analysis of new data. Old conflicts like the early (regional speciation) versus late out-of-Africa theories are now definitively resolved, finding a bit of truth in both, but mostly favoring the later out-of-Africa theory. The travels of our ancestors, while hardly tracked with GPS, are slightly less obscure, indicating that native Australians have, in the words of these authors, "one of the oldest continuous population histories outside sub-Saharan Africa today", dating back roughly 50,000 years.

Some are obsessed with nearer-term geneology.
Solar time is now.
Capitalism without owners- not working so well. New governance is needed.
Default on foreign lenders, followed by broadly shared economic growth.. what's not to like?
Zombie banks need to be nationalized and resolved.
Trickle-up economics: not natural, but engineered.
Does the Big Lie have legs?
A video on tax policy, broke-ness, and the dinosaur economy.
Wildlife crisis- even worse than the economic crisis.
Quote of the week- Wynne Godley, godfather of the MMT school saw it all coming back in 1992:

"If a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation."

And Krugman: "If you were part of the dialogue in the late 80s and early 90s, it became clear that the euro was best understood as a plot by Italian technocrats to get themselves German central bankers. This was not, it turns out, a good idea."

On moral subjectivity

2011-11-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

Are moral truths objective? Are they even "truths"?

A recent New Yorker profile of Derek Parfit tapped into a broad and untypically theological theme that there must be something absolute about morals- something objective and fixed, a standard that we all know by some (maybe god-given) instinct and reach for or knowingly violate. A recent Philosophy bites podcast ventured into similar territory, with Paul Boghossian. (Here is a typical academic discussion.)

I'm no expert here, but very much take the opposite view, (most famously presented by Hume), that we come up with our morals subjectively, and communally by negotiation, ending up with characteristically human, but variable systems for entirely this-world reasons. The only hint of the absolute is game theory, which lends inescapable structure to our transactions, as it does to evolution more generally.

One interesting pursuit of philosophers of ethics (such as Parfit- or Rawls, or Singer, or Kant, or Plato) is the contruction of ideal moral systems founded on reason. For Rawls, reason says that we should build societies that treat everyone fairly, with the particular rule that in doing the design, we should assume that we would arrive into that society at a random position, not the position we currently hold, thus motivating author of such a system to be maximally impartial, just, and fair.

"He came up with what he called the Triple Theory: An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable." - from the New Yorker profile of Parfit cited above.

Well, this certainly sounds great, but one has to ask: why? What makes reason come up with such schemes? What motivated Rawls to come up with this scheme, and what could possibly make it "right" instead of "wrong"? There have to be premises here on which reason operates, such as our desire to be treated fairly, to be free, to have the opportunity to fulfull our personal potential, and live as well as is practical. There has to be a point. All the relevant points are desires. They may be common desires, but they are not unversal desires. It is the problem of competing desires that creates the whole need for moral systems in the first place, and adjudicating among them can't possibly be the job of reason, in the end, though reason is certainly helpful in articulating our choices and forecasting their consequences. At any rate, it is human desire that justifies a "reasonable" or utilitarian system for getting them satisfied.

So the logic of morals as I see it is that we have desires & needs, and this leads to the creation of a moral system that satisfies them in the face of other people with their own, either complementary or competing desires. I find it extremely hard to see where absolutes enter into this logic. Humans may well have desires that are programmed by god. We have no idea. But even if so, it is from that programming that our premises for "reasonable" systems descend in practice, not from some deity telling us directly what is good and what to do (Biblical interpretation aside, which would truly be going down a rabbit hole). Indeed, some of the most interesting religious literature features people telling god how poorly he has behaved, and shaming him to do better.

One can certainly see the practical attraction of positing morals as absolute and god-given, especially one's own. But that is a mere con game if no one has evidence that his are any more or less god-given than those of others ... which is the position I think we are in.

Oxytocin or oxycontin? Morality and the mind.
Scott Atran on religion and atheists. A podcast telling atheists how hopeless their cause is.
Salon offers an Occupy manifesto.
Please consider transferring from your megabank.
On criticism and the truth illusion.
Crony capitalism kills. Government saves lives.
Compound interest trumps compound growth- one ratchet of wealth inequality.
Do you pay negative taxes?
Afghanistan needs a post-US economy. A functioning society would be nice, too.
Quote of the week, taking a moment away from economics to learn about higher education. From Science magazine, taken in turn from Teachers College Record, 114 (2012):

"Most students enter college aiming for a 4.0 GPA. Given that grading in American educational institutions is unregulated, how meaningful is a 4.0? Rojstaczer and Healy examined grade distributions from 200 American colleges and universities over the past 70 years. They report that movement away from the traditional bell-shaped grading curve began in the 1960s and 1970s in order to help students avoid the military draft. A continual rising of grades followed, without the accompaniment of increased student achievement. Graduation rates have remained largely static for decades, the literacy of graduates has declined, and college entrance exam scores of applicants have fallen. America's educational institutions have gradually created an illusion where excellence is widespread and failure is rare. In fact, “A” is now the most common grade. Efforts at grade regulation are controversial, but without grading oversight, either on a school-by-school or national basis, it is unlikely that meaningful grades will return to American education."

Evolution, revolution, or redistribution?

2011-10-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

In evolution, losers die. What happens in capitalism?

Trite as it seems, comparing capitalism with evolution still makes sense to me. (And to others.) Companies struggle with each other to survive, and the losers disintegrate. But individuals (i.e. people, er, I mean humans) in our system are in a similar Darwinian struggle for jobs and income- now sharply accentuated with globalization. When individuals succeed, the results are clear- they get rich, maybe famous. But what happens when they fail?

That is a bit of a problem in capitalism- those who fail don't conveniently disappear, but linger in poverty, creating political and moral problems. They test a culture of pure rapacious competitive greed for the presence of human values. For her part, Ayn Rand couldn't give a fig for the fate of the losers- the proles, the leaches. That would be the orthodox capitalist position, though there is the small complication that after the money has all been taken from the losers, the winners still need workers to give them food and pedicures. Exactly how little can workers be paid and still arrive to work? And secondly, how can the moral claims of losers in unemployed poverty be best ignored and dismissed?

This brings us to our political moment and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The last few decades have featured a cult of the market and the demonization of human values in the name of supposed efficiency and just deserts. The result has been a well-oiled economic machine that transfers wealth upwards and glorifies the rich. Only, the market turned out to have a screw loose. Greed unleashed led to fraudulent banking on a cataclysmic scale, among many other pathologies in finance. Profligate lending to unqualified borrowers was not bumbling, generous, or inadvertant, but a pattern of fraud perpetrated by businessmen motivated by personal greed over organizational, not to mention systemic and public, responsibility.

They won, sure enough- took the money and ran. Virtually none have been called to account. It is the line where "winning" in the capitalist competition crosses from serving customers to fleecing them and destroying their lives. Obfuscating this basic dynamic is what current Washington politics is all about, especially on the Republican side. And exposing and resolving this dynamic is what OWS is all about.

The losers in capitalism don't quietly fade away, but linger on as citizens, voters, maybe protesters. This is where humans transcend evolution and the bare laws of competition. For all of biology's glories, it has been an extremely painful and slow process, and has resulted in sub-optimal solutions. The fact that humans, once evolved to have enormous brains, could take the world by storm, occupy all lands, commandeer all resources, and fly off into the solar system ... well, that shows how limited the scope of evolution had been up to that point in comparison. It testifies to a consciousness and intellect that reaches far beyond competitive narrow-mindedness- so faithfully modelled by market competition- to a revolutionary capability to foresee the future, to alter circumstances, and to adopt a whole new vision of humanity.

It is a humanity that engages in common effort, plans in common for future prosperity, and shares the fruits of that planning. It is a humanity that harnesses markets and competitive logic as tools, but not as a theology that places Mammon ahead of all else. Polls show that most people share this vision- one of rational forethought, mutual moral obligation, fundamental legal/political equality, and measured economic inequality. Everyone, perhaps, except the most stultified economists.

So, somehow, we have gotten blown off track by the ideology of greed and false efficiency, back to a Herbert Spencer-era economic Darwinism as an ideal of human affairs. Yes, some degree of competition and unequal reward is neccessary to make the economic wheels go around on a micro level. But other values are required as well: a democratic political system that directs the economic system, instead of being corrupted by it; recognition of public goods as essential goods; and progressive mechanisms (specifically, a financial transaction tax, among other means) to counteract the ratchet of wealth accumulation in the hands of the few so that other virtues besides greed can have a place in our society.

Roubini analyzes inequality ... Karl Marx was right.
Regulating money power.
What do we want? Impunity for the rich! When do we want it? Yesterday!
The right competes to propose even more presents to the rich.
.. and can be Keynesian when needed, showing intellectual er.. flexibility.
What is missing in Greece? Taxes from the rich.
Martin Wolfe meditates on economic justice and efficiency.
An army of fobbits ... and a lesson in providing jobs for all.
How was Iceland's crash resolved? By default, fiscal support, putting women in charge, and forcible bank resolution. An object lesson in who has control- the government, not the markets.
Economic quote of the week, from Bill Black- Whom do the euro masters serve?

"The ECB has no statutory mission to protect the interests of Greece’s creditors. Its decision to side with the interests of Greece’s creditors (overwhelmingly European banks, particularly German banks) against the interests of a member nation makes clear why the ECB poses an enormous danger to Europe. The ECB is dominated by theoclassical economists who glory in their “independence” from democratic institutions but are slavish servants of the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) – the misnamed “too big to fail” banks."

Evolutionary knob-twiddling and networking

2011-10-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

Butterfly wings and waves of ancient innovation highlight the dynamism of transcriptional control in evolution.

When you hear about small changes during evolution.. the retreat of brow ridges from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, or the growth of our brains over longer spans, you are typically hearing about changes in regulation of proteins that are themselves unchanged. A little more expression here, a little less there, and perhaps a few more years of expression during childhood.. it all adds up to just the kind of gradual change that Darwin had in mind when he saw that variation is pervasive in biology, and the raw material of evolution.

In our genomes, the locations most conserved over geological time are the protein-coding sections of genes. They are the raisins in the pudding, around which much less stable DNA swirls- the introns, promoters, enhancers, centromeres, telomeres, transposons, repetitive elements, and other material / junk, each of which have their own, typically faster, rate of change. When a protein sequence changes, its action everywhere changes immediately. In contrast, changing where and when it is expressed can have smaller and more subtle effects. More gradual effects, in an evolutionary sense.

Regulatory regions (promoters and enhancers) that control protein expression are dispersed, often spread over many times the length of the protein-coding DNA. They are also modular, composed of separable cassettes with specific control effects/patterns, in contrast to the mostly linear one-damn-amino-acid-after-the-next nature of protein-coding DNA. (Putting aside protein coding flexibility based on intron/exon dispersion). This pattern of dispersed controls is an inheritance from our Archeal ancestors, and is part of what made eukaryotes such revolutionary life forms, able to evolve rapidly relative to bacteria.

Example of a human gene (DAC1) of 2,274 protein-coding base pairs, itself a set of exons (B, in center, vertical black lines are exons) dispersed over 430,000 base pairs of introns. It is set within a 2,000,000 base pair region (A and B) with modules (B; red marks similarity to human) conserved in several species, and individually capable of driving gene expression in mouse embryos as shown in C. (H-human, M-mouse, F-frog, P-pufferfish, Z-zebrafish)

Two recent papers highlight this property in different ways- one about the patterning of butterfly wings among species that convergently evolve to mimic each other's designs, and the other tracing ancient innovation in the vertebrate lineage by bursts of regulatory change followed by conservation/stasis.

Taking the second article first, the regulatory regions of our genome are peppered with small modules (typically much smaller than protein-coding segments) that are somewhat conserved, for their regulatory role. Each module typically drives expression of its associated gene in response to an environmental event, or at a specific time and place in development, as in the above example.

The authors dredged up such modules en masse from several vertebrate genomes (about 10% of all gene regulatory elements, from two fish, cow, mouse, and human) and ask when they first became conserved in evolution, and what genes they associate with. Not being as well conserved as proteins, virtually none are traceable beyond 600 million years ago. The paper is mostly devoted to methods, since these sites are small, difficult to align across different species, and their times of origin are difficult to estimate. But I will leave the methods issues aside.

The interesting finding is that over this span of time, there were four distinct patterns of regulatory innovation (i.e. origination and conservation of regulatory modules) tied to different kinds of genes in vertebrates. The first wave, peaking at the very start of available data at 500+ million years ago, was of transcription regulators themselves, which bind to regulatory DNA sites. This indicates variation and evolution in the most basic programs driving animal function and development.

The second epoch ranged from 500 to 200 million years ago and is associated with developmental genes, reinforcing the finding above, but indicating that the deployment of transcriptional regulators was solidified well before the full palette of developmental possibilities was explored. Development is mostly regulated by the coordinated expression of genes, including transcription regulators, that go on to regulate other genes and proteins in a cascade or network.

A third epoch peaked sharply about 250 million years ago, being the fixation of regulatory sites near receptor genes (Figure below). Receptors play central roles in the nervous system, in smell and taste, and in hormonal control systems like the sex hormones. All these areas were important areas of innovation through the vertebrate lineage, but apparently concentrated at this era just as the age of dinosaurs began.

Lastly, the most recently fixed set of regulatory sites lie near genes involved in post-translational protein modification. This is the attachment of molecules ranging from tiny methyl and acetyl groups to fatty acids like palmitate up through whole mini-proteins like ubiquitin and its many relatives to an active protein.

Period during evolution (x-axis) when regulatory modules near specified classes of genes (noted at top) arose and became conserved (y-axis), indicating a function of increased importance,

These modifications exemplify evolutionary tinkering and jury-rigging. They originate in other processes, (markers for protein degradation in the case of ubiquitin), whose components (or copies thereof) were dragged into new regulatory roles, at first perhaps as just a tentative little tweek on top of the existing complexity, then over time used in more roles when other sources of variation and adaptation had already been so networked that they couldn't change. The evolutionary story suggests that in our lineage, the deeper and more central the system of regulation, the earlier it settled into a more-or-less stable, conserved, and unchangeable, state.

Turning from deep time to more recent events, butterflies in Northern South America are (for the time being) highly diverse. Yet some have converged from different lineages towards similar wing patterns in violation of the general rule of species divergence, and particularly the rule that different species need distinct markings to promote correct mate selection and ecological niche maintenance. This mimicry comes in two versions. Either a distasteful species is mimicked by another that is not distasteful in order to steal its advertising.. i.e. its protection from predators, (Batesian mimicry), or two distasteful species converge together in order to raise the level of advertising they share (Müllerian mimicry).

They would make car dealers proud! But what causes all this plasticity of wing patterning? How do butterflies find it so easy to create and then alter their beautiful patterns? Authors of this paper find one gene that seems to be in charge- a transcription regulator whose own regulation holds the key to variation in the Heliconius genus of butterflies, a distasteful genus (to predators that is, not to us).

Geographic distribution (B), lineages (A, horizontal), and mimicry (A, vertical) of selected Helioconius butterflies.

In this figure, the horizonal rows contain genetic close relatives, while the vertical columns show geographic co-occurence. The archetypal Müllerian mimics are H. melpomene and H. erato, which look very similar despite coming from distant lineages. The authors note that the Helioconius genus has hundreds of different wing pattern races and species. So they have helpfully lined up the various mimics that co-habit but arise from different lineages and thus presumably have converged to similar wing patterns from different ones originally. These are the butterflies they use to ask the question: what are the gene(s) responsible for this variation and convergence/mimicry?

A great deal of past genetics had already pointed to one large genomic region responsible for red wing variants in this genus. The authors drilled down further by using high-tech methods to measure the RNA expression from regularly-spaced 60 base pair segments throughout that ~500,000 base pair suspect genome region. The RNA was prepared from dissected pieces of wing, comparing gene expression in red-colored pieces to that in green or black pieces. Only one location spanning about 15,000 base pairs correlated in its expression closely with the observed color variation, surrounding a gene called "optix".

As one can tell from the name, this gene was already known for its role in eye development in flies. Indeed, earlier researchers found that "Ectopic expression of optix leads to the formation of ectopic eyes suggesting that optix has important functions in eye development." No kidding! "Ectopic" meaning that they engineered expression of the gene in novel places, and - holy moly! - saw eyes develop in those places.

Back to wings.. the authors then looked at full-wing patterns of expression of the optix gene, and indeed it seems to closely presage the appearance of red color, such as in these images:

Expression of optix in 72 hour pupal wings (blue patterns), compared with adult wings of the same species.

The authors also looked at the genetics of optix in more detail and found that not only was there high correlation, but there was complete correlation between the alleles of optix and the resulting wing patterns, using hybrids of various races, indicating that optix is not just a downstream reflection of some other patterning component, but that it drives the red patterning by its location of expression.

Now the interesting part was that they sequenced the optix gene from seven of their Heliconius species, and the protein code was identical in each of them. Twenty million years of evolutionary divergence hadn't made any difference. The authors thus deduce that the genetic variation at this optix locus all happens in the surrounding regulatory regions of the DNA, not the protein coding areas. And this makes sense if the function of the protein has remained the same - make red pigmented areas on the wing (or make eyes, in other settings) - while its deployment in space across the wing has varied with the evolutionary needs of the moment.

They state "optix provides a compelling example of a gene that drives adaptation because its various alleles are regulatory variants that have pronounced effects on complex large-scale patterns." Unfortunately, they have not yet found those regulatory regions. Someone's grant and future work surely hangs in the balance. But as noted above, these regions and their variants are sure to be small, modular, dispersed, and hard to detect, since they exist at the edge of efficacy; bordering on random noise, in a DNA sequence sense.

Control is the key. Just as electronics and computer science quickly gave rise to information theory and cybernetics, and our financial and political worlds depend on people knowing what they are doing and having effective management processes in place, (ahem!), biology too is drenched with management issues. The human genome has half the number of genes that soybean does.. so to paraphrase, it isn't how many you have, but how you use them.

Mars, Venus, and evolution.
The invisible hand, red in tooth and claw. Also inefficient and counter-productive.
BofA deathwatch ... and here.
Euro meltdown/deathwatch.
Fed reform watch, from the left.
Who is the debt-iest president?
On cronyism, regulation, and zombie banks. Also, they own everything...
Democracy enters its death-thoes.
Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell, that China knows what it is doing, economically:

"So the graph highlighted in the early stages of the crisis the importance of very large fiscal interventions. My Chinese contacts informed me that at the time there was no discussion over there about the country drowning in debt or that the government was going to “run out of money”. These ideas that crippled the recovery in the West were not allowed to germinate in China."

Occupy Marin at 12 noon- be there .. at the square.

A Better Retirement

2011-10-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

A modest proposal- cancel all retirement plans.

The US retirement system is a mess. It is grossly unfair, in that employers can choose whether to offer retirement benefits or not, with employees not able to say much about it. Whole fields of employment may have defined pensions or their miserable cousin, the 401K, or nothing, with little rhyme or reason. Workers unwittingly enter fields that either do or don't offer retirement benefits, for all sorts of unrelated reasons of interest and talent, and wind up forty years later either made in the shade, or dumpster diving. We need a better way.

Employers also are mistreated by the current system. Some misers offer the stingiest 401K (no, or token matching), while others offer generous defined benefits. The latter can be destroyed by their pension obligations if they undergo contraction in the ever-changing business landscape, rendering them disasterously uncompetitive against younger companies without large pools of retirees. Among 401K plans, the degree of matching is highly variable, presumably a gauge of labor power in that company or industry, with results that only come out in the wash when the worker is later hung out on the line.

This hidden part of pay packages should, like health insurance under the Obama reforms, be made more uniform, and also be brought into the light by a few fundamental reforms.

First would be to cancel all non-Social Security retirement plans offered in the US, whether by private or public entities. Retirement is not a job for the workplace. Instead, Social Security should be doubled, to provide a uniform and stable base to the retirement of every working American. Despite all the scare stories, there is plenty of scope to beef up Social Security, by raising the cap of income levels that are taxed, and increasing the tax rate.

Second would be to eliminate the employer role in 401K plans. If a company wants to pay employees more, it should put that in the top line of salary, while the employee takes responsibility for the saving, the investments, and the tax deduction. All employees should be treated equally, not given more or less money based on whether they wish to save. Employees would still be able, however, to get their desired savings automatically deducted from their paychecks. The switch would by law put the money previously hidden in retirement benefits into the employee's top-line pay.

For instance, an empoyee might decide to save 10% of income automatically from her paycheck, and have it sent to a specified investment account. Her company would pay her the extra 10% that it previously paid in matching 401K contributions. The employee would take over the tax benefits, being allowed up to $20,000 of annual income to be counted as pre-tax toward this 401K/IRA. The government would offer all workers a social-security-grade account to invest these savings, (as inflation-protected bonds), in case they don't want to gamble it at the Wall street casino, and might also insure special bank savings/CD accounts if desired.

All this would go a long way towards decoupling retirement from the corporations and other institutions we work for. They don't want to worry about our retirement- they have better things to do. They have also been willing to underfund and raid these retirement accounts. Retirement is just too important (and far too long-term) to leave to employers.

The paternalistic model of employment needs to be put out of its misery, instead of penalizing those employers with moral scruples. Companies deserve a level playing field where they compete on their productivity, and attract workers based on transparent offers of compensation. Such reforms will also promote workplace mobility, lowering the need for workers to wait out bad employment situations for their promised retirement. The various fiascos of early retirement programs (allowing retirement at 55, even 50) would no longer be an issue, since no one would get defined benefits that could be arbitrarily granted and started at early times.

Lastly, this proposal would also resolve the public pension crisis, which is truly dire. As investment returns head downwards in our Japan-decade, the extravagant promises made to public employees by various well-meaning but undisciplined public entities have become unsustainable, hollowing out municipal and state public services. This albatross of needs to be cut from our necks by clawing back promises that were so rashly, and sometimes corruptly, made. These costs should be transparent on the top line of salary, not in the sticker shock of hidden crises bequethed to future generations. Public employers need to get out of the retirement business as soon as possible, and into a fair, transparent, transportable, worker-centered system.

Companies raid the retirement cookie jar.
Retirement funds speculate in the current bubble- commodities.
Inequality is a fundamental, long-term problem.
And it is high time to fight back.
For the GOP's part, they will stop at nothing to do nothing.
Corruption- rampant on both sides.
Green- it's time, it's right, and it's economical.
Dennis Ritchie- even more influential in computers than you-know-who.
The Afghan peace deal is a delusion.
Further Afghan commentary from a contractor on the ground.
"God can see it."
Reich helps out OWS with a rundown of lies in the class war.
OWS poster show.
Economic quote of the week, from Robert Skidelsky:

In the US case, adjustment will require a break with a credit-fuelled economy, which is the only way American capitalism has of dealing with the vast inequalities of wealth and income that it has created by outsourcing most of its manufacturing to low-wage countries. There is little sign, however, of the US being willing to rethink its version of capitalism.

Evolved to blog

2011-10-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

Is our reason good for thinking, or good for arguing?

Recent podcasts featured two researchers who propose a novel idea about the point of human reasoning. Their proposition is that it evolved not to reason silently to ourselves, but to support our side in arguments. (Hugo Mercier, on point of inquiry; Dan Sperber on philosophy bites.)

Acting in the world, we generally don't resort to pen and paper to work out complex trains of thought or future action. We go with our gut, and trust to our instincts. We also go by painstakingly cultivated cultural norms and other social frameworks, virtually all of which are implicit, not to say unconscious. It is only in the modern world that we have engineers working out complicated tasks by mathematical means, or management gurus leading by microsoft "project", for what that is worth.

A theme in recent shopping research is that the more we obsess about a decision, and the more we make lists of pros and cons, the less well the decision goes. It is another case of our unconscious guiding us very well through the vageries of life, while reason just can't keep up with the huge amount of information involved.

Our reason, when we choose to employ it, also has characteristic defects. We use it to rationalize existing preferences more than to lead us to new conclusions. We suffer from confirmation bias, which helps us (blindly) feel good about past decisions. We use it to criticize the positions of others relentlessly, with far more skepticism than we would ever train onto our own core ideas.

So what is its point? If reason is so biased and rarely used, why have it at all? Hugo Mercier thinks we reason to argue- it is a social skill far more than a solitary one. This hearkens back to the core pursuits of the ancients, one of which was rhetoric, a sadly abused discipline in our current politics. The citizen gathering, shura, or agora was where public policy was made, with momentous consequences for everyone in the society. Wars were begun, diplomats heard, crimes judged. This was where common action was commenced- that essential function of being human.

Today, through the magic of modern media, our attention spans have declined to soundbites, horseraces, gaffes, and gotchas, rendering reason in the public sphere virtually invisible. We are left with the vote as the final refuge of public will, virtually naked in its tattered clothing of discussion and debate, exercised as a pure, though often ignorant, expression of private interest, rather than public spirit.

Sorry to digress.. so, does arguing and public reason lead to better results? Sperber and Mercier argue that it does (if not on certain cable channels). This is mostly clearly seen in the scientific culture, where pet theories and self-serving authorities are raked over the coals of public critique, peer review, and independent confirmation. It is the public nature of science that is key to its success. Even lone geniuses like Newton and Eistein had their bad, even crackpot ideas, (alchemy in the case of Newton), judged and flushed down the drain of "irreproducible results".

Other animals do not reason together- it is a uniquely human activity as far as we know. Most animals reason implicitly, individually, and unconsciously, with only a few (perhaps jays, crows, higher mammals) able to reason their way around the most elementary problems in a way that appears strongly conscious. So this conscious reasoning capacity is a very recent layer atop the much more powerful unconscious systems that keep us alive and going most of the time.

A leading theory for human intelligence posits that it was mostly selected for its social virtues and attractiveness to mates. Language is of course a primary factor in our heightened consciousness and reasoning ability, to the point that we often reason privately by talking to ourselves or writing, (or doing math), to "bring out" thoughts that otherwise are inarticulate, unformed, or absent. The nexus between language and reasoning (and the other human virtues of art and imagination) seems very strong, supporting an interactive theory of how and why we reason.

Nothing turns on one's reasoning powers like a good argument. Our assumptions are questioned, our interests opposed, and in turn we call up latent resources of rhetoric and rationalization. The true target is typically onlookers in the disinterested middle who may lack preformed personal committment. It may be possible, ideally, to exhibit such a compelling argument that even those directly opposing one's argument must recognize its validity.

In my blogging travels, I have to say that such experiences are quite rare, especially in the area of religion where the most devout inaccessibility to reason prevails, whether public or private. Perhaps the ability to change one's mind needs to be better appreciated and cultivated in our society, particularly in our politics.

Bad loans- who is at fault?
Bad banks... mark-to-make-believe.
Warning- patriarchy at work.
Evil, finally vanquished.
Yet in Koch industries, it somehow persists.
Stiglitz on the need for lots of public spending.
Plastics, really vanquished.
Even China can't really stand Pakistan's duplicity.
OWS slogan of the week: "Tax the psychopaths".
Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell, writing about the fundamental issue of economic distribution:

"In the past, the dilemma of capitalism was that the firms had to keep real wages growing in line with productivity to ensure that the consumption goods produced were sold. But in the lead up to the crisis, capital found a new way to accomplish this which allowed them to suppress real wages growth and pocket increasing shares of the national income produced as profits. Along the way, this munificence also manifested as the ridiculous executive pay deals and Wall Street gambling that we read about constantly over the last decade or so and ultimately blew up in our faces.

The trick was found in the rise of “financial engineering” which pushed ever increasing debt onto the household sector. The capitalists found that they could sustain purchasing power and receive a bonus along the way in the form of interest payments. This seemed to be a much better strategy than paying higher real wages."

What a REAL debt crisis looks like

2011-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Greece is in dire straights. We are not.

Economic discussion in the US is appallingly primitive. Boehner says that the federal debt "is the real jobs killer". This is taken seriously, and he continues to be invited to talk shows to spread his economic wisdom. No one is there to say that he is lying.

What does a debt crisis really look like? It looks like Greece, which is on the verge of exiting the Euro and defaulting on its Euro debts [Ed.- This may have happened already by publication]. Greece does not print its Euros, but has to borrow (or beg) Euros to cover its deficits.

It is in the same position as a Lehman or other company that borrows the state currency of issue from private lenders, who only buy the debt on free market terms- i.e. dependent on the perceived risk of default and insolvency. Last I heard, Greece was facing interest rates of 25%- truly astronomical and already a functional form of default. Recently, the central Euro bank extended Greece several extra emergency loans, but this was just putting off the inevitable, since the fundamental rules were not changed.

How do we look in comparison? The US government has unlimited dollars, so we are never subject to insolvency risk (with the exception of political or policy idiocy, where our leaders decide to withold dollars and lead us over a cliff). We face the different risk of inflation, if more dollars are printed than the economic system can handle. We definitely faced inflation through the seventies, after a binge of social and military spending in the preceding decade. But now? Now we are facing deflation, and all the work of the Fed to raise the "money supply" has lain idle as unlent bank reserves, awaiting a revival of animal spirits.

So inflation is telling us that the US federal deficit is not a problem at all, let alone a jobs killer. Indeed, the surest way to create more jobs is to fund them directly by government spending (with or without higher debt), killing two birds with one stone- raising employment, and also raising the perceived inflation target that will discourage passive investments, encourage active investments, and shrink fixed debt burdens.

The Republican economic rhetoric has become ever more confident and shrill as its snow job on the American public has gained traction. Surely its CEO supporters think that high taxes are hurting them, that government regulation is hurting them, and that labor unionization is hurting them. But that is not why they are not hiring. They are not hiring for lack of business. Macroeconomics should never be left in the hands of businessmen- that only leads to depression.

The point of public policy is not the care and feeding of the plutocracy, but the care of the general public interest, especially that of the lower and middle classes, which have been so abused over the last decades.

To put our current unemployment situation into perspective, the Apollo space program employed about 400,000 people at its height. Now, with unemployment plus the rate of discouraged workers standing at about 16%, and a civilian labor force of about 154 million, this works out to 62 Apollo programs. Granted, not everyone who is unemployed is a rocket scientist. But truly mind-blowing amounts of talent and energy are lying wasted, a casualty of free markets that don't work, ideology based on lies, and a general failure of political and intellectual will. We are choosing decline in the US, not suffering it.

Example of pure shilling.
Long term decline is setting in.
Skidelsky on indebtedness and Hayek.
Egregious waste in the oil fields, and how to end it.
Economics quote of the week Marriner Eccles, Chair of the Federal Reserve, 1933, via Bill Mitchell:

"We have a complete economic plant able to supply a superabundance of not only all of the necessities of our people, but the comforts and luxuries as well. Our problem, then, becomes one purely of distribution. This can only be brought about by providing purchasing power sufficiently adequate to enable the people to obtain the consumption goods which we, as a nation, are able to produce."

Mystics envy

2011-09-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Why do physicists keep getting mystical on us? A review of "The Tao of physics".

"The Tao of Physics" took the world by storm over three decades ago, leading to a mini-industry of East-West mind-melds and tortured theories of grand spiritual unification. Has anything resulted from this, or changed? No, I don't think either physics or mysticism has changed in its wake, though perhaps our cultural recognition of the universality of certain psychological tropes has increased. I happened across this book recently, and thought it might make enjoyable reading.

Fritjof Capra gives very nice introductions to the physics of his day, and also capsule summaries of the major Eastern spiritual traditions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, and the somewhat complementary Chinese systems of Confucianism and Taoism. His technique is generally to mash up the most mystical-sounding quotes from leading physicists with the most physics-sounding quotes from various mystics. Naturally, the questions each are grappling with have some resemblence, in that they are highly mystifying. And each are thinking about deep aspects of time, space, matter, and change. So the Buddhist Ashvaghosha is thought to have said:

"Be it clearly understood that space is nothing but a mode of particularization and that it has not real existence of its own ... Space exists only in relation to our particularizing consciousness."

What can one make of this? Probably something along the lines of mind-over-matter, perhaps an extreme Platonic sort of conception that "reality" doesn't exist outside our minds, and that with enough mind-power, we can fundamentally alter our relation to reality, even reality itself.

When placed within a discussion of Einstein's relativity, (as it is), this doesn't really make a great deal of sense. Einstein didn't dispute the existence of space, indeed he created a mathematical system of unprecedented accuracy to describe it and its relations to time, light, and gravity. The nature of space in modern physics is certainly odd, since it serves as the matrix for gravitation's effects, and generates virtual particles all the time, especially in the vicinity of condensed forms of energy that are regular particles. There is far more to the nature of space than we currently appreciate.

So there is no denying that space is a strange beast, (among much else in the phantasmagoria of fundamental physics), but whether the mystics understand anything about it, rather than offering empty riddles, and perhaps taking some ultimately subjective view of all forms of reality in relation to their personal voyages of meditation ... is, frankly, doubtful. And so it goes through the book.

A typical problem is the enormously different standards of evidence demanded of the two fields. The mystics have only to make bald and piquant assertions (hopefully also agreeing with each other on some vague metaphorical plane) to be taken seriously. In contrast, physics hews to an empirical standard where theories can actually fail. For example, in the epilog, Capra bemoans that lack of unified theory of relativity and quantum phenomena, which continues to this day:

"At present there are two different kinds of 'quantum-relativistic' theories in particle physics that have been successful in different areas. ... A major problem that is still unsolved is the unification of quantum theory and general relativity ino a quantum theory of gravity. Although the recent development of 'supergravity' theories may represent a step towards solving this problem, no satisfactory theory has been found so far."

That is a remarkable statement that no mystic would ever make. Do we have a thorough understanding of reincarnation? Has it been "solved"? How could we ever tell? With such imaginary, ethereal ideas, it would be simply impolite to press for details or evidence.

Yet Capra has previously in the book pushed the analogy far, far beyond the breaking point:

"Anybody who wants to repeat an experiment in modern subatomic physics has to undergo many years of training. Only then will he or she be able to ask nature a specific question through the experiment and to understand the answer. Similarly, a deep mystical experience requires, generally, many years of training under an experienced master and, as in the scientific training, the dedicated time does not alone guarantee success. If the student is successful, however, he or she will be able to 'repeat the experiment'. The repeatability of the experience is, in fact, essential to every mystical training and is the very aim of the mystic's spiritual instruction."

But just what is being experienced here, what experimented with, and what found? These journeys are introspective, finding things that are already there, indeed finding mental contents and instructions in large part put there by the culture and the teachers. While the traditions may generate and carry great social and psychological wisdom from this focus on the mind, they are on a great navel-gazing merry-go-round that could not possibly develop insights into physics and cosmology. They are humanistic disciplines all the way down.

Most unfortunately, Capra spends the climactic chapters on a theory of the constituents of protons/neutrons, called S-matrix theory, which has since been carted off to the scap heap of failed science. It has been replaced by the quark theory, with its gluons and very well-worked out chromodynamics. This wasn't just a scientific blind alley, but also a mystical one, since S-matrix theory denied the very existence of particles like quarks, and led to inflated claims of consciousness being the royal road to conjuring the particles themselves:

"Such a theory of subatomic particles reflects the impossibility of separating the scientific observer from the observed phenomena, which has already been discussed in connection with quantum theory, in its most extreme form. It implies, ultimately, that the structures and phenomena we observe in nature are nothing but creations of our measuring and categorizing mind."

Note the subtle switch from the structures of phenomena, which may very well be functions of how we look at them, to the phenomena themselves. He goes on.. "The Eastern mystics tell us again and again that all things and events we perceive are creations of the mind, arising from a particular state of consciousness and dissolving again if this state is transcended."

And there is the basic problem, since if we know anything, (which itself is not a certainty, indeed, but what else do we have?), it is that we are not a dream and the world is real, both in its capacity to afflict us and in its vast beauty. Transcending it is a pipe dream, while escaping it is all too easy, through such means as drugs, meditation, philosophical day-dreaming, or death. Intellectual adventures are laudible, but only give us the reward of truth if they are disciplined by the usual mundane attention to logic and evidence.

Roubini lays down the law on what must be done.
An essay in religious guilt.
Community decay is part of the middle class decline.
Obama- change ain't coming from the top.
Granholm on our public policy decline.
Cartoons become reality: "... detonating an explosive device that was hidden in his turban."
On licensing shoplifting.
Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"... why the hell is the ECB prepared to bail out banks but not countries – with what are effectively unlimited low-cost loans? Similarly, why is the US Federal Reserve prepared to proved unlimited US dollar credit lines to Europe with no firm collateral? The words 'appease elites' creep in when I wonder about those questions and 'damn the unemployed'."
...
"Who is benefiting? In each of the nations which have engineered a major redistribution of national income away from wages towards profits, it is the elites who have usurped what growth has been achieved."

Economics graph of the week, from Fed data:

Morning in America- consumer debt started to rise (light line),
and assets fall (dark line), in the early 1980s.

The Meme War

2011-09-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Reflections on a lost decade.

I am reluctant to add my drop to the flood of 9/11 commentary, but an article by George Packer got me thinking:

"The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years, we haven't stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it's almost impossible to define victory. You can't document the war's progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense. A country used to a feeling of command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction, swinging wildly between passive fear and fevered, often thoughtless, activity, ata high cost to its self-confidence."

We used to fight wars of territory, or at least principle. But now we are in a psychological war of unusual depth and complexity. The "clash of civilizations" formulation is too grandiose, while the "war on terror" alternative is both vague, as noted by Packer, and solipsistic, as though we were making war on hobgoblins and nightmares.

Yes, some of us were terrorized. Many were and remain hurt. And yes, we reacted shamefully and stupidly. It is a story of a power bestriding the world after the collapse of its conventional adversaries, only to face internal strife, complacency, and needling from Lilliputian adversaries.

As the title indicates, I'd suggest that the meme concept is well-suited to this challenge. The militant Islamists may be few in number, but their approach has a long history, and enjoys many levels of cultural support. The ideological conflict is extremly deep-seated, with the US and Islam each drenched in world-historical missions with presumptions of purity and superiority.

The conflict is most pointed with Islam-centric countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan; by turns resentful, hot-headed, duplicitous, bigoted, and mortified by their systemic weaknesses, including, except for the oil countries, poverty. Islam's global culture has long taken a back seat to the West, exchanging its status of colonizing foreign lands (like India) with the experience of being colonized. The West is now headed by the US's military, economic, and cultural dominance, and Islamic culture responded by becomming passive-aggressive; first against the Western outpost of Israel, and more recently against the US directly.

The broad culture proclaims Islam to be a religion of peace, even while jihad is spelled out with great specificity, and its bequest of a shrunken world empire is a matter of identity and pride. Revanchist mullahs preach of renewed dominance and empire, were their listeners only dedicated and pure enough in their religious devotion.

As Mao taught, revolutionaries swim in the river of the people. We may kill every member of Al Qaeda, but militant Islamism will go on, fed by an unending stream of fodder from the madrassas of Pakistan, taught by the Wahhabi mullahs of Saudi Arabia. It is a battle of ideas / ideologies / memes, far more than a battle of individuals or nations. An ideology that can routinely employ suicide bombers is more than a tactical adversary- it is the fruit of a much larger cultural tree.

Some of the meme dimensions that come to mind:

Power- Next to group identity, worship of power is one of humanity's very worst traits. The irony of Islamists complaining about the overweaning power of the US, while at the same time dancing over every victory of their own with pronouncements that the US is a paper tiger to be shortly swept into the dustbin of history, is pathetic, but not unprecedented. What are they talking about? They are talking about power.

Islam is more power-hungry and power-conscious than most religions, with a bloody political militarism in its scriptures and early history. One of its deepest cultural failings is that power is respected more than principle, implicitly legitimating one despotism after another. But the culture draws the line at infidels, who should never rule over Muslims, however powerful. Worship of power neatly takes second place to group identity.

But worship of power makes its absence felt so much more keenly, activating the deepest memes of honor and group in a quest for dominance, even when hopeless. Why aren't other small and weak countries chafing under the US thumb, like, say, Norway, or Gabon? Perhaps because they are not as power-obsessed and ideologically resentful in dreams of past & future glory.

Religion- While religion is the thread woven throughout this conflict, both explicitly and implicitly, the problem is not confined to crazy theologies and believers who are more or less devoted to wholly imaginary saviors, eschatologies, and prophecies. No, the specifics are more or less changeable memes- the Balkans exhibited the same fusion of group and religion but diversified among Catholicism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity. The problem is how base human traits are egged on in a systematic way by the cultural structures of Islam- how its Arab inheritance of bigotry and honor re-expresses itself so persistently.

Compare Islam with Christianity and Buddhism, which together form a sort of spectrum of decreasingly violent religions. Each has its mystical, pacifist elements. The Sufis have done yoeman's work in reinterpreting Islam in pacifist, introspective ways, and are reviled for it. In contrast, mystical introspection forms the main path of Buddhism, with its occasional violence and other defects very much the exception. Christianity lies at the center, with a great profusion of both liberal and militaristic elements, drawing from a central wellspring of heavily conflicted teachings, combining some pacifism and positive ethics with a great deal of hellfire in both testaments, and power & war major themes in the old testament.

Democracy & Progress- Do they "hate us for our freedoms"? In way, yes, since the dominant power is free in a way that no lesser power is. We are free to bludgeon Islamic countries, while they are not free to do the reverse. Freedom and power are intimately entwined.

This contrast contributes to the many conspiricy theories that abound in the Islamic wold, ascribing all manner of hidden influence to the US, even though the facts of the matter show that when we do consciously exert our power, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, that power is a shockingly blunt instrument.

At any rate, there is more to US influence than pure power, and this is where our ideology of democracy, freedom, and progress comes into play. These memes are central to the "hearts and minds" operation by which the meme war will really be won or lost. The legitimacy of US power abroad hinges not on how much ammunition we have, but whether we truly support the interests and self-determination of other peoples. Most people want democracy, and though squaring democracy with Islam can be a challenge, Islamic countries such as Turkey show that democracy and progress in economic, human rights, and civic spheres go hand in hand.

So my take on the war is that the tide turned not with the death of OBL, but with the Arab spring and its thorough coverage on Al Jazeera. This showed the way forward for the Islamic world at large, under their own power, with the mostly helpful, and occasionally decisive, influence of the US in the background. Clearly, our next step should be to put Palestine on the same road to self-government and independence.

One hesitates to say it, but the more or less stable conclusions to the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan are in some measure consistent with G. W. Bush's instinct to "shake things up" in the Middle East, though whether he retarded or speeded regional progress is hard to say. Perhaps our bravura show of incompetence disabused Muslim onlookers and especially intellectuals about the external origins of their various travails.

Consumerism- Along with all the positive memes from the West, of better political systems that fulfill Islamic goals even better than the Islamic formula does on its own, (i.e. more organized and legitimate ways to select leaders, leading to peaceful and effective government), is the more insidious influence of Western consumerism. The TV shows, the prosperity, the shameless commercialism and greed. All this is highly conflicting when viewed from the other end. People do individually want to live better, with more goods, education, and sanitary conditions. But do they have to give up their souls to get there?

Western consumerism is rather intensely anti-spiritual, not to mention amoral. It breaks down barriers of taste, propriety, and tradition. The spiritual equanimity and community of Islam is put at risk by its advance. Muslims look at the spiritual corruption of the Saudi royals, and must be deeply disturbed. This has the power to undo the political logic/meme of democracy in the balance of Western influence, or at least to inspire persistent and principled opposition.

Unfortunately, consumerism is such a natural and emergent property of democratic systems and their allied prosperity that there is little we can do to separate them or cancel one half of the equation. The best we can probably do is to tend to our own hearths and try not to lose sight of point of a free economic system, which is to afford useful work and decent living conditions to all its citizens, and in that way (if we are successful) to continue providing a positive cultural path, warts and all.

Paul Berman on the meme war, and its resemblance to other utopian movements of the last century. (By subscription)
On transcendence and redemption in history.
Declinist rants, on oil and politics.
A macro-view of our foreign policy.
Lakoff, on the meme-scape and the domestic battle for power. With commentary.
Government- problem or solution?
Who exactly is reforming education?
"Strikingly, no other circumstance triggers a larger decline in well-being and mental health than involuntary joblessness. Only the death of a spouse compares."
Inequality, poverty, and our economic future.
Terrorist watch- at the post office.
Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"The evil cycle of neo-liberalism is circular – the ideology inflicts damage which is then explained by there not being enough damage which then leads to policies which cause further damage which then is rationalised …. and so it goes. "

Economics graph of the week, from Paul Krugman's blog:

How much inequality?

2011-09-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

What is the optimal setting for economic inequality in a society?

Many utopias have foundered on the dream of egalitarianism. Communism promised equality, yet delivered the ultimate inequality- despotism. Nevertheless, we keep dreaming of egalitarian systems, because we originated in substantially egalitarian societies of the family, band, and tribe that predated the unimaginably vast forms of wealth and power possible today. People owned little more than they could carry, and relied on social networks within a very small hierarchy for insurance against their various reverses and calamities.

In the primitive setting, some social hierarchy is natural, though quite variable. Some cultures practiced matriarchy, and few could (or wished to) support chiefs or kings in any kind of lavish style. In Afghanistan today, the rural Pashtun culture carries on the typical practices of tribe / small-group leadership, which break up and coalesce continuously, along with exemplary hospitality, strong codes of honor, intense male domination, and uniformly impoverished conditions.

So our natural setting seems to be some relatively modest degree of inequality, little of which was economic, rather taking political and social forms. The diversity of primitive power systems is an indication of the various human temperaments and psychologies that will have great difficulty agreeing on a single optimal system in a huge culture such as our own. Thus we have constant debate, if not warfare, over visions of how much hierarchy, how much differentiation of power, how much inequality, is best.

The advent of democracy, equality before the law, human rights, and similar ideas dramatically curtailed the scope of raw social/political power. This enlightenment complex of ideas has been an enormous step up in our level of civilization, (if one favors egalitarianism), and perhaps in some way back towards our native state, as expressed in the formulation of "natural" rights. One wonders sometimes why libertarians, tea partiers, and other denizens of the far right don't frankly fight as much for inequality and freedom on the legal and political planes as they do so vociferously on the economic plane. For a return, in essence, to the Darwinian struggle in all its bloody dimensions.

The economic dimension remains the main battlefield of class and power, with inequality possible to levels undreamed of in any other aspect of social relations, outside the few remaining political dictatorships. Concentrations of economic power have grown immeasurably with the advent of storable wealth, with individuals amassing wealth equivalent to the GDP of small countries.

In primitive societies, great wealth creates obligations to share and distribute, it being generally perishable. In our society, wealth can be held indefinitely and compounded infinitely. Our current crisis is characterized by an unwillingness to spend, despite the availability of veritable oceans of money (in corporations, in banks, and amongst the wealthy). The poor and middle class have lost spending power as they have lost income, employment, and credit, so this crisis, (if one views high unemployment and stagnant economic activity as a crisis), is fundamentally related to the unequal distribution of wealth and income.

Left to its own devices, the capitalist system creates ever greater inequality. Outside of boom times, such as during World War 2, there is always an army of unemployed that lowers wages. As living standards at the bottom are maintained at a minimal level to forestall riots, the political system is engineered to preserve the position of property and wealth, and the corporate system is turned into a club of cronies. This story has been repeated in countries all over the world, as the gains from technology and economic development have flowed into the pockets of the few.

This process is generally corrosive. Do the rich in the US sponsor great philanthropies and public works? The short answer is no- the greatest concentrations of wealth are captured by the financial elite who are the most psychopathically immoral and greedy of all. The accumulation of wealth has finally, in our specialized and advanced age, been severed from practically any human or civic virtue, so that its benefits lie sterile, behind gated compounds and in the clutches of people whose greatest ambition is to cheat the government of a few more pennies.

If they fail to invest their wealth in new enterprises- in the grand cycle of capitalism- then we may wait a very long time indeed for deliverance if we rely on the the invisible hand alone, in the current crisis.

Yet inequality remains the engine of capitalism, from the basic market proposition of finding the best deal, to the channelling of labor into the most productuve pursuits and the destruction of poorly run companies. Hayek was certainly correct that market mechanisms process some economic information far more efficiently and subtly than any explicit control mechanism could hope to. Inequality, even greed, is the invisible hand behind a good deal of what we see as excellence, efficiency and innovation.

But how much is enough? It is in some ways a psychological question- how much and what kinds of motivation do the various participants need to create that vibrant economy? I think psychology tells us that much less motivation in the form of money would suffice. Does a CEO need millions in compensation if she already has the reward of having scaled the ladder of success and gathered enormous corporate power? Not really. Only in the crony-ridden closet of executive compensation is it necessary (and possible) to embezzle vast sums from the shareholders in order to satisfy one's status aspirations vs the other CEOs on the block.

Other cultures have shown the way, such as Japan, the Scandinavian countries, and indeed the US of the 50's and 60's. In each case, either social norms or government policies such as high taxation keeps economic inequality much lower than it is in the US. Since social norms in the US are hopelessly out of whack, we need changes elsewhere to reign in economic inequality, and particularly to encourage accumulated wealth back into circulation where it can create jobs and generate income in a more egalitarian society.

For instance, I have suggested 100% estate taxation, and would also recommend a wide-spread financial transaction tax, in addition to more progressive taxation of income and reform of private retirement systems. The point is not to penalize anyone, but to counteract the corrosive wealth-concentrating effects of laissez-faire- one more effect among its many, many other defects that need to be regulated for the common good. For example, the financial industry generates diminishing, indeed negative, returns to general economic wellbeing the larger it gets, and especially the more "innovative" it gets. It needs to be reigned in substantially.

What about the bottom of the ladder? How much monetary motivation and thus inequality is required there? Clearly, economic motivation is essential to drive most people to take jobs and perform whatever services society deems useful. Left to their own devices, most people would pursue other interests of perhaps more cultural significance, (blogging?), but rarely of economic significance. The communists substituted, for the lash of economic necessity, raw state power, which turned out not to be much of an advance.

So conservatives are certainly correct that there is a risk to excessive egalitarianism / socialism which grants benefits to all without some mechanism of bending each person to common duties (i.e. the risk of free-riding). But there are significant caveats. First is to those who are not productive in any case, like the young. In a well-run society, children would be generously supported with public goods like health care, parks, day care, cultural enrichment, and free education to the highest levels. The point would be to work with parents to develop the most well-educated citizens, workers, artists ... persons, without reference to family income and class.

A second important caveat is that running the macro-economic system properly is a central job of the state. It is pointless as well as cruel to apply the lash of unemployment and poverty when there are no jobs to be had. Keynes and his school showed (and continue to show, in the economies cited above) that unemployment is a political matter that the state can remedy when it wishes. The fact that we have fallen into a period of learned helplessness in the US speaks to how thoroughly our putative democracy has been taken over by a callous ideology of capital at the expense of workers.

Specifically, in order to restore overall economic activity and thus jobs, the state needs to direct money from its various inert forms (savings, bank reserves, the Federal power to create money) to the lower end of the economic ladder, by whatever means necessary- conservation corps, public works, payroll tax holidays, helicopter drops, whatever.

In the end, both economic efficiency and morality argue for greater economic equality than we observe in the US today, though certainly not perfect equality. The most sclerotic economies around the world are the most unequal, with small coteries of the powerful feathering their own nests while the majority beg for crumbs. The most vibrant economies, like those of Northern Europe, are far more egalitarian, with high living standards across the board, high cultural attainment, and high happiness into the bargain.

We can do it. This is not rocket science. We can turn another page in humanity's ascent from Darwinism to civilization. We can find and maintain a middle way- a prosperous and humane way- between communism and plutocracy.

A discussion of inequality and the withering middle class.
The spiritual work of being out of work.
Those super-paid American managers ... aren't that good, either.
Who matters, in Washington?
Stiglitz on our fatal 9/11 over-reaction.
Krugman on exactly how not-big-enough the stimulus was. (Several trillion)
Interesting notes on gold and gold-like monetary systems.
"... protests are not approved in Islam no matter what injustices the ruler commits."
Europe, melting down.

A Better Business

2011-09-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

A new form of business incorporation offers a ray of hope amid the moral darkness.

The limited liability corporation has become an institution of enormous importance. One aspect to appreciate about it is its steadfastly secular nature, organized to make money and little else. Corporations have occupied and expanded the secular space of Western culture, and many imagine that it may do the same in other corners of the world currently under the sway of religous or state ideologies.

A second positive aspect of the corporation is its standing refutation of Chicago-style economic theory. If everyone had perfect knowledge of economic circumstances, and acted in perfect self-interest, then why would we need the apparatus of the corporation? Instead we might have a perfectly free-lance world were workers and capitalists enter into voluntary contracts for each desired task, priced by a perfect market and renegotiated continuously, while each party serves its self-interest perfectly by serving the interest of the other with perfect fidelity. Not realistic? No indeed, thus corporations arose to organize labor on an explicitly non-market basis (i.e. by direct management) so that actual and complex productive activity could take place without the inefficiencies of the market.

Lastly, the corporation has been an important promoter of personal freedom, especially the freedom of capitalists (we'll call them entrepreneurs!) to generate new enterprises, new goods, and forms of productive activity outside state control. The freedom of employees has been less enthusiastically advanced, but depending on the state of the labor market and the diversity of the corporate landscape, workers may have freedom at least to choose among employers, and can exercise some power and gain a significant share of the benefits of this organizational form. At any rate, better that some be free than none.

On the other hand, with the rising importance of the corporation as the scope of productive activity that needs to be shielded from markets grows in complexity, and as individual corporations have grown, numerous flaws have become apparent. One is that corporations have no morals. Their only admissible ultimate goal is to make money, and (formally at least) to obey the law. While it is helpful in many ways to have such philosophical clarity, it also sentences the majority of the population to spend the majority of their waking hours in the bulk of their most productive years in what are often soul-crushing conditions, dedicated to bilking their fellow-citizens of a few dollars by whatever means human imagination can devise, in a never-ending rite propitating Mammon.

A second flaw is that corporations are not properly separated from the state, but rather control enormous pots of money that have been allowed to seep into the political system, buying the ear of the electorate, buying the personal loyalty of leaders, and buying legislation directly. While pure democracy has its problems, and all associations of citizens deserve a hearing in the public square, the combination of amorality and vast wealth with political influence has created a toxic imbalance in the political system, where vast swaths of the citizenry are effectively disenfranchised, both of their intellectual / media atmosphere, and of their vote.

And corporate money doesn't even represent the corporation as a whole- most certainly not its workers- but typically the cozy self-serving ideologies of its management, who have captured, as they have so many other fruits of corporate existence, the political power inherent in the corporation's concentration of wealth.

In some respects, it was ever thus, from our founding by the most wealthy planters, slaveholders, and financiers of the English colonies. Nevertheless, as we have advanced from our founding state in such other matters as slavery, and as the corporation has gained truly prodigious roles in our culture and government, not to mention ever-increasing legal rights of personhood, it is time to give the corporate charter a rethink.

Thus I am happy that my state representative, Jared Huffman, has offered legislation for California to authorise a form of incorporation that restores some small amount of moral sanity to the concept- the benefit corporation. This corporate form has been set up in several other states- California is not plowing new ground- and exists in the continuum from non-profit corporations and public benefit corporations, (like port authorities and other municipal bodies), to mutual benefit corporations (membership organizations, like country clubs, that may be profitable) to the full-out for-profit corporation.

The distinction from the latter is that a benefit corporation can't necessarily be sued for not maximizing profits. It can adopt binding obligations to other goals, such as fair treatment of employees, the environment, or its customers, in addition to making profits and paying taxes. Thus a company like, say, Google, would not have to rely on a putative corporate culture of "don't be evil" to withstand the pressures of the marketplace and the ire of its shareholders, but could write social obligations of various kinds into its charter of incorporation that are equally binding as the profit motive.

Granted, this is a small step. But it recognizes that corporations are the gorrillas of our culture. If they must be legal people, then at least they should be allowed the possibility of being moral people. As we have recognized that Darwinian evolution is not solely the province of rapine and slaughter, but also of social morals and altruism, so we may eventually evolve the corporation into a responsible social entity, by demanding through the competitive market as well as other avenues that it encode moral tendencies a little more deeply.

Working life today.
A little more on Hayek and Friedman- not so freedom-loving after all.
Germany's convenient devaluation.
Failure of the free market- the mortgage industry is still evil.
Another failure of the free market- generic drug shortages.
Apple- the good side of business competition.
Spiritual warfare, going mainstream. Darwin would be so proud.
A 12-step program for atheists.
Pakistanis appear uncomfortable with an "atmosphere of distrust". Who knew?
Bank capital needs to be liquid, and better regulated.
Martin Wolf on economic escape velocity ... not.
Economics quote of the week, by Bill Mitchell.

"And when a major recession comes along Barro and Co explain this by millions of workers making the same calculation together – that leisure is preferred and so they quit. All at the same time."

And.. Maynard Keynes, 1936, from Skidelski's "Return of the Master":

"If nations can learn to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy ... there would no longer be a pressing motive why one coungtry needs to force its wares on another or repulse the offerings of its neighbor ... with the express object of upsetting the equilibrium of payments so as to develop a balance of trade in its own favour. International trade would cease to be what it is, namely a desperate expedient to maintain employment at home by forcing sales on foreign markets and restricting purchases which, if successful, will merely shift the problem of unemployment to the neighbor which is worsted in the struggle, but a willing and unimpeded exchange of goods and services in conditions of mutual advantage."

Breaking DNA to save itself

2011-08-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

The structure of an enzyme that disentangles DNA- by passing strands through each other.

A single break in a cell's DNA is, typically, lethal. The cell will wait and wait for repair to happen, but if it doesn't, boom- it commits suicide. This is one of the quality controls that cancerous cells lose, in order to carry on despite the broken chromosomes they typically contain, among many other mutations. It is one of many homeostatic and quality control mechanisms that manage our cells. Another enforces that all DNA is completely replicated before cell division begins, and a different one enforces that all the condensed chromosomes are congregated neatly at the middle of the cell in mitosis, before separation and division can proceeed.

Yet we have enormous amounts- eight feet- of DNA in each cell, wrapped up in knarly bundles that can't possibly be maintained tangle-free, even with nice rollers to curl on (histones) and scaffolds to fold into (chromosomes, when condensed). On top of that, DNA is helical and additionally twisted, requiring unwinding to be read by RNA polymerases, and much more extensive unwinding to be replicated. What we find inside our cell nuclei is a mess. So naturally, we have several enzymes dedicated to untangling DNA- winding and unwinding it, and in extremis, when a knot can't be unwound, an enzyme that passes strands through each other, cutting the gordian knot.

These are topological problems, so the enzymes are called topoisomerases, catalyzing transitions between topological states. The current paper describes an atomic structure of topoisomerase II, which cuts DNA, allows another strand to pass through the cut, and then reseals the original strand. Quite a dangerous proposition! The experimenters used an anti-cancer drug (etoposide) to lock the enzyme in an interesting halfway state of cut DNA, helping them grow the crystals of protein that provided the structure.

Remember that the diffraction pattern of X-rays passed through a crystal allows mathematical reconstruction of the arrangement of the crystal's atoms, given enough order in that crystal, and enough intensity from the X-rays, typically provided by synchrotrons these days.

X-ray diffraction pattern of an arbitrary crystal. The center is where the main X-ray beam goes through, and the surrounding dots are reflections from the atomic crystal planes. With a lot of math, one can reconstruct the crystal's atomic structure.

In cancer cells, the DNA is particularly messed-up, cell devision is rapid, and the quality control mechanisms that tell the cell to halt and wait for repairs when the DNA is broken are gone. So this drug encourages more and more DNA breaks, to the point that active cancer cells get fatally damaged, even without the specific suicide system that is sensitive to single DNA breaks in normal cells. The cancer cells are given the rope to hang themselves.

But I am more interested in the magic of the topoisomerase II enzyme. (Topoisomerase I enzymes just nick one strand of the DNA, altering its helical winding- a much less complex proposition). It is interesting to consider how mere enzymes could effectively untangle DNA as they do. They don't have fingers or eyes, and they don't have any wider perspective on what is going on in the cell or in the DNA knots that evolution has fashioned them to resolve. They just cut DNA and reseal it, but in a clever way that leads, quite efficiently, to de-knotting of the cell's DNA.

The cycle of action is shown below, in cartoon form.

The enzyme grabs one segment of DNA (the G-segment), and bends it. This bend plays a critical role in funneling local knotted DNA segments (the T-segment in this case) which topologically "want" to pass through the G-strand towards the "mouth" of the enzyme, here shown in beige. When such a T-segment arrives, the enzyme, using ATP, cleaves the G-segment, opens its DNA gate (red, and see below), and allows the T-strand to pass through to the C-gate, the hollow area below the active site (green). Lastly, the G-strand is resealed, the T-segment is released, and everything is reset as it was at the start, minus one tangle. Incidentally, bent, stressed DNA induces increased activity by this enzyme.

Why does the C-gate exist? One might think that once the T-strand is through, then no problems- no need to keep it around rather then let it go on its way. I think the reason is for informational control- so that the enzyme knows to reseal the G-strand, rather than to cut it again. I assume there is a shape-dependent control by the occupied C-gate to enforce the direction of the overall cycle of the cutting/sealing active site.

The structure of the enzyme (just the core part, including only the colored areas of the protein cartoon in "A") is shown below. The C-gate is hard to miss. This large void is clearly able to hold the passed T-strand of DNA while the enzyme ligates the G-strand back to its pristine condition. Looking carefully, one can also see the strong bend of the G-segment DNA (backbone in blue), with both ends pointing sharply upwards.

One can imagine that the rest of the enzyme that was not solved or shown here (gray in part A) might help to form more of the funnel that brings the T-segment into proper position at the top. It might also help the enzyme hold tighly onto those DNA ends that, were they to get lost, would be virtually impossible to find again in the vast molecular soup of the cell and likely cause complete cellular arrest and death.

The cancer drug and topoisomerase II inhibitor, etoposide (in yellow) blocking the DNA strands within the topoisomerase II complex from being fully religated.

The paper devotes most of its time to the structure of the etoposide drug complex- how it locks the enzyme in an intermediate conformation and how these interactions might guide the design of better drugs. Given that this whole mode of therapy is rather crude, (hardly better than bombarding cells with radiation), it is hard to imagine how any "improvements" to the inhibitor would be helpful. Nevertheless, I find these structures immensely interesting- informative about how our bodies work at the molecular level, enlightening about obvious questions that arise with the advent of ever-longer DNA genomes, and indeed even artistic.

Here it is in 3D!

Yes, the crazies are really crazy.
Secular humanism, in the sentimental clutches of Paul Kurtz.
Is BofA the next Lehman, going over the event horizon? Parts I, II, III
Bernanke's speech, dedicated to do-nothing-ism.
Shalizi on macroeconomic models, with link to a critique.
Diplomatically speaking, talking is OK.
Economic quotes of the week, from Bill Mitchell

"Our real world laboratory is providing priceless data upon which we can assess basic propositions that mainstream macroeconomics provides and which Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) contests. A nation cannot have a fiscal contraction expansion when all other spending is flat or going backwards. Britain is up against an impossible equation."

And, on the "believers in laissez-faire". A Kuhnian expired paradigm is on its last legs, waiting for its proponents to die off.

"One thing that is clear – the majority of these economists never have to carry the costs of their denial and retire on nice pensions. The same cannot be said for the victims of their arrogance and denial."

The worse, the better

2011-08-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

The unemployment rate is not just a bummer, it is a sensitive gauge of social power.

The unemployment rate is disastrously high, and our government studiously dithers about doing nothing. The Republicans have cleverly diverted attention from the real problem onto the entirely chimerical problem of the federal "debt" at a time when people are saving like mad and only too happy to hold government bonds. The Democrats seem to have caved utterly to the forces of corporatism and finance, which got their bailouts and are now busily making war on labor. We (and other developed nations) are making precisely the same errors that we made during the Great Depression and in Japan's long-running recession, leaving the economy stalled so that the rich can widen their relative advantage.

It is as though Keynes and others who learned from economic history never existed. It is almost as though democracy doesn't exist either. Most of the problem is intellectual. This morning, a leading economist and conservative ideolog (John Taylor) lied through his teeth on NPR about how the Obama stimulus didn't work "at all", how corporations are not investing due to their fears of higher taxes, and other talking points of the Right. That such people are allowed to continue speaking as "experts" is unconscionable, however credentialed they are.

In this way, the intellectual waters are muddied, just as the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry, and the anti-evolution industries have muddied waters in their respective fields, freezing constructive public debate and action. What do conservative economists serve? The interests of wealth. At this moment, their lies serve variously to shield the powers of finance and corporate America from a reckoning for creating this enormous economic crisis in the first place, to forestall any constructive regulatory and fiscal solution to that crisis, (other than bailing out the banks, and the first dose of stimulus), and to entrench the power of wealth by floating the most self-serving "solutions" like lowering taxes and pulling saftey net programs from the poor, as well as, in effect, extending high unemployment for as long as possible.

For unemployment is a key indicator of our era. It is a barometer of the balance of power of capital vs labor. Low unemployment means that labor is hard to find and needs to be paid and treated well. High unemployment means the opposite- that employers can demand extraordinarily precise skill sets, provide no training, little security or benefits, all for low pay. Low unemployment is the most powerful promoter of worker's rights and middle class well-being, more than unions or legislative action.

Beware of economists who soft-pedel high unemployment as "natural" or "structural", as though the country were full of "lucky duckies" who prefer poverty to work, or losers who can't keep up with the jet setting workers of China. Whenever macro-economic times are good, people show that they can and want to work by working at high rates. Desire and training are not the issues.

It is more than ironic that the disaster caused by the financial sector as it oversold credit to the unworthy and leveraged itself to the stratosphere would result in yet greater power for those very financial and corporate malefactors. But there we are, and our only recourse is through the political system, which has also duly been taken over by money, speaking with the forked tongue of right wing economics.

The Federal Reserve has the official mandate of maintaining low unemployment as well as low inflation- somewhat conflicting goals. But who runs the Fed? Bankers run the Fed, and bankers have had little regard for the employment mandate. Now they have none. The Fed poured money into the banks to restore their solvency, and took on vast quantities of their questionable debt. But for employment? They have hardly lifted a finger, lowering interest rates in case any bank might deign to lend to a worthy cause. There has been no mention of truly active policies like targeting higher inflation rates and negative real interest, forcing banks to lend or lose their charters, or forcing banks to eat some of their bad mortgage loans, as well as processing them more efficiently, to get consumers back on their feet.

We have little to hope from any of these quarters. The sad part is that high unemployment and a widening gap between rich and poor doesn't even serve the rich very well. The economy as a whole will become less productive, skills will be lost, infrastructure will continue to deteriorate, public goods will be shortchanged, political and social relations will fray, we will fall behind China, the dollar will slowly lose its reserve currency status, and even the rich will find that their heretofore advanced base of operations in the US is not nearly as attractive as it once was. It is a scandal and a shame.

Incidentally, today's title comes from the Russian revolution, whose instigators recognized that the worse conditions became within Russia, the more fertile they were for revolution. The analogy to our epoch may be double-edged.

Cary Tennis ruminates on work.
Defenders of marriage should look to jobs and income.

"...people are more likely to get married if they have the things that make a union strong: mutual respect, problem-solving skills and — especially — economic security."

If we need jobs, we should make them.
MMT economics gains a little ground.
Mystical experiences in the azure hyperfield.
Regulator saves the country $1 trillion.
Does the euro need to split in two?
Where do profits come from? Investment, government deficits, and consumer debt- an unstable combination.
Economics quote of the week, from Nouriel Roubini:

"So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality and reduces final demand."

Graph of the week: Fed data on bank reserves. QE1,2 has been funnelled into banks, which sit on the money, doing no good to anyone, other than themselves by collecting interest courtesy of the Fed. The velocity of this money is zero. The Fed pays 0.25% on reserves, which adds up to real money on $2 trillion outstanding. This is quite apart from whatever Treasury bonds banks can buy paying 3%. Banks are well cared-for. Workers and homeowners.. not so much.

Sex and the Red Queen

2011-08-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

You knew sex was good. Now it is shown to fight disease and extinction too.

As studies of evolution progress, we often find papers dotting i's and crossing t's more often than opening new vistas of theory. This is one of those papers, showing with elegant experiments that reproduction via sex has significant advantages for a population of animals faced with pathogens that evolve quickly- as most of them do, and as most populations are.

In alchemy, the queen is typically white, and marries the red king to bring about the union of opposite natures, resulting in the birth of a unified hermaphrodite, the diamond body, the rubido, the golden flower, or the philosopher's stone. In psychological terms, enlightenment is achieved through such unifications when one has found the Jungian Self, or turned into the Nietzschean Übermensch. Given all this, I have no idea why Lewis Carroll chose the Red Queen as his character who runs and runs, but never gets anywhere- he was apparently more familiar with card play than with mystical esoterica.

At any rate, Carroll's Red Queen symbolizes an important feature of evolution, which is that a great deal may be going on genetically and physiologically over evolutionary time, with little changing on the surface (i.e, in the fossils or other visible features). Even in the absence of selection and adaptation, evolution continues apace through neutral change, as mutations and other alterations accumulate, leading to the many forensic tools we have today to identify people and trace their lineages.

The most pressing source of non-neutral change, i.e. selection, is typically from microbial pathogens, which we may not think about very much in the developed world, but which pervade the evolutionary setting. Such pathogens evolve quickly, as we have learned from spectacular feats of antibiotic resistance. So, while we as animals possess a sophisticated multi-layer defense with an adaptive immune system, it isn't enough. Plagues of many kinds, and more chronic infections have wrought havok, keeping lifespans low, infant mortality high, and life generally perilous. Our salvation is genetic diversity, accumulated through mutation, kept in ready reserve in our diploid genomes where recessive genes are frequently not expressed, and shuffled continually by sexual reproduction.

For example, some people are resistant to AIDS. They may be infected by HIV, but do not become ill. They have a mutation that, when present in two copies, denies HIV access to the receptor it binds on the cell surface, and that is that.. complete protection. Were the AIDS epidemic to run to completion, those people might be the only ones left.

After several epidemics of this kind, (which cause genetic "sweeps" in the human population), a lot of evolution has happened, raising the proportion of previously rare gene alleles, but for little obvious gain- just to escape the next pathogen, and the next, and the next, in a never-ending arms race with those evil micro-terrorists who would do us ill. That is basically the Red Queen hypothesis.

The role of sex in this scenario is manifold. First, it keeps shuffling the genes around in the population, so that those animals that survive a genetic sweep should still harbor a fair proportion of the population's genetic variation at other loci, (genes), in preparation for the next pathogenic assault or other adaptive crisis.

Second, the shuffling uses the diploid nature of our genomes to "hide" recessive alleles of genes, so that even if such alleles have slightly deleterious effects most of the time, they persist in the population and can come to the rescue when they represent a key solution to an adaptive challenge.

Third, sex recombines genes that may in combination represent adaptive solutions that they do not in isolation. Fourth, the shuffling process deals out especially "bad hands" to a few organisms, which concentrates the bad genetic material and presumably kills it off by selection, counteracting the ever-rising level of mutations in the population at large, the large majority of which are deleterious- a process that goes by the name of Muller's Ratchet.

Very well- the theory behind all this is solid enough, biologists have deduced instances many times, and have tested it explicitly where it is easy to do- among microbes. But the current paper demonstrates the benefit of sex in particularly clear-cut fashon, using the nematode worm C. elegans. This tiny worm has a sexual choice- hermaphroditism and self-fertization, or maleness and obligatory sex, which can be enforced in the lab with appropriate genetic mutations when desired. In the wild, C. elegans are mostly hermaphroditic, with about 20% choosing the single-sex (male) lifestyle which carries the risk of not finding a partner and not reproducing at all. The choice is stochastic, but also a matter of genetics, so worm populations can evolve different rates of hermaphroditism when the trait matters.

The experimenters subjected worms to persistent infection with a bacterial species they typically contend with at much lower levels in the wild. In various experiments, the bacteria were either held constant or allowed to evolve along with the worms, in which case they evolved against each other through thirty worm generations. To maximize bacterial evolution, the bacteria for the next generation were taken from the dead carcasses of worms they had killed in the current generation. To help the worms along, they were mutagenized lightly before beginning, so their populations would have increased genetic variation.

One question was- if worms are genetically prevented from cross-fertilizing, can they keep up with an evolving pathogen? The answer turned out to be... no they can't. Such strains went extinct within about ten generations.

The metric for this work was bacterially-induced mortality rate of worms at the end of the experiment, at either generation ten (to accommodate those worm strains that went extinct shortly thereafter), or at generation thirty. The orginal mortality rate was 20% to 40% for all strains. For the obligately selfing (hermaphroditic) worms, this rose slightly against the non-evolving bacteria (to 40%), and rose dramatically- to 80%- against bacteria allowed to co-evolve, after which these worm strains went extinct.

On the other hand, wild-type worm strains ended up just where they began, no matter what the bacterial regimen- at about 30% mortality. And the obligately outcrossing worms succeeded by generation thirty in lowering their mortality from infection to about 15%, even in the face of co-evolving bacteria. The message is that sex strongly facilitates the rapid evolution that is required to outrun pathogens which have short generation times and rapid rates of evolution themselves.

An interesting extra analysis showed that among the wild-type strains put through this process, their rate of outcrossing increased markedly in response to bacterial infection, ending up at 90% in the face of co-evolving bacteria (see graph). This indicates that not only is sex helpful in staving off infection, but is itself a target of selection in organisms that have a choice in the matter, and is thus a sensitive gauge of sex's benefits.

Rate of outcrossing (sex) among wild-type C. elegans subjected to co-evolution with pathogenic bacteria (solid line), or to non-evolving bacteria (dashed line), or to no bacteria at all (dotted line).

London reaps its due from austerity.
Where are the real grass roots?
The rich are different, not in a good way.
Thank god- blasphemy is still OK.
Lies, magic, and art..
Bernanke finally comes clean.
Economic quote of the week, from a policy paper by James Crotty- the great austerity war.

"This increasing political pressure to destroy the foundations of the New Deal is bizarrely paradoxical. The right-wing coalition is on the verge of succeeding in its eighty-year quest to defeat the New Deal, not in spite of, but because it produced three-decades of economic failure and exploding deficits. It is the huge rise in government debt generated by the right-wing model that created the recent financial and political crisis that in turn spawned a wide-spread demand for austerity."

Oolon Colluphid's God

2011-08-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

An homage to Don Cupitt- a theologian I can deal with.

What is it about god? It drives some people nuts, and drives others to absurd feats of theological gymnastics. Dead for a hundred years, but your garden-variety theologian seemingly hasn't gotten the message. Don Cupitt offers an answer:

"... theology is the one subject whose practitioners are in constant danger of finding themselves becoming demythologized right out of their subject, and then being told by everyone that they have a duty to resign. The corollary is that you can be a theologian in good standing only for so long as you are not very good because you don't yet see your subject clearly and in an up-to-date way. You may plan to survive the difficulty by adopting the time-honoured strategies of being evasive, or sticking to history, and so avoiding ever actually having to come clean about your own personal views. But you cannot help but feel a little uncomfortable about the paradox: an academic must seek full, transparent understanding, but when you fully understand religion you are no longer a 'believer'."

Former Dean of Emanual College, Cambridge, radical theologian Don Cupitt takes modern science and philosophy seriously, and thus doesn't believe god is "real". And that is perfectly OK with him. In any case, the matter needs to be faced squarely. Due to his various heresies, he has both been sidelined in the Anglican church, and humorously mocked by Douglas Adams, who modeled the theologian Oolon Colluphid in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on Cupitt. Colluphid's putative titles include "Where God Went Wrong", "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes", "Who Is This God Person Anyway?", and "Well That About Wraps It Up for God".

The title I am going to cover is "The Great Questions of Life", 2005, a book that puts Cupitt's various philosophical points across fairly briefly. Of the great questions, some are badly posed (What are we here for?), some not theological at all (Are we alone?), some infected with bad philosophy (What is real?), while some get a plain answer (Is there a God? No). The rub is that Cupitt still has great attachment to the Anglican traditions, and to some of the overall Christian culture, especially the revolutionary liberal teachings of Jesus himself.

The problem is simply to take in the higher level of knowledge we now have, and the separation of reality and fantasy that characterizes the modern state of philosophical understanding, including the sciences, arts, and humanities, and apply it to theology. Unfortunately, that means throwing a great deal out, and Cupitt has bitten the bullet and done so. The book is heavily philosophical, more so than Christian per se, which makes it interesting far beyond the Christian (or post-Christian) community. For instance, right off the bat, he has a passage on Hegel that did more to clarify Hegel's philosophy for me than reams of wiki pages:

"In Hegel's day people were coming to see the end of L'Ancien Régime as marking the end of the old hierarchical conception of reality, and its replacement by a new story that sees everything as developing historically within an entirely immanent process. In Hegel's interpretation of modernity, with the end of classical metaphysics the entire supernatural world of religion has come down from heaven and been dispersed into the unfolding common life of humanity. Ecclesiastical Christianity as we have known it hitherto reaches fulfilment and comes to an end. Instead of being routed through the heavenly world above, religion becomes immediate and beliefless, and the love of God is transposed into a new and ardent love of and commitment to life."

The main theme of this book is the "outsidelessness" of our situation. The universe is outsideless, there being no way we can ever peer beyond the shroud where our telescopes and cosmological theories reach, with spacetime being essentially closed (with a hat-tip to the multiverses, which are dubious). Supernaturalism is a matter, not of cosmology, but of psychology. His other example is language, which in any dictionary is defined solely in term of other language symbols- it is a self-contained, self-referential system. Similarly, our human, earthly world is outsideless as well, with no one handing down the rules and meaning. We are all we've got, and we had better take care of this, our precious world.

"As we have seen in looking at the great questions of life, even to this day, most people seem to assume that the purpose of life, the real meaning of life, the point of it all, the goal of life, what life is all about must be something great that hidden outside life. I thought the same myself, at first. Only very gradually, through the influence of figures like Hume and Darwin, did I gradually some to admit the superior beauty and clarity of naturalistic or immanent types of explanation in all fields."

"The general rule is that everything is contingent: everything is the product of time and chance. The cases of living organisms, of language, and of culture generally all pursuade us that complex, ordered, rule-governed, and self-maintaining or self-replicating systems can be formed and can develop just by the interplay of contingent forces within the world, over long periods of time. ... a broad, spreading network of purely contingent truths can be immensely strong without having to be based upon any sort of external support or founding certainties."

Cupitt makes the rather ironic point that conventional belief is in essence just as unrealist as his own more explicit formulation:

"Today, because of the decay of metaphysics, the ordinary believer's God is an imaginary Father- a finite being, in time- to whom one listens and with whom one talks. At the same time the ordinary believer invokes the God of non-realism, as when he or she says: 'My God is not a God of Judgement. My God is a God of Mercy, forgiveness, and love. Not a God of the respectable only, but also a God who takes the side of the outcast, etc.' In such talk (of which we hear a great deal) God functions as a personification of our most cherished values. So the God of the ordinary believer and the ordinary chuch leader clearly does not 'literally' exist. ... the believer is openly admitting that 'I posit a god whose job is to reflect my own cherished values, and in whom I can therefore believe.' Today's religion is therefore non-realist and will be quite happy to remain so- but with one qualification: it oddly insists upon its own realistic character, even though it is totally unable to spell out exactly what God's 'objective reality' is."

Ouch! No wonder Cupitt had to strike out on his own, founding the "Sea of faith" movement. And no wonder he tickled Douglas Adams.

Getting past the dissing of traditional religion, Cupitt's positive program consists of a very democratic and idiosyncratic approach to spirituality. Indeed, he is very sympathetic to those who term themselves "spiritual", without bothering with traditional dogma and theology. Glastonbury and all that. The purpose of religion becomes the generation of hope and health insofar as it battles the existential problem. He offers a creed:

"1. True religion is your own voice, if you can but find it.
2. True religion is in every sense to own one's own life.
3. True religion is the pure solar affirmation of life, 'in full acknowledgement of its utter gratuitousness, its contingency, its transience, and even its nothingness.'
4. True religion is productive, value-realizing action in the public world.
5. Faith is not a matter of holding onto anything. Faith is simply a letting go. It floats free."

I particularly liked his discussion of point 2, where he urges being and showing the values you have inside:

"You are your own life. Your personal identity is not a secret thing hidden inside you: it is your lived life and the roles you play. Thus your commitment to life and to the task of becoming yourself has to be read as the task of fully appropriating one's own life and assuming full responsibility for it. Here I reject the traditional idea that there is great virtue in obedience to religious law and to the direction of religious superiors. Instead I join all those young people who would rather die than put up with an arranged marriage or any career or life-path chosen for them by someone else. In traditional Christianity the demand for radical personal religious freedom has always been condemned as deeply sinful, but I think we must now insist upon it. One must choose one's own life, both making it one's own and seeking fully to express oneself in it. One must come out in one's own life."

While this can be taken as vintage 70's self-actualization and self-fulfillment, even self-centeredness, (or, more probably, a redux of Nietzsche), it is also quite akin to the Buddhist program of fixing the world from the inside out, instead of finding and conquering outside demons. And yet, it communicates a love and gratitude for life, instead of a focus on asceticism and sufferance.

People take their own paths to reject reality.
Joseph Heller and the death of god.
And in Afghanistan, is it tradition, or is it religion? Whatever its name, it is patriarchy.
A southern tea party, a southern agenda.
We are still on FIRE.
Terror attack in the US- ho-hum.
Europe has set itself on course to repeat depression dynamics.
Economics quote of the week, today from a wealth fund manager, speaking of how differentiated wealth and power are, even within the top 1% of the wealthy.

"Most of those in the bottom half of the top 1% lack power and global flexibility and are essentially well-compensated workhorses for the top 0.5%, just like the bottom 99%. In my view, the American dream of striking it rich is merely a well-marketed fantasy that keeps the bottom 99.5% hoping for better and prevents social and political instability. The odds of getting into that top 0.5% are very slim and the door is kept firmly shut by those within it."

And a graph, on where gross income shares are headed, drawn from regular Fed reports:

What do I know?

2011-07-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

A review of "On being Certain", by Robert Burton.

Do you know someone who is always right? Who knows all the answers and would be mortified to admit that he (it is usually a "he") doesn't know something, has no opinion on some topic, large or small, or, heaven forfend, was wrong? I guess that would be me, in all honesty.

Complementary syndromes, Burton suggests, might be OCD, depression, and anxiety, afflicting those who lack a sense of certainty about some issues- whether one is clean enough, has done the right thing, or said the right words. Or of having lost the essential sense of purpose and meaning of which one was previously confident.

The sense of certainty is highly valuable to us, allowing decisive and efficient use of scarce time and partial information. But is it right? Obviously, it is not always right, and can't be relied on ... that is the problem.

"It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in your head. The accomplishment is to make sure that it is telling you the truth." - a patient, quoted by Burton

Burton is a former head of neurology at UCSF, a novelist in his spare time, and has written a charming, temperate, and succinct indictment of our sense of certainty. His first job is to elevate this mental sense to an explicit and respected status, since it is a bit nebulous. We have our five traditional senses. And recently, we have become aware of a few other senses, like the body position sense and the empathic social mirror sense. These unconscious mechanisms of our minds help make us feel "normal" and situated, becoming apparent only in rare cases when they go awry.

Likewise, the sense of certainty is central to our mental workings, yet a little difficult to appreciate. How do ideas "pop" out of unconciousness? Why do they pop out? Clearly while we are day-dreaming, or night-dreaming, some parts of our minds are hard at work, testing out problems, models, and ideas. Just as clearly, the unconscious has some mechanism to evaluate the results- how closely their solution matches a target problem, perhaps posed explicitly by our conscious mind, ("What is the nature of benzene's double bonds?"), or perhaps posed implicitly by circumstance ("How do I get out of this burning building?"). Either way, we don't typically hear about all the false leads and underlying processes, but receive "the answer" as an idea that "strikes" us as correct, perhaps leading to immediate action.

This sense is, naturally, tied into the pleasure centers of the brain as well, so if we come up with a great idea, we feel great about it. It can be a very powerful buzz. This leads to the possibility of addiction, as mentioned at the top, which is to say that people may become so attached to the pleasure of being right that they keep blogging, week after pointless week, prating about how right they are to hold some idea or other.

There are also times when the sense of certainty arises untethered and unbidden, such as during mystical experiences. One that comes to mind is that of the German Jacob Böhme in 1600: "... one day he focused his attention onto the exquisite beauty of a beam of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish. He believed this vision revealed to him the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the relationship between God and man, and good and evil." Burton quotes William James on the subject:

"They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time."

Likewise, drug-induced hallucinations can cause absolute senses of knowledge, realness, and purpose which dissolve into a hangover. Temporal lobe epilepsy can have similar effects. All of this is to say that this sense is a specific function of our brains, and needs to be regarded with a bit of dispassion by those (which generally means all of us) who give it excessive credence. In fact, I regard this book as an excellent companion to Eric Reitan's "Is God a delusion?", which with similar temperance and good cheer goes right down the rabbit hole of imputing great (possible) cosmic sigificance to mystical experiences, among other improbable conclusions. The one clearly informs the arguments and scope of the other.

"Knowing that the sense of self is an emergent phenomenon arising out of simpler neuronal structures doesn't and won't stop theologians and philosophers from debating issues they have no chance of resolving. Scorpions sting. We talk of religion, afterlife, souls, higher powers, muses, purpose, reason, objectivity, pointlelssness, and randomness. We cannot help ourselves."

But Burton fries fishes on both sides of the culture war. The sense of certainty is not just core to our conscious stream, but also to memory, which is far less reliable than we typically assume. One of the great findings of social & cognitive science has been about the unreliability of eye-witnesses. A person may spin a tale of rationalizations with complete certainty, unaware of how vague their memories really are. We had a local court case recently where the defendent, cleary guilty of murdering an ex-girlfriend, spun a tale of defending her against two unidentified assailants who were the actual murderers. Not even his own defense attorney took the proposition seriously, but the troubling thought is that this defendent may have convinced himself of its truth, as OJ may of his yarn as well.

So certainty is fundamentally impossible. Internally, our brains use sophisticated Bayesian statistical methods to come up with probabilistic conclusions. But do they tell us about it? Of course not. They typically give us black and white answers, which we have historically assumed come from heaven, or from souls, or from wherever. We really can not make any definitive statements about anything outside the kinds of logic and math that are self-contained inventions to start with. The atheist can not be certain that there is no god, and nor can she be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, or even that it rose today. Some things may be more certain than others, but none are absolute. And the kicker is that we are in constant revolt against this uncertainty, since it is both psychologically uncomfortable, operationally impractical, and hidden from our view.

"Our mental limitations prevent us from accepting our mental limitations."

Ultimately, I think Burton does a little soft-peddling, since the conclusion of all this is that we benefit from an outside arbiter to control our sense of knowing about important and abstract topics. And that arbiter is ideally going to be empiricism, i.e. science. Indeed, one might portray science as, in a way, a higher level of consciousness, in the sequence from unconscious reflex to consciousness under emotional brain control, to increasingly reliable memory stored in written form, and then to a communally validated pool of knowledge & theory. Science is the social mechanism we have devised to hold hypotheses in suspension, to test them logically and empirically, to subject them to public scrutiny by those who typically have an emotional interest in shooting them down, and attempt to record their fruits objectively. It descended from the academic disputation common in the monastic and humanist past, but obviously evolved in a new and far more productive direction.

"There must be certainty from the US president." -G. W. Bush, quoted by Burton.

Unfortunately, there is far more to the human condition than science can address. A depressing coda in the book deals with medical practice, which is ridden with the posture of certainty subsituting for actual knowledge, expertise, and competence. Even the best doctors can never consciously assimilate very much of the vast medical corpus, (assuming that this data is itself free of bias, which is far from the case). So they go by their training, by hunches, and experience, more or less well remembered, all wrapped up in the white coat of authority. Most of the time it turns out OK, but frequently it doesn't. Something as simple as a checklist for medical procedures has been shown to dramatically reduce complications, showing that the confident competence we typically rely on is far from sufficient to render optimal care.

Conversely, confidence and authority can have medical benefits, such as when a doctor prescribes a placebo, yet inspires enough confidence in the patient that real improvement results. The endless billions that Americans pour into alternative medical treatments, self-help, motivational speakers, and the like are surely not going completely to waste, since however appalling from a rational perspective, subjective confidence and happiness can lead to health (though probably not wealth!) in some circumstances, due to our intimate mind-body connections, particularly in the areas of stress and immune function. We just need the wisdom to know where, when, and who- which, by Burton's analysis, we can never have.

Incidentally, particularly clever theologians have seized on the cognitive defects of our condition as an argument that nothing said by a philosophical naturalists can make any sense- that the position is inherently self-defeating because reason itself is impossible if we truly are naturally evolved beings, speaking nonsense and greed into each other's ears. To the rescue comes god, who by fiat makes us make sense- both in the context of the universe, and to each other. God enables reason, we are in His image, He is reasonable by definition, etc..

"And this leads directly to the question whether it is at all likely that our cognitive faculties, given naturalism and given their evolutionary origin, would have developed in such a way as to be reliable, to furnish us with mostly true beliefs." -Alvin Plantinga

Among the assumptions here is that biologically evolved reason and the sense of certainty are not just unreliable, as per Burton, but totally, fantastically, utterly defective. Needless to say, there is little reason to take this argument seriously, since evolution, while it may not have rationality as its only cognitive goal, has accuracy in many perceptual and cognitive respects among its goals, which can later be leveraged and supplemented by calibration, critique, etc. in a scientific/philosophical method, at least when carried out by competent people.

I found this is an outstanding book with philosophical and practical messages. Uncertainty touches countless areas of our lives. For example, serious consideration of uncertainty underlies much of the difference between Keynesian and classical economics, with the latter taking a typically theological approach by assuming away uncertainty (i.e. supposing rational expectations and perfect knowledge) under the cover of an impressive (in this case mathematical) apparatus. In other news- the Norwegian atrocity- the attachment that right wingnuts have for their guns testifies to their lack of appreciation for our many limits as humans- particularly, the possibility that extremism and passion (which they typically possess in abundance) may in rare circumstances get the better of them or others in their household and render their favorite weapon an instrument of mayhem and murder.

Wingnut response to Norway: "I hereby vow to carry my handguns more often."
A little epistemic humility on Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia- still not a beacon of freedom.
How can one have a lie detector if we believe our lies?
Pasta, flying to new heights.
Why are we kowtowing to economic criminals?
Reinhard and Rogoff are responsible for immeasurable harm, are apparently still employed.
And what is going on with "President Pushover"?
Economics quotes of the week, via Bill Mitchell. Apparently the Bank of International Settlements understands the banking system after all, by this quote:

"In particular, it is argued that the concept of the money multiplier is flawed and uninformative in terms of analyzing the dynamics of bank lending. Under a fiat money standard and liberalized financial system, there is no exogenous constraint on the supply of credit except through regulatory capital requirements."

And:

"Further, the only way a government such as the US can “go broke” is if the politicians deliberately and wilfully decide not to use the financial capacity of the government and refuse to credit relevant bank accounts in the non-government sector. That would be an extraordinary conspiracy against the people of their own land and against peoples in other lands that had acquired US dollar-denominated assets."

Finally, an unemployment update:

To sleep, perchance to renormalize synapses

2011-07-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Flies sleep too, and give us novel access to the nature and function of sleep.

Why do we sleep? Why do even whales and dolphins sleep, alternating hemispheres so that they can stay at the surface, breathing reliably? Why does sleep deprivation eventually lead to insanity and death? Incidentally, isn't sleep deprivation as commonly used by our military and other security organizations equivalent to torture?

A recent paper supports one theory (originally developed by the same authors, Tononi and Cirelli, in 2003) of why we sleep, which is that our brain's neurons build up connections through the day, which the special characteristics of deep, slow wave sleep prune back to a manageable condition. Apparently fruit flies also sleep, allowing the enormous tool chest of experimental fly biology to be deployed on this fascinating question. That flies sleep at all is quite remarkable, since a fly's life is extremely short- a perilous few weeks at most. Yet they snooze away a third of it, admittedly at night when they might not want to be active anyhow.

The idea behind this theory is that learning happens by the classic Hebbian theory- cells that fire together wire together. That is to say, their synaptic connections increase in strength and number. Nerve cell processes (axons and dendrites) grow and make new contacts, and in a few cases, nerve cells may even divide and multiply. So during a day of intense activity and learning, we (or a fly) are continuously building up synapses, and perhaps not breaking them down ... the balance continues to rise and rise, until eventually the brain just seizes up and doesn't work anymore.

"The hypothesis predicts that the more one learns and adapts, (i.e. the more intense is the wake experience), the more one needs to sleep."

Sleep -specifically, the deepest slow wave forms that happen relatively early each night- is then theorized to put this process into reverse, erasing the weakest synapses and thus "renormalizing" the system back to some "normal" level that exchanges some old or unimportant crud for newly learned connections. Thus you might wake up and suddenly, the piano piece you were working on with diminishing returns the night before now seems a great deal easier, while yesterday's lunch is wiped clean away. Incidentally, later stages of sleep that involve dreaming may selectively reinforce older memories, instinctive imperatives, and stray connections in a completely different tuning process.

The original paper outlining this theory is thankfully available, and here are a few choice quotes from it:

"The slow oscillation occurs at a frequency that is ideally suited to induce depotentiation/depression in stimulation paradigms, namely <1 Hz [31]. Thus, from a frequency perspective alone, slow-wave sleep would be a good candidate for promoting depotentiation/depression.
...
The close temporal pairing between generalized spiking at the end of the up-phase and generalized hyperpolarization at the beginning of the down-phase may indicate to synapses that presynaptic input was not effective in driving postsynaptic activity, a key requirement for depression."

(Here, depression means the opposite of classic Hebbian learning. Now cells that fire together under the slow wave paradigm unwire from each other. "Downscaling" is another term for synaptic renormalization.)

"Thus, at least at the molecular level, sleep may not just be unfavorable to synaptic potentiation, but specifically conducive to generalized synaptic depotentiation/depression. More direct tests of this prediction can be envisaged. It is already known that sleep altogether favors dephosphorylation in the brain. One could further measure phosphorylation levels in sleep and wakefulness of residues of the AMPA channel [sensitive to the neurotransmitter glutamate and widely present in the brain] involved in potentiation/depotentiation and depression/dedepression, as well as indices of AMPA receptor internalization."

...
"Finally, the reduced activity of the noradrenergic system during sleep would ensure that only downscaling occurs, and not potentiation."

"According to the hypothesis, during sleep the strength of each synapse would decrease by a proportional amount, until the total amount of synaptic weight impinging on each neuron returns to a baseline level. Provided there is a threshold below which synapses become ineffective or silent, synapses contributing to the noise, being on average weaker than those contributing to the signal, would cease to interfere in the execution, and the SNR [signal to noise ratio] would increase. "

"Finally, the hypothesis triggers some further questions. For example, can anesthetic agents also produce synaptic downscaling, to the extent that they promote slow-wave activity comparable to that of NREM [non-rapid eye movement] sleep? ... How does the hypothesis apply to other brain structures where sleep rhythms are different, such as the hippocampus? Or to other species, such as the fruit fly? And finally, what about REM sleep? Could it be, for example, that with its steady depolarization and high spontaneous activity, REM sleep might pro- mote the insertion of AMPA receptors in the synaptic sites that are still effective after the downscaling of NREM sleep, and thereby favor their consolidation? Such “polishing” of synapses after the “cleansing” action of NREM sleep would agree with the regular alternation between NREM and REM sleep and the reported cooperativity between the two stages of sleep in certain procedural tasks"

Summary of model, from a later Tononi and Cirelli paper.

"Evidence for a relationship between synaptic strength or density and SWA [slow wave activity during sleep] also comes from developmental studies. SWA changes during the lifespan in a way that seems to follow cortical synaptic density, as indicated directly by electron microscopy on post-mortem tissue and by MRI estimates of the amount of gray matter. Thus, both synaptic density and SWA reach a peak in adolescence, after which they decline rapidly, and continue a slower decline into old age. Pathological decreases in synaptic density, as observed in neurodegenerative disorders and schizophrenia, are also associated with reductions in SWA. Moreover, after visual deprivation during the critical period—a procedure associated with synaptic depression, slow waves are reduced by 40% in the absence of changes in sleep architecture."

The synapse is a complicated place, with special proteins expressed on both sides, (i.e. presynaptic and postsynaptic), including storage systems for neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, secretion apparatus, receptors to detect them, as well as the usual ion channels that run electrical conduction along membranes all over the nerve cell.

The researchers use flies altered to express neuron- and synapse-specific genes fused to a gene fragment encoding the fluorescent protein GFP, lighting up the resulting neurons. The researchers also use straightforward sleep/wake control over their flies, keeping them in individual glass tubes (+ food) mounted in automated activity monitors, and shaken when needed to keep the flies sleep-deprived.

Flies don't make beds, put on pyjamas, or even so much as curl up to sleep, so researchers have to define it in a slightly more indirect way. Immobility for over five minutes is called sleep, while activity within a one-minute interval is defined as wakefullness (called "wake", for convenience). Nevertheless, they tend to sleep in a familiar pattern, for an eight-hour night, of which the first 2.5 hours are the deepest and most immobile. Flies are kept up by caffeine, noisy neighbors, etc., and catch up on missed Z's as soon as possible, but only for a fraction of the missed time. All of this is very much like our own sleep.

Below is the observed sleep pattern for typical female flies, where W marks the wake period (lights on), S marks the sleep period in the dark, and SD marks sleep deprivation, which appears to be very effective.

The weak part of the paper is that the researchers get their data by microscopically visualizing the synapses and neurons in selected areas of the fly brains and counting them or measuring their overall brightness by eye, which, even if done by neutral ("blind"!) observers, as they claim, is inherently noisy and subjective. But the point was to judge the effect of sleep on synapse structure and proliferation as directly as possible, (rather than, say, measuring the level of synaptonemal proteins over the entire brain in a gross way, which has been done repeatedly and agrees with the hypothesis on that level), so for the moment, this might be the best method available.

Below is shown a typical set of data, where they measure the volume of presynaptic structures (the half of the synapse that comes from the upstream axon) with two different marked proteins (syt-e/synaptogamin, and a neuropeptide called PDF) in a type of neuron involved in circadian rhythms. There are unequivocal differences when the flies were sampled after the sleep (S) condition or after the other two conditions- sleep deprived (SD) and wake (W).

Tha shake things up a little, they use mutant flies with no circadian rhythm- the Per (Period) gene is knocked out, so the flies have random bouts of sleep, (shown below), at least until they were all sleep deprived (SD7, seven hours), followed by either more sleep deprivation (SD12) or sleep (+S5). The data shows the despite that lack of endogenous rhythm, flies still need to catch up on sleep after being deprived.

The corresponding graphs of visualized synaptonemal proteins is below, showing, as expected, that sleep lowers these proteins significantly, while continued sleep deprivation raises them. These flies are cranky!

In the next set, the experimenters test another type of neuron, and look at postsynaptic dendrite elaboration in flies expressing fluorescent actin, which should show up pretty much everywhere. In this case, the dentrites grow "spines" as they contact upstream neurons and make synapses, so the spines are counted, shown in the image below as the very small balls. They also measured dendrite branch lengths. After showing that sleep deprivation leads to slightly elevated numbers of spines, they ask a new question- whether environmental enrichment during the day correlates with number of dendritic connections. While the control flies are left in their boring one-fly-per-tube hotels (W), the experimental flies are unleashed for twelve hours into a fly "mall" with a hundred other flies (Wm). Whether terror or happiness ensues, the researchers probably can't tell!

You can see that the briefly socialized flies have a lot more going on in their brains, growing longer dendrites and more dendritic synapses (spines).

All these values fell back to normal levels after sleep (below), showing a correlating cycle of more neuronal connections after waking activities and declines after sleep. Incidentally, the enriched flies also slept longer (I), as you might expect after a day of partying, including naps taken during daylight.

Lastly, the researchers use an interesting gene (FMR1), which, when defective in its homologous form in humans, causes mental retardation and other problems, called fragile X syndrome. Prior work indicated that flies lacking this gene product have over-elaborated neurons with lack of pruning, along with learning and other problems, and that overexpression of the gene can cause the reverse effect: well-pruned neurons even in the absence of sleep. These flies sleep 30% less than normal, and sure enough, the experimental protocols of sleep deprivation didn't significantly alter the dendrite counts and volume compared to wild-type flies.

Genetic variation in such a gene might be responsible for variable amounts of sleep need seen naturally, in flies as well as in humans. So it remains slightly puzzling why most animals need so much of it. Perhaps, given the astronomically-imposed day/night cycle, checking out for eight hours is not much worse than checking out for two. We may also have only scratched the surface of what sleep does for us, whether physiologically or psychologically. Certainly Jungians, among others, set great store by dreaming, which happens during a separate sleep phase. Do flies dream?

This hypothesis is well on its way to becoming a compelling theory of what is likely the principal reason why we need deep slow-wave sleep and run into serious problems if we don't get it. The underlying mechanisms remain under investigation, (especially the functions of the various brain waves, and the dynamics of synapse growth and regression), and the hunt goes on for the mechanisms and rationale of other significant processes that happen during sleep.

We have a gambling problem.
On the power of the placebo effect.
What happened to the Republicans?
How's that hearts-and-minds operation going in the Middle East?
A local peace dividend- open space on Mt Umunhum.
Krugman tracks employment.
Economics quote of the week, George Packer in the New Yorker, on Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta's insider trading conspiracy with Galleon's Raj Rajaratnam.

"On the afternoon of September 23rd [2008], Rajat Gupta, former head of McKinsey, joined members of the Goldman Sachs board on a conference call. They discussed Warren Buffet's proposed investment of five billion dollars in the investment bank, which had been imperiled by the crash. The conference call ended at 3:54 P.M. Sixteen seconds later, Gupta called Rajaratnam's office. At 3:58, just two minutes before the markets closed, Rajaratnam gave an order to buy three hundred and fifty thousand shares of Goldman stock, worth forty-three million dollars. That night, the world learned of the Buffett investment. At the peak of the crisis, Gupta the Goldman board member's first thought was to make sure that his investment partner Raj Rajaratnam could exploit the deal. A month later, the drill was repeated: as Goldman prepared to announce an unexpected quarterly loss, Gupta called Rajaratnam, and Rajaratnam sold all his Goldman stock before the announcement."

Who's got the biggest piggy bank?

2011-07-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Some notes on the US federal debt.

It is important to realize what a non-issue the US federal debt is, and thus what a stalking horse it is for the same old class war of rich vs poor and capital vs labor. This was clarified when, after voting against raising the debt ceiling, House Republican leaders hurried to assure Wall Street bankers that they were just bluffing- they would surely raise the debt ceiling in the end, but just wanted to put some more theatrical pressure on the Democrats to squeeze out more spending cuts, presumably so that the economy performs worse during the upcoming election. Government is always bad, when it is run by Democrats.

One would think that savings are a good thing to be encouraged, so increased government bond holdings by individuals would be a good thing, insulating them against future calamity, funding their retirements, paying for their medical services, etc. The Federal reserve has certainly encouraged banks to save lots of money, pumping them full of reserves and offering them bonds so that they can make a bit of money and crawl their way back to solvency without lending.

But one person's saving is another's liability. Why not leave these liabilities in the private sector instead of the government sector? The private sector recently went through a meltdown where some savings were lost due to bankruptcy, and other savings through vertiginous market drops- a highly unpleasant situation. Federal debt has zero financial risk, (though the risk of political idiocy rises by the day). The US government has never defaulted, has never repaid substantial amounts of its own debt, and can print up more money any time. So from the customer's standpoint, safety is worth the low interest rates the government offers.

On the other hand, is the government robbing the private sector of capital, "crowding out" sources of savings? Hardly ... the world is awash in savings, increasingly desperate to chase even meagre returns. Obscure economies were inudated with investment in the 90's, only to be whipsawed by its fickle exit. The Chinese, of all people, are saving prodigiously. The dot-com boom showed the nation's enormous appetite and financial capacity (via other people's savings) to support risky schemes that end in tears. Ditto for the housing boom just ended. Most companies are sitting on hoards of cash. Any decent commercial investment can find plenty of money, but with demand guttering, few companies have strong growth and investment prospects. Bankers are reluctant to lend, but not for lack of money.

Granted, the private financial sector (or FIRE) would prefer to force the regular savers and pension funds to invest through their greedy minions. Thus the ideological push to privatize Social Security, Medicare, 401k's, and anything else they can get their hands on. But while private finance is surely important, (though its "innovations" are anything but), it is not ideal for many forms of investment, retirement perhaps among them.

But what of the risk to the government? Isn't its debt bomb "exploding"? Or spiralling? Or "out of control"? This where the title comes in, because if we take a step back, we can see that of all the savings kitties out there, the government has the largest one by far. The power to print money is equivalent to having an infinite piggy bank. It can spend any time, as much as it wants. It can also reverse course and add to its virtual savings by running overall budget surpluses (drawing dollars back out of the private balances, which is typically quite destructive to economic growth). So of all the actors on the scene, the federal government is best equipped to weather any storm and meet any calamity. The question is mostly whether it wishes to do so, and secondly, whether its use of that piggy bank is consistent with keeping the value of the money stable.

Inflation can be caused by unbalanced spending from any source- if the government prints and spends too much money, or if China suddenly decides to dump all its dollars and buy US real estate, or if the older generation suddenly joins a Buddhist cult en masse and gives all its money away, or if banks keep lending and creating money without proper oversight and capital backing. The economics would be the same- galloping inflation when spending of saved dollars far outstrips the productive capacity of the economy. So whoever has the dollar stash is a source of inflation risk, just as sudden credit destruction and a pell mell flight to safety leads to the economic tailspin we are experiencing now.

It is uniquely the government's job to 1. regulate the banking sector which creates most of the money, and 2. meter out its own spending to counteract whatever monetary pressures there are, whether contractionary or inflationary. Today the pressures are clearly contractionary. With interest rates at zero, the Fed has found it impossible to prod banks to create more money by lending. More spending is called for, and indeed a higher explicit inflation target is called for as well. (A whacky site hosts a good video series on money & banking, at least in the opening three parts- especially note the equation of debt with money.)

Note how different this is from an individual Euro country, which has no implicit pile of savings to work from, or from a gold-standard country, which likewise is limited to whatever its miners happen across in their voyage of environmental destruction. The powers of having an unlimited piggy bank are enormous, as are the dangers, which is why governments have tried to paint central banks as mysterious, oracular, god-like, non-political entities.

Conversely, it does the government no good to pile up surpluses. Since its "savings" are infinite, it need pile up no savings against a rainy day. Indeed, any surplus it runs is useless, flushed down an accounting hole. Surpluses represent money withdrawn from the private sector (by excess taxation) which is simply extinguished ... it is not stored in a vault somewhere, or used to buy private bonds, etc.. it is deflationary destruction of the same money it creates effortlessly on the other end. Sometimes such deflationary pressure is helpful, but of course not today.

It is also worth noting that issuing government bonds to balance government spending is no protection against inflation. Bondholders give up short notes (dollar bills) in exchange for long notes (bonds). But nothing much else changes as far as anyone is concerned. The government had spent the money originally in any case, the money was intended to be saved in any case, the savers still possess the money in any case, and they can redeem their bonds in the market at any time, given the government's commitment to keeping it liquid and functioning. With bonds, the spending of those dollars is notionally barred for the term of the bond, and in return, government throws in a small annuity, paid from its infinite stock of savings or from taxes. But these are very minor effects in the normal course of affairs.

The bond rigamarole is virtually pointless from a macroeconomic standpoint, though from a political standpoint, it can "bond" the rich to the financial soundness of the government (though Republicans may not have gotten the message!). Government bonds also provide provander for central bank's management of bank reserves and interest rates, though it certainly doesn't need endless trillions for that purpose in the normal course of events.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that savings in government bonds will be an increasing and stabilizing feature of our financial landscape. By all means, private issuers should have first priority in the market, getting all risk-seeking money that wants higher rates. But our future looks much like Japan's present, with high levels of federal bonds held by individuals as a stable core of savings. And that future looks very good, as far as the government's accounts go.

How much is too much? We are closing in on a federal debt of 1X GDP, or about $14 trillion. Japan is at roughly 2X GDP. How much do you have in savings personally? Do you want to have one year's income, or two year's? These seem like paltry amounts, really, compared to what is needed for serious retirement, so averaged over a population, 2 or 3X GDP sounds perfectly reasonable as a steady-state level of population savings parked in safe government bonds, balancing consumption with savings. (The fact that these holdings tend to be held highly unevenly among income groups is a separate issue.)

The problem in the mean time is that savings desires are running ahead of consumption desires, resulting in depressed economic activity and unemployment. Here is where the our political will comes into play. It is the government that can support both the desire of people to save after the recent profligate boom, and also the horrifying unemployment that continues in its wake.

There is no inherent contradiction between the two. The government clearly needs to spend more, within its inflationary constraints, which are right now extremely low. It would also help if it spent in targeted ways that directly create jobs, rather than disproportionately giving to the rich through tax gifts, etc. and waiting for the shower of money to trickle down. And the point doesn't have to be consuming more stuff made in China. With a little political foresight and leadership, we could be spending on remaking our energy system and rebuilding our infrastructure and educational system. There is a great deal to be done to make our country and world a better place.

J. K. Galbraith on the various idiocies of the debt ceiling "debate".
Tom Tomorrow, ditto...
Class war in the EU.
Class war here.
Class war in the courts ... back to caveat emptor.
Crush the proles!
The jack-boots are also marching in Belarus.
Fox news and taxes.
Progressives don't get the deficit, either.
Krugman does debt.
Not so easy being a psychic.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan.. not all it is cracked up to be.
Economics quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell:

"The national government in a sovereign nation (currency issuing with floating exchange rate) always chooses the national unemployment rate. Not sometimes, but always."

Is consciousness search?

2011-07-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

Search is all the rage in apps and the internet. What if search is consciousness as well?

After reading Antonio Damasio's book "Self comes to mind", about consciousness, I am little wiser than before. One of its few significant points is to reiterate that explicit memory is a matter of replaying data stored entirely unconsciously in certain areas of the brain (like the frontal lobes) in other areas regularly involved in presenting sensory information. Thus, if we remember a day at the ocean, a brain scanner would see our visual, hearing, and smell processing areas light up with a muted version of the actual experience, presumably transmitted there as a pattern from memory storage areas that, as we learned, basically dump out in reverse what previously played into them.

The book's second significant point is that consciousness is largely about learning, by using long-term, large scale context drawn from unconscious sources to train unconscious modules elsewhere in the brain. Consciousness doesn't directly execute anything, as anyone learning a new skill can attest. If we are learning to play a musical instrument, a very painful process of setting a conscious goal alternates with halting execution as we consciously try to get our body to adopt new actions and habits. Then we consciously perceive the woeful result, and the learning cycle continues. Once the relevant unconscious processes form, conscious direction can be devoted to ever-greater levels of abstraction and indirect control.

"In the words of William James, ‘‘consciousness’’ appears as ‘‘an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself’’ (James, 1890, chapter 5)." (All quotes taken from this article, not from Damasio)

Third and last is that Damasio is convinced that consciousness involves very low levels of the brain- the stem and thalamus, in addition to higher cortical regions. In one of the few items of data presented, he claims that hydrancephalic patients, born with with no cortex at all, (and who can live into their 20's), still have a rudimentary and responsive form of consciousness. They like some people and not others, like some foods and not others, etc. He also notes that only very few lesions, such as some in the higher brain stem, can radically impair consciousness, indicating that consciousness is a rather broad and evolutionarily primitive function.

So much for the book review. Thankfully, I ran across a much more lucid and up-to-date review of the field, which seems to be freely available, and which supplies relevant quotes below.

What gets me going are databases, so I would naturally see consciousness as a search function over a database. Are feelings involved? Sure, they are just another datatype in the database! Specifically, I'd propose that consciousness is the integration of connections drawn from a vast database which instantly (that is to say, within about 0.3 to 0.5 second) inbue perceptual or recollected data with context, meaning, valance, and feeling. That, I would argue, is the solution of the consciousness problem... the hard problem that is posed as: what makes the "redness" of red?

On its face, red is just a brain-encoded category plucked out of the electromagnetic spectrum more or less arbitrarily. What makes it conscious and rich for us, unlike what a video camera might experience of the same visible phenomenon, are the feelings and knowledge associated with red in our internal constellation. Perhaps we "like" red, and have special associations with various shades of red. Perhaps we know a little about interior design, or graphic design, and see the power that red can lend to projects in those areas. To a baby, red is just flat data, though it may also be intrinsically attractive, based on biological programming of our perceptual apparatus and feelings. Red is the color of blood, after all, and of ripe fruits- doubtless a powerful color on purely inborn biology alone. But to adults, it can be far more meaningful, in qualitative terms of association, which leads to the term "qualia".

Our brains are connection machines, (and also modelling machines, at a higher level). All data that pours into our heads are automatically linked to a web of ambient data- how a cookie smelled as it was being dunked in an aromatic tea by our fingers which felt its slightly greasy, crumbly surface, as we fumbled through a conversation and thought about the morning ahead. Stream-of-consciousness is old-hat by now in literature, but it is important to recognize how significant it is, relative to what is possible with current computers. In database technology, we struggle to relate individual pieces of data, and have to frame them into arbitrary classifications, numerically indexed and neatly tucked into bins. The technology is utterly unlike the freewheeling automatically everything-connects-with-everthing-else analog methods of brain data storage.

Once the data is in, it is ready to come back out, whether implicitly as we go about our lives and keep associating whatever is new with all that has gone before, or explicitly via reverie and replay in our sensory brain regions. One can have more or less data, thus more or less consciousness. Without training, one might be oblivious to the subtleties of classical music, or baseball, in effect being less conscious. Animals have all sorts of levels of consciousness, depending on how much information they can muster, and how much of it their brains keep in close and immediate connection, rather than in the vast unconscious troves of senstivities and implicit memories that far outnumber what is conscious.

What differentiates unconscious from conscious data? Unconscious data is surely usable in specialized systems, and through the mysterious processes of the dynamic unconscious, may create truly novel linkages (ideas) that pop into consciousness from time to time. Unconscious processing is also parallel, in contrast to consciousness, which, while maybe disjoint, still exhibits a linear "flow". This makes unconscious processing far, far more efficient and powerful than consciousness. But it is not continuously integrated and available, perhaps via the high-frequency gamma-wave attention system and long-range axons that seem to correlate with consciousness. The cerebellum is an example- a module of the brain devoted mostly to fine motor control, which processes information without contributing one iota to consciousness, probably because it isn't wired into the top-level consciousness system that exchanges information all over the brain, if in limited amounts.

"Human ERP [event-rrelated potential] and MEG [magnetoencephalography] recordings also revealed that conscious perception is also accompanied, during a similar time window, by increases in the power of high-frequency fluctuations, primarily in the gamma band (>30 Hz), as well as their phase synchronization across distant cortical sites (Doesburg et al., 2009; Melloni et al., 2007; Rodriguez et al., 1999; Schurger et al., 2006; Wyart and Tallon-Baudry, 2009)."

"Nonconscious stimuli can be quickly and efficiently processed along automatized or preinstructed processing routes before quickly decaying within a few seconds. By contrast, conscious stimuli would be distinguished by their lack of ‘‘encapsulation’’ in specialized processes and their flexible circulation to various processes of verbal report, evaluation, memory, planning, and intentional action, many seconds after their disappearance (Baars, 1989; Dehaene and Naccache, 2001). Dehaene and Naccache (2001) postulate that ‘‘this global availability of information (...) is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.’’"

What form does this "information" take? That is a significant question, even if we accept the overall hypothesis about a global information exchange network or workspace that correlates closely with consciousness. Information all over the brain takes the form of action potentials, quite different from whatever we might imagine as qualia- cloudy whisps, movie images, compositions by Bach, etc. Consciousness would clearly take the same form, being a subset of the wider information flow in the brain, with the properties of being integrative, linear, and consistent in form while varying in content. Positing any other form that this information could take wouldn't make biological sense, nor would it help clarify what makes qualia special.

"A notable feature of the dynamic core hypothesis is the proposal of a quantitative mathematical measure of information integration called F, high values of which are achieved only through a hierarchical recurrent connectivity and would be necessary and sufficient to sustain conscious experience: ‘‘consciousness is integrated information’’ (Tononi, 2008)."

One special property of consciousness is that it can reach into many other areas, depending on attentional focus. Special long-range axons (pyramidal) are thought to provide some of these connections:

"The ‘‘special morphology’’ of the pyramidal cells from the cerebral cortex was already noted by Cajal (1899–1904), who mentioned their ‘‘long axons with multiple collaterals’’ and their ‘‘very numerous and complex dendrites.’’ ... Furthermore, quantitative analyses of the dendritic field morphology of layer III pyramidal neurons revealed a continuous increase of complexity of the basal dendrites from the occipital up to the prefrontal cortex within a given species (DeFelipe and Farin ̃ as, 1992; Elston and Rosa, 1997, 1998) and from lower species (owl monkey, marmoset) up to humans (Elston, 2003). ... These observations confirm that PFC [prefrontal cortex] cells exhibit the morphological adaptations needed for massive long-distance communication, information integration, and broadcasting postulated in the GNW [global neuronal workspace] model and suggest that this architecture is particularly developed in the human species."

Outside the brain, search has evolved rapidly over cultural history. First, we gave up our deep cultural memories, such as epic poems and stories, in favor of writing and books, such as scriptures. Now we give up our medium-term memories to the internet, not bothering to remember the blizzard of factlets that can so easily be looked up on Wikipedia. Perhaps the next step is supplementing consciousness itself- our moment-to-moment short term memories that make up the database that connects everything in our heads into meaningful constructs. While technically fanciful, or at any rate very far off, (cue the singularity people), if we could get faster and bigger analog memory storage from chips implanted into our heads, and connections between them made compatible with the existing consciousness network, then search would be internalized and create new levels of consciousness.

As an example, head-mounted displays are already in existence that automatically annotate ambient scenes, for instance for military pilots. So imagine looking out, but instead of a bare streetscape, it is covered with highlighting colors or text annotations that indicate properties of interest, like restaurants, or street signs, or dirt ... whatever you are concerned about. This would be a richer form of consciousness than we are normally used to, though still limited by what we can pack through our existing sensory apparatus. Suppose that these annotations were internally generated and spontaneously pop up in response to whatever we were thinking or looking at ... that would be consciousness itself.

Some more interesting papers and links on the topic:

Phase transitions and chaos.
Gamma and the coding of consciousness.
More on gamma.
Relations of gamma and theta waves.
Not all gammas are the same.
Another all-around review of the field.
The demented Stuart Hammeroff retreats from quantum consciousness, to only slightly more plausible dentritic gap junction consciousness.

"Interestingly, recent research also suggests that spontaneous brain activity, as assessed by resting-state EEG recordings, may be similarly parsed into a stochastic series of slow ‘‘microstates,’’ stable for at least 100 ms, each exclusive of the other, and separated by sharp transitions (Lehmann and Koenig, 1997; Van de Ville et al., 2010). These microstates have recently been related to some of the fMRI resting-state networks (Britz et al., 2010). Crucially, they are predictive of the thought contents reported by participants when they are suddenly interrupted (Lehmann et al., 1998, 2010). Thus, whether externally induced or internally generated, the ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ may consist in a series of slow, global, and transiently stable cortical states (Changeux and Michel, 2004)."

Unemployment is also a civil rights issue.
Stiglitz speaks.
Trickle down? Nope. Wages are declining.
Corporations to rule over us all.
Christians still hunting for Adam and Eve.
It's just a fish, so who cares?
Another telling of the regulatory and free market debacle.
Bradley Manning, Hero.
Economics quote of the week- Warren Buffet:

"If Greece could print its own drachmas, it wouldn't have a debt problem."

Blogging alone

2011-07-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

A review of Putnam's Bowling Alone, about social connections as social capital.

In "Bowling alone", (2000), sociologist Robert Putnam offers a wide-ranging critique of recent US society as having become more disconnected and socially poverty-stricken, even as we have gained in many other forms of intellectual and material wealth. It is enough to make one wonder whether the Islamists and related extremists have something of a point, as they resist the destruction of traditional Afghan and other Islamic societies by the steamroller of Western commercialization.

I was reading another delightful book, the Big Bonanza, by Dan DeQuille, about the silver mining days of the 1880's Comstock lode, which mentions the dizzying array of social associations in Virginia City in its glory days: the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Ancient Order of Druids, Knights of Pythias, Knights of the Red Branch, Improved Order of the Red Men, Masons, Champions of the Red Cross, Caledonia Society, Society of Pacific Coast Pioneers, German Turnveriens, trade unions for miners, printers, and others, churches, Virginia Benevolent Society, St. Mary's Orphan Asylum and school, two daily papers, and more. This in a town of 30,000. I realized that this connected significantly with Putnam's thesis, though I had never read his book. Not having TV back in the day, they entertained each other in grand style, making music, gambling, meeting, lecturing, dining, doing good deeds, prospecting, and pontificating. Now, much of that social connection has fallen by the wayside as we cacoon in our homes with professional entertainment piped in profusion, via cable, internet, broadcast, and radio. We have gained immeasurably, but what have we lost?

So I read Putnam's book, which provides a detailed and multifaceted analysis of what he calls social capital. The first thing to ask is- what is social capital, and what is good about it?

Social capital is the kind of thing that researchers like to visualize with complicated maps, like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is the degree to which we are connected to other people by bonds that are social, and thus reciprocal and feeling, rather than commercial and anonymous, or imagined via novels and film. It is saying hello to someone on the street, making both of you feel more human and connected in a society, rather than anonymously alone. It is voting, and marrying, and writing letters to the editor, and conducting meetings of the bridge club or neighborhood group, and running the library. It is baby-sitting for others and looking in on an elderly neighbor.

Social connections generally make us feel good and improve health. Marrying raises life expectency the same amount as quitting smoking. "Regular club attendance, volunteering, entertaining, or church attendance is the happiness equivalent of getting a college degree or more than doubling your income." On the work front, connections are self-evidently conducive to getting better jobs and greasing the wheels of commerce. "Rainmakers" are hired in many businesses almost solely for their Rolodexes. And in the political sphere, those with more social capital vote more, and those with more connections have more influence. Organizing is all about aligning the participation of the many towards shared ends. The tea party is an example of (relatively few) people of like mind banding together on behalf of an agenda and gaining influence from that solidarity.

But there is a flip side to social capital as well, which is freedom. Moving to the anonymous city from the gossipy small town can be hugely liberating. Everyone needs some personal space, and some, such as many artists, intensely need quiet and solitude to plumb the depths of their muse. So there needs to be a balance. Putnam notes that when it comes to happiness, while attending club meetings monthly is far better than attending none, attending them daily is worse than monthly ... there are diminishing returns to sociability. We observe the same among monkeys and chimpanzees, that infants need intense social connection to their mothers, but thereafter, there is an ongoing and shifting balance between independence / exploration and the need to be part of a group- to have a sound home base to work from.

Additonally, social capital is not always positive, but can bond in intolerance and bigotry. The KKK was a voluntary civic organization, after all.

So what's the problem? Putman points to a variety of studies and statistics that show that our civic life and social connections have become weaker over the last few decades. Membership in all kinds of organizations has declined. Many organizations that used to be truly civic and locally based are now skeleton membership and lobbying operations based in Washington DC. Graph after graph shows declines in such things as membership rates in chapter-based national organizations, local meeting attendance, service as an officer, volunteering in campaigns, voting, social visiting, family dinners, stopping at stop signs, philanthropy, subjective happiness, card playing, and yes, bowling as part of a league.

For example, membership in the PTA, per family with children, is less than half what it was at its peak in 1960. Union membership is less than half of its peak in 1950. United Way giving is roughly half of its peak in 1960. The number of security guards has doubled per capita since the 1950's, as has the number of lawyers. Hitchhiking has become unheard of. Suicide is three times more prevalent among youth in the 90's than it was in the 50's. Putman makes quaint reference to people raking their own leaves before they blow onto someone else's yard, in the general (socially rational) expectation that similar good turns would be done by others. Today, of course, the name of the game is to power-blow your leaves and other detritus onto as many neighbor's yards as possible.

Probably this is not surprising to anyone. All kinds of civic virtues have been faltering noticeably, as have bridge clubs, entertaining, smoke filled rooms, percolators, and the rest of it. Despite all the hoopla surrounding the many internet communications technologies, one has to say that facebook is a social wasteland- focused on the barest of substance- "like"!- and the barest of interaction, however far-flung. Blogging can occasionally furnish more substance, but its interactions remain rather disembodied, as well as parochial.

More interesting is Putnam's analysis of why this social decline happened. There is a long list of possibilities, of which I will give a few, mixing in some of my own:

The auto-addled suburb

The twin benifices of oil and prosperity allowed most of us to move out of the warm Jane Jacobs urban community into sterile Levittowns, requiring an isolating and draining car trip to go anywhere and do anything. While the genteel ideal of living in the country took the US by storm, it left in its wake neither the closeness of traditional rural country life nor the close-packed inescapable community of the traditional city.

The demon tube

TV is the only form of entertainment that, according to Putnam, destroys social capital, sitting us on our couches and frying our brains. The average household has their TV on an average of eight hours per day, shockingly enough. Those who watch only what they plan for in advance are far more resistent to its corrosive effects on social engagement than those who watch "whatever's on".

The greatest generation

In a word, war is the greatest social glue, especially if you win.

The feminist vacuum

Not vacuums that are feminist! The 50's and 60's were the age of stay-at-home moms driven bonkers by their isolation in the above-mentioned suburbs by the problem that had no name, who then devoted their vast energies to den-mothering, league of women voter-ing, and all the other worthy pursuits of social gluing and betterment they have no time for today.

The forgetting of Keynes

Life was supposed to be getting better about now, with jetpacks and endless leisure. Instead, most workers face stagnant living standards, higher risks off-loaded by their employers, (principally in the areas of retirement and job security), less effective leisure time, and longer working lives due to the downturn and the lack of secure retirement. Meanwhile, income has risen immensely for the fewer rich, making the entire society, as an economic system, poorer and less prosperous than it could be if wealth and spending were more evenly distributed. All this is principally due to the ideological forgetting of Keynes, whose policies were aimed at maintaining overall prosperity through full employment.

The prosperous cacoon

The home has taken on increased significance in modern America, as the consequence of all the above trends, principally those of suburbanization and electronic entertainment.

The inequality curse

Putnam has numerous graphs of social metrics tabulated by state, where states of the South always come off worst. One could view this through an economic lens, since economic inequality has long been higher in the South than elsewhere, with its stronger class distinctions, glorification of hereditary wealth, and antipathy to unions, not to mention the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In recent decades, the entire country has moved in the same direction, dramatically losing union membership and seeing rising economic inequality. Republicans keep trying to repeal inheritance taxes as the purest expression of their plutocratic proclivities. Of course, as mentioned above in the discussion of Keynes, inequality is fundamentally corrosive to prosperity. But it is also directly corrosive to social capital, as the rich rule the political system and airwaves from within gated communities, served by a pliant underclass, and feel less beholden to and less like the "little people".

"Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible."

The red scare (not one of Putnam's theses)

Communism was far more popular during the Great Depression and WW2 than it is today. Social solidarity, socialism, unions, and similar sentiments had great traction, while today, even being a community organizer seems to be a dirty word. Of course as the 50's wore on, the revelations of Stalinism and McCarthyism eroded this legacy, focusing communitarian sentiments on less liberal practices like keeping women in the kitchen and showing wholesome family dramas on TV. Still, the greatest generation had significantly more exposure to and practice of serious socialism than we would dream of today, with FOX news keeping a careful watch over our bodily fluids.

A surfeit of civil rights (not one of Putnam's theses)

The civil rights movements of the last century, encompassing successive waves of inclusion of, well, virtually everybody, have been unquestionably good. But is it possible that the club that everyone can join has become devalued in the process? One theory of our unique national founding is that the founders were especially conscious of liberty and the rights/values of association because they denied them so systematically to their slaves. Putnam makes a substantial point about social capital taking two forms, either bonding capital, which can be quite introverted within a community and exclusionary, versus bridging capital, which is open to all and encourages cross-fertilization. But there may be less to this distinction than meets the eye, if a society is class-structured so that no truly bridging capital is really possible. In short, in psychological terms, do we always need an out-group, however distant and implicit, to support in-group social solidarity?

"Slavery was designed to destroy social capital."

So what's the answer? Mostly, it's war that's done it. Putnam tracks the changing complexion of civic engagement, and finds a very strong generational component, where engagement rose in a small spurt after WW1, then massively around WW2. The WW2 generation has been consistently more civically inclined throughout their lives than those before or after, for several probable reasons. First was that the war directly trained US citizens in countless acts of engagement, from actual military service with their fellow bumpkins from all over our fair land to intensive mobilization on the home front for victory gardens, scrap drives, bond drives, and all sorts of other sacrifices. As religious leaders know well, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the psychological commitment.

Secondly, the whole mood of war is rather electrifying and unifying. In my lifetime, we have experienced faint echos in the various Middle Eastern wars, but none in the existential way that world war against utter evil engendered. And lastly, winning the war certainly helped as well, with the added flourish of devising and dropping the most incredibly powerful weapon ever. This mood of sheer power and potency was later sapped away in the Vietnam war, as we faced an enemy that made a mockery of our technological power with its understanding of social capital, ironically enough.

So, the greatest generation was highly trusting of each other and their institutions, expressed in their high degree of involvement in those institutions and in other forms of social engagement. Call them square, but they were cohesive and civic-minded in a way that our later jaded, ironical generations are not. It is also noteworthy that the Civil war, for all its internecine horror, also engendered a generation of civic activity that was reflected in the profusion of social organizations mentioned above in Virginia City, Nevada.

The other factors listed above also have roles in the drama, especially TV, which Putnam blames for perhaps a third of the decline. The TV epidemic is indeed serious, as bad as the much discussed obesity epidemic, and closely connected to it. Both are characterized by the ingestion of junk and the displacement of healthy fare. Both make us less fit and are promoted by corporations pushing what are essentially drugs in the guise of free choice, individualism, and easy living, not to mention better sex, ironically enough. TV presents the additional insult of the thoughts and desires of corporations themselves in a constant barrage of deceitful harangues that form our ambient intellectual atmosphere, and as a bonus, forms our current mode of politics as well.

Is there any hope? Putnam has an absolutely dreadful concluding chapter, full of stentorian "Let us find ways to ..." pronouncements. More interestingly, he devotes a long chapter to the Gilded age, also called the progressive age (1870's through 1920's), when the US really transitioned to modernity and when most of the large associations that survive today were born, like the Boy Scouts, League of Women's voters, Red Cross, NAACP, Goodwill industries, Lion's Club, Teamsters, and Sierra Club. It wasn't just the civic energy from Civil War mobilization that caused this flowering, but the deep social changes of urbanization and immigration that posed the problem of rootlessness as never before. Social entrepreneurs of many stripes devised new organizations to replace some of the rural civic connections that had been lost, using the dense new urban neighborhoods as springboards to restore social connection.

Conservatives might comment that it was precisely the lack of government meddling that called forth the private action and philanthropy that made this flowering possible. Ironically, in that view, the aim of many of the new organizations was to regularize their charitable activities as part of the state, in which they succeeded in cases like hospitals, welfare, work training programs, and Carnegie's libraries. Did they succeed too far?

In essence, these organizers discovered and promoted novel public goods, which are most fairly provided on a public basis. If we find that various social services (like, say, Kindergarten) are important to have on a universal basis, then leaving them to the vagaries of sociability as it ebbs and flows with the generations, let alone leaving them to the free market, isn't a fair, efficient, or consistent way of providing them. So government provision simply makes sense, even if it has an eroding effect on our voluntary scope of activity. One of the last bastions of social solidarity occurs during natural disasters, when communities pull together to pile sandbags, evacuate the elderly, rescue pets, and eventually rebuild and sue oil companies. Yet even these sacred tasks are being seized by FEMA and other government agencies! Where will it all end?

One wrinkle in the greatest generation theory above is that the older generation still votes at far higher rates than succeeding generations. And despite their higher civic-mindedness, they also vote their pocketbooks, which in California has meant the decline of public eduction, and nationally means the government-mandated transfer of wealth from the young to the old, in the form of social security and medicare.

What is the solution? As has been often remarked, we missed a significant opportunity after 9/11, when we were told that more tax cuts and more shopping were the proper sacrifices to make for this new war effort. While a nice world war against an evil empire might be just the ticket, that doesn't seem to be in the offing, largely due to the good work of the greatest generation who, through WW2 and the long cold war, sought to reduce the scourge of war, more or less successfully. Very well, there we are!

Politicians have long been calling us to the "moral equivalent of war", against poverty, inflation, cancer, oil shortages, obesity, whatever... These faint echos only accentuate the dilemma, which is that only a real war presents the existential threat that calls forth the commensurate social solidarity. Were it up to me, the new war would be waged against global warming, in a global Kumbaya effort to save the biosphere, uniting not just one nation, not just all humanity, but all life forms in one intense shared effort to make a greener, richer, and sustainable world. Unfortunately, that seems psychologically naive. All of evolution and anthropology tells us that there is no quarry or enemy nearly as lethal nor as numinously significant as our fellow humans.

Thus we may just have to settle for a less-than-greatest-generation level of social solidarity. Without unifying wars or sufficient rates of natural disaster, the US still has a strong civic mythos, whose cultivation remains of great importance. On the other hand, we don't have to give in to twitter, facebook, and TV as they dumb down our discourse and keep us glued to our individual seats & tray tables. I am hardly one to talk, blogging and all, but perhaps the odiferous tide of faux-reality TV may finally prompt viewers to turn themselves into doers ... to go outside and say hello to their neighbors.

Arctic village tells of a fascinating and rich society in the 1930's Alaskan wilderness.
Along with social capital, remember natural capital.
Pax Mongolica, successor to the Islamic golden age, precursor to the Renaissance.
"Tomorrow's China will be a country that fully achieves democracy, the rule of law, fairness and justice, ..."
Speaking of rotting our brains, the decepticons will enslave us all.
Joseph Stieglitz relates how globalization has not helped its targets- the underdeveloped masses, cancelling out our global hearts and mind operation, such as it is.
Krugman on books that inspired him.
The Bank of International Settlements hires Lehman's former risk manager.
Economics quote of the week, from Krugman:

"The key insight is that while debt does not make the world poorer – one person’s liability is another person’s asset – it can be a source of contractionary pressure if there’s an abrupt tightening of credit standards, if levels of leverage that were considered acceptable in the past are suddenly deemed unacceptable thanks to some kind of shock such as, well, a financial crisis. In that case debtors are faced with the necessity of deleveraging, forcing them to slash spending, while creditors face no comparable need to spend more. Such a situation can push an economy up against the zero lower bound and keep it there for an extended period."

And even Martin Wolf recognizes that government deficits play an essential role in allowing private deleveraging in the current depression:

"The question I have is this: does the BIS know that every sector cannot run financial surpluses at the same time?"

Intuition, projection, and the forgetting of Keynes

2011-06-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Are we doomed to forget inconvenient intellectual achievements?

Paul Krugman gave an outstanding talk to an English economics conference about the current "little depression", or great recession.. take your pick. To encourage you to read it directly, I will try to be brief myself. We are reliving the essentials of the great depression, and had even gained a more recent preview via Japan's meltdown and stasis over the last two decades. Yet our central bankers declare themselves "puzzled", and worse still, we are all forced to relive the intellectual battles from great depression which had already been won by Keynes.

Relevant book on the topic.

Economists have forgotten a great deal. However painful it is to realize, the ideology of ever-increasing progress in education and intellect seems to not be true- it is possible for whole institutions and generations to revert to prior ignorance, at the hands of lazy textbook writers, ideologs pushing simplistic mantras, and greed posing as enlightenment. The paradigmatic case is of course the fall of Rome and the ensuing descent into metaphysical darkness. Krugmann's message, at the end, is that the forgetting of Keynes may be a history we are doomed to repeat, over, and over, and over, and over ...

"By ―unstable, I don’t just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that’s part of it. Equally crucial are the regime’s intellectual and political instability."

...

"If we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, central banks have been its monasteries, hoarding and studying the ancient texts lost to the rest of the world." ... "... sooner or later the barbarians were going to go after the monasteries too; and as the current furor over quantitative easing shows, the invading hordes have arrived."

Such mantras as crowding out, Say's law, monetarism as the sole regulatory tool, and most flagrantly, the government-as-household analogy, are all convenient, easy to teach, and easy to digest fallacies, shown to be fallacies by Keynes 75 years ago. But understanding Keynes is hard- it is often counterintuitive. Thus people, even economists, and most especially economics journalists, fall back into intuitive, relatively mindless slogans that may work on the micro level, but are inapplicable, even dangerous, on the macro level.

This has religious implications, if I may digress. Religion represents easy intuitions and superficial analysis perpetually competing with difficult to understand, or at least difficult to stomach, concepts of realism- of the void and of our true place in the universe. And especially the projection of whatever we value most, fear most, or most hope for onto the cosmic tapestry. In a similar way, classical economics, as Krugman presents it here, is a projection of micro-thought to the macro level.

So the problem is very similar- how to preserve learning, especially counter-intutive learning, in the face of our intution which is always gets the first at-bat? Our most important, devilish problems are precisely those with counter-intuitive forms or solutions. The easy ones were dealt with long ago. Quantum mechanics, religion, most of the remaining problems of philosophy, and macroeconomics are prime examples. When easy intuitions converge with the agendas of interested parties, like the rich in the case of anti-Keynesianism (taking a myopically short-term view of their interests), or the clergy and their brainwashed sheep, the retreat into ignorance can look inevitable and tragic.

Krugman on greedism.
Romney- just as nuts as the rest of them.
Republicans attach sign to self: "We are idiots".
Al Gore, on science, reason, and the media.
The importance of better batteries.
As far as I am concerned, no fish are OK to eat, ever. But if you need a fix...
RIP Clarence Clemmons.
But in a bit of positive economic news, another economics quote, from Bill Mitchell

"The news from those that opposed the MFI [Milton Friedman Insitute, at the University of Chicago, which was just closed] is that the University of Chicago has had trouble raising funds to support the institute partly because of the 'declining value of the Friedman name and reputation'"

Consciousness vibrations

2011-06-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

New method assesses consciousness in people in vegetative and similar states.

The world has recently become aware that some paralyzed or comatose people may be more conscious than previously assumed. The medical profession had assumed that there is always some modality of behavior available to a conscious person- perhaps a finger point, and eyelid raise, or an eye-roll. But fMRI studies show that consciousness can exist in a fully "locked-in" state. Doctors have also assumed, with perhaps more cause, that some sensory modality is always preserved. If not vision, then at least hearing or touch. Whether exceptions exist here is unknown, and may be impossible to tell without much more knowledge and invasive methods of stimulation.

It is a deeply frightening prospect- to wake up from a coma, but be completely paralyzed, unable to tell the world you are there, and thence sentenced to a life of vegetative warehousing or worse. A recent fMRI study demonstrated that when one subject was asked to imagine a tennis game, the scanner could pick up distinct patterns of the characteristic activity, yet nothing else transpired.. no hand motions, no head nods, no meaningful eye blinks.. nothing. This subject's hearing was fine, evidently.

The current paper extends this work by using a different and cheaper method of diagnosis, (EEG scalp surface electrical wave monitoring), and develops out of it a deeper theory of what is going on during consciousness. MRI scans are expensive enough in usual practice (about $4000), and functional MRIs take more still time and expense. EEGs, in contrast, are easier to administer and are normally performed anyhow in cases of doubtful brain function, though they only "see" the brain's surface, and at quite low resolution.

In other ways the data from EEGs are quite rich, however, comprising the superficial brain waves that can come in many frequencies and locations. Could it provide a map of the brain's communications that reflect the long-range connections thought to be characteristic of consciousness? These authors devise a dense matrix of sixty electrodes for the patient's head, with data processing methods that provide a geographic and temporal map of electrical activity. They use two classes of patients- vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) along with conscious controls, to ask whether the three groups can be reliably differentiated.

The patients had been pre-evaluated by an extensive panel of more conventional criteria, to separate some cognition without communication (MCS) from the non-cognitive VS state. For example, "... if visual pursuit of a mirror is present at least two times in the same direction, the patient is then considered to be MCS". The researchers didn't reclassify anyone based on their EEG analyses. They also wheel in a form of analysis called "Dynamic Causal Modelling" (DCM), which "... allows for for inferences about the neuronal architectures that generate hemodynamic [fMRI] or electromagnetic [EEG] signals." This is the key to their work- a model devised in their own prior work (drenched in Bayes-style statistical methods) that uses the timing and amplitude relations between EEG signals to develop simple models of communications links between major areas of the brain.

These areas are:
The inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is involved in decision making and risk assessment. This is in the lower part of the frontal cortex.

The superior temporal gyrus (STG), which is involved in auditory and speech processing. This is in the upper part of the temporal (side) lobe.

The primary auditory cortex (A1), which it says is at the first stage of auditory processing, is very close to STG in the temporal cortex.

The model is that not only do signals flow upward from A1 to STG and thence to IFG, but signals return back from IFG to STG while the patient is conscious, perhaps as the mechanism of attention.

The test the researchers did was very simple, offering the patients auditory tones where strings of monotonous tones were sporadically shifted to new pitches. The signals they were looking for were of the brains "noticing" the shifts.

The top diagram shows tones used, including noticeable deviations. The bottom diagram shows a sample trace (ERP) from one EEG electrode in a control subject, where the shifted sound is reflected/recognized in a later blip (red) which is proposed to be the conscious recognition of ... something different.

Here, all sixty electrodes are mapped out spatially on a notional scalp, and temporally relative to tone shifts. One can see that the controls have far more active resonating activity after such a shift than either the MCS or VS patients. Yet the MCS patients show a discernable peak at 172 milliseconds that the VS patients don't. Below in black are shown the same data thresholded to a significance level of P<0.001 for each population.

The theory is that auditory processing is intact for all the subjects, reflected in early activation (~60ms) of difference detection in the primary auditory areas. Yet consciousness, which is known to lag sensory processing by larger intervals (up to 0.5 second), happens later on, and would necessarily be picked up later on in the EEGs. The question is where exactly the conscious signal lies, what does it mean, and can its detection be automated in a practical EEG test that can be widely applied in hospital settings?

The researchers apply their home-grown DCM model of intra-brain communication, and conclude that by far the best model (of all the theoretically possible connection schemes among the A1, STG and IFG regions) that matches the data is one where the missing ingredient in VS patients is not conduction of auditory information all the way up the chain from A1 to STG to IFG, but where recurrent conduction back from IFG to STG was absent, shown in red below.

They note that by their model, recurrent connections are still active in all cases between the lower STG and A1 levels, but while these may have important roles in auditory processing, they are all unconscious. "These findings stress the importance of recurrent processing in higher-order associative areas in the generation of conscious perception and do not support the view that recurrent processing in sensory cortex can be equated with consciousness."

VS patients lack the long-latency EEG signals that indicate reaching-back of the cortical areas back to the sensory areas. The authors characterize the role of such connections as Bayesian predictive modelling that is executed by the cortical areas and constitutes "inference on the causes of external stimuli". But the inference isn't enough on its cortical pedestal. It needs to continually check back on its inputs to validate its modelling, and perhaps thus create the sensation of "realness" and the sensation of time passing as differentiable events.

Another group puts the thought similarly:
"These findings challenge the pivotal role of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness. Instead, it appears that specific brain areas (or cognitive modules) may support specific cognitive functions but that consciousness is independent of this. Conscious sensations arise only when the brain areas involved engage in recurrent interactions enabling the long-lasting exchange of information between brain regions. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that also the state of consciousness, for example, in vegetative state patients or during sleep and anesthesia, is closely related to the scope and extent of residual recurrent interactions among brain regions."

Modern monetary theory, in basic terms.
Haircuts are still needed.
Those darn Afghan soldiers. Not to mention our own darn soldiers & bad intelligence.
China doubles coal consumption.
IBM, helping a nation's physician with his examinations.
Children, imagination, science, and causality.
Vibrations of the rastaman kind.
Economics quote of the week: Jonathan Swift, courtesy of Bill Black.

"The Lilliputians look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft. For, they allege, care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, can protect a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty hath no fence against superior cunning. . . where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage."

The not-so-great society

2011-06-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

Do we even care about unemployment?

Suppose we enter a world of increasing efficiency, where what once required labor is done by robots, or done overseas, out of sight and mind. Anti-trust concerns have continued to whither away, so the US might have only a handful of corporations that bring us all we need: MegaAgCorp, MegaRoboCorp, MegaMediaCorp, MegaCareCorp, and MegaBankCorp. Indeed efficiencies are so high that each of these corporations has one CEO and just a few programmers tending the machines. Everyone else in the country can do as they please ... they are not really needed. Because of the excess of trained programmers, the CEO hardly has to pay the programmers anything, so he gets all the profits, shared to some degree with the CEO of MegaBankCorp, which is a major shareholder.

This is entirely acceptable and plausible in the capitalist model of laissez-faire, given the technological premises. The CEOs in this model would have to spend furiously to keep other citizens in the country supplied with the funds to buy food and goods, if they wished to do so. They might be prodigious philanthropists, supporting tens of millions of people each with handouts, arts, circuses, and make-work. An entire trickle-down economy could be modeled in this way, resembling in some ways the extremely concentrated wealth conditions of imperial Roman antiquity.

On the other hand, the CEOs might pile up their profits as money- or even as gold if they were infected with Austrian economics. The rest of the population could then go to hell, so to speak. Unfortunately that system wouldn't get very far because with no spending, there is no income, whether in the form of gold or other money. This economy, while perhaps a model of Ayn Rand go-Galt-ism, wouldn't even work on its own terms, let alone larger moral terms. The CEOs would quickly cease to get income, along with everyone else.

It is a problem we are increasingly facing as we live in a new economic landscape with new types of shortages and excesses. For the last two centuries, new machines and cheap energy challenged us to find ever more complex uses for labor. Indeed, labor virtually ceased being labor at all, and turned into thinking. Now with the advent of computers, thinking is getting increasingly displaced as well, and we may end up doing little more than entertaining each other.

It would be a fine pass to come to, but only if the essential supports coming from the concentrated, automated parts of the economy are distributed widely. The idea that everyone should do something for others as far as they are able is certainly important and virtuous. But who evaluates who is able, and what is the worth of their work? If all of this is judged by the Mega CEOs who are the vaunted "producers", the culture is impoverished, and if taken to its economic extreme, such policy becomes rapidly fatal to any semblance of an economy or society.

I think the lesson should be obvious. The productive capacity of our hyper-developed economic system is largely the patrimony of past inventors, researchers, innovators, educators, and laborers. (Matrimony, if one wants a more feminist-friendly spin!) I don't even mention its more general dependence on cultural & natural resources. The managers and capitalists of the means of production are important cogs in the machine's current instantiation and productivity, but are also custodians on behalf of a much larger society of stakeholders. They may deserve a larger than average share, but they do not deserve the whole pie, no matter what market forces or cronyism may say to the contrary.

The idea that workers who are no longer needed in some corner of this vast enterprise can be simply "voted off the island" and sent into jobless penury seems callous to say the least. When amplified to the 10 to 20% levels we see today in the under- and un-employment picture, it amounts essentially to society-wide masochism. Not only are individuals and families reduced to destitution, for which food stamps are not a reasonable and dignified answer, but the entire system is, as Keynes pointed out, made poorer by the waste of so much labor.

Solution 1
I think there are four paradigmatic solutions that the leading ideologies put forward for such a condition. In the idealistic Republican Horatio Alger story, the unemployed work their fingers off inventing new products, services, and business models which so melt the hearts of reluctant bankers that new lending happens, new businesses arise, and more spending occurs in the economy generally. This investment both brings forth new money (via lending) and also brings money out of the savings of the rich as investment and consumption, thereby redistributing income downwards and keeping the economic cycle turning.

Solution 2
A more realistic, hard-headed version of the Republican approach would be that the unemployed remain invisible to the larger economy and good riddance. Perhaps they subsist on alms from private charities, redistributing small amounts of money downwards on a sporadic basis. Money that is rapidly re-collected to the higher levels by the usual mechanisms of private enterprise- payday loans, tobacco and alcohol addiction, and other advertised necessities. Perhaps the unemployed start their own gardens, bartering goods with fellow outcasts and starting an underground economy that remains invisible to the top end of town. They may even develop alternative currencies and markets. Back in the erstwhile conventional economy, contraction occurs and labor becomes cheaper, but as long as the remaining money concentrates upward, all is well.

Solution 3
On the Democratic side, there are two basic approaches, both slightly more socially responsible. The classic counter-cyclical balancing approach is to redistribute public money (from taxes or from de novo money creation) on a more systematic basis than alms, paying unemployment insurance, health insurance, income support of other sorts, and tax cuts weighted to the middle and lower classes. These are designed to raise aggregate demand, raising economic activity and enployment in the private economy back to self-sustaining levels. A very simple relationship, really, which is proven Keynesianism.

Solution 4
Last is the public works approach: direct employment of the unemployed, in public works the country needs so desperately. Our roads are recognized to be of third world status. Our bridges are falling down. Our energy system is antiquated. Our seniors need aid and assistance. Our broadband is sub-par. There is plenty of work to do, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist (also government supported!) to see that unemployment + work that needs doing = solution. The many public works of the Depression, such as Hoover dam, are still paying dividends today. In the wake of enormous money contraction / credit destruction in the private banking collapse, we have plenty of scope for the government to create money needed for such programs. It doesn't all have to go to the banks through various rescue packages, pumped up reserves, etc!

The stakes could not be more serious, both for individuals being crushed by the current downturn, and for our general prosperity and well-being. The simple fact is that we are not "broke". We may be intellectually, politically, and compassionately broke, but that is a different issue!

Skidelsky thinks about it..
Paul Solmon thinks about it.
Executives rake in billions.
Tech and the concentration of useful work.
Bill Black agrees that Goldman Sachs was doing god's work.
Krugman on debt and interest payments ... not a big deal.
Solar capacity is growing and getting cheaper.
Planet wrecking heads to new heights.
Black hats and white hats in the cyberworld.
On corruption in Afghanistan.
The State Department bunker in Iraq. What on earth are we thinking?
Our new Senate: nothing gets done.
And the civil war, still going.
Be good to your dog.
Bill Mitchell quote of the week: A graph of unemployment duration, which is indefensible in a civilized country, putatively the richest and smartest on Earth.

Sustainable energy when?

2011-06-04T09:23:00.001-07:00

Notice anything weird about the weather? It is high time to reform our energy system.

Climate change is bringing is raging tornadoes, floods, wildfires, droughts, famine, and probably an active hurricane season, not to mention untold harm to the biosphere for millennia to come, especially via permanent extinctions. Putting aside the political and ideological battles, what do we need to address it? We have the technology. What we need is the economic and political will to use it. Truthfully, the only thing we really need is a price on fossil carbon.

Right now, a few cars are being run from electricity, and various carbon-free options exist for generating electricity, including nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. The elephant in the room is cheap fossil fuels- coal and gas for electricity, and oil for transportation. If we avert our eyes from their various environmental costs, as is the wont of mainstream economics, they are very cheap, and as long as they remain cheap, carbon-free energy will not be economically viable.

They may not be cheap forever- oil is already hitting global peak production and higher prices. But coal and gas seem less supply-limited, with fracking all the rage. Coal is particularly noxious in this regard- incredibly dirty, and evidently endlessly plentiful, in the US, India, and China. Some existing regulations on coal pollution raise the effective price of coal-fired electricity, but not enough to make carbon-free sources economically viable, or as the aim should be, economically superior.

Prices of wind and solar energy have been trending downwards, however, so the state of affairs seems very close to tipping. Unfortunately, good information is very hard to come by, since each source pushes its story with various related costs put in or left out. I attempt to quote final electricity prices from various sources, in rough terms:

Source	¢ per kWh
coal	5 to 10
gas	5 to 20
wind	5 to 10
nuclear	10 to 15
geothermal	5 to 10
solar plant	12 to 20
residential solar	20 to 30

So we are certainly within striking distance of economic parity for several forms of non-fosssil energy production. Adding a carbon tax of $0.10 per kWh, summing over annual electricity production of 3,101 TWh gives a cost of $310 billion yearly. Is this a lot? Not in a $14 trillion dollar economy, especially when the entire amount stays in the system. It can be used to displace other, less efficient taxes, or pay off the debt, give back credits on income taxes, build parks, employ the unemployed, give more money to bankers, or whatever else we would like to do with it.

Adding in oil consumption with a comparable tax of roughly $1 per gallon, over 7.3 billion barrels consumed per year nets another $300 billion- another significant increment to all those who are concerned about the federal debt!

The point of all this isn't, of course, to make money for the federal government, but to put a proper price on all the harms flowing from our use of fossil fuels- which extend to foreign policy, our endless support of enemies like Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia (woops they are a friend ... a friend!), destruction of landscapes through mining, horrors of ash disposal, not to mention the emissions. The new normal should be concern for future generations and the environment, not for the easy guzzling of today.

A couple more issues come to mind- the role of nuclear power, and the intermittency of solar and wind power. Fukushima was an honest-to-goodness disaster, and will incidentally increase Japan's fossil energy consumption for a long time to come. But it was also a very old design. Future nuclear plants will have safer designs, benefitting from experience, including that at Fukushima. And there are also very interesting reprocessing schemes that could eventually make the nuclear fuel cycle far more benign and manageable than it is today. So nuclear shouldn't be counted out. But like fossil fuels, its costs, including enormous design margins, waste costs, and occasional catastrophic (or at least highly dramatic and disruptive, if not terribly lethal) events, need to be factored in.

Solar and wind power are inherently intermittent power sources, so current policy is reluctant to make them more than 10-20% of the mix on any grid. The solution is energy storage, in the form of water reservoirs, flywheels, compressed gas, or other mechanisms. Such mechanisms will become more efficient with a sufficient market, another important goal of carbon taxes. The situation is reminiscent of the key problem with the electric car- its battery. Indeed, these problems may connect through smart electricity grids that use the fleet of connected cars to stabilize and even out loads on the grid itself. The difficulty of storing energy at both small and large scales certainly highlights the amazing convenience of concentrated, reduced, fossil carbon.

Do electric utilities even care about fuel costs? Aren't they regulated monopolies that pass on all their costs to the consumer, whatever they are? Haven't they been given free passes to charge customers for the enormous and unforeseen costs of nuclear energy? Isn't direct regulation via mandates and rules the better path? I can't claim any expertise in this complicated area. California has accomplished a great deal with enlightened regulation of its electricity providers, keeping its electricity consumption far lower than other states. Nevertheless, all stakeholders need stronger incentives towards sustainable energy, from the householder and driver, up to the power generator, whether well-regulated or not. Simplicity alone argues for a blanket fee on fossil carbon that automatically reaches all of its uses.

Should we wait for China to act first or agree to act in concert? Obiviously, this is the most transparent stalling tactic. Peak oil is coming anyhow. The US has contributed the most to global warming to date, and despite falling behind China in the polluting race, has the greatest moral responsibility to act. The best way to pressure other countries to act is to act ourselves, rather than holding everyone hostage in a game of mutually assured environmental destruction.

I know it seems pollyannish to repeat this theme of carbon taxes in the current political environment of politicians racing to the bottom of demagogic "principles" of greed and corporate subservience, but someday, we will get our heads out of the sand and take responsibility for the future.

Gregor discusses overall energy usage in the US.
The Saudis want the addiction to go on as long as possible.
Putative centrist Michael Lind says ... no worries- let's keep smokin' the dope.
A commenter on the right says we have plenty of energy, no environmental worries, and "... we are in the midst of a Cold Civil War in which each election cycle offers another critical battle." That, at any rate, is true enough.
Economic benefits to California from green energy (pdf).
Where have all the fish gone?
Are we facing a domestic religious war?
What happened to rule of law?
There's someone in my head, but it's not me.
Working for free... has it come to this? Is labor completely neutered?
Krugman- apparently facts have a liberal bias. But facts never stopped anyone...
Economics quote of the week, from Paul Krugman via Bill Mitchell:

"So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility."

And from Bill Black:

"... the IMF was blind to the developing crises. It even praised nations like Ireland during the run up to the crisis, missing the largest bubble (relative to GDP) of any nation, an epidemic of banking control fraud, and the destruction of any pretense to effective Irish banking regulation."