Death of a Species

Callous indifference and business-as-usual greed dooms the delta, and the delta smelt.

As ecological icons go, the delta smelt isn't much. A small silver fish, like a zillion others. But it lives in the way of dredgers, bulldozers, farmers, shippers, and a thirsty multitude. It was put on the endangered species list in 1993, and has kept right on dwindling, until in the most recent count, a single smelt was found. One.

The San Joaquin / Sacramento / San Francisco Bay delta used to be a very large estuary of marshes, reeds, rivers, and islands that gradually fed the great rivers of the Sierras into the Bay and thence through the Golden Gate the Pacific ocean. Fresh water met briny in constant tidal and rain-fed flows. Smelt were obviously not the only beneficiary of this rich ecosystem, but countless shellfish, mammals such as beavers, insects by the billion, and birds by the million. The delta was a major stop on the Pacific flyway for migrating birds. And it was the conduit for several species of now-endangered salmon.

Comparison of the delta as it was, and as it is now. Virtually all its marshland and most of its complex river habitat is gone.

Despite the popular image of California as a state of nature and natural wonders, it has been pillaged in the name of greed from the beginning. The Spanish mission system started the ball rolling by enslaving and decimating the native peoples. Then the gold rush led to thorough destruction and pollution of the rivers, while working its way upwards into the hardrock mines of the Sierra. Next was agriculture, which in California became a rapacious and short-sighted industry, well-illustrated in the now-obscure novel by Frank Norris, The Octopus. Then it was onwards to a thorough re-plumbing of the state by the water lords of Southern California. The latest incarnation of this get-rich quick ethic was the dot-com bubble, by which Silicon Valley took investors all over the world to the cleaners.

The little smelt and all the natural riches it stands for had little chance, of course, when there was free, fertile land to be had by diking, draining, and dredging. A state which had some inclination to protect the spectacular, yet conveniently remote and barren, high Sierras, had no appreciation for the ecological values of wilderness in the bottomlands, even for flood control, which is increasingly difficult as so much of the "reclaimed" land is under sea level, protected by primitive, flimsy dikes. With the extended drought and the vast rerouting of fresh water, the delta has begun to flow backwards, introducing salt as well. But the state, being owned by its commercial interests, leaves public and ecological policy to die a quiet death, along with the smelt.

The planetary climate and biosphere face similar forces of corruption, greed, inertia, and neglect, which will just as soon see it die with a whimper than plan in a public and morally forward thinking spirit for future generations of all species.

• Notes on our friends the Saudis.
• Secularization hypothesis finds new support.
• Further notes from the religion of peace.
• The odd history of US fundamentalism.
• Bruce Bartlett just can't take the corruption any more.
• Even if corruption is quite natural.
• Notes on real estate redlining.
• Economics is not yet a science.
• Silence on fiscal policy is dereliction by central banks.
• Bill Mitchell on the Australian budget process. A cartoon.
• Aetna raises its minimum wage: "The pay raise and benefit program for low-wage workers will cost Aetna only $26 million, while the CEO alone made $15.6 million last year, though most of it in stock options."
• Some problems with TPP.
• Class and money beats performance.
• Essay on the new frontiers of brain science, and its changing nature.
• 110 year old infrastructure for trains? We can do better.
• Two banks find a judge with a spine, after they lied to convince Fannie and Freddie to go subprime.
• Economic graph of the week: Stiglitz on inequality.

The Imperialism of Universal Values

We shouldn't pretend that everyone shares our values.

Values are not universal. It is simple as that. The imputation of our values, even the most rationally derived and well-meaning, to others does not mean they are shared by them. We can claim that there is a basic human nature that intrinsically shares some values. But even then, others may have different priorities, so that even if they share many individual values, they might rank them differently, preventing us from claiming any basic set as absolute or universal. Indeed,  ideologies are notoriously powerful in re-arranging our values, to the point of valuing death over life.

The brief interlude of enthusiasm for universal rights, in the wake of World War 2, might seem to belie this philososphy. But really, it was more of an exercise in victor's justice and idealism, as well as cultural imperialism, than it was a free response of all countries around the world to the new concepts of inalienable human rights. Half the signatories to the declaration of human rights were, after all, totalitarian countries of various stripes. And it came under immediate protest from Islamic countries.

This informs the debates about Muslim responses to Charlie Hebdo, other cartoon provocations, and the West in general. Others may simply not rank free speech as highly as religious belief and cultural tradition. We in the West have a hard-won rationale to prefer our ranking, religion being a font of sensitivities and claims to power that, given precedence, tend to grow endlessly, gobbling up all other rights and ideologies. But the Muslim world has its centuries-long experience as well, which can't simply be disregarded and overrun for the sake of what we call progress. Even if we ideally could take a poll of each affected Muslim to truly, democratically, figure out what they want, as opposed to what their various mouthpieces, governments, and leaders want, that presupposes the validity of democracy, which itself is a contested value.

The same issue extends to the treatment of women. The current Western dispensation towards liberation and equality is extremely novel, even in the West, so whatever its moral virtues in our eyes, and even those of Muslim women if that be the case, it can't claim any intrinsic universality.

This is all to say that the attacks by Muslims on offensive authors and artists can not be addressed by lecturing them or the Muslim world on the sanctity of free speech, human rights, and obvious morality. There may be an argument to make from within the Muslim tradition. The Quran expresses occasional mildness towards unbelievers, instructing to treat them fairly and ignore them otherwise. Unfortunately, such arguments stand little chance against the major themes of the Quran, which pours hatred and scorn on unbelievers and apostates on most other pages.

So perhaps the better argument is simply one of cultural self-preservation. We have a right to our values, whatever they are, and while it would be ideal to convince others of their goodness and rationality, that is far from a guaranteed course. Perhaps these defenses of free speech and rights of journalists are really directed to the choir, to buttress the values we already share, in the face of a terroristic challenge. Which is in fact straightforward cultural warfare, seeking to displace our values with others, and tactically to turn our virtues of openness against us.

The hijab is a particularly effective and notable aspect of this cultural war, being fought in Europe for the most part, the frontier between Middle East and West. While migrants are desperately seeking the safety and economic refuge of Europe, many of those already there seek to carve out cultural islands separate from the larger society, (though often perforce, being discriminated against), and sometimes, to hear what is going on in European mosques, against the larger society. The hijab is a public reminder and marker of this social segregation and power, showing a separate sub-society in the midst of the larger one, even while it relies paradoxically on the freedom the larger society makes possible. It is a message that may be read in various ways, but one way is surely as a rebuke to the dominant values, as many other religious movements have expressed through European history, incidentally.

How do these values relate? If the rebuke being offered were of a constructive nature, as nuns and monks have embodied for centuries, (at least if one takes a charitable perspective!), complete with distinctive clothing, it would not raise much ire. But the offered value system seems, at least to the West, highly distasteful, based as it is in the bigotry of the Quran and the bitter patriarchy, dysfunction, and closed-mindedness of modern Islam. For they have their imperialistic, universal values as well.

It just remains for us to reject those values, without assuming that those who are trying to displace them actually, paradoxically, believe in them. And to protect ourselves physically and socially from their proponents. What makes it tricky is that the Muslim community in this instance is not monolithic, like some army of Mongols at the gates. Many seek to assimilate, the vast majority are peaceful and appalled by their own coreligionists. So it becomes a policing issue of detecting insurgents within the gates; something that, while surely corrosive to our assumptions and traditions of openness, is hardly unprecedented in the history of the West, going back through the Cold War to the history of Venice, which in its heyday had particularly effective intelligence services.

• Prospects for the Middle East ... look poor.
• Afghans aren't the only corrupt ones in Afghanistan.
• Dennett on religion & the future.
• Religion and science are not in conflict at all. Hmmm.
• Scientology was already a criminal organization back in 1973.
• Ford Doolittle, on the stupidity of nature.
• Will management be the last employees?
• Reich on the TPP. Corporations want to run our countries ... more than they do already.
• Krugman: Jobs, pay, and stability are the issue in Baltimore.
• Krugman: Redistribution really works.
• Krugman: Thinking would also work, if more people did it.
• State's rights aren't always the top priority in Nuttistan.
• Supreme court lays another egg. Corruption is OK for other people.
• Economic efficiency has virtually nothing to do with today's inequality. Power and ideology are the issues.
• Bill Mitchell on money and banks, pt 1, pt 2.
• Economic graph of the week, from the IMF. Our finance industry is negative, not positive.

Do Neurons Use GPS?

No, neurons and their axons use chemical guidance signs to find out where they should be going, in huge migrations though development.

The brain and nervous system don't just happen by way of cell division during development. They are products of enormous migrations from points of cellular birth, which are generally at the edges of the nascent structure, such as the ventricles of the brain. And getting the cells to the right place is only half the story, as neurons then send their axons all over the place as well, to create those amazing connections that run our bodies and minds. Neurons that enter our feet typically have their cell bodies at the base of the spinal chord and send axons along a tortuous path that of course ends up going about three feet in adults. It is astounding.

Some of our neurons are very long, and for most neurons, their axons as well as cell bodies migrate substantial distances during development.

Obviously, the mechanisms behind these movements are going to complex. One example is in the brain, where new neurons travel out to the various layers they are destined to inhabit via a scaffold of guide cells, the radial glia. Even when such physical structure helps out, the primary mechanism is a sort of pheromone system, like what ants use when making trails, but a good deal more involved. A recent paper describes the chemical signals that guide neural axons of the mouse through a critical crossing at the midline of the spinal chord.

These axons are called "commissural axons", since they cross the bilateral joining point, or commissure between the two sides of the body. In the brain, the corpus collosum is a large bundle of such axons.

"For example, commissural axons are initially repelled by bone morphogenic proteins (BMPs) in the dorsal half of the spinal cord. They are then attracted by gradients of Netrin-1, Sonic hedgehog (Shh) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) towards the floor plate."

The floor plate (bottom) secretes two molecules, Shh and Netrin, in wild-type mammals. If either one is mutated and absent, neurons that normally use gradients formed by those molecules to know where they are going do not find their way as reliably.

"While it is known that both Shh and Netrin-1 form gradients, it is not clear how steep the gradients are in vivo and how this steepness influences axon pathfinding in gradients formed by single or multiple guidance cues. Although theoretical chemotaxis modeling has suggested that two overlapping attractive concentration gradients could increase the probability of a cell making a correct decision about the gradient direction, this prediction has not been tested experimentally."

The "pass" from one side of the spinal chord to the other, at the early embryonic times when this axon extension process takes place, is called the floor plate of the neural tube. It is the site of expression of at least two guidance molecules, the proteins Shh and Netrin. These are secreted and form a gradient that is sensed by receptor proteins on the axons, specifically by their pseudopod-like front end called the growth cone. One trick is that once axons find their way to the floor plate, they need to reverse their response pattern so that they grow away from it instead of towards it. This repulsion from the floor place is known to be mediated by another molecule, Slit.

But that is not the topic of the current paper, which simply makes the observation that for the attraction phase of axon growth, two signals is better than one. This has been presaged by mutant studies where the mutation of each individual gradient attractant, Shh and Netrin, causes worse axon guidance, but not a complete breakdown of commissure formation as happens when both are deleted (see figure above).

Neural growth cones seen in the process of deciding where to go. Gradients are indicated by the black triangles at sides, as set up in the lab. "A" presents a schematic of a growth cone showing asymmetry of the protein signaling kinase SFK, which accumulates internally on the more highly stimulated side, reflecting part of the cell's mechanism for detecting the outside guidance molecule signaling gradient. SFK responds to both Netrin and Shh.

The researchers take this all in vitro, reproducing the gradients with microfluidic cells, and asking how their cultured neurons move in response. They find that, as expected, gradients that are shallow as they are in the embronic setting where the axons spend most of their time are not very good at guidance for each molecule individually.

Summary of experiments, showing both axon migration (the cell bodies are dots, and the axons lines) and SFK kinase orientation within growth cones, all responding to the combination of two shallow signaling gradients more reliably than to either alone.

They also show that within the guided growth cone, a key protein (kinase) that transmits the Netrin and Ssh signals from outside to inside itself adopts a biased concentration gradient, matching what is detected outside. Aside from validating the other findings, this provides some rationale for large sized of growth cones, which by spreading out physically can detect relatively shallow gradients of their signalling molecules.

It is not a momentous paper, but a small step on the way to learning how the nervous system develops ... from one cell to the most complicated machine in the universe.

• This week in Nuttistan: "ISIS also imposed gun control immediately upon takeover of the terrain under its control.  Totalitarians fear weapons as the only threat to their supremacy.  Do not ever allow yours to be confiscated. The next step is enslavement and death."
• Who are you calling "we"?! Just because someone discovered the Higgs doesn't mean that everyone is a smartypants.
• A godsend for the godless.
• A corrupt God vs the New Deal.
• Big data needs big rules and regulation.
• We have a lot to answer for in Cambodia.
• Grexit is neigh, and neigh-well unavoidable.
• Going to college? Caveat emptor.
• The blue line isn't so thin. And is increasingly corrupt.
• Remember the Dominican Republic?
• Climate change talk is like religion? Just what does the GOP think is wrong with religion?
• Oh ... ISIS deals with some more so-called apostates.

Radio 1: Consciousness as a Streaming Information Service

The benchmark of modern theories of consciousness, by Bernard Baars, 1986: "A cognitive theory of consciousness."

One of the more contentious and mysterious areas in science is consciousness. Its existence was long denied by behaviorist psychology, yet long-standing schools of (idealistic) philosophy have held that it is the only thing that exists at all- that all else is an illusion, or at least subsidiary to the great reality which is consciousness. The universe itself is conscious!

Well, that is absurd, but it indicates the trickiness of a subject that attempts to explain our ability to think about subjects. One quickly gets into philosophical, if not logical, thickets. But it is pretty clear that inanimate matter doesn't think, while we and our fellow animals have, after billions of years of painful evolution, graded abilities to think about things, including ourselves, which arise from that organ behind our eyes ... the brain.

The study of consciousness is now a hot academic field, but that happened only in the last couple of decades, after the long hiatus of behaviorism. Bernard Baars's book from 1986 is a watershed in the field, presenting a functional theory of consciousness which has little to say about its physiological basis, but has profound things to say about its phenomenology, internal logic, and purpose. Its model (consciousness as global workspace) remains the basis for current work in the field.

In some respects, consciousness is extremely small, not to mention slow. We can barely attend to one thing at a time and remember maybe five to seven things in short term memory. Anything we do consciously must be done at a snail's pace, and only once learned becomes faster as it also becomes automatized, and sinks into the unconscious. The unconscious is, in contrast, endlessly vast, taking care of physiological functions all over the body, analyzing speech as we hear it, translating our thoughts into speech as we speak it, and on and on. It is a parallel, not serial, fleet of processors, some of which are very fast. Any action we take is made up wholly of unconscious mechanisms. All we are conscious of is maybe the goal of reaching for a cup, (or typing a letter on a keyboard), and all the calculation and activations in between are taken care of, like magic. A practiced typist won't even think about reaching for individual letters anymore, but will fluently type by the word, or more.

Yet consciousness does one thing that none of these other, learned, unconscious processes do, which is broadcast information extremely widely over a vast population of other (unconscious) processors. When reading some text- consciously, and only consciously- it is judged by a variety of processes that operate outside of immediate consciousness. Is the syntax correct? Is the style fashionable? Is the content interesting? Is the spelling correct? Is the meaning connected to the last sentence? The fact that these issues and many others can only be analyzed when one is "paying attention" has great meaning for the nature and role of consciousness.

I used to think that consciousness was the caboose on the train of thought. The classic experiments of Libet showed that for any action, even so-called voluntary action, electrodes can pick up activating signals well before one is conscious of a choice being made. And it is obvious with the slowness and high-level nature of consciousness that anything that enters it has gone through a great deal of prior processing at other levels of the system. But that doesn't mean that consciousness is only a spectator. No other process provides the integrating, broad reach across virtually every process in the brain, at a high level. Bringing something into consciousness means testing it for coherence at many levels, from spelling to consonance with our model of the world and hierarchy of goals.

Thus consciousness is an active function, specially tasked with broadcasting novel data far and wide over the multifarious pool of unconscious processes, which can each in turn comment on what they see. Is an object moving in the distance? Such an event exites special visual processors and calls to attention what may have not been there before. Conscious attention then allows us to consult our full cognitive battery of memory, world model, goals, etc. to decide what that object might be, in relation to our needs.

This leads to Baars to consider the stream of consciousness phenomenon. Why is it so tenuous and fluid? The fact is that we are virtually unable to attend to unchanging stimuli. Even loud noises, if repeated endlessly, fade out of awareness. The hedonistic treadmill is notorious for habituating us to any pleasure or good forture we may experience, which is soon taken for granted and cast aside in a search for the *next great thing. Consciousness concerns itself with information, in the formal computational sense. Whenever some activity starts to pall or become routine, it fades from consciousness. When learning new skills, this is a good thing, as sufficient repetition causes the whole process to go automatic and unconscious, like touch typing. Good or bad, the phenomenon seems to be universal as well as clearly adaptive. We are constantly on the hunt for novelty and information. Whatever is been-there-done-that is relegated to the dustbin of memory, or obliviousness.

It should also be obvious at this point why conciousness is so narrow and singular. If some data is supposed to be broadcast and commented on by many, indeed all available, other processes for integrated evaluation of an ambiguous or novel situation, there can only be one such item at a time. Consciousness is a radio station we listen to one story at a time. It is, and must be, a serial processor. Baars marvels at the then-trendy studies in biofeedback, which demonstrated that with enough training, virtually every part of the body and mind can be manipulated consciously. Individual muscles can be trained, blood pressure changed, etc. This phenomenon is coming into clinical use for various prosthetic appliances, which can be controlled by all sorts of muscles or thought patterns that wouldn't at first glance be candidates for actuators of voluntary action.

What gets access to consciousness? Again, unconscious processes lead the way. A big driver is our internal hierarchy of goals, one of the major unconscious functions that interacts with conciousness. Do we want a sandwich? A walk? A newspaper? Money? Survival? Life is complicated that way, as needs come up all the time at all levels. When a super-high level goal comes under fire, we are rivetted. Earthshaking experiences change conciousness itself, by re-arranging the unconscious contexts that underly it- it is not the earth that shakes, at least most of the time. Hallucinogens like LSD can have this kind of deep, long-lasting effect. On the other hand, if information comes along that violates a high-level model of reality particularly egregiously, we may also block it out rather than take on the problem of breaking down our painstakingly developed models of reality, (contexts, in Baars's teminology). Thus we fight cognitive dissonance to save them by rationalization, confirmation bias, denial, etc. Bears makes a point of the coherence that conscious contents must have to be useful, which rests on the cooperation of the many unconscious processes / contexts that join to create conscious contents. If these sub-processes conflict rather than cooperate, the result may not be conscious novelty, but rather indecision at lower levels and lack of consciousness on that topic.

Dreams naturally arrive on this train of thought as well, though Baars leaves that topic as an exercise for the reader. Baars does note that consciousness is heavily visual, with much less vivid access to abstractions than to scenes in front of our eyes. He speculates that this may indicate the evolutionary history of consciousness began in straight sensation, and only later attracted goal evaluation, retrospection, planning, inner speech, and all the other aspects that so enrich consciousness for us. During sleep we are released from the immediate layers of the goal system, so one might hypothesize that the consciousness apparatus turns towards free experimentation, using imagery to explore the deeper levels of our unconscious contexts- the goal, memory and prediction systems, which are susceptible to many complexities and internal contradictions. Dramatic role-playing, which is such staple of waking entertainment as a way into the mysteries of the human condition, are here personally staged for our continuing development.

Indeed, the theater is a leading metaphor for consciousness itself:

One can compare the mind of a man to a theater of indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron [i.e. front of the stage] there is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on ... Among the scenery and on the far-off stage ... . unknown evolutions take place incessantly among this crowd of actors of every kind, to furnish the stars who pass before our eyes one by one, as in a magic lantern.
-Hyppolite Taine, 1871

Lastly, one must wonder at how this is instantiated physically. The fact, and it does seem to be a fact, that consciousness involves wide broadcast of its narrow content, with far-flung systems both understanding what they are receiving and sending back ongoing commentary, requires a lingua franca of the mind. One aspect of this is clearly the gamma oscillation, which co-occurs with attentive consciousness and fits the model of something that unites broad but temporary coalitions of brain areas. But what is the code? What is the wave carrying? Is mere coordinated activation from one specialized area to another enough to form useful communication? That is hard to believe, but as yet, our tools are too narrow, or too crude in time or space resolution to figure out what this code might be.

Baars speculates that all goals and abstractions seem to have fleeting imagery in consciousness, again harkening back to the perceptual bias of consciousness. Our use of metaphor in language is naturally tied up with this phenomenon. Thus it may be imagery that is in some functional sense the lingua franca of the system, thought that still does not say how so many parts of the brain could recognize this language, especially the many humble parts that really do not seem to deal in imagery at all, like syntax checking, posture, "aha"- type solution verification, etc. Perhaps imagery forms a high-level language of aspirations, fears, planning, etc., without being needed for low level processes. This would tie in with the Jungian conception of the unconscious, with its core of archetypal images, our experience of them in dreams, and our need to develop and express them in art.

• Cognitive nature and nurture in Scrabble.
• But is the presidential campaign "news" enough to enter consciousness?
• People do have their own facts.
• On anger, and its cheap dismissal.
• Myths of the mythically-minded.
• A big key to poverty- violence, lawlessness, corruption.
• Like in Qatar.
• Best case scenario from the WSJ: wages are awful, peaked in 1972.
• The labor market won't do it alone ... we need better policy towards redistribution.
• Do we need "low cost, low wage" economies anywhere in the US? Where public assistance makes up the difference? No is the short answer.
• IBM luvs Louisiana.
• Reason prevails, barely, in Comcast merger.
• Props to the Hubble.
• Neonicotinoids even worse than thought.
• Islam: "But it also brought together peoples who’d never had a common worldview, or shared humanity, before." And.. "And there can be no freedom if we are stuck believing in people, like Hirsi Ali and her ilk." ... who had to move to the US due to Islamist threats on her life. The author is scattershot in his apologetics, but well-intentioned.
• Please don't use bar graphs for complex data.
• A little mesmerizing cymbalon.

The WSJ agrees- wages have been stagnant for a very long time in the US, clearly not related to productivity growth.

Evolution Sweeps Away Diversity

Natural selection carries off a large portion of neutral genetic diversity in large populations.

One would expect that large populations accumulate much more genetic diversity than small ones, over time. But if you watch those nature shows about herds of wildebeest roving over the Serengeti, it is very hard to see that variation. They behave as one, and look highly similar. Indeed, contrary to naive theory, larger populations tend not to have proportionately more genetic diversity than small ones. Why? The classical equilibrium law of population genetics assumes that larger populations naturally would have more variation, proportional to the number of members and the lengths of their various separate lineages. To balance this out, it also takes longer for any single new mutation to spread through such a population, so the ultimate rate of fixation of new mutations is no faster in large populations that it is in small ones.

"Under the assumptions of the neutral model of molecular evolution, the amount of variation present in a population should be directly proportional to the size of the population. However, this prediction does not tally with real-life observations: levels of genetic diversity are found to be substantially more uniform, even among species with widely differing population sizes, than expected."

But empirically, this expected high level of variation has not been true, even for neutral (unselected) alleles. This difference between theory and reality has been termed a paradox, and a recent paper (review) recounts the arguments above, showing that it is natural selection which constantly clears off accumulated variation, including completely neutral alleles that have no selective effect at all. This paper is not the first to address this whole paradox theoretically, but is the first to give an definitive quantitative solution.

"We show that genomic signature of natural selection is pervasive across most species, and that the amount of linked neutral variation removed by selection correlates with proxies for population size. We propose that pervasive natural selection constrains neutral diversity and provides an explanation for why neutral diversity does not scale as expected with population size."

Comparison of two species, one with large population size (fruit fly, A) and one with very small population size (Przwalski's horse, B). The gray dots are estimates drawn from 500k basepair windows across each genome of the local recombination rate (X axis), which can vary a great deal along chromosomes, and the local level of mutation and variation (Y axis). In a completely neutral theory, these measures should not correlate with each other (red line). The model developed in the paper is shown in the blue lines, where in a large population with lots of selection going on, regions with relatively low recombination show dramatically less variation, consistent with the rare selected mutation in those areas (whether positively or negatively selected) carrying a large number of neutral alleles with them, either to fixation (positive selection) or to their demise.

The issue is one of linkage. Imagine a long chromosome, with lots of genes and mutations. If one of those mutations is bad, then all the other mutations near it will be carried along with the bad one into oblivion, even if they did no harm themselves. The degree of linkage is a matter of the local recombination rate. Some areas of our genome recombine much faster than other areas, and thus allow more fine (selective) separation between nearby mutations, as they end up in different gametes and individuals due to the recombination that happens during meiosis.

So these researchers took a census of multiple genomes from many different species, (63 billion sequencing reads in all), measuring local recombination rates and mutation rates. They found that the bigger the species' population, the more clearly the prediction of correlation between the two measures came out in the data. Thus fruit flies, with a vast natural population, have roughly two-thirds the genetic diversity one would naively expect. The rest seems to have ended up shot down, innocent victims standing a little too close to more deleterious mutations.

In smaller populations, selection is just as fierce, but the level of neutral genetic diversity isn't expected to be as large in the first place, so loss by random drift plays a stronger role than loss as a byproduct of selection.

Humans are an good example. Now we are a huge population, but in genetic terms, we are practically clones compared to most other species. This is mostly because we were a very small population not long ago, and have only reached seven billion in an evolutionary eyeblink. So we have the genetics of a small population. But even in small populations, selection will have this diversity reducing effect, at a lower level. The intense selective evolution we went through over the millions of years prior not only kept populations small, but spread attractive and advantageous features through the population, at the expense of some of the other variation that was lying about.

In a way, this is an explanation for why species remain coherent entities through time. Their genetic diversity doesn't just grow endlessly into genetic chaos, but stays centered, in some abstract sense. Recombination and mating keep the genetic elements of the population continually mixing in a cloud of closely related forms, but it is selection that trims the outliers, both neutral and deleterious, keeping the cloud coherent, even as it also moves the entire cloud in new directions over the evolutionary landscape.

• The progress of inequality. (with graphs). Did supply-side mean 1%-side?
• Some sharp words for those new atheists.
• But people will believe anything. In for a penny, in for a pound with Scientology.
• A hopeful sign towards a more equitable world.
• Theology remains utterly absurd.
• Keynes on inequality, interest, the lower bound, and demand.
• Pay what you wish: the IRS is now toothless.
• "Redistribution", or justice?

RNA, RNA Everywhere

The enhancers that drive transcription are themselves transcribed, in a regulatory process.

The last decade or two have not only brought a genomic revolution in molecular biology, but also remarkable discoveries in RNA, finding micro RNAs, conserved long non-coding RNAs, piRNAs, siRNAs, snoRNAs, and now eRNAs, for enhancer RNA. Even though most of the genome is junk and remains junk, 80% of it is transcribed, so the cell turns out to be a flurry of all sorts of incredibly diverse RNAs beyond the classic molecular biology trinity, which is: mRNA to carry the gene sequence from the DNA, tRNAs that serve as the plug-in adapters between triplets on those mRNA messages and the amino acids they will become in the protein, and the rRNA that forms the body and catalytic core of the ribosome, operating the converyor belt that brings together the first two RNAs to synthesize proteins.

In retrospect, we perhaps should not have been so surprised, since RNA has been there from the most ancient period of life, and the messiness of biology tends to elaborate complexity, using any wrinkle or handle as a regulatory process. But for a couple of decades we were blinded by the preponderant relative mass (and, to be fair, importance) of the RNA trinity in the cell, and only recently have we had the technical means to find the great diversity lurking beneath.

A recent review catalogues the findings and hypotheses about the newest member of this tribe, eRNA, in detail. In eukaryotes, especially as they become more complicated, genes are driven by quite elaborate collections of "enhancers", which are DNA segments typically far upstream, by thousands to hundreds of thousands of base pairs, that bear a cluster of DNA binding sites where regulatory proteins bind, which either turn that gene off or on. One gene may have many separate enhancers, each typically devoted to one phase of development and/or one location in the body where it drives the activity of its target gene.

Schematic of gene control, showing an enhancer (LCR) that has several colored regulatory proteins bound to it. At the same time that it loops through space to contact its target (ßmaj gene), it is also transcribed to short RNAs (red) by RNA polymerase (P). The small discs all over the place are histones (H), which are modified with various colored methyl and acetyl groups in another regulatory process.

Enhancers can do this because they form loops from their distant sites, to contact the start point of their target gene, at what is called the promoter (pictured above as a bold elbow+arrow, when active). This arrangement means that it hardly makes much difference how far away the enhancer is- the proteins it binds can ignore the many kilobases, sometimes hundreds of kilobases, of linear distance in the DNA between themselves and the target gene's start site. But it also means that there needs to be some way to "insulate" one gene and its gaggle of far-off enhancers from those of other genes, which one wouldn't want crossing over into each other's territory and turning each other on. That is a story for another time.

The new and quite paradoxical finding is that enhancers are themselves transcribed, and that these resulting eRNAs are not just accidental junk, but play a significant role in the operation of the enhancer and the regulation of its target gene. As pictured above, (in red), eRNAs come streaming off the enhancer long before the target gene gets turned on. And if those eRNAs are degraded by an experimenter's intervention, typically (and ironically) by programming siRNAs against them, then the target gene turns on much less than otherwise. So it is not just the act of enhancer transcription that is important, though that is thought to have some regulatory effects as well, but the products themselves, at least in some cases.

eRNAs are thought to interact with another level of regulation, which operates through the histones which typically package all eukaryotic DNA. Any protein that binds to a specific site needs to get through this packaging, which can happen in some cases by detecting the DNA on the outside of the histone, or by waiting for a stochastic loosening of the histone from the DNA. But after the pioneer proteins find their sites, they can attract other regulators that specifically modify lysines (K) on the histone with methyl and ethyl groups, neutralizing their charge and lowering their binding affinity to the negatively charged DNA. This process "opens" up the chromatin for other regulatory proteins to bind. The specific lysines that are modified on histones constitute a complex code that marks areas in chromatin for various stages of transcriptional and other activity. The eRNAs have yielded mixed behavior in this pathway, sometimes being required for histone modification at target genes, though not typically at the enhancer region.

Much is still unknown about these eRNAs- how general their occurrence is, how they work, what these little RNAs are doing in the enhancer-promoter complex, and what drives their own transcription. It is like wheels turning within wheels, within wheels- where does the gene activation process ultimately begin?

• Bonus reference on eRNA.
• The NCAA competition is wonderful, but its organization and inequality are not. This should be nationalized.
• Like lots of other things.
• Bibi has a screw loose.
• Yes, religion doesn't make any (rational) sense. And, yes, theological institutions are a farce, educationally.
• In case you were clueless about the NBC saga.
• Pilots are another abused class of worker. No wonder one gets depressed.
• Austerity correlates with recovery ... negatively.
• Open carry? Not at the NRA convention.
• People are instinctively socialist, and fair. Image from the talk, on inquality:

Our Drug War: Ignoring Social Poverty and Exporting Paranoia

How our horrible drug war became everyone's nightmare: Johann Hari on Point of Inquiry.

Unusually, this is a podcast review, rather than a book review. But you never know where something interesting is going to come from. Johann Hari has written a book about the war on drugs- its origins and rationale, and was interviewed on the atheist podcast, Point of Inquiry. The story is remarkable and shocking.

Way back, when the Victorians such as Arthur Conan Doyle were doing cocaine and opium, no one thought to criminalize such drugs. If you wanted to kill yourself, go ahead. But temperance (vs alcohol) set the stage for the criminalization concept, (and its utter failure), in an extreme case of historical irony. As Hari portrays it, the end of prohibition led its leaders and bureaucratic apparatus to look for other ways to retain power and stay occupied. Presto.. the heightened criminalization of heroin and marijuana, which had begun in with the Harrison Narcotics act in 1914. Note that the most addictive drugs of all were left untouched and continue to kill millions of people yearly ... nicotine and alcohol.

There is no question that this is a class-based construction, and Hari cites intense racism as a motivating factor, as the "hard" drugs such as opium, heroin, and marijuana were thought to be favored by the lower classes. Billy Holiday is a big focus of story.

But the irony is that these addictions are not as deterministic as we have been led to believe. Rats as the model organism are brought in to show that while in the original experiments, they certainly preferred drug-laced water to plain water, these were run in bare cages where the rats were bored out of their minds, anxious, unhappy. If the same experiment is run in more normal conditions, in a physically and socially enriched environment, rats do not become addicted. They prefer a real, normal existence to one that is zonked out.

Hari also cites the experience of Switzerland, which has maintained a medical model of drug treatment (which we used to have, before it was taken over by the mania of the drug war). Addicts get their drugs prescribed, take them daily, and go about their lives. They also tend to quit on their own eventually, again preferring reality to a drugged life. It is a very low-stress solution to the problems of addiction. Much lower stress than the warfare that the US has used its leading post-war position to export around the world, severely damaging countries such as Colombia and Mexico in an effort to criminalize and stamp out what clearly can not be stamped out.

But the main issue is one of class and social support. When large swathes of the population are alienated, degraded, discarded, and dehumanized, drug addiction can naturally become a large-scale, scary problem. We would be tempted to treat it with zero tolerance, with mass incarceration, and a world-wide attempt to interdict the offending substances. Yet the problem lies not in the drugs, but in ourselves.

• Organized crime, or organized religion?
• Europe's little ice age may not have happened. But current warming is happening.
• Not every employee at Citi was/is a criminal.
• If corporations are people, they aren't very good people.
• Market failure or government failure? The ideology of monetarism.
• One reason why education will never solve inequality: " the continuing tragedy of adjunctification".
• A glimmer of hope against the neonicotinoids.
• Why does anyone take Putin's nuclear blackmail seriously?

Thomas Piketty: We Are Heading Into a World Where We Do Not Want to Be, Pt 2

I review Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, second and concluding part.

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is the landmark economics book of our time, not because it is especially advanced in an academic sense, but because it situates basic questions of wealth and its distribution within a very long historical perspective, raising questions about where we want to be and go as a society. The profession of economics rose to prominence in the twentieth century, when high growth was the norm and when very significant disruptions happened which had reduced the role of inherited, accumulated capital. This turns out not to be a regime that could go on forever, but rather a very unusual condition that has blinded the profession to other forms of capitalism. Through the longer history, low growth and a very heavy weight of inherited capital, combined with its strongly unequal distribution, was the norm, creating feudal or feudal-like conditions. With the Occupy movement, this realization of where we are headed hit the wider culture, but Piketty provides the data, the in-depth research, the historical perspective, and the prescription for what to do about it.

While one cause of all this inequality was, traditionally, straightforward war and seizure (think of the Norman invasion of Britain), the other reason, and why such inequality becomes so entrenched, is (apart from political and social factors) that capital always commands a price, roughly 5% (typically as land rent, in the old days). So if an economy grows at only 1% or less, which is traditional, and capital returns 5%, then capital will grow continuously, relative to the rest of the economy, in perpetuity. And indeed, the more capital one starts with, the more efficiently it can be managed and the higher return it yields.

It is a bit like a casino where the house always earns 5%. Now imagine that the doors are shut and no one can leave. All the chips eventually find their way to the house, and economic activity winds down to nothing (or solely what the house spends for its own consumption, which may be minimal) due to the immiseration of the gambling masses. If the house makes loans to its customers, this only delays the inevitable, since they those customers will never have the means to repay. In the very old days when kings ruled the land, their generosity was critical for economic functioning. If they spent all their time hording their treasure instead of distributing it, everyone else lived in abject poverty.

The only countervailing factors are disruptions like war and revolution, unusual growth either demographic or technological, or, at the terminus after very high accumulation, a slackening of the return on capital, if there is truly too much of it relative to a slackening economic activity. Marx, incidentally, realized this, and assumed that wealth increases forever, and thus requires a revolution for corrective redistribution. Hopefully we can do better. The irony is that the French revolution, by Piketty's data, did very little to redistribute wealth, even as it did so much to redistribute heads. And the Soviet revolutions revealed the significant importance that private capital does have, even if it tends to become maldistributed over time.

All this was touched on in part 1. Now that capital has recovered in the rich countries since the disruptions of the twentieth century to a roughly normal level of five to eight times annual national income, the process of its concentration is proceeding to create a rentier society where a large aristocracy of wealth controls the economic system. In addition, it bids to control the political system as well, and will inevitably reshape the social system to reflect its dominance. Piketty also points out that such inequality saps the ability of a middle class to exist, exacerbates financial instability, and reduces overall prosperity due to a lack of income among the majority of the population. One only has to compare our current time, or the Belle Epoch of France, (for example as portrayed in the novels of Marcell Proust, whose narrator is endlessly besotted with social climbing up the aristocratic ladder of his day), to the very middle class post-war era in the US to understand this remarkable contrast.

"The history of the progressive tax over the course of the twentieth century suggests that the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed. Is was war that gave rise to progressive taxation, not the natural consequences of universal sufferage. The experience of France in the Belle Époque proves, if proof were needed, that no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interests- and that includes economists, who currently occupu an enviable place in the US income hierarchy. Some economists have an unfortunate tendency to defend their own private interests while implausibly claiming to champion the general interest. Although data on this are sparse, it also seems that US politicians of both parties are much wealthier than their European counterparts and in a totally different category from the average American, which might explain why they tend to confuse their own private interest with the general interest. Without a radical shock, it seems fairly likely that the current equilibrium will persist for some time. The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion, and the New World may be on the verse of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century's globalized economy."

So, here we are, and it isn't pretty. What does Piketty propose to do about it? He has several axes to grind, actually. But above all he points out the absurdity of living in an epoch of supposedly democratic capitalism, and not knowing who owns what ... not knowing where the money is. We have an income tax that reveals in quite thorough fashion (to the government, at least) what each person's income is. But wealth? That is a completely different story. Piketty has had to piece together his academic wealth data from all sorts of odds and ends, mostly unsatisfactory. He even descends to using the Forbes list of billionaires, hardly a rigorous trove of data. So goal one is basic transparency, so that we, as citizens, can see what is going on.

Second, and drawing his most vituperative comments, are the existence of tax havens like the tiny countries of Europe, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Cyprus, etc., which parasitise on their larger neighbors by relieving them of the taxes of their richest citizens. For us in the US, the Cayman Islands come to mind, home to much of Mitt Romney's wealth. This race to the bottom of financial governance is appalling, and has no place in a just and well-run world.

Third comes the actual aim of mitigating large fortunes so that they do not grow without end to create a parasitic class of rentiers. These aims come together in his proposal of a global annual wealth tax of, say, 1%. It would require reporting and thus transparency. Indeed it would involve reporting directly from the accounts held, much as income is currently reported directly and automatically by the W2 form in the US. It would be global and thus eliminate the possibility of escape, subterfuge, and regulatory competition. And it would be substantial, stemming the natural process of feudalization that is the path we are on, not just in the US, but world-wide.

Over a generation, this tax would be roughly equivalent to a 30% estate tax, which in my view is, frankly, not enough. Piketty does recommend that this tax be progressive, rising to as high as 5% on very large fortunes. But if their return is in the 5-10% range, then their growth will only be slowed, not stemmed. The very idea that priviliged children get not only their genes from their parents, and a lifetime of educational and social advantages, but also enormous piles of money, is abhorrent as well as wasteful. If they are so talented by way of their natural advantages, why should they, of all people, not benefit society by working? As a society, our interest is in harnessing the talents of everyone to the fullest extent. Allowing substantial wealth inheritance flies completely against this principle, and isn't very healthy for the recipients of such largesse, either. As a "rights" issue, the rights of the parent to bequeth as he or she sees fit should not extend to the right of children to come into enormous estates just because they happen to be born to Thistlewaite and Ambrosia Moneybags. Society at large needs to come in between to restore some semblence of justice here. It is the epitome of what used to be called "unearned income".

"In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just a rapidly since he stopped working. Once a fortune is established, the capital grows according to a dynamic of its own, and it can continue to grow at a rapid pace for decades simply because of its size. ... Money tends to reproduce itself."

Along the way, Piketty devotes a brief chapter to the public debt crisis. As an MMT acolyte, I am not sure why he regards it as a crisis, (apart from Europe, where the confused system of not-really-sovereign debt truly is in crisis), or why paying it off is seen as good, or what point there is in calculating the net wealth position of the public sector. (Which is zero:  public assets are typically balanced by public debt). Since it prints the currency and manages the entire monetary as well as military and taxation system, the wealth of a truly sovereign state is effectively (potentially) infinite, depending only on our collective desires and productivity. Piketty's biggest beef is that the public is obliged to pay its public bondholders interest in perpetuity- money that could be better spent elsewhere, like on education- and that the rich should be paying this money in taxes rather than lending in return for continual income. Which is a fair point. He offers that a one-time wealth tax of roughly 15% would suffice to eliminate public debt entirely. Not a bad thing, I am sure, but hardly the most important policy need, other than in Europe. I guess the basic issue is whether the interest paid on public bonds is onerous or not. It has been an extra burden during the time when inflation was winding down from the high of the seventies, involving a bonus payment for inflation risk, and monetary lag. But now, with rates roughly at zero, and probably destined to remain at the inflation level for a long time to come, the net burden for truly sovereign debt seems to be relatively low.

Piketty secondly promotes the idea of higher taxes on income at the highest brackets, going back to roughly 80%. He spends quite a bit of space demonstrating that the wealth divergence in the US owes more, as yet, to the amazing income of high-level executives than to the build-up of "old money". Old money will surely come as a maturing vintage, as it has in France. These super-high incomes are not due to the super-talented artists, athletes, and inventors. No, it is (95%) the suited class of high-level corporate managers, by far: people Piketty terms "super-managers". Not because they manage particularly well- the data shows conclusively that that is not the case. But "super" from how much corporate wages and profits they have been able to capture, out from under the noses of workers on one side, and shareholders on the other. And one proven way to discourage such greed - perhaps better called embezzlement - is to place confiscatory tax rates on excessively high incomes.

It goes without saying, of course, that unearned income such as dividends, interest, and capital gains, should be taxed at least as high, if not higher, than labor income. How we all got bamboozzled by the Reagan era's pro-capital ideology (double-taxation! entrepreneurialism!) is frankly hard to understand. (Piketty engages in a subtle discussion of the point of corporate income taxation while dividends and capital gains are simultaneously taxed.) When all is said and done, the Piketty program would thoroughly undo the "Reagan Revolution" of greed, which led as surely as night follows day to the inequality, the high indebtedness, the corporate short-term-ism, the lower-class misery, the public poverty, and the financial instability we see today. The question is whether our politics have already been so captured by the 1% that Piketty's program is as impossible as the entire commentariat seems to think. Stranger things have happened, in the US, not so long ago.

• Piketty on student debt. Another mechanism of class war.
• Piketty on Piketty.
• There's nothing quite like the death tax.
• Krugman on recent GOP budgets, involving trillion dollar asterisks: "Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer."
• GOP, right on cue ... let's eliminate capital gains taxes!
• The media landscape of modern authoritarianism.
• We evidently have too much oil for our own good, let alone coal.
• Burned on both ends.. the real cost of coal.
• Defects in market capitalism, continued ... hospitals.
• We know it's fake, but do theology anyhow.
• Maybe the norms in housing and mortgage lending got out of hand.
• Let your people go!

Thomas Piketty: We Are Heading Into a World Where We Do Not Want to Be

I review Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Part 1

The tome of the (new) century turned out to be a surprisingly easy read. Perhaps Piketty pulls his punches, and dumbed the subject down a bit. He certainly has tried hard to make his arguments accessible, never tiring of citing Balzac and Jane Austin. His book is pleasantly clear and rewarding to attentive reading.

The Wall Street Journal sneers at the "redistributionists" among us, who are ready to steal the hard-earned wealth of the gifted and talented, pissing it to the wind of the poor who will always be with us. But that obviously assumes a few things about both the rich and the poor. Piketty's project is to map the evolution of wealth (and, to a lesser extent, income) over the last few centuries and across as much of the world as provides decipherable data. He makes many points, but perhaps the most significant is that over the vast majority of time, (which includes the past and future), wealth tends to be extremely unequally held, and is gained through inheritance and passive investment, not through boot-strap pulling, stick-to-it-tiveness, disruptive innovation, or other bromides of the comfortable set.

No, feudalism is the norm, and if we don't want a feudal society, (means of production being, in good Marxian terms, the template of social relations), we will have to do something positive about it. The mid-twentieth century was, in Piketty's analysis, an extremely rare time- something we look back on as a golden age that escaped this default feudalism, for several reasons. First was war and pillage, which obviously destroyed much of the wealth that had been built up over the guilded age, Belle Époch, and prior generations. Second was rapid population growth, which naturally increased the economic pie and diluted fortunes. Third is economic growth via technological advancement, which was truly astonishing through this time, and had the same effect of diluting old money with new. And last was war and rapine again, by way of the communal spirit it instilled, which inspired and justified remarkably progressive rates of taxation.

Piketty shows that during this unusual period, work was strongly rewarded, since even at the highest levels of wealth, (1%, 0.1%), it was labor income that was the principal source of income, rather than capital income. It takes generations for levels of wealth to rise from such a catastrophe back to the amount (of about eight times annual national income) that characterizes most societies, and is starting to characterize ours once again. Now, in these leading demographics of the 1% and above, which used to be termed the aristocracy, inheritance is becoming once again a more important source of income than labor. Incidentally, one might note the perspective this casts on the minority and especially black experience in America, which is one of perpetual oppression, especially economic, also generations in the making, which will take generations to remedy.

The structural reasons that Piketty supplies are relentless. Since capital tends to earn very regular returns, of about 5%, and still does, even with the vast amounts of capital floating around, thanks to the great elasticity of capital / labor subsitution in our age; and since economic and demographic growth are returning to more normal levels of about 1-2%, capital will always grow during normal periods.

There has always been some perplexity about what to do about this structural dominance of capital. Indeed, this book gave me a clearer understanding of the ancient antipathy towards usury:

Rent is not an imperfection in the  market: it is rather the consequence of a "pure and perfect" market for capital, as economists understand it: a capital market in which each owner of capital, including the least capable of heirs, can obtain the highest possible yield on the more diversified portfolio that can be assembled in the national or global economy. To be sure, there is something astonishing about the notion that capital fields rent, or income that the owner of capital obtains without working. there is something in this notion that is an affront to common sense and that had in fact perturbed many number of civilizations, which have responded in various ways, not always benign, ranging from the prohibition of usury to Soviet-style communism.

He also notes that in Victorian times, the rich at least didn't hide behind the fig leaf of meritocracy as they do now in a blame-the-victim ideology (job creators!, Steve Jobs!). No, they scrambled for good marriages and rich inheritances with hardly a look back at the immiserated masses or any "duty" to economic or social utility. But I would counter that the ideology of nobility and blood was even more pernicious than that of capitalist meritocracy.

Secondly, there are strong economies of scale to capital which Piketty illustrates using American university endowments. The biggest endowments like Harvard use professional managers and complex strategies for hedging, diversification, and finding unusually lucrative investments. And they make roughly double the return (~10%) as the smallest endowments, which afford virtually no money for management and make do with typical mutual fund returns of 5-6%. Thus inequality grows over time, as the bigger fortunes lose significantly less both to investment mediocrity as well as to consumption.

In addition to the purely structural reasons why, barring catastrophe or specific policy, capital tends to grow and inequality tends to grow along with it, the social pattern follows the pattern of production (or non-production in this case) to also favor capital. The Reagan revolution dramatically lowered rates of taxation, which are now, over most of the country in comprehensive terms, not progressive at all. Estate taxes have been lowered, and managers and financiers been unleashed to prey on working people who thought, for instance, that they were actually buying houses.

But what is the problem with all this anyhow? If some people save while others spend their way to the poor house, shouldn't each get her just reward? One problem is that these rewards take many generations to fully accrue, and it is simply impossible to justify the wealth of those who had no role in building it, even granting for the sake of argument that it was accrued in some virtuous fashion originally. A second problem is about the value of work in the society. If we have a class of essentially parasites who live off of capital, who are in addition the leading demographic of the whole society, that leads to the devaluation of labor and effort. It is not just that the talents of these people (whatever those might be) are lost to the common weal, but that their pinacle position, infects the society generally with an ethic of class over utility.

Returning to the mid-twentieth century, growth rates were extremely high, the social ethos was egalitarian and public-spirited, an historically unique middle class took hold, and the top tax bracket in the US was near 90%. Were companies managed better then, or now? I think they were managed better then, with a more balanced sense of stakeholders, and less intense focus on the short-term stock price. Certainly, US companies did very well in those days, without paying their managers obscenely. And this was a conscious social policy borne of the Depression, war, and slightly left-tinged social consciousness of the day- that extremely high pay to managers was obscene and economically counter-productive, thus should be strongly discouraged by way of confiscatory taxes. High tax rates also applied to estates, with no obvious detriment to our way of life. Equality turns out to be good economic as well as social policy.

But the causes, other than progressivism, were highly unusual conditions, (Depression, war), not ones that we want to see again. And sure enough, we are headed into what Piketty shows are historically normal conditions, where the top 10% own 70% of all wealth, the top 1% own 35 to 50%, and the bottom 50% own nothing. Someone like Bill Gates can't possibly spend his fortune, and seems to be unable to give it away fast enough. It just grows and grows, gobbling up more shares of global income and wealth. Were he interested in politics, we would have a very serious problem on our hands.

Next week, we will continue, considering Piketty's recommendations of what to do about it.

• More ways to blame the victim, and avoid the real work of redistribution.
• Most (good) governments do more redistribution than we do.
• Rent and position in the corporation.
• Inequality is corrosive, even morally obnoxious.
• Monetary ideology and class war, continued. Continued...
• ... Mixed with southern revanchism, continued.
• Active government is the key to development.
• But should regulators be for sale?
• Not only is governance a significant void (or free-for-all) in Islam, so is any definitive interpretation of Sharia more generally, for fear of supplanting Muhammed.
• Economic image of the week: The art formerly called currency in Zimbabwe.

Power, Glory, and Terror

Why all the terror, and why is religion involved?

What drives the Jihadists? It is a little hard to imagine, viewed from the comfortable vantage of the West, where the most salient issues tend to be the next iPhone or Playstation model rather than the pursuit of totalitarian power, let alone a stringent image of the deity. (Which is to say, taking for granted the overwhelming power of the West in virtually all aspects of modernity.) The package of power and religion is a heady one, however, and picking it apart from such a vast cultural distance is both difficult and essential, since we are mired in the fight.

The ideal Muslim society is a blend of piety and power, with Muslims in charge, but not through what we in the modern West would recognize as organized or legitimate means. Meetings of elders might result in the election of a leader, but just as valid is the taking of power by force. It is hard to remember, but in the West as well, holy warfare was common, and torture, in trials by fire, boiling, etc., justified by the theology of favor. The king has God's favor as long as he is popular and powerful, for instance. Enormous effort was devoted to methods of augury, but results would always speak loudest. It is a peculiar conflation of Darwinian fitness and theism. But the element of spiritual force (or communal psychology) is not to be denied. Those with deep commitment, even unshakable faith in their cause and in their talents, are vastly more powerful than those with mere technology.

One source of spiritual force might be culturally accepted forms of divination, augury and the like, providing some tentative positive thoughts. But another source is straight out bigotry by way of belief that one's scriptures are perfect, one's race pure, one's religion true, and one's enemies evil. Tribalism is not exclusively the province of religion, but religion tends to be the most powerful binder of groups, at least on par with nation states and soccer teams. All else pales before the transcendent purposes of the universe.

But why all the terror? That is what is most striking about today's jihadists, their method of projecting power through unspeakable cruelty, not to mention lovingly tended web sites and advanced video techniques. In the West, we have just gone through an extensive mea culpa / handwringing about torturing a few of those who have terrorized us (or, by our incompetence, who are innocent). We think it is bad, but clearly others have fewer qualms, notwithstanding their own propaganda using our practices of torture to paint us as unspeakable villains. They know it is bad, but that doesn't stop them from beheading and raping and pillaging. What exactly is going on?

It looks very much like our qualms are being turned against us. We have nuclear bombs after all, and could dispose of the problem very easily, were our morals sufficiently lax. If one is insulated against what might be called weakness, i.e. moral qualms that rise as one's level of civilization, empathy, and responsibility rise  ... by way of, say an ideology that tells one with absolute certainty that one is good even while one is doing evil acts... why then one can win the race to the moral bottom, and bend innocents to one's will, gathering power of the basest kind.

Power, in the form of coercing others to do what you tell them, on pain of death or harm, is the most execrable level of social relations, which grade upward through respectful competition, tolerance, self-interested cooperation, communal cooperation, and love. Why anyone would consider mixing a putatively great religion with such evil moral practices (outside of self-defense) is a significant question. One answer is that the scripture and early history of Islam in particular is no stranger to violence and terrorism. Unbelievers are terrorized on every page with visions of hell, discrimination, and ultimately, direct violence from believers.

Does this mitigate the attraction of the doctrine? Evidently not. That is what is so curious. Power is itself attractive. We record the history of the powerful, and forget all others. It hardly matters how cruel and blood-soaked the reign, the top cultural rungs are occupied by those who succeeded most thoroughly in terrorizing their friends and enemies- Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, etc. and so forth. If Hitler had won, doubtless the same would have happened. His terror was evidently not thorough enough. The Darwinian logic of all this is depressingly clear- that power is its own reward and rationale.. nothing succeeds like success. Other societies like Rome and the Jim Crow South used terror as a regular feature of power within the social order. One might say this of most societies, really. Terror goes hand in hand with the enforcement of social order- even among us with our amazing rate of brutal incarceration, and our large and desperate homeless population.

Another answer is that practically any situation can be constructed as self-defense. We have to bomb people in far-away lands because of their destabilizing influence on the general world order, which we as the dominant power are committed to uphold. That is a bit of a weak rationale, but at least somewhat more reasoned than that of "homeland protection", which is entirely beside the point in our current engagements. For Muslims, their abject loss of cultural dominance vs the West is in itself an affront that constitutes victimization and justifies violent defensive measures. The influences of the West are infiltrating everywhere, in communications, in depraved art, in philosophical skepticism, and most horrifyingly, in women's rights. Where will it ever end?

Terror is then a natural method of force projection, multiplying influence when "normal" means of mass killing are not available, and "normal" status quo-supporting ideological constructs are not desirable or sufficient. Its rationalization by way of total-izing ideologies or self-defense is all too easy. But in a revolutionary context like the current Jihadist campaign, it also has very limited scope. Shock (and its attendant demoralization) only lasts so long, and soon this demonstration of ruthless dedication (and localized power) calls forth revulsion and regular military power from among its opponents, both inside and outside the Muslim world, if they have courage and their own ideological resources.

• Saudis spawned the purer forms ... ISIS.
• Al Qaeda negotiated regularly with Pakistan: "God is with us".
• God sure is a great therapist. But "is" it?
• GOP clown posse and the Ayatollahs... brothers from another mother?
• Re-segregation is in full swing in the schools. Private schools need to be abolished.
• This week in the WSJ, "There’s no need for the FCC to override the free-market agreements that make the Internet work so well."
• Genetics of savings propensity.
• Piketty on the Euro: "It can't work."
• On the institutional politics of capital, feudalism, slavery, etc. And the case for taxation.
• Wingnuts vs Obamacare: be careful what you wish for.
• The unique logic of Keystone: Give us that pipeline or we start blowing up cities.
• Dividend tax cut causes zero increase in investment.
• Homelessness.
• "... prison is a penalty that cannot be reimbursed by the corporate employer."
• Alice Rivlin on fighting the last (monetary) war.
• Economics graph of the week, on Federal social spending: