A Better Retirement

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

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

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

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

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 world, 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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• 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: