With a Little Help From My Chaperones

Ribosomes need hundreds of helper proteins during construction.

One of the premier machines of molecular biology is the ribosome. It weighs in at about 3 million daltons, or hydrogen atom-equivalents, and has a huge catalytic core of RNA surrounded by 79 proteins. Due to its ancient origin, mixed composition, and large size, it is also very complicated to produce, yet needs to be made in prodigious amounts. Its manufacture begins in its own organelle, the nucleosome, which is a small compartment within the nucleus where the many copies of genomic DNA that encode ribosomal RNAs get transcribed. Countless events happen thereafter, chemically modifying the RNA, adding proteins, chemically modifying them with various phosphate, acetyl, and methyl groups, and transporting the nascent ribosomal halves out of the nucleus to the cytoplasm. One irony is that the proteins added to the ribosome are all synthesized (by pre-existing ribosomes, naturally) in the cytoplasm and thus have to be transported into the nucleus individually before being re-exported as part of the assembled ribosome halves.

While most proteins and RNAs fold themselves and assemble naturally, based solely on their sequences / composition, the bigger they are and the bigger the complexes they participate in, the more help they tend to need from special proteins called chaperones. The ribosomal RNA uses 76 helper snoRNAs to get itself folded and modified correctly. For assisting the folding of proteins, there are two classes of helpers, general chaperones which help proteins fold by exposing them alternately to hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces, and specific chaperones that bind to one or a few target proteins, typically right as they come off the ribosome production line, to prevent them from aggregating with the wrong crowd, and to transport them to the right place for assembly. Assistance for ribosomal RNA folding may have been the original function of some ribosomal proteins which are now essential for function and permanent parts of the mature structure. But now the ribosomal proteins themselves need chaperones, to the tune of about 200, for proper assembly.

A recent paper discussed an example of a specific ribosomal chaperone, Acl4, which ferries the ribosomal protein Rpl4 to its mark. Rpl4 is an average-sized protein, about 50,000 daltons, but its structure is remarkably splayed-out, rather than compact. When assembled, part of its structure reaches into the exit tunnel of the ribosome, where newly synthesized protein chains come out, and seems to help them stay in the straight and narrow, especially hydrophobic segments that would be tempted to stick to themselves or other proteins, clogging the tunnel.

Structure of Rpl4. The blue part sticks into the protein chain exit tunnel, and is evolutionarily conserved, while the red part reads over the surface of the ribosome, touching several other ribosomal proteins, with unknown function.

Position of Rpl4 (red) on the ribosomal large subunit. PTC labels the peptide transferase center, or synthetic core of the ribosome, and the emerging amino acids chained into a protein are black circles. The hydrophobic knee of the nascent protein tunnel is where the key segment of Rpl4 (4) has a role, along with some other ribosomal proteins (17, 39).

But this ability to manage hydrophobic protein segments implies that Rpl4 is itself, in that region, hydrophobic, and thus prone to aggegation. This is in addition to the rest of the structure, which reaches across several other proteins on the ribosomal surface, in snake-like fashion. While researchers know that this latter structure is essential, they do not know yet what it does. This intriguing protein clearly needs help in assembly. The researchers hypothesized such a chaperone helper, and went out to find it using a tagged version of RPL4 with which they could easily co-purify whatever stuck to it, including several of its ribosomal protein colleagues. But there was one more protein, called Acl4. Unfortunately, the researchers didn't come up with this name themselves, but were scooped by others who published similar data only a few months before. So it goes.

Using a series of engineered deletions of the Rpl4 protein, the researchers show that Acl4 binds over the key hydrophobic area of Rpl4, as one would expect. They additionally show that Acl4 binds to Rpl4 even before it is fully synthesized, also as one would expect for a specialized protein chaperone. In yeast cells, neither protein is actually essential. Strains with either or both genes deleted still live, though grow very slowly. They would never survive in the wild.

Knowing the nuts and bolts of how our biological molecules operate, particularly the extraordinary lengths evolution has gone to fix and fine-tune systems that must have been functional enough in their much simpler, early incarnations, fosters an appreciation of the messiness of the molecular world. Sometimes huge size and complexity is a product of endless jury-rigging, not of exquisite design.

Drama of ribosomal synthesis, for a few actors. Rpl4 (green) is synthesized in the cytoplasm, and captured by Acl4 (purple). Then both transport to the nucleus, where they dock to the assembling ribosome, which is then in due time transported back out to its final destination. Acl4 cycles back by itself for another load. A minor pathway also exists in the absence of enough Acl4, where a generic nuclear transport conductor, importin, can bring Rpl4 into the nucleus, since Rpl4 contains the necessary targeting signals in its sequence.

• Investment is better than saving.
• "...  if the corruption persisted, the Taliban would win, no matter how many American troops joined the fight."
• Mice stutter too.
• Are we really that bad? And if so, is the answer to self-destruct? "If Western governments desired to reduce the number of people trying to find safety in Europe, and the suffering that results from such attempts, they would refrain from invading other countries, from impoverishing their peoples, from providing arms to repressive regimes that collaborate with the West, from requiring neoliberal policies that create inequality and poverty, and from destroying the world by their consumption of fossil fuels."
• Krugman on Japan's timidity trap ... it needs 4% inflation, with all available tools.
• Gun nuts packing purple prose: "I have seen many homeschoolers on the trail with parents, reading literature and learning real American history, when men were free, rather than the fabricated crap and lies they learn in public schools that passes for history, taught by the collectivist lemmings."
• Nuns in a pickle.
• Annals of feudalism: Hey, let's make worker's comp optional!
• And then off-load the cost to the taxpayer.
• Up from poverty, around the world.
• Up from draught.. by ending traditional water rights.

Man Does Not Live by Competition Alone

Tuning our way between competition and cooperation; Mankiw, Diamond, et al. on institutions.

I've read a fine book by Jared Diamond, "The world until yesterday", which is filled with analyses about many native cultures, in contrast to the ambient Euro-Western commercial culture we find ourselves in. What are the differences? Can we learn from each other? Indeed we can. The chapters on warfare make one very important point, which is that war is not hard-wired into humans. When conditions are conducive, we make war, and when it does not pay or is not necessary, we do not make war. Traditional societies typically live at some level of constant, if low-level, warefare, which takes a great toll in lives as well as tranquility. It was often an enormous positive when Westerners imposed state-based systems that eliminated free-lance (ouch) warfare, appreciated by all concerned, despite all the other injustices, indignities, and horrors of colonialization.

Institutions matter a great deal, and if we arrange those institutions to foster cooperation, we can have peace. But when they foster competition, honor, winning, and all the other martial values, we should not be surprised at the results. That is sort of the fork in the road we in the US find ourselves at right now, as the GOP doubles down on class war and seeks to enshrine the right of the 1% or 0.1% to screw over the rest of the population. At the same time, we seem to have valorized this war in the form of the culturally dominant NFL, where competing CEOs (either coaches or quarterbacks, take your pick) lead the nameless and abused troops to pummel rival firms and take over their territories. Some sectors of our society seem to have lost sight of the virtues of anything but competition.

A exemplary document in this effort is the recent defense of the 1% by Greg Mankiw, Harvard economist. To summarize, he points out that super-stars like Steve Jobs and Robert Downey Jr. get their money fair and square in a market competition, so they deserve it, as do all the other CEOs and high-earners who command their high incomes by virtue of a competitive market in talent. All fair, right?

There are many things to say about this, particularly about the true nature of the CEO / FIRE executive market. But one is that it lacks perspective on the institutional framing at work, which is not a matter of accident or divine command. Back in the days of the Hollywood studio system, what would Mr. Downey have been paid for his stellar acting? Not $50 million, by a long shot. Back then the institutional setting was different, and while star actors were well paid, they did not take a high fraction of the box for themselves. Did actors of that time *deserve to be paid less? Did the CEOs of those times deserve to be paid less?

This is far more than a question of how much a market in talent should or shouldn't bear. It is a moral question about what everyone's talent and time is worth, as well as the more practical psycho-economic question of how to treat our fellow workers / citizens in ways that extract their maximum talent for the general cultural betterment and prosperity, including their own. If 99% or 25% must be beaten down so that 1% can pillage and then flaunt their wealth, is that desirable, even if it is the natural result of a competitive system that we ourselves construct? Is the market even the proper measure of such values? Does 1% of the population have to go homeless so that another 1% can maintain its market power vs labor?

My point is that competition is a tool that we use in the classic economic sense to run a capitalist economic system, putatively for everyone's benefit (that is, the greatest good for the greatest number, more or less). And in reality, competition is sharply regulated and limited so that we get results we want rather than those we don't. Each firm is internally socialistic to some extent in order to fence out the market and form a team that can get work done without competitive pressure that is otherwise extremely damaging and literally counterproductive. Many results of competition that are judged to be bad, such as pollution, monopolization, organized crime, etc., are regulated for the public good (or not, as the case may be!). Firms do not go into commercial warfare with machine guns blazing.

As they say in business, "everything is negotiable". The system is not pre-ordained. And if a system fosters excessive competition, with winner-take-all economics that destroys its own institutions and empowers a greedy and amoral elite with so much money that it corrupts the entire political and cultural landscape, a rethink is certainly in order. For example, the recent economic crisis was largely caused by FIRE [finance, insurance, real estate] executives making the conscious decision to short their institution's futures, and those of their customers, via liar loans and all the other paraphernalia of banking control fraud, in order to make short-term gains for themselves. They won the competition, (indeed were forced to those practices by competition itself), leaving the rest of us holding the bag. In response, we need (and have not really gotten) better regulation to block such harms, but more deeply, we need to look at the whole competitive culture.

A similar dynamic is short-changing our longer-term future, where short-term gains in using fossil fuels are funding an enormous political / propaganda effort to minimize / deny climate heating and forestall any public policy to address it. We need a little less competition as the metric of all value, and a little more reflection, compassion, foresight, and judgement.

Putting this in investment terms, there is always a balance between public investment and private investment. An advanced economy always needs some of each- streets to drive on, and cars to drive in. No economy can run without a large array of public goods. We have been under-investing in public goods for a very long time, not only in the critically important area of future climate change, but in the totally here-and-now issues of bridges, education, and perhaps most of all in our political system which provides all these goods, keeping it safe from corruption and capture by the most amoral (and highly competitive!) minority elements of society.

Basically, the whole tenor of competition in the US is vastly overdone. Other cultures (Scandinavia) work extremely well with a much lower level of competitive vainglory and economic elitism, not to mention its concomitant existential destruction of the underclass. And in large part, they do this through redistribution, since what the 1% gather is far from just deserts. It is the product of luck, of public investment, of the work of others, of unanticipated aspects of institutional settings, rent, plus, at times, talent. And where did this talent come from? Even that is only partly their own responsibility, having been largely conferred by birth. We all built it. Collectively, we want everyone's talent to be nurtured and expressed, but isn't the prospect of having a great and fulfilling job or life's work a sufficient spur to develop one's talents? What more does money provide in life satisfaction? And what happens when the flagrant reward of a few people's talents retards everyone else's chances to develop theirs?

Converse examples come from regions like the Middle East and Africa. Where is no shortage of competition, yet for some reason, progress is limited, if not retrogressive. Is it possible that competition is not enough, and that for progress to occur, that competition needs to be heavily channeled and regulated by both strong states with explicit laws, and by implicit cultural practices and norms that favor creation and service over destruction? (For comparison, consider the extended debates on governance that took place in the pre-revolutionary American Colonies.) Looking at the Middle East in particular, Islam has a special problem with violence. It is outstanding at fostering (small) institutions of worship and charity. But it is miserable at fostering instutitions of governance, and through its doctrine of jihad encourages destruction, at least by some readings, particularly those that take its earliest scriptures and history most seriously.

• A WSJ author gives some numbers on what full redistribution would look like. "To recap: Current federal tax-and-spending policies combine to redistribute $1.5 trillion each year from the top 40% of Americans to the bottom 60%. To close the income gap to zero would require $4 trillion. The questions to those who say we should do more to narrow the income gap are: Where on that continuum should we aim, and what policies would achieve these goals without bringing the economy to its knees?"
• Tax havens are bad.
• Netherlands is the Delaware/Cayman Islands of the EU.
• Conventional lunacy ... central bankers plead for interest rate increases.
• The invisible hand needs visible public works.
• Leadership means building cooperation.
• Sociopaths in the 1%- rule or exception? Are companies themselves sociopathic (i.e. amoral) by definition?
• Competition for thee, but not for me.
• Iraqis have been misgoverned for some time.

For Whom Shall the Robots Work?

When robots do everything, will we have work? Will we have income? A review of Martin Ford's "Rise of the Robots".

No one knows when it is coming, but eventually, machines will do everything we regard as work. Already some very advanced activities like driving cars and translating languages are done by machine, sometimes quite well. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, and computers have been coming for white collar jobs as well. Indeed, by Martin Ford's telling, technological displacement has already had a dramatic effect on the US labor market, slowing job growth, concentrating economic power in a few relatively small high-tech companies, and de-skilling many other jobs. His book is about the future, when artificial intelligence becomes realistic, and machines can do it all.

Leaving aside the question of whether we will be able to control these armies of robots once they reach AI, sentience, the singularity ... whatever one wishes to call it, a more immediate question is how the economic system should be (re-)organized. Up till now, humans have had to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. No economic system has successfully decoupled effort in work (or predation / warfare / ideological parasitism) from income and sustainance. The communists tried, and what a hell that turned out to be. But Marx may only have been premature, not wrong, in predicting that the capitalist system would eventually lead to both incredible prosperity and incredible concentration of wealth.

Ford offers an interesting aside about capitalism, (and he should know, having run a software company), that capitalists hate employees. For all the HR happy talk and team this and relationship that, every employee is an enormous cost drain. Salary is just the start- there are benefits, office space, liability for all sorts of personal problems, and the unpredictability of their quitting and taking all their training and knowledge with them. They are hateful, and tolerated only because, and insofar as, they are absolutely necessary.

At any rate, the incentives, whether personal or cooly economic, are clear. And the trends in wealth and income are likewise clear, that employment is more precarious and less well paid (at the median), while income and wealth have concentrated strongly upward, due to all sorts of reasons, including rightward politics, off-shoring, and dramatic technological invasion of many forms of work. (Indeed, off-shoring is but a prelude to automation, for the typical low-skill form of work.) There is little doubt that, left to its own devices(!), our capitalist system will become ever more concentrated, with fewer companies running more technology and fewer employees to produce everything we need.

What happens then? The macroeconomic problem is that if everyone is unemployed, no one (except the 0.00001%) will be able to buy anything. While the provision of all our necessities by way of hopefully docile machines is not a bad thing, indeed the fulfillment of a much-imagined dream of humanity, some technical problems do arise; of which we can already see the glimmerings in our current society. Without the mass production lines and other requirements for armies of labor that democratized the US economy in the mid-20th century, we may be heading in the direction, not only of Thomas Piketty's relatively wealth-heavy unequal society of financial capital, but towards a degree of concentration we have not seen lately outside of the most fabulous African kleptocracies.

What we need is a fundamental rethinking of the connection between income and work, and the role of capital and capitalists. The real wealth of our society is an ever-accumulating inheritance of technology and knowledge that was built in common by many people. Whether some clever entrepreneur can leverage that inheritance into a ripping business model while employing virtually no actual humans should not entirely dictate the distribution of wealth. As Ford puts it:

"Today's computer technology exists in some measure because millions of middle-class taxpayers supported federal funding for basic research in the decades following World War II. We can be reasonably certain that those taxpayers offered their support in the expectation that the fruits of that research would create a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren. Yet, the trends we looked at in the last chapter suggest we are headed toward a very different outcome. Beyond the basic moral question of whether a tiny elite should be able to, in effect, capture ownership of society's accumulated technological capital, there are also practical issues regarding the overall health of an economy in which income inequality becomes too extreme."

As a solution, Ford suggests the provision of a basic income for all citizens. This would start very minimally, at perhaps $10,000 per year, and perhaps be raised as the policy develops and the available wealth increase. He states that this could be funded relatively easily from existing poverty programs, and would at a stroke eliminate poverty. It is a very libertarian idea, beloved by Milton Freidman, (in the form of negative income tax), and also emphasizes freedom for all citizens to do as they like with this money. Ford also beings up the quite basic principle that in a new, capital-intensive regime, we should be prepared to tax labor less and tax capital more. But he makes no specific suggestions in this direction ... one gets the impression that it cuts a little too close to home.

This is the part of the book where I part company, for several reasons. Firstly, I think work is a fundamental human good and even right. It is important for us to have larger purposes and organize ourselves corporately (in a broad sense) to carry them out. It is also highly beneficial for people to be paid for positive contributions they make to society. In contrast, the pathology surrounding lives spent on unearned public support are well-known. Secondly, the decline of employment in the capitalist economy has the perverse effect of weakening the labor market and dis-empowering workers, who must scramble for the fewer remaining jobs, accepting lower pay and worse conditions. Setting up a new system to compete at a frankly miserable sub-poverty level does little to correct this dynamic. Thirdly, I think there is plenty of work to be done, even if robots do everything we dislike doing. The scope for non-profit work, for environmental beautification, for social betterment, elder care, education, and entertainment is simply infinite. The only question is whether we can devise a social mechanism to carry it out.

This leads to the concept of a job guarantee. The government would provide paying work to anyone willing to participate in socially beneficial tasks. These would be real, well-paying jobs, geared to pay less than private market rates, (or whatever we deem appropriate as the floor for a middle class existence), but quite a bit more than basic support levels for those who do not work at all. Under this mechanism, basic income is not wasted on those who have better paying jobs. Nor are the truly needy left to fend for themselves on sub-poverty incomes and no other programs of practical support. While the private market pays for any kind of profitable work no matter how socially negative, guaranteed jobs would be collectively devised to have a positive social impact- that would be their only rationale. And most importantly, they would harness and cultivate the human work ethic towards social goals, which I think is a more socially and spiritually sustainable economic system, in a post industrial, even post-work, age.

The problem with a job guarantee, obviously, is the opportunity for corruption and mismanagement, when the market discipline is lifted in favor of state-based decision making. Communist states have not provided the best track record of public interest employment, though there have been bright spots. In the US, a vast sub-economy of nonprofit enterprises and volunteering organizations provides one basis of hope and perhaps a mechanism of expansion. The government could take a set of new taxes on wealth, high incomes, fossil fuels, and financial transactions, and distribute such funds to public interest non-profit organizations, including ones that operate internationally. It is a sector of our economy that merits growth and has the organizational capacity to absorb both money and workers that are otherwise slack.

Additionally, of course, many wholly public projects deserve resources, from infrastructure to health care to combatting climate change. We have enormous public good needs that are going unaddressed. The governmental sector has shown good management in many instances, such as in the research sector, medicare, and social security. Competitive grant systems are a model of efficient resource allocation, and could put some of the resources of a full job guarantee to good use, perhaps using layperson as well as expert review panels. Improving public management is itself a field for development as part of the expanded public sector that a job guarantee would create.

In an interesting digression, Ford remarks on the curious case of Japan. Japan has undergone a demographic shift to an aged society. It has been predicted that the number of jobs in health care and elder care would boom, and that the society would have to import workers to do all the work. But that hasn't happened. In fact, Japan has been in a decades-long deflationary recession featuring, if anything, under-employment as the rule, exemplified by "freeters" who stay at home with their parents far into adulthood. What happened? It is another Keynesian parable, since the elderly are poor consumers. For all the needs that one could imagine, few of them materialize because the income of the elderly, and their propensity to spend, are both low.

The labor participation rate in the US.

Our deflationary decade, with declining labor participation rates, indicates that we are heading in the same direction. We need to find a way to both mitigate the phenomenal concentration of wealth that is destroying our political system and economy, and to create a mechanism that puts money into the hands of a sustainable middle class- one that does not rely on the diminishing capitalist notions of employment and continue down the road of techno-feudalism, but which enhances our lives individually and collectively.

• For instance, we can afford a post office.
• Poverty is permanently damaging.
• Welfare and public goods feed economic growth.
• Do we have a perpetual savings glut?
• Bill Mitchell on labor-capital relations. Such as they are.
• Panopticon and the modern office.
• Bernanke: I was pwned. Krugman: ... and anyway, the deficits were more important than the Fed bailouts.
• We are, typically, fools.
• ... to believe that CEO pay relates to performance.
• Bill Mitchell on why banks are pushing for higher interest rates. Hint: it is not to help the rest of us.
• Further map of Taliban control in Afghanistan. The long-term institutional failure of short-term engagement.

Hunting the Muse

Review of "This is Your Brain on Music", by Daniel Levitin.

Music is an odd intersection of math, science, and emotion. The notes are starky digital, as laid out in their logarithmic sequence on a keyboard, or on other instruments. Our hearing of them is likewise mapped with pitch-precision up the windings of the cochlea. But once in the brain, all hell breaks loose, as we map a linear sound input into many dimensions, from source location, source identification, speech interpretation, and emotional understanding. It becomes a rich sound-scape.

Dan Levitin's book is subtitled: "The science of a human obsession." He is clearly obsessed himself, going into an academic study of sound cognition after a lengthy career as a music producer. And he writes an excellent story about what is currently known about music in a scientific sense, along with a very effective primer in music theory. But one question still, in my mind, eluded him, which is perhaps the most basic- why does music carry such a strong emotional impact?

Scholars of music make a great deal out of a theory of expectations- how musicians play with our expectations in all aspects of music- rhythm, pitch, timbre, etc., to retain our interest, tell stories, move our bodies, paint a picture in soundscapes. This is an important area of work, but I think leaves out some very basic aspects of musical communication. What is the difference between a major chord and a blues chord? Just one note, but it makes a vast and instant difference in feeling. I think a major question in music theory has to be.. what is that difference? Cultural and personal expectations may have a role, but the effect is so immediate that I think something deeper is going on.

While Levitin's book mentions to the use of music and sound by other animals, it still seems to suffer a bit from species-ism, the idea that human music is of a different kind than that of other organisms like a bird's song or a whale's call. He argues against the extreme theory of Steven Pinker's, that music is "cheesecake" in the sense of being an intense, possibly even dangerous, derivative of some other, perhaps vestigial, evolutionary function (that function being language, which Pinker studies!). Levitin points out that rock stars have the kind of reproductive success, at least in potential terms, to put that theory to the lie in short order. Music is not vestigial at all.

But he does not seem to go the rest of the way, which would be to plumb the depths of the emotional code that music in the wide sense has been for animals from a rather early stage. While mammals have brought hearing to the highest possible pitch (sorry!), as exemplified by bats and dolphins, even insects involve song in the most momentous and doubtless emotional aspects of their lives. Who hasn't heard crickets chirping, or cicadas singing, or fruit flies courting? It may not sound like much to us, but to them it is the way to fulfill their most cherished hope, the fulfillment of which must stir whatever emotion they are capable of. And while anthropomorphization has its dangers, it seems fair to me to understand emotion as a virtually universal system of evaluation and expression of needs, little different in less complicated species than in ourselves. After all, the youngest human infant has towering emotions, despite virtually non-existent cognition. We should not confuse richness with intensity.

And it isn't just love. Hearing the Blue Jays and Hummingbirds fight it out in the yard, with terroristic screeches, shows that a wide-spread tone-language covers the emotional gamut. Human music is clearly a refinement and elaboration, and perhaps this is what Steven Pinker had in mind with his cheesecake analogy, but the underlying tonal language is not confined to humans at all. It also clearly preceeds all kinds of explicit language, even though birds are known to have small languages as well. Think of cats purring, and mice chirping in their ultrasonic language, to their pups and to others. Such sounds express strong pleasure, just as our music can.

That lays the groundwork of the universality of sound communication and music-type communication particularly. From there is a small step to recognize that, given the physics of sound, that assonance and dissonance form natural poles of emotional tone language. Blue Jays use dissonance to scare competitors, cats use assonance to express pleasure. Crickets chirp in tune and in rhythm, because that is attractive to female crickets. The assonance/dissonance spectrum seems to have been encoded into emotion very deeply in evolution, sort of like the flavors of sweet and bitter foods, or the attractiveness of pure colors, which are so strikingly encoded on the plumage of birds, versus the drab comouflage at the other extreme. (Or on chameleons.)

The language of chords, then, is rather analogous to that of color mixtures, where shades of dissonance enter as more complex mixtures are made. Why does that mixing evoke particular emotions, and more importantly, why do we value these complex mixtures, over the pure, major chord tones? We seem, in common with whales, mice, and other complex creatures, to need to share our emotional states, which are rarely simple. Sharing emotion creates social coordination and bonding, essential to social species, which we all are. The importance of song in courting is the premier example, of course. James Brown eloquently expressed the virtigenous rollercoaster of pain and pleasure in love, and communicating it to potential partners gives them important messages about how much they are loved and needed, creating the basis of long-term cooperation.

Emotions are complicated, and while we have many modes for communicating them, from smell, to touch, to visual cues / badges, movements and gestures, and among humans now even explicit language, music has evidently been a pre-eminent mode for complex animals. It is there that we can find the reason why Dmaj7 is different from Dmaj5 or an octave. This is not a mechanistic explanation- brain scientists such as Levitin are busy figuring out how the connections among perception and emotion happen in the brain. But we know that it happens and wonder, more crucially, about its evolutionary rationale. And that rationle, to paint it in extremely glib fashion, is to provide animals, humans included, a mode of emotional communication of exquisite expressiveness and sensitivity, which is open to anyone who hums a tune or coos to a child. It is closely related to language, which is typically strongly musical in part or whole, but is far more deeply and directly emotional.

Indeed, Levitin makes an interesting contrast late in the book between people with the genetic disorders autism and Williams syndrome. The former are emotionally impaired and generally perplexed by music, while the latter are notoriously musically gifted and highly social & verbal. Those with Williams syndrome can read emotions well, as they can music- the languages seem closely related on this genetic level as well.

• Why so crazy? Russell Banks brings up the obvious racism of our Republican party. Also Krugman.
• Prices per plate are going up ... how is this a democracy?
• Murder and the corporation.
• All the Republican tax plans are now out. Enough said.
• The airline industry is no longer competitive.
• The impact of low-skill immigration: "The absolute wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, as did the wage of high school dropouts relative to that of either high school graduates or college graduates."
• Justified gun use in self-defense is rare. And gun control (aka gun-grabbing, for all you Freudians) works.
• Image of the week ... the Taliban control maybe 1/4 of Afghanistan.

Who's Driving This Wreck?

How do you find the mutations in a messy cancer sample that actually drove the cancer to exist?

Cancer is a little like a car wreck. A mechanical defect or two may cause an accident, which then causes a lot of other damage to the vehicle and to others. How does the investigator figure out what was the first thing to go wrong? In cancer cells, an accumulation of mutations is part of the mechanism by which a cell escapes normal growth controls and becomes cancerous. Unleashing a slew of mutations makes it much more likely that the cell will find (and naturally select) the two or five more mutations that allow it to transition from pre-cancerous to malignant.

But along with those causal "driver" mutations, the unleashing process usually causes hundreds or thousands of innocent "passenger" mutations, even deleterious ones that kill off some of the cancer cell descendents. Taken as a whole, the mutations are all grist for the selective mill. But for the growing practice of precision medicine, these extra mutations muddy the waters persented by the DNA sequence of a tumor sample. Modern cancer drugs are only helpful when directed against the mutant proteins that caused the cancer, and continue driving its growth.

Sure, there are a few usual suspects to round up; p53, BRCA1, 2, and others. But that is only guessing. A couple of recent papers tried to look more systematically through large sets of tumor sequences to find driver mutations, one using a popularity measure, and the other using a pathway effects measure. Unfortunately, these methods are not applied or applicable to single tumor samples, which is to say the clinical setting, but rather are academically oriented to the hunt for more genes and gene mutations to put into the hopper of possible cancer mutations that can then later be applied to clinical cases.

Simple statistics can tell you to a first approximation which mutations are more common in tumor samples than in control samples. For common mutations, like those in p53 gene, this is fine. But this method has a hard time finding uncommon cancer-causing mutations, which, though individually uncommon, are in sum a large and important class. This quest is of interest both for clinical use in compiling a complete catalog of possible driver  for prognosis and treatment, and also academically as a hunt to find new genes that have roles in causing cancer.

A recent paper takes a step towards super-charging this search by combining DNA mutation data with RNA expression data. The idea is to ask the tumor cells which pathways are particularly active or deranged from a gene expression standpoint, (and associated with cell growth and tumorigenesis), which then helps tremendously in focusing on genes that participate in those pathways as candidate tumor drivers. These would necessarily be a small fraction of the 22,000- odd genes in the whole genome.

Here is where biology starts to look a little like electrical engineering. The first step of the study is to create pathways out of the gene expression data that was drawn from their tumor samples and from other cells. Pathways are circuit diagrams of what gene regulates what other gene, in cascades of control that function everywhere in biology, especially in development, homeostasis, and environmental response, and which go haywire in cancer.

Conceptual molecular pathways that might be relevant to cancer. Misregulation of/by any gene can be detected by reading out the altered expression of targets at the bottom.

Specific example pathway, cartooning interrelations among some of the greatest hits (common driver genes mutated) in cancer biology.

An example pathway is labelled as cellular component organization, shown above. Genes like RB1, TP53, BRCA2, MYC are all well-known regulators involved in cancer. The point here is not that common cancer genes show up in such networks, but that elucidating a regulatory network should bring up all the actors in a process, including other lesser-known genes that might also play a role. Mutations in those genes are the target of this work that seeks to create a more complete catalog of known relevant genes and mutations in them that contribute to cancer. But ultimately, everything is connected with everything else, so a lot depends on how one calculates these networks. The authors seem to be relatively conservative in their scope, and cross-check their networks with those from a commercial source, Ingenuity, with which they largely agree. They also validated their final results, in terms of cancer genes and their driver mutations, using the same commercial source, rather than going into the lab to test another large batch of tumor samples, for instance, or generating transgenic mice or cell lines to evaluate the effect of each mutation.

Incidentally, even if the full set of cancer genes is known, identifying a relevant mutation, for cases like that of AURKA whose overexpression contributes to cancer, can be extremely difficult, since overexpression can be due to point mutations many thousands of bases away from the gene, in regulatory regions which are not well mapped or understood anyway. The researchers are interested, however, in simple correlation, taking many tumor samples and asking which mutations are correlated with the changes in pathway perturbation that are seen in the gene expression data. That simplifes the search somewhat.

Getting the data required for this combined analysis is not easy, yet technical advances make it possible. And the result is evidently quite powerful. The researchers claim many orders of magnitude improvement in (apparent) driver mutation detection, compared with prior algorithms, and compared with any algorithm run without pre-grouping the candidate genes by this empirical pathway-based method. Unfortunately, neither the text nor figures are very clear on this point, so I have to leave the data discussion there.

It is critically important to generate increasingly comprehensive models of cancer as part of mastering molecular biology in general. Each of our three billion DNA nucleotides is doing something, some much more than others. We have only cartoon pictures so far of a smattering of our molecular circuitry. Thankfully, nature is not coming up the new models every year, but understanding the current model of human, and the molecular accidents that befall it, is an enormous task that will keep us occupied for decades.

• Inequality, economic sclerosis, and rent.
• Rent in wage negotiations, by way of artificial austerity.
• There is no sign that the Fed should be raising rates.
• And why do bankers want higher rates anyway?
• Ben Carson ... expertise in one area does not confer authority in all. Each case has to be made on its own terms.
• The animated empire of Walt Disney.
• Does the medical market work? Not for consumers.
• Dune ... on the Afghan-Pakistani border.
• Cringely on the cyber-arms race. All is lost.

The Federal Budget Should Never Balance

Honest ... the deficits are OK. The sovereign government has a critical role in economic stabilization and prosperity.

The household analogy is a very durable one: the idea that, since taxpayers and households need to balance their budgets, that the government should as well. Politicians across the spectrum enunciate this mantra / analogy as though it were self-evident. The irony is that although liberal politicians may speak such lines with less formal conviction, it is Republican office-holders who have shown time and again over recent decades the most willingness to throw such balance out the window, in pursuit of tax cuts, with their ensuing deficits. Nothing personal, of course, just class war as usual!

The recent British debacle of liberalism kowtowing to a Tory narrative of austerity and budget-cutting is one more example of the false consciousness that is damaging particularly to liberalism, but also to everyone else who participates in modern economies. Because, in truth, the federal budget should never balance. Its imbalance is the most powerful tool we have to keep the economy stable and growing.

For households, and for dependent government entities like cities and states, the budget constraint is absolute ... there is no free money, and no use to a deficit. They may have capital accounts, with bonded debt for capital needs, like houses and roads. But every such debt has to be paid off eventually. Banks occupy a special place in this system, since they can create money, via the loans they fund. But every cent of these deposits (though not the interest ... where does that come from?) is matched by the loan note on the bank's books. Banks also have a zero-sum balance sheet.

A federal government with a sovereign, floating currency is an entirely different beast. It is the entity that creates the (high-powered) money that everyone else uses. It is not constrained by a zero-sum balance sheet. Therefore the propaganda of a federal government "running out of money" or being broke, or having to live within its means ... are all meaningless. The federal treasury (in combination with the central bank) can spend money at will on whatever it likes. The idea that it has to issue bonds to "fund" spending not matched by tax receipts (i.e. deficits) is an economic fiction. Such policies are legal fossils from another age, where money was not printed by fiat, but was backed by gold / silver. The fact of the matter is that federal spending provides the money to those who buy such bonds, and the bonds do little but replace one form of low-risk saving with another, rather than altering the buyer's behavior, affecting inflation, etc. Plus give a stream of income to the wealthy.

But obviously, there is a constraint on federal spending and money creation. That is the overall level of economic growth and monetary inflation. Since the government is free to create money, it assumes the risk of fostering inflation and the responsibility to manage monetary growth to keep pace with the various forms of economic growth: population growth, productivity growth, and trade deficits, if any. Additionally, economics has found that modest inflation, on the order of 2%, is beneficial to encourage productive investment over inert savings (such as gold). Add all these categories of monetary growth together, and you get a virtually constant need for federal deficits. This is why, as a matter of fact, we in the US do have perpetual deficits, why making the federal budget go into surplus creates highly unstable economic conditions, and why politicians seeking to balance the federal budget are charlatans.

Taxation is part of this scheme as well, of course. While deficits may be required in perpetuity, they are not typically enough on their own to fund the whole government. Additionally, the central role of the fiat currency has to be established at the outset. Taxation fills both roles, creating a need for the "legal tender for all debts, public and private" which is demanded by the government for taxes, and which it uses to commandeer a large share of the private economy, above and beyond the annual growth it funds with new money.

So much for normal economic times and methods. It is in crisis when the powers of the federal monetary system become most important and evident. Where in the old gold standard days, a government could do nothing during the frequent business collapses, busts, depressions, etc., a modern federal government can spend exactly as much as is needed to make up for the evaporation of bank credit and the money that bank credit represents. The government can resolve deflation in a matter of a few pen strokes. Properly handled, there is no need for economic slowdown or unemployment at all, since the full gap of private credit-based money (which characterizes a depression) can be made up as needed by federal spending of new money.

Note, however, that such a gap can not be made up by the central bank alone. As currently constituted, central banks can lower short-term interest rates and can lower long-term rates by way of "quantitative easing", but they can not inject money directly into the economy. If banks do not want to lend, or borrowers do not want to borrow, no interest rate is going to induce them to do so. And they will be particularly shy of lending after having just lost their shirts in a credit-destroying debacle. Thus it is critical for the rest of the government to not sit on its hands, but spend as needed to cover the monetary shortfall created by declining economic conditions, or a credit crisis in the private banking system.

Of course, it isn't all spending and free money. When boom times come, (as measured by very low unemployment and rising inflation), the federal government needs to have the discipline to take away the punch bowl, using its tools of fiscal retrenchment, taxation, and higher interest rates to restrict inflation. Past governments have shown some laxity in this department, as is tempting and unfortunate. We spent the seventies perplexed by the connection between high government spending and inflation, before Paul Volker pulled the plug with a high interest rate-induced recession. But the fact is that the current atmosphere permeating central banking and conservative politics is far too scared of inflation, fighting a war that was won decades ago. The focus on austerity and budget constraints is not really about inflation anymore, but about keeping workers powerless and underpaid in a perpetually under-performing and under-employing economy.

Tom Tomorrow, on markets.

• For more on MMT & Keynesian economics, see a blog by Bill Mitchell.
• Brad Delong on Fed structure, mandate, and policy.
• Surowiecky on Stieglitz and inequality. 
• Krugman/Thoma on Keynesian policy.
• Robert Schiller on the idiocy of conservative economics: "But adhering to an approach that overlooks these factors is akin to doing away with fire departments, on the grounds that without them people would be more careful – and so there would then be no fires."
• Why do governments love banks so much?
• The bureaucrats knew a thing or two about Vietnam.
• What lack of competition and regulation is costing us in internet service.
• Buying the feudal political system you want ...
•  ... Leads to weakness in the Western (and antipodean) political class.
• The curse of year-around plenty in the tropics.
• Is complexity in scientific data opening the door to obfuscation and worse?
• Economic graph of the week ... median income:

If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?

Reflections on competitiveness, othering and empathy.

Our sympathies radiate outward from the self in ever-widening, and attenuating, circles to family, friends, neighbors, city, nation, species, genus, order, phylum, etc. The pain of some carries great meaning and demands empathy, while others we eat for food or trample underfoot without a second thought. A recent podcast about the livestock industry described the deplorable treatment of animals raised and slaughtered for food, which seemingly is intrinsic to the industrialized methods requisite to the modern way of, and scale of, life.

To put it slightly differently, the "I" is never an objectified being, but intrinsically a subject defined by feelings and thoughts, rather than by physical nature. Descartes defined being by this subjectivity, not by objective & physical reality. We have souls, but do others? Do animals? The farther one gets from the self, the less possible it is to feel for the other, the less intersubjective one tends to be. As a child it is jarring to realize that our bones can be broken, elbows scraped, and that our bodies are seen as objects by the medical profession, among others. Is the subjectivity of the "I" an illusion, or is the objectivity of the body?

But even within our own species, we clearly have ways to limit empathy, demonizing others by whatever social construct as opponent groups, nations, races, and as less than human. One shudders to think of the cruelties that were once routine, like children torturing cats, heretics burned at the stake, prisoners drawn and quartered, etc. The catalog is astonishing and disturbing. ISIS seems to be continuing in traditional fashion, though we certainly did our bit during the reign of George W. Bush.

Sure, we are programmed genetically (morally) to feel for our brethren and hate our foes. The science of human empathy has advanced markedly of late, and finds many ways by which we are genetically programmed to feel for those close to us. Yet others, including animals, have feelings just as we do. Their subjective existence is no different from ours in kind or value. Our programming against universal empathy is thus illogical, and arises purely from the competitive necessity by which we must at some point summon the ruthlessness to dispossess others of what they have so that we can prosper in their place. Sometimes by taking their land, sometimes by eating them.

This is the mystifying aspect of our love of competition, such as sports. Granted, sports might be better than war, but the valorization of such anti-social aspects of ourselves, where winning is everything, and legions of losers must suffer defeat so that one champion can be crowned ... it seems morally suspect, at least. If one looks askance at Donald Tump's demonization of Mexican immigrants, one can hardly in the next moment cheer on one's team to crush its opponents, one's country to win its wars, and one's family to succeed in its dreams of professional and reproductive dominance over other people. Competitiveness is all of a piece, and is a moral disaster.

What does competitiveness get us beyond our narrow interests? By way of natural selection, it gets us more successful populations where the weak are culled out and the most ruthless, strong, and clever survive to create yet more successful progeny. And is that the world we want to build, as humanity reaches gargantuan proportions of population and success on Earth? Our success vis-à-vis the rest of the biosphere is painfully evident. We have no competitors but each other. What does success against each other then mean, other than pain and waste?

In the economic system we have devised for ourselves to share out scarce resources, competition is supposed to generate innovation and efficiency. But typically, real innovation comes more from individual inspiration and from government funded research, with the business system merely implementing and applying what others have found, bringing it to a market scale. That is not unimportant work, and the basic market mechanisms that distribute goods are indeed very effective. But it is a principle that can be taken way too far, invading our human values and common cultural projects.

That is the subtext of our cultural moment grappling with inequality, conservatism, and a GOP that has escaped earthly bounds into an ideology of extreme competitiveness that dare not speak its full name. The 1% are, by capitalist definition, the most successful of the species. By conservative, competitive principles, they (exemplified by Donald Trump and Mitt Romney) have the duty and right to shape the social system to perpetuate their own kind at the expense of the lesser competitors among us (technically, losers). Yet there is a democracy to think about, so lip service is paid to propsperity for all, possibly through tax cuts for the rich, possibly through cutting social spending on the poor. But such hypocrisies may not even be needed as the culture becomes inured to a new feudalism, with its ever-hardening social hierarchy.

What is the answer, other than the cultivation of unifying cultural themes, and the critique of divisive, competitive, and unfeeling ones? As the black lives matter movement has brought to consciousness, there are very deep levels of social construction and competition in our society that need ongoing critique and inner work. I think that as part of the work of expanding our field of empathy among fellow humans and other beings, it is useful to see ourselves as an other as well.

Darwin took the first great leap in this direction, taking humans down from a metaphysical singularity and back into the family of life. To realize that we are apes, that we are no more feeling than other organisms that fight tenaciously to live in their own way, and that, considering our own workings as organisms, we have so very little insight that we have no personal idea how our organs work, how our very mind works, that we are strangers in a strange land. Programmed, yes, to feel that our feelings take precedence over all else and all others, but maybe capable of feeling a commonality of mystery and empathy as well.

• Jeb! and the disaster that is mainstream Republicanism.
• The ultimate form of capitalist debt and peonage ... human capital contracts. Why not sell your first-born at birth to the corporations and be done with it?
• Saudis educating children...
• Political polarization is another bad consequence of economic inequality, since money and democracy want different things.
• Australia's internet speed is even worse than ours ... another failure of conservatism.
• A better bus system might be better than chimerical trains.
• Bill Black on DOJ, closing the barn door seven years after the horses left.
• An agenda to address economic inequality. Missing are a financial transaction tax and wealth taxes, such as Piketty's annual wealth tax, or a much higher estate tax.
• Housing shortages increase inequality and feed the rentier class.
• Saving appearances in the Wall Street Journal: "Bush Wants Fewer Tax Breaks for Wealthy Than Most in GOP."

Orthologs and Homologs and Ohnologs, Oh My!

Long ago, vertebrate genomes underwent genome duplication, which unleashed great evolutionary opportunities.

Among the most ignorant arguments ever foisted on a gullible public by anti-evolutionary Creationists was that information can not increase in living systems by natural means. Put in its sophistical garb, with a intimation of high-power mathematics and quantum theory, it was hard to resist the idea that this PhD from the finest schools really knew what he was talking about. But, obviously not, since information is interchangeable with energy, as we do every day with our keyboards, and as life forms spend their time doing internally as well.

The clearest refutation of this appalling hypothesis is the phenomenon of gene duplication, when by some accident of replication or recombination, stretches of DNA can double, and an organism ends up with two genes where only one was before. As time goes on, the extra copy may disappear, recombining back out of existence, but on the other hand it may share functions with its brother (or homolog) and gain variations in its regulation or expressed sequence that lead to some new function and thus a selective reason to remain in the genome.

DNA duplications are simply accidents, no more mysterious or transgressive than the existence of DNA in the first place. And they can happen at any scale, from single nucleotides up to whole genomes. In fact, the duplication of whole genomes has been tremendously important in evolution and has been recorded in the histories and genomes of many lineages. A recent paper delved into two rounds of genome duplication that happened to the early vertebrate lineage, whose traces are peppered throughout the genomes of ourselves as well as all other vertebrates.

Incidentally, plants have experienced lots of gene duplication events, even triplications. This is the main reason why many plants have more genes than we do, despite not (apparently) being more significantly more complex.

Genome duplications and triplications in the history of angiosperms.

When a gene duplicates, a race begins between the forces of recombination, which tend to splice it back out due to the pair's identical sequences, and the forces of evolution (i.e. natural selection) which, if some kind of diversification happens, or some other rationale for keeping the extra copy, keeps it around. The rationale may simply be higher production of the same product from two, rather than one, gene. But over time, the reasons tend to get more interesting, with each gene diverging, and thus specializing, in the regulation of its own expression, or the activity of its expressed protein. Once both copies have specialized for different functions, the race is done and the gene is there to stay.

Since evolutionary biology is all about relatives and lineages, a complicated terminology has developed for describing related gene sequences, which are so very useful in finding interesting genes and deducing their function. Two genes with similar sequences are called homologs, which also means that the two sequences are related by descent. There are many families of genes, some with hundreds of members in a single species which are related in such a way, a testament to the profuseness and usefulness of gene duplication over the history of life.

If a gene is related 1:1 to a homolog in another species, such that they are fulfilling a similar role and came from the common ancestor by lineal descent, they are called orthologs. While many orthologs are relatively easy to recognize, the ability of genes to keep duplicating and diversifying in some lineages but not others can sometimes make it difficult to decide on orthologous relationships. Indeed, homologous family members present in one species are called paralogs, and whether each paralog has its separate ortholog in another species, or whether only one of them is the true ortholog and the rest are later sproutlings depends on the precise lineage history, which one has to figure out by lining up the relevant genes from several different species.

Lastly, the current paper studies homologs which descend not from single gene duplications, but from whole genome duplications, and are called Ohnologs, in honor of Susumo Ohno, who first proposed their existence. In some respects, whole genome duplications happen relatively easily. A cell just forgets the chromosome division process during mitosis, and voila- a duplicated genome. There are no dosage effects of one gene present at unusual amounts, since all are duplicated equally. There are problems mating with other organisms, however, as the chromosomes no longer match. But if parthengenesis is an option, even that issue can be overcome and a new species is founded into the bargain.

Whatever the short-term difficulties, the long-term implications of a successful genome duplication event are momentous. The new species has extra genes coming out of its ears, which lend themselves to countless opportunities for specialization and diversification. To new features that would not have been possible through the painstakingly slow accumulation of alterations in one gene. The current paper documents in the greatest detail yet the back-to-back duplication events that happened at the base of the vertebrate lineage, about 600 million years ago. The authors labor to detect as many of the remaining genes as possible, despite the ravages of time through which genes get shuffled, lost, reduplicated, garbled, etc.

They use whole genomes from several species, both inside and outside vertebrates, to look for traces of related duplicates or quadruplicates. The main piece of evidence is synteny, which is the similar ordered location of genes along the genome, comparing two species, or in the case of ohnologs, homologous genes within one species. The problem is that smaller gene duplication events can show very similar signatures to ancient whole-genome duplications that were later shuffled around by recombination. So the authors need to use a collection of species that are broad enough to place the hypothesized duplication back in time at the putative vertebrate duplication events. At the highest stringency of analysis, they come up with 1381 ohnolog sets, i.e. two or more genes traceable to a single originating gene. At lower stringency, they find up to 2642 sets, comprising almost 8,000 genes. This is over a quarter of the human genome complement, so is not bad work for events that were so long ago. It is remarkable to see so many duplicate genes preserved at a detectable level.

A pre-eminent example of such gene duplication is the Hox genes, which control broad tissue identity, especially by segment, of the body plan. The diagram below shows a classic case of ohnolog inheritance, where, using alignments of the relevant genome regions of several species, four versions of the Hox cluster are present in humans where only one is present in flies and in the chordate (but not vertebrate) lancelet. Individual copies of the Hox genes were lost in the vertebrate lineage, presumably before their diversification had established new and essential functions, but most stuck around in some form. The diversification of Hox genes allowed greater body plan complexity, as extra copies contribute to identity of novel tissues all over the body, such as limbs, digits, and parts of the head, going substantially beyond the strictly segmental identity system used in flies.

Genes controlling segmental identity in the body plan of animal species, the Hox genes, show clear evidence of the ancient genome duplications that happened at the base of the vertebrate lineage. Though some of the Hox genes were subsequently lost, the rest comprise sets of Ohnologs.

• Bonus paper on the ancient genome duplication in yeast.
• The Fed is getting ready to make a mistake.
• Rank Christianity... the sacred liberty to cram my religion down your throat.
• Annals of the class war.. who wins from QE? Mostly the financial sector, which wouldn't be the case if we had used fiscal policy instead. And more on public debt.
• The Stepford mistress-bots.
• Excess global savings is the new normal, and doesn't mix well with a free capital and investment market.
• Wag the dog.. markets have very long time horizons, which can whipsaw current valuations.
• Socialism and worker power.. scaring capitalists straight.
• Charity is closely related to feudalism. Governments do it better and fairer.
• Annals of denial.. ISIS and its brand of Islam.
• The garbage patch is worse than ever.
• How MMT differs from Keynes.
• Image of the week.. it's full of stars! A Hubble field of numerous lensed galaxy images.

Europe Engineers Another Versailles, in Greece

One person's take on the Greek economic crisis and the fallout of the Euro.

What happened in Greece? The narratives are shockingly divergent. On the one hand, Germans view Greece as a spendthrift poor relation who borrowed up the gills and now wants sympathy and even more money to throw down the drain. Nein!

On the other hand, Greeks are suffering depression conditions even worse than our Great Depression, and surrendered utterly in their most recent deal with the Trioka, (aka Germany), who are behaving like the Nazis of yore in destroying Greek independence and sending them into incredible poverty. The deal dictates that the Greek government run substantial budget surpluses as far as the eye can see, despite presiding over an economy in free-fall. It is reminiscent of the Versailles treaty that likewise tried to wring blood from the stone of then-Germany for its culpability in World War I.

Who is at fault and what is to be done? Greece is obviously heavily at fault, both for borrowing when lenders of Euros were willing to lend, and for not running an economy that maintains a rough trade balance with the rest of the Europe and the world, necessitating that borrowing (and for running a government that can not even collect taxes competently). But who were the lenders? As in our own sub-prime crisis, are the lenders who gave money so irresponsibly to the most corrupt and dysfunctional government of Europe, in full knowledge of its poor trade position, not a little to blame? Or mostly?

That is the first issue, that debtors should not be always and entirely to blame when debts go bad. Just ask the Donald. He has no qualms about redemption through the magic of bankruptcy, and Greece likewise should have few compunctions, morally, about reneging on its debts. But then it shouldn't expect any more bailouts or lending, of course. That would be the deal.

Obviously, having just been through a confidence-shattering banking crisis, the Germans and others are not excited about leaving their banks holding the bag for their bad loans to Greece. So they are extracting all the blood they can. And their bargaining position is excellent, because Greece's trump card, its willingness to leave the Euro at the same time it defaults on its Euro debts, seems to be unplayable since 80% of the population favors, even after all this misery, staying in the Euro.

Leaving the Euro would have the beneficial aspects of 1) allowing Euro debts to be more easily reneged, since Greece would henceforth have its own currency and not rely on Euro institutions; 2) allowing currency devaluation that is desperately needed to bring Greece's trade imbalance under control by automatically making imports expensive and exports cheap; 3) allowing the government to get out of its troika-imposed austerity and run budget deficits as any normal & sovereign government in its position (with trade deficits and depression conditions) would do. It is worth noting that the Euro zone is not a democratic entity. There is no president of the Euro, or popularly elected legislature, etc. It is a bureaucratic monster with little accountability, specifically constructed along the lines of a central bank to be independent of political control, except for its masters, who are the leaders and technocrats of the European economic powers, aka Germany. Which leaves little say for countries like Greece.

In the Euro system, if it were run properly, Greece would have no more currency or budget flexibility than the State of Alabama has. Alabama doesn't print its own money, or budget with ongoing fiscal deficits, or benefit from natural adjustments of a floating currency in its trade. It resembles a household that uses money originating from outside and must balance its books. Sure, there may be debt in the form of long-term bonds, but there is no scope for the many uses of a truly soverign currency. At the same time, the welfare state of Greece would be willingly under-written by the Euro zone in toto, as would some attempts at fostering economic growth, instead of making Greece sell off its public assets and endure decades of austerity.

It is thus remarkable that the Greek people are so attached to the Euro, and to being part of the European political project in general. They see themselves, indeed, as the historical and cultural heart of Europe ... where it all began. I think there are some class aspects to this position as well. The upper crust in Greece are much more tied into the European system and benefit far more from inexpensive imports than the lower classes. They would naturally regard leaving the Euro as unthinkable, and lead the political system in that direction. Also, they have so far been able to game that system so well, with all the loans and corruption, that it might seem as though the party might not have to end, even at this late date.

In any case, in or out of the Euro, Greece has to start balancing its external trade. In the absence of currency devaluation, which provides the cleanest and most progressive way to accomplish this, that takes the form of paying people fewer euros, enduring lengthy recession, and hoping that everyone with any prospects doesn't flee to other countries before a new balance between internal average pay (lower than that of their dominant trading partner Germany) and tradable productivity is found.

The role of the government in all this is something of a side-show. It ran all kinds of deficits over the Euro period, and incurred many debts. But its future budget surplus and extra taxation can not do the heavy lifting of bringing the total trade balance back on course. And what if different regions of Europe have persistently different trade balances? Not every country can be better than average. What then? In the US, different states have clearly different trade balances, and while Federal spending makes up some of the difference and supplies a safety net, in the end some states become poorer than others and send their labor out to more productive ones. The rust belt rusted out, and Social Security and unemployment insurance was not enough to save it. Property values there may be a fraction of what they are on the coasts, but the prices of other goods are typically set nationally, making these regions suffer on a permanent basis. This is one price of currency union, that laggard regions that have trade deficits with productive regions have no means of trade/currency adjustment, and can become hollowed out ruins.

That fate awaits Greece and the other poor relations of the Euro zone, unless more robust and regular means of "adjustment" are found. So far, profligate lending filled that role, until the party ended. But the need for such transfers did not end, indeed is especially acute now, with unemployment at unimaginable levels in Greece and Spain. Greece's debt should in all decency be a dead letter in its entirety, for example. Germany can't keep selling its wares to the other Euro countries, not buy enough in return, and expect the system to sail on without someone coming knocking.

• Stiglitz on Greece.
• New Yorker on Greece.
• Who caused the crazy? Too much religion, or too little?
• The evolution of hate-words.
• Coal, at least, is slowly dying in the US.
• The Taliban is still about.
• This week in the WSJ: Martin Feldstein warns of new depression due to Fed pumping of stock prices, turns around and advocates raising the interest rate.
• The traffic is soul-crushing.

Free Banking: How Good, and How Free?

A fixation of libertarians is banking without any government control, or free banking. Did it work? Can it work?

What if we could get the government off our necks and out of our pockets, reverting to a more blissful state of nature when human relations were voluntary and markets rendered, by their invisible hand, everything we need? That is the dream of libertarians, especially monetary libertarians, who yearn to go back to gold and back to a time when anyone could issue any kind of money they pleased.

It is difficult to take all this seriously, but let's try. We would have to put aside the myriad problems of the gold standard. The gold (and silver) standard did one thing very well in its day, which was to keep money similarly valued over long periods of time. A ducat was worth something reasonably similar for hundreds of years, as was a Pound Sterling, i.e. a pound of silver. The intrinsic scarcity of these metals, and the nature of mining that added to stocks in very rough proportion to human economic activity (at least when economic growth was very slow), made them natural stores of value, virtually universal among pre-industrial human societies.

Free banking has actually happened, apparently most purely in Scotland in the 1700's and 1800's, till the evil British put the Bank of England in charge of monetary policy for good, in 1844. In this system, banks competed by issuing notes on their stocks of gold. These notes constituted their funding for loans, and acted as currency. This was truly a fractional reserve system, where on a certain stock of gold, they could issue several times the value in notes, and expect that redemptions back to gold would be rare enough that they would not, in normal circumstances, face a "run" on those reserves. Their motivation, therefore, was to have their notes be as trusted as possible, and thus as long in circulation as possible, so that loans could be made in large amounts. This style of banking goes back a long way, back to the Venetians and probably beyond. The early US in the 1800's had a similar system, though free banking enthusiasts look askance because it was heavily regulated (and corrupted!) by the states, not to mention that it ended up being extremely unstable, with numerous runs, collapses, and depressions.

Free banking is not really free, in my estimation, but highly restricted in several respects. First is the gold standard. The only commonly and universally recognized form of money at the time was precious metal, for which the notes served merely as an IOU. But were everyone to wish to convert their notes to gold for safe-keeping in their mattresses, (say, if war beckoned), the system would fall apart instantly. So it was a sort of ponzi scheme from the start, as is, in fairness, most banking. The gold standard meant that many banks could operate simultaneously, recognize each other's notes, and clear each other's payments, (and have the motivation to do so), because ultimately, they knew they could settle in gold if the need arose. Crises arise, now as then, when one institution loses this trust, faces lack of credit from intermediaries and / or customers, and spirals immediately into liquidation.

Under what I would take as true libertarian principles, really free banking would be something quite different, where a bank could issue money based on any form of value at all, and compete in the marketplace of customer trust. Its reserves could be land, or timber, cows, or cockle shells. Perhaps this would reduce in practice to the old gold standard, or perhaps to the money of some well-run state far away, as many dollarized economies practice it today(!) In any case, the use of gold/silver would not be forced on the banks and their customers, but be their own choice of funding / backing.

The second restriction was the nature of the bank corporation, which had unlimited liability. Thus, unlike our own corporations, which can escape any adversity through bankruptcy, the owners (partners) of classical banks were on the hook if there was a run or over-lending and their gold stores ran out. The Scottish system had one spectacular failure, of the Ayrs Bank, which reportedly ended up with virtually no losses to the note holders because the partners were cleaned out. Obviously, this rested on a legal system that was willing to hold the partners to literal account, something that seems to be oddly lacking in the current business climate. Likewise, the legal system had to underpin the gold standard, recognizing its central role of value in economic life.

Additionally, arch-libertarian Murray Rothbard brought out a rather tart paper about how unfree the Scottish system actually was, since its banks evaded their gold redemption requirements with great determination, and relied instead on Bank of England notes for most redemptions, treating it as their central bank. It is actually an excellent article about banking in general, graced with terror over proto-Keynesian "rank inflationists".

"Professor Sydney Checkland points out that Scottish banks expanded and contracted credit in a lengthy series of boom-bust cycles, in particular in the years surrounding the crises of the 1760s, 1772, 1778, 1793, 1797, 1802-03, 1809-10, 1810-11, 1818-19, 1825-26, 1836-1837, 1839, and 1845—47. Apparently, the Scottish banks escaped none of the destabilizing, cycle-generating behavior of their English cousins."

"The Scottish system was one of continuous partial suspension of specie payments. No one really expected to be able to enter a Scots bank . . . with a large holding of notes and receive the equivalent immediately in gold or silver. They expected, rather, an argument, or even a rebuff. At best they would get a little specie and perhaps bills on London. If they made serious trouble, the matter would be noted and they would find the obtaining of credit more difficult in the future."

"Bailey overlooked the fundamental Ricardian truth that there is never any social value in increasing the supply of money, as well as the insight that bank credit entails a fraudulent issue of warehouse receipts to nonexistent goods."

Anyhow, given these important restrictions and traditions, the Scottish system was quite competitive and reasonably robust for its day, with a few large and many small banks. The one thing it didn't do was serve the state, which by time was becoming used, in England, to running the monetary system for purposes of both inflation control and its own funding, especially in war. As Rothbard notes, the Scottish system had led to credit gyrations and substantial inflation, issuing roughly fifty times as many notes as the underlying gold/silver. This allowed economic growth, but also was completely unsustainable in terms of a true gold standard.

In the end, we return to the questions that were current in the 1800's as modern banking began to take shape. Should fractional banking be allowed in any form, or should money be 100% backed by the precious metals of tradition? If fractional banking be allowed, how should the creation of money be controlled to prevent the incessant cycles of boom and bust which appeared inherent to the free system whereby banks printed paper money in response to business demand for credit? If fractional banking be not allowed, how could one accommodate economic growth when the supply of money failed to grow- that is, when one's mines (or Imperial thievery) failed to crank out as much new metal as proportionately required for growth in population and technology? Would everyone end up being "crucified on a cross of gold"?

The answer, obviously, is that neither a 100% gold standard, nor free, unregulated banking, are optimal. Given the world's current wealth of about $250 trillion, an ounce of gold would have to be worth $50,000 to back wealth at 100%, which seems not just unrealistic, but obscene and a threat to our natural environment, given the mining this price would entail. Historically, as economic growth far outstripped metal mining, central banks took over macroeconomic policy with regard to money creation, inflation & interest rate control, bank regulation, reserve requirements, and many other practices. Central banks have made their share of grievous errors, particularly in the Great Depression. But some lessons have been learned, and our latest brush with the pitfalls of ponzi banking was significantly less bad than the Great Depression.

Nor is a stable store of value over long periods of time the only point of having a monetary system. Rather, it should exist to increase prosperity and human well-being. Gold is still available, after all, to all and sundry who wish for that imperishable store of value. For the rest, modest and controlled inflation using an elastic supply of money, as a spur to productive investment and labor over pure saving / mattress-stuffing, may be a more desirable feature of an optimal monetary system, combined with active state management to maintain value over booms and busts in the business cycle.

• Stiglitz on banking and credit catastrophes. A failure of mainstream economics.
• Bill Mitchell on basic Keynes.
• "Faith" is not faith.
• "Free" enterprise is anything but. There is always a network of consequences.
• The 1% vs Social Security.
• Modi calls Pakistan a spade. There is no "good" Taliban.
• All our money is belong to your national debt. Paul Krugman schools Rand Paul.
• The atheists are OK.