PoTD

I will soon be back with some of my own words.   For now, consider Mike Munger on Jared Diamond.

Q:  What's the rest of the list besides guns?

PoTD

Henderson channels the true subjectivist Austrian economics beautifully here.  Ever so important.

Location?

Do many of my readers live in the greater DC area?

PoTD

Mel on dehumanization.  I would argue that this is the central worry that leftist types have when rightist types start talking about topics like immigration and HBD topics.  RTWT...consider how the rhetoric deployed plays in this space.  Consider the method...treat it as important.

PoTD

Seth Roberts on Education.

PoTD

The story is impossible to tell often enough.

QoTD

via Robin Hanson, from Scott Siskind:

A democracy provides a Schelling point, … an option which might or might not be the best, but which is not too bad and which everyone agrees on in order to stop fighting. … In the six hundred fifty years between the Norman Conquest and the neutering of the English monarchy, Wikipedia lists about twenty revolts and civil wars. … In the three hundred years since the neutering of the English monarchy and the switch to a more Parliamentary system, there have been exactly zero. … Democracy doesn’t always perform optimally, but it always performs fairly, … and that is enough to prevent people from starting civil wars.

Fairly...if one includes the once-English America...we should probably count 2 (American Revolution & US. Civil War).   By observation, besides it's other many faults, Monarchy causes internal civil wars, perhaps at a rate of 1/33 years.  Democracy is running 1/150.  

PoTD

In the 736th installment of The Crimson Reach's single-blog crusade against "default" and related in(s?)anities, he posts an excellent article titled The bias towards spending.  Please read.

Ill

Hence not writing much.  Maybe flu, maybe cedar fever.  Lots of sleeping.

Recipe: Roquefort Sauce (By Request)

Ingredients:

White Wine that you could drink...I tend to prefer a Chardonnay for this, but I tend to use a Pinot Grigio...and my wife drinks the rest with dinner (I'm a teetotaler, even though it's less healthy...can't stand the taste of alcohol): ~1 cup
Heavy Cream: ~1 cup
Unsalted Butter: ~8oz
Roquefort Cheese: ~8oz (I often use 2 3.5 oz containers, because that's how Papillon sells 'em. )
Parsley:  1 large handful, chopped.
Pepper:  My preference is about 1tsp of crushed green peppercorns (Iron skillets crush peppercorns well).  YMMV.  I also frequently don't have those, and just toss in a 1/2 tsp of pepper.

0. (Night before) Soften cheese and butter by letting it sit out overnight or so.
1. Pour the wine into a saucepan, heat on high, cook it down to just a tiny little bit (couple tbsp left).  You can generally get away with not reducing it quite as far.
2. While the wine is reducing, using a separate bowl and a fork, mix/mash together the softened roquefort and softened butter.
3. Pour the cream into the reduced wine.  Leave on high, perhaps cover with a splatter-guard or lid...cook down to 1/2 cup (yes, the 2 cups of liquid have become 1/2 cup total)
4. While the cream-wine is reducing, chop the parsley.  One large handful of fresh chopped parsley will do.
5. While the cream-wine is reducing, prepare the pepper...either find black pepper, or crush the green peppercorns (right now, I'm using a medley, not just green).  
6. When cream reduced to ~1/2 cup...turn heat down to medium-low, Drop butter/roquefort mixture into the cream...use spatula to get it ALL out of the bowl...you don't want to miss any.  Stir in.  
7. Once roquefort/butter mixed in, drop parsley + pepper in, turn heat down to low.    
8. keep warm until serving.

Normally served over:

Steak (Filet -- 1.5 inch thick, pan seared 2 min each side (on a pre-heated stainless steel frying pan, and finished to rare by placing the pan in the oven @450 in <10 minutes).  Cuts with a fork.

Shoestring french fries ... but make sure to get a good brand, not the kind that tend to taste sour.  I can't remember which brand.  

Green beans -- ends chopped off, placed in glass container...microwave for 5-6 minutes.   

Pour the sauce over everything.  It's among the best meals I make.  It's definitely the most requested for special occasions.  

2nded PoTD

Coyote Blog found it.  McArdle wrote it.

When I was reporting on Wall Street, I used to be told with some regularity that government was needed to counteract the short-term thinking of the business sector, who never thought much beyond the next quarterly earnings report.  This now seems as quaintly adorable as picture hats and daily milk deliveries.  An ADHD day trader with a cocaine habit and six months to live has considerably more long-term planning skills than our current congress.

RTWT

2nd PoTD

Government logic wins.  Crampton points out that the social costs of being healthy far outweigh the social costs of being sick, unfit, and smoking.  The government should subsidize coke, booze, and tobacco:

"Smokers remain the benefactors of the rest of us - voluntarily paying ridiculous levels of tax and then dying before taking much out of the superannuation system."

PoTD

HBDChick links to why girls do better in school:

The study shows that gender disparities in grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys’ grades are lower than where their test scores would predict, according to the researchers.

In other words: grades are about how well you do what you're told, and seek approval from the teacher...and a lot less about what you learn.  

Again, from Aretae's personal teaching experience...

for any given year of teaching, one can almost always identify the top 5% of girls and the top 5% of boys.  

The top 5% of girls uniformly does what they're asked to do...and does it near perfectly.  The top 5% of boys uniformly ignores what they're asked to do, and does something else brilliantly.  

On Scarcity

(By Request)

The engineers say that it's an engineering problem.  If there's only 1000 tons of helium available, then when we run out of those 1000 tons, we're out of helium.

The historians say that it may seem like an engineering problem, but somehow we never run out of anything.

The economists say that it's 2 or 3 different problems, none of which are the engineering problem that the engineers talk about:

Question 1:  Business problem:  How valuable is the helium for use #1 vs. use #2.  As we start to run out of helium, the price goes up, and childrens helium filled baloons start to cost $5 or $10 or $20 each, instead of $1.  All of a sudden, kids don't get baloons for their birthdays...they get stuffed animals instead.  And the rate of use of helium drops.  If helium costs $1000/baloon-worth...an awful lot of folks will opt not to use helium

Question 1b:  What are the best substitutes?  In the case of balloons, perhaps a mixture of hydrogen with argon is almost as good as helium for both non-combustibility and lightness (I don't know).  Perhaps balloons need to be mounted with non-combustion safety devices at a cost of $6/each in order to make hydrogen safe enough to use instead of helium.  If helium costs $10/baloon...welcome safe hydrogen balloons (safe already, hydrogen burns upwards, but whatever).

Question 2:  Is it recoverable?   Right now most helium baloons are made from semi-permeable rubber-ish stuff, which leads to the baloons slowly leaking.   However, a substantial number of baloons, apparently increasing, are made of metallized paper...which means that the helium doesn't escape.  Perhaps loaning a group of metallic helium balloons to a kid's party is now doable...with a substantial deposit.  Perhaps helium is becoming so scarce that helium recovery devices mounted on airplanes are cost-feasible.

Question 3:  Is it produceable/renewable?   At what cost of helium does commercial fusion become worth investing in purely, or additionally for the production of helium?  Why are there more forests in the US now than there were at the turn of the 20th century? Because we needed wood, and wood grows.
Between fission and fusion, we can also produce any element that is important enough.

Question 4:  Can we use less of it to get the same result?  It used to take a lot more metal to build a car than it does now.  Knowledge is replacing mass rather rapidly.  Ditto roughly everything.  Turns out that our intuition that manufactured goods are made out of stuff is a mostly wrong, industrial age model.  Manufactured goods are mostly made out of knowledge.  And the less knowledge you have, the more stuff it takes.

Question 5:  What incentives are in place to convince people to push the borders of questions 2-4?  Really...that's question #1 again.  $100 barrels of oil opened up the North Dakota Shale Oil fields.  Shale Gas has deeply transformed the energy industry.  What is worth solving?  Well...the $ available make a difference on that problem.

But the engineers reply...But surely there is some limit?

And the economist-engineers say...we're not talking quantity really...we're talking rate.  Suppose we could build fully recyclable cars, produceable in 15 minutes, google-driven, and uber-safe...provided you had access to 500 pounds of carbon.   It could well be that we could build a car to drive to work...drive home, recycle the car into a outdoor bungalow for your party that evening...and then recycle it back into a car for the next day's drive.

And the engineers reply...But surely there is some limit on rate?

Sure...there are two real limits on what we can support.  Mass and energy.

The earth's crust masses 10^25 g.  The earth masses 6 x 10^27 g.  We can't beat that without getting offplanet.  The solar system's solids, minus the sun, masses on the order of 10^30g.  We can't beat that without getting outside our solar system.  

The earth receives on the order of 10^17 watts.  We can't beat that without getting offplanet.  The sun produces on the order of 10^26 watts.  We can't beat that without getting out of the solar system.

So...yes..we know that human beings using beyond about 10^30g of mass or 20^26 watts is a hard-ish limit minus FTL travel.

Other limits?  I'm not aware of any other hard limits.

Once I hear people proclaiming the end of available mass or energy...and using sane values like 10^25 g or 10^17 watts...then we have something to talk about in terms of scarcity.  Until then...it's basically all artificial limits and technical problems (some of which aren't solved yet).

From Mother Jones?

Lead Causes IQ failure causes all other problems...sez mother jones (HT: Hippie Environmentalist Humans-Are-A-Virus Sister)

A Gentle Introduction to Aretaevianism

If the blog had only one message to say to the world, this would be it:

For all problems, feedback systems are both the problem and the solution. -- Aretae

• Why do we have life?  
• Evolution.  Little luck, lotsa feedback.
• Why are we thousands-to-millions of times richer than our ancestors?  
• Economics and free markets.  Little inspiration, lotsa feedback.
• Why do we know much more than our ancestors?
• Science.  Little prediction, lotsa feedback.
• How do people learn?
• Practice.  Little information, lotsa feedback
• How should you build manufactured stuff?
• Toyota-Lean.  Normalize, then feedback
• How should you develop software?
• Agile.  Feedback-based risk management
• How should you make a country wealthy?
• Freedom and property rights.  Little law, lotsa feedback
• How should you fight a fight?
• OODA.  Little strategy, lotsa feedback.

Of course, feedback systems being always the problem and the solution leads to an awful lot of other things.

Why are feedback systems always the problem and solution?

Prediction is very hard, especially about the future -- Yogi Berra

In other words, we're wrong a lot.  A lot a lot.  Why?  Several reasons.

1. Essential unpredictability.  In completely understood systems, where every single interaction is well understood, that doesn't make the future predictable.  Non-linear dynamic systems, commonly called chaotic systems, are in many cases impossible to predict at any distance into the future regardless how well you know the data.  Even simple problems like Gravity are unsolvable both analytically and simulation-wise in situations as simple as: 3 objects attracting one another, where all 3 have more than 5% of the mass of the system. And, as far as I can tell, this constitutes most systems.  
2. The simple problems are gone.  In the time from Newton to Fermi, there was an awful lot of science that could be done by just watching for patterns...and then using that to predict the future.  AFAICT, all the simple problems have been solved.   we are now facing the question of what can you predict in the face of dozens or hundreds of variables...all of which matter?  You can make statistical predictions on which you'll be wrong  most of the time...but hopefully better than you would be without said prediction.  Science is still falsifiability all the way down...but how one falsifies has changed.The problems being addressed are not (mostly) ones that involve 2 particles or a single wave-form.  Human psychology is a hard problem.  Kinda like the weather.  Or the economy.  Or any other interesting problem.  
3. Other People.  Your goals are just your goals, and other folks often have different goals. If you make a plan, and your goal is opposing their goal, they will try to oppose you.  Any contest that doesn't take into account other agents which may oppose your goals, or who might have near-orthogonal goals is guaranteed to go to the folks who react better.  And if their first attempt to oppose you fails, they will likely try a second.

Are those all the reasons?  No.  Actually, I left off one of the big ones:

Monkeybrains -- your brain doesn't work how you want it to...or very well at all. 

Come again?
There are several features of the human mind that are actively disbelieved by most folks, but psychological research confirms most of them strongly.

1. Goals are prior to reason.  The order of events in most cases of thinking or acting is measured to be:  
1. Brain decides what it wants.  
2. Brain pushes conclusion to face.  
3. Brain pushes conclusion to body.  
4. Brain pushes conclusion to conscious mind.  
5. Conscious mind creates explanation for what just happened  
2. The brain is not unified.  Rather there are a set of independent modules, each of which operates largely alone in deciding what to do.  A conclusion in the form of a final vote is the only information that gets bubbled up to consciousness.  
3. The brain is obviously evolved above that of monkeys almost purely for the purpose of doing social  games in roving bands as large-pack top-predators (like wolves, but bigger packs).  The only evolutionary dangers to human beings were:
1. Ostracism -- lone humans die, besides not reproducing.
2. Other human beings -- mostly in-group, but some out-group
3. Parasites/Diseases -- this may be the big evolutionary game...with the other ones on the side.
4. Accident. 
4. Consciousness plays the role of press-secretary for the steering committee of the brain, not the role of Chairman of the Board or Chief Executive.  
5. The self that you are now has different interests than the self that made a decision last week, and also than the self that will get on the scale tomorrow.  

Logically, evolutionarily, psychologically, epistemologically, developmentally, and economically, the goal is where you start.  Reason comes after, to justify the goal.  If you're uncertain of this...read D'Amasio.  As a thought experiment, consider the evolutionary fate of creatures which allowed reason to lead their goals, rather than goals to lead their reason.  Given the basic weakness of human reason, this is NOT a very likely path to success.

Additional questions:
How is life now, as compared to the rest of human history.

Now is the Golden Age.  By any reasonable measure, life has never been better for most of the people on the planet. The past was horrid for 99% of the population.

See Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, Julian Simon, Dierdre McCloskey, or one of those folks.  Catastrophists are cranks.  The last 2500 years of Apocolyptics have been nuts or trying to make a buck...and it hasn't changed any this year.   At least the Peak Oil people have shut up now (haven't they?).  The AGW Catastrophists have another several years of steam in them.


What accounts for our lives being so much better than the normal historical life?

Our lives are good because we escaped the Malthusian Hell via Economic Growth

Is that all?  Surely, it has something to do with democracy, capitalism, rights of man

Yes, that's all. For poor people, economic growth is the be-all end-all.  Wealth impacts health, lifespan, happiness, IQ & height (across at least 3 generations via nutrition).  It is not obvious at what wealth-point it becomes sane to trade other considerations for economic growth...but it's not obvious that anyone yet has reached it.  And wealth is a darn good proxy for positive liberty, which is a superset of negative liberty.  Wealth and economic growth are the it.

What causes growth?

Growth happens via Technological Innovation, Property Rights, Trade, and Specialization  

It isn't clear what other factors need to be in place in order to make growth happen.  It is obvious that without innovation, property rights, trade, and specialization, growth doesn't happen...and we descend slowly back into the malthusian hell.  

What's the biggest danger facing us today?  Falling back into that state.  We must keep economic growth going.  What's the biggest danger to economic growth?

Artificial Scarcity -- Monopoly -- the inability to exit -- is our central danger

Rulers have always tried to run the world.  Often times they have succeeded.  And insofar as they succeed, it is in their best interests to stop growth, as growth deeply alters the economic power structure, which then nearly always spills over into altering the political power structure as well.  One could call it the North Korea problem.  Kim Jung Un seems to be doing pretty well.  Better than most rulers most places.  It's just everyone else in the country who's screwed.

Scarcity/Monopoly is how corporations gain power...and how the government manages power.  The goal is to eliminate monopolies, so that innovation thrives.  In the absence of competition, firms don't die when they should...states don't wither as they should...and the world stops innovating, growing, improving.

What is then the ideal political system?

Until governments has to compete for citizens, the citizens will keep getting screwed.

See the government in the world that screws its citizens the least:  Switzerland.  Most of the power is municipal or cantonal, and they have to compete for citizens with one another.  Also see the top 10 free-est countries   All small, and to some extent competing for citizens, except the slightly decentralized federal system of the USA.