Are economists a higher life form?

I just read this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is about the work of an anthropologist who has come up with what I think is a very insightful model of human relationships. Relationships can be divided into four types: communal sharing, equality matching, authority matching, and market pricing. Social conflicts mostly arise from confusion over which relationship mode is being used. (Just read the damn article!) As I said, I think this is a great idea that explains a lot; however, I have a few issues, mostly not with the model but with the article.

First of all, market pricing doesn't fit in with the other three relationships. The other three are things that people do; market pricing is something which arises indirectly from what people do. Namely, in an "ideal" market, prices arise from people acting "rationally;" that is, being as greedy as they can get away with. The fourth paradigm would be better called something like "rational trading."

It also neglects, as far as I can see, all non-peaceful relationships. Where does robbery fall, I wonder? Could it be that the fourth paradigm would better be expressed as "greedy exploitation," and that it is only expressed in modern society as trading because we have laws and police that discourage people from just killing me and taking my stuff? The author of the article goes on to suggest that the reason people have a hard time understanding economics is that the fourth paradigm is the newest in the development of human culture. In light of what I just said, I think this is wrong for two reasons.

First, if we see that market pricing is really just greedy snatching, it becomes apparent that it is not the newest social form, but the oldest. It is only because the other three have arisen that it is now expressed in a more civilized way.

Second, the article's claim that people have a hard time understanding economics is because they don't truly understand the "market pricing" paradigm is completely backwards. The standard model of economics considers only this paradigm; two centuries after Adam Smith, economists are only now beginning to incorporate other, "irrational" behaviours into their models, and with limited success. As social relationships go, "market pricing" is actually the simplest to understand! The fact that greed is the only motivating instinct that we have a thorough economic understanding of is precisely why the author can erroneously mislabel this as something abstract like "market pricing." The fact is, people just don't understand the far-reaching effects of large numbers of social interactions; even the science of economics has only managed this for situations in which some very particular assumptions hold, and I postulate that it is this limit that prevents widespread intuitive understanding of market pricing.

The article ends with the idea that to have an intuitive understanding of market pricing is to "take a step or two up the evolutionary ladder." While I don't disagree that understanding standard economics is useful, and is an indicator of intelligence, the implication here is grotesque! An "intuitive grasp of economics" here can be taken to mean an ability to act without any motivation other than greed! And to suggest that this represents some kind of advancement of humankind is pathological. There's more to life than stuff!

Other minor gripes: the whole idea of an "evolutionary ladder" is a bit silly, even as an analogy. Whether you're a human or a worm, you're either alive or you aren't; there is no other objective measure of evolutionary superiority. Also, the quotation "From each according to ability, to each according to need" should properly be attributed to John Smith of the Jamestown Colony, not to Marx.

Of Mice and Men...and Keyboards

A little over two years, I got a Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro keyboard and mouse combo. I regret to inform you that it is now dead.

A few weeks ago, I started to notice that the mouse was acting up a little bit. Not properly releasing from clicks, not tracking as smoothly as usual, etc. Then this morning, I dripped some coffee on my keyboard and it's totally fubar. Given my track record, two years is a remarkably long time for a keyboard to last in my hands, so I'm not too disappointed. For now I'm using my spare keyboard (yes, I'm a geek, I have a backup keyboard and mouse), and I'm shopping for a new keyboard and mouse.

The problem is that I can't get what I want. I have a few issues with the ergonomics of standard keyboards. A lot has been said about the retardedness of QWERTY keyboards, and I won't even get into that; besides, QWERTY is the standard and it's not something I can change. A lot has also been said about how stupid it is to put the Caps Lock key where it is. But that's not my main issue. My main issue is with the numeric keypad: it should be on the other side. Having the numeric keypad on the right means that you have to have the mouse even further to the right. That means that you have to do one of two things that are both ergonomic no-nos: you either have to sit slightly off center of the keyboard and reach to the left to type, or you have to reach to the right to use the mouse. This might be excusable if there were some reason for it, but there isn't; the numeric keypad would work perfectly well on the left side of the keyboard.

Another thing that bugs me about keyboards is size. Why do all decent keyboards these days have like 150 keys and take up your whole desk? It's retarded. I don't need a "Shopping" button for God's sake! I just want the basic 104-key layout with maybe a volume control, that's all, and I want it the keyboard to be about the size of the keys, not surrounded by a 3-inch plastic border.

I think the closest thing to what I want would be the Logitech diNovo Cordless Desktop, with its sweet detachable numeric keypad. The only problems are that the mouse is ugly and uncomfortable and it costs a whopping $180. So, sigh, I'll probably just get something fairly cheap (I saw a cordless desktop from Microsoft on sale at Bureau en Gros for only $80--I'm a little bit afraid it will self-destruct if I try to use it with Linux though) until they come out with my dream keyboard.

Oh, and if you want to get me a Christmas present, I wouldn't mind one of these. Drool!

Calgary (The first in a series: things I said I would post about and didn't)

Back in August, I went to my friend Eric's wedding in Calgary. At the time, I said I'd write about my impressions of Alberta, and I never did. Until now. I'll start by saying that one thing I noticed about Albertans (especially compared to Montrealers) is that they are unbelievably nice. The mountains are beautiful, and the mountain towns like Banff and Canmore are really nice (Banff is a bit of a tourist trap though). I don't think anyone will dispute me saying that the rest of the province is a bit boring scenery-wise though: almost perfectly flat, nothing but grain fields, and roads so straight that driving around the slightest bend is an event.

Now to tell you what I think of the city of Calgary. Proud Calgarians can skip the rest of the post; I'm not trying to be mean, but that's probably how it'll come out.

I think the problem with Calgary is threefold: for one, there are no constraints to its outward growth. Two, that growth is very rapid. Three, almost all of that growth has been in the age of the automobile and cheap energy. The result is less of a city than an isolated concentration of suburban sprawl. The one exception to the sprawl rule would be the downtown, which seems to be something out of one of Jane Jacobs' worst nightmares, a dense cluster of phallic monuments to oil and finance companies that turns into an urban wasteland come six o'clock.

Kunstler famously described suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, and Calgary is a stunning example of this. The vast wealth generated by the city is being sunk into suburban infrastructure with no future. Everything in the city depends on the ability to drive. The public transit system seems to be something of a city-wide joke. There seem to be no local shopping streets in the city at all; just malls and strip malls, and the requisite gigantic parking lots that go with them. The diminishing returns on this style of development are readily apparent; it takes ages to get anywhere, and you have to drive, and the traffic is just as bad as in downtown Montreal. I seem to recall reading something once about how in modern cities, the space devoted to cars is more than the space devoted to people; I would guess that somewhere like Calgary, the ratio is dramatic! The thing that shocked me most of all about the city is that it has no passenger train service! VIA Rail now only serves the Edmonton branch of the line, and the only rail traffic in Calgary is freight.

I really worry about places like Calgary. What will happen there when gas costs $2 a litre? $3? $5? $10? I can't imagine. They can't help but become slums. If you think otherwise, that more oil will be found in time, or that technology will come along to rescue our happy motoring existence, you're fooling yourself. Don't believe me? Here are a few places to start:

• The End of Suburbia - a 50-minute documentary available on YouTube.
• The Oil Drum - the most comprehensive site on the web for information about oil and energy. See their introduction and their response to last week's CERA report that the mainstream media so unquestioningly reported as the end to our energy worries.

Too Little, Too Zune

I know the other day I was picking on the approach that Apple was taking with the iPod, but I have to give Apple credit for not doing anything nearly so stupid as what Microsoft is doing. The new Microsoft player won't play tracks purchased from Microsoft's music service and won't work with their new operating system out of the box!

This whole DRM thing is really getting out of control. Nothing makes me more hesitant to buy music (or books, movies, etc.) from a legal source than the thought that I'm not going to be able to use it when and where I want. It's one thing to expect people to pay for something they can get for free; it's another to expect them to do it when the free version is better!

Centrist? We'll See About That!

I recently took the World's Smallest Political Quiz, only to learn that I am a centrist.
Now, anyone who knows me and knows anything about my politics knows this is a load of crap. I admit, the answers I gave on the quiz might lead someone to believe I was a fairly moderate person, but it's the questions the quiz didn't ask that make the difference.

It turns out that I'm not the only one who has criticized this particular political quiz, unsurprisingly. The quiz is run by a libertarian advocacy group, and the main criticism is that it overclassifies people as libertarians (and that it is Americentric, which I can forgive). My opinion is a bit different though; I think that a large number of Americans genuinely are libertarians, even if they don't identify themselves as such; the traditional dichotomy of left vs. right has made them confused about their political identity.

My problem is not that the two-dimensional characterization of people's political beliefs is one more dimension than we need, but that it's too few dimensions. Obviously, if you want, you can characterize a person's political beliefs in an indefinitely large number of dimensions, limited only to the number of things people can have political opinions on. Obviously though, people's answers to many political questions are highly correlated, so it is possible to reduce this to a lower-dimensional characterization. The traditional system attempts to map this multidimensional space of political beliefs onto a one-dimensional line of left vs. right. The system used in the quiz, and in other models I've seen, extend this to a two-dimensional manifold. But why one dimension? Why two? Do we really know what an appropriate number of political dimensions is? Has anyone ever bothered to find out? I'm thinking I might be the person to do it.

Here's what I'm thinking of doing: 1) making a very large survey of political questions, as many and as varied as I can reasonably expect people to answer, say n. 2) collecting the answers from a large number of people, say m. I now have a collection of m points in an n-dimensional space. 3) Performing a principal component analysis on the results. For those readers who haven't studied statistical pattern recognition, basically what this does is figure out what are the sets of issues that are most strongly correlated. Essentially, it finds the best way to sort people's political beliefs. It might be that our traditional views of left vs. right are completely wrong, and that there is another set of issues that more meaningfully divides people.

So this is a big project I'm thinking about working on. Maybe in the summer. It's time to finally sort out this left vs. right nonsense. I'd appreciate any feedback from people regarding what sorts of questions to ask in the survey, or any other thoughts.

Democracy Now!

By now I'm sure we all know that the Democrats had a field day in the midterm election on Tuesday, taking over both the House and the Senate and sending a message to the hawks in the administration. The most important result of the election, though, went completely unnoticed in the media, except for one little map from the BBC website. See if you can spot it:

See it? Yeah, that's right: New Hampshire is now the 11^th Canadian province. Hooray! It's a Remembrance Day miracle!

Election Day U.S.A.

I just came across an interesting article from the last U.S. election about election politics. It's a bit disheartening, but it rings true: it's all a failure, not enough people have a clue to really vote properly. One quotation I found particularly salient:

Most Americans simply do not make a connection between tax policy and the over-all economic condition of the country. Whatever heuristic they are using, it is definitely not doing the math for them.

So true, unfortunately. Of course, it's really not much of a surprise that most people don't know much about politics, since most people are completely absent from the political process except for one day every couple of years.

Headline News

Another one for the "BBC needs to try reading their headlines out loud to themselves" file: Former bandmates slam Boy George.

Another one for the "Japan is fucked up" file: Faking it as a priest in Japan.