Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Economics

Remote Work, Transportation, and SARS-CoV-2

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In the past 100 years, the world has experienced three major technological revolutions with respect to human industriousness and communication:

  1. Mass availability of automobiles for personal travel.
  2. Mass telecommunications for mass one-way messages via television/radio and telephone calls.
  3. Mass availability of personal computers.

With these three technologies, one would think that the American dream would be to work from home or near home, to drive to work to solve in-person problems and work communications would be brief, informative, and useful.

Instead, we’re in this bizarre circumstance wherein traveling to a central location (because it came first) is the primary work mindset and telecommunications and computers are used to make employees more aware of their work bureaucracy from home.

Now, working from home has trials and difficulties, but it also allows for helping family, choosing hours, working efficiently without interruption from lazy co-workers, and so-on. This applies to education, most jobs

My hope during the SARS-CoV-2 quarantine situation is that we can make the family the center of American life with work as the intrusion.

This would be good. Old habits die hard, though.

Of course, the issues raised by a viral spread this large are both practical and speculative, for instance, while a smaller world with more local economies would make local quarantining far easier, having megacorporations like Amazon, for all the problems it causes, makes it easier for people to access things like vitamin C, materials they need for their small business when local supplies are unavailable, and so-on. Is there a way, in the future, to have a world that integrates the resources of a global economy while maintaining the local culture and efficiencies of local communities. Like, why is every building in America made of drywall when it mildews easily in humid areas? Mega-economies are efficient at spreading things everywhere regardless of appropriateness.

The Digital Tribe

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No man is an island, even conceptually.

We see ourselves enmeshed in multple layers reality:

  1. Family
  2. City
  3. Nation
  4. Sport teams
  5. Religious groups
  6. The physical world
  7. Etc

There are certainly more elements to this and many of our social selves instantiate precisely to fit into these groups. So we behave differently at work than at home, in a forrest than at church, at a restaurant than at a friend’s house, etc.

Our bodies have an entire reflect system to help us navigate all of these communities. For instance, you may value your job and your family, but you feel more guilty about leaving your family for a slightly bigger paycheck then you feel about doing w/out the money.

Our emotions, far from being mere spontaneous reactions are deeply social and party rational, insofar as they respond to things we deeply value, either innately or through choice. You might call your family, friends, and religious group a tribe.

Your emotions respond to your perception of your tribe’s approval. This helps you survive. The word being valuing your tribe and the opinions of your tribal members is loyalty or even faith. They are the people you trust and entrust yourself to.

Now, in more ancient times, people were necessarily localist, and so outlier tribe members had two options: leave the tribe or find a niche therein. If they could not, too bad. Leaving meant facing hostile groups or the environment without support.

In the age of the Internet, it is far easier to find a tribe if your family is boring, hostile, or uninvolved. This can be good. So much of our culture is complete bullshit these days, that finding a real, local tribe to fit into is almost impossible in some regions. For instance, I live in a city w/no gym and probably a 90% obesity rate. Almost everybody who goes outside wears sweatpants and sports-team shirts. I do not hate these people, I just cannot fit in with them. Thankfully, I live near a large city with more like-minded people. But if I didn’t, the Internet could provide me with access to experts in weight-lifting, forums of weight lifters offering guidance, support, and encouragement, and all of this would be to my choosing. And this happens for people in many domains: gaming, religion, humor, dating, etc.

What’s my point? That the Internet offers replacement tribes and therefore creates a set of emotional commitments. So while people might feel lonely because they have very little close fellowship with like-minded friends, they also find themselves highly influenced by distant individuals with no skin-in-the-game for their well-being. For instance, an individual with gender dysphoria whose behavior might have been taboo 30 years ago, might have been pressured into therapeutic intervention or into having a private life of cross-dressing and public life that looked much different. Now, such an individual can go to Twitter and find what appears to be millions and millions of supportive cheerleaders, feel really good about a permanently life-altering series of surgeries, and have not one conservation with a dissenting voice that is genuinely concerned. This happens with divorces, religious conversions, abortions, and so-on.

Why? Our tribes are digital.

Debiasing Desire an Interesting Paper

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I found this paper, or rather, saw it linked on Twitter. It purports to criticize the behaviors of online dating platforms for their sexual racism, suggest that sexual selection is the result of more than individual choice, but rather of cultural factors as well, “In this view, individuals’ intimate affiliations are not the product of “pure” individual choice, but are instead shaped by accretions of state and social power.” The paper then suggests that one can resist such assortative mating, “resistance simply requires recognizing that desire is malleable,” particularly it can be shaped by online dating platform algorithms. But whose desires should be shaped, I wonder. I’ll simply drop this paragraph here indicating whose desires should not

While it may strike us as normatively acceptable to encourage intimate platform users to be open to more diverse potential partners, we might find some categories more palatable for such intervention than others. For example, it might seem inappropriate to suggest that a Jewish user seeking other Jewish people “expand her horizons” past those preferences, which might be based on a number of religious and cultural considerations. Similarly, a platform suggesting that a gay user “consider” dating someone of a different gender would likely strike us as problematic. Intimate platforms can be very useful for minorities looking to meet others who share their background and values. Instead of drawing a bright line on what should or should not be acceptable categories to consider, we suggest that designers should take the needs of marginalized or historically oppressed populations into account when considering how intimate platform features are used. Careful consideration of the outcomes of the exercise of intimate preferences may reveal that some of these groups are at greater risk for harm than others, and that platform features should be implemented accordingly.

Debiasing Desire (14-15)

So, the paper is clear that cultural factors are a partial cause for romantic interest in similar looking individuals. But then it also says that certain groups’ cultural dating preferences (namely local minorities) should be respected and not influenced by dating app algorithms. This is already incoherent, as to influence majority users into dating outside of their preferred ethnic/religious/cultural boundaries necessarily encourages them to date minorities. I do wonder though, do the authors of this paper think that world minorities should get special treatment or only local ones (say, Irish individuals should be left alone to date as they wish, but Chinese users should be influenced to date non-Chinese people)?  Also, what of countries like Somalia. Should members of the Italian minority in Somalia be influenced to date/marry members of the majority since Italty has a larger population than Somalia or should Somalian Darod Clan (something like 50% of the population) be influenced to date the Italians but not the reverse. 

All of this is to say, what are they teaching people in these schools? Do they engage in deliberation or do they just write words about things and ask editors to take out grammatical errors? Also, what exactly are the intentions of such a paper if the practical results of its efforts were so poorly conceived? 

Book Review: Poor Richard’s Retirement

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Aaron Clarey, Poor Richard’s Retirement: Retirement for Everyday Americans

Aaron Clarey is a consultant and independent economist who writes books that are meant to help young men and women make wiser financial choices. His approach is no nonsense, gruff, and often cynical. But despite seeming like a complete jerk, his advice which is free on his blog or youtube channel clearly comes from a big heart (for sensitive users or those who may listen w/children around, he does curse a lot). This is evident when he, for instance, criticizes parents who don’t spend a great deal of time with their children (this is a common thread in his books and podcasts and I only listen to them a couple of times a year).

I disagree with a great deal of his material, but it’s because he’s not religious and I’m a Christian. But his grasp of markets, how they work, and what personal steps are necessary for success are second to none.

That being said, if you’re a millennial, especially one who graduated college between 2007-2010, you’ve probably wondered how in the heck you could ever retire. If so, Clarey’s book has everything you need. It contains a helpful explanation of steps one can take in order to get ready for retirement, but does something a great many similar books don’t do. He reframes what it means to live a life of meaning with a personal sense of significance. The book amounts to a sort of secular explanation of Jesus’ saying that we should “…take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

I think the argument he makes, though it veers toward cynicism is worth reading in full because of its rhetorical effect. So I won’t explain it.

The practical tips he gives are excellent. His solution to the problem of retirement is ultimately satisfying (more on that below). And he does run some of the numbers comparing costs in previous generations of those of ye olde current year in a way that is helpful and potentially guilt inducing.

Worthwhile quotes:

  1. Understand this and understand this clearly. Most two-income families are: Outsourcing the upbringing of their own children To complete strangers Passing up on seeing their children grow up So BOTH parents can work jobs they don’t like While suffering commutes that keep them from their families AND stressing themselves out in the process. (47)
  2. We engage in the rat race, pursuing pointless educations, for taxing careers, life-wasting commutes, just to buy stuff, pointless material things, while abandoning anything and anybody that really matters in life.  It’s the cause of the majority of divorces in the country, the majority of unvisited parents in nursing homes, and is ultimately responsible for all the country’s financial problems.  And to throw the burden of saving for retirement on top of Americans’ inability to just keep it together, only makes an already-miserable situation impossible to bear. (48-49)
  3. It is a full – time job to go and seek out new and interesting people who are going to make your life worth living. (134)

Conclusion

Ultimately, Clarey’s essay on retirement is an admirable little book in that it accomplishes three things:

  1. Instructs you not to retire.
  2. Tells you how to retire.
  3. Subverts the present day value system.

With respect to number three, I’ll wax philosophical. One of the reasons that a capitalist style economy can work is if Adam Smith’s moral sentiments are assumed. Capitalism helps provide a wide degree of freedom to people who pursue a sort of Aristotelian/Christian/Stoic vision of the good life wherein virtue is paramount, social trust is assumed, and while the particulars of an individual’s pursuit of wealth and greatness may vary, they typically revolve around family, invention, adventure, and philanthropy. Such a system of values simply is not broadly assumed in Western Civilization, and so capital itself is perceived as the highest and total good for man.

Clarey, an irreligious capitalist, sees this problem as a source of poverty and unhappiness and attempts to solve it by reorienting the value system of his audience. For this the book is worth ten times the price. Buy it for graduating seniors, read it if you’re in college, use it to get out of debt. It’s a good book.

Eating Meat is good for the environment?

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I mean, of course it is. Farming animals requires ecosystem maintenance, whereas vegetation farming on mega farms is simply a process of ecosystem alteration through a process of chemical fertilizing, mass pesticide promulgation, and government subsidizing of non-ideal plants in regions hostile to their growth. Dr. Eades, over at protein power has a great post about this:

Human herding mimics the ‘herding’ done by large predators in the wild. That replicating natural herding creates the richest soil makes sense given that grasslands, large herbivores, and carnivores all co-evolved. Just as with diet, the closer we come to what the forces of natural selection designed us to eat, the better things work.

Here’s a Ted talk he posted about it by Allan Savory:

Youth Science Projects and American Aspirations

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I came across an archived usenet post linked on social media:

How come the heros of our movies are no longer Micky Rooney or Spencer Tracy playing Thomas Edison, or Paul Muni playing Erlich or Pasteur, instead Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison and Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint? And movies whose heros are lawyers.

 

Paperwork and lawyering. Fixing and improving and advancing society by talk-talk, not building. A lawyer president and his lawyer wife. Crises of power that don’t involve spy planes and sputniks, but incredibly complicated and desceptive word defintions and complicated tax frauds. You think we’re not preparing to go to Mars because SF is too optimistic? Sure. But it was optimistic about whether or not the can-do engineering of the 40’s and 50’s, done by the kids who’d grown up playing with radios and mechanics in the 20’s, was going to continue. Needless to say, it didn’t. I’ve seen a late 1950’s book of science fair projects for teenagers that include things like building your own X-ray machine and cyclotron (no, I’m not kidding– it can be done). There are rockets in there, and cloud chambers, and all kinds of wonderful electronics stuff. But we didn’t go that way. Instead, we turned our children into little Clintons, and our society into a bunch of people sitting at PCs, entering data about social  engineering, not mechanical engineering. So instead of going to Mars, we went instead to beaurocratic Hell. Enjoy, everybody. It really could have been different. Nature didn’t stop us– WE stopped us.

I’m not opposed to lawyers, we need them. I even that a few of them read this blog. But the idea that the aspirations of American culture were transformed by entertainment focusing on paperwork fields and the actual content of education are obvious. My wife and I intend to home school our children. And I suspect that we’ll be buying some of those old science books.

I think our young simply feel that the world handed to them is either good enough or impossible to bend toward their own success. So their aspirations end at “make enough money to chill.”