The Good Old Times

The 'good old times' -- all times when old are good --
Are gone...
- Byron, The Age of Bronze

I've been reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. While exploring various reasons for a society failing to perceive environmental degradation, Diamond mentions "creeping normalcy" or "landscape amnesia", referring to the tendency for people to become accustomed to large changes if they occur slowly and gradually.

One such change, it seems to me, is the increasing busyness of life. Perhaps the 9-to-5 office job was always a myth for most people, but it certainly seems that people I know work longer hours now than people did when I was a kid, though I wasn't paying a lot of attention then. Certainly if you go back farther, people worked much longer hours: in 1900, manufacturing workers put in 55-60 hours a week over 6 days (source). And average weekly work hours have remained stable from 1976 to 1993. However, since 1981, the proportion of Canadian adults working more than 40 hours per week has risen (source - PDF), so more people are indeed working more (though more people are also working less than 35 hours per week). And according to Whaples' report (op. cit.), "Although median weekly hours were virtually constant for men [since 1950], the upper tail of the hours distribution fell for those with little schooling and rose for the well-educated."

But even our leisure time seems to be busier nowadays. There are certainly many more things to occupy us: every year brings 600 new movies, 2000 new video games, and at least 275,000 new books, not to mention the ever-increasing torrent of Internet forums, blogs, and social networking sites.

When I was a kid, I spent uncounted hours playing with the same Legos, listening to the same few LPs, rambling around in the same woods, and rereading the same books (I read The Lord of the Rings something like a dozen times). Now there are so many new books and games, so much new music, it seems to me I seldom have time to experience any single book, game, or album in depth.

This reminds me of a poignant bit from Bill Bryson's Lost Continent (1989):

[I] wondered why it was that I had been so enchanted by this place when I was five years old. Were childhoods so boring back then? I knew my own little boy, if driven to this place, would drop to the ground and start hyperventilating at the discovery that he had spent a day and a half sealed in a car only to see a bunch of boring log cabins. And looking at it now, I couldn't have blamed him. I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

Maybe less is more. Maybe I should just stop now and go reread something.

Jesus was a socialist

I can't figure out how anyone who professes to be a Christian can oppose universal health care. Let's see what Jesus said on the subject, shall we?

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
for I was ahungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee ahungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
for I was ahungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee ahungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
(Matthew 25:31-46)

Let the whining and excuse-making begin. "But all Jesus says is that we should visit the least of our brothers when they are sick -- he doesn't say anything about a public option or a single-payer system." Tell it to St. Peter, buster -- the clear implication is that EVERYONE is responsible for caring for ALL those in need. Sounds to me like you're headed for everlasting punishment.

Oh, and by the way, all you capitalists? "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Matthew 6:24)

And some more advice:

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
(Matthew 19:21-24)

Hey, no one said being a Christian would be easy. At least you don't have to fight lions bare-handed in an arena these days.

Too Big to Succeed

"Greed is good" was the mantra of the 80s, but after the stock market "crash" of 1989 and the arrest of junk-bond traders Ivan Boesky and Michael Milligan, it became no longer acceptable to say so.  Not that the culture of the financial industry changed -- it simply became less conspicuous.

Greed is, of course, an inherent part of human nature, and any political or ethical system which fails to take it into account is doomed to failure.  Part of the reason for capitalism's success (such as it has been) is surely that it harnesses greed to productive ends.  Or perhaps more accurately, some of its side effects benefit society (creation of jobs, technological progress) in spite of its main goal of facilitating greed.

However, even Adam Smith recognized that regulation of capitalism is necessary to avoid its more egregious abuses, particularly where "externalities" (public or common goods such as the environment) are concerned.  Smith probably did not anticipate the emergence of megacorporations and the highly interconnected financial system we have today, living as he did before the Industrial Revolution got into full swing.  If he had, perhaps he would have placed even more emphasis on the need for regulation.

The May Atlantic includes an article by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the IMF, recommending that the federal government nationalize failing megabanks and break them up into medium-size pieces, with new antitrust regulations and caps on executive compensation to prevent megabanks from coming back.  Johnson recognizes that this would produce some inefficiency and might drive some financial activity overseas, but in his view, these disadvantages are outweighed by the benefits of not having to bail out banks that are "too big to fail".

I wholeheartedly concur with Johnson, but why stop at banks?  The federal government has been bailing out GM and Chrysler for the same reason, that they are too big to fail.  But individual construction companies, which have also been hard hit by the recession, are not getting a bailout (though you could say that the industry as a whole is getting a bailout from the stimulus package).  Perhaps this is because there are no construction companies that are too big to fail.  Why not impose limits on the size of any corporation, not just banks?

Johnson blames the "oligarchy" of financial executives for exerting undue influence on the government and preventing these reforms.  But even in the unlikely event that we manage to break the financial oligarchy's hold on the government, some other corporate oligarchy will just take its place, unless we take steps to prevent any industrial oligarchy from arising, by limiting the size of any corporation.

This idea is anathema to conservatives and libertarians, as constituting interference in the pure market, but that position seems indefensible to me.  Without antitrust regulation, monopolies and cartels naturally arise, which reduces or eliminates the competition that is an essential aspect of the free market.  When individual corporations become too big, government steps in to prevent their failure, either because the corporate oligarchies control government, or because government concludes that their failure would have an unacceptably large impact on society.  This also constitutes interference in the free market.

A more reasonable objection concerns how the size limit is determined.  Presumably the limit would differ across industries, to take into account different economies of scale and barriers to entry.  But this becomes subject to interpretation and manipulation (lobbying) -- the definition of an industry, the determination of which industry a particular corporation belongs to, and the determination of the limit for a given industry.  And there would have to be provisions for adjusting the limit as new technologies change the economies of scale or create new industries.  But surely any step in this direction would improve our current mess.

Mother's Day

Often at church on Sundays the pastor would exhort us not to confine our religious devotions to one day a week, but to think of Jesus and follow his precepts every day.  The idea is certainly laudable, at least for anyone who professes to be a Christian, but most people seem to have a difficult time actually putting it into practice.  So they fall back on Sunday.

This morning the children brought their cards to Mommy and promised to be nice to her all day, a promise honored largely in the breach.  I was struck once again by the enormity of appreciating mothers only once a year, when every day Mommy does a thousand things, large and small, to help her children survive and thrive.  Surely, every day should be Mother's day!  But just as the Israelites (and most of the Republican party) constantly turned away from God, so do children invariably neglect and mistreat their mothers.  Even on Mother's Day.

Pirates!

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Santayana's quote is almost a cliché by now, but it seems every week brings another instance of it.  The latest is the attack by Somalian pirates on the Maersk Alabama, the sixth such attack in the last week.  Attorney General Eric Holder (why not the Secretary of Defense?) is quoted by the AP as saying that the the United States will take whatever steps are needed to protect U.S. shipping interests against pirates.

Well, there's one quite obvious step -- obvious, that is, to anyone who remembers the past.  Convoys have been used to deter pirates as well as military attacks on merchant shipping at least since the Spanish treasure fleets of the 16th century, and have proved very effective.  When the US entered the Second World War, 609 ships were sunk by German submarines before the Navy got around to setting up a convoy system, after which losses fell sharply.

The Navy now argues that they don't have enough resources to protect all the shipping in the waters off Somalia.  They have set up a "Maritime Security Patrol Area" 1000 km by 10 km which commercial traffic is advised to stick to.  But with 10 or fewer ships, they can't be everywhere even in this narrow corridor.  So -- group merchant ships at the ends of the corridor under the protection of one-third of the force each while the remaining third escorts a group along the corridor and then brings the next group back.

No doubt merchant shippers will complain, as they did during the First World War, about the loss of productivity involved in having their ships wait for the next convoy.  As Wikipedia points out in a rare display of irony, "The loss of productivity due to convoy delays was small compared with the loss of productivity due to ships being sunk."

Boom & Bust

The boom and bust cycle seems to be everywhere:

• The dot-com boom
• The housing bubble
• Tulip mania. The Dutch banned short selling of tulip futures... in 1610.
  
• After the South Seas Bubble burst in 1720, "A resolution was proposed in parliament that bankers be tied up in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the murky Thames."
• During the Panic of 1837, 250 business houses failed in New York in three weeks, 343 out of 850 banks closed, and the economy did not recover until 1842.

And not just in economics.  Populations of snowshoe hares, voles, grouse, and lemmings also increase and decrease rapidly in cycles.

People's tendency to "be fruitful and multiply", like their tendency to overexploit public resources and to favor short-term over long-term advantage, doubtless derives from evolutionary imperatives.  A lemming can be forgiven for having as many baby lemmings as it can; a herd of reindeer can be forgiven for eating all the lichen on an Arctic island.  They are only animals obeying their instincts.  But humans have at least the potential to anticipate the effects of their actions.

I think the key question facing humanity is whether we will collectively keep our heads in the sand regarding the long-term effects of our individual selfish actions, or whether we can muster enough rationality to agree to regulate or restrict ourselves -- all of us.  To quote Garrett Hardin in "Tragedy of the Commons":

As James Madison said in 1788, “If men were angels, no Government would be necessary” (Federalist, no. 51). That is, if all men were angels. But in a world in which all resources are limited, a single nonangel in the commons spoils the environment for all.

Spring Ruminations

Regardless of what the calendar or the groundhog says, I always think spring arrives when the first flowers appear.  Last week my daughter saw the first snowdrops of the season.

The other day I was strolling on the Bronx River trail and noticed some crocuses about to unfurl.

As you may guess, the trail follows the Bronx River, more or less, for about five miles from the Kensico Dam in Valhalla south through White Plains and on to the Hartsdale train station.  It also follows the Bronx River Parkway and the Metro-North Railway's Harlem line, so it isn't as peaceful as you might wish.  But it's pleasant to be able to get out of the office and see some trees, running water, and wildlife.  Ducks are common (mallards, mergansers), as unfortunately are Canada geese; on a couple of occasions I've seen snowy egrets wading in the river or gliding along just above it.  Parts of it are quite scenic, even when the trees are bare.

At this time of year, however, what is most in evidence is the trash.  A good bit of it seems to have been ejected by motorists (the parkway is only a few yards away in many places), but a large amount is carried along by the river until it snags in a tree branch dangling in the water or washes up along the banks.

At one point a culvert carries runoff into the river.  When I passed, the water was a bright viridian color, whether some chemical effluvium or an algae bloom I don't know.

What is it about human nature that makes us so careless of our waste products?  Did we inherit this trait from our distant arboreal ancestors, whose refuse, once dropped out of the tree, simply disappeared?  Or perhaps we should blame our more recent hunter-gatherer ancestors, who didn't stay in one place long enough for their garbage to accumulate to problematic levels.

Humans are certainly not the only offenders, as anyone can attest who has walked through a cow pasture, or for that matter a trail frequented by Canada geese.  Certain Pacific islands were covered several yards deep with guano until humans began harvesting it as fertilizer.  In fact, nearly every life form now extant on Earth owes its existence to the cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), which 2.5 billion years ago began polluting Earth's atmosphere with a toxic chemical called oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis.  For all the justifiable concern over global warming, humans haven't done anywhere near as much damage to the environment as these ancient one-celled creatures.  Not yet, anyway.

Choosing a Language

"I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat."
-- Winston Churchill

Most American children do not study a second language until high school, if then. (*) This means that they are capable of making a rational choice -- younger children are likely either to choose on a whim or to be influenced by external factors (typically parents).

Suppose you are interested in learning another language (or you are required to do so). Assuming you have a choice of languages, how should you choose which one to study? The most common argument you will hear is that you should choose a language which many other people speak, since you are more likely to have occasion to use it. This is certainly a valid factor to consider, but it is far from being the only one. Here are some others:

Literature. Spanish may be the most frequently spoken language in the US besides English, but Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and many other languages have significant bodies of poetry, drama, fiction, and philosophy.

Science. English is the most commonly used language in science these days, but much important work is and has been done in other languages, especially German and Russian, in areas such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, linguistics, psychology, and medicine.

Music. Italian is the universal language of music, but French and German are also common in vocal music.

International relations. If you plan a career in government, business, or the military, it may be useful to learn the languages of major geopolitical powers or hot spots -- Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, etc.

Savoir-faire. Impress your date by taking her to a fancy restaurant and conversing with the maître d'hotel and the sommelier in French as you order hors d'oeuvres. Provide literal translations of the dishes on a Chinese menu. Discuss the finer points of Italian opera, quoting liberally from the libretto.

Heritage. Are your grandparents Irish, Ibo, Inuit? Maybe you would like to talk to them in their native language and help keep their history and oral traditions alive, or visit the ancestral country, or read the sacred texts of their religion.

Ease of learning. Rigorous statistics on this subject are hard to find. Spanish has a reputation for being easy, but that is mainly due to its phonetic spelling. French and German have more common vocabulary with English. Non-Indo-European languages such as Arabic or Swahili are much more difficult for an English speaker to learn. Non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese and Japanese are very difficult to learn to read and write.

Here are some observations by language teachers:
Which Language? French, German, Spanish, or Latin?
FAQ: Which Foreign Language?

Aesthetics. Some languages just sound nicer than others. Opinions vary, of course, but it seems to me that languages with many liquid sounds (Spanish, French, Italian, Polynesian) are more mellifluous than languages with many stops and harsh gutturals (German, Czech, Hebrew, Russian), and more musical than languages where pitch is semantically significant (Chinese). Some alphabets are visually fascinating (Georgian, Phags-pa, Kannada, Lontara, and of course Glagolitic).

Above all, unless you have an immediately practical reason to do otherwise, you should choose a language that appeals to you -- then you'll be motivated to study and practice more.

* According to a 1995 report by the Center for Applied Linguistics, only about 6% of primary-school students study any foreign language, and 39% of high-school students. A recent survey indicates that the number of public elementary schools teaching foreign languages actually declined from 1997 to 2008, to 15%.

Transparent Taxes

One of the problems with our form of representative democracy is that nearly all of the citizens are effectively disenfranchised at least some of the time.  When the Republicans control the government, Democrats feel that they are not being represented, and vice versa.  Even citizens belonging to the majority party do not necessarily agree with all of their party's platform.  As Lincoln might have said, "You can represent some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't represent all of the people all of the time."

The problem is exacerbated when citizens are forced to pay taxes to support programs to which they are opposed.  I may be a pacifist, but my taxes pay for the military.  I may oppose welfare, but my taxes pay for it anyway.  I can urge my representatives to vote against funding programs I dislike, but if I'm in the minority among constituents in my district, they may not act on my wishes, and if they're in the minority in Congress, they may not be able to eliminate programs anyway.  Even if they do, the people who support those programs are not having their wishes represented.

Is there any solution to this problem?  Ideally, since government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, I and all those who agree with me on every issue could form our own government.  In the real world, this has a tendency not to work out very well, as evidenced by the plenitude of civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and "freedom fighters".

I do have ideas about how to make government more representative, but I'll save those for another post.  For now, I have a more modest proposal.  Why not let citizens specify what their taxes should be used for?  We have a very limited form of this now, namely the Presidential Campaign fund, to which I can elect to contribute $1.  

The tax return could instead list a variety of programs, with a box next to each into which I can write the amount of my taxes I wish to contribute to that program.  Thus, if I am concerned about the environment and food safety, I can split my taxes among the EPA, FDA, and USDA.  If I dislike farm subsidies or foreign aid, I can allocate my taxes elsewhere.  If I don't care, I can leave all the items blank and let Congress decide how to spend my taxes.

Corporations likewise could allocate their corporate taxes to programs of concern to them.  If companies are having a hard time finding skilled workers, they can allocate their taxes to education or job training.  If they're concerned about intellectual property protection, they can support the patent office.

What about unglamorous but essential government functions such as dredging shipping channels, running prisons, servicing the national debt, monitoring television broadcasts to make sure no children are traumatized by the sight of a female breast, and paying congressional salaries?  Well, perhaps we find some of them are not so essential after all.  In other cases, perhaps the agencies concerned need to do a better job of educating the public -- in essence, advertising their services.  And Congress would still set tax rates.  If absolutely necessary, they could limit you to only being able to allocate, say, 90% of your taxes, the rest to be spent at Congress's discretion.

Besides making us feel a little better about paying our taxes, this would also serve as a much more accurate gauge of what citizens think our government should be doing.  Which is what government is supposed to be all about, right?

Magic and Language

Arthur Clarke once wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  So, for example, if you could travel in time and show a computer to a man from the Middle Ages, it would surely seem magical to him.

In fact, though we don't like to call it magic these days, to most of us a computer is essentially magic, in the sense that it operates by mysterious principles which we don't understand.*  You could extend the analogy farther by remarking how often the computer must be placated, pleaded with, even prayed to, so as to avoid as far as possible its unpredictable and sometimes malicious quirks.

But information technology, to use the current lifeless cognomen, has been around for much longer than computers, longer than adding machines and abaci.  I would argue that it began with the invention of writing, some 6000 years ago, which made it possible to transfer information across arbitrary distances in space and time.

To the illiterate, this was obviously magic.  How could a person learn of an ancient or faraway event from mere marks on stone, clay, wood, or papyrus?  There must be some supernatural power at work, either in the scribe or in the marks, or both.  Perhaps something of this feeling animates those who inscribe their names and doings on convenient walls, from ancient dynasts to modern graffiti artists.

Words, whether written or spoken, are at the heart of magic -- think of a wizard casting a spell, which derives from a Germanic word meaning "talk".  Glamour originally meant "a magic spell" and derives from grammar, which comes from the Greek grapho, "write".  If we stretch the definition of technology to include language itself (after all, language is certainly an acquired skill, or techne in Greek), this follows directly from Clarke's observation.

And it seems to me that there is something magical in language.  Think how radically words can alter human behavior -- a shout of "Fire!" in a crowded theater, a verdict of "Guilty", a declaration of love or war.  How can marks on a page, or pixels on a screen, or vibrations in the air, influence human actions?  Through the human mind, of course, and since no one understands how the mind works, it must be magic!

* Partly this is the result of abstraction. When I am writing a blog post, I am not concerned with the tiny voltage differences across billions of minuscule transistors which form the most basic level of the computer I am using, nor the CPU registers and microcode at a higher level, nor the event handlers and bitmap display software at a still higher level. All of that may as well be magic to me. If there were tiny imps and homunculi inside the computer case interpreting my keystrokes and painting pixels on the screen, it would work just the same as far as I am concerned.

"Glagolitsa"

"Glagolitsa" is the name of an old Slavic alphabet used from the 9th century onwards in the Balkans, said to have been invented by Saints Cyril and Methodius.  The name comes from the Old Slavic glagolati "to speak", hence poetically "the marks that speak".  

I thought that was a very appropriate name for a blog intended to discuss words, etymology, and language, among other subjects.  Also, it looks really cool!  The image to the left (from this fascinating article) is from the Missal of Hrvoje, written in 1404.

I encountered the alphabet in a roundabout way, thanks to Janáček's Glagolitic Mass -- of course, the music doesn't directly involve the alphabet, though it is sung in Old Church Slavonic.