Time for something a little lighter.
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A street artist who calls himself Tom Bob has fun with everyday objects.
Click on the links below for more of Tom Bob’s art.
There’s a Genius Street Artist Running Loose in New York City and Let’s Hope Nobody Catches Him by Monika for Bored Panda.
There’s a Genius Street Artist Running Loose in the Streets and Let’s Hope Nobody Catches Him (30+ New Pics) by Ilona for Bored Panda.
Click to enlarge
Any time you log on to Google, Facebook, Twitter or other “free” social media, information on every keystroke is being fed into powerful computers somewhere.
Algorithms in these computers correlate this data. They compare you with other people with similar profiles, The algorithms—”intelligent,” but blind—experiment with ways to use this information to modify your behavior so you will do what they want.
What they usually want is for you to respond for an ad for a particular product or service. But they can be trying to influence you to vote—or not to vote.
Jaron Lanier, a scientist and entrepreneur who pioneered virtual reality, wrote about this in his new book, TEN ARGUMENTS FOR DELETING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS RIGHT NOW (2018).
He thinks this is sinister. Your social media may not be influencing you a lot, but it is almost certain to have some influence, and that influence is operating on you below your level of awareness.
Social media feeds you stuff that is intended to stimulate your emotion, and it is easier to stimulate feelings of anger, fear and resentment than it is feelings of joy, affection and security.
I know this from my newspaper experience. Back in the 1990s, my old newspaper made a big effort to discover what kind of news our readers wanted. In surveys and focus groups, they said that wanted positive news—articles about people accomplishing good things. But the article they remember the best was a horrible story about a dead baby being found in a Dumpster.
The people who answered the survey weren’t hypocrites. Not at all. It is just that we human beings react in ways we don’t choose, and this leaves us open to manipulation.
Another effect of feedback from social media is to reinforce whatever it is you happen to be—liberal, conservative, pro-gun, anti-war—and to diminish you ability to understand people who think differently from you.
I was shocked when I read about Cambridge Analytica, the campaign consultant that worked for the Trump presidential campaign, and its claim that it could manipulate voter behavior on an individual basis. But I later came to realize that this was the standard Facebook service, and could have been available to the Clinton campaign.
Lanier takes the charges of Vladimir Putin’s interference in the campaign more seriously than I did. The Russian ads seemed amateurish to me (unless they were decoys to divert attention from the real influence campaign) and most of them were posted after election day.
But effectiveness of the 2016 ads is beside the point. If the combination of Big Data, artificial intelligence and behavior modification algorithms can influence voting behavior, Putin is sure to use it, and he doesn’t, some other foreign government or institution will. Not to mention our own NSA and CIA.
Thomas Frank has a new book out, an essay collection called Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. The videos above and below consist of interviews he gave about it. Here’s how he introduced it.
The essays collected here scan over many diverse aspects of American life, but they all aim to tell one essential story: This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn the structure beneath them is crumbling. This is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.
In headline terms, these essays cover the years of the Barack Obama presidency and the populist explosion that marked its end. It was a time when liberal hopes were sinking and the newly invigorated right was proceeding from triumph to triumph. When I wrote the earliest installment in the collection, Democrats still technically controlled both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency; when I finished these essays, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office and Republicans had assumed a position of almost unprecedented power over the nation’s political system.
For a few, these were times of great personal satisfaction. The effects of what was called the Great Recession were receding, and affluence had returned to smile once again on the tasteful and the fortunate. The lucky ones resumed their fascinating inquiries into the art of the cocktail and the science of the grandiose suburban home. For them, things transpired reassuringly as before.
But for the many, this was a period when reassurance was in short supply. Ordinary Americans began to understand that, recovery or not, things would probably never be the same in their town or neighborhood. For them, this was a time of cascading collapse, with one trusted institution after another visibly deteriorating.
It was a golden age of corruption. By this I do not mean that our top political leaders were on the take—they weren’t—but rather that America’s guardian class had been subverted or put to sleep. Human intellect no longer served the interests of the public; it served money—or else it ceased to serve at all. That was the theme of the era, whether the locale was Washington, D.C., or the college your kids attended, or the city desk of your rapidly shrinking local newspaper. No one was watching out for the interests of the people, and increasingly the people could see that this was the case.
Tamara Draut, at the conclusion of Sleeping Giant, her book about the new American working class, offered a list of proposals that she called A Better Deal.
THE BLUEPRINT FOR A BETTER DEAL
A Better Deal for Workers
• Modernize out labor protections by fighting the definition of “independent contractor,” creating new rules for stable scheduling practices and ensuring that the growing “on-demand” workforce is protected by labor laws and has rights to basic worker benefits. Expand federal enforcement capacity and increase the fines and penalties for companies that break the rules.
• Guarantee paid sick days and paid parental leave as universal benefits for all workers.
• Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021 and eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers.
• Reform labor laws to ensure the ability of workers to join a union, including prohibiting so-called right-to-work laws and establishing majority sign-up as the authorization required for establishing a union.
A Better Deal for Families
• Develop a system to guarantee access to affordable and high-quality child care for infants and toddlers for all working- and middle-class families and high-quality jobs for child-care workers.
• Reinvest in state public higher education to achieve debt-free public college for all working- and middle-class students.
A Better Deal for Society
• Revitalize our nation’s infrastructure, including addressing climate change, to ensure full employment
• Establish a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Racial Healing to provide full accounting of our nation’s violent racial history and to address its legacy in residential segregation, occupational segregation, the racial wealth gap and oppressive criminal justice and policing practices.
• Develop comprehensive immigration reform to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers.
A Better Deal for Democracy
• Reform election procedures and practices, including establishing automatic voter registration to ensure all citizens are registered and widespread adoption of same-day registration, early voting and restoration of voting rights to formerly incarcerated citizens; restore the Voting Rights Act to provide voter protections for African Americans
• Establish a system of public financing at the federal, state and local levels, to reduce the role of corporate money and private wealth in funding elections and allow more racially diverse and working-class people to run for office.
• Amend the Constitution and transform the Supreme Court’s approach to money in politics to establish that money is not free speech and that corporations are not people.
What is missing from this list?
One of Jordan Peterson’s core ideas is the human capacity for evil, and his great examples are the crimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China.
What’s notable about all three, he wrote, is not just the atrocities committed by the ruling party, but that the regimes were sustained by the consent of ordinary people.
Under certain circumstances, Peterson believes, almost all of us are potential secret police informers and concentration camp guards.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
His heroes are people such as Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who found a meaning in life to sustain him in a Nazi death camp; Vaclav Havel, who lived in truth despite his frequent imprisonments in Communist Czechoslovakia; and, above all, the great Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived Soviet forced-labor camps and found a way to tell the world about them.
Havel condemned those who went along with the regime, such as the greengrocer who put up a sign saying “workers of the world, unite” because doing so is a path of least resistance. Solzhenitsyn went so far as to blame himself for helping make the Gulag possible by failing to contract the Soviet regime’s lying propaganda.
So the choice is stark. Either be willing to say “no,” no matter what the cost, or be a potential cog in a killing machine.
What is it today to which we need to say “no”?
It is whether to go along with unprovoked military aggression, assassinations, preventive detention, torture of suspects, warrantless surveillance and all the other practices of police states—all of which have come to be accepted as normal.
Ordinary Americans let themselves be led, step-by-step, to committing atrocities such as the My Lai massacre or the Abu Ghraib tortures. Until more of us learn to say “no”, we will be just like ordinary Germans in the book Peterson discusses in the video above.
Time for a little relief from politics.
THE THREE MUSKETEERS by Alexandre Dumas (1844) is probably the first modern action-adventure story and the prototype of action-adventure novels and movies to come.
I’ve seen at least three movies versions during my life and I dimly remember reading the original a number of years ago. I recently finished re-reading it, with great pleasure, as part of a reading group hosted by my friend Linda White.
What sets The Three Musketeers apart from earlier stories of heroes and derring-do is its wit, its good humor and its quirky and amusing characters.
They aren’t solemn and serious, like, say, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. They’re having a good time. I enjoy their repartee and byplay as much as their adventures, which they seem to be enjoying as much as the reader.
There really was a KIng’s Musketeer corps, personal troops of King Louis XIII, who spent a lot of time loafing around Paris, drinking, gambling, womanizing and getting into fights with members of Cardinal Richelieu’s rival corps of musketeers.
This is an ideal life for a certain type of young man, and D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis are all young. D’Artagnan is 20 years old when the novel begins, and Athos, who is old enough to have a tragic and secret past, is only 25.
They are classic examples of the aristocratic warrior ethic. They are fearless. They are unconditionally loyal to their king, their patron and each other. And they never back away from any challenge, danger or fight. They remind me of the pilots described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff.
On the other hand, they are not much for sobriety, self-restraint, deferred gratification, long-range planning, big-picture thinking or respect for the sanctity of private property or the virtue of women.
Each of them has a lackey, a totally loyal personal servant who attends to their every need, which also makes their lives more pleasant.
As the novel develops, it seems that the ruthless and devious Cardinal Richelieu and his evil secret agent, Milady de Winter, are acting more in the interest of France than the shallow and self-indulgent King Louis III and the faithless Queen Anne. No matter! Our heroes have chosen their side as, as men of honor, they stick to it, no matter what.
We had three men and four women in our reading group. I would have thought that some of the women would have been bothered by the musketeers’ cavalier attitude toward women. Cavalier! There’s an interesting adjective. It is probably based on the behavior of the actual Cavaliers, who is real life were warrior aristocrats with more of a sense of honor than a sense of virtue.
One thing that bothered me about the musketeers’ story is that they didn’t spend any time drilling with muskets. A musket is a complicated weapon to load and fire, especially under battlefield conditions, and that is why troops were given musket drills so that behavior become automatic.
But not Athos, Porthos and Aramis. They spent all their time in swordplay. The same is true of D’Artagnan, who is only a would-be musketeer until the end of the novel.
The time comes when they are called upon to fight with muskets, and they do so, expertly. Their lackeys load muskets for them, and they are all deadly marksmen, even though they have not spent any time practicing and the musket is not a particularly accurate weapon.
When I read the novel, I was swept along by the action and didn’t stop to think about such things until after I put it down. I enjoyed it. If you like swashbuckling adventure stories, you might enjoy it, too.
What should be most important to progressives? The fights by women, African-Americans and Latinos against oppression based on gender and sex? Or the fight by wage-earners against exploitation by a tiny minority of corporate executives and wealthy investors?
I recently finished reading SLEEPING GIANT: The Untapped Potential and Political Power of America’s New Working Class by Tamara Draut (2016, 2018), in which she argues these fights are the same fight, on behalf of largely the same people.
Wage-earners today, she said, are disproportionately female and people of color. Some of the fastest-growing job categories are in food service, health care, education and personal service—jobs historically held by women and people of color.
Many of them, maybe for this reason, are historically low paid and outside the protection of labor laws.
The only way today’s workers can defend their rights is by means of solidarity across racial and gender lines, which means fighting against racial discrimination and sexual harassment as strongly as fighting for a higher minimum wage or universal health care.
Tamara Draut, vice president of policy and research at Demos, a pro-labor think tank, is the daughter of a steel worker.
Her dad did hard manual labor under unhealthy conditions, which caused him to die of lung disease. But he earned a union wage that enabled his family to live in their own house, take vacation trips and send Tamara to college.
Working people still do hard manual labor under unhealthy conditions, but fewer and fewer of them earn a union wage.
In fact, the percentage of American workers represented by unions is lower than it was right before enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. The law is less and less favorable to unions.
Large companies increasingly operate through chains of franchises and subcontractors, under restrictive agreements that do not allow leeway to increase pay or provide benefits.
Nine out of 10 food service workers tell pollsters they’re subect to wage theft—being short-changed on wages or being forced to work off the clock. One in five don’t work regular shifts; they don’t know from week to week when they will work.
One of the workers Draut interviewed for the book was “Damon,” a 32-year-old African-American man who was out on disability from his job in a Coca-Cola warehouse.
He was a “puller,” which meant that he put together orders for delivery on trucks by manually stacking cases of Coca-Cola on pallets. He was paid by the number of cases he moved each shift, at the rate of 8.4 cents per case.
On each shift, the pullers are given a quota, the number of cases they must move each shift, and they are not allowed to leave the warehouse until they make their quota.
“Because we get paid on commission, I go out hard,” he said. “I put my body on the line. In order to make a good living pulling cases, you got to be fast.” He told Draut he typically finishes his shift in six to seven hours. but most of his co-workers take eleven to twelve hours. One died of a heart attack while pulling cases.
I often feel discouraged about the state of the world. But a lot of things seem to be improving behind my back.
This set of charts was created by the late Hans Rosling for his newly-published book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, and are taken from Amazon’s listing for the book.
Rosling contended that people in Western Europe and North America underestimate the progress being made. In his opinion, this was based partly on an underestimation of the capabilities of people in Third World countries. He thought that the harmful effect of this mistaken pessimism is that it discourages continued efforts to make progress.
He created Gapminder software as a means of graphically illustrating progress over time.
Colonel Andrew Bacevich, in a recent article for TomDispatch, said the U.S. military is committed to a never-ending war whose aim is no longer victory, but to avoid admitting defeat.
Some generals have even stated publicly that they don’t foresee a time when the “war on terror” will ever come to an end.
That’s not their fault, Bacevich wrote. Everything humanly possible to achieve victory in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria short of genocide has been tried by the U.S. military and failed. But so long as American forces remain in those countries, American neoconservatives can say the United States has not been defeated.
Bacevich pointed to the First World War, when it soon should have become obvious that continuing the war was more harmful to all participants than any gain that any of them could have hoped to achieve through victory. Yet no head of state except Lenin in Russia could think of anything to do except fight on until the end.
This was the great nightmare of H.G. Wells, in The War in the Air and The Shape of Things to Come—that a future world war would be impossible to stop until there was a complete breakdown of governmental authority and social order.
We in the USA are a long way from that. The only consequences of “defeat” would be giving up the false dream of world empire.
But there may come a time when the nations our government is trying to conquer and dominate will combine and give us Americans a taste of our own medicine. If and when that happens, all our choices will be bad.
LINK
Infinite War | The gravy train rolls on by Andrew Bacevich for TomDispatch.
Puritans in 17th century New England believed that Satan was real and ever present. To doubt that the devil was a clear and present danger was an indication that you yourself were under the influence of the devil.
In 1692, in and around Salem, Massachusetts, many people, mostly women, were accused of being witches. Nineteen were executed and six more died awaiting trial.
If you were accused of being a witch, the way to save your life was to confess your sin and accuse other people of being witches.
The great playwright, Arthur Miller, saw a parallel with the search for hidden Communists in his own time, and wrote The Curcible, which was staged in 1953, in order to bring this out. I read this play as part of a monthly play-reading group hosted by my friend Walter Uhrman.
The events of the play did not follow the exact historical record, but Miller did a good job of depicting the Puritan culture and attitudes, especially its pervasive sense of sin and guilt.
Possibly the central character, John Procter, like the Thomas More character in A Man for All Seasons, was more concerned with his individual integrity, like a 20th century person, and less with salvation a 17th century Puritan would have been.
Miller did not explicitly draw a parallel with events of his own time, but the parallel was there to see. Intellectuals and other public figures accused of being Communists or former Communists were blacklisted if they refused to confess or name others, just like accused witches in 1692 Salem.
His play drew the ire of the government. He was denied a passport to view the opening of the play in London in 1954. When he applied for a passport renewal in 1956, he was subpoened to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee. He readily told about his own past political activities, but refused to testify about anybody else.
He was charged with contempt of Congress, and a federal judge sentenced him to a fine and prison term, but his conviction was overturned on appeal in 1958.
The same syndrome of accusation, confession and new accusations, but on a larger and more lethal scale, operated in the Soviet purge trials in the 1930s and in the Spanish Inquisition. There were many witch trials. An estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft from the 14th through the 18th centuries.
In the 1990s, many Americans were caught up in a literal witch hunt. Satanic cults were thought to be a real menace, and innocent people went to prison on false charges of abusing children in Satanic rituals.
Today the threat to basic civil liberties in the United States is greater than it was in the 1950s, although it doesn’t involve rituals of confession and naming names as in the Salem witch trials or the Congressional investigations of the 1950s. In that sense, The Crucible is yesterday’s news.
I’ve never believed that Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un would give up North Korea’s nuclear weapons, mainly because, if I were him, I would regard nuclear weapons as the only way to deter an attack by the United States.
But Joel S. Wit, a former American diplomat who participated in negotiations with North Korea in the 1990s and again in informal talks in 2013, said he believes Kim really would be willing to give up nuclear weapons in return for cessation of hostilities by the United States.
Kim wants diplomatic recognition by the United States, a peace treaty formally ending the Korean Conflict and an end to trade restrictions and economic sanctions, Wit said. In return, KIm would freeze nuclear weapons development and, step by step in return for U.S. actions, to dismantle nuclear and missile test sites.
This would not be the same thing as giving up nuclear weapons entirely, but it would be a sign that Kim wants peace, and a first step to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. There is nothing that the United States is doing to North Korea that is of any direct benefit to the American people.
These objectives weren’t achieved at the Kim-Trump summit, and maybe the negotiations will ultimately fail, but the door is still open.
The biggest reason for hope is the desire of President Moon Jei-in of South Korea to make peace with North Korea. As long as the governments of the two parts of Korea were enemies, peace was impossible. If they are no longer enemies, peace is achievable.
President Moon’s accomplishment is like West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which resulted in the signing of a treaty in 1972 between the West and East German governments recognizing each other’s right to exist. This didn’t end the Cold War, let alone end the East Germany Communist dictatorship, but it helped make possible.
I don’t see any path to democracy in North Korea, but bringing the North Korean people into contact with the outside world would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
LINKS
North Korea’s Denuclearization and the ‘Libya model’ by Joel S. Wit for The Atlantic.
How Corporate Media Got the Kim-Trump Summit All Wrong by Gareth Porter for Truthdig. Hat tip to Bill Harvey.
How Moon Jai-in Brought North Korea to Negotiate by S. Nathan Park for The Atlantic.
Singapore agreement will end the cold war, South Korea’s President Moon Jie-in says by the South China Morning Post.
The key word in the Trump-Kim show by Pepe Escobar for Asia Times.
The North Korean summit and deal by Tyler Cowen for Marginal Revolution.
Recently I read and enjoyed THE MYTH OF MANAGEMENT: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong by Matthew Stewart (2009).
Stewart told two stories in alternating chapters. One is a history of theories of management, which is the topic of my previous post. The other is Stewart’s personal experience of BS jobs in management consulting.
In 1988, Stewart, at age 26, found himself with a philosophy doctorate from Oxford and no job, On a whim, he sent his CV to some management consulting firms. By chance, he got a job from a firm looking for “non-traditional” hires—that is, people without MBA degrees.
Matthew Stewart
He soon found himself going to distant countries and convincing executives twice his age that he understood their businesses better than they did. His tools were a set of algorithms developed by his firm, and his ability to play the role of an expert.
The main algorithm, as described in his book, was a system for estimating the cumulative cost, revenue and profit for serving each of a business’s clients.
What the system almost always produced was a graph, which looked like a whale, that showed that 20 percent of a firm’s clients produced more than 100 percent of its profits, 70 percent added virtually nothing and 10 percent cost the firm money.
Of course the question is how to disentangle the high-value, little-value and negative-value clients. If you follow the Pareto 80/20 rule, then 20 percent of a public library’s books can be expected to represent 80 percent of its circulation, and the remaining 80 percent of the books only 20 percent of the circulation. But you wouldn’t want a library to dump 80 percent of its books.
Companies that stop making low added-value products, as Eastman Kodak did with cameras and Xerox did with small copiers in the 1980s, find that ceding these markets empowers potential competitors.
That’s not to say that the quantitative analyses done by Stewart and his colleagues were worthless. Understanding numerical data is useful. But nobody ever checked whether Stewart’s firm’s interpretation of the data was helpful or even correct. The consultants never suffered any consequences for being wrong.
Stewart did risk analysis—he had no training in risk analysis—for a Mexican bank in the eve of the collapse of the Mexican peso and the Mexican banking crisis. Neither he nor his client had any notion that the crisis would be upon them, and his firm walked away with millions of dollars in fees.
He quit his firm for a while, then was enticed to join with some breakaway employees to form a new firm. He invested all of his savings in the new firm. After a time some the partners started to squeeze out Stewart and other partners. They stopped his pay without telling him and refused to let him withdraw his stake.
But he successfully sued, got what was owed him and sold his shares in the company at the height of the dot-com stock market bubble. He then began his new career as an author.
His whole saga reads like a satirical novel. Indeed, since he doesn’t mention the name of his firm, his clients or his co-workers, it could just as easily have been fleshed out and published in the form of a satirical novel.
As a newspaper reporter who covered business for 20 years, I learned that there are intellectual fashions in management theory as in everything else.
Once the key to success was thought to be vertical integration. The idea was that a corporation should control every aspect of its business, from raw materials to distribution, in order to guarantee quality and eliminate the middleman.
Then the key was supposed to be diversification. The idea was that a corporation should engage in varied lines of business so that a downturn in one line of business was offset by continued gains in others.
Then it was core competency. The idea was that a corporation should limit itself to whatever it did best and enjoyed a competitive advantage, and outsource everything else.
The path of least resistance for any manager has been to follow the fashion of the day. Failing by doing the same thing everybody else was doing has always been more acceptable than failing by doing something different.
I recently read a book, THE MANAGEMENT MYTH: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong by Matthew Stewart (2009), that validity of these management theories ranges from highly uncertain to completely bogus.
I was surprised to learn that the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor, founder of scientific management, and Elton Mayo, discoverer of the so-called Hawthorne effect, were based on fake experiments.
F.W. Taylor
Frederick W. Taylor claimed that there was one best way to perform any physical task. It was the job of the manager or industrial engineer to discover the best way and to micro-manage workers so that they followed it, mindlessly and repetitively.
He claimed to have taught a Bethlehem Steel worker he called “Schmidt” the most efficient way of loading pig iron onto a freight car, and made that a standard method for loading pig iron.
The reality was that, one day in 1899, he gathered a group of Hungarian immigrant workers and challenged them to load as many 92-pound ingots as they could in 14 minutes. He then extrapolated this to a 10-hour work day, discounted the total by 40 percent. The total was 47.5 tons.
He offered a wage incentive if they could do this all day. This would have been quadruple their normal output. They declined.
Taylor then recruited another group of workers and challenged them to meet the target. The only one who could was a German immigrant named Henry Noll—the “Schmidt” in Taylor’s tale. Bethlehem Steel did not adopt Taylor’s method, but it became famous anyhow.
Taylor’s system eliminated the need for skilled workers. They were undesirable because they might have ideas of their own. It was up to managers and industrial engineers, not the workers themselves, to determine how each job can best be done.
His method was the same as the Soviet Stakhanovite system: Take a strong and efficient worker, determine the most he can accomplish under ideal conditions and make that the target for every worker. Lenin praised Taylorism.
Elton Mayo
Elton Mayo claimed that workers could be managed by offering them psychological and emotional rewards.
He claimed to have found by accident that workers at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant became more efficient as a result of being the center of attention—the so-called Hawthorne effect.
The reality was that in 1924, an engineer named Henry Hilbert at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant ran an experiment to determine whether increased illumination would increase worker efficiency. The study was subsidized by the electric power industry.
He gathered seven women employees in a separate room and had them assemble telephone relays under different lighting conditions. He also experimented with work breaks. Efficiency seemed to increase no matter what he did.
Mayo learned of the results of the experiment and decided that the real Hawthorne effect was treating these women as though they were special and making them feel they were members of a team.
But Stewart pointed out that the factor he ignored was that the assemblers were given a group wage incentive to achieve greater efficiency. Also, two members of the original team were fired for being shirkers and malcontents, and one of their replacements strongly wanted the higher wage and pushed her co-workers to do more.
Hilbert later repeated the experiment. One group of workers were given the same special treatment, but no wage incentive. Their efficiency did not improve. Another were given a group wage incentive, but no special treatment. They achieved the same efficiency gains as the original group.
So it was the pay, not the special treatment that mattered. But the whole point of Mayo’s method was to avoid the need for increased pay.
I never read the original Harry Potter novels, but I have been completely engrossed in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fan fiction novel by Eliezer Yudkowsky published on-line, chapter by chapter as it was written, from 2010 to 2015.
The premise is that Harry Potter’s foster-father was not the vile Vernon Dursley, as in the original novels, but Michael Verres-Evans, an intelligent and kindly Oxford biochemistry professor, who encouraged Harry to read science and science fiction.
Consequently young Harry is a committed rationalist, who regards the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft not as a refuge from an unkind Muggle world, but as a puzzle to be solved and a challenge to be overcome.
He also is a genius, with the intellect of a Richard Feynman and the ambition of a Napoleon Bonaparte, along with the emotional maturity of an 11-year-old boy.
His plan is to use the methods of science to unlock the secrets of magic, then to combine the powers of both to “optimize” the world on rational principles As a character remarks, this is not far from wanting to become a Dark Lord.
Young Harry escapes the control of Headmaster Albus Dumbledore and Professor Minerva McGonagall and allows himself to be mentored by the cynical Professor Quirinus Quirrell, while trying to wean fellow student Draco Malfoy from unthinking malice and Hermione Granger from unthinking goodness.
There are many adventures, in which young Harry seemingly triumphs by applying his intelligence and the rational method. He becomes impatient with Hogwarts’ witches and wizards for failing to understand cognitive bias, Bayes’s Theorem, game theory, effective altruism and the other principles of rationality.
Then, in the end, he discovers that he has completely misunderstood his situation and brought himself, Hogwarts and Magical Britain to the brink of doom. But he thinks his way out of his plight at the very last minute and saves the day, although not without cost.
I enjoyed and admired Jordan Peterson’s 12 Years for Life. It is good advice, written in high-energy prose, on how to form the habits that enable you to overcome despair and lead a meaningful life.
The fact that it is a best-seller is not only due to the merits of the book, but on the need for such books, especially for aimless young men.
Jordan Peterson
When I reviewed the book, I largely ignored Jordan Peterson’s underlying political views because I didn’t think they were important to the book’s basic message.
But now that Peterson has become a political pundit on TV, I think his political thinking deserves a closer look.
In the videos I’ve watched, Peterson expresses himself forcefully, understandably and without equivocation. He gets the better of debate opponents and hostile interviewers. He says hardly anything I outright disagree with, but much that is one-sided and incomplete.
Here’s what I see as Peterson’s intellectual limitations.
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Psychology vs the Social Sciences
Peterson has a good understanding of human motivation, based on wide study of psychology in all its aspects and also his practice of clinical psychology. But human behavior is constrained by political, economic and social structures, which Peterson has not studied well.
For example, he explains economic inequality as a product of hierarchies of competence, the fact that some people are more talented and work harder than other people.
I have no doubt that such hierarchies exist. But they don’t explain the great increase in wealth of the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the population throughout the Western world. The average CEO’s income was 40 times the wage of the average corporate employee 30 years ago, and it is 400 times as much now. Are rich people smarter and harder working now than they were 25 years ago? Or is there some other explanation?
Psychology helps you to understand what is permanent in human nature. You need the social sciences to understand differences between communities and societies and how they change over time. I would like to see Peterson engage with a social scientist who knows his stuff, such as the economist Thomas Piketty or the political scientist Thomas Ferguson.
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Individualism vs. Mutual Aid
Jordan Peterson is an unusually self-reliant and individualistic person. As an anti-Communist, he identifies with individual dissidents such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. But I don’t know of anything he’s written about the Solidarity movement in Poland. There is only so much you can do by yourself to resist tyranny. You need solidarity with others.
Similarly, he considers himself a Christian of a sort. But he never goes to church. He once said he doesn’t need to participate in a congregation to think about God.
12 Rules for Life is all about taking responsibility for solving your own problems and for society as a whole. It is sensible, inspiring and a good starting point. But there is only so much you can do by yourself. Mutual aid is part of human life. People need to be able
I admire Peterson’s rugged independence, but most of us human beings aren’t like him. We need community as well as freedom in order, first, to survive and, second, to get things done. Peterson is insufficiently aware of this side of life.
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Academia vs the Great World
Jordan Peterson became famous not just because of his book, but because of his resistance to mandatory rules about using special pronouns for individuals who didn’t consider themselves men or women.
I think he was right both on academic freedom grounds and on the merits of the issue. But he writes and speaks as if conflict over political correctness rules were as big an issue in the world as large as they are in academia.
In the world outside the college campus, women are subject to employment discrimination and sexual harassment, black people are subject to employment discrimination and police harassment and unauthorized immigrants to deportation and separation from their families.
These are not micro-grievances, and it is natural and right for people who are picked on because of race, gender, immigration status or other characteristics to band together on the basis of identity to defend themselves.
It is true that this kind of identity politics can devolve into a war of competing micro-nationalisms, without a vision of the common good. Peterson’s critique of identity politics is all right as far as it goes, but it is not enough. What’s needed is an idea of the common good.
One of the best books of the late, great Jane Jacobs was Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992).
In it she argued that there were two main systems of thought about political and economic ethics—what she called Guardian morality, which she named for Plato’s philosopher-kings and is the morality of those whose income comes from control of territory, and Commercial morality, which I’ll call Trading morality, the morality of those whose income comes from voluntary exchange.
Guardian morality is concerned with obeying rules and pleasing superiors. Trading morality is concerned with creating value and pleasing a public. A healthy society, for Jacobs, keeps these two systems of morality—or syndromes, in her terminology—in balance and in their proper place.
Jane Jacobs
A Guardian organization, such as a police department, is corrupted when it follows economic incentives, Jacobs wrote. A Trading organization, such as a corporation, is corrupted when it seeks monopoly power instead of creating value.
I claim that what Jacobs called Guardian morality is a conflation of two syndromes. The two are the morality of Plato’s Guardians and the morality of the “spirited” young male warriors that the Guardians used as enforcers.
I’ll call the second syndrome the Warrior syndrome. The Guardian syndrome is an ethic of virtue, and the Warrior syndrome is an ethic of honor. This is a deep division. Neither “Commerce” nor “Trading” is a good word for the third syndrome, because, as I’ll discuss, it is not necessarily about money, but I’ll use it.
The three syndromes roughly correspond to the moral values of the three estates in 18th century France—the feudal lords (warrior), clergy (guardian) and urban merchants (trader). They correspond to prevailing moralities in 17th century colonial America—Puritan Massachusetts (guardian), aristocratic Tidewater Virginia (warrior) and Dutch New Amsterdam (trader).
If you think in terms of three syndromes instead of two, some things become more clear. The Bolsheviks were, as Jacobs wrote, a tyrannical would-be priesthood, an example of a Guardian syndrome gone wrong.
But the Mafia was not, as she said, another example of the same thing. The Mafia is a would-be Warrior aristocracy based on a perverse code of honor.
The problem with certain American police is that they follow a Warrior syndrome when they should be Guardians. They are more concerned with establishing dominance and punishing insults than with preserving order
Below is my revision of Jane Jacobs’ chart. Jacobs’ original words are in italic and my substitutions are in bold-face.
Is it possible to guarantee a job at a good wage to everybody who wants one? Senator Bernie Sanders is working on a proposal to do just that, and several other Democrats have endorsed the concept.
Nobody in this country has ever tried anything like this.
“Full employment” as usually understood means reducing unemployment to the lowest possible figure, now estimated at 1.5 percent.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal created millions of useful jobs, but fell far short of providing a job to every individual who wanted one. He proposed a postwar economic bill of rights that included the right to a decent job, but it isn’t clear whether that was meant literally or as an aspiration.
At the present time, the most widely-discussed proposal for a job guarantee is the National Investment Employment Corps (NIEC) proposed by Mark Paul, William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, working with the Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Public Policy Priorities.
The NIEC would provide a job to any American 18 years old or older at a minimum annual wage of $24,600 for full-time workers ($11.83 an hour). They would have a chance to advance within the program to $32,500. Wages would rise with the rate of inflation or to keep pace with any increase in the national minimum wage.
Full-time workers would be given the same health insurance and other benefits as other federal employees, whose cost is estimated at $10,000 a year. There also would be an option for part-time work.
The Secretary of Labor would provide “employment grants” to state, county and local governments, as well as Indian nations, for NIEC workers to carry out community projects. The Secretary also would work with federal agencies to identify kinds of needed work that aren’t being done. Examples might be energy efficiency retrofitting, elder care, ecological restoration and preschool services.
Where local governments could not think up enough useful projects to provide full employment, the NIEC would step in and do the work itself. On the other hand, it would not fund work that would displace already existing employees. Investigators would check to prevent corruption or boondoggling. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Paul, Darity and Hamilton estimate NIEC would employ 10.7 million workers which, factoring in part-timers, would equal 9.7 million full-time job equivalents.
They estimate the annual cost of their program at $543 billion a year. That would be offset, they say, by reduction in spending for food stamps, unemployment compensation, earned income tax credits and other federal programs to help the poor and unemployed, and by an increase in taxable income.
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has developed a less-detailed proposal, which is said to be the basis for Bernie Sanders’ proposal. The main difference is that the Levy proposal is based on a wage of $15 an hour.
It sounds good. What would be the problems? I think thee are some serious ones.
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