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01 Jun 2005 — Atlas Deconstructed

After hearing about Atlas Shrugged for over a decade, I finally read it, out of a simple and selfish motive. I wanted to get a fresh copy of the book, black out all the political speeches, and auction the marked-up copy through EBay. Surely someone out there would appreciate the joke enough to bid $20 for Atlas Snipped…or at least contribute to my net.reputation by spreading the news of the auction.

A few hundred pages later, I realized the flaw in my plan. If I crossed out every political speech (by a hero, villian, or narrator) from the book, I would be left with little more than some out-of-context sex scenes (which, by 2005 standards, are not exactly racy). If I deleted the parts of every political speech that failed to advance the plot, I would probably be able to shrink the book by at least half, but I’d have to reread the book with some care in order to figure out exactly where to cut.

I don’t have enough patience with this book to go through that kind of trouble, but I did notice a certain tension between Atlas Shrugged, a book with explicit arguments for certain philosophical ideals, and Atlas Shrugged, a story that makes implicit statements of what is right and wrong. Details, with some spoilers, are below the fold.

In the world of the novel, every great “man of the mind” is an Objectivist, or at least holds Objectivist values without being conscious of the philosophical system that unites them. Things are not so neat in the real world. The AK-47 assault rifle, for example, is a brilliant work of engineering, but its designer, a two-time Hero of Socialist Labor, is not an Objectivist role model in any other respect.

The emotional impact of the novel depends on its catastrophic plot, but the plot depends on characters being Objectivist if and only if they are brilliant and courageous. If the world of Atlas Shrugged were well-stocked with gifted engineers and managers who were willing to negotiate with the collectivist state, then the strikers of Galt’s Gulch would be as politically irrelevant as the Amish. If all the world’s “men of the mind” united behind some other political program, they could shut down the economy in the name of that program, rather than capitalism. (Cf. “The Roads Must Roll”.)

If laissez-faire capitalism is truly superior to every other economic system, then it should be able to demonstrate its superiority even when the competing economic systems are granted their share of talented contributors. Atlas Shrugged does not provide such a demonstration. If the strike plot-line is read as an argument, it’s an argument for class unity, but not an argument for unity on behalf of anything in particular.

Ayn Rand, speaking as a philosopher through John Galt, presents rationality as the distinguishing mark of the human species, and laissez-faire capitalism as the only economic system that respects human beings as rational actors. But Ayn Rand, portraying the world as a novelist, portrays the vast majority of humanity as anything but rational: they whine for largesse from people wealthier than themselves, they submit to guilt-trips from people poorer than themselves, they don’t care to work to improve themselves or their surroundings, and in general they spit on the free market even while enjoying its benefits.

By ending her novel just before her heroes leave Galt’s Gulch and set out to rebuild the world, Rand avoids laying out the implications of this cynical view of humanity. Many people outside Galt’s Gulch would willing to accept laissez-faire capitalism for the short term, as an alternative to starvation, but in the long run, they would look for every opportunity to bring back the bad old days of collectivism. Furthermore, some people—for example, televangelists—can amass large fortunes within a capitalist economy without developing any particular loyalty to that economic system, and might contribute some of their fortunes to undermine capitalism.

Rand is not interested in showing us how her heroes would grow their wealth while protecting their interests in this post-apocalyptic world. Instead, she invites her readers to imagine the rebuilding process as an uncomplicated triumph, the millenium following the Rapture. Even if her characters could resolve this dilemma in a way consistent with the novel’s view of human nature, a sequel that portrayed this resolution would show “men of the mind” interacting with people who might not share their values, rather than separating from them.

Finally, Rand stumbles against a politically inconvenient fact about capitalism as it is practiced today: Almost every “man of the mind,” no matter how brilliant and productive, is an employee, not an owner, of the company that takes advantage of his talents. The shareholders of their companies are probably not much smarter or harder-working than the average mortal (compare the average Lucent stockholder with the inventors of Unix), but the shareholders are ultimately in charge.

Contrast this banal fact of corporate law with one of the main plot lines of Atlas Shrugged: Francisco D’Anconia’s campaign to destroy D’Anconia Copper. According to the Objectivist party line, the other shareholders in D’Anconia Copper got what they deserved, because any rational shareholder would have sold the stock before the campaign of destruction began. But this excuse rings hollow. If someone hires me to fix his car, and I deliberately destroy it, no character flaw of my employer can justify my sabotage. I was free to refuse the repair job or to fix the car to the best of my ability, but not to accept the job and then ruin the property I was entrusted with. By the same token, D’Anconia was free to resign his position and sell his holdings in D’Anconia Copper, or to manage the company in good faith. Instead, he violated his fiduciary duty as a corporate manager. This character is a capitalist role model?

The essays within Atlas Shrugged use logical argument to advocate a certain philosophy, comprising rationality, empiricism, and individual property rights. The story uses its portrayal of heroes and villains to advocate a much simpler point of view, one not always consistent with the philosophy: People who are like the heroes of this novel deserve everything they have and then some. Everyone else deserves to die. Which, if any, of these moral codes is correct? If you have been inspired by this novel, and are moved to convince everyone else that they should become Objectivists, then perhaps you should check your premises.

15 May 2005 — Power is sweet

We all know that American society is degenerating in two ways: people are eating more and more sugar-laden food, and using more and more electricity. Fortunately, technology is on the way to take advantage of the first problem to solve the second.

via jwz

27 Apr 2005 — Shaving cream / Be nice and clean / Shave every day and you’ll always look keen

Is there some technical lit-crit name for poetry that uses its rhyme scheme to allude to taboo words without actually including them?

26 Apr 2005 — The case for a chaotic party

A lot of Democrats have envied the united PR campaigns that Republicans have been able to maintain, with the same talking points faithfully repeated across blogs, talk radio, TV pundit shows, and newspaper columns. Mark Schmitt reminds us that such unity has its price, and the Republicans might be paying the price right now.

A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total….

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than “government sucks,” they would know this. Hayek’s libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn’t have any means for correcting its mistakes—look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn’t fulfill their promises.

Schmitt calls his posting “What the Republicans Could Learn from Hayek”. But Democrats could learn something here, too.

26 Apr 2005 — It would put a dent in the single-malt-Scotch budget

Alpha-Geek came across the following decision-making technique, quoted from Herodotus:

If an important decision is to be made [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk and the following day the master of the house…submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.

I would propose this to my synagogue’s Board of Directors, but I embarrass myself enough at Board meetings when I’m sober.

25 Apr 2005 — The season of our cholesterol

Conversation at Ta`am China…

Jen: “I wonder what the most active business day for kosher restaurants is.”

Me: “Probably erev Pesach, since they have a captive market. So to speak.”

15 Apr 2005 — I am the ghost of tax forms yet to come

Instructions for the 2004 form 1040 (i.e., the one due today):

Line 23: Educator Expenses If you were an eligible educator in 2004, you can deduct up to $250 of qualified expenses you paid in 2004….

Qualified expenses include ordinary and necessary expenses paid in connection with books, supplies, equipment … and other materials used in the classroom.

Instructions for the 2005 form 1040:

Line 23b: Military Expenses If you were a member of the armed forces in a combat zone in 2005, and you spent your own money to buy a flak jacket for yourself or armor for your vehicle, you can deduct up to $500 of the cost of the armor.

Instructions for the 2006 form 1040:

Line 23c: Culture of Life Expenses If you took time off from work in 2006 to picket an abortion clinic or hospice, you may deduct $100 for every day you protested (up to $1000).

Instructions for the 2007 form 1040:

Line 53c: Homeland Security Credit If you reported suspicious behavior to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Homeland Security, and a terrorist was deported or detained indefinitely as a result of information that you provided, you may claim a credit of up to $2,000, depending on the value of your information.

30 Mar 2005 — Gender and friendship: follow-up file

In a posting last year, I remarked that women and men have remarkably different relationships with their same-sex platonic friends, but biographies of transsexuals don’t reveal much about their platonic friendships. I was intrigued, therefore, to come across a certain passage in As Nature Made Him, John Colapinto’s book about Bruce a.k.a. Brenda a.k.a. David Reimer.

For those unfamiliar with the case: when Bruce Reimer was eight months old, most of his penis was burned off in a botched circumcision. Following the advice of the famed psychologist John Money, they renamed the child Brenda and tried to raise her as a girl. Brenda had emotional problems throughout her childhood, rebelling against everything associated with girlhood, and when she found out about her medical history as a teenager, she insisted on being reassigned as male.

During her childhood as Brenda, one of Reimer’s few friends was a classmate named Heather Legarry. Colapinto reports:

Heather…valued Brenda as a girl devoid of the duplicity and backstabbing that had poisoned so many of her relations with girls in the past and that even threatened the harmony of her current clique of tomboys. “Brenda didn’t speak much,” Heather says, “but when she did she was never vindictive or false. She was very honest. If she told me something was black or white, it was.” (p. 125; link added)

As transsexuals go, Reimer is hardly typical, but I’ll take my data points wherever I can get them.

see also these comments from lyonesse, who worked in Prof. Money’s lab, on Reimer

22 Mar 2005 — Priorities, priorities

While the Republicans considered Terry Schiavo’s life important enough to cut short President Bush’s vacation, Sun Hudson, a six-month-old terminally ill baby, became the first infant in the US authorized to have his life support discontinued against his parents’ wishes. The hospital wouldn’t even honor the mother’s invitation for the media to see the allegedly-conscious baby. The law permitting this euthanasia, the Texas Futile Care Law, was drafted after negotiations with National Right to Life, and signed by one Governor George W. Bush.

Of course, Schiavo’s care is being subsidized by a trust fund established by a malpractice settlement. Hudson was not so lucky.

Liberals believe that your life belongs to yourself. Conservatives of a bygone era believed that your life belongs to God. The people who call themselves “conservative” today, it seems, believe that your life belongs to Mammon.

via Mark A. R. Kleiman

17 Mar 2005 — C is for Chance

(Previously in this series: A is for Anonymous, B is for Beauty)

How can a hard-line communist state sustain itself in a world where capitalism seems triumphant almost everywhere? Cuba can blame all its problems on the US embargo. North Korea has its nuclear weapons. Engelstan, meanwhile, has the lottery.

As part of the celebrations inaugurating each new Five-Year Plan, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Engelstan draws one worker’s name from a giant drum. The man or woman selected spends the next five years living like a monarch (indeed, living in the palaces of the old monarchy), enjoying luxuries that no other citizen, not even the Secretary himself, is entitled to.

There is, of course, one catch. In order to participate in the lottery, one must have a certificate of good citizenship from the local Workers’ Party office. “Good citizenship” has never been precisely defined, but everybody agrees that good citizens speak no ill of the Party, and are quick to denounce anyone who does.

Officially, the lottery is supposed to give the people a taste of the life that every comrade will enjoy under communism. Unofficially, it redirects the human temptation to gamble to the service of the state. Party officials are quick to remind their flock that if, Marx forbid, capitalism were to take root in Engelstan, the state could not afford to support a lottery winner in the current lavish style.

Back when the Soviet Union was still a going concern, their ideologues turned up their noses at the Engelstan lottery. “An anti-socialist, regressive policy that romanticizes the feudal oppressors,” wrote one professor of Marxism-Leninism at Patrice Lumuba University. Since the Berlin Wall fell, that professor has had to support himself by driving a taxi in Moscow.

31 Dec 2004 — Park it and Locke it

The custom of reserving the parking space that you shoveled out strikes me as an excellent application of John Locke’s theory of original property acquisition. A parking space on a public street (absent meters and so forth) is common property, but once the owner of a car mixes his or her labor with it, it becomes his or her own (with some reservations), and the driver leaves a token to mark the acquisition. It’s not kosher to dig out a parking space, mark it, and then leave it empty for days on end, because then you are violating the Lockean principle that when you take from the commons, you should only take what you’re going to actually use.

Of course, according to a strict reading of Locke, all this only applies in the state of nature, and now that we’re bound by the social contract, we should respect the laws of the civil government, which (at least in Boston) does not recognize any right to keep the parking space that you shoveled out. Then again, if driving in Boston is not the state of nature, it’s as close to it as I ever want to get.

Locke, of course, has had a great influence on English and American political philosophy. In other parts of the world, competing theories of property and government had a stronger influence. So I am wondering: when the snow is a foot deep in France or Sweden or Lithuania, do people also have the custom that you can keep the parking space that you dig out? Are contemporary Americans moved by the dead hand of an eighteenth-century Briton, or was Locke merely using philosophical language to formalize a common human tendency?

Update: In Sweden, the city actually plows the sides of the street so people can park there. What a concept!

22 Dec 2004 — Holy grail, holy lawsuit

The late Andrew Galambos believed that a person’s ideas were “primary property,” more so than his or her physical possessions. Galambos even contributed a nickel into a trust fund for Thomas Paine’s heirs every time he used the word “liberty” in a lecture, because Galambos believed that Paine had invented it.

Apparently, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have become Galambosians: they believe that the concept of “Jesus survived his crucifixion, married, and had children” is their primary property, and they are demanding that the publishers of The DaVinci Code cough up a few nickels.

via Through the Looking Glass

21 Dec 2004 — The Social Security non-crisis

The Left Business Observer debunked the tales of Social Security “crisis” that were circulating back in 1994 and 1998. Now that the Bush administration is pushing Social Security “reform,” wonks closer to the Democratic mainstream, such as Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum, have come to the same realization.

If you don’t have the patience to read Yglesias or LBO, contemplate Kevin Drum’s graph, which shows that “doomsday” for the Social Security trust fund has been about 35 years away for the past ten years. If you have a little more patience than that, here’s my standing-on-one-foot explanation:

• The predicted “bankruptcy” of the trust fund is simply the time at which, if all the trustees’ predictions come true, the fund will have to borrow money from the general fund instead of loaning money to it.
• Even if the predictions are accurate, “bankruptcy” can be prevented by raising the Social Security tax by a few points (or by making all income, not just wages up to a certain limit, subject to the tax).
• Even if the predictions are accurate, Social Security taxes are not raised, and Social Security benefits are cut to stave off “bankruptcy”, retirees in the 2040s will get more, even after adjusting for inflation, than retirees today.
• The Social Security trustees have been consistently lowballing their predictions of future economic growth. If US economic growth over the next 40 years is anything like it was for the last 40 years, then there will be no “bankruptcy.” If it is as low as the trustees fear, then stocks and bonds aren’t going to do so well, either.

15 Dec 2004 — Intellectual profitability

Philip Greenspun, responding to an UberNerd friend who believes that “if you don’t have a patent you can’t make any money,” observes:

Checking the top 10 out of the Fortune 500 companies, for example, we find Walmart right on top, followed by Exxon Mobil. Except for IBM none of the companies feels like one based on intellectual property and even IBM these days gets most of its revenue from service. Certainly it is tough to see how an insurance company such as AIG (#10) and a bank such as Citigroup (#8) are living large from patents.

I was reminded of a posting from Karsten M. Self on the Free Software Business email list almost three years ago. He observed that…

From an industry list of the top 100 computer companies by sales for 1998 (latest numbers I’ve got), there is only one pure-play software company in the top ten, it’s ranked number ten, and that’s Microsoft. You have to drop to number 56 to find another (Novell), then 63 (Adobe). The other companies are largely a mix of HW + services (e.g.: IBM) or SW + services (e.g.: Oracle)….

[Out of the firms in Software Magazine’s “Software 500” that list no revenue from services,] the following note software revenues as the bulk of all revenues: Microsoft ($21,591 [million]), SAS ($1,020), Adobe ($1,015), Autodesk ($820), and Symantec ($728). I’m excluding consulting firms (e.g.: PW-Coopers, Andersen) whose “software” revenues are largely associated with consulting services. SAS’s reported financials exclude service revenues. Only two of these firms (other than Microsoft) could be considered to have a significant desktop presence: Adobe and Autodesk. The delta between them and Microsoft is 20 to one.

So, of the top fifty “software” firms, there are four which derive the bulk of their revenues from software itself, for a total software revenue contribution of $25.1 billion, 86% of software revenues from software firms comes from Microsoft itself.

As far as Internet Time goes, three years is an eon, but I suspect that anyone looking at current figures would see a similar breakdown.

15 Dec 2004 — Don’t quit your day job, Judge

Judge Richard Posner (appeals judge on the Seventh Circuit, professor at the University of Chicago) says that it’s OK to fight a preventative war if the expected benefits of the war outweigh the expected costs.

Quick reality check, ladies and gentlemen: when was the last time two countries went to war and both countries’ leaders had accurately predicted the costs and benefits? Let’s review the past twenty-five years. The Bush Administration, and every member of Congress who authorized the present invasion of Iraq, underestimated the cost of the occupation. In the previous Gulf War, Saddam Hussein underestimated the likelihood that the US would intervene to protect Kuwait. Slobodan Milosevic underestimated the likelihood that NATO would do anything more than wring its hands over the fate of the Bosnian Muslims. Ariel Sharon underestimated the cost of maintaining a friendly government in Lebanon. Yasser Arafat underestimated the benefit that the Palestinian people would gain from the intifadah.

If calculating the costs and benefits of a fight were as easy as pricing a stock option, then few if any countries would go to war at all. “As you can see from this mathematical proof, our expected benefit from invading you is 500, and our expected cost is only 100.” “By Jove, you’re right! I’ll just advise my government to unconditionally surrender to you now, and save us both a lot of trouble.”

Indeed, when the costs and benefits of a war are clear to everyone involved, there is no war. In 1940, the military forces of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were obviously no match for the Red Army. Therefore, when the Soviets sent in troops to occupy those countries, they met with no resistance.

via Crooked Timber et al.

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