On Being a Parent

 I was asked to write something about parenting. I don't know if I'm qualified, but I do have experience. I first became a parent a month after my twentieth birthday. I am now toward the end of my sixth decade. That means I have been a parent for more than twice as long as I have not been a parent. I have four children and a large number of grandchildren. This note reflects my aspirations. Sometimes I don't succeed.

I was young, but fortunate, as a first time parent. Both Sarah and I are readers. I also have a tendency to question whatever I am told and try to reason from first principles. Sarah had been working in a good day care center for some time and has a natural affinity for young children. So we read about child rearing. Not just current books, but older ones as well. It became apparent that child rearing is as faddish as all other aspects of culture. This was both troubling and freeing. Troubling because, in a deep sense, no one knows what they are doing. Freeing because reasonable human beings keep being reared despite the fashions. As a species we instinctually know what to do as long as we follow our better nature. We want to touch and hold our children. We want to see them laughing and happy. We want them to be strong, independent, and fearless. Most of us understand that if a child is unhappy, there is a reason for it. We may never find a cause, but there is one. That means an unhappy child needs and deserves love, support, and compassion even if their pain is caused by the trivial or even nothing we can discern.

Children grow to be adults, but they are not adults. They are unreasonable bundles of emotions, actions and reactions. They can sometimes be persuaded by argument, but they are not rational. They are exquisitely and effectively responsive to their environment. Children will mold themselves to get what they need from their environment. They also have all the normal human instincts and emotions: Empathy and cruelty, a sense of fairness and unfairness, love and hate, rewards and revenge. It is important to remember that they respond to the actual environment, not the stated environment. Parents may talk about love, fairness, and respect. If they display disappointment, favoritism, and criticism, the children will respond to the actual environment not the stated one.

Come to think of it, adults are much the same. The difference is that we have a greater mental capacity to examine the world and form rational plans. We also have a more developed capacity to act in accordance with what we think rather than what we feel. As an adult I may feel rage, but if that will not help the situation I will act calmly and unemotionally to make things better.

One very, very, important difference between adults and children is that children are easily distracted. When distracted, they often forget what happened before. My first child, September, was colicky as an infant. That just means she was fussy and often unhappy. That is when I learned that intense physical actions could erase her emotions. When she was fussy I would sometimes hold her high and let her fall, always in my hands, for a few feet. Her internal reaction was basically "what the hell just happened". Processing the experience often erased her previous unhappiness and she could be re-engaged with something happier. It also started me on a path of raw physicality. By the time she was nine months old I would take her and throw her high in the air and catch her on the way down. We both enjoyed it. On the now outlawed spinners in parks (maybe 15 feet across with metal tubes to hold on to) I would push sets of children just as fast as they could take. You had to watch how tight their grips were and whether anyone was turning green, but it was great fun.

For older children, the same lesson applies. When a child is behaving badly you can lecture them and punish them in various ways. However, they simply lack the mental capacity to reflect and change behaviour. A quick explanation is important so they understand how you view the world, but for most incidents after you have explained you can simply erase the situation. I find humor, games, and even the worst mock magic tricks effective. Recently I took an unhappy child who was effectively being punished for bad behavior with siblings and made things ok again by pretending to take a coin from behind their ear. I can't do such a trick, but I made it so apparent that I was disappointed with my repeated failures that it was funny to them. This erased the distress and they could go back to the family without causing additional trouble. The siblings share a short attention span, so the incident was forgotten and reintegration possible. If the punishment had been likely to be effective, I would have left the kid alone. But self reflection is not a strong point for children and I think a wiser course of action is to make the immediate situation better and get back to normal as quickly as possible. In this case, about two minutes.

Once on a family road trip we ran into a blizzard. This did not please my one year old(?) grandchild in his car seat who wanted us to stop and who wanted to be breast fed. Stopping seemed out of the question if we ever wanted to make it home. I drove for maybe six hours as the toddler screamed continuously. Everyone was as kind and patient as we could be with him. We talked and tried to explain, but he did not stop screaming. This made my driving, in a blizzard, on a highway with spun out cars littering the shoulder, "difficult". I must say though, I was impressed with both his stamina and force of will. For a while afterwords I called him The Dark Lord. He has turned into a fine young adult who has learned to control himself better. But I think he still has that underlying determination and force of will.

In that car, there were three generations of people of mixed ages. I like to believe we all modeled and reinforced important lessons: The focus and self control necessary to accomplish what needed to be done in spite of adversity. The ability to act calmly in an emotionally fraught situation. And most importantly, the compassion needed to deal with a child who was, quite reasonably, completely distraught about their situation.

Stories are important. It is how we, as humans, approach life. We tell ourselves stories of who we are, and who we are not. I tell myself the story that I am an honest, intelligent, capable person. I tell myself this, and believe it, despite the fact that I can recite a litany of my deceits, embarrassingly stupid actions, and incompetence. Having this litany is important in being honest to myself. It does not change my view that, on the whole, I am honest, intelligent, and capable. It is something I aspire to even if I don't always accomplish it.

As a parent we have the opportunity, through our actions, to form the inner story a child tells themselves. If they are constantly accused of deception and bad intent, they will form the inner story that they are deceitful and wicked and will behave accordingly. If they are praised for effort and encouraged in kindness, they will form the inner story that they are hard working and kind.

My father's mother, an irish catholic, raised nine boys. Much of it effectively as a single, poverty stricken, mother because her husband developed parkinson's disease and was totally disabled. She was revered by her children and by many of her peers. She said the way to create honest children was to always believe them, even when lies were apparent. That way they understood that the very air around them was filled with an expectation of honesty. It worked. Her children were sometimes SOBs, but they were almost invariably honest. And, as it turned out, invariably intellectually rigorous. They passed these traits to my generation.

I often say that when a child is just born, they rely on us for everything. By the time they are forty five, we hope they rely on us for almost nothing. The art of parenting is managing the transition between the two stages. One important aspect of the transition is agency. Agency is the notion that you can choose a course of action and see it through. As parents I think we should give every child as much agency as possible while still protecting them from irreparable harm. To show them that even adults were children and did things that were not great, I tell young kids stories about times I did embarrassing things. A favorite seems to be the time, when I was about four, I got up from my nap without my mother knowing and walked to the beach (a few blocks away) NAKED. I was brought home in a police car.

In my mind, the statement that I have four children is not quite accurate. For me, any child in my presence is my child. In the presence of a child, I am not important. The child is the important one and what I am thinking and feeling takes a back seat to what they are thinking and feeling. I think this is reasonable because, given the normal course of events, they will be here after I am dead and gone. They will be able to affect the world long after I cannot, and they are the repository of any small legacy of humanity that I hope to leave behind.

Life is often difficult, unfair, and disappointing for each of us. I firmly believe that if anything is going to allow us to improve our lives, it is compassion. For me, that means putting myself aside and trying to understand others. Once we understand, forgiveness is often possible. This includes compassion for ourselves. That does not mean that we condone actions, just that understanding is necessary for correction, change, and redemption.

Compassion is especially important around children. It not only makes their lives better and happier, it also makes for an emotionally supportive environment. That environment allows them to grow into better people.

My basic advice to other parents is this. Compassion begins with putting aside your needs, your emotions, your desire for a different world. As the Buddhists say, "Comparisons are odious". Look at your current children, your current situation. Understand it, and make it better. Do this with as little regard for yourself as you can manage. You have a lot to juggle and a lot of responsibilities. Sometimes when the toddler is screaming, you just have to tend to business and drive the car. Remember, you are the least important person in the room.

Shower Thoughts

You may start to think I'm a little obsessed with showers, but in fact I'm a little obsessed with everything.

Showers are a small protected space in the day. The requirements are simple as is the activity. You walk into the shower and a few minutes later you walk out warm, wet, happy, and cleaner. The act of washing is simple and repetitive. It requires very little thought, which clears the way for everything else. Showers put the lie to any notion that I am a single unified self. There are multitudes inside me.

Take this morning. I have been playing a lot of music and it is common for me to sing in the bathroom and shower. This morning I was singing "Summertime", the same verse over and over, but a jazzy scat version with lots of embellishment and some pushing of the harmony. As with much bathroom singing I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it and part of my mind started wandering to think about what it would be like to give a regular short weekly concert, maybe a half hour or so, at a very nice concert venue at Colorado State University. I would love to do this, but the University is quite closed off. I've pursued ways to work with the music school, but there are roadblocks and nothing has panned out. It would be really nice to bring in other musicians I have been playing with for this little non-existent concert. Oooh, for a long time I have thought it would be nice to find a reasonably accomplished tabla player to improvise with -- and flute/tabla music starts running through my head in along with "Summertime".

All this is going through my head as I am singing, taking off my robe, adjusting water temperature, and climbing in to the shower. After a minute enjoying the warm water, I stop singing. For the rest of the shower, and even now, "Summertime" is still floating through my head. It is a little musical background to everything else I am thinking and doing, but my mind moves over to thinking about this multi-processing going on and how I find it an interesting story, maybe I should write it up. Meanwhile I'm rinsing my little mesh body scrubber, washing my hair and starting to lather up. The lack of musical venues for me is running through my head as I re-imagine various schemes that I may or may not work on to secure spots and I'm idly thinking of pieces for these little short concerts. This is at the same time, I'm observing this mix of events and "Summertime" is still there, with variations, running through my head.

Is it any wonder that sometimes after having been in the shower for five minutes, I honestly cannot remember whether I have washed my hair or not?

If We Aren't Careful, We May End Up Where We Are Heading.

It is easy to predict man made catastrophes. Sometimes they even happen. Here are some intractable problems/trends that are likely to make the next hundred years "difficult". If we do not find some way, pretty quickly (fifty to one hundred years), to change course I think we could be fairly described as a failed species. That is, things will look much more like "Blade Runner" or "The Mote in God's Eye" than "Ecotopia".
This post assumes an unstated desired future. If your view of a desirable world differs significantly from mine, you may not find any problems here.
The good news is that we can relatively easily make things much much better. The bad news is that, as a species, we seem incapable of making good long term choices. If change occurs it will likely occur on the back of poverty, war, famine, and plague. If change does not occur, we are condemning our descendants to an impoverished, less habitable planet.

Social Trends - Concentration of Wealth

It has always been true in settled societies that wealth is concentrated. As productivity increases in industrialized societies, it takes less and less labor to make the same amount of goods. Either we constantly increase the amount of goods we desire and require (endless growth) or more and more people become "redundant" as they say in England. That is, there is no need for their labor.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a serious countervailing social movement to redistribute wealth to make societies more equitable. Tides seemed to have turned and, particularly in the United States, the scales have tilted toward unfettered wealth and, along with it, increasing manipulation of both media and elections to serve the plutocracy.
I am not suggesting a trilateral commission type conspiracy. Instead, individuals and groups with plenty of money are doing their best to publicize their point of view and make it the basis of discourse. There has been about a century of systematic work to improve marketing. In the political arena the admonition that government should be more like business has been taken to heart in the propaganda department. Political messages use the tools of marketing (focus groups, test markets ...) to find the most immediately effective messages.
There have been some genuine innovations in the exercise of power though. For example, it is no longer necessary to buy politicians. It is much easier to find someone who already holds your point of view and work for their election. An extreme example is Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co..
Sometimes there are social policies that reinforce the concentration of wealth as an unintended consequence. For example, higher education is increasing in cost and is commonly funded with loans. Forbes reports that two thirds of all students graduating from four year colleges and universities carry loans with an average debt of $23,000. This is a doubling from 1996. Instead of leaving the University with knowledge and a clean slate to start new enterprises, this generation is pretty much forced by debt to become simple employees of existing operations.
We know the end of this story. In the U.S. there is relentless propaganda campaign that insists that we have a pure meritocracy and the wealthy are the ones who feed us all. As the gap between haves and have nots continues to widen and the number of have nots increases, eventually they will simply rebel. If that happens, expect decades of chaos and class warfare with guns.

Social Trends - Fewer, Larger Entities

As technology improves it becomes possible to create larger and larger organizations. Advances in information processing have accelerated this capability.
The current tendency is writ large in the video distribution industry. When VHS tapes became the technology winner, the low entry costs for starting a video store allowed thousands or even tens of thousands of independently owned video stores to blossom. Almost as quickly there was a wave of consolidation as smaller operations were either bought or driven out of business by a regional video chains. These, in turn, were consolidated into a few national chains (Blockbuster, Showtime) which dominated the market. There are still mom and pop video stores, but after the first boom they never had appreciable impact on the market as a whole.
In many industries there are very few real players. This includes media companies where nine companies control virtually all television and Clear Channel controls 1200 radio stations. Four cell phone providers own the lion's share of the mobile phone market (280 million subscribers). There are five major oil companies. Oil companies are among the largest companies that have ever existed. Over half of all farm seed is produced by fewer than ten companies.
As a side effect, increasing institution size also works to further concentrate wealth.
We know from network theory and from study of biological systems that diverse systems which have large numbers of highly interconnected parts are more resilient and less prone to catastrophic failure than systems with fewer nodes and interconnections. When diverse systems of many nodes have some of them fail, the remainder of the system tends to work around the problem. When their are fewer, strongly connected nodes, they tend to drag each other down in the face of disaster. Note how this sounds just like the start of the 2008 financial crisis and the current Greek debt crisis.
In agriculture, the number of farms has decreased, the acreage of each farm has increased, and the vast majority of farms are a monoculture. We have centralized meat and food processing. While the system may be immediately efficient, it is also incredibly fragile and shortsighted. We impoverish the ecosystem, including the soil ecosystem. We also make our food supply dependent on a smaller variety of foods where a single virulent disease can spell disaster. Centralized processing means that millions of people can be infected or poisoned from a single point.
Despite their inherent fragility when faced with the unexpected, in the normal course of events, centralization tends to win. The only way to redress the problems is by creating an environment that rewards smallness or penalizes bigness.

Social Trends - Race to the Bottom

Globalization has allowed the entire world to become a source of labor and products. One side of this is that wealth has flowed to some desperately poor places. The other side is that it has depressed pay in many developed countries and made jobs much less secure. While money does flow toward poor areas of the world, the net effect is to lower labor costs in general. It is interesting to note that globalization involves capital and goods, not people. A factory worker in Sheboygan is competing with workers in Bangalore, but it is unlikely the factory worker can emigrate to Bangalore and take advantage of its lower cost of living.
Globalization allows producers to reduce costs. Labor is part of this, but not the whole picture. It is also possible to reduce costs by operating in locales that allow costs to be ignored or externalized. For example, it will be cheaper to produce in a country that allows wholesale pollution or deforestation because you don't have to install that expensive emission control equipment or worry about forty years down the road when the trees are all gone.
Because every locality wants the jobs, the tendency is to offer the most attractive deal possible to producers who promise jobs. Producers use this to pit localities against each other. Internationally, this rewards countries with the worst labor practices and the most lax regulations. Within the U.S., communities generally bid by offering tax breaks. The hope is that the increased wage base will make up for the breaks, but often the end result is simply to starve local government.
When the cost of production goes down, a number of things can happen. The cost of goods to the end consumer can go down. High tech items show this most clearly but it also shows up in the price of clothes at Old Navy. Second, profits for producers can increase. This has happened as well. In the current "recession" profits for U.S. manufacturers have completely recovered. Finally wages for workers can increase. In the past few decades this has not happened. Wages in the U.S. have been stagnant for almost two generations. When producers (owners) increase profits but workers do not share in the wealth, this increases the concentration of wealth.
Remarkably, public discourse on workers benefits has joined this race to the bottom. Look at the discussion over public pensions. There is a problem with pension funding. Governments have sometimes promised more than was prudent (as did GM and other major corporations). The discussion never seems to be "how can we get private retirement better", it is always "public employees are getting benefits that private employees do not, let's reduce them".

Social Trends - Rise of the Ideologues

Never underestimate the power of a simple idea or worldview even if it is completely wrong or destructive.
People will take a few general principles and assume everything can be explained by them without much regard to complicating factors. If the ideas lead to bad results, it is a failure of application, not the principle.
Among the current Ideologies that are threatening social destruction I would include (non-exhaustive list): radical violent Islam, any religion based on literal inerrancy of the bible, libertarianism, and all forms of racism.

Social Trends - Algorithms and Hubris

There is a notion in computer science called the singularity. This is the creation of smarter than human intelligence. A basic question is, will we notice it?
We already have specialized machines that perform much better than humans. Computers have bested humans in games like chess. Robots create and assemble parts much faster and more accurately than humans. In the computer gaming world, our "enemies" are dumbed down to correspond to our terribly slow human reaction time and limited ability to handle large numbers of inputs. Our planes and cars are already run by computers. Humans enter basic parameters for flight, but the plane itself makes virtually all decisions.
To increase efficiency we constantly streamline and automate business processes. The end result is an expansion in the power of algorithmic systems. In a modern corporation there are fewer and fewer levers pulled by fewer and fewer people. Take shipping as an example. A company like Fed-Ex has completely automated the routing of packages. Once your package information is entered into the system, humans do nothing but follow a machine generated instruction to pick up a box in one place and drop it at another. Airline reservations are another example. Humans do not play any role in the process. The price is determined by complex algorithms that are probably beyond the understanding of any single person. Planes are automatically booked and overbooked. Even upgrades and seat re-assignments are pretty much controlled by the algorithm. The person at the gate has almost no choices and no authority.
The system we have to create these systems is not reassuring. When a business decides to automate a process, a team of people, often outside specialists, is assembled to analyze the problem and implement a solution. When successful, the results are put into production and handed off to a separate team that is in charge of operating, maintaining, and improving the system. In theory this is a repeatable process with each group playing its specialized role. The players usually do not understand each other's roles very well. At the business level, the indicators are productivity (how many flights are booked in how much time and at how much cost) and overall profit and loss. The systems are designed to report some set of indicators so this can be tracked. The people who look at the indicators do not usually understand the underlying algorithms. The people who design and implement the system are specialists in new product creation and generally leave the scene after the process is in place. The people who maintain and improve the system generally have documentation, but they may not be aware of why particular design choices were made and the trade-offs involved.
Another way to state this is that every day we create large algorithmic systems that no single person, or even group of people, understands. As long as he systems work reasonably well or can be discarded, there is no real problem. When the systems fail or are critical but so complex they cannot be discarded, we run into trouble.
On Wall Street, most trading does not involve humans. In 2009 almost three quarters of all stock trades were automated trades based on computer algorithms. Since then this number has almost certainly increased. When you listen to commentators discuss the stock market and why it moves one way or another, it is complete nonsense. It sounds good and it always supports the commentator's overall view of the world, but it is not based in any kind of fact. On May 6, 2010 the stock market briefly crashed. It took five months to issue a report that could attempt to explain what actually happened. The basic answer is that the machines did it.
The hubris part of this trend is that there are people who think we can model and control complex systems. As an example, one of the great failures of modern economics has been the attempt to quantify risk. Do a google search for "quantification of risk economics". You will get pages of google results that are complete nonsense written by people who actually believe they are close to the holy grail of putting a number on risk. Often they create models that work well in certain circumstances - but their predictions ALWAYS fail catastrophically in the long term.
What happens when you put a couple of people with Nobel Prizes in Economics in a room with the Vice Chairman and Head of Bond Trading at Solomon Brothers. You get a well funded scheme to make money based on the finest and most capable economic models of the day. You get "Long Term Capital Management" a firm which made profits until it completely failed in 2000. The failure of a single firm, even a big one, is not particularly important. Unfortunately the firm was so highly leveraged (highly leveraged means "playing with huge sums of other peoples money") it threatened to bring down large portions of the financial system. Fixing the problem required a massive bailout supervised by the Federal Reserve. It failed because of events that they simply could not predict. That is the point. There are always events that we simply cannot predict. We do pretty well with "normal distributions", hence the reliable existence of life insurance. Unfortunately, most real world economics are not "normal".
The run-up to the 2008 collapse was a tribute to the power of simple greed, but all good cons need a convincing story. In this case, investors were reassured that the risk involved in collections of mortgages was known and quantified, and besides, we can hedge (insure) to limit losses. There was outright lying at every level of the financial transactions, but a systemic problem was that the intertwined system intended to reduce risk by spreading it, simply increased risk for everyone. Of course there were some folks who knew about the lying and worked the system to their own advantage (notably, Goldman Sachs).

Social Trends - Missing the Big Picture

Evidence based action is important to understand what works and what doesn't. When we have the evidence it seems silly to ignore it. But, it is also silly to read more into our simple experiments than is actually there.
Experimentation is difficult and expensive. This is especially true with trying to understand humans. Too often we end up understanding and exploiting a tendency. The results may be immediately satisfying but ultimately destructive.
There are many situations where short term investigation gives us a "local optimum" where people are more satisfied at this instant, but the end result is ultimately destructive to our health and well being.
The prime example of this is industrial food production. To build a more popular food product you have to understand what people want so they will buy your product. An industry with a new product must be able to produce it consistently and on a large scale. If you create a focus group or simply ask people on the street to tell you which of several food products they prefer, the winner is likely to be the the cheapest product with the highest sugar/fat/salt. As organisms that evolved in circumstances of want, we crave these things. To produce the product consistently and in large quantities you have to industrialize the production of the raw ingredients. In the case of food this is living organisms. For crops, we standardize the breeds, the methods of production, and we process the results in chemical plants to homogenize, filter, and extract. For animals, we reduce them to eating machines on a cheap controlled diet and we engineer their genetics to change what was an animal into a muscle production machine.
We get consistent products that we biologically crave, we also get obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and an odd form of malnutrition. Don't worry about the malnutrition though, because we have processed supplements to fix that.
Since the introduction of the automobile we have done exactly the same sort of short term fixes. When faced with traffic problems, typically traffic congestion, the answer is always the same. Congestion will be alleviated if we add more lanes and reduce the number of entrances into the main streets (no houses on arterials). It also helps if people stay away from the congested areas. The end result is our typical suburban city form. That is, a built environment that is reasonable if you are a car, but not very suitable for supportive human culture.
On a business level the question is usually "How can we improve our profits this quarter or this year?" It is almost never "How can we stay in this business in a sustainable way?" or "How can we make the world a better place in ten or a hundred years?" If your time horizon for profit is one or even five years and an opportunity arises to make a profit based on destruction that will not become apparent for ten or twenty years, most businesses will take the profit and screw the future, which leads to the next section.

Environmental Trends - Destruction of the Natural World

It is clear that as a species we are quite willing to destroy everything around us for short term survival or short term gain. We are willing to completely destroy the natural environment. Take as examples mountaintop removal for coal, deforestation and overfishing.
On top of this, there are unintended results of our actions. The prime example is global warming. General habitat destruction as we exploit more and more of the world is a severe problem.

Environmental Trends - Unsustainable Human Population

We have already passed a tipping point in human population. We have more people than the planet can sustainably support. Like a profligate child with a large inheritance, we can live for some time by depleting our inheritance, but in the end we will be broke. In this case of humanity, our inheritance is the natural world and all its riches which we are rapidly despoiling.
It is not clear what the carrying capacity of our planet is, particularly since this is partially related to the technology at hand. It is clear that we have exceeded the current capacity. As the human population continues to increase we will see even more rapid environmental degradation as well as more frequent human disasters (crop collapse, famine, social unrest, war for resources...).
In industrial countries population has stabilized or even decreased. This gives some hope that we can control our own numbers. For the world as a whole I think it is likely that we will simply exhaust natural resources. This will cause a very painful decline in human population based on misery.
As a contrast, think what the world would be like with our current technology if we had a third of our current population. We could live in a world of human plenty with a massively improved environment. We have passed the point in human society where increasing human labor is the best way to improve the human condition.

Quitting my Job

At the beginning of January I quit my job, leaving corporate America. My employer was surprised but I had been working on my escape for quite some time. I had been saving money and acquiring equipment for my next adventure, a coffee house.

A major complaint I had about my employer was a shift to completely bottom line thinking. I decided that my leaving the company should be on the same terms. I submitted my resignation at an inconvenient time for the company with an offer to continue working for some period of time for, effectively, more money. They refused and I left. I won't be requesting a recommendation.

It has now been a couple of months and the results are mixed. In some ways my life has improved. I have been spending more time at the gym. Over the past three or four years my fitness level has plummeted and my weight spiked. Since I quit both my weight and resting heart rate have slowly decreased. I have also moved more toward what I consider my genuine self. I have volunteered time to a local food co-op and even marched in the Martin Luther King day parade.

On the other hand, my stress level has not decreased. The new business is a gamble and progress has been slower than I would like. This has left me with free time that I have not used as productively as I would like. I should be writing more blog posts. I should be playing more music. I should be working more aggressively on some business related activities. I don't always deal with stress in the most productive ways.

Heath care in the US outside of a corporate umbrella is difficult. Assuming we can get any coverage at all it looks like the best I can do is about $450/month with a $10,000 yearly deductible. That means Sarah and I are on our own in any year we spend less than $10,000 out of pocket. On one hand this is what insurance is for, protection against catastrophic loss. On the other hand, the rates seem high for this kind of protection.

A number of years ago one of my swim buddies was irritated with his wife. He likes beer and she sometimes worries that he is drinking too much. She mentioned this in an exam with his doctor. He said that even if he had a problem, his doctor should be the last person to hear about it. If his doctor wrote anything down, it would go into the insurance database and future insurance coverage might either increase in cost or be denied.

Sarah and I ran into a version of this in our insurance application. Before I left my corporate job, we made sure that we had preventive care done. I got my eyes checked (I do this every couple of decades) and Sarah went in for a physical. One of the tests recommended for someone of her age is a bone density scan. The results showed lower density than desired. While this is good to know and treat, on our insurance application it comes up as a potential chronic, expensive condition. By requesting the scan, the physician actually did Sarah a disservice. A possible consequences is that we may be denied coverage for anything related to bone density for one or more years. At worst, our request for insurance may be denied altogether.

Yes, there is a global health database maintained and used by all the major US insurance companies. If you have health insurance, one of the papers you sign is an agreement to disclose everything to the insurance company. That information goes into the shared database. The database is not used to improve your health care, it is used to determine risk and reduce insurance company payouts.

The coffee house is progressing. I am negotiating a space and think I have basically come to terms with the landlord. The location is good and the costs look do-able. The next few months will be really exciting. I expect that all free time will evaporate and just hope I can keep up the gym visits.

Losing Contact

Like everyone else, my world view is limited and filtered by my own experience. Like everyone else, when there is no available, reliable research I form opinions based on my particular, atypical experiences.

Based on surveys, I have to accept that about twenty percent of adults in the US smoke. My personal experience says it is about five percent because the group of people I interact with day to day are generally non-smokers and the smokers tend not to smoke around me.

I bring this up because I feel a cultural change, but have only the most personal and anecdotal evidence. It strikes me that, day to day, I have less and less genuine human contact, both physical and emotional. I am sure some of this has to do with time of life, particular circumstance, and the softening effect of memory. Despite this, I feel there is a genuine cultural change for the worse in the United States.

Years ago when our family was smaller and very young, we moved to Oregon. This was to a small city. We arrived with nothing but the names of some friends of friends. During the three years we lived there, we developed a set of close friends and companions. I was trying to work as a musician and formed contacts in that community. We formed bands of convenience and played the local taverns and coffee shops. There were day jobs for money, but we spent as little time as possible there because our real lives were elsewhere. I helped people build additions, move, attended births and birthday parties and do all the other quotidian things without the thought of payment or trading labor. We were just in it together. There were parties and saunas and music and love. I don't remember censoring what I thought or said with these people. I'm sure that some folks were put off and probably pulled away, but there were enough left for a small community.

I contrast that to my current situation. My monetary work takes virtually all of my waking hours. Due perhaps to a poor choice or poor opportunity, my commute is quite long. A typical day involves getting up at 5:10am. By 5:30 I am in a spinning class at the local gym. After that I shower, dress and commute to work. At work there is no real communal area and I typically eat lunch alone at a nearby shopping mall. My day is largely spent in work meetings, large and small. Although I am constantly talking with people, it is all work related. I do not get home until about 7:00pm, quite exhausted.

At work, I do not speak freely. Some time ago I made a small, very bad, joke on an email received by everyone in our office (probably sixty people). Some people in management thought that such a joke might be construed by someone as offensive. As far as I can tell, no one actually complained, but some folks fantasized they might. I read and re-read the message and could find no basis for any rational complaint, but I complied with the request to send an apology saying that such communication had no place in our office.

I am more aloof than most people and I see friendships develop and grow in the workplace but I am guarded. I simply do not trust that the organization has my or my colleagues best interests in mind. As a manager, I try to protect the people who work for me, but the day may come where I am asked to do things that injure them. Most of my bosses seem to accept the notion that the primary purpose of our work is to monetarily advance the organization as a whole. I like the people I work with. I respect them. I think the institutions we have created force us apart rather than bringing us together.

In the past few years sending work off-shore has been a common topic of management discussion in several jobs I have had. It generally occurs as almost a spreadsheet computation: cost of labor versus inefficiencies in communication and the cost of developing requisite skills in people far away. In talks about pay we speak of being competitive. Work benefits are a way keep talented people from defecting to other jobs. There are career development programs and birthday reminders, but I feel the underlying sentiment that we are not dealing with friends or even people, but with labor units. Labor units that should be developed and trained and respected, but the basic notion is economic utility. The purpose of the organization is to earn money for the owners. In my current job, the owners want good economic results so they can cash out by selling the company to someone else.

Frankly, I do not think economics should form the basis for our work lives or any other part of our lives. We require money to live and our lives must make sense economically. Work must make money, but that does not mean that money should form the basis of work. Work can be centered around helping others. It can be centered on a common sense of purpose and making something bigger than one person. It can center on doing things no one has done before or better than anyone has ever done them before. It can provide community and a way to help each other.

My reaction to my work brings me distance rather than closeness to others. This is, of course, my reaction. Others may react differently, but I do not think my experience is uncommon.

I sometimes look at movies as a window onto different times and places. A couple of good examples are the original (1951) "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan".

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a good story but mostly I like to contrast the everyday life that is portrayed with current life in the US. A human looking alien is loose in Washington. This apparently well educated and intelligent may chooses to live in a boarding house where he finds good middle class folks. (As a side note, Thomas Jefferson, Jon Marshall and Aaron Burr all lived in boarding houses while in Washington DC.) A single mother and her son (12 years old?) live in the boarding house as well. Within a few days the mother trusts the new boarder well enough to have him look after her son. The son has the run of Washington and is allowed to roam by himself. This setting is not the point of the movie and I do not believe that reviewers of the time commented on the lives portrayed. This was simply the texture of the time.

"God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan" is the story of some remarkable Sudanese men. Due to war in Sudan, thousands of children were forced to flee, without any adults, across thousands of miles to refugee camps in Kenya. In Kenya they lived in refugee camps run by the UN where they created their own goverment and were schooled. Their lives were confined to the camps and they developed an extremely close knit society based on personal contact, trust and loyalty. The film introduces us to several of these young men given the opportunity of moving to the US. These are remarkable people. When we meet them they have not only survived their epic flight from Sudan, they are also remarkably well educated. Each speaks at least two or three languages.

For them, the US is a land of opportunity and provides a chance for more education and money that they can send to their community back in Kenya. It is not particularly mentioned in the film, but you see this group of men who completely depended on each other in Kenya become a fragmented group of individuals who share the same apartment, but spend no time together. Their communal life is simply shattered by the reality of contemporary American life. I do not believe that they would choose to go back, but as an observer the tragedy and loss are stark.

It is about time for me to change my life to bring it more closely into line with my values. More on this later.

Some Thoughts on Debt

I've been thinking some about debt. It seems to be the zeitgeist. There is nothing profound in this post. Mostly, I am just presenting a framework to think about lending and borrowing. The last part gives some of my personal debt rules.

Well, what this post lacks in profundity it makes up in length. Here is a small index.

What is Debt
Hedging the Bet
Different Kinds of Debt
When Waters are Calm
When the Storm Comes
Personal Protection


The other day I was in a shop that was being liquidated. I am always curious why businesses must close, so I spent a little time talking with the owners. One of the questions I asked was whether they had to take on much debt to open the shop. They said no, they used equity (the monetary value of a property or business beyond any amounts owed on it) from their home to finance the venture. For them, debt is defined to be any amount owed that exceeds net worth. That is, if you can sell all your property, and have enough to pay everyone you owe, you are not in debt. Even if this were an accurate definition, the home equity loan payments must have affected their cash flow.

What is Debt

The American Heritage Dictionary defines debt as:

1. Something owed, such as money, goods, or services.
2.
a. An obligation or liability to pay or render something to someone else.
b. The condition of owing: a young family always in debt.

The other side of the debt coin is loan
1.
a. Something lent for temporary use.
b. A sum of money lent at interest.
2. An act of lending; a grant for temporary use: asked for the loan of a garden hose.
3. A temporary transfer to a duty or place away from a regular job: an efficiency expert on loan from the main office.

Loans and debt are all about the future. Both the lender and the borrower envision a future where the debt can be repaid, usually with interest. Ben Stein wrote a column about sales in which he recounted buying a car he wasn't sure he could afford.

In 1976, when I moved to Los Angeles, I desperately wanted a Mercedes 450 SLC, a car that was — even in used form — far more than I deserved or could afford at my entry-level, highly tenuous work as a scriptwriter. My salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills, Larry Anish, listened to my objections and simply asked, “Don’t you believe in your own future?” Of course, I bought the car.

In this case, the salesman wanted to sell the car. His financial interests only involved the sale. The loan, its terms, and its collection were someone else's problem. The salesman's projection of the future implied the fulfillment of dreams and faith in the buyer. In this case, I presume the bet was good. Ben got, and enjoyed, his car. The salesman got his commission, and the lender got the money back plus interest.

A different power dynamic occurs when someone wants a loan to start a new business. The borrower is generally the supplicant trying to persuade others that the wish should be granted. The lender usually insists on a business plan that takes into account foreseeable costs, revenue, and risks. The business owner dutifully uses the plan to project a future where the business succeeds and all parties prosper.

Hedging the Bet

Because the future is uncertain, lenders usually hedge the bet. This takes a number of forms.

In a "secured" loan the borrower offers something as collateral. Collateral is property or assets that are offered to secure a loan or other credit. Collateral becomes subject to seizure on default. With a secured loan, the lender is judging that even if the loan is not repaid, the collateral will allow recovery of the money owed. This was the case with the business owners who were liquidating their shop. They put up a portion of their house as a guarantee that they would repay the loan. Even after their shop is gone they must keep up the payments on the business loan or the lender may foreclose on their home to reclaim the remaining balance of the loan (plus interest, fees, the cost of the foreclosure...).

For secured loans, losses are limited to the difference between the amount due on the loan and the value of the property (less any costs for selling).

A standard mortgage is a secured loan where the lender owns the property until the debt is repaid. That is, the property itself serves as a stand in for future payments. The lender can only lose if the property loses value over time. A similar, but more risky, arrangement is used by venture capitalists. In exchange for money, the borrower gives up some portion of company ownership. This includes not only profits, but decision making as well. The business itself serves as collateral. The investors are projecting that if the borrowers cannot repay, the investors can seize the company and make it profitable.

Not all loans are secured. Sometimes the borrower and lender take a leap of faith together about the future. This is usually not a blind leap. Most loans are made with the expectation of profit and a weighing of risk. The amount loaned is balanced against the current situation of the borrower and past history of repayment. At the single loan level the lender generally requires that a trusted person, someone with a history of repaying debts and with current financial means, guarantee the loan. Lenders also vary the interest rate based on projected risk. As uncertainty of repayment increases, so does the interest rate. Over a large number of loans, the lender is assuming a certain percentage of defaults. The interest rate must be high enough to not only cover these bad loans, but to make a profit in addition.

The consolidation of financial information has allowed information about virtually all loans for all people to be tracked and shared. In this way, lenders enter into loans with a reasonably complete history of past borrowing and repayment. Financial models are used to project risk levels, hence the "credit score". In addition, lenders usually require some proof of current income.

The existence of elaborate systems to predict risk gives great comfort to lenders who deceive themselves that they understand the likely future. Unfortunately, the actual future is often unlikely. Every system of prediction devised by humans has failed, often catastrophically.

Different Kinds of Debt

Debt should not be considered a curse word. Much, if not most, of our built environment would not exist without debt. This includes roads, bridges, buildings, automobiles, computers... Most of the debts incurred to build these objects were incurred in good faith and paid off as expected. For individuals, both homes and cars are usually financed by debt and could not be bought without debt.

Debt is incurred for different reasons. Some of this is embodied in the language we use to describe debt.

One of the terms is "leverage". The term is analogy with mechanical system where a lever allows a small amount of force to move a large object. In the financial case, the lever is the borrowed money. The borrower expects a future where financial gains from the borrowed money exceed the cost of the money.

Suppose I wish to buy a commercial property and have $1,000,000. I could invest all of my money and buy a small property outright. If the property increases in value by 10% and I sell, I make $100,000 profit. Suppose instead that I pay 10% down and take out a loan for $9,000,000. If the property value increases 10% and I sell, I make $1,000,000 (less the interest paid on the loan). With the same amount of my own money, I make roughly nine times as much. That is, I have leveraged my money.

In general, lenders of leverage loans insist on knowing the purpose of the loan and do their own analysis of the financial viability.

Educational loans are a form of leverage. The increase in earnings that come from increased knowledge and skills is expected to justify the risk that incurring a debt implies. Even a car can be thought of as leverage if it allows the buyer to travel in a way that increases income (a job across town).

A second kind of loan is "credit". This term is a strange reversal of meaning. In accounting there are columns for credit and debit. That is, credit is the opposite of debit. In more general parlance, credit is something you earn or have. In the lending industry, you can borrow against your perceived financial credit. That is, you can get a "credit line" which is an amount of money the lender thinks you are likely to repay. This gets shortened to credit.

Parenthetically, another twist of terminology is "debit cards". If you use a debit card, the amount is immediately debited to your bank account. Usually a debit card can only be used if you have the funds to cover the expense. That is "debit cards" do not incur debt.

Because the borrower is judged on general reliability, credit loans are typically "revolving credit". That is, there is not a single loan with a set amount and a fixed number of payments. Instead, the amount of the loan and the size of the payment can vary from month to month. The maximum amount that can owed at any time is fixed. This limits the risk to the lender.

Credit loans are typically unsecured and the lender does not investigate how the money is used. Consumers typically use credit lines for everyday expenses. That is, the money is used in ways that do not increase future income. This makes credit loans more risky and, as a consequence, increases their cost to the borrower. Some of the cost is in higher interest. Another part of the cost comes from fees associated with the account.

There is generally a minimum payment that must be made on a credit account each month. However, the interest and fees associated with maintaining a balance are so large that the minimum payment due may not even cover the monthly interest on the loan. As long as most of the loan will eventually be repaid it is to the lender's advantage for borrowers to have a large outstanding balance.

For example, if a credit card company lends someone $10,000 dollars and that amount is paid off at the end of the month, the card company makes only the amount of the money that the merchant paid to accept the credit card (typically a one to two percent of the bill plus a per transaction fee of between four and twenty five cents). For $10,000 this might be a single payment of $100 from the merchant.

If the borrower does not pay back the loan at the end of the month, the lender starts collecting interest. Currently, credit card annual percentage rates for interest range between ten and twenty five percent. On $10,000 a fifteen percent rate would be $1,500 a year or about $125 per month. In an economy where a five percent rate of return is considered healthy, fifteen percent is very good money. Of course if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender is out the principal loaned. At fifteen percent, it takes about seven years to collect as much in interest as the original loan.

Lenders who want their borrowers to carry the highest possible level of debt do not have the borrowers best interest in mind. It is very difficult for many people to defer desires. The promise of immediate cash is almost irresistible. Most adults know someone with a large number of credit accounts, many of them "maxed out". They may even be borrowing money from one account to make minimum payments on another. They are literally "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul".

When Waters are Calm

Everyone who has watched "It's a Wonderful Life" knows that the credit system is based on trust. As George Bailey says:

No, but you... you... you're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house... (to one of the men)...right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?

The system is built on debtors paying their loans in an orderly fashion. George Bailey's building and loan acts as a middle man. In George's bank the people lending the money are the depositors. The people borrowing the money are the homeowners. Often the borrowers are also depositors. If the amount of deposits, loan repayments and withdrawals are predictable the bank can have enough cash on hand to satisfy the small number of depositors who wish to withdraw their money.

There are three pillars of stability.

• The vast majority of loans will be repaid.


• Assets that secure loans maintain their value and are liquid (can be sold quickly).


• There is a predictable pace of repayment.

In orderly times (any time when this month looks a lot like last month) the system is resilient and can tolerate a certain number of loans not being repaid. As long as the average rate of default can be predicted the lender can factor that number into the interest rates for loans. The interest rate is not just a return on investment. It also covers losses from the few loans that are not repaid.

This desire toward order can be seen in pre-payment penalties. Some loans have a condition that penalizes the borrower for paying the loan before expected. The lender expects a certain amount of interest to be paid over a set amount of time. When the borrower pays back the loan early, the lender no longer gets interest payments. The pre-payment penalty compensates the lender for this "lost" income. Typically loans are repaid early because the borrower has found a lender with a lower interest rate. The pre-payment penalty keeps borrowers from jumping ship.

When the Storm Comes

Danger comes from disorderly times. Unfortunately, destructive feedback cycles magnify small problems and guarantee that there will be disorderly times.

The economy as a whole is incredibly interconnected with money flowing from person to person and organization to organization. This network does not just involve formal loans, it involves all non-immediate transactions. As an employee you are typically paid for work some time after it is done. This is not a formal loan, but you have loaned your labor with the expectation of a future repayment.

When expected cash stops coming in, the person or organization that expects the money does everything possible to recoup the loss quickly and to reduce the exposure to future problems. The response is typically two sided. One side is trying to replace the lost money, the other side is to reduce expenses so that the losses do not affect payments to others.

To replace lost money, organizations will typically try to be first in line for future repayment. In addition they will add fees and penalties to the amount due. Virtually every business invoice contains a provision for interest to be paid when the amount is past due. Usually there is increased emphasis on finding new customers.

Everyone who has worked for a large organization has seen it protect itself against cash flow problems. The first step is to reduce discretionary spending. The "Tuesday doughnuts" disappear. Training and travel are curtailed or eliminated. Then come hiring freezes, furloughs, and layoffs. When the problems are severe, expenses that are expected to yield future profits are eliminated. First to go is administrative staff followed by research and development. The sales force is a company's most immediate investment in profit. When layoffs hit the sales force it is a sign that the company is close to insolvency. Bankruptcy often follows.

Layoffs extend the problem from the business to individuals and families. Individuals and families protect themselves in much the same way as businesses. They try to increase income by finding new work or starting new businesses. Expenses not directly related to day to day survival are eliminated. Then credit card payments (past expenses) are ignored. Utility and shelter payments are next to go and finally food.

In our interconnected system, problems are infectious. If those who normally give you money pull back, you cannot spend as much with others. Those expecting your spending must, in turn, pull back. When a large portion of the economy is affected it is called a recession or depression. Recession and depressions are an economic infection so large that no single individual or organization can adequately respond.

Not every downturn spreads widely and there are different causes. When a single company fails, the surrounding economy usually replaces the missing goods or services and the workers find jobs in other firms. Some downturns are more widespread but do not affect the whole economy. The mechanization of agriculture causes farm labor needs to plummet while production remains high. Individuals lose their jobs and are forced off the land. When this happens the workers generally move to urban areas with more opportunities. This often leads to an increase in urban population and a large number of unemployed people, sometimes for a generation or more. This is devastating for the individuals, but the economy as a whole is often largely unaffected.

Personal Protection

Loans are about hope and the future. Don't discount your potential and your future, but try not to sabotage it either. There may be a time when you make a decision to "go for broke" because you think the potential rewards outweigh the potential risk. This is a good thing, but walk in with your eyes open.

The first step in protecting yourself and your family against financial trouble is to accept that trouble will come along. Someone will lose a job. The car will require expensive repair or replacement.

Temporary setbacks can be smoothed over by a reserve of cash. If the car breaks and you have some extra cash, you simply repair or replace the car. If you lose your job, the cash may see you through until you find another source of income.

Low income families may not be able to create any reserve. These families have no recourse and must respond to events the best they can. There are government programs (food stamps, section 8 housing ...) that may help, but basically you are on your own. When thinking about government aid, just remember:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. (Anatole France from The Red Lily, 1894)

One of the first responses to financial trouble is to reduce expenses. It is in this area that loans become dangerous. Loans are typically a fixed monthly expense. That is, they are an expense that cannot be reduced without starting a chain of negative repercussions.

Once again the poor get the short end of the stick. If you have no cash reserve but do have access to a line of credit, you can smooth over trouble by borrowing. Long term, this is a losing strategy. Loans always involve fees and interest and short term loans are the most expensive. If you cannot afford to create a cash reserve, you probably cannot afford the fees and interest. However, such loans may be the only recourse available.

Currently I am fortunate. I have sufficient income to cover my expenses and to create some reserve. Part of this is income, part is inherent conservatism. It is in my nature to avoid ongoing expenses.

If you can afford them, I recommend some rules of thumb.

• Never use a credit line except to consolidate payment. I use a cash-back card for many purchases but I pay the balance in full every month without dipping into cash reserves. In fact, I go one step further. I do not put anything on the card unless I currently have enough money to pay for it. That is, I do not buy something on the fifth of the month with the expectation that my paycheck on the fifteenth will cover it.
  


• Do not incur a regular payment that prevents you from saving a little every month.
  


• Only borrow as leverage. That is, the money should be used in a way that will pay for the total amount of the loan. For a family, a mortgage is in this class. Shelter is an expense that cannot be avoided. If you intend to live in a place for some time, paying a mortgage rather than rent may make sense because the non-interest portion of the payment buys property that can be sold later. This can be a good long term investment even if the property decreases somewhat in value. Rent is simply lost.
  


• In flush times, pay down debt. I bought my current car with a loan. A couple of years after the purchase I got some unexpected cash. I used that to pay off the car which eliminated a fixed monthly expense.
  


• One way to create a cash reserve is to pay ahead on loans. I am several months ahead on my mortgage. When a cash crunch comes, that gives me an expense I can eliminate for some period of time.
  

Josie is Gone

My dog is dead. Josie was almost fifteen. For a long time she had been in decline. First calcification of tendons in her legs and arthritis. Then she lost her hearing and her eyesight became dim. She became progressively weaker in her legs and would sometimes just fall over. Yesterday morning she had her second bout of a vestibular problem that removed her sense of balance. Her eyes jerked spasmodically and she could hardly get up. The first bout of balance problems was a couple of years ago. On the vets advice, we just let her work through it. This time, faced with all her other difficulties and obvious pain, I decided to euthanize her. She died in my arms at the vets office this afternoon. Silver was there with me and it was a good thing. I don't know how I would have handled it alone.

Josie was a border collie. She lived to please and serve. When she was a puppy I took her to an obedience class. It was difficult for her because, like many border collies, she was extremely shy. Most dogs were given treats as a reward, but Josie would not take them. A simple word of praise was all she wanted. For discipline, a disapproving glance was usually enough. When we house trained her and she would have an accident, I would look at her and say "uh oh". This became a curse word for her and for years afterward I had to be careful about muttering "uh oh" under my breath lest she think that she had done something terrible.

Border collies need something to do. Josie was a runner and a tennis ball dog. Josie was a wonder. She didn't just run, she ran full out and she ran where she was told; in and out of gates, right and left based on both verbal and visual cues. She was obsessed with tennis balls. Sometimes I work from home. One day I looked down and had seven tennis balls at my feet. Inside we would throw balls across the room or down the hall. It was so unconscious that I did it without interrupting my work. She would put a ball on my lap so that it was convenient. Outside, she vastly overestimated my strength. If I was throwing the ball, she would run out two hundred yards and look back saying "throw it to me here!". Even using a tennis racquet as an aid (which I often did), I couldn't get it that far.

Josie always tried to get visitors to play her tennis ball games. For her, the game was to see how much she could get the ball thrower to work. She would drop the ball some distance from the thrower. Many people assumed that she was shy and a dog that almost knew how to fetch. She just required a little more training to bring the ball all the way back. A few minutes would do the trick. In fact, Josie was training them to work just a little harder to get the ball. If you walked ten feet to pick up the ball, the next time she dropped it, it would be twelve feet away.

In another blog post, http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/2008/07/running-dog.html,I talked about the legal trouble we got into. When I was forced to stop running Josie in the park I never forgave the city. To this day I view the city bureaucracy as malevolent and incompetent. This city and its inhabitants love order over freedom and for no reason destroyed the fun that Josie and I had in the park. Even though I have no plans to move, I do not feel at home here.

We got Josie as a family dog, and so she was. She played with and loved all of us. As is common with Border Collies though, she needed a master. I was that person. I trained her and I think it is fair to say that she was my dog. For most of her life, Josie slept on our bed. That stopped only when she got too old to jump up. Through her whole life, Josie followed me around. If she didn't see me for a while, she would come looking.

I say that I trained her, but as everyone who has a good companion dog knows, that is not true. We trained and adjusted to each other. I talk about verbal and visual signals, but that does not convey the subtlety of the communication. We had a sound and gestural system that involved known signals, but also the tilt of a head or the lilt of a word or bark. We were partners.

She was a puppy. She grew up to be a strong and proud adult, then declined in her old age. She had as good a life as we could give her. Now she is gone. My right arm is missing and I will not get it back.

Limits of Analytics

If you read many of my posts, you will discover that I am an analytic person. That is, I tend to look at situations from the outside and try to figure out what is actually going on through the use of observation and reason.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this natural tendency, I am well aware of the limits of this sort of analysis. There is a strong strain in my culture that believes rational analysis is the primary basis of human knowledge and that this sort of knowledge should underlie action. I think this is a pernicious view that cheapens us as humans. Our ever increasing scientific knowledge base can protect us from some of our cruel and irrational tendencies. For example, the existence of the well respected Centers for Disease Control in the United States will keep us (unlike the Egyptians) from slaughtering all our pigs because we are threatened with the "swine flu". In general though, analytic knowledge is too incomplete, too prone to error, and too slow to serve us in most situations. We have other, more effective tools to make our way through the world.

Violin construction is an excellent example of how humans actually learn and change. the golden age of violin construction occurred three or four centuries ago. To this day we do not understand why the Cremona violin construction produced what we feel to be superior instruments. In the intervening centuries we have developed mathematics and simulations that have improved our understanding of vibration and acoustics. We have used this and our knowledge of consistent manufacturing to create increasingly better musical instruments in increasingly large numbers. As with so many other things, we live in a golden age. It has never been easier or cheaper to own a fine musical instrument. That is, our analytic knowledge has raised the bar, but it has not allowed us to attain the level of mastery achieved by people without these formal analytic tools.

So how do we actually learn and progress in areas that cannot be understood by current analytic techniques. In short, trial and error. Humans rarely invent, but we have a marvelous capacity to vary what we do and to detect the effects of the variations. Most of what we call invention is really applying existing knowledge to a new area or amassing small sets of variations to achieve a shifting goal. Violin makers have rules accumulated through experimentation. These rules govern the choice of materials, their manufacture (strike here with your fingernail and if it sounds "dead" thin the material over in this area). These rules do not come from any kind of mathematical analysis and only rarely from a rigorous program of experimentation. Instead they come from the accretion of experience over generations. This experience is based on a deepening, visceral understanding of the desired end and the practical means to achieve it.

A generation ago there was much work on "expert systems" that could replace humans in various areas. The general notion was: figure out the rules people use to solve problems, encode those rules, and replace the human with a computational engine operating over the rules. The first step was to find a competent expert and extract the rules. Usually this failed. Most experts could not express the rules and those who could were often wrong. Observation of actual problem solving shows that it is a wonderfully complex and non-linear activity. People try one approach, and abandon it midway. They put down the problem altogether and work on unrelated things. They try different approaches in seemingly random order. Some approaches seem to not make much sense. They pick up abandoned work and add to it. After the problem is solved, they explain (and remember) what they did as a linear sequence that led to the solution, but that does not fit the actual activity.

There are limits to most of our analytic techniques. Many practical problems are frightfully complex and often chaotic in the mathematical sense. I have little doubt that we will continue to increase our analytic tools, but the end result may provide only statistical rather than direct guidance. For these situations we can make informed guesses, but having a ninety percent chance of success doesn't help much if you find yourself on the ten percent side.

One reasonable response to complex situations is to make them simpler. This underlies much of modern manufacturing and business. If materials used in manufacturing are not uniform, manufacturing techniques must adjust to the differences. A good solution is to improve the raw materials to eliminate the variability. On the human side, we invent personnel rules that constrain how employees are treated. This simplifies management and gives people a sense of fairness and boundaries. At the same time it depersonalizes and turns the most unique of animals into an industrial part. I was once on a conference call where someone started referring to "human capital". I told him that if he called me that I would hit him.

As biological animals we have evolved to be incredibly adept at a rapid, subconscious, and often amazingly accurate analysis. The trick is to harness this biologic capacity while using our analytic knowledge to inhibit our more destructive automatic tendencies.

Over time, analytic knowledge tends to increase faster, be more reliable, and be transmitted more easily than experiential knowledge. Serious inquiry requires rigorous analysis and careful, controlled experimentation. But in novel situations (almost every situation we encounter) and in areas where we are expanding our knowledge, purely rational techniques do not serve us well. There is some special non-analytic human capability that allows us to succeed.

Running the dog

In looking through old writing, I ran across this letter I wrote to the city after receiving the second in a series of tickets. The topic of the letter is of less than earth shaking importance, but there are serious issues on the function of government and freedom versus order.

After writing the letter I did some research. I discovered that the level of injury and death caused by dogs is almost exactly the same as that resulting from baseball, and the most common victim in both cases is children. It also turns out that dogs are most likely to cause trouble in or near their homes and least likely to cause trouble in public places. In addition to normal animal control my city (through its Natural Resources department) spends on the order of a quarter million dollars a year enforcing leash laws. The leash law applies to all animals including cats, but there is a specific exemption for birds under voice control.

In the end, the city had its way. The fines double on every ticket and I could no longer shoulder the burden. I made some attempts to change the law, but could find no leverage point. I no longer spend much time at the park. Other dog owners have also been driven away. When I do go by the park the dogs are gone, and so are many of the people. I was genuinely surprised at how important the simple pleasure of running the dog at "my" park was to me, and how betrayed I felt at having local government stop me. When my dog running disappeared, so did my pride and sense of responsibility toward the city.

The Letter

This note is about a bad law that has been badly applied. On September 29, 2004 I received a ticket for having my dog off leash in Spring Creek Park (animal at large). This is my second ticket. Each ticket was issued by park rangers I had never seen before and have not seen since. Each of them said they had no discretion in issuing the ticket. The second ticket was issued in what looked like a concerted effort by the city to crack down on unleashed dogs in the park. There were at least two rangers, one of them driving a pickup truck through the park to make sure lawbreakers did not escape.

Over the past nine and a half years I have come to Spring Creek Park at least twice a day virtually every day: rain, snow or shine. I spend between ten minutes and half an hour at each visit. That makes about 7000 visits to the park or about 1400 hours. I think it is accurate to say that over the past ten years I have spent more time in Spring Creek Park than anyone else. Until receiving this latest ticket, it was my intention to create and publish a photo essay book showing daily views of the park over an entire year.

The purpose of those 7000 visits to the park has been to run my dog. She is an impeccably trained border collie. If you have ever been around a border collie, you know that they are active dogs that need to run. I have trained Josie to run laps around the ball fields. She is getting old now and has slowed down. In her prime she would routinely run 20 or so laps around the ball-field as a warm up. After the laps she generally has the energy to do other training exercises. Her record is 50 laps, or about eight miles, at a full run. I have taken her to the dog parks, but there is nothing there that can provide the flat out running that she both enjoys and needs. She is completely disinterested in other dogs and humans.

I stopped bringing a leash to the park years ago. I can honestly say that, in all our visits, not once has my dog been a danger to any person in the park. By training and temperament, Josie rarely acknowledges that there are people in the park. As a border collie, she is all business and her business is running in the patterns that I tell her to.

Josie is a fixture at the park. She is known by the workers and the neighbors. She is admired for her ability and her training. I have received countless compliments on this dog. The number of complaints can be counted on the fingers of one hand. On the rare occasion someone looks nervous or says something, I take Josie out of the park. Periodically, either in Spring Creek Park or in other parks, an animal control person will stop by and tell me about the law. Without exception, those folks have complimented me on Josie's obedience and asked me to take her out of the park. To make life easier for all of us, on those occasions I leave the area. One animal control person said they were responding to complaints about dogs in that particular park. He suggested other places where he would not be patrolling that day.

The animal control workers and the visitors to the park have understood something the city ordinance and the park rangers do not. My dog running in the park is an innocuous and safe activity that improves my life, the dog's life, and is largely a joy to other park visitors.

While I am at the park, I pick up more dog waste than Josie leaves. I collect and throw litter away. Every couple of years I find a stray that has wandered away from home. I track down the owners and return the dog. One time I found and returned a wallet that had been stolen from a truck in the neighborhood. The owner didn’t even know it was missing. When teens rolled one of the trash barrels out onto the frozen lake, strewing garbage along the way, I recruited a couple of fire-fighters from the next door station. We retrieved the trash barrel and picked up the garbage.

Of course, the fact that my dog is well behaved does not make the law bad nor does it excuse me as a lawbreaker. What makes the law bad is that it worsens rather than betters the community. I have spent a lot of time researching human behavior, particularly in cities. We know a lot about what makes good, vibrant communities. One of the most important factors is that neighbors know each other, are aware of their surroundings, and take responsibility for the community. Parks can be marvelous places, but many towns have the problem that their parks are dangerous, particularly in off-hours. One of the major differences between a safe park and a dangerous one is community use. Crime and trouble avoid public view. When good people are near and watching, trouble moves away.

Over the years it has been interesting to see how people use the park. Almost no one simply walks through the park enjoying it. People come because they have a reason. They do what they planned to do, then they leave. Parents who bring their kids to the park stay very close to the playground. The more adventurous will walk over to the ball field to play for a couple of minutes. Ball players stay on or next to the playing field. Walkers and runners tend to either walk in a straight line through the park or they travel the perimeter. Sunbathers invariably pick a spot away from these main uses. Except for dog runners, most of the park is simply unused other than as an attractive backdrop to the other activities. People with dogs off lead almost always stay away from other park users and run their dogs in the open, unused spaces.

I seem to be pretty typical of the people who take their dogs to Spring Creek Park. These are neighborhood people who care about the neighborhood and take care of the park. I know this because I see them every day. I see them talk with each other and pick up after themselves and others. Some of the dogs are on leash, most of them are not. The difference seems to be in the temperament of the owner and the dog. If someone has a dog that will not obey or is flighty, they will only take the dog off lead once or twice. The adventure of screaming at your dog while chasing it through the public park or nearby neighborhood is a powerful deterrent to letting untrained animals off lead. People with leashed dogs behave more like walkers. They move through the park rather than spend time in it.

I am sure the Parks Department receives complaints about dogs running wild through the park. Many people feel threatened by dogs on the loose and many people simply do not like the idea that others violate the law. If the city banned blue flowers, I am sure it would receive many calls about the law violators with blue flowers in their yards.

In terms of actual danger or harm, I cannot speak with authority because I do not have the figures. I can speak from my experience and observations. Fossil Creek Park just opened. It is a beautiful park and heartening in terms of its design. For some time parks have been dumbed down to make sure that no visitor can be injured. Fossil Creek Park seems to have very thoughtfully constructed play areas, but ones where the users must take responsibility for their actions. The skate park at Fossil Creek is marvelous and seems to be heavily used. Even without seeing the figures, I can guarantee that there are more injuries in that skate park in a single week than dogs have caused in Spring Creek Park in the past ten years. Of course there is a difference between me falling off my own skateboard and being accosted by a strange dog. One I control, the other I do not. Whenever a skateboarder lets his board fly and it hits someone else or a dog owner has a dog that is out of control, they should be held accountable. But control is the problem, not the activity.

The Parks Department is in an awkward position. There is a law on the books. Until the law is changed, they must either ticket the offenders or turn a blind eye. I would prefer that the law is changed, but this is an area where emotion runs high. Not many politicians will stick a neck out for a fight that will gain them nothing but animosity, regardless of the facts. We, unfortunately, live in a time where many areas of civil behavior have been written into law. Most of them are well intended, but many of them are violated routinely. If a policeman decided to ticket every lawbreaker he saw, he could never get to a violent crime scene. He would spend all his time ticketing speeders, jaywalkers, and litterers along the way. When laws are numerous they are, and always will be, selectively enforced. I suggest that the Park Rangers would be better employed by spending more time getting to know the neighbors who do the real policing in the parks and less time driving them away by ticketing them for harmless activities.

Blog Comments, Families, Us and Them

I started this blog not because I expected anyone to read it, but because the act of writing clarifies thought. I had been meaning to do more writing for some time, but didn't have an excuse or outlet.

If you look through the posts, at least so far, the comments are made by a small set of people. These folks are my immediate family, the clan for which I am the "Pater Familias". That title does not come from the Roman honor, but from a line in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou". The title of that movie came from a fictional book in another wonderful movie, "Sullivan's Travels".

I am finding out that the comments are an interesting part of the blogging experience, even if they mostly come from my own family. The comments themselves usually have something to say. They are also touchingly protective. They announce "See, I'm reading this. I care". This protective attitude is amusing because, when my children were little, they assumed I was indestructible. To this day I am often mistaken for a trampoline. On an emotional level, one of the favorite pastimes of the family is putting me in humiliating situations. For example, when I had some friends over on Halloween to help in building a fence, my clan insisted I spend dinner dressed up in drag as a beauty queen, complete with toilet paper sash announcing my title "Miss Evil Colorado".

This is part of what I call the hierarchy of social identification. Most of us identify with a whole set of groups that extend from family to peers to school/work, community, nation... This is one of the most powerful forces in human society and sets the stage for collective action. On the dark side, it separates "us" from "them" and allows our collective action to be unspeakably cruel. A family, as with most social groups, has plenty of internal friction. But facing outward, will present a united front and protect its members.

It is demonstrably true that humans band together into trust groups. Innate traits like skin color or epicanthal folds are easy markers. As a regrettable consequence, each of us tends to exclude those with innate differences as not part of our group. This is natural, but not inevitable. For example, imagine a room with two black and two white men. If one white man and one black man both have gang tattoos and one black man and one white man are both wearing expensive business suits, they will initially pair up based on clothing rather than skin color.

None of us belong exclusively to a single group and all of us are capable of forming strong associations with almost anyone. Put a group of musicians from around the world in a single room and in short order they will be forming new associations based on their shared passion for sound.

The identification with social groups and antipathy toward outsiders seems to be a base human trait. I know of no social group without some degree of this. The positive part of this tendency is the ability to come together to work toward a common goal. On the negative side, the separation between us and them allows “us” to treat "them" without any consideration other than our own aim.

Separation of "us" from "them" is often justified because “they” are different from “us”. Biologically, this is hogwash. Each of us has parents and there are familial traits. Some of us are blonde and some have black hair. Some groups of people have lived with enough isolation to show adaptation to their surroundings. For example, groups living farther from the equator tend to have lighter skin. These differences are marked enough so that pathologists can identify human groups from these physical traits. That said, humans are also nomadic and relatively recent. This underlies a remarkable degree of genetic homogeneity. I liken the differences between humans to the differences between brown spotted and black spotted Dalmatian dogs. As a species, we have so little genetic diversity that some scientists postulate that the species was reduced to a very small number of individuals in the not so distant past.

Because there are physical differences between human groups, it is interesting to ask if there might be analogs in other areas. For example, some groups of humans might be more or less capable of mathematical reasoning or eye/hand coordination. I think this is unlikely. Variants like skin color give an advantage in a particular region. Mental and social advantages have no such geographic constraints. People with the advantage will quickly spread the genetics outside their own group. Only extreme geographic isolation could keep advantageous adaptations out of the general gene pool. Human history is filled with tales of travel, conquest, and stranger's babies. Unjustified claims of essential differences between groups of people have been used to justify genocide. To counter this tendency, the standard of proof for assertions of fundamental differences between groups must be extremely high. I know of no evidence that there are physical differences between human groups that elevate the fundamental capabilities of any group. This is especially clear when we look at genius. Genius is characterized by some capability that is far greater than normal. Think Leonardo da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, or Michael Jordan. Genius springs up around the world and cannot be characterized by family, "race" or any other factor I know of. There are musical families, but to paraphrase Aaron Copeland : there was nothing to indicate that Leonard’s parents would produce a Bernstein.

Our upbringing affects who we are, not just emotionally, but physically. There is evidence, for example, that people brought up speaking a tonal language tend to respond differently to sound than those brought up speaking non-tonal languages. In those cultures, a higher percentage of people perceive absolute pitch. Our bodies change based on our environment, but are especially malleable before adulthood. There are some abilities, like language acquisition, that fall off as we grow older.

Humans are genetically pretty homogeneous, but in values, and hence behaviour, we vary greatly. Because we learn behaviour from each other, values and behaviour tend to be cultural. The biggest influence is family followed peer groups and finally the culture as a whole. Some societies are monogamous, some have men with multiple wives and some have women with multiple husbands. In some societies butchers are respected and prosperous. In others they are outcasts. Food taboos are so strong that it is difficult to imagine violating them. Culturally forbidden foods include fish, insects, dogs, and pigs.

Even in groups with strong cultural mores, there will be rogues. Every society has outcasts and criminals. Some people, gangs, clans, and governments are dangerous to outsiders. That is one of the reasons that we look for cultural allies. They may help protect us from the dangerous humans. But the tendency to bond in groups is more than a need for protection. We also have a need for acceptance by others in our group. The combination of fear and the need for acceptance and protection is very powerful. A social group can manipulate individual humans to do literally anything. They will rape, torture, and murder neighbors with whom they have lived peacefully for years. They will kill themselves and their own children. That is, the very groups we rely on for protection from the dangerous humans can also transform us into those dangerous humans.

Everyone thinks they have things they will do and things they will not do. However, the power of circumstance and persuasion move these lines. Totalitarian regimes recognize this so they create programs to make everyone complicit. Right now you would not think of killing the Jew/Black/Korean/Armenian shopkeeper on the corner, but in light of the past actions of people like him, would you be willing to keep an eye on him and report suspicious activity? Would you if there were a payment? One thing leads to another. Lines are drawn between us and them. They are clearly threatening. You are one of us. You have shown it by your actions – even accepting favors or money. But your status is provisional and must be earned by showing your commitment to us. You must show your commitment to us by acting more strongly against them.

We are all susceptible to these forces, but we can also recognize them. It is up to each of us to recognize both the danger and the opportunity in the strangers among us. Some wariness is important for self protection. But given a chance, that person who is currently part of "them" may be a valuable part of "us" in the not distant future.