Vaccines and Nazis

 In the wake of a Tennessee school board banning the graphic novel "Maus" a friend posted a meme 

"FUN FACT: Kids who read Maus don't grow into adults who constantly compare minor inconveniences to the Holocaust". 

One of their friends responded with:

"Those who have read Maus I & Maus II realize the steps to genocide and become aware much earlier than those who haven’t, that what appears to be minor inconveniences to someone who they are manipulated into “othering” is much more significant than that and is one of the first steps to much worse. I TA’d a class on the Shoah/Holocaust at UCLA in which we carefully analyzed the beginnings of the Holocaust, which most did not recognize. They looked at propaganda about Jewish people, political dissidents, gypsies and LGBTQ people as a minor inconvenience. They saw it, as is happening to some disabled and religious minorities today with the current drug mandates, to be a minor inconvenience that they couldn’t go to the movie theater or a play or dtudy or work anymore. They saw it as a minor inconvenience that they were forced to publically identify themselves as other. Often it was mistakenly justified as they can choose-a different political

ideology, sexual orientation, religion- and nowadays to take the offered drugs. It requires empathy to step into another’s shoes and realize that not being able to work, travel, or study is not a minor inconvenience. Not being able to go to cultural events, museums, the theater, restaurants or other public places like trains is not a minor inconvenience. At least not for those being othered. Did the author of this meme really study the Holocaust, including the couple of years before the camps? Did they sit and watch the propaganda videos and read Wiesel and Primo Levi? The Nazi propaganda is eerily similar to much of the big pharma propaganda played on corporate news nowadays. Very little facts, much obsession with a monolithic view of what science and facts are, which does not allow for critical thought or inquiry. Intensive censorship."

There is a lot to unpack here. Before I start, so it doesn't get lost in the rest of this little essay, I want to be clear. I view the facebook response to be a clear instance of "comparing minor inconveniences to the holocaust". But... the response is complex and makes some interesting points, so I think it's worth a discussion. References to support my statements are available upon request.

This as a slippery slope argument. I think the basic point that moving into the Holocaust was a step by step process of dehumanization is true and valid. It is also true that part of the process is a gradual separation of us and them, with "them" being restricted in activities. At first the restrictions seemed relatively innocuous, like explicit identification, but then moved rapidly to eliminating necessities like education, work, and property.

It is also true that these tactics are not novel and this can happen in any society, including our own. The target can be foreigners; look at the English treatment of the Irish before, during, and after the great famine. Sometimes they are used to oppress subcultures like the  Uyghurs in China. Sometimes it is appearance, like black people in the United States. As with the Nazis the playbook is often used in conjunction with other techniques to establish an oppressive dictatorship. Dictatorships are usually created with the support of a substantial portion of the population. Garnering support is easier in the face of an identified threat from within: communists, Jews, homosexuals, elitists... 

We know from past experience that there is a slippery slope. But not every government action that separates "us" from "them" leads down that slope. A counter example is the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. It identifies a class, disabled people, that has historically been a group that is shunned and discriminated against. The ADA does exactly the opposite. It forces the rest of us, under force of law, to make accommodations for the disabled. Each of us must park farther from the door of the store, must make curb cuts when we put in sidewalks. When I built my coffee shop I had to install a section of counter that was low enough so that a person in a wheelchair could easily sign a credit card slip. In other words, for the protection of a particular class of people, my freedoms are restricted and I am forced to act in ways that are sometimes expensive and inconvenient. 

In fact, a defining characteristic of humans is our ability to band together and subsume our personal interests to the groups to which we belong. This is one of the characteristics that makes our species so powerful. It is also the double edged sword I have described. On the one hand it allows us to create cruel and dictatorial societies. On the other hand it allows us to band together and make the lives of everyone better.

We band together with different groups of different sizes. The most universal is the family, but we also create a societies with friends, work groups, and legal entities (city, county, state, nation...).

Because the subject of the facebook response is really the societal attempt to get everyone vaccinated for Covid, it is worth looking at vaccination in general. I think the most popular vaccination in the U.S. was for polio. Smallpox vaccination had shown people that vaccinations could be safe and effective. Polio was severe and widespread. Even today, there are people who do not have full use of their limbs because of polio. The polio vaccine was partially funded by voluntary public contributions. When the vaccine became available it was eagerly accepted and there was little protest.

When the Europeans came to the "new world" they brought disease, most notably smallpox, with them. Within a generation or two as much as 90% of the native population was dead from disease. This makes the Black Death in Europe look like a Sunday picnic.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if the child died under it: my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”

Franklin's son died in 1736, but he had been a supporter of smallpox vaccination since at least 1721. Why wasn't his son vaccinated? Franklin blamed himself, but there is a school of thought that it was his wife Deborah who resisted and Franklin resented her for it. It is known that he found excuses to be away from his wife for years at a time. If the speculation is true, it is a case where Franklin sacrificed his own desire to vaccinate to that of his family group (his wife), and it cost him his son.

There are groups that should generally be ignored regardless of their sincerity, their arguments, or the depths of their belief. An example is the "flat earthers". People who believe that the earth is flat. They are interesting psychologically and sociologically, but their beliefs are simply wrong. The current scientific theories of gravity are some of the best tested theories in existence. Over all space and time scales the theories have been confirmed. The structure of the earth and the solar system are well known and described. Our models are predictive and confirmed by those predictions. We can, for example, predict eclipses, the length of the days, the precession of the North Pole, the tides caused by the moon... In contrast, the flat earth theories are a mess. They don't explain much of anything and can be disproven by anyone who has a simple knowledge of geometry. Despite this, the beliefs are remarkably resistant to change. All objections are met with an answer, incorrect, but usually in a form that has a surface coherence, and apparently raise more doubts about the scientific explanation.

The flat earthers are a case where we (individuals, educational systems, the media, government...) do not have to discuss "both sides". There are not two sides. We have well established information and we have a few people spouting nonsense.

Gravity is relatively (pun intended) simple. Many of the things in our lives are much more complicated. We have created large systems to measure, analyze, theorize... In science the system includes peer review of results to enforce honesty and reduce sloppiness. It is not perfect but, on the whole, the system works and knowledge increases. 

In economics we require large scale data collection to feed our analysis and understanding. Over the past century the government has refined the collection of economic and demographic data and put firewalls in place to reduce political manipulation of the data and its analysis. Again, it doesn't always work, but in general the data we have is roughly correct.

Medicine is another case where large scale data is needed. Data collection is difficult, but we have made progress. The insurance system requires standard diagnosis and treatment codes. All deaths are classified, which is why we know how many people died from being tangled in bed sheets. Of course no one knows that you had a cold three years ago because you did the sensible thing and waited for it to go away without seeing a doctor.

In the case of vaccines, we keep records. Each suspected side effect is tracked. This includes reports from physicians and large scale studies of correlations between vaccine recipients and reported illness. The data are not perfect, but they are not bad. For Covid, hundreds of millions of doses have been administered. There is simply no doubt that the Covid vaccines are safe and side effects are incredibly rare.

For Covid as a medical condition, we have done a terrible job of keeping track. The best data we have are for hospitalizations and death. We also have the results from PCR tests. These come from a self selected sample, but act as a reasonable indicator of prevalence. 

Two things we know about Covid pretty certainly. First, in many people the disease is severe. Second, the vaccines used in the U.S. are safe and effective. The vaccines dramatically reduce the chance of severe illness and the rate of transmission. To dispute the severity of the illness or the effectiveness of the vaccines, you have to ignore the ICU at your local hospital and the testimony of the doctors and nurses who work there. This information is easy to get and widely disseminated. To deny it is ignorance at the level of the flat earthers. 

Smallpox and polio are diseases of humans, they have no animal reservoirs. That means if we eradicate the disease in humans, it goes extinct. Through world wide societal action, we have eradicated smallpox. It is simply gone. Some of this action was governmental and coercive. Children were not allowed in school unless they were vaccinated. Another way to say that is that unvaccinated children were identified as a group, singled out for special treatment, and refused access to education. This did not create a slippery slope leading to a dictatorship in the United States or anywhere else. In my view, it was a correct societal action that allowed a scourge of mankind to be eliminated.

Polio is nearly eradicated. It still exists in pockets around the globe. Those pockets exist because ignorant and militant ideologues in those places prevent vaccination. These repressive elements sometimes assassinate health care workers traveling from village to village trying to save children by vaccinating them.

An old saying is: Your right to extend your fist ends at my nose. In the case of disease it is sometimes hard to tell what your fist is and where my nose is. In 1907 a paper was published that traced a set of typhoid fever outbreaks occurring between 1900 and 1907 to a single person, later nicknamed Typhoid Mary. Mary was asymptomatic and never accepted that she was transmitting the illness. She was forcibly quarantined and her treatment by the state was appalling. Eventually she was released on condition that she take precautions to prevent spreading the disease and not work as a cook. She tried being a lower paid laundress but eventually returned to cooking. She again transmitted the disease and again was forcibly put into quarantine where she remained for over twenty years until her death. Conservatively, at least fifty three people were infected and at least three died because of Mary. There have been other asymptomatic carriers of typhoid fever, but none so famous or as appallingly treated as "Typhoid Mary". What should be done with someone who injures those around them and refuses to stop?

I have a grandson who is medically compromised. That is, he is more likely to get disease and, if he gets sick, is more likely to have severe symptoms. His life is easily put in danger. Because of Covid, this child has spent a third of his life basically confined to his home. His parents movements and actions are constrained because they do not wish to unwittingly infect him. Visitors to the home have to quarantine for a period of time and have a negative test before being allowed in. One of the reasons this has dragged on for so long is because there are a large number of people who have dug in their heels and refused vaccination. 

I am angry about this. I believe I am justified. Do I support restrictions on people who have not been vaccinated so the damage they inflict can be limited? You bet I do. If you want to go to a public place where you can infect other people, I want some assurance that you are not a danger to those people. Instead of my grandson, I want those who put him in danger to be restricted.

Climate Change: How Do We Know and Why Do We Care

Occasionally on social media when someone posts in opposition to the notion of human caused climate change I respond. No one's mind is ever changed. I contend that, at this point, if you doubt human caused climate change you are either woefully ignorant or have a world view that simply cannot admit the possibility. You will not change your mind because you cannot change your mind.

When I was a kid I read Isaac Asimov's "The Universe" and it fascinated me because he not only gave information about what scientists think about the structure of the universe, but also gave some notion of the evidence that led us to believe these things. I'm no Asimov, but I thought I might go through some of the ways that scientists have used to peer into the climate past and to project the future. Many of the papers that discuss these things are behind paywalls, so I'm going to rely on more public links. Click on the links only if you want more information. The sources I have used tend to provide references that you can explore for even more information.

In all of this: observations are limited, observations often include only a few locations on a very large planet, there are uncertainties in measurements, over long time spans continents drift ... Despite this, there are enough measurements using a variety of techniques and theoretical underpinnings so that the general picture is quite clear and compelling.

First there are the "How do we know" questions. The "how" of what we know of climate depends on the time frame.

Recent Times (hundreds of years)

For recent times we have direct measurements of weather. This includes temperature (air and sea) and precipitation. There are also direct measurements of longer term indicators like sea level (though sea level is an inference based on statistical averages of a large number of measurements). Vegetation records and blooming information also give information. We also have counts of the number of hurricanes...

Even simple measurements like temperature have complexities. Each temperature record is taken at a single time and place using a particular technique. Over time the surroundings change as do the methods of recording the change. A measurement may have been  taken in an open field in 1903 using a mercury thermometer. The same location today may be in the middle of an urban area with the temperature taken by a thermocouple.

The longest temperature record goes back to 1659 in Central England. It shows temperature for only about 400 years and only in a single area. Sea surface temperatures have been taken since the time of the US revolutionary war. Early ocean temperatures were measured by putting a thermometer in a bucket of water drawn from the ocean. Starting in the 1960s, temperatures were automatically recorded at the intake ports of large ships. More recently, buoys have been deployed to measure temperatures, but they differ in design and sensing methods.

The scarcity of data and differing techniques mean that adjustments and inferences have to be made to convert these individual observations into a coherent and meaningful world wide data set. For example, canvas buckets cool ocean water, insulated buckets less so. Measurements near a ship engine room tend to have warmer results. Luckily, when people publish data sets, they also publish the adjustments so that other people can check the assumptions, apply different adjustments, and check to see what the results are.

Individual observations indicate "weather" (more immediate) at a single location, but we are interested in climate (longer term) over the planet. To bridge the gap, scientists have created models and simulations. Modeling complex phenomena is difficult and tricky, but models can be checked against current and know past conditions to see how well they do. To cut to the chase, the models have gotten pretty good at simulation and predictions over time spans of decades. There are many large scale computer models for the climate (in the 10s, not the 100s or 1000s). This computer modeling work has been an ongoing effort for at least four decades. During this time period several things have occurred to increase the accuracy of the modeling. First, the computers of today are literally one million times faster and can handle a million times more data. That means simulations that used to take 11 days to run can now be run in one second. A year's simulation in the 1970s can be run in half an hour. Second, techniques of modeling have improved (smaller voxels at temperature boundaries, incorporation of aerosols from volcanos into the models, better ocean heat modeling...). Third, we are measuring a lot more by deploying more weather stations, ocean buoys, weather balloons....

http://www.ocean-sci.net/12/925/2016/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543546/why-climate-models-arent-better/
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-framework-accounts-conflicting-global-temperature.html

By comparing different indicators over time we can see if the measurement records tell a coherent story. If they don't, it indicates something wrong with the measurements or our understanding of the climate. Over the years, we have been able to create a theoretical understanding that pretty well corresponds to the observed record.

Over the near term, the last century or so, virtually all the data points in a single direction. The earth is warming pretty quickly. We can see this in measurements of air and ocean temperature, total volume of ice, earlier spring blooming, movement of habitats and migrations of animals ... The "hockey stick" graph of temperatures is real and correct.

https://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3325.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large-scale_temperature_reconstructions_of_the_last_2,000_years

Thousands of Years

Each year a tree forms a new ring. The size of the ring provides an indication of temperature and moisture at the location where the tree grew. In locations where dead tree trunks are available, living trees form the initial line in a chain of trees. Patterns of thin and thick at the outer edges of a dead tree may match the inner patterns on a living tree so the tree ring timeline can be extended. There are places where we have a tree ring record up to 4000 years.

If the recent pattern of rings on a particular species of tree can be matched to the weather patterns in the local historical record, we can use this correlation to start constructing plausible past weather patterns. This gives a climate measure for the location.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/tree-ring

Coral has some of the same attributes as tree rings. Regular patterns of growth can be detected. Oxygen isotopes in coral layers can also be used as climate indicators. Uranium/Thorium ratios can be used to date the coral samples.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=4467119&fileOId=4467197

We can also look at changes in the landscape to see patterns of deposition that indicate climate. This includes evidence of glaciation, ancient sea levels, pollen in sediment...

Thousands to Millions of Years

All climate measurements must rely on something that is different between warm climates and cool climates. One thing we have gotten good at in the past century is measuring the relative quantities of different isotopes of elements. The chemical properties of an element largely depend on the number of protons in the atom (its atomic number), but the weight of the atom also depends on the number of neutrons. In some circumstances the weight makes a difference. Isotopes are elements with the same atomic number but different atomic weights.

One important link between temperature and isotopes comes from the water evaporation cycle. Most oxygen is O16, but some is O18, which contains two extra neutrons. Both O16 and O18 are stable. O18 requires slightly more energy to evaporate and also tends to rain out slightly sooner than O16. These processes occur today and can be measured. As the earth cools, more water is stored in glaciers and ice caps. This water evaporated then snowed onto the land. The O18 tends to rain out earlier (at lower latitudes) so the snow tends to be depleted in O18. As O16 enriched snow enters the ice caps, it leaves the ocean. That means the oceans tend to have slightly higher O18 levels when the earth is cooler. The same process is true for deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen.

http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/research/strat_dating/annual_layer_count/ice_core_dating/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_isotope_ratio_cycle

This gives us two complimentary ways to measure ancient temperatures. We can look at the O18/O16 ratios in ice cap cores. We can also measure ocean O18/O16 ratios in the ocean using sediments high in calcite (CaCO3). because the calcite was formed by microorganisms that got one of the calcite oxygen atoms from the sea water in which they lived, the sediment reflects the O18/O16 ratios when the organism lived.

The ice core data goes back at least 740,000 years. Sediment data can be used for a much longer time span (at least hundreds of millions of years).

Note that we have current confirmation of the theory and two different sources of data: ice and sediment. This gives the data some real credibility, particularly since the very recent data is confirmed by other means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_isotope_ratio_cycle

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/temp/domec/domec.html

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hugh_Jenkyns/publication/252408787_New_oxygen_isotope_evidence_for_long-term_Cretaceous_climate_change_in_the_Southern_Hemisphere/links/571b621008ae6eb94d0d6405.pdf

Why does climate change?

Looking at the deduced climate over the past millions of years we can say pretty definitely that climate has changed drastically over time. The question of why is frightfully difficult. Moreover, small changes in one thing or another can, over time, create big changes in climate. The basic principle is that the temperature of the planet depends on its internal heat, the amount of energy entering the system (mostly from the sun) and the amount of heat leaving the planet (mostly reflected light). The earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket, keeping the earth warmer than it would be without the atmosphere.

The sun has day to day differences in output, 11 year cycles of sunspots and a long term trend (hundreds of millions of years) of increasing energy output. The earth's orbit changes as does its axis of tilt. Volcanos put large amounts of reflective particles into the atmosphere, reflecting more of the sun's energy into space. Snow and clouds reflect more light than land or ocean. Clouds block heat. In fact, water vapor and clouds are the most powerful heat trapping substances for the earth, accounting for about three quarters of all heat trapping.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_05/

The oceans have a huge thermal mass and there is large scale heat transport through the oceans and between the ocean and the air. Ocean currents carry much of this heat and transport depends on the positions of the landmass. Over eons continental drift can affect climate. The ocean circulation also depends on salt concentrations and large amounts of fresh water melting may interrupt planet wide ocean circulation. If planet wide ocean heat circulation is interrupted, there may be larger temperature differences between lower and higher latitudes. This may cause more snow to persist at higher latitudes and increase the reflectivity of the planet as a whole.

Scientists have been trying to tease the affects apart. The further back in time you go, the more difficult it becomes and the more speculative the conclusions.

Carbon Dioxide

This is the measure that has become controversial for political and monetary reasons. Despite the perceived controversy, we know a lot about the basic heat processes of the earth and there is no real controversy among the scientists who actually study climate. The physical response of CO2 to light is well known and can be easily measured. The effect of CO2 is to take infrared heading out of the planet and reflect some portion of it back in. This is not a huge effect, but part of it takes affect above the level of water vapor and provides another insulating layer for the planet.

The most immediate indicator of CO2 as a possible cause of temperature rises comes from a simple correlation over the past century.  Of course simple correlation means little to nothing, and over extremely long periods of time (hundreds of millions of years) the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature are tenuous at best. That said, in an extremely complex system it is difficult to find causes and effects. Our best hope is to look at recent conditions where we have more measurements and the ability to test hypotheses directly. For the recent past, CO2 as a driver is quite well established.

The affects of CO2 have been directly measured. On the land, direct measurements of the wavelengths captured by CO2 have been measured and found to be increasing in conjunction with the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. The corresponding measurements from space show the opposite affect. As CO2 increases, the amount of light radiated by the planet in the range that CO2 absorbs goes down. That is, we have directly measured the greenhouse imbalance caused by increasing CO2.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation-intermediate.htm

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/

https://www.eumetsat.int/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v&allowInterrupt=1&noSaveAs=1&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleasedhttp://science.sciencemag.org/content/289/5477/270

https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/100737.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21691

Theoretical attempts to assign quantitative amounts to different drivers of temperature are rapidly maturing. These point to the same conclusion, in the current situation CO2 is the main driver of increasing global temperature.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-human-and.html

Why do We Care?

This section is a little different. Even if the climate is changing, why should we care? After all, climate has changed drastically in the past and life on earth has survived. Even faced with mass extinctions, life has recovered. Devastating changes in climate have set the stage for new types of life to thrive and become dominant.

The earth and life on earth will survive climate change. Technological human society may not. In any number of areas, we are currently engaged in unsustainable practices. As Herbert Stein pointed out "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Our human life spans are relatively short and it is easy perceive the world we live in now as not much different than the world we were born in. Over spans of centuries it is easy to see the drastic changes.

Because the world is large and has been around a long time, we can unsustainably use some resources for a very long time. We probably have centuries of fossil fuels left. A few centuries is a very short time when we consider the millions of years it took to accumulate these reserves, but for humans it means we don't have to worry about having enough fossil fuels for many generations of human life.

When agriculture emerged there were probably fewer than twenty million people on earth. We hit the one billion mark around 1800. It took 123 years to get to two billion. Currently we are adding a billion each couple decades. This population increase requires a concomitant increase in resource use. When the European settlers first reached North America cod were so numerous that it was joked you could walk across the ocean on the backs of cod. In 1992 the cod fishery collapsed and it was estimated that it's biomass was one percent of its earlier levels.

When European settlers got to the U.S. Pacific Northwest the size and expanse of the forests were breathtaking. It seemed a resource that could not be exhausted. The forest is still vast, but satellite images show the incredible level of human exploitation.

There is good reason to say that we have entered a new geologic era, the anthropocene, where the dominant force shaping the planet is humans. Humans now move more earth than natural geologic processes. All of the worlds great aquifers are being emptied for agriculture. Many of them will cease to be productive within a couple of generations. Biologists tell us we are on the brink of a sixth great extinction of species. That is, an event on the scale of the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time it is being caused by human intervention in the environment.

Humans are an extremely adaptable species, but we rely on the web of life around us as well as incredibly complex and fragile systems of technology and trade. Rapid changes in either ecology or collapse of technological webs may exceed our ability to respond while maintaining our technological society. We are already seeing large scale human misery, but many people refuse to acknowledge there is even a problem. We are headed toward a world wide failure of systems that is unprecedented in human existence.

For me, the terrible part is that, collectively, we understand what is happening and if we take action we can enter a golden age of human existence and restored ecological health. We know many of the problems and we know some of the solutions. For example, E.O. Wilson has made the excellent suggestion that we set aside roughly half the earth as a preserve outside of human intervention. The preserve must be connected and contain many of the most biologically productive areas. This seems like a large and undoable task but, surprisingly, his analysis shows that it is not. The simple act of making contraception readily available to everyone (with no coercion) is probably sufficient to keep human population in check. Movement away from burning carbon is not only do-able it is probably inevitable for cost reasons, yet the fossil fuel industries fight tooth and nail to keep the burning going. World wide, democracy and concern for the average citizen is diminishing while power is being concentrated in the hands of people and institutions whose main concern is preserving and expanding their wealth and control.


https://www.amazon.com/Half-Earth-Our-Planets-Fight-Life/dp/1631492527/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499277232&sr=8-1&keywords=half+earth+e.o.+wilson

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM

https://qz.com/871907/2016-was-the-year-solar-panels-finally-became-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-just-wait-for-2017/

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/05/535596277/all-new-volvo-models-will-be-electric-or-hybrid-starting-in-2019

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/impacts

Colorado State University and its On Campus Stadium

A few disclaimers and clarifications before I begin. I have been watching the CSU on-campus stadium saga for some time and I am currently a member of the joint CSU/Fort Collins Stadium Advisory Group formed to mitigate any untoward effects of the new stadium on its neighbors.

This essay is NOT connected to the advisory group in any way and reflects, in its rambling way, my own opinions about the stadium process and university funding. All of my analysis and speculations are strictly that, analysis and speculations. They are based on the best information I have and I try to be factually correct, but I have no special knowledge.

Finally, I have found that all the people associated with CSU and the City of Fort Collins appear to be acting in ways they feel will genuinely improve, in the medium term, the university and the city.

LARGE SCALE FORCES ON CSU

Universities in general are in trouble. The reason, as is often the case, is money. State funding of the higher education system is drying up. There are four main sources of money for higher education:
 - Student Tuition and Fees
 - Faculty Research Grants
 - State Government Funding
 - Alumni and Large Donor Giving/Endowments

A couple of major forces related to funding of the university system are at work. The first is consolidation of wealth and power.

Astoundingly, wealth distribution in societies throughout the world and throughout time has followed a single pattern, a Pareto distribution. http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/2010/09/wealth-distribution-and-work-week.html.  The Pareto distribution is a self-similar curve where quantities are concentrated. For example, the top 10% of the population might control 70% of the wealth. If you take all of the wealth of that top 10%, the top 10% of those richer folks will have 70% of the wealth of the rich folks. Throughout the world, this basic curve can be used to describe wealth distributions. The differences are in the constants. In a highly egalitarian society, the top 10% may have 50% of the wealth. In a kleptocracy, the top 10% may have 95% of the wealth. For the past couple generation's wealth in the US has become increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. In 2012 the top 10% in the US had about 76% of all wealth.

The same concentration of wealth applies to institutions. There are an increasing number of college students. Before World War II, the entire university system was smaller relative to the population and fewer people received higher education. The system expanded after WWII to include a much larger percentage of the population. This was extremely successful economically. We met the need for additional seats by making existing institutions larger rather than increasing the number of institutions. In the 1970's the average size of a state university was probably about 20,000 students. In the past decade or so we have seen this increase to 30,000 or 35,000 students. Hand in hand with this increase in institution size there has been a growing concentration of alumni giving. The lion's share of giving is going to a smaller and smaller set of universities. In 2015 about 30% of the all donations went to just 20 schools. The more successful graduates you have, the more likely your university will move up on the alumni giving list. Within each school there is a smaller and smaller set of donors who give the lion's share of all donations, and hence have a larger and larger voice in the direction of the institution.

A second force is cultural. In the U.S. we tend to view all aspects of culture through the lens of commerce. This has become even more pronounced over the last 30 years. The primacy of commerce extends to all aspects of culture. Even religion has corners, like the "prosperity gospel" based on prayer as commerce. Government is seen as inherently inefficient (bad) because it does not operate in a marketplace.  This has become accepted to such an extent that we have starved every civic institution that is not directly involved in commerce. Prestige and power are associated with wealth. In effect, we are creating a new feudal society where wealthy merchants have become the noble class.

Universities are not exempt from this cultural lens. Every few years a drumbeat starts announcing that college graduates are not ready for the workplace. That is, a university education is viewed as job training. This push to commercialize everything has also hit university administration. Universities are increasingly run as a business. This seems to be inevitable. Basic management training in the US is based on the business model. There are specializations for non-profit organizations, but the models of organization, motivation, and feedback are based on the current business model fads. Along with this comes a top-down approach to management with power and money concentrated in as few hands as possible. The university president acts as a CEO. As such, he or she is charged the operation of the institution and all true decision making is made at the top. An effective CEO will listen to advisors, but this is more to counteract opposition and build consensus than to alter direction.

As a business, the university must do what it can to satisfy its customers. It competes against other, similar institutions. To be financially sound, each university must turn a profit so it can support current operations and expand in the future. In this view, the funding sources can be viewed as customers and, like a successful business, the institution should be customer focused.

Taking each customer in turn:

Students are ostensibly the raison d'être of the university but not all students are alike. Because they pay higher tuition, out of state students are more desirable, and CSU is competing against universities in the student's home state. For marketing reasons, higher achieving students are also more valuable. The product that CSU is marketing to students is the experience on campus. To satisfy these students, the experience should be comfortable and stimulating. That is one of the reasons so much money has been spent on improving dorms, the recreation center, and the student union.


Faculty research grants serve several functions. They fund labs, faculty, and graduate students. Grants serve a marketing function by increasing the international visibility and prestige of the organization. Grants follow grants. The more grants a university has, the more likely other grants will follow. There is an easy way to incentivize faculty to bring in more grants. You simply measure the size of the grants and reward the faculty who bring in the most. In terms of grants, each department is either a profit center or a loss. Sometimes unprofitable departments simply have to be funded (English, Art...) but they can be put under pressure in the normal ways to be more efficient. For example: increasing the number of adjunct faculty, automating instruction, increasing class size ...

While still a comparatively small portion of research grants, corporate funding of research is becoming more important. This leaves the university exposed to pressure to support the funding corporations. See the recent scandal at Brown University. https://www.aaup.org/article/academic-freedom-and-corporate-university#.V6sczJMrKgQ

When you hear that CSU is a research institution, be aware that this a sales pitch to both students (we are on the cutting edge) and to grant organizations (we can effectively use your money). The goal may be research, but only in so far as that research provides funding either by attracting more grants or attracting more students. Research tends to be concentrated in areas that might be commercially viable in a decade or so. Too long for strictly commercial enterprises, but not pure research untied to commerce.

Because it is a funding source for the school, state government can be considered a customer of the university. In this sense, lobbying is "marketing" to the government. State government is in a rather unique position because it owns the institution even if it doesn't provide much support. In Colorado, the state government has a number of constraints that limit the amount of money it can spend on higher education. State government is thus the worst kind of customer: cheap, demanding, impossible to dump.

Finally, there is alumni and large donor giving. Donor funding is discretionary and based on whim. First you have to find the wealthy, then you have to persuade them that your institution is worth funding. If wealthy alumni feel the institution has helped them in their life or helped a community they care about, it will be worth funding. If a donor has a particular interest that can be furthered by funding, they will give. As an example, the equine department(s) at CSU have greatly benefitted from donor funding.

ON CAMPUS STADIUM

As far as I can discern there is very little overt corruption in Fort Collins. I find city employees well educated and thoughtful. They value information and when making decisions they look for other comparable situations and try to find best practices. The city as a whole is conservative in the sense that it likes the comfortable and conventional. We try to do the same as everybody else, just do it a little better.

Under Tony Frank, CSU is following a similar strategy. I think the CSU administration is well aware of the forces shaping the university system and is doing its conventional best to make sure that CSU ends up large enough and well enough endowed to survive the coming storms in higher education.

Tony Frank was made president of CSU in 2008. He has spearheaded the largest CSU expansion in decades, perhaps ever. The last major expansion was part of the post WWII restructuring of higher education. This is a perfect time for expansion largely because interest rates are at historic lows. The Board of Regents has viewed Tony Frank’s tenure positively and in 2015 he was made chancellor of the CSU system, which includes multiple campuses throughout the state.

During his tenure Frank devoted attention to all CSUs customers. Increasing enrollment brings in increasing tuition and fees. Much of the capital improvement money has been spent on the student tuition leg of the funding sources, improving and updating dorms, the rec center and the student union. Dorms have been improved. Faculty is aligned to the goal of bringing in more research grants. In the past few years a concerted campaign has aimed, successfully, at bringing in more donor money. Let's not talk about state government.

Sometime around 2011 Tony Frank made a marketing decision that both out of state student enrollment and large donor giving would be improved with a more visible and successful athletic program including an on-campus football stadium. Let me make this clear. I think the on campus stadium was a marketing decision made around 2011 before any public deliberation. Tony Frank as university president chose to build an on campus stadium. The only question afterwards was how to best implement that decision.

In December 2011 Jack Graham was hired as Athletic Director to implement this marketing plan. Within two months a "feasibility study" was started for a new stadium. The study was duly produced and in late 2012 Tony Frank recommended a new stadium to the CSU Board. This was followed by two years of PR bungling.

The stadium was popular with rich CSU donors and the athletics department. It was popular with no one else. The faculty members I have spoken with think the stadium is idiotic. The student body is divided, but largely opposed. Within the city a group, "Save our Stadium" formed to oppose the new stadium.

CSU and the city created a committee to look at stadium impacts. I had the bad fortune to watch one of these meetings on cable television. Representatives from CSU and the architecture/construction firms simply refused to answer any questions. My recollection of one exchange is: "How tall will the stadium be?" "We don't have an exact answer for that. We'll try to find out some information and get it to you later."

There is a real science to getting buy in for an existing decision. The stadium outreach violated many of the rules and it failed. One basic rule is to never give opponents the notion that the basic decision can be changed. Rather than creating support, the outreach created resentment and opposition. Fund raising proceeded but slower than hoped.

In a bold move, on August 8 of 2014 Frank simply fired his athletic director, Jack Graham. Within four months a new decision making process looking at alternatives was created and completed. The committee was given four alternatives and chose two of those as most viable. In the end, Tony Frank modified the options and chose to go with his original 2011 decision. A new stadium owned and operated by CSU would be built on campus.

Ground was broken and, in agreement with the city, a new Stadium Advisory Committee was created. This committee has the limited scope of trying to improve the operation of the already approved stadium. CSU has bent over backwards to be transparent, listen to the neighbors and not make the same mistakes twice. The stadium will be quieter and less bright than it might have been because CSU listened and spent money to satisfy its neighbors.

ANY COMPLAINTS?

If my analysis is correct, all of this seems rational and perhaps even inevitable given the cultural environment. There is only one real casualty, the university itself.

There are probably as many opinions on the nature and purpose of a university as there are people. I am giving my point of view as someone who spent a lot of time as a student, both undergraduate and graduate. I am a parent of four children who graduated from college. I am currently owner of a business that caters to the university crowd. When my children started college I thought a lot about what I hoped for them to learn in their higher education http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-to-learn-in-college.html.

Historically, universities have been self-perpetuating institutions based on both educating societal elites and allowing intellectuals the freedom to advance human knowledge. I contend that the institutions have been successful in inverse proportion to their integration into the commercial structure of the society. There are exceptions. Land grant colleges in the United States have focused on practical farm research and, along with farm extension programs, have revolutionized agriculture in the U.S. multiple times. On the whole though, the most successful research programs have been those where the goal is pure knowledge. The application of that knowledge has not been the concern of the school or the professors.

It is on the science side where commercial results are most immediately apparent, but the academic developers of calculus, differential geometry, physics (classical, relativistic, and quantum), chemistry, evolution, and genetics have been concerned with basic understanding the world. All of these areas, which underlie so much of our commerce, were created without any possible awareness of commercial applications. Academic competition, jealousy, and infighting is as old as the institutions. Holding research private and patenting academic discoveries is relatively new. These developments potentially make some needed money for the institutions, but hinder long-term human advancement. Einstein once said, "I refuse to make money out of my science. My laurel is not for sale like so many bales of cotton."

On the education side, particular skills have always been less important than the ability to understand and adapt to the world. It is important to have a deep understanding or skill in something or other, but the importance comes from the fact that once you have one deep skill, it is easier to acquire a second or third. When the WWII veterans came out of college, they created a vital society
There were many factors involved: monetary policy, size of cohort, delay in starting families... Higher education helped the veterans by giving them particular knowledge and skills, but also because they understood more broadly and could see further than the less educated.

The emphasis on running the university as a business enhances funding and fosters efficiency. It also ties research to commercial results and chokes off longer-term thinking. It reduces the quality of education by increasing class sizes and putting more responsibility for basic education onto the least experienced members of the faculty community. If you read the Feynman lectures on physics one of the most illuminating aspects is the sheer clarity of mind and broadness of vision that is apparent from simply being in the presence of well educated genius. Fewer undergraduates experience this as we put more graduate students, adjunct faculty, and junior faculty members in charge of teaching.

Big college athletics serves no research or educational purpose. Very few students participate in the marquee sports and those students are largely segregated from the rest of the campus. Every dispassionate study of finances shows that the programs never pay for themselves. Many people get rich off college athletics, but the only function of big athletics within the university is marketing to two audiences: modern day barons who can contribute to endowments and potential out of state students who bring more revenue when they enroll.

The direct appeal to the barons is obvious in the design of the CSU stadium. Roughly one quarter of the facility is set aside for luxury accommodations some served by a separate elevator to keep the moneyed from the hoi polloi. The more you pay the university, the better your experience will be: better seats, more amenities and better parking. Students sit in the cheap seats across from their betters. In addition to watching, cheering, and identifying with the university, they can stare and wish for riches that will enable them to join the barons. Those with money can use a display of wealth as a way to court influence within their circles. This is a standard feature of modern spectator sports. In the Stadium Advisory Group some members have suggested that the prices are too low and that raising prices to the maximum level possible will make the most desirable spots a better way to display wealth and influence. It will also help pay for the stadium.

The choice of football as the main sport to market is obvious, trite, and tragic. It is obvious because of the popularity of the sport. It is trite, because every institution trying to make it to the top tier is doing exactly the same thing. It is tragic for a number of reasons. The first is consolidation of sports money is already occurring. Fewer institutions are getting larger and larger shares of the pie. That means that many second tier schools, perhaps CSU, will fail in their attempts to cover stadium costs by using sports to lure out of state students and donor money.

The choice of football is also tragic because it plays to the worst part of human nature and actually hinders the education of students. Football is a purely spectator sport. People feel kinship based on team affiliation, but they do not do anything to actually improve themselves or the team (except spending money). In football, the identification comes at the expense of the athletes themselves. The vast majority of athletes, even at the top ranks of university athletics, do not make a career of their sports. CSU makes a genuine attempt through its academic programs to support these young people who are trying to get an education at the same time as having a physically demanding, unpaid, full time athletic job. Time after time we have seen in college athletics that as the money pressures rise, so does the temptation to cut corners and win at the expense of the athletes. With what we have discovered about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the current form of the game cannot continue for more than a generation or so. The fans are rabid, the money is great, but more and more parents will stop allowing their children to risk brain injury to play. This will dry the pool of available talent.

Learning how to take care of ourselves and others is an important part of becoming an educated functioning adult. If you look at people in their forties, fifties, and beyond you will find healthy adults who run, swim, bike, play tennis, golf, baseball, basketball, racquetball, ski, and snowboard. You do not find football players. The activity is simply not consonant with maintaining health. The notion of spectator sports instead of participatory sports is at antithetical to the core of the university missions.

PEOPLE MONEY AND SKILLS

One of my rules of thumb is: If you want a great organization, don't put the money men/women in charge. In any organization, the money must work out. If you put the money men/women in charge, only the money works out. Everything else, including the reasons the organization exists, suffers.

As a software professional, my career has centered on new product development. Often this is as a consultant to large organizations that wish to update their technology. The obvious reason to bring in outsiders is to get specialized expertise, but there is a cultural reason as well. People who are charged with maintaining and incrementally improving existing systems develop a conservative mindset. Many people charged with operational systems cannot cope with the uncertainty of new development. Conversely, many people in new development cannot cope with being confined to meticulously tracking potential problems.

The same kind of cultural dynamic probably occurs within the university. The skills necessary for the maintenance and gradual change of a university are different from the skills needed for major expansions. Major expansions require expensive and risky decisions that are made quickly. It is inherently a gamble on the future. The decision makers have to create a political environment where people feel involved but the pace of change is not slowed or halted.

In big college athletics the game is to quickly build a team and win more than you lose. As a coach, you either win or you are fired. If you win, you can leave and move up the coaching ladder to a bigger program with more resources. If you get fired, you move down the ladder.

In new software product development, once the job is done, the excitement subsides and the developers most instrumental in getting things done quickly move on. They are invested in the problem solving and the building, not the end result or the institution. The same is probably true for people involved in university expansion. The thrill is building the physical assets, creating the winning team. When that is completed, the tendency is to move on to the next place that needs this type of expansion.

The average tenure of a university president is about 8.5 years. Athletic directors last about 5 years. Football coaches, 4 years. For all these positions, the professional track usually moves the person from institution to institution. It is rare that these professionals "grew up" in the institution where he or she is president/athletic director/coach. Because their job tenure is much shorter than a career, people in these professions have to be more concerned with the job and their personal progress rather than the institution. Contrast this with faculty who tend to marry their institution and may very well stay with the same school for their entire professional life.

The highest paid people at CSU are associated with big budget sports (men's football and basketball coaches) and university administrators. These areas take increasing amounts of the overall labor budget. That is, we are paying the most for the people whose ties to the institution are weakest.

Following conventional wisdom gives a conventional strategy. Everyone following the same strategy competes for talent, driving up prices. When institutional loyalty is low, a larger paycheck and personal advancement are even greater lures. In addition, people naturally value their own work and value those who are like them. Administrators are likely to pay administrators more.

The end result of the current strategy is to invest large amounts of money into activities (athletics, creature comforts, administration) that are, at best, peripheral to the core of the university mission. The focus on money and business related metrics undermine faculty morale and lose the long-term research focus of the institution. The course may be inevitable in a culture based on business that does not value learning or education except as it helps commerce. The course may be inevitable, but it is also regrettable.

Creating Social Engagement

As the number of mass shootings continues to climb I, like everyone else, will put in my two cents about causes and possible solutions.

I do not believe the problem in the US is one of guns. It is a problem of culture and will not end until the culture changes. Luckily, culture is the sum of what each of us thinks, does, and says. That means we can change it by changing ourselves. This personally daunting task becomes easier as we see our friends and neighbors modeling the behavior. Each of us contains a multitude of selves and we just need to let the best of ourselves come out, repress the worst in ourselves, and reward the better actions of others.

In this post I won't be posting much in the way of references, but I believe that my argument is well supported by the evidence. I am looking at trends, not universals.

First, some words on "safe" and "comfortable". It is ingrained that these words belong together. In a recent survey on traffic in my city people were asked to prioritize the importance of a number of items. One of them was "Streets should be safe and comfortable". In fact, safety and comfort do not go together. If people feel too comfortable driving, they increase their speed which, off the highway, makes the street less safe. In the same way, we often feel most comfortable when we do not engage strangers, but we are social creatures and expanding our social circles makes us better people.

Violence against strangers tends to be perpetrated by people who are socially isolated. Social isolation is defined as a lack of contact with other people and it is deadly in a social animal like humans. The opposite of social isolation is social engagement. Increased social engagement makes us more capable in dealing with people in a variety of situations. It gives us greater control of our environment and makes us more aware of what is going on around us.

Here are some ways we can improve our culture and ourselves. Some are simpler than others. All require some effort, at least at the beginning.

You know that weird person you have noticed? The one that makes you a little uncomfortable? Next time you pass him/her, say hello. You need not converse, just acknowledge their existence as a fellow human being and move along. After a while you might make some small talk or even have a real discussion, but that is not a requirement. It is not likely, but eventually that person could turn into your best friend.

Join or start a group. Almost two hundred years ago Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations." Prove him right. Join a book club, a bowling league, a soccer team, a bicycle club ... It doesn't have to require much time. Book clubs generally meet about once a month and you don't even have to read every book.

When you converse, listen to the other person. In general, allow them to have the last word. Listening does not signify assent. When it comes right down to it, you probably disagree with everyone around you on one topic or another. That doesn't mean you have to shun them. However... if someone's views are truly vile, feel free to call them on it. Tell the racist "I'm sorry, I could not disagree more. I think your beliefs are without support and if you act on them I will work against you." Again, this is hard, but with practice you will get better at it. If someone seems like they might be dangerous, report them.

If someone asks you for help, provide it. There are, of course, requests and circumstances that make this unwise or infeasible, but make "yes" your default answer. You can take this a step further. If someone looks like they need help, offer it. A little harder is a change of attitude. Be more concerned that everyone who needs help gets it and less concerned that someone who is "undeserving" may be abusing the system.

Our built environment is often badly constructed for social interaction. Do not support this. In choosing a home we often look at the inside amenities. This is important, but don't forget the outside. Is there somewhere outside, facing the street, where you and a couple friends can sit down and watch the world go by. If not, is there a way to easily construct a sitting spot? If a home fails this simple test, don't buy or rent it. Inside, is there a room where you are likely to spend time that has windows on the street? If not, you will have no opportunity to get to know the daily life of your street. It is harder to integrate into a neighborhood if you never see your neighbors. On a nice evening, think about walking around the block. As you go around, say hello to folks. Ask them about their day. If you cannot do this comfortably or if no one is ever around to say hello, you have a bad neighborhood. Try to fix it or move.

Vote to make your community better even if it means increased taxes. If there is a ballot measure to build/improve schools, support it. More parks and improved public spaces, support it. Support it especially if it goes to other folks who have less than you. Send your support to the lowest income schools and neighborhoods. Make sure poor kids have good parks and athletic fields. Even better, make sure your community works to integrate people of all incomes and backgrounds into the same neighborhoods. If, as is common, your school board sets the boundaries of schools to keep rich and poor separate, confront the candidates and ask them to change. A unit of neighborhoods is the boundary for the local elementary school. If a school does not have a mix of incomes, bus the rich kids in. Better is to build more lower income housing throughout the town. This seems scary, but all the evidence shows it makes everyone better and safer.

Underlying all of this is an acknowledgement that we are all people. We differ in backgrounds and in how we think society should work. Communication and engagement teaches us about each other, how to get along, and how much we are alike. We exist in a biological ecosystem, but also in a social ecosystem. Make your ecosystems stronger by encouraging diversity and strong connections.

Conspiracies Without Cabals

Todays topic is human organization and the analysis of power. In particular, how we can have actions that look concerted, but which do not necessarily require collaboration between individual actors. That is we have things that may appear to be conspiracies, but without any organizing cabal of plotters.

We analyze situations at a level that is practical and with the tools that produce results. We cannot analyze complex physical phenomena in terms of wave functions because the mathematics are intractable. At the level of atoms and molecules we look at electron shells and bonding strength. At the level of materials we talk about stress and strain...

An analogous situation occurs when talking about human behavior. We have to decide which types of analysis are most productive for describing particular aspects of human society. Sometimes the appropriate level is examining individuals, their motivations and actions. At other times it may be more productive to look at larger scale organizations.

In the animal world, an example is a flock of geese. The flock travels long distances without a leader and without conclaves. At any given instant, the goose who is most certain about the proper direction influences the flock to move in that direction. No single goose knows the route, but at any instant one or another goose has a pretty good idea. The flock finds its way where the individuals might not. For analyzing travel, the flock is the correct unit.

We can view the political system as a means to resolve contention between individuals who have differing notions of man and society. Some people value loyalty and the preservation of known successful structures. Other people value fairness and adaptation to a changing world.

At a level up, we can view the US political system as a competition between two major groups, the political parties. The names and values of the parties change over time, but the structure of the US electoral system seems to ensure that there are only two parties (with the occasional splinter party). For analysis, we can look at the party itself, not the people in the party. That is, look at the machine. The parties have evolved over time, but for the US system, the important qualities seem to be: that there are two major parties, that the populace is partitioned into people who largely support one or the other, and that real consequences - power, money, and favor - flow to the inner circle of the party in power. At this level, the modern targeted marketing favored by both parties make sense. Elections are held. A party only gets power if its representatives get the votes in their district. Separating the electorate into very fine segments and appealing to a single issue that is important to a particular individual will sway votes and get the party into power. For the party, being in power is more important than any particular issue or group. The individual parties have expressed beliefs, the party platform. The platform is not any kind of coherent philosophy or reality tested approach. It is merely a collection of issues the core constituency cares about and that can be used to polarize the population and get votes. The party in power uses the apparatus of government to reward those who keep it in power. The favors generally flow to large contributors, often organizations not individuals. The base currency of reward is access. The result of access is most commonly legislation that favors financial interests (a group level result), but it can be personal (e.g. ambassadorships or other government jobs).

In this analysis the characteristics of the groups (parties, lobbying groups ...) rather than individuals is important. To my mind, this fits the facts pretty well. At an individual level, any participant may be internally persuaded that they are working toward future personal rewards, but sometimes the odds don't seem very good. During the presidential primaries of 2008 Andrew Young, an aid to candidate John Edwards, tried to protect the candidate by claiming to be the father of Edwards' illegitimate child. The notion that this lie would somehow advance Young's future personal prospects seems delusional. It looks more like a subsumption of personal interests to the aims of the campaign (the group).

Analysis of group behavior is difficult because groups are constantly appearing and disappearing and they form and break alliances. For example, there is a firearms industry that sells weapons to individuals. At one level we can examine each company as an organization promoting its own aims and competing with other firearm manufacturers. In the political sphere they have banded together and sponsor the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA is beholden to the manufacturers for much of its funding, but it also has a large number of individual contributors. The demands of the rank and file may move the organization away from the aims of the manufacturers. The NRA also gets direction from the specific individuals who lead the organization. The leaders of the organization have some autonomy, but they must operate within a range that is acceptable to the funding constituency.

The difficulty of analysis is increased by the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize the world around us. Every day on the news there is a story talking about the stock market rising or falling, and the reasons behind the movement. The "reasons" are invariably nonsense based on the feelings of "Investors". "Investors" or "The Market" is everyone who bought and sold stock that day. This is anthropomorphized into a thinking, feeling uber-being. On the news you will hear comments like "Investors were frightened by the newly released jobs figures, causing the market to go down". These comments reflect the personal feelings of news commentator and are not based on any rigorous polling of people making trades. If we did poll, we would undoubtedly find a huge range of reasons for buying and selling (the fund needed cash, rebalancing a portfolio away from stocks ...). Even rigorous polling would give us no sensible reason because most trades are not made by humans. Most trades are made algorithmically by computer programs so complex that no individual can, without extreme effort, determine why any particular trade was made. In the "flash crash" of May 2006 the stock market lost, then regained, 10% of its value in less than hour. After five months of analysis the SEC released a report trying to explain why the market fell on that particular day. The answer had nothing to do with the magical "Investors" or "The Market". The SEC explanation included a lot interaction between algorithmic trades (including high frequency traders). Almost a decade later, the reasons are still debated. If you hear a discussion about the stock market that includes human motivations for movement, it is almost certainly fantasy, often in service to the biases and aims of the organization that pays the commentator. That does not mean the commentator is deliberately lying. They are reflecting the views of those in their circle of "experts". Those experts in turn are employed by an organization with an organizational world view tuned to support the aims of the organization.

Analysis at the group level is not hopeless though. There are common strands that allow us to discover some rules and explain actions. Unfortunately, as in many complex systems, often we can only explain in hindsight. It is only in hindsight that we can see how the various forces actually played out. In hindsight, things that were uncertain when they unfolded appear to be more inevitable. This feeling of inevitability can, in turn, lead to the notion that there was deliberate intent by some small set of individual actors (the cabal). All of us have the intent trying to shape the future, but our individual intent is usually tempered by our position within society, which shapes what we think and believe, and by the organizations through which we act.

Partly because of our stated value of respecting individuals, US society is structured to support organizations rather than individuals . In the political sphere, we do not vote for a party, we vote for an individual in a winner takes all system. To get the resources necessary to win an election, individuals almost always have to join a party. The party has a ready place on the ballot for its candidates, the party has a pool of money and a network of people who can be mobilized to work for the candidate. To get this support, the individual must align him/herself with the aims of the party.

In national office, officials "represent" millions of people. They use "public opinion" to help shape their message (but perhaps not their votes). Public opinion can be gauged by polling, and by analyzing comments and requests from constituents. If you have ever written to a national elected official you can see how your feedback is handled. The "personalized" response from the official is a set of canned paragraphs on topics you mentioned. It is clear from this response, that you letter has been analyzed at the level of "concerned about issue X" or, at the most specific, "supports position Y". Based on that, the paragraphs are chosen. These days, the analysis of your letter and the response may be automatically generated without human intervention. I have asked my elected officials to let me talk to someone about this process, and been ignored. The input to the official is presumably equally coarse, basically a count in a spreadsheet that indicates how many constituent wrote in "support of position Y". That is, the responses are aggregated in a very simplistic way. In such a world, organizations have oversized influence because they can mobilize people to affect the count in the spreadsheet of public opinion.

This makes political life a competition of organizations. Powerful individuals can increase their power by creating "grass roots" organizations capable of generating pressure on elected officials by changing the counts in the spreadsheets. Thirty second ads are used to mobilize additional letters and calls. The smartest powerful people go one step further by controlling media to affect the way issues are framed. But, whenever an organization is created, even the most powerful individuals cannot force the organization to completely reflect personal beliefs. Inevitably, other individuals in the organization influence the direction as well.

When we see the results of this process, we may assume there is a conspiracy of individuals (the Trilateral commission, Davos participants ...). It is demonstrably true that actual public opinion has no effect on the legislative process in the US. But this does not mean there is a conspiracy with secret meetings, it is the result of the wars between competing, powerful, moneyed organizations. These organizations form alliances and work together when it is convenient. As alliances are created, individuals will meet, but I believe an appropriate level of analysis is the organization. Individuals create and manipulate organizations for personal gain. I contend individuals strongly influence organizations, but only occasionally control the outcome of the balance between organizations. Individuals generally ride the larger organization trends for individual advantage.

A Comparison of Sweden and the US

The other day someone pointed out that if Sweden were a U.S. state it would not rank very high on per capita GDP. This was a Facebook conversation and the tone of the post was "see you socialist left wing fanatics, even in the best case your socialist state is worse off than almost all of the U.S.". This, of course, created a small firestorm of posts, which I think was the object of the provocation. The comparison is interesting though.
There are cases where the differences in governance, national attitude and results are stark. For example, Haiti and the Dominican republic share an island, but the contrast between the two is stark. The same can be said of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Sweden is not, of course, a socialist state. The U.S. and Sweden are both industrialized nations with relatively educated populations. The U.S. has a leg up because of its vast natural resources.
Given the general similarity of status of Sweden and the U.S. as industrialized nations, a comparison of social policy and the results for the average citizen is worthwhile. I think the differences between Sweden and the U.S. are largely a reflection of basic philosophical differences in national attitude. As a nation the U.S. attitude is: social darwinist, each man for himself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you cannot make it here don't blame anyone but yourself, government always does a worse job than the private sector. I have never been to Sweden so I cannot report firsthand on conditions there. From the outside its social policy seems more: we are all in this together, each does better when all do better, we are all people and things happen so let us support each other, government programs work well at providing the basis for us to build strong lives.
The Swedish GDP for 2010 is about 458,000 (millions). With a 2011 estimated population of 9,415,300 the per capita GDP is about $48,640. This is roughly the same as North Dakota at 47,714 which ranks as the 20th highest state GDP per capita. There is some disagreement about these numbers. For example the wikipedia article on the Swedish economy gives a per capita GDP of about $37,775, which would make it closer to Michigan, the 42nd poorest state. Sweden cannot prop up its social welfare system with natural resources like North Sea oil (Norway, Britain). It must pay through basic productivity.
In the World Economic Forum (the Davos folks) Global Competitiveness Report, Sweden ranks above the US (because of the recession)
Sweden is not going bankrupt. Its overall national debt is 40% of GDP compared to 60% - 90% for the United States (depending on whose number you use). Sweden went through a real estate and financial crisis in the early 1990s and had to re-adjust its social spending to accomodate lower GDP. Sweden is now used as a model for how a nation should handle financial crises. Sweden can afford its social programs. Because it is somewhat poorer pre capita than United States, we could afford similar programs if our national philosophy allowed it. The difference is choice, not money.
Sweden ranks high in taxation about 48% of GDP (2007). In the developed world, Sweden is on the high end of taxation exceeded only by Denmark. In the U.S. taxes are about 27% of GDP (2006). The U.S. tax rate is one of the lowest in the developed world. Only Mexico, Turkey, Korea, and Japan have lower taxes as a percent of GDP.
So, which resident gets the better deal: someone living in Sweden with its not-outstanding per capita GDP and high taxes or a resident of Michigan/North Dakota.
Health care in Sweden requires patients to pay a fee per visit/prescription, but total costs to the patient is limited to about $360 per year. In comparison to the US Sweden has more doctors and nurses per capita. Life expectancy is higher, and infant mortality is lower. Over 80% of all medical costs are paid by the government (vs. 45% in the US) but the total cost spent on health care is so much lower that the US government pays more as a percentage of revenue than Sweden does. So, in Sweden everyone is guaranteed health care, the cost is lower both to the individual and the government than in the U.S.. The outcomes of health care are generally better, and citizens do not need to fear medical bankruptcy.
In education, Sweden works hard to make sure that opportunity is equalized for children. Grants from the national government take into account the economic conditions of the particular region. Poorer regions are subsidized and richer regions bear an extra cost. Rural regions are compensated for transportation costs and smaller class sizes. There are independent schools, roughly equivalent to charter schools in the U.S. Parents may have to pay a fee for preschool and childcare, but there is a ceiling to those costs which takes household income into account. Higher education is essentially free to the students. Students must pay for text books, and equipment needed for personal use. This means that students enter the workforce essentially debt free.
This contrasts with the United States which has limited pre-school support and where higher education is increasingly unaffordable. Two thirds of students leave higher education with an average debt of $23,000 dollars. We have created a generation of young adults who, instead of leaving college and becoming entrepreneurs, are forced by debt to ender the labor force as employees. In the United States, public dollars going to higher education have decreased and tuition costs have increased. The United States of America is the only OECD country where 25-34 year-olds are not better educated than 55-64 year-olds. This may be in part because other countries had more room to improve over the past 25 years.
In Sweden, taxpayers spend about 6.6% of GDP on education. In the U.S. about 5.5% of GDP is spent by the government on education.
We all know how skewed incomes are in the United States where the top 400 wealthiest people have more than the bottom 150 million.
About 80% of the Swedish workforce is unionized. As might be expected in a place where people tend to feel part of a single society and look after each other, the unions make the society more equal, but do not eliminate inequality or reward laziness. In hard times, looking after each other may mean unions accepting pay cuts to save jobs. The Swedish unemployment system looks much like the US unemployment system.
If we honestly compare industrialized societies, the US doesn't look so good. We have a national mythology that we are a nation of rugged individualists in a country that provides the opportunity for everyone with drive and determination to make whatever they want of their lives. While we do pretty well on the individualist side, shunning all non-business forms of collective action. We do less well on the opportunity side. American families are less socially mobile than families in other countries.
Much of the U.S. national catechism is simply incorrect.
People do not do best as rugged individuals working for their own benefit. We are social creatures who do best as collections of individuals working together and helping each other.
People are not naturally dishonest or working to game the system. There is a persistent, endemic problem of dishonesty, but this is the exception not the rule. Most people getting unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, WIC payments, social security, medicaid ... are ordinary hard-working folks just like you and me who have hit hard times. Most of them will be back on their feet in a little while, they just need some help to see them through.
Work and money are not the center of most people's lives. Most people work for money to earn enough to live, but are not particularly interested in accumulating large amounts of wealth. Everyone would love to be wealthy, but if you talk to people about what they would do once they got that big pile of cash, very few of them talk about accumulating more. Most people would simply do more of what they currently enjoy the most. We should not be educating our children to be effective workers, we should be educating them to understand themselves and the world around them.
Government can be effective. Government is comparable to other large organizations in efficiency and effectiveness. I have worked as a consultant to both government and private entities. The problems are somewhat different, but both government and private entities tend to have about the same level of bone headedness. If we look around the world, we can see examples of more effective governance. Sweden seems to be one of those places.
The United States has low taxation, both at the individual and the corporate level. The question in most of the developed world is not "how much am I taxed", but "what do I get for my tax dollars". As an example, the citizens of every country with universal health care are basically pleased with their system do not want a privatized system.

Fairness and US Federal Tax

I keep seeing articles about "fairness" of the federal tax system. In particular, that the wealthiest americans fund most of the government. For example, the Wall Street Journal "As it happens, the top fifth of earners currently pay 67% of all federal taxes". On the face of it, it doesn't seem fair that twenty percent of the population should pay two thirds of federal taxes. To make this even worse, depending on how you work the accounting, somewhere between ten and forty seven percent of households pay no Federal taxes at all.

This blog entry was triggered by an opinion piece written by Glenn Hubbard, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. "Left, Right and Wrong on Taxes". In that piece Mr. Hubbard says

When I left my job as the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy in 1993, I left a message on my office blackboard for my successor. I wrote, “Broaden the base, lower the rates” repeatedly until I filled the entire space. I then had it covered with wax so it could not be erased. (Yes, the government charged me for my bit of vandalism. But it was worth it.)

I think all of this is nonsense. It seems to be based on the simplest possible notion of "fair" and a deep misunderstanding of wealth, taxes, and spending.

Anything to do with taxes and finance is complicated, but this note is not. I am using a very broad brush, but in data I use the numbers that argue against my point of view. For example, I use federal spending numbers from 2000 when the government spent much less than it does now. The income figures come from 2005, which gives households a higher income than in 2000. I did this because it is hard to get a consistent data set but I wanted to make sure I could not be accused of cherry picking data.

The gist of my argument is that the wealthiest must pay most of the burden because, frankly, they are the only ones that have any money. The federal government goes after them because they cannot get the money anywhere else without having people starving in the streets.

In 2000 the federal government spent about 1,789 billion (about 1.8 trillion) dollars. See: Government Spending Details, Federal Spending by the Numbers 2010, Table 1.1 — Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789–2009 . In 2005 there were about 110 million households . Dividing federal spending by households gives an "average" federal tax burden matching taxes to spending. In billions, this is: 1,789/.11 or $17,890/household

In 2005, twenty percent of all households had an income less than $18,500. That means for one out of five people to pay their "fair share" we would have to confiscate all their money leaving them nothing for food, shelter, heat, water... Looking at income breakdowns, the poor are disproportionately young and have less education. This group has more households headed by single women. My own experience and the fact that they tend to by younger indicates there are often children in the households. Children have no say in when or to whom they are born.

My earlier post discusses how, in virtually all societies, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. If you compare the wealth curve to the tax curve. you will find general agreement. Compare "But by 2005, the top 10 percent accounted for nearly 55 percent of all federal tax revenues, while the rest of the population paid about 45 percent." with the fact that the top ten percent has about 71% of the wealth.

The federal government taxes the rich for the same reasons Willie Sutton robbed banks. That is where the money is. If you look at capability to pay taxes (percent of wealth vs. percent of tax burden), the top ten percent are getting off easy. In terms of power politics, that makes sense. The wealthiest have the greatest ability to influence government policy and public opinion. As Warren Buffet famously said, "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

We have income redistribution in the United States, as does every industrialized country in the world. We do this because the alternative is having malnourished children and a huge homeless population.

It would be impossible to argue in favor of the current federal tax system with its arcane rules and special deductions. Eliminating many of the current deductions would allow stated tax rates to go down and would make the stated rates closer to the actual rates. But calls to “Broaden the base, lower the rates” are another salvo in the class warfare already going on. If we look at Mr. Hubbard's specific proposals we can see where he stands.

Broaden the base lower the rates.

Reduce taxes for the wealthiest americans (softened by removing deductions).

Cut corporate taxes.

Increase income mostly for the wealthiest americans. The evidence that this spurs economic growth is sketchy at best.

Shift from income tax to a consumption tax.

This disproportionately affects those who must spend all their income.

The United States is the wealthiest nation that has ever existed. Even with our debt crisis we can afford to support those among us who are the poorest and most vulnerable, but it will require taking some wealth from those who have the most.

Human Social Groups

Humans are social animals. We band together into family, social, and work groups. Our money societies allow us to see how dependent we are on these social groups. In most societies, roughly half the people earn the money to support everyone. The other half are either engaged in non-money activities, like taking care of children or the infirm, or they are children or infirm. If you are lucky, you will spend roughly a quarter of your life in the care of others. This includes your time as a child and time when age, illness or disability makes it difficult to earn. If you are unlucky, you may spend all of your life dependent on others.

While we have cities containing tens of millions of people, each individual has a much smaller social set. The average person probably has between one and two hundred people with whom they regularly interact. Humans have hierarchies of social identification and protection. Siblings will abuse each other within a family but band together to defend against people outside the family. People complain about intrusions of federal government in local affairs, but join a national army to defend the country. These nested social groups provide us with protection and purpose. We tend to be loyal to those with whom we identify. We will forgive and protect them, even when they do things we would condemn if done by outsiders.

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, which 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 behavior, we vary greatly. Because we learn behavior from each other, values and behavior 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.


Humans like to be comfortable, both mentally and physically. Most of us are comfortable with our beliefs and day-to-day actions. Marked differences make us uncomfortable, so we avoid them. When we have a choice most of us only associate with people who share much of our own outlook and behavior. This tendency divides humanity into separate groups. In every U.S. high school there are the artists and the jocks. They may share classes, but they don't share much else. As adults, when the differences are solely those of belief, we sweep them under the carpet with admonitions about not discussing religion or politics at parties. When apparent differences are physical, the separation becomes stronger. Sometimes physical difference is innate, like skin color. Other times it is cultural, like dreadlocks, ear locks, or tattoos. We use these physically identifiable differences to announce the groups to which we belong. In a group of strangers it is always comforting and sometimes essential to find allies whose actions can be anticipated and whose help will be forthcoming.

In contemporary US society we have confused and conflated notions and enshrined two false concepts. The multifaceted nature of our current groupings is often reduced to false notions of race and ethnic group. Both of these are dependent on ancestry.

Our genetic homogeneity makes the notion of race pretty much absurd. The notion of ethnicity identifies groups of people based on cultural ancestry. This seems more reasonable because humans group first into families and families are a fundamental driver of values and behavior. In the US though, this has become hashed up as well. The cultural value of individualism and laws preventing discrimination based on obvious physical and cultural traits have caused some re-mixing of groups. This shift can be seen most clearly in people whose families have been in the US for several generations. Some of my great-grandparents were ethnically Irish-American. They were strongly Catholic and associated with others of Irish descent. They knew the history of their homeland and had views about their place in it. I am several generations removed from that. In totality, my ancestors came from a number of places. I do not identify with any of those places as a homeland and my customs and habits are only dimly related to that background. My ethnic group is "Middle Class Suburban". Social pressures have isolated some groups more than others in the US. This makes "African American" or "Hispanic" seem more reasonable as ethnic groups. However, there are a great many people classed in these groups who are culturally much closer to "Middle Class Suburban" than to the stereotypical "African American" or "Hispanic” ethnic groups.

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.

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.