Dear Mr. President

Two weeks ago, Barak Obama visited Stockholm and spent half an hour or so on the KTH campus. Since Nordita is officially part of KTH, safety regulations went through the employee email list weeks in advance. Luckily I was away the great day. I was told later the Swedes were so successful scaring people off the impending traffic disaster that Stockholm was basically deserted during the President’s visit and elks were seen chewing licorice in front of the royal palace.

I flew back to Stockholm the following day. Lufthansa online check-in suffered an interesting technical glitch and produced a boarding pass for seat 1A business class. Yeah to software bugs. As I was sitting in the business class with leg space I don’t actually need (I’m not socialist, just short), I couldn’t help but wonder what, if I had 15 minutes, would I tell the President. Hell, what would you tell the man?

From the German perspective, the American political system looks strange, which is ironic given the history of Germany’s representative democracy. The strong role of the US President in particular and the focus on individuals rather than programs in general is the most obvious difference. Stranger even is that the political landscape in America is in practice a two party system. This has created a situation where, instead of different parties offering a spectrum of alternatives, the two parties morph to fit their potential clientele, or make it fit. And, needless to say, the wealthy part of the clientele lobbies for their interests, an influence that’s amplified by the almost complete lack of labor unions.

Yes, from a German perspective it seems strange that a country which values democracy so dearly practices it so badly. But then I’m not a political scientist, I just hope I know enough to put my two X in the right places on Sunday.

During the years I spent overseas, Academic America seemed to be overwhelmingly on the side of Obama’s Democratic Party. I recall many seminars in which an US American speaker would make jokes or political statements that clearly showed they were confident the majority of the audience would sympathize with their political views. And they were right of course. (Provided the audience was mostly American. These jokes don’t fly in Europe.) But during the last year I sense this support base faltering as the conditions for scientific research gradually worsen under Obama’s watch.

There are many things the man must shoulder and I’m sure they weigh heavily. Among all these weighty boulders, there’s a tiny little pebble that made me lose my faith the USA will overcome its anti-scientific congestion. It came with this headline:

Congress Cuts Political Science Research Grants

“Last month [March 2013], President Obama signed 600 pages of legislation to keep the government from shutting down, while shutting down much of the nation’s [political science] studies. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) secured Democrats’ approval for an amendment to the bill that eliminates the National Science Foundation’s political science studies, except those the NSF director deems relevant to national security or U.S. economic interests.”

By now, the NSF has cancelled the political-science grant cycle.

Dear Mr. President, how could you have let that happen?

Every major problem that this planet presently faces is primarily about organizing human life and negotiating complex problems with uncertain solutions. The existing political, social, and economic systems are insufficient to deal with these problems, and scientific knowledge is insufficiently integrated into decision making procedures. As societies and economies have become more interconnected, political institutions have not kept pace. The technology is there, the knowledge how to use it isn’t. This realization lies behind initiatives like the FuturITC and attempts to predict political unrest. Yes, that’s political science for you.

Today riots are organized on twitter, wars are led on YouTube, and election results predicted on online futures markets. Nobody knows what this means for the future of democracy. Do Facebook and Twitter help spread Democracy and Human Rights? Are the White House Petitions are good idea or do they just create noise? Yes, that’s political science for you. We all have too much information and not the faintest idea how to intelligently aggregate it and use it within our political systems. We need a scientific approach to institutional design. Trial and error is an archaic procedure that takes time that we don’t have, and errors have become too costly.

Just the situation to scrape funding for the political sciences, I see.

I am trying to imagine Angela Merkel suspends all governmental funding for political science. Germany is the land of the poets and thinker, the land of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels and Weber. Besides inventing compound nouns, Germans are also good with solidarity, strikes, and nudity. The Americans made very sure each German receives a solid education about the merits of democracy. I can see the outrage. I see the ‘68 students, now at retirement age, clogging the streets, “academic freedom” scrawled over their flopping breasts. “Censorship!” they shout. “Thoughts are free” they sing. Then the President of the United States calls. “Angie,” he says “Wtf?”

The great advantage of the American political system over the German one is however that the US President can only serve two terms, while the German chancellor can run till he or she drops dead.

Dear Mr President: I hope you tried a handful of the salty licorice that the Swedes chew down by the pound. Because that’d make you as sick as I feel when I read what American scientists must endure these days.

Americans prefer Swedish wealth distribution

I was a little bit depressed about the recent US midterm election. Not so much because of the outcome. I wasn't too convinced of Obama when he was elected. The way his campaign went, I was afraid he'd turn out to be a populist and change his course every time some interest group's wishes made it into the headlines. But I severely underestimated the man. In contrast to most of the commentators on the outcome of the midterm election, he is evidently well aware that halfway through his term he's in a lose-lose situation anyway. Either he keeps his course and is being criticized for not being a miracle healer, or he'd listen to the masses and claim he changed his mind and be criticized for that. Whether one thinks his political agenda is promising or not, in that situation at least he's aiming at doing the right thing in the course of history, rather than doing the right thing to be re-elected. In January, Obama said:

"I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president."

A rare case of a politician with a backbone. Given that, I can't say I was surprised by the election outcome. No, what depressed me was the lacking substance of arguments. The American nation strikes me as similar to a group of overweight people who at their first weight watchers meeting chants "Yes, we can" and cheer upon change. But when change is staring back from the dinner plate, and change on the scale leaves waiting, they realize change doesn't come easy. And the vast majority of them still doesn't know the difference between social democracy and socialism. Clearly, the world would be a better place if everybody would read my blog ;-)

Anyway, to some extend I don't care very much how the Americans organize their society. I think they're not fully using their potential, and find that a shame, but after all it's their decision what they put on their plates and shovel down their throats while I, well, I live in Sweden. And that brings me to one of the most amusing studies I've come across lately:

Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time
By Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, PDF here

Michael Norton, from Harvard Business School, and his colleague Dan Ariely, from Duke University, asked a random sample of US citizens what wealth distribution they think is ideal. In 2005, they surveyed 5,522 people. Asked for their voting pattern in the 2004 election, the sample reproduced well the actual voting result. The survey respondents were given a definition for wealth so there was no ambiguity. Then they were shown three pie charts. Each slice of the pie represents 20% of the population, from the poorest to the wealthiest. The size of the slice is the wealth owned by this group. One pie showed a perfectly equal distribution. The other two pies were unlabeled but showed the distribution of the USA and that of Sweden.

The result: 47% of Americans preferred the Swedish wealth distribution, followed by 43% for the equal distribution, while only 10% found ideal the actual distribution. Just focusing on the Swedish vs the US distribution, 92% of Americans prefer the Swedish one over their own.

[Source: Fig 1 of this paper]
It turns out that these preferences depend only very little on demographic factors like gender or whether they voted for Bush or Kerry in 2004. Considered how convinced Americans tend to be about their own greatness, this result seems somewhat puzzling. However, keep in mind that these pie charts were unlabeled in the questionnaire. The replies makes sense if you come to the next question. In that, survey respondents were asked first to guess the wealth distribution in the USA, and then chose what distribution they would find ideal. It turns out that most Americans severely underestimate the rich-poor gap in their own country, and in addition would prefer a distribution that is even more equal than their erroneous estimate. This is shown in the figure below.

[Source: Fig 3 of this paper]
Again, note how little both the estimate as well as the ideal depends on demographic factors.

This result fits quite well with previous studies which had shown that Americans overestimate the social mobility in their own country. They're still dreaming the American dream, despite its evident conflict with reality.

After I stopped laughing I started wondering what this result really means. The survey respondents are very clearly considering the present wealth distribution as not ideal. However, the wealth distribution is a fairly abstract observable. Would you have been able to accurately estimate it? My own estimate would have been considerably closer to the actual one than the average guess, but that's only because I happen to have seen the relevant numbers before.

Norton and Ariely had a good reason to ask these questions: The philosopher John Rawls proposed that justice should be identified by taking a position behind a "veil of ignorance." For that, you're supposed to imagine that you decide on a particular question - for example the distribution of wealth - and only after you've decided you'll be randomly assigned a position within that society you've just created. I've never been really convinced by that approach. It's much too heady, or call it utopian. As a matter of fact, people don't live behind a veil of ignorance and their own social status does influence their decisions. Also, it isn't only the ideal (size 4!) that's relevant but also the way to get there (diet). In fact, the way is typically the question that's more immediate and thus more prominent on people's mind.

If one just asks people what they think is ideal, you're probing their ideas about what they believe the wealth distribution means, not necessarily what they actually want. To get to the relevant point, one would have to ask for factors that actually affect their life, or are such that they have some basis to judge on. Social mobility for example, the possibilities that are open for them and their children, is a relevant factor, and it is of course related to the wealth distribution. Or, instead of asking for the distribution of wealth, maybe better ask if they think somebody's work is really worth a 1000 times more than somebody else's. Another factor, and the one that bothers me most, is that wealth means power and it means influence. How much influence on your life do you want a small group of people to have? And at which point does this run into conflict with democratic decision making?

Bottomline: This is an interesting study. It explains a lot of things about the US American attitude towards their country's income distribution and the sometimes puzzling disconnect between their wish for change on the one hand and on the other hand their unwillingness to really take the necessary steps: they believe the steps are smaller than they in fact are. However, it's not a result that should have any relevance for policy decisions because the question asked is impractical. One doesn't chose a wealth distribution first and then gets randomly assigned a place in that society. It's not how things work in real life, and it's just replacing one dream with another one. There's always the risk the dream might later turn out to be a nightmare.

Aside: Dan Ariely, one of the authors of the study, writes a blog. He commented on his own paper here.

Oh-oo-oh, you think you're special

I once joked that when my blood pressure is too low I go and buy the Time Magazine. It works better than medication and with less side-effects. Now that I live in Sweden however, the Time Magazine doesn't stare at me on the register in every supermarket. Since Stefan cares about my well-being, he now has a subscription, special offer, EUR 20 for one year. And thus, on our road trip from Frankfurt back to Stockholm I browsed through one of the recent issues. So I can now offer you a particularly nice example for American arrogance self-confidence.

In the March 11 issue, Andres Martinez suggests one of "the most important trends of the new decade" in his article

The Next American Century

The "important trend" is, in a nutshell, that the world will become a Global America:

"The fact that the rest of the world is becoming more like us — in ways good and bad — underscores the extent to which we are living in an American century, even as it erodes, by definition, the notion of American exceptionalism."

He derives this development towards The Global America from a thought experiment:

"If you bring together teenagers from Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea and Argentina — to pick a random foursome — what binds these kids together in some kind of community is ..."

Let's see, what could it be that binds these teenagers together? They like Pizza? They have skin problems? They think their parents are embarrassing? No, it's actually...

"... American culture: the music, the Hollywood fare, the electronic games, Google, American consumer brands."

Well, to be honest I don't know very much about the Nigerian music scene, but I'm not sure what this is supposed to say except that some countries can't really afford to invest millions in "producing" stars. So let's for a better comparison have a look at this week's German top 10 single charts. The singer's nationalities are in order from 1 to 10: German, German, Belgian, German, American, British, French, American, Virgin Island (I guess that's still British?), American. 3 out of 10 is not bad, but maybe Martinez should take a trip to Germany or France and turn on a radio to get a realistic perspective on the international music scene.

Sure, I am willing to admit that he is right to a large extend, American music and movies are wide spread. And yes, we all use Google and it's an American company. But that's the past. How is that predictive for what the next century will look like?

Well, Martinez isn't done with his insightful analysis. He further lets the reader know:

"As anyone raised in a different country will tell you, two of the strongest impressions someone has on arriving in the U.S. are 1) what a great country this seems to be, and 2) what a mess it must be, judging by the tenor of news coverage and political discourse."

rotfl, the strongest impression that I had after moving to the USA was 1) what a mess this country is and 2) how ridiculous it is that the news coverage desperately tries to protect the American "exceptionalism." Martinez' article is an excellent example of 2).

As you can guess I know a lot of people who are European (mostly German) who spent a postdoc in the USA. They generally share my impression. Let's face it: American food either sucks or is overpriced. American highways are countrywide in a pity state. Americans seem to have no clue how to do a decent plumbing work or how to achieve a functioning canalization. They will instead always tell you there's something specifically weird with their weather. For example, it might rain. Or the sun might shine. Windows in America either don't open or, if you managed to open them, they won't close. Since the windows and doors don't really close, naturally there always has to be a heating or air conditioning running. And let's not even start with issues like education, poverty or health insurance. I think you get the point. The only thing that's really exceptional about Americans is how they still manage to believe they are exceptional.

But you know what? This lifestyle based on low quality standards and constant maintenance has one big advantage: it increases the GDP that Martinez is so proud about. Yes, that's right, every time you wreck a wheel in a pothole, every time your child gets sick, every time you call the plumber, every time you call customer service, every time something breaks and has to be fixed, every time something can't be fixed and has to be replaced, the GDP goes up.

Luckily, unlike what Martinez writes, Europe is not turning into a second America. We actually have working public transportation over here. According to the World Economic Forum the most tech-friendly country is Sweden. Past 2001 the "Top Intelligent Community" has not been in the USA (and in 2001 it was NYC, hardly representative for the nation). If you go to the dentist next time, look at the label of the instruments because chances are the equipment is made in Germany. In the biggest part of Europe same-sex-partnerships are legal. In Germany, prostitution is legal, so is abortion. How long will it take for Americans to crawl out of the 20th century? And Shania Twain, who wrote the line that is the title to this blogpost, well, she's Canadian.

Okay. Now that I'm done with Martinez' ridiculous essay let me get this straight. I'm not a nationalist. There are indeed many things about America that I like very much. Ahead of all, there's the entrepreneurial spirit which is taken on in the, infinitely better, article "In Defense of Failure" by Megan McArdle in the same issue of Time Magazine. If you have a start-up idea, if you want to try something new, if you want to be crazy: America is the place to go, not Europe. There are many things Europe could learn from America, ahead of all maybe how to establish a proper "union," and there are things America could learn from Europe, ahead of all maybe how to build proper highways. The same probably holds for other parts of the world. We can all learn from each other, and this exchange is not a one-way process.

I don't think we'll globally converge on the same values and tastes any time soon, and I don't think this would be desirable either. There are some issues we have to converge on in an increasingly interconnected planet, and we have to work on that. But it is extremely unlikely that the outcome will be The Global America.

"You're Tarzan!
Captain Kirk maybe.
John Wayne.
Whatever!
That don't impress me much!"

~Shania Twain, That don't impress me much

She figures there's way to go

The European Commission just published "She Figures 2009" (download PDF here), a summary of data covering aspects of gender inequality in the European Union. The statistics used in this publication are drawn from Eurostat, the European Commission services’ official data source and correspondents in various member countries.

I didn't read the full 160 pages, but here's two interesting figures. The below shows the percentage of men (yellow) and women (purple) in different stages of scientific career in science and engineering. From the left to the right the career level increases. The figure summarizes data from 2002 and 2006. While at the entry level there's 31% women (up from 30% in 2002), and at the PhD level the percentage has increased to 36% (up from 33% in 2002), at the level of tenured faculty there's only 11% left (up from 8% in 2002).



[Click to enlarge]

The other interesting figure is the composition of boards that are responsible for making decisions for scientific research directions such as scientific commissions, R&D commissions, councils, committees and foundations, academy assemblies etc (they are listed in the report in detail). The figure below shows the percentage of woman in these boards by country. From left (highest percentage) to right (lowest) we have Sweden, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Denmark, Bulgaria, Iceland, Italy, Slovenia, France. The last five are the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Israel, Poland, Luxembourg. The dark pink bars are the average values for several groups of countries in the EU.



[Click to enlarge]

Overall I got the impression the situation is improving, but very hesitantly so. Way to go Europe, way to go.

The Nature of Laws

It occurred to me I haven't bothered you with my random thoughts for a while, so here's a topic that keeps coming back to me: The consistency of laws. In mathematics it's the whole point, in physics it's a guiding principle, but when it comes to our societies' legal system, the consistency of laws is considerably more murky.

As a teenager, I had a period when I was convinced that direct democracy would be the answer to all flaws in our democratic system. I also thought that the reason why we do not have a direct democracies is that it was in practice unfeasible. After all, Germany has some more inhabitants than Switzerland. With the advent of the internet, so I thought, direct democracy should eventually become practicable - globally! - and lead to flourishing of democracy.

I was really excited about that prospect for some while, until it occurred to me that there are other good reasons why a representative democracy is preferable, reasons that our, your, and their funding fathers thought about, and that a teenager needed some time to figure. It is ironic that a decade later I found the excitement about direct democracy echoing back at me from the internet, lacking exactly the awareness of the merits of representation that I had been lacking.

One of these merits of a representative democracy is what Jaron Lanier referred to very aptly as “low-pass filtering.” Opinions are easily influenced by all kinds of events and peripheral news, and in times when hypes pass around the globe in next-to-no time these opinions are in addition strongly amplified. One couldn't base any decent policy on such a constantly changing background of opinions.

Another problem that is that even without the high-frequency noise, people's opinions are inconsistent. He was a strong defender of freedom of speech, untill that blogpost proclaimed his product is a big piece of shit. Nuclear power plants are great, unless they are in your backyard. And abortion is evil until your teenage daughter dies in labor.

These are several variations of inconsistencies between laws on different level. The constitution (basic law!) is on the most fundamental level. It's what defines your nation. These laws are, for good reasons, very hard to modify. But they are also very general and with that quite vague when it comes to concrete applications. In other cases they are just outdated and require new interpretations; a good example is property rights in times of file sharing. But the point is that all laws more concrete for specific situations should be in agreement, read: consistent with, the fundamental laws.

If law was maths, one could derive everything from the basic axioms, but of course that's not strictly possible. One of the main reasons is that eventually our legal system is based on words that lack precise definitions and interpretations that change with time and context. But still, measures have to be taken to make sure no laws exist that are in conflict with each other, and that means in particular no newly passed law should be in conflict with the agreed-upon basic laws. Otherwise the legal system is inconsistent.

One problem of that sort that has made a lot of headlines in the last years is gay marriage in the USA. If your country grants equal rights to all its citizens they better be all allowed to marry their partners. It's not a question of public opinion, it a question of consistency with the constitution and a case for the constitutional court. As we've seen, the public opinion is indeed, sadly enough, inconsistent. But that's only my opinion of course, and I'm not the constitutional court.

Another problem of that sort, the one that triggered this post, is Switzerland's ban on the building of minarets in a recent referendum. Yes, that is correct. Nevermind religious freedom. But hey, the Swiss Justice Minister says the decision is “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.” No? Then what is it? Let's see:

“Supporters of a ban claimed that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and a legal system - Sharia law - which are incompatible with Swiss democracy.”

The catholic church is of course a great example for democracy. But more importantly, banning minarets cures the symptoms, not the disease. It's a pointless, stupid, ineffective and constitutionally doubtful decision that should never have been allowed as referendum to begin with. If you have problems with certain practices a religion exercises, it's them that you should ban, not their architecture. I'm glad Switzerland is not in the European Union.

Now that I've voiced my outrage, let me say the underlying question is of course a tricky one. What questions is it that you can pose to a group (crowd, electorate) and get a useful answer? James Surowiecki in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds,” has summarized many research results that have targeted this question. But many questions still remain open and, what is worse, none of these results seem yet to have made it into application.

Knowing which questions one can pose to a group under which circumstances and expect a useful answer is important for our lives on many levels. Just take the question whether a group of successful scientists is able to select the most promising young researchers. It's not that I actually doubt it, what bothers me more is that we don't know. We are still operating by trial and error, and this is one of the reasons why I say we need to finish the scientific revolution.

Since I'm afraid these thoughts have been a little too random and I've lost the one or the other or the other or the other reader, let me wrap up: Direct democracy is not always the best option, and inappropriate use can result in inconsistencies. If you want intelligent decision making - in a referendum, in your committee, in your company - you better first figure out under which circumstances which way of aggregating opinions has proved to be successful.

“Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”

~Oscar Wilde

The Future of Rationality

It occurred to me I haven't bothered you with my random thoughts for a while. Not that I had lack thereof, they just possibly were a little too random to make it into written word.

I wrote this sentence with my toes, just to amuse you.

So here's a thought I've been pushing around for a while. Are we on the path towards more or less rationality? The last several hundred years were marked by increased rationality: the rise and success of the scientific method, the Age of Enlightenment, the decline of religion and superstition, and so on. But you look around these days it seems that increasingly more people seem to be scared by the prospect. If you extrapolate that trend where will it lead us? Maybe there are just things we don't want to know. (See also The Right Not to Know).

It seems to me there's a sentiment in the air that we need more "spirituality," more "magic," more "wonders" in our increasingly technological world based on mechanical engineering and computer algorithms. Some people want to "reinvent the sacred," others emphazise "emotional intelligence" or "the power of thinking without thinking." Blink.

While I think some of these arguments aren't very insightful, there are two aspects I'm sympathetic to.

For one, I think there is at any one time a limit to what humans can possibly know, possibly even a limit to what we can ever know and we should be more aware of that. That means for example instead of being scared by gaps in our knowledge it or discarding them as a failure of scientists we should recognize the relevance of acknowledging and dealing with uncertainty, incomplete knowledge and 'unknown unknowns,' as well as be vary of The Illusion of Knowledge.

But besides that putting an emphasis on rationality neglects other cognitive abilities we have. For example, many of us have on some occasion met somebody who, through their experience, have developed a strong intuition for what might or might not work. Even though they might not be able to come up with any precise "rational" argument, they have a feeling for what seems right or doesn't. Granted, they might be mistaken, but more often then not you'll benefit from listening to them. One of the most important gifts, so I believe, of the human mind is to make what Plato called on some occasion at this blog an 'intuitive leap' into the unknown. Without such leaps our space of discoveries would be strongly limited. Rationality isn't always the path towards progress. (While not many insightful points were raised in the aftermath of the publication of Lee's book, I found it very interesting what Joe Polchinski had to say on the role of rigor in physics.)

Now let me step away from the human brain and consider instead of a system of neurons the systems that govern our every day lives, like for example our political systems. They have some "rational" processes to deal with input and to decide on actions. They also have some emergency shortcuts resembling unconscious reactions. If somebody throws a pillow at you, you'll raise your arms and close your eyes without a long deliberation of whether or not that's a good thing to do. If somebody throws a bomb on your territory you don't want to get stuck in endless discussions about what to do.

But what about intuitions and emotions? Where is the space for them?

Let us take as an example the credit crisis. It was not that people who were actively involved in building up the problem were completely unconcerned. They just had no way to channel their uncanny feelings. From a transcript of a radio broadcast "This American Life" (audio, pdf transcript, via):

mortgage broker: ...it was unbelievable... my boss was in the business for 25 years. He hated those loans. He hated them and used to rant and say, “It makes me sick to my stomach the kind of loans that we do.”

Wall St. banker: ...No income no asset loans. That's a liar's loan. We are telling you to lie to us. We're hoping you don't lie. Tell us what you make, tell us what you have in the bank, but we won't verify? We’re setting you up to lie. Something about that feels very wrong. It felt wrong way back when and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened ... we did it because everyone else was doing it.

Italics added. My favourite part though was this

Mike Garner: Yeah, and loan officers would have an accountant they could call up and say “Can you write a statement saying a truck driver can make this much money?” Then the next one, came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have to have a credit score and a pulse.

Alex Blumberg: Actually that pulse thing. Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

Well, so much about rationality. The point is it's not that people didn't feel there was something wrong. It was just that the system itself had no way to address that feeling. The negative feedback it could have provided went nowhere. 

Or take the academic system, one of my pet topics as you know. It's not that people think it's all well and great. In fact, they can tell you all kinds of things that don't work well and some can complain seeming endlessly. But the system itself has no way to address these concerns. The only way to improve it is external intervention, which however usually only takes place once things go really wrong.

It's like you go out with a guy and even though you don't know exactly what's wrong, he makes you feel really awkward. But instead of just stop dating him you'd go see a shrink who looks up in a book what you're supposed to do. That's about what's wrong with our political systems.

So what's the future of rationality? I think we'll need to find its proper place.

Aside: I believe that many of the arguments we have about rationality are based on a lacking definition. For example if I intend to buy a new gadget I will typically look at the first few offers and pick the one I like best, finito. Sure, if I had looked a little harder or a little longer I might have saved some bucks. But frankly I'd rather pay more than spending an infinite amount of time with customer reviews. I think this is perfectly rational. Others might disagree. (And now encode that in your utility function.) That is to exemplify that rationality might not easily be objectively quantifiable.

Book review: "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama

In case anybody recalls, there was a presidential election going on last year. One couldn't open a newspaper, switch on the radio, go for a coffee without hearing "Obamaobamaobamabama." The absolutely last thing I wanted was to read a book by this person. But then it hunted me down in form a Christmas gift from my mother, "The Audacity of Hope," in my mailbox.

Okay, so I read it. After all, the guy is now president and he smiles friendly from the cover. What is there to say? It's an entirely flawless book. Neatly organized into 9 chapters -- Republicans and Democrats, Values, Our Constitution, Politics, Opportunity, Faith, Race, The World Beyond our Borders, Family -- covering every sector a politician should have an opinion on, sprinkled with anecdotes, personal stories and reflections, it is an easy read, entertaining and interesting. The book is so good it is disgusting. One has to hate it. It feels as if one thousand PR agents went over it and sanded out all edges. Doesn't the guy have any vices, doesn't he have any regrets, didn't he make any mistakes, doesn't he have anything provocative to say at all? Can somebody be so smoothly intellectual and considerate and indeed be real?

Here is the only upsetting sentence I could find: "[T]here will be times when we must again play the role of the world's reluctant sheriff." Unfortunately, this sentence is only outrageous when quoted out of context since the rest of the chapter provides a perfectly reasonably 21st century view on foreign politics. The guy is neither a dumb pacifist nor eager to convert the rest of the world to Americanism.

What I liked best about the book has however nothing do to with it largely overlapping with my political views. No, it is that it communicates that politics is done by humans for humans, that arguments can be approached from an intellectual rather than a personal point of view, and that one can disagree with somebody without declaring that person an enemy. And it describes how the media by and large grossly distorts this process, amplifying and exaggerating differences to everybody's disadvantage.

Though the book is generally optimistic (well, what did you expect?) it is cautious about the status of our democracies, especially the influence of wealth and the functionality of the political system itself. You shouldn't be surprised I pick out these two points, readers of this blog know they are among my pet topics. Obama writes:

"[T]oday's constitutional arguments can't be separated from politics. But there's more than just outcomes at stake in our current debates about the Constitution and the proper role of the courts. We're also arguing about how to argue -- the means, in a big, crowded, noisy democracy, of settling our disputes peacefully. We want to get our way, but most of us also recognize the need for consistency, predictability, and coherence. We want the rules governing our democracy to be fair."

Which nicely highlights the necessity to ensure our political systems work optimally. One could call that meta-politics. It is unfortunately a topic that doesn't receive enough attention though one should think the need to occasionally update procedures that are centuries old would be apparent. He further points out:

"[W]e must test our ideals, visions, and values against the realities of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded or replaced by new ideals, sharper vision, deeper values."

If I translate that into my usual, considerably less eloquent, style: We must ensure our systems allow not only for variation, but also evaluation and following adaption so we remain able to learn and improve. The world is changing and we have to change with it.

About the devastating backlash it can have on our democracies when influence is weighted by wealth, Obama writes "[T]hose who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify [...] subvert the very idea of democracy." Well said. Unfortunately, he remains vague on what to do about it.

A general criticism is that with his elaborations on all these topics he doesn't set any priorities. It is all well and fine to have high goals and visions about everything, but where to start? What is it that he finds most important? If you were president, what were the first thing you'd do? Also, the chapter about religion strikes me as somewhat odd, but then it seems to be a big deal in the USA. And one issue I found completely missing is what appears funny about American elections to most outside observers: it is essentially a two party system. I don't think this is a good status and a point that would have merited a sentence or two.

Altogether, I guess the book is as good as a book from a politician can get. I find it neither particularly inspiring nor insightful, but I learned something about American history and politics. If this was an Amazon review I'd give four stars. One lacking because of leaving me nothing to complain about.

PS: Thanks, mom :-)

Political Ideologies

I just came across these interesting survey results on “The State of American Political Ideology, 2009,” which documents the findings of a study by the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress about political values and beliefs in America.

According to their tastefully red-white-blue website decorated with stars and stripes, the Center for American Progress is “a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action.” They have hijacked the words “progress” and “innovation” and explain their “work builds upon progressive ideals put forth by such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King,” and “draw from the great social movements of the 20th century—from labor rights and worker safety, to civil rights and women's suffrage” to “translate those values into new ideas and action firmly rooted in the economic and political realities of the 21st century.” That's just so you know what page we are on.

The results in the report are based on 1,400 interviews with adults 18 years or older. They have put political ideologies on a sliding scale from 0 to 400 with 0 being the most conservative position on the continuum and 400 being the most progressive (according to their report “an innovative categorization of ideology”), and calculated the score from responses to 40 statements about government and society.

They find a mean ideological score of 209.5. Interestingly, Americans are apparently most progressive about the role of government and least progressive on cultural and social values. Ideas about economics and international affairs fall in-between. Less surprisingly for what is essentially a two-party system in which every party is trying to adapt to the popular opinion of the day, they find there really is no “far right” or “far left,” but rather “far center-right” and “far center-left.” Do I need to add that a one-dimensional sliding scale with a pre-chosen notion of “progressive” for political, economical as well as social questions doesn't quite accommodate plurality either?

As a PS to my recent post on The American Dream, let me quote these replies in regard to the present economic situation

“The economic recession is clearly affecting many Americans. A full two-thirds of Americans (67%) report that their family’s income is falling behind the cost of living, with 23% saying their income is staying even and only 6% saying it is going up faster than the cost of living. The belief that family income is failing to keep pace with rising costs is uniformly held across ideological, partisan, race, and income lines.

Despite the harsh climate, many Americans continue to believe that they have achieved or will achieve their own understanding of the American Dream in their lifetime. More than one-third of Americans (34 %) say they have already achieved the American Dream and another 41 %believe that they will achieve it in their lifetime. Roughly one-fifth of Americans (18 %) say they will not achieve the American Dream in their lifetime.”

You can read the full report here, and find out your own score here. Readers of this blog won't be surprised that apparently I'm “extremely progressive”




Humor me and leave your score in the comments.

Change You Can Believe In

“We will restore science to its rightful place.”

~Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

I have a complaint.

It is impossible these days to live in North America and not be optimistic about the changes the new President of the United States will hopefully initiate, especially for science. These are not easy times for somebody who has pessimism as substantial ingredients in her bloodstream. Psychologists call it “preventive pessimism.” It's essential for my survival. And every time somebody mocks me about it I point out the world needs pessimists. There's too few of us. And we're constantly afraid we'll die out.

Currently your local blogging pessimist is wondering what the heck “restoring science to its rightful place” means. Where is the “rightful place” of science? Who decides that? And how is science supposed to get there? Most people seem to assume the statement is an announcement of financial support towards governmental funding bodies. The optimist is excited. The pessimist points out money alone isn't sufficient, it also matters how it is used. And there are problems one just can't solve with money.

The Academic System

I have written many times on the problems with the present academic system, for example here and here. The central point is, as far as the internal organization is concerned, that the individual incentive structure of the academic system does not presently result in a desirable macro behavior - that would be an efficient use of time, human and financial resources. Instead, the present system rewards behavior that does not necessarily have anything to do with good scientific research. The reasons for this are most importantly:

• The use of simplified measures for scientific success that, once institutionalized, turn into goals researchers pursue for their own sake (like a high number of publications or citations).


• Career obstacles for those who want to change their field of research which creates incentives to stick with a topic even if returns diminish and other areas lack personnel.


• Neglecting to pay attention to sociological effects in large and growing communities which can result in severe misjudgement of promises, hypes, fashion trends, and bubbles of nothing.

This is how far the internal organization is concerned.

Being a scientist is not an easy task. It requires ignoring personal preferences, likes and dislikes and to just focus on the evidence. It is a process that can very easily be skewed by any sort of external pressure, may that be financial pressure, peer pressure or time pressure. Regarding the external organization one further has to worry that public pressure negatively affects researchers objectivity.

The academic “ivory tower” allowed research to flourish in an environment free from such pressures. This protection has now mostly crumbled away, which goes on the expenses of scientific integrity. This is what needs to be restored. It's not that researchers are not aware their interests are being affected, and they don't notice they have to waste time with playing silly games to remain in the market. It's that the problem is a system failure that disables its own repair because spending time on that repair also would be against the individual interest.

Restoring Science

“We will increase support for high-risk, high-payoff research portfolios at our science agencies.”

~Barack Obama, Sciencedebate 2008

Sounds good, doesn't it? (Or at least it did before we learned that some high-risk, high-payoff folks wrecked our financial system.) But what does that mean? Who decides how much risk is good for science? Will we get central planning? Will somebody compute it?

I think all such prescriptions are temporary fixes, and will eventually cause new problems. Today you might call for more risk-taking, tomorrow you'll be complaining about too much risk-taking. The only way to address these questions is to allow the system to self-optimize. That means in particular, give scientists enough freedom to chose which path they think leads to progress - within the constraints given by the overall direction the society set. Just trust these scientists. Their individual goal is knowledge discovery, and if you just let them follow these goals that will get you exactly what you want - progress.

In more detail:

1. Scientific progress is a long-term project. Running it with people on short-term contracts creates an internal disagreement between individual interest and the long-term goals, especially when combined with high competitive pressure. Scientists will be forced to focus on projects that fit into a short time frame, and they will have to watch out for letters of recommendation necessary for their next job search.
   
   To solve the problem, create decent middle-class-jobs for scientists. These don't have to be high-profile jobs, but they shouldn't be crappy short-term contracts either. People who chose academia aren't there because they want to become rich. They are there because they love science. Just give them a sensible job, one in which they can continue if they do well, one in which they can pursue long-term projects and don't have to be concerned about shifts in the public opinion or the approval of their peers.
   
   In short: stop the trend of exporting more and more research to postdocs on 2 year contracts.



2. Avoid that researchers can get stuck in a field and make sure they can change into a different one without too large personal drawbacks. Unless one makes sure this is the case one will create groups of people who self-support their own work and colleagues working on similar projects to increase their own career chances.
   
   To solve the problem, don't require extensive prior experience in a very narrow field of expertise to obtain funding. Instead, look at the applicant's ability to carry out research projects in general. Further, support people who want to learn the basics of a new field, and give them a grace period in which they will likely not be highly productive.



3. Appropriately reward community services - they keep science healthy. That might be eg peer review, public outreach or writing review articles - even if no original research. All these are activities we need, but they are currently underappreciated.



4. Restore autonomy of researchers and research institutions. Reduce financial dependence and personal dependence of researchers. That means in particular, don't require researchers to get in grants to obtain tenure - it exports power to funding agencies. Don't assign researchers to supervisors or specific topics unless absolutely necessary. Instead, promote independence to support originality.



5. Especially in basic research, don't require scientists to plan ahead for several years, this is completely off reality. A five year plan for a research project can become redundant within the first month. A common practice is thus to file in proposals about projects that are already finished or almost finished because then one can write what funding agencies like to hear: lots of details already with results. That's one of the games people have learned to play.
   
   How to solve the problem: orient proposal requirements on the reality of the research field, and fund researchers who have demonstrated the ability to carry out research projects without asking for detailed plans. Have a little faith and don't overplan.

The balance between high-risk and conservative research, and between specialization and interdisciplinarity will vary from field to field, and from one decade to the next. Just make sure the system is able to accommodate these changing needs and can achieve a dynamical balance.

Bottomline

“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”

~Stewart Brand

If you want change you can believe in, free scientific research from the constraints of an outdated academic system.

Socialism and Social Democracy

For no particular reason I just want to clarify a confusion that I have encountered fairly often, that's what the difference is between Socialism and Social Democracy. Socialism aims to achieve a more just society by putting the means of production in the hands of the government, it is against privatization (though not necessarily for common ownership, that's communism). That has a priori nothing to do with planned economy in case you wonder.

Social Democracy means you acknowledge that the free market fails to automatically take into account certain goals your society might value, that are most often those based on solidarity and long-term plans. For example environmental protection, help for medical emergencies, social help etc. An unregulated free market is merciless on the sick, the old, the poor, or the unlucky, simply everybody who fails to contribute directly to economic growth for whatever reason, e.g. by having too many kids. Social democracy includes the human wish not to see your neighbors starve the moment they can no longer be productive, and recognizes that one day you might be in that same situation.

The way it is typically done is to take away money from those who have plenty, e.g. by taxes, and give it to those who need it to survive. Yes, that means redistribution of wealth. You do that backed up by a democratic system to ensure this redistribution is considered just by the majority of people and not in conflict with more fundamental laws. Needless to say, the people who have the big money will complain about it. Keep in mind they made their money in a system that is considered unjust by the majority of people living around them. The outcome is a social market economy, that is, one that combines a capitalist mode of production with the belief that society should protect all its members from economic and social need.

Justice is however something that is perceived very different depending on what culture one has grown up in. I for example find it quite amusing that Americans like to talk about Germany as a 'social welfare' state as if that was something undesirable. As far as I am concerned, I am very relieved that if I am in Germany I know all my neighbors do have a health insurance, I know all my friends have an unemployment insurance, and I know they can live from social help should it be necessary. Of course there's parties in Germany who are more left or right leaning, more or less liberal, more or less conservative, but overall the idea of a social market economy is more generally accepted.

Choose what you want. That's what democracy is good for.

The Lightcone Institute

After you have stared at the link to the Lightcone Institute in my sidebar for a year or so, I think the time has come to tell you what it is about. It's what I spend my time on that is not occupied by physics - which is typically not much, and presently not any, but has added up over the last decade to make this a more concrete project which managed to attract a moderate but existent amount of interest. It's my way to make constructive use of my desperation about the state of the world, and an antidote to the nagging feeling that what I work on isn't particularly useful for the vast majority of people on this planet.

Sure, I can give you a long speech about the purpose and importance of fundamental research and how it is interesting for the broader public, not to mention that it is where my personal interests are. But it remains a fact that investing into fundamental research is a luxury of societies at a very advanced level. And if I open a newspaper after a day sitting through seminars it tells me the world really has other problems than axion-dilaton coset SL(2,R)/SO(2) 7-branes or similar fun. Sometimes more, sometimes less so. Presently more so.

But hey, as I told you previously, to me science is more than a profession, to me science is a worldview. And thus my interpretation of the problems we are currently facing on a global scale is a lack of scientific method, which has resulted in an erosion of trust in the systems that govern our lives. We are failing to update these systems and their institutions so they be able to deal with our increasingly complex global problems.

Finishing the Scientific Revolution

Science is as old as mankind. We analyze the world we observe to better understand it, and to make our lives more pleasant. The scientific method has proven to be extremely useful to achieve this; this method being nothing but inventing a model for the world based on previous knowledge, and testing how well it works. If it works well or at least better than available models, we call that progress and use it for further examinations. If not, we discard it and look for something better. At least that's the idea. A lot can be said about how this so straight-forwardly sounding manner has worked out during our history in less straight-forward ways, but to say the very least, it has worked tremendously well for the natural sciences.

Science in its organized form has taken off in the 16th and 17th century, and has changed our world dramatically. This period in our history during which we saw a tremendous amount of progress in the fields astronomy, physics, biology, medicine and chemistry is often called the “Scientific Revolution” - a revolution of thought rather than a revolution of governance that kick-started the development of technologies and established scientific research as one of the most important drivers of progress in our societies. We find during this period the names of great thinkers like Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Franklin and Descartes, to only mention a few.

Today we study as sophisticated areas as neuroscience, nanotechnics, immunology, microbiology or endocrinology. Don't worry if you don't know the latter, I didn't know it either, I Googled it and found it's the study of the glands and hormones of the body. And then there are of course the computer sciences, which are possibly the most impressive outcome of the technological developments altogether and the advancements of computing power itself has had a large impact on the possibilities in scientific research.

I'm not a historian and this isn't an essay about the history of science. I'm just telling you that because this revolution doesn't include the social sciences. Most notably, academic research in the fields that we would today call sociology, politics and economy are still waiting to obtain the attention they deserve. In these areas, the dark middle ages of trial and error in applications have lasted some more centuries, with the situation only slowly changing today. The reason for this is not hard to find. Understanding political or social systems is much more complicated than understanding the motion of planets, since the latter is a system that can very easily be simplified to a model that is computable even by hand. In the political and social sciences, arguments are lead mostly in the narrative, and have for long been detached from what actually was happening in politics. Neither did much of these studies reach the broad public for most of it is not part of the standard school education, as is physics, biology and chemistry.

It is only now, in the 21st century, that the advances have gotten far enough so we begin to understand some aspects of systems as complex as for example our global economy. In fact, the economical system is probably the best investigated case that falls into this category, for there is money to make there. The political system lags behind. This lag is is crucial because it is needed to deal with the progress driven by the natural sciences. What we are running into is a dangerous imbalance in which new technologies change our societies faster than the governing institutions can deal with these changes.

Results from the natural sciences are today very well integrated into our daily lives. Think about architecture, engineering, drug tests, health checks, and numerous investigations behind every single consume item, from your car to canned food.

In the last decades one also finds increasingly more examples for a similar integration of the social sciences. Think about architecture again, but take into account the question what group of people the building will host and what amount of interactivity you want to create. A lot of thought has been put into this for example with PI's building. Or think about city planning in general. Economic modeling too has become quite common, though it is tainted by ideological believes and lacks scientific rigor. And then there are the cases where governments commission models to better understand the outcome of planned regulations, like various forms of carbon taxes. These are all cases where one sees some first glimpse of a development I am sure will speed up rapidly in the coming years: an increasing application of insights from the social sciences to our daily lives, in a more organized manner.

And after four centuries, it is really about time to finish the scientific revolution.

Reestablish Trust

And why is this necessary? It is necessary because we simply are no longer able to deal with the problems we are facing. Just look at the present economic crisis. If you stop for a moment trying to find somebody to blame, then the problem comes down to:

1. Lack of understanding how the system works, i.e. studies that would have been necessary are missing.


2. Paying more attention to ideology than to scientific argumentation, i.e. failure acknowledge the importance of objectivity.


3. Failure of our political system to incorporate knowledge in a timely manner.

You can say the same with regard to the question why climate change is so slow to be addressed. You can say the same about lots of other outstanding problems, may that be the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, water shortages, or even your country's inability to come to any conclusion of how to address coming energy scarcity. These are processes that happen, but they happen excruciatingly slow and are hindered by unnecessary rhetoric and psychological games.

Is it really surprising then that many people have lost trust in what politicians say? Is it really surprising that we are now facing several years of aftermath of a economic crisis because of lacking faith in this system?

The conclusion that I draw from this is that the most important thing we need is a solid basis for arguments, and a way to integrate won insights. We need to improve the systems we are operating in, the systems that are meant to allow us to live together with a minimum amount of friction and a maximum amount of progress.

I neither believe that human behaviour is predictable, nor do I think the goal can be to replace human decisions with 'scientifically correct' decisions - this is plain nonsense. What I think however is possible, and necessary, is to make sure decisions can be reached and incorporated fast and easily. One should make a clear distinction here between opinion and the process to reach and implement a decision from opinions. What I am talking about is to set up the system, based on scientific insights, to provide a better environment for those living within it to pursue individual goals without being hindered by outdated institutions.

Or, in short, make sure the system can correct its own mistakes.

The Lightcone Institute

So that's what the institute is about. It is about bridging the gap between the natural, the social, and the computer sciences to initiate this change. And since it is a change in which the scientific community plays a pivotal role, one can't do it without addressing the problems of the academic system itself. The problems of the academic system are in many ways reflections of the larger problems we see in our societies: We have a system that is hindering progress, and knowledge about this dysfunctionality is not incorporated. The system is outdated and unable to correct itself.

You see the above discussed points reflected in the four pillars of the Institute's research. There is the interdisciplinary research to make these connections between the different areas of science, there is the basic research to provide the fundamental pieces that might be missing, there is researching research to address the role of the scientific community. And then there is the essential public outreach to get the hopefully won insights to where they needs to be. The latter point is meant to include communication to the public, as well as to private, academic, and governmental institutions.

You will find that on the website the areas of research are populated with some possible research topics that fall into these categories, like Social-Ecological Systems, Network Science, or the Future of Scientific Publishing.

As to the operation of the Institute, it is a directed research in that the Institute has a clearly defined mission that studies should be dedicated to. Here are the mission statements:

• The Institute's research is to be beneficial and relevant for society.


• The research is focused on interdisciplinary work between the natural and social sciences, fundamental research, and the sociology of science.


• The Institute aims to strengthen the public outreach of the scientific enterprise and actively communicate its research endeavors.


• The Institute will collaborate closely with political institutions, businesses and academia.

All that's missing is money and people.

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance to keep pace with the times.”

~Thomas Jefferson

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Think ahead

Here is a self-quote, dated January 3rd 2008, from my post On the Edge:

“What is currently much more scary is the global economical instability. I am not much of an an economist, but even I sense there will be some major economical crisis rather soon, possibly even this year. If you need any indicators, take Bush talking about the 'fundamentals of the economy being strong'. The whole situation in the US is incredibly unstable. There is a large percentage of people living damned close by poverty level. If their situation gets only slightly worse, they will be pushed to fight for survival, not because they want to, but because they have no other way out.”

This just came back into my mind after reading “Crises on Many Fronts” by Bob Herbert in today's NYT.

“But if we are indeed caught up in the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, the ones who will fare the worst are those who already are poor or near-poor. There are millions of them, and yet they remain essentially invisible. A step down for them is a step into destitution.”

Right. And if we wait another year, then maybe somebody will come to realize what I meant with unstable did include the political situation.

This is your economy on drugs

The Reward Circuit

Happiness and self-fulfilment are common goals in the game that is human life. However complex the rules of that game, eventually it is a neurobiological response in our brains that makes us feel happy or satisfied. Natural selection has favored those species who desired to achieve behavior that was beneficial for the survival of the individual and its kind. In the course of evolution, we were thus endowed with what neuroscientists call the “reward circuit”. The reward circuit becomes active if we do what is necessary or beneficial for survival, such as eating, learning, or having sex.

Research has shown the reward circuit is not only a direct response that leads to the production of endorphins responsible for happiness. It is also coupled to the hippocampus, our learning and memory center, and the prefrontal cortex, relevant for our thinking and planning. This enables us to develop possibly quite complicated tactics to trigger the reward mechanism. With the rise of human culture, many secondary goals have developed such as the desire for money or human touch, and tactics explained in all the self-help books that promise a way to reach them. This reward circuit provides a powerful mechanism on the level of an individual that has been enormously effective in driving progress of the whole species.

There are shortcuts to immediate happiness. Drugs like cocaine, speed, angel dust, heroine, morphine, alcohol and tobacco stimulate the reward system, and often provide greater pleasure than is normally the result of natural stimulation. With repeated drug use, neurotransmitters in the brain develop a substance tolerance, it then takes a larger dose to achieve the same effect. Simultaneously, the user becomes less receptive to natural stimuli and loses interest in activities other than obtaining the next dose. Changes in the brain metabolism cause withdrawal effects, which makes it hard to fall back into a previously stable and pleasant state. Our ability to learn from rewards and direct our actions towards this goal then leads to a planning of how to get the next drug. It becomes the center of interest, many users report a constant obsession with the drug. In many cases, the addict neglects primary survival needs.

All of the mentioned drugs have well studied negative consequences for the user's physical and mental health. But the knowledge of these consequences is generally not sufficient for the addict to break out of this vicious cycle that rewards repeated short-term kicks on the expenses of long-term happiness. If left untreated, it will finally lead to breakdown or death.

Knowledge of this lacking ability for self-correction of the reward circuit has therefore caused us to issue laws, educate our children, and help those in need. These are measures to protect us from our own weaknesses to avoid potentially fatal damage.

There are other ways to cheat on our reward system, that include overeating or extreme sports that trigger hormone rush, actions that become feasible at a high civilizationary level when primary survival needs are easily fulfilled. The boundaries between what unhealthy behavior requires external constraints are flowing and subject of discussion, which strongly depends on the consequences of substance abuse for the rest of the society, the tension lies between personal freedom and damage to other individuals. Tobacco use has by now in many countries been widely banned in public buildings. Obesity, though not an addiction, has been argued to require action.

Besides these substance addictions, impulse control disorders like pyromania, or compulsive stealing and gambling have similar effects of immediate satisfaction and high rewards. “Monetary reward in a gambling-like experiment produces brain activation very similar to that observed in a cocaine addict receiving an infusion of cocaine,” says Hans Breiter, co-director of the motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Centre at the Massachusetts General Hospital [1].

Many facets of human behavior pursued today are hard or impossible to trace back to primary needs, like the desire to appear on TV or to collect shoes.

Return on Investment and other Highs

Similar reward mechanisms operate in the systems that govern our lives. These incentives eventually go back to individual rewards, and they are often institutionalized for larger groups of people and based on secondary criteria that have grown out of primary needs. Companies don't strive for sex, they strive to accumulate capital. Interest groups don't hunt for food but for attention. Nations don't seek understanding but influence.

One can cheat on these reward mechanisms as well, which leads to the emergence of tactics that run contrary to the original intention of being beneficial for the society. We therefore have means to constrain damaging behavior like proper product information, property rights, ethical codes for scientific conduct, trade laws, or marketplace regulations. Again, the question of what needs attention is a discussion constantly in flux. The aim is in all cases to ensure that the pursuit of individual interests within a given system results in desirable long-term and large-scale trends.

October 2008, the world economy is struggling. The system meant to distribute resources, free capital, and connect traders in a virtuous cycle of demand and supply is choking after warnings have been ignored for more than 15 years [2,3,4]. Politicians and economists likewise praised the wisdom of the free market to regulate itself. Thousands of bankers all over the globe acted for their own immediate advantage, neglecting long-term risks, ignoring tell-tale signs of more problems to come. Again and again proposed political regulations to ensure the well-being of the society on the long run were put aside, argued to dampen the highs of the gambles. Bonuses of top managers increased to absurd rates, became the norm, increased further. What has worked for some became the goal for more, an upward cycle in constant need of higher kicks.

“Dissatisfaction over high pay, business failures and American-style laissez-faire capitalism has been sweeping across Europe for some time, but it has been given new impetus as investors and politicians struggle to make sense of a credit vise that tightens by the day.
Even before the latest tumult, steps were taken in the Netherlands and France to limit excessive compensation, and the issue is back on the agenda [...]”

Landon Thomas, NYT [5]

Disregard of long-term goals combined with immediate rewards in a system rushing from one high to the next became accepted as the norm. Consume has turned into an antidote to national and personal downs, was made into a value pursued for it's own sake, producing absurdities along the way, and inhibiting the ability for self-correction:

“[C]onsumerism is based on the fact that we are a society dominated by business interests. There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment - Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. The business press has been quite explicit about this goal.”

~ Noam Chomsky [5]

Reliance on the infallibility of the reward circuit results in a neglect of factors necessary for the survival of the society as a whole.

Until finally the system breaks down.

I think we're in for an indefinite period of withdrawal, trying to return to a stable mode of operation.

Recovery

“[T]oday there is only one incentive for doing business, and that is the maximization of profits. But the incentive of doing social good must be included. There need to be many more companies whose primary aim is not that of earning the highest profits possible, but that of providing the greatest benefit possible for human kind.”

is how Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus summarizes the need to pay attention to the needs of the society as a whole [7].

But how well do we know long-term effects? And if we know them, can we be sure they are implemented sufficiently fast to avoid damage?

Remarkably enough, I agree with Alan Greenspan on the cause of the problem. In his speech at Georgetown University on Oct 2nd [8] he said “Reputation and the trust it fosters have always appeared to me to be the core attributes required of competitive markets.”

Yes, the central issue is trust. But not trust in the traders, but trust in our ability to detect and correct shortcomings of the system. A detection that should not be hindered by faith-based argumentation, should not be tampered with by rhetoric, should not be driven by psychological effects. It requires a solid data base, shared knowledge, objective evaluation, and validation of models and predictions. In short, it requires a scientific method to reestablish trust in the working of our political and economical systems.

The Scientific Revolution, which has lead to a stunning progress in the natural sciences four centuries ago, has not yet been extended to the applications of social sciences. To a large extend, developments in these areas are still made in a process of trial and error, experiments with the well-being of billions of people. It is a slow learning process often plagued by a lacking ability to learn from past mistakes. Given that trial and error has worked for a long time, and that the computational prerequisits to deal with large amounts of data are only available since recently, it is not surprising this revolution did not take place earlier. But it is about time we upgrade to the 21st Century.

Bottomline

The Scientific Revolution is unfinished, and we need to finish it.

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[1] “Gambling - Like Food and Drugs - Produces Feelings of Reward in the Brain," by Harald Franzen, Scientific American, May 24, 2001.
[2] “The Reckoning - Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy," by Peter S. Goodman, NYT October 8, 2008.
[3] “The End of Arrogance - America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role," Spiegel, Oct 2008.
[4] “The Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: The 12 Steps to Financial Disaster,” Nouriel Roubini Feb 5, 2008.
[5] “Culture of Outsize Pay for Bankers, Born on Wall Street, Has Europe Fuming,” by Landon Thomas Jr., NYT, Sep 30 2008.
[6] Interview with Noam Chomsky - “The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System,” Spiegel Oct 10 2008.
[7] “Capitalism Has Degenerated into a Casino', Spiegel, Oct 10 2008.
[8] “Markets and the Judiciary,” Dr. Alan Greenspan, Sandra Day O’Connor Project Conference, October 2, 2008

Yes, he can have a dream

But a dream it will likely remain. German newspapers have been discussing back and forth during the last days whether Barack Obama while on visit in Germany should be allowed to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate at July 24th in Berlin (SPEECH AT BRANDENBURG GATE? -German Politicians Are in an Obama Tizzy). The Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit says yes, the chancellor Angela Merkel says no. Today the topic made it into the NYT which titles

Prospect of Obama at Brandenburg Gate Divides German Politicians

You didn't ask for my opinion, but in this case I'm with Merkel though she's in the wrong party (can you imagine I'd vote for a party that has a C for Christian in its name?). Obama isn't an elected representative of any nation, at least not yet. It is pretty clear he wants to speak in front of a historically loaden location like the Brandenburg Gate to help the campaign in his own country, and I think Germany should try to stay out of other countries election campaign.

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Aside: I do presently neither receive nor can I send any emails. The problem seems to have occurred about 12 hours ago and before somebody gets up on the east coast it probably won't be resolved. So please don't expect me to reply to any emails I didn't get. In case it's really urgent recall an invention named 'the phone'.

Update 4pm: Email works again.

BioFuel

In March, Biofuel was the title story of the Time magazine. In The Clean Energy Scam, Michael Grunwald reports on 'new studies' that investigate closely especially the efficiency in using cropland for growing such 'renewable' energy sources. I was puzzled about the following discussion in which it was 'revealed' that ethanol production from corn does not make sense, neither economically nor ecologically. Instead, under quite general circumstances, more energy is needed to produce the ethanol than is obtained from it.

If one takes into account all energy inputs more than 140% more energy (mostly high value oil and natural gas) is needed to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than is in the ethanol itself. There are various environmental impacts of corn ethanol, including severe soil erosion of valuable cropland, and heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides that pollute rivers. Because significant amounts of fossil fuel energy are used in ethanol production, large quantities of carbon dioxide are produced and released into the atmosphere, and during the fermentation process about 25% of the carbon from the sugars and starches is released as carbon dioxide [1]. Besides this, growing the crops takes large amounts of water which in some parts of the US is already becoming an issue that will likely worsen in the soon future.

And that doesn't even touch on the ethical problems it causes because ground that's used for biofuel crops is ground that's not available for food production. (The type of corn used in biofuels is not the same that is used to feed humans.) Some of the richest countries, among them the United States, Brazil, Canada and several European Union states, have large and expanding food-for-fuel industries. The poorer countries, among them Egypt and Venezuela, have been highly critical of biofuels because the crops used to make them take food off the table.

I was puzzled by this biofuel discussion because it wasn't news to me. Okay, I couldn't have quoted the exact numbers or details, but I knew the general sentiment. Neither did I have the impression this was news to commenters on my blog when it was casually mentioned in a previous post. I am not usually following these things too closely, I mean, I have a job and spend most of my time reading papers anyway. So, I think it must have been my younger brother, who is a mechanical engineer, explaining me that, which leaves me wondering how widely known these facts were.

To state the most important fact again and really clearly: Growing 'biofuel' does not make your country more independent of oil and gas resources, because you need more of these resources to grow it than you eventually gain. The only thing it does is a psychologically interesting 'greenization' of energy. You could as well use an oil-powered turbine to pump water up a hill, then let it run down again and call that clean energy from water-power. The energy you gain back is of course less than you invested, but since it's now an 'alternative' energy it deserves governmental subsidies. (I think they've actually been doing that somewhere in Switzerland, but can't recall the details, anybody has a reference?) It's not an investment that makes sense in any way.

I probably would have forgotten about the biofuel, hadn't I read some time later that the German ministry for environment wakes up when hearing biofuel might drive up food prices and utters confused statements ("muss auf den Prüfstand"), before calming down and proclaiming one would hold onto what the plan says. Meanwhile Sean from Cosmic Variance states that Energy Doesn't Grow on Trees and is pleased that "People seem to be gradually catching on to the fact that biofuels are an especially wasteful and dirty energy storage system." Talking to my friends, they confirm my sense that little of that was surprising.

So I tried to find out how 'new' actually is that news. Here's the story. Since the early eighties, there have been dozens of studies showing that ethanol production from corn and other crops is not an economically and ecologically sensible option. It is expensive and under quite general circumstances takes more energy than one gains from it. Two articles by the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) dealing with ethanol production using corn for liquid fuels from biomass reported a negative energy return [2,3]. These reports were reviewed by 26 expert U.S. scientists independent of the USDOE; their findings concluded that the conversion of corn into ethanol energy was negative and these findings were unanimously approved. Since then other investigations have confirmed these earlier findings.

In 2002 and 2004 there were reports from the US Department of Agriculture [4,5] in which it was claimed biofuels could have a net energy return (34% in 2002, 67% in 2004). These studies however were based on wrong assumptions that neglected needed energy sources, and the conclusions not appropriate. This has has been documented in further research articles. For an excellent review, see [1].

Now this makes me wonder how can it be possible that this knowledge has been so consequently disregarded? Sure, there's big money in the game, there's lots of people trying to make profit, but how can we life with a system in which scientific studies are just ignored? And now that the problems are catching up with us, and we're possibly seeing the first signs of a global food crisis, I read

"Food-summit draft rejects biofuels control

The final declaration of United Nations food summit will not call for controls on biofuels even though almost every delegate at conference agrees that turning crops into fuel has had some role in raising food prices to crisis point. A draft declaration making the rounds at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the sponsor of the three-day summit which ends Thursday night, calls only for more study on the effect of biofuels on food security. "

More study?

Why this bothers me: The world economy is a very powerful system that has without any doubt done an incredibly well job increasing wealth, improving the infrastructure and the lives of billions of people. But not in all cases does this pursuit of micro-interests lead to a desirable outcome on the macro-level, especially not when long time and/or distance scales are involved. To put it bluntly: what do I care what happens in a decade somewhere in Africa? Its for this reason that we have political systems that ought to implement these aspects. Unfortunately, our political systems are far too slow and inefficient for this task, especially on a global level.

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[1] Pimentel D, Patzek T (2005) Ethanol Production using corn, switchgrass, and wood and biodiesel production using soybean and sunflower. Natural Resources and Research 14(1): 65-76.
[2] ERAB (1980) Gasohol. Energy Research Advisory Board, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC.
[3] ERAB (1981) Biomass Energy. Energy Research Advisory Board, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC.
[4] Shapouri H, Duffield JA, Wang M (2002) The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update. USDA, Office of Energy Policy and New Uses, Agricultural Economics. Report No. 813. 14 p.
[5] Shapouri H, Duffield J, McAloon A, Wang M (2004) The 2001 Net Energy Balance of Corn-Ethanol (Preliminary). US Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC.