The anti-Kurzweil

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder is a fascinating mess. It’s centered around a single big idea – that some systems are not merely robust to disruption and shocks, but are capable of actively gaining from them. Taleb’s background is in finance and trade and his theory is deeply rooted in his trading strategies, but it goes far beyond that, purporting to be a very general theory of systems and indeed life in general. The book spins out implications of this idea at multiple levels, from economics to diet to basic philosophies of life. It is deeply personal – the author is clearly trying to pack a lifetime’s worth of thought into this package, which works both for and against the ideas. Taleb is in desperate need of an editor but probably too arrogant to accept anybody else’s intervention in his work. So the book feels kind of shapeless. 

Taleb’s thinking quite deliberately does not take the form of any kind of traditional academic theorizing. If there’s anything like a formal theory in this book, it is so enmeshed in his personality and biases that I couldn’t really make much sense of it. This is despite the fact that I share a large subset of his biases, his contempt for high-modernist central planning for instance. He is so confident of the correctness of his biases that he feels free to build them into this theorizing without much justification. The result is that the book quite often reads like a personal brag than a philosophical or scientific treatise (his habit of boasting about his physical strength and calling his opponents “half-men” also contributes to this impression).


So for me the actual content of this book remained tantalizingly obscure. This was frustrating, because it did seem like there were some deep, important, and profound truths hidden away, but they weren’t conveyed in as effective a way as I would have liked. Perhaps it is too much aimed at the world of standard economics that he despises, a foreign territory to me (but he despises all of academia just as much). If I try to summarize my understanding of what he is saying, it comes out both trivial and contradictory. For instance: apparently the secret of economic antifragility is to arrange your resources so they have limited downsides but at least small probabilities of large or unlimited upsides. Sounds like a great principle, but doesn’t sound like any more useful (to an economic naïf like me) than “buy low, sell high”.


The contradictory part is when he gets into ethics, where his main principle seems to be that one is obligated to have “skin in the game” – that is, personal exposure to risk. He is exquisitely scornful of the Wall Street types who manage to profit while destroying value for others, but how is that different from what he does? Financial trading (unlike actual economic production) is inherently zero-sum, if you profit, you are inherently always taking advantage of somebody else. I’m missing some distinction that I’m sure is there. Perhaps taking advantage of your peers (those who have the same skill and risk portfolio as yourself) is OK, but preying on the defenseless masses is not? A deeply ethical/aesthetic sensibility pervades Taleb’s work, and I find that quite appealing, but his sensibility is different from mine in ways I can’t quite tease out.


This short quote:

You cannot sit and moan about the world. You need to come out on top. (p 386)

encapsulates an important quality of Antifragile. He advocates action and winning over being right in any abstract academic sense. Academics don’t have skin in the game, they don’t suffer when they are wrong, thus their pronouncements have no weight. This makes some sense, but also doesn’t seem to leave room for any standard of value but money or power. The frank acknowledgement of the brutally competitive nature of life, while no doubt common on Wall Street, is pretty jarring in a book with the intellectual ambitions of this one. It’s an anti-intellectual stance, denying the possibility of any sort of un-self-interested enquiry. Taleb is well aware of this problem and his rhetorical strategy is to create a couple of separate personas to manage the contradiction of being an anti-intellectual intellectual. Fat Tony is the street-smart winner, uninterested in ideas for their own sake, while Nero Tulip represents the more cultured and cultivated side of life (but he too must play and win financial games).


One passage in the book really clarified Taleb’s position in the intellectual firmament for me: where he figures out a way to describe himself by identifying his polar opposite:

I was just reading…about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality. I felt some deep disgust — as would any ancient — at the efforts of the “singularity” thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion. (p370)

I’ve mentioned Kurzweil a few times here, mostly to note his boring drone of a speaking style. Taleb seems to have the opposite flaw – he is so determined to be interesting that he doesn’t know when to put his personality aside and let his ideas speak for themselves. My own background is a lot closer to Kurzweil’s though, so maybe I am just too much of a nerd to catch the antifragility train.

Speaking of Kurzweil and AI – it occurs to me that minds and biological systems are necessarily antifragile (or at least robust), due to their evolutionary history. Every biosystem that exists has managed to do so despite being situated in a chaotic, dynamic and often hostile world. Computer systems are nothing like that. Like the formal theories of mathematical logic that gave rise to them, they are practically designed to fall apart at even a single mistake or contradiction. People are pretty aware of this and have been trying to back-fit various kinds of robustness onto computers, but it never goes very deep. Someday someone will reconstruct computation and computational intelligence on a truly robust foundation.

It is Forbidden to Forbid

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Anarchist Bookfair this past weekend (previous years here). As usual, had trouble embracing the scene. Bought The Art of Not Being Governed which I've been meaning to read for awhile, and some others.

One thing that always interests me, but it's sort of a forbidden topic, is how all these people who are vehemently anti-capitalist and anti-existing-system manage to survive. Somehow they feed themselves after all, and if it's through the underground economy that's still an economy of some sort. They don't all live on communes in the country.

This question arises on a different level when it comes to the vendors, who are running little businesses promoting an anti-business attitude. Some of these seem to be fairly large-scale and stable affairs. If I was hostile I would use this to dismiss the whole scene, but I'm not really – any revolutionary or agent of change has to simultaneously live within the world as it is while plotting to overthrow it, and thus has to live the contradictions.

Anyway, for some reason the day before my own mental barriers between anarchy and entrepeneurmanship suffered a partial collapse which led me to open up this t-shirt shop. So far it has neither enriched me very much nor done much to subvert the dominant paradigm, but it's early days.

Caught a bit of activist Scott Crow's presentation; the takeaway I got from him was that open collectives (where anybody can join) don't work very well; closed tightly focused groups with shared values work better. That makes a lot of sense, but raised a lot of unanswered questions on just what anarchist governance could mean. The same largely unspoken question hovered over a panel on anarchist parenthood.

Review of Graeber's Debt

David Graeber has emerged as one the of the founding intellectuals of the Occupy movement, and his book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years has received a good bit of attention as a result. It promises to reveal a new and powerful way to look at the world, reconfiguring our notions of money, credit, and basic human relations. Even better, from my perspective, it has a worked-out theory in opposition to the libertarianoid, market-based view of humanity, and an explanation of how that displaced the truth. Sounds perfect for me! But I wanted to like this book more than I actually did.

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The traditional economic story is that we started with barter, and when that proved inconvenient, invented money and markets. Graeber will have none of that. According to him, no real society ever operated on barter in the usual sense. The real start of economics is loose systems of personal obligation and credit. In tribal or village societies where everyone knows everyone else, it is not hard to keep track of what favors are owed to who. Enumerated exchanges, whether by barter or by money, are reserved for strangers with whom one can expect to not interact with much in the future. Society is more like a potluck party than a market -- everyone is expected to bring something to the table, but it would be very rude to make explicit demands, or try to bargain prices.

Graeber calls this "baseline communism" and it is the economics of ordinary human relations, dinner parties, and exchange within a community, firm, or workgroup (he doesn't mention Coase, oddly). This vision runs completely counter to the usual economists's ways of thinking, where self-interest is paramount and nothing that is not priced and convertible to utility units can exist. Graeber's agenda seems to be in part to assert a new common sense, one based on normal human relations rather than calculation. As a mathematical type myself, I am only partly buying this -- or, as a rationalist, I have to believe that self-interested motives underlie human behavior at some level -- which doesn't mean that Graeber is wrong that naked, explicit calculation is something more recent, new, and anti-human.

The way violence, or the threat of violence, turns human relations into mathematics will crop up again and again...it is the ultimate source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt (p14)

This introduces another theme of his, which is that the concept of debt confuses the moral and the mathematical, it turns the normal idea of obligatory behavior into something quantifiable, fungible, and as a result more sinister and onerous. I confess to not quite getting this idea enough to describe it very sensibly. But I think his agenda is clear enough -- in his view, monetary debts have become tools of oppression, sometimes obviously such as in the cases of debt-peonage, but more subtly as a tool of social control. That this has been allowed to happen is because of the confusion of such debts with moral obligations, and breaking that link is what he is about.

...in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land"

As hinted above, it is war and violence that, as a side-effect of destroying traditional society, replaces it with the cash nexus:

Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y...and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result...was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage" -- and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence....(p238-9)

So, Greaber is telling a story that has been told many times before -- the fall of traditional societies to centralization, bureaucratization, war, the state, rationalization -- but he's doing it through a lens that is new (at least to me), that of debt and differing conceptions of money and trade.

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He ends with a concrete proposal:

It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality,, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. (p 390)

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So, what didn't I like? Something in the tone of the book seemed off to me. It's an odd mix of academic anthropology and political special pleading. This makes it difficult for me to read, because one never knows how much to trust the authors' objectivity. A more self-critical spirit would be welcome.

Graeber is constantly speculating on the thinking and motivations of people who lived thousands of years ago and/or half a world away, in a breezy and offhand manner, as if they are going to be applying his version of common sense in what is merely a different context. This runs counter to what I normally think of as the anthropological style, which heightens the strangeness, difference, and ultimate unknowability of different cultures. At one point in my life I ate that kind of stuff (eg, Cliffeord Geertz and Michael Taussig) right up. Graeber's more down-to-earth approach is quite different, and perhaps refreshing in a certain way, but I don't trust it.

My mistrust is heightened by one rather glaring example where he refers to a world that I do know well, and gets quite a large number of things wrong:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages. (p96)

I can count at least six errors in that one sentence. Which may not be important, but doesn't lead me to trust Graeber on the areas where I am less expert. Also, I went into this book hoping to learn more about the tradition of Jubilee and debt-forgiveness, but he didn't get into that very much.

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One more quote:

We have already seen how both Vedic and Christian teachings thus end up making the same curios move: first describing all morality as debt, but then, in their very manner of doing so, demonstrating that morality cannot really be reduced to debt, that it must be grounded in something else.

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and a special note for MLK day: it occurred to me that in his I Have a Dream Speech he inverts the metaphoric use of debt that is Graeber's subject:

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance

Awhile back I suggested that the only solution to our economic problems was a Biblical jubilee, and pointed to some economists who were talking semi-seriously about it. Now here's another one, with a twist that could make it work: rather than have one every 49 years, do it probabilistically, with a 2% chance in every year, so people don't game the system.

I wonder if a non-global jubilee would work. What if you only forgave the debts of a randomly-chosen 1/5 of the economy every ten years, or something?

I don't suppose something like this would ever happen; there is a built-in bias against random processes in government, perhaps because of its inevitable extrapolation. There used to be a draft lottery, and some public goods are distributed that way (such as slots in desirable schools in San Francisco), so it's not inconceivable.

Book Review -- Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get A Life

This chatty and engaging book by Thomas Geoghegan explores the little-known world of the present-day German industrial economy -- a form of quasi-socialism which involves large measures of worker control, through unions, "works councils", and other mechanisms. Contrary to what you would expect if you read only the financial press, this model appears to work quite well -- Germany is the world's biggest exporter (outdoing China), and they've managed to retain and make use of a skilled manufacturing workforce. According to Geoghegan, the lifestyle of a typical middle-class German is vastly better that that of a similar USian, at least along some obvious dimensions (vacation time, guaranteed health care, job security and hence no need to work like a dog to keep your job) and some non-obvious ones (a strong feeling of social solidarity, the way job stability helps to build a high-value workforce).

This is a book of personal impressions rather than something systematically researched and thought out. Geoghegan wanders in and out of the country in a daze, not quite believing this can work. Most of the people he talks to in Germany believe their system is doomed and the Anglo-American model of capitalism will triumph there as it has everywhere, and the German workers will join the race to the bottom along with the rest of the world. Yet even the center-right parties (the Christian Democrats) have robust support for the existing system.

There is some wistful but unconvincing speculation about how the US could somehow someday adopt a model like this. I'm dubious. The social and economic fabric of the US has frayed so far that it is hard to imagine it coming together again to make a society like that of Germany, where people feel responsibility for each other and enact that responsibility through social institutions with enough actual power to restrain economic rapaciousness. OTOH, think about the hellish world that present-day Germany grew out of. So dramatic changes for the good can happen. I hope it doesn't require passing through utter catastrophe.

Geoghegan's earlier book, Which Side Are You On: Trying to be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back is also very good.

Speaking of solidarity, another interesting-looking book on my queue is Yellow Blue Tibia, a novel in which Stalin after the end of WWII enlists a troop of Soviet science fiction writers to create a a new threat to bind the country together -- sort of Watchmen meets Gary Shteyngart. Uniting-against-a-fake-common-enemy is a hoary idea, but presumably the setting puts a new spin on it.

I, for one, welcome our new Chinese technocrat overlords

Hacker/activist Jeff Lindsay was musing about what a technologist political party would look like (possibly inspired by today's idiot Thomas Friedman column which is best answered by this 50-year-old Jules Feiffer cartoon).

I mentioned the American technocracy movement, with its roots in Edward Bellamy's scary utopia and Thorsten Veblen's "soviet of technicians". But that's just me being retro; most technopolitics these days is larded up with libertarian ideology, so that the idea that scientists and engineers should actually run society is not even considered, because libs believe nobody should run society.

But I also accidentally learned today that almost all the leaders of China are engineers by training. The premier, Wen Jiabao is one of them -- he has a postgraduate degree from the Beijing Institute of Geology. He was on Fareed Zakaria's show today and despite being a ranking member of the Communist Party was recommending as his favorite books Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments and Marcus Aurelius.

So, we're doomed. Not to extinction perhaps, but to eclipse. We're run by a combination of lawyers and lunatics; how could a society run by wise engineers not surpass us? Presumably a society run by engineers will at least not neglect to invest in infrastructure like we do.

The US still has a lot on the ball in its ability to do science, engineering, and innovation. But I worry about the macro-scale level of investment necessary to continue to do such things, particularly in education. The advantage of a strong, centralized, semi-authoritarian state is that it can easily decide to make such investments. The post-WWII US had that property; all the centralizing forces of the war were redeployed into a military-industrial-academic complex that gave us the computer industry and the Internet. But that was in economic good times; now that we've squandered our wealth it is hard to maintain that kind of machine.

Reasons to be Local

[Or "I hate economists", parts MMCCCXLI and MMCCCXLII.]

So here is Arnold Kling piling onto a discussion (he's 3rd in a chain that started in the NYT) of economists mocking locavores, people who believe it's gennerally better to eat food produced locally. The crux of the libertardian argument is that the price of a vegetable accurately reflects all the costs that went into making it, particularly energy, so that buying local (if it is more expensive) is not really any better for the environment and may well be worse.

There are at least three responses to this that I can think of (aside from "fuck off"):

- Economics takes as axiomatic that people's preferences are unassailable. So if some hippies want to pay more for locally produced produce, who are you to tell them otherwise? Obviously they get more utility out of it. It's not like it's hard to discern the sometimes vast differences in quality between locally-grown produce and stuff that's been industrially produced and shipped across the country.

- Underlying the locavore ideology is a set of beliefs that may or may not be accurate but must be addressed in any sensible discussion. Among these: the idea that prices do not accurately reflect energy usage because of the massive subsidies given to petroleum-based economy (including highway construction and fighting trillion dollar wars in the Middle East). Some locavores believe that it's a moral duty to compensate for these distortions even at the cost of paying more at retail.

- Another value underlying locavorism is that local is better because it's more reliable and there are fewer intermediaries between producer and consumer. There is actual value in being able to look the grower of your beets in the eye and converse with him. There is value in having a short supply chain because it reduce the potential for adulteration.

And there's the feeling of unease at the astounding reach and complexity of global economic webs. This may be easier to see in the context of manufacturing. Sure, it's nice to be able to afford cheap stuff from China, but (a) sometimes it has poison in it, and (b) it makes us dependent on a bunch of heathens who don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Validly or not, it is easier to imagine a farmer two counties over as being a good guy than one two countries over.

I myself don't entirely buy into this sort of view, which might as well be called localism, which underlies a lot of the ecological, foodie, and other movements, especailly here at the southern end of ecotopia. It has elements of fear and reaction to it; in its extreme forms you end up as a survivalist hoarding guns and trying to grow all his food in the backyard because when the apocalypse comes, you can't rely on anybody. And it seems to be somewhat of a conservative, romantic reaction to the triumph of globalized capitalism -- which needs a response, but somehow farmer's markets don't seem quite adequate.

The flippant, arguments presented by economists illustrate very clearly the extraordinary poverty of thought produced by the crappy economic ideology exemplified by libertards. They are just so enraptured by their abstract models of how markets work that they don't bother to see if they actually apply to the actual world.



On a slightly more elevated plane, here's a couple of comments I made on Robin Hanson's blog. Hanson seems a lot smarter than Kling, but in these posts and elsewhere you can see a deformation professionelle not very far below the surface, a determination to reduce the complexity of social dynamics to some kind of univariate maximization of "status" or "utility". Blah. Not that that is not a useful stance sometimes, but really, what a boring way to view the world.

[[update: I forgot to mention that Kling is a corporate shill who used to write for the propaganda mill Tech Central Station. This piece that trashes Open Source as communism and praises Microsoft is a good example -- that its predictions were entirely wrong is somewhat forgiveable given that it was written in 2003, but check out the ad banner at the bottom.]]

Two talks on trust

[[update below with a review of the Ostrom talk]]

I made the mistake of getting Stanford's event calendar piped into mine, now I am constantly reminded of all the fascinating talks going on right next door, most of which I don't have time to go see (not that going to talks is a very good way of learning things). Here are two this week that are tempting me. This blog is already a declared Elinor Ostrom fan. The other one looks like it's more intellectually edgy. I wonder why it's at 7am? Maybe they're trying to ensure no actual gangsters attend?

[[edit: times are wrong, Stanford is confused about its time zone. Add 7 hours.]]

Elinor Ostrom (recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics / Political Science, Indiana University)

Thu Apr 8 12:30pm  

Annenberg Auditorium, 435 Lasuen Mall

Understanding Social Ecological Systems

Elinor Ostrom is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. She is also the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. Ostrom is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She is the recipient of many distinguished awards and has authored (and/or co-authored) numerous books including "Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons from Experimental Research (2003); The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptations (2003); The Samaritan's Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid" (2005); "Understanding Institutional Diversity" (2005); and "Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice" (2007).

This is event is co-sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Department of Economics.
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Codes of the Underworld: Trust, Honesty, and Symbolic Communication

Fri Apr 9 7am 

ENVIRONMENT & ENERGY BUILDING Room 101

Diego Gambetta, a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center this spring, will be presenting some of his work from Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton University press, 2009). With him will be three discussants exploring his work and connections with their own: Gerry Mackie (UCSD, Political Science), Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine & Stanford, Philosophy), Rebecca Bird (Stanford, Anthropology), and David Laitin (Stanford, Political Science). These scholars are all part of a large interdisciplinary group working towards a better understanding of trust, signaling, communication, and cooperation. This symposium will serve as a venue for a discussion of the interplay between the work of these five scholars and the wider disciplines that they represent.

Ostrom talk review

 Ostrom is an engaging speaker with a touch of academic drone, and I mean that in a good way -- her Nobel Prize did not seem to go to her head, and she's doing the same sort of work she's been doing for decades. Her talk was on her research on how social communities form rules to manage communal resources, and the various factors that go into making that successful (she had a list of a couple of dozen, such as size and mobility of the community, how bounded the resource is, and amount of communication between members. Her term for what she's studying is Social-Ecological Systems (SES) which emphasize the active role of social rules in managing natural resources. This talk didn't have anything at all about Knowledge Commons, which have a completely different set of dynamics and constraints.

I didn't get any really deep new insights, because so much of what she said just seemed like common sense to me (with some actual data to back it up, and a useful taxonomy of rule types). Unfortunately it's not common sense in the field of economics and policy, so her work is somewhat revolutionary and, with her newfound fame, may actually make a big difference for the better in how the world is run.

Another review

another Ostrom talk on video

The speed of money

Apparently there is an entire small industry devoted to reducing the latency of financial transactions (typically measured in milliseconds).

And that's only a tiny part of the larger industry that makes the infrastructure for electronic transactions of all sorts. Here's a random company in that field. On that site, go find "Switching engine demo" (can't link directly, it's all Flash). Watch out for the sharks!

My ignorance of the financial world is nearly total, but it seems to me that stuff like this must be either a symptom or a cause of the recent collapse. The existence of hundreds of thousands of hair-trigger electronic automated trading rules all linked to each other through near-instantaneous networks seems problematic. What kind of dynamic system does this create? Doesn't it sound like you could get small-scale bubbles happening on a second-to-second basis?

It also sounds like another indication that the financial industry is a net economic drain. Think of all the people working on shaving milliseconds off of financial transactions. What possible benefit are they bringing to society? Presumably the only reason to care about millisecond-scale latency of transactions is because it brings some kind of advantage, in other words, you are racing to make your trade before the next guy can. The relation of this to any actual economic value escapes me.

I am enough of a believer in capitalism to acknowledge that the capitalist function of allocating capital productively is worthwhile. In fact I found my way to this topic via a casual conversation with a VC -- and whatever you think about Silicon Valley VCs, at least they are actual investors, not pure speculators; unlike the sorts of people who slice up shitty mortgages and resell them and unlike people who are slaving away to shave milliseconds off of transaction times. But 95% of the energy of the financial world seems devoted to things that have no visible relation to actual, real-world economic value.

Is there a way to bring the financial world closer to reality? One possible answer is a tax on financial transactions, which would put some dampers on whatever crazy feedback loops might exist in this system. Hm, Keynes had this thought in 1936:

"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the situation is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States.

And here's a recent op-ed piece saying much the same thing.

Guard labor and open source

According to this paper by Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, an astonishing 26% of the US workforce in 2002 was engaged in non-productive "guard labor", meaning their work was not directed towards producing goods or services but was instead aimed at making sure that the wrong people did not help themselves to slices of economic pie that they were not supposed to have.

Compare this to 11% in contemporaneous Sweden, or 7% in the US in 1929.

I'd argue with some of the definitions and methodology in the paper, in both directions. For instance, supervisors are the largest category of guard labor, but it's hard to say that all of management is non-productive -- they aren't all PHBs, many make creating contributions other than merely riding herd on their employees (ie, they are thinking of someone like a low-level manager in a call center whose only job is to make sure employees don't stay too long on their bathroom breaks -- but there is also, say, Steve Jobs). On the other hand, there are entire industries that are effectively engaged in guard labor that are not counted in Bowles and Jayadev's measure, such as health insurance. And the finance industry is neither productive nor guard labor (I wonder what percentage of the economy is skimmers and con artists?).

Prisoners and the unemployed are also counted in the numbers for guard labor, because the concept depends on the idea of power and sanction, and prisoners and the unemployed are considered "necessary concomitants of the public and private sanctioning systems, respectively". This struck me as odd, but makes some sense when taking a macroeconomic point of view -- both the guards and the prisoners are people who are not doing actual economically productive work -- their labor is wasted as a direct result of the fact that the social system of power and property needs to be upheld.

Ideally we would also include those producing guns for private use, locks, security systems and the like, but we are not able to do so because of the lack of data.

The need for guard labor is related to the broader goal of understanding the role of institutions in the role of managing and reproducing the economic activity of society:

The insight we wish to develop is that securing conformity to institutions can be quite costly, and the cost differs among institutions and across time and space. Conformity achieved through the coordination of expectations or the internalization of norms, for example, may not be very costly, as in the case of driving on one side of the road or the other, or the voluntary compliance with tax laws in some countries. However, where conformity to a society'™s institutions is secured primarily through governmental coercion or privately deployed sanctions,the resource costs may be substantial. Examples include some authoritarian political systems, colonial regimes, and as we will see, highly unequal capitalist economies.

Intuitively, the more inequality in a society, the more guard labor it requires. There's a convincing scatterplot of GINI vs. guard labor fraction by US state included in this quite good profile of Bowles in a Santa Fe paper.

Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it's sand in the wheels.

Here's the last paragraph of the paper:

Fourth, illegitimate inequalities are costly to sustain. While cultures often justify vast differences in power and access to valued resources, the mind is not a blank slate on which such ideas as the divine right of kings or the superiority of the "˜white race" can be etched at will. Two decades of behavioral experiments have provided convincing evidence that humans in dozens of cultures are inequality averse, and that violations of norms or reciprocity often lead to costly confl‚icts.

Of course the counterargument to the view that guard labor is mere friction is pretty easy to make -- that all this guarding is actually necessary to make producers productive, via incentives and structuring. The ticket-taker at the movie theater produces nothing, but without the efforts of him and others, the actual movie-makers could not get paid and could not raise capital to produce anything. It might be more efficient to have a different scheme, for instance having entrance to the movies be free and producers supported by the government via taxation. That may sound absurd or totalitarian but just such a change is happening in academic publishing via the Open Access movement and free-access journals like PLoS. Institutions that did nothing but provide proprietary guards over content (like my former employer Elsevier) are on their way out.

In fact, the whole free/open source movement in software and elsewhere may be seen as a response to the unpleasantness of guard labor. Proprietary software requires licensing schemes (ticket-takers) that cause new bugs, interfere with legitimate uses, and more generally cause friction. More broadly, locking software behind a pay wall reduces the amount of sharing and requires frequent reinvention of the wheel. It's inefficient, and this drives engineers crazy. Most of the time they don't get to vote, but the FOSS movement arose as a direct response to some of the unpleasantness surrounding proprietary software and has in its way been amazingly successful.

Guard labor is in its most purest and most apparently wasteful form when it is guarding digital content. The question is why then, if our economy is more involved in producing content than ever before, is the fraction of guard labor so high? I suppose it is also true that guarding digital content takes more effort than guarding physical objects -- how much of the fraction is RIAA lawyers, or the army of private detectives employed by Monsanto to sue small farmers who allegedly use their genetically modified seed without paying (genes are basically digital content -- and I just watched Food, Inc. which goes into this story). Monsanto, like DRM, is friction, but capitalists would argue that it such friction is necessary to spur production. But there can't be all that many people employed doing this kind of work.

I was around for the birth of the open source movement and efficiency really had nothing to do with it -- it was a moral struggle, based on the anguish of the excluded when a once open resource suddenly being subject to enclosure and guarding. But its ongoing success happened because of efficiency and the self-interest of software producers and companies. It is interesting to hear arguments for more general economic equality and openness, usually derived from a moral or emotional basis, being made on the basis of macro-scale efficiency.

[[edit: I was constructivly flaming Bowles' frequent collaborator Herbert Gintis on open-source here]]

Nobel Prize in Anarchy

For awhile now I've been saying that economists should be paying attention to open-source and other commons-based models of production. How often does a radically new way to organize production come along, after all? It seems like academic economists should be studying the hell out of it. There are some books by Yochai Benkler and Steven Weber but they barely scratch the surface.

I was making this argument to Herbert Gintis, a prominent political scientist with a good book-review blog on Amazon. Gintis is a smart guy but has some weird blind spots (Israel and open source, for starters) which I could not resist poking at. Anyway, in the middle of the conversation, the Nobels in Economics were announced. I had never heard of the awardees but it turns out that one of them, Elinor Ostrom, won it specifically work on the structures of economic governance for in-common resources such as fishery stocks, water resources, and also "knowledge commons" such as open-source software projects. Huzzah! Well, I felt somewhat vindicated and also somewhat embarrassed to find that the economics profession was actually ahead of my recommendations. On the other hand, Ostrom is not an economist, she's in political science, and apparently a couple of famous economists who write for the New York Times were unfamiliar with her as well. Gintis was very familiar with her work but for whatever reason that didn't seem to affect his view of open source as economically trivial.

One of the famous economists who had not heard of Ostrom, Steven Levitt said: "...the short answer is that the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama." I'm not sure that's true. I see many libertarians on the net trying to get in front of this wave, even though her work is essentially a complete refutation of the libertarian framework of thought.

Libertarianism is erected on a foundation of individual rights, private property, self-interest, and markets. Notice what's missing? Any notion of society and in particular institutions, the very thing both of this years laureates were studying. People like Somin would like to think that because the institutions Ostrom is studying are not (in general) states that she's on his side. But Ostrom's work (OK, I haven't actually read it yet so I'm just going on net commentary) has more in common with critics of capitalism such as Karl Polanyi and left-anarchist theorists of cooperation like Kropotkin.

On reading some more of the Hayekian blogs I fear I may be doing an injustice to them (and maybe Ostrom), probably because I tend to conflate idiocies of net.libertarians with the more sophisticated theories of academics. Perhaps her work transcends left and right, which wouldn't bother me, those categories from the French Revolution seem to be increasingly stale. Not that they don't have some validity but for the last hundred years or so the two sides seem to spend most of their time taking on each other's worst characteristics. It would be nice to have some new ideas about how society should be governed and it would be nice to have those solidly grounded in empirical research. Ostrom's work seems to fit the bill.

One question I have is how these cooperatively-owned resources enforce their rules. For things like fisheries, there are community and peer enforcement of rules, but at some scale this turns into a state or something indistinguishable from it, I would think. Of course, with informational commons like Wikipedia or open-source their is no scarcity and hence no need to patrol for cheaters. Unfortunately we can't yet eat information, so the extension of open-source models to the physical world is questionable.

Some links:
Ostrom's win is a blow against simplistic private, market-based economies.

Academics debate just how Hayekian Ostrom's work is.

Creative Commons notices.

Here's Ostrom talking on "Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons":


I note she cautions against "top-down solutions".

Anarchy of Mind

Thanks to reader bhyde's recommendation I've been reading George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will, which is on the whole excellent. I can't quite believe that I never ran across it before, since I did my graduate work on somewhat similar issues. But while I explored all sorts facets of the control of behavior by networks of loosely-coupled goal-directed units, I was innocent of economics or utility theory, so missed out on some things.

The underlying idea of Ainslie's work is that we prefer more immediate rewards to longer term ones, and that the discount curve for such preferences is hyperbolic rather than the more rational exponential curve predicted by standard utility theory. The hyperbolic discount curve leads us to preferences that are not consistent over time, and thus to a process of "inter-temporal bargaining" between different versions (or parts) of ourselves.

The phenomenon of akrasia -- acting against one's own better judgement and values -- has been recognized for millenia, and has its most obvious manifestation in the form of addictions and the failure to overcome them. Ainslie extends his scope way beyond that, however, and attempt to explain everything from scratching intolerable itches to empathy using his framework. I'm not completely convinced, but I probably need to make another pass over the book to fully understand the theory.

Most interesting to me, he posits that the need to manage intertemporal relations between parts of the mind are the root of the self itself. Mental phenomena like will and selves results from attempts to build internal structures that constrain and rationalize divergent preferences. The structure of the person mirrors what we know of the structure of social institutions:

The historic difficulty of specifying what the self consists of doesn't come from its superfluousness, but the fact that it's a set of tacit alliances rather than an organ. The logic of limited war relationships naturally creates a population of cooperating processes, a fringe of outlaw processes, and a means of determining which will be which. And since limited warfare is conducted among individuals as well as within them, we can observe some of its properties in interpersonal examples.

Societies settle disputes within legal systems. Some depend on legislators...who lay down procedural principles. They've been the model for conventional allegorical theories of intrapersonal governance. But the most successful legal system in history, the English common law, has no lawgiver and no written constitution, only a tradition...

Like the common law, this process doesn't require an executive function to steer it. Nevertheless, a person's efficiency at developing personal rules s probably ncreased by executive processes....Thus "ego functions" may be learned on the bass of how they improve intertemporal cooperation.

Ironically, this picture of the person mirrors what our picture of a corporate hierarchy has become...people in corporations don't blindly follow orders, but act only when they're confident of each other's commitment to act. Executives don't function effectively by rationally analyzing facts as by finding facts that make good rallying points.

(p. 98-100)

All this is very reminiscent of Minsky's Society of Mind, which also had a large focus on competition between different parts of an individual's mind. Both theories paint a picture of the self as radically discordant, a network of semi-independent processes whose coordination is not given, but has to be achieved. However, Minsky focused more on cognition and mechanism and less on utility and reward.

Ainslie writes in a highly compressed style that is sometimes difficult to follow. His ideas raise more questions than they answer (for instance, they suggest ways to re-think some standard psychological ideas like the Freudian superego, authoritarian personality characteristics, and "disorders of volition" like depression). And when I read this kind of stuff I always worry a little bit if it is psychologically harmful -- given the effort we put into constructing coherent selves, subverting that effort by pulling the curtains aside and revealing the backstage machinery seems to entail a risk of spoiling the show. But these caveats aside, I found this book extremely worthwhile.

Here's a musical accompaniment:

Real Labor Day; Technical Work; Open Source Economics

Today is the real labor day; the one in September was an effort to disassociate the more conservative parts of the labor movement from the radical factions. May Day was relabeled as "Loyalty Day" by Eisenhower.

I'll link to this post I did on the fake labor day a couple of years ago on the nature of programming work.

Very few people in the computer industry seem to care about the unequal distribution of monetary gains in the technosphere. That some people get to be zillionaires while others slave away in cubicles seems very normal. In the heart of Silicon Valley where I work, everyone thinks they are going to get rich, and a significant enough fraction does. The open-source movement, a great idea in many ways, has only intensified the concentration of financial gain, where a few people who manage to occupy a strategic location in the system end up profiting over the unpaid work of others. Almost nobody seems to be critiquing this, but one exception is Seth Finkelstein, who focuses on how the unpaid labor of thousands of Wikipedia writers and editors has not only enriched the world, but a few individuals who get to take credit for this vast network of volunteers.

Oh well, I'm just bitter because I have managed pretty well to avoid getting rich, my interests have always either been non-commerical and/or mistimed (I had a proposal for a www-like system in 1986, a few years before the actual web took off). Luck has a lot to do with who wins in a winner-take-all economy; so does having a particular personality type. We live in a culture that worships outrageous success and disdains those whose accomplishments are modest. The genius of the labor movement was in giving a voice to the ordinary, in glorifying the mundane. Only partly successful, of course -- the dynamics that lead to inequality of status are powerful and perhaps innate to human existence; the global market economy did not invent them, it just perfectly embodies them.

The labor movement was a response to the dislocations of the industrial revolution. We are in the midst of a postindustrial revolution; new economic forms are being invented as we speak (virtualized companies, open source projects, intellectual commons...) and who knows how that's going to shake out. Nobody seems to have a very good model for how the information economy (where goods are expensive to create and free to reproduce) should relate to the everyday economy of scarcity, of things like food and energy. Open-source is creating great value for the world while the people who create it have to beg and scrounge to support their efforts. This seems wrong and unsustainable in the long term.

Report from Davos

I decided to skip Davos this year so am relying on reports like this one (via Whiskey Fire which has pointers to much more).

Two interesting factoids from this article: One, $25 trillion in market value has evaporated in the current financial crisis. That's a lot! Of course, the right interpretation is not that this much value vanished, but that that's how much fake value was hallucinated by an insane system that is now coming off of some kind of analog of a drug binge.

The other factoid is that you, dear reader, ar just as much to blame for this mess as the more obvious culprits, according to one of the economic luminaries at Davos:

One Davos regular, Washington-based Carlyle Group’s managing director David Rubenstein, said he thinks a key issue at this year’s gathering is “who is at fault.” Yet Rubenstein, who was saying at Davos two years ago that the outlook for leveraged buyouts was “very robust,” says responsibility shouldn’t be tied only to him or his industry.

“There are six billion people on the face of the earth, and probably about five billion participated in what went on,” Rubenstein said in an interview. “Everybody participated in some way or shape or form.”

BTW, if I were inclined to be a conspiracy nut, the Carlyle Group would probably be one of the major nodes in the network graph I maintained in crayon on my apartment walls. Oh wait, the internet is my wall.

Jubilee

Wikipedia on the biblical rule of Jubilee:

These Babylonian kings... occasionally issued decrees for the cancellation of debts and/or the return of the people to the lands they had sold. Such "clean slate" decrees were intended to redress the tendency of debtors, in ancient societies, to become hopelessly in debt to their creditors, thus accumulating most of the arable land into the control of a wealthy few. The decrees were issued sporadically. Economist Michael Hudson has maintained that the Biblical legislation of the Jubilee and Sabbatical years addressed the same problems encountered by these Babylonian kings, but the Biblical formulation of the laws presented a significant advance in justice and the rights of the people...this legislation was also eminently practical, in contradiction to many Biblical interpreters who are not economists and who have labeled it "utopian."

My naive reaction to the financial mess was to say, in my stupid way*, that the real economy (the part that actually produces and consumes useful stuff) should be at least capable of being unaffected. Banks may close, hedge funds may evaporate, but farms and factories and their inputs and outputs don't disappear overnight. Can't the real economy of valuable production and consumption continue while Wall Street shrivels into its own black hole of debt?

But of course the mystery of depression is that a disease of the fake economy causes enormous difficulty and hardship in the real economy. The two are inextricably linked, or so it seems. But let's imagine that they could be separated. If the problem is a collapsing network of debt, why not just ignore all that and get on with the business of living? What if we declare Jubilee and make all that ridiculous network of bad debt null and void?

Well, of course, you couldn't actually do that! Civilization would crumble. Even I'm not stupid enough to think that is practical. Except some people who might actually know something about economics are thinking along the same lines:

In the past, when excessive debt burdens were accumulated by government, they tended to do one of two things: either they defaulted-”this is the Argentine solution-where you say, "œAh, I'm sorry, I'm afraid we'™re not going to be able to meet the interest payments this month, and never again will we make the interest payments."

The other scenario is inflation, where the real debt burden is eroded because the money that it's denominated in loses value.

I don'™t think we'™re really going to be out of the woods here until something of that sort happens to the huge debt burdens of the U.S. economy. Either these debts will have to be fundamentally written off in some way, or inflation will have to reduce the real burden.

Inflating our way out of the problem seems like the most likely scenario to me. Hyperinflation sounds like a lot less fun than "Jubilee", but perhaps they amount to the same thing.

*I am quite willing to admit having very little understanding of anything involving money or economics. I used to feel bad about this until I realized that what William Goldman said about Hollywood applies. You can have a (pseudo) Nobel in economics and still bring about ruin.

Big numbers

via, this interview with Zimbabwe's central banker:

In November you shut down Zimbabwe's stock exchange. Will you open it again?
The stockbrokers were creating a money supply that wasn't there. I printed Z$1.5 quadrillion, but the exchange was operating with Z$100 sextillion. So I said, "Who is doing my job?" Unless there is more discipline and honor, the exchange will stay closed. I can't be bothered. I don't know when it'll open. It's a free market, a business which must be allowed to succeed or fail.

But it gets better, as they attempt to outdo astronomy in the orders of magnitude department:

In the absence of credible official statistics, Hanke developed a hyperinflation index for Zimbabwe and in an article in the December 2008 issue of the financial magazine, Forbes Asia, put the annual inflation rate at around 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent - 65 followed by 107 zeros. "Prices double every 24.7 hours," he noted. "Shops have simply stopped accepting Zimbabwean dollars."

I don't believe I've ever seen the words "quindecillion" or "novemdecillion" used before, certainly not concatenated. Whether this number actually means anything in the context of economic reality is another thing -- it's about 2^365, so was probably calculated on the questionable assumption that prices can continue to double every day for a year. It seems that people would just stop using the currency long before then, and indeed they are starting to, but on the other hand the government just issued a Z$ 100 trillion banknote, which will probably be available on eBay for US$10 in a few months.

[Update: I'm not the first to notice that economics far outstrips the natural sciences in the size of the exponents it can generate:

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

-Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

]

The blame game

The latest meme on the financial crisis from the right: it's all the fault of Carter, Clinton, and "socialists", who forced the banks to make all these subprime loans via the Community Reinvestment Act in 1975. I actually listed to this piece of right-wing hate radio from Mark Levin where this theory is expounded.

For someone who rarely listens to this stuff like me, the tone is downright scary. Levin has a voice like a dentist's drill. I have a hard time imagining the audience for this stuff -- I imagine bitter, hate-filled members of the downwardly mobile white sub-working class -- Joe Pesci, minus any charm or charisma. I hesitate once again to throw out the f-word but I can't help but think of Hitler's speeches and the Two Minute Hate from 1984.

The thing is, there may even be some truth in what he's saying. No doubt Democrats have had a hand in this crisis; they are just as much in bed with Wall Street as the Republican party (not sure how that squares with them being "socialists"). But how can you take someone seriously who not only sounds like that but writes things like this:

I want to congratulate the attorneys who work with me at Landmark Legal Foundation for tenaciously pursuing the untold story of the systematic abuse of American MPs by the al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Here's a counterattack to this sort of theory; the most commonsensical refutation is that most of the bad subprime loans were made in the last five years; so if a bill passed in 1975 is responsible why was there a 25-year lag time?

And also this report (via) which says:

CRA Banks were substantially less likely than other lenders to make the kinds of risky home purchase loans that helped fuel the foreclosure crisis.

Oh well, so much for alternative points of view. The facts don't matter too much, what matters is whether Levin et al are going to succeed get this notion into the minds of the populace.

If things get really ugly economically, I mean ugly in people's real lives, not just the financial markets, don't be surprised if this sort of hate boils out of the backwoods of AM radio and into the mainstream, wherever the hell that is. People are going to be looking for someone to blame, and the right has been honing their eliminationist rhetoric on progressives and Democrats for many years now. Fuck, I feel like stringing someone up myself, and while I'd start on the other side of the political divide there is plenty of blame to go around.

Oh, the humanity!

Won't somebody think of the investment bankers?

It'™s going to be very hard psychologically for these people, Frank said. œI talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he'™s ever done.
...
The chairman of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, still has his mansion in Greenwich, CT, his oceanfront estate on Jupiter Island in FL, and his Park Avenue co-op in Manhattan. Many at Lehman blame Fuld for dallying while his investment bank went bust, taking risks with other people's money while he cleared over $40 million in salary and stock in the last year alone.
...
Former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz collected more than $38 million in salary and bonuses in the last three years for which figures are available, though he and Lehman executives also saw their net worths drastically plummet as stock values crashed.

via. Some of his commenters suggest some rather, ah, extreme measures that should be taken by ordinary people who have to work hard and will now be pushed further into poverty and financial stress by the incompetencies and thievery of the moneyed class. Like I said last post, I have some sympathy for this but it ain't going to happen. It made me recall this earlier post. There's no defending the murderous excesses of communism, but I am sympathetic to the underlying rage. In the words of Principal Skinner, "There's no justice like angry mob justice."

A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you're talking real money.

• Long-term cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion.
  
• Long-term cost of the government's bailout of the financial industry: $2 trillion. (today's figure is 1T, doubling that is probably being conservative).
  
• A president you can have a beer with: priceless
  

That's about 2 years total federal spending. Pissed down the toilet, and you and me are saddled with the bill, or about $25,000 for every adult in the US. Those numbers don't quite convey the enormous opportunity cost these liabilities represent. That is $5 trillion dollars not being spent on repairing infrastructure, fixing our health and education systems, funding alternative energy research, or even protecting us against terrorist threats.

Somebody somewhere pointed out that what we have now, clearly, is a system that could be described as "vacuum up" rather than trickle-down. Wealth is sucked out of the pockets of the working strat into the coffers of the extremely wealthy. Now the Wall Street types can go enjoy their bonuses while the ordinary taxpayer is on the hook for the downside of their fun and games.

If ever a situation called for angry mobs, this is it. Citizens should be stringing up the bankers and politicians from the lampposts. Not likey to happen in this spread-out and obese country.

Addendum: there must be a great disturbance in the force when people like Tyler Cowan are saying things like this:

You can blame lots of the crisis on government -- more than most people think -- but at the end of the day it is hard to escape the conclusion that markets simply have performed horribly in a number of important regards.

Also, one of his commenters identifies an important point that I haven't seen elsewhere:

The Secretarys authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time

This is clever and nobody in the mainstream media has figured it out.

If you think the cost of this bill is $700 billion, you're wrong. The cost is actually infinite and the entire bill constitutes a giant money-laundering scheme.

Paulson can (and presumably will) buy up to $700 billion of these "assets", then sell them. Let's say he decides to buy them at 60 cents on the dollar and sell them for 10. You, the taxpayer, will eat the fifty cents, for an immediate cost of $350 billion dollars.

Having done so, he is then authorized to do so again, since the $700 billion is no longer on the government's balance sheet.

In fact, he can do this without limit, other than possibly due to the federal debt ceiling, which of course Congress will raise any time we get close to it. Oh yeah, this bill does that right up front too. No need to bother with it the first time around.

Folks, $700 billion isn't even close to the total cost of this monster.

Stupid American politics

Our politics is so stupid. The right is piling onto Obama for some perfectly valid remarks he made that dared to reference "bitterness". This kind of crap will keep happening, he will be damaged, the Democrats will continue to engage in fratricide, and we'll end up with a bomb-bomb-Iran McCain administration. Fuck. Not that I'm under any illusions that a Democratic administration would usher in utopia, but there's less chance of another nightmare of craziness, evil, and incompetence.

This guy (Mark Ames) is my new god:

But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber the lie, the more they want to hear it repeated.

And his description of the Bush administation as "Inspector Clouseau meets the Book of Revelations".

via Sadly, No!

Or maybe the American people will surprise me.