Your values become your destiny

Cam across this quotation. It is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi but I have not been able to find the actual source.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.

The game changes as you play it

From The Emerging Revolution in Game Theory from The Physics arXiv Blog.

While the news is interesting and important, if somewhat esoteric, there is a post in the comments which I think is a really striking observation. The author of the article is taken to task in the comments for describing the new discovery as revolutionary. There is a lot of posturing back-and-forth of the nature of "my differential philosophical paradigm is more complex than your differential philosophical paradigm." The comment I liked though was this simple:

This is not a "revolution." You've simply hit upon a fundamental philosophical truth: The game changes as you play it.

Not by what they explain, but by what they fail to explain

From Unintended Consequences by Edward Conard.

Science judges hypotheses, not by what they explain, but by what they fail to explain. When anomalies pile up, experts reject the hypothesis that engender them.

Tuchman's Law

From A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Tuchman, Barbara, Page xviii. Keeping perspective:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).[

Ngrams and books

Here's a neat concept out of the fincial services industry that might have application in culture and reading. From Too Central to Fail by Alex Tabarrok. What they are dealing with in the original paper is whether we ought to be concerned only with the size of a bank (in terms of systemic risk of failure) or whether we ought to also take into account the centrality of the bank within the system. A big bank that has a low level of interconnectedness with other banks may pose less risk than a smaller bank that is much more interconnected. Their research indicates that we indeed should be looking at centrality as well as size when we seek to manage systemic risk.

Here is a graphic that illustrates their point.

Looking at this made me wonder whether there might be a way to take the same concept and apply it to books in order to determine the extent to which particular books influence our overall culture. Some books are read by many people over many years. Some books are a flash in the pan with huge sales in a given short period of time and then they disappear from the cultural radar screen. It is instructive to look at best seller lists of fifty years ago and realize just how many of the names of those authors are completely unknown today.

What might a comparable graphic look like for books. Which books are most central and how would we measure that? Citations perhaps. Or perhaps, Google Ngram, a version of citations. Here is the Ngram for five books that are viewed as classics and/or are considered controversial; To Kill a Mockingbird, The Little Engine That Could, Lord of the Flies, Go Ask Alice, And Tango Makes Three.

My interpretation of this chart (mentions in books between 1960 - 2008) would be that The Little Engine That Could has grown over time as a children's classic and is now mentioned two or three times as often as in the seventies or eighties. Go Ask Alice climbed with the drug scene but is less than half as relevant as even ten years ago. Lord of the Flies continues with a very strong showing but down 30% perhaps from its peak in the mid-sixties. To Kill a Mockingbird goes from strength to strength. And Tango Makes Three drove a lot of controversy when it came out 2005. Despite all the talk and the book challenges at libraries and the extensive discussions in the ephemera press - there was not even a blip in the more permanent record of books.

People are often concerned about the erosion of morals and values and in general a darkening of modern children's literature. There is concern just how much modern children's literature might be eroding our culture. I created an Ngram to look at how much the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare are being discussed in the past five decades versus such classics or best sellers as Harper Lee, Rowling, and the Twilight series.

As you can see in the following Ngram, Twilight, To Kill a Mockingbird and Harry Potter, as much as they are significant part of the childhood reading pantheon today, are swamped by the avid conversation that continues around the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare.

Finally, I look at Harper Lee, Rowling, Stephenie Meyer versus Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, and Peter Pan, more classic children's authors/books. Only Rowling gives the old masters a run for their money.

The burden of choosing good books for our children remains a significant and consequential one but the gloom and doom concern about just how corrosive contemporary children's literature might be is, if not misplaced, perhaps at least less consequential than we might have considered.

Challenged books

From the American Library Association, the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009.

You can see all the issues here: questions of age-appropriateness, good taste, atheism, moral ambiguity, ideological concerns, etc.

Technology or relevance

I ran a Google Ngram on four of the major US children's books awards, the grandaddies, Newberry and Caldecott as well as newer awards, Coretta Scott King and the Printz award.

My interpretation is that the awards had their heyday 1975-1995 with a measurable dip in the late 1980's. However, since circa 1995, all the awards have been in decline with Caldecott and Newberry suffering the steapest declines, down some 60% since their peak. Is it the internet (mass adoption beginning circa 1995) which perhaps has generated alternate means for assessing value of books via a plethora of children's books website, social media, and blogs dedicated to children's reading? Perhaps circa 1995 there was some change in the awards where the tastes of judges has diverged from those of the reading public, condemning them to decreasing relevance.

We need efficient feedback and we need the capacity to be exposed to consequences

This article, Teachers on the Defensive by Frank Bruni, prompted a train of thought regarding the importance of feedback.

While the history of man is one of slowly improving productivity and life success (an accelerating trend in the past fifty years), the means by which that occurs have long been the source of speculation. I believe there are many critical components whose interactions are complex - so complex that it is difficult to make accurate forecasts. One element of the puzzle, in fact the inverse of increasing productivity (which is a well established trend line), is our incapacity to explain why certain countries, cultures or regions first expand and then collapse - the rise and fall of empires if you will. There always thousands of proximate causes but none of them on their own are sufficiently reliable to be useful predictors of future collapse.

Take post World War II Japan for example. From 1945 to circa 1995 they were an accelerating juggernaut of productivity, putting fear into every trading partner. In books, movies and the popular culture, as well as among the chattering classes, there was grave concern. A concern that persisted right up to the point when their growth suddenly collapsed. They have been in a seemingly permanent state of stasis or contraction for some twenty years. And no one (well some individuals but not the consensus view) saw it coming.

In this article regarding the paradoxical position of teachers unions, there may be a hint of an answer. The paradox is that the teacher's unions have never been so successful in serving the interests of their members in terms of protection from termination, in terms of compensation, in terms of working conditions and yet at this very moment they face existential threats.

I wonder if the core issue is not perhaps the absence of effective feedback mechanisms.

“We bear a lot of responsibility for this,” Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] told me in a phone interview on Friday. “We were focused — as unions are — on fairness and not as much on quality.” And they’ve sometimes shown a spectacular blindness to public sensitivities in their apparent protection of certain embattled teachers in given instances.

In biology, nature is a cruel taskmaster of survival. Only those organisms that survive and reproduce are permitted a continued existence. How they survive is not preset, the survival mechanisms are miraculously manifold. Feedback on fitness for purpose is prompt, as represented by death or survival. Fairness does not enter into the equation, only quality.

In free markets, the freer the market, the more similar it is to a biological Darwinian process. Commercial success, absent regulation, is entirely contingent upon being able to respond quickly to changing exogenous circumstances. Again, there is no fairness in the equation. You either survive commercially or you do not and that survival depends on the quality of various, and often unpredictable, aspects of your business.

Both biology and commerce are distinguished by exceptionally clear feedback mechanisms married to a ruthless execution of consequences. There is no margin for error.

It is interesting that those regions that are most prosperous today are those that first took up the widespread dissemination of books, printing and reading - all being forms of cognitive feedback. Those countries which are the closest adherents to the principles of the Enlightenment (pluralism, tolerance, natural rights, freedom of press, religion, agency, rule of law, etc.), which principles greatly facilitate feedback and consequences, are also those that are the most prosperous today. Again, there is little focus on fairness in the consequences of Enlightenment, simply a statement of bedrock principles which will inherently have consequences, not all those consequences at any point in time being particularly desirable.

So the first thing I took from the article was the consideration that the problem is not so much with unions per se but the simple fact that based on government structure and past prosperity, that unions have been able to insulate themselves from both feedback and consequences. That would appear to be what we are struggling with now. As Weingarten indicates, the focus has been on fairness and not on effectiveness (or quality as she puts it). With no feedback mechanisms, the focus on fairness has undermined effectiveness and there is now a thirty or fifty year feedback deficit to be made up. It is not unlike plate tectonics. The longer there is no slippage (adjustment) the greater the magnitude will be the earthquake when it comes. Just one of those unavoidable facts of life. You can take a thousand small quakes or one massive one but it is inexorable that there shall be an adjustment. Just like biology, just like commerce.

Teacher effectiveness is an inherently complex thing. Can it be done in an administrative fashion with rules and measures and tests? Sure, to a degree, but is it optimal? Don't know. Is local control of and discretionary management of education likely to be unfair in some way? Sure, but ultimately that isn't the point. Does it work is the point. And we are uncertain about what has worked, what needs to work and what ought to work in the future. What we do know is that despite massive increases in resources devoted to education in the past fifty years, it is unclear that people are better educated or more productive or social outcomes more fair.

Statists seek to impose fixed solutions on complex issues which they hope will be secure over time. Libertarians trust in disaggregated unplanned actions. Both are rational responses to existing circumstances. The question is, over time and subject to repeated, unexpected exogenous shocks, which approach stands up better. I would argue that the pursuit of fairness, while understandable and to some degree noble, is a chimera.

Earthquakes are neither fair or unfair; they just are. Whether you accommodate plate slippage via ten thousand micro-quakes, always having small damages to clean up and pay for, or whether you take it altogether, once every long while with a single massive earthquake is the choice. When you close off feedback and close off the capacity to endure consequences, then you have, from a systems perspective, chosen to take a single massive earthquake.

We can choose, in human systems, when subject to constantly changing circumstances and unexpected exogenous shocks, to take on constant micro-quake adjustments or we can postpone adjustment for as long as possible and then take a body blow. What we can't do is choose not to adjust. It has nothing to do with fairness but with life - we always have to adjust one way or the other, much or as little as we like the consequences of having to adjust. We need efficient feedback and we need the capacity to be exposed to consequences.

What both common sense and expert consensus assure us to be true very often isn’t

From The Coming Oil Boom by Chrystia Freeland. She discusses the emerging realization that there will be a sea change in the global energy market in the coming decade. This realization has been emerging over the past twelve months (from what I have been reading), but still hasn't reached the mainstream as far as I can tell. Ms. Freeland's closing paragraph is a reminder of an enduring truth independent of the details of her report.

A final conclusion to draw from the next oil revolution is a little more existential. This is yet another reminder that what both common sense and expert consensus assure us to be true very often isn’t. It was obvious that efficient markets worked and financial deregulation would stimulate economic growth, until the financial crisis and the subsequent international economic recession. It was equally apparent that we were running out of oil — until we weren’t.

The only exception that I would take is that, as with almost all major issues, there were in fact those that have been preaching in the wilderness for years and decades that those ancient task masters Supply and Demand would, left to their own devices, solve the energy problem - maybe not in a way that we liked or in a way that we expected, but solved it would be. Just because they weren't listened to doesn't mean that they weren't prophesying the reality that is now upon us.

Common sense and experts have value in the right context but we have to understand the context. If we don't have that context, then their value often is negligible. The science is never settled and no one ever has all the answers. Comprehending the trade-offs between short term tactical efficiency and long term effectiveness is endlessly complicated and frustrating. Perhaps our best approach is to be wise, be modest, be prepared.

Behaviors and well-being

From Class Origin and Elite Position of Men in Business Firms in Sweden, 1993–2007: The Importance of Education, Cognitive Ability, and Personality by Erik Bihagen1, Magnus Nermo1 and Charlotta Stern, evidence supporting my contention that the bulk of success differentials resides within behaviors and values rather than, as was the case in the past, systemic discrimination. I have not read the report in full yet but the summary seems to bear this out. Sweden has the advantage of being historically pretty homogenous, thus stripping out most issues of differences in race and religion, leaving substantially discrimination based on class (and closely correlated, education).

The aim of the article was to study class origin effects on belonging to the organizational elite in large private Swedish companies between 1993 and 2007. We find a clear working class disadvantage. Decomposition analyses indicate that the social class gap in arriving at elite destinations between those of Service I and working class origins is due chiefly to differences in educational attainment, and only to a very small extent to which school one attends and which field one studies. Cognitive capacity is of rather minor importance net of schooling, but the importance of personality traits is of greater importance and increases over time. One striking result is that the importance of educational attainment for explaining the social class origin gap decreases markedly between 1993 and 2007. It was hypothesized that the ongoing expansion of the educational system would increase the importance of having a degree from more elite schools, but our findings do not support such a hypothesis. Instead, our analyses point to the increasing importance of personality traits over time. The results suggest that there is a change in the value of education and personality in the labour market, but as men of working class origins have disadvantages in both domains, the relative disadvantage of originating from the working class is rather stable. One interpretation of the apparently growing importance of personality traits could be that educational expansion inflates and undermines educational distinctions. Another interpretation would be that corporations in a post-industrial society increasingly demand members of the elite with a greater variation in skills such as extraversion.

An interesting finding is the way in which a ‘winning’ personality is associated with elite positions: even with all controls included, we find a clear personality gradient and a bonus for scoring high on most of the specified traits. This stands in contrast to cognitive ability, where higher levels are of importance to educational attainment, but where there is no net bonus of high values after controlling for achieved education. It seems that when it comes to elite recruitment, assuming that one has a university degree, it is better to be socially winning, including extraversion, than to be very smart. Elite positions, as we define them, often mean having a leading position, suggesting that leadership talents may be more closely associated with social skills than with cognitive skills. Also, it is plausible that personality is less easily measured than cognitive ability (Grönqvist, Öckert and Vlachos, 2010), which may mean that the importance of personality is even greater than what our analyses indicate.

If this proposition, that values and behaviors are the differentiator in achieved success (holding all other variables fixed), is born out, it forces to the forefront the challenging and prickly topic which I think is at the heart of future productivity - how do we recognize and measure the contribution of behaviors towards productivity, and how do parents transmit those values and behaviors.

I believe that books (and other narrative based instruments such as songs and ballads, poetry, hymns, social story-telling etc.) are a key element in that transmission. If this supposition is true, it calls into play to a much greater extent the issue of "quality" children's literature. It is not simply a matter of whether the books are well written but also the extent to which they assist in fostering and transmitting those values and behaviors conducive to future productivity, success and well-being.