In my beginning is my end

From T.S. Eliot in the quartet poem, East Coker.

In my beginning is my end

It seems that the sought chalice of modern classical liberalism is the refutation of the hoary truth of Eliot's line. How can we structure a system in freedom that also frees people as hostages of history?

Not just worthless but dramatically misleading

Interesting.

Rasmussen Reports, a highly reputable polling organization released a report this Easter weekend, 64% Believe Jesus Christ Rose From the Dead. They did the same survey a year ago Easter and had this result back then: 77% Believe Jesus Rose From the Dead. Hands up if you believe that 13% of Christians lost their faith in the foundational precept of their religion in a single year. That out of 225 million Christians, nearly 30 million lost their faith in one year?

If you don't believe that, and I don't, then what is going on with the numbers? Same sample size (1,000), same question, same margin of error.

I can't see any obvious reason to explain this other than that these surveys are dramatically less reliable than we are led to believe and that they are much more sensitive to timing or context or weather or sampling error, etc. With a margin of error of +/- 3%, a statistical fluke of sampling high one year and low the next (i.e. a maximum error range of 6%) would still leave a dramatic drop in faith of 7%. Still well outside the realm of believability.

I am usually deeply skeptical of most surveys anyway but this is a quite remarkable piece of evidence if you wished to make the argument that most surveys are not just worthless but dramatically misleading.

Slavery and comparative advantage

From Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins by Steve Olson. Page 57.

A fascinating yet troubling hypothesis. Comparative advantage as the root cause of slavery in an increasingly productive and technology fueled world. The argument makes sense but still is uncomfortable. There is not much daylight between selling a human because they are bounty from conquest versus selling a human because they are worth more elsewhere than they can produce locally but for some reason the latter feels in some unfathomable way more inhumane.

In the middle Ages the geographic origins of slaves in the western world began to change. The number of slaves from Europe and Asia gradually fell, while the number from Africa grew. By 1700, Africa was the world's primary source of slaves.

Scholars have cited many reasons for Africa's rise as a slave producer. Tropical climates and poor soils in Africa limited agricultural productivity, so the overall economic return from selling a young male into slavery was greater than if that man became a farmer. Africans captured and sold slaves in exchange for manufactured goods, which delayed the continent's economic development and further depressed the value of labor within Africa. The rise of sugar production in the New World created a need for huge numbers of agricultural laborers, and Africans were more resistant to the diseases of tropical sugar plantations than were people from other parts of the world. The slave trade was highly profitable to those who provided, transported, and used slaves, and the continents political fragmentation made it difficult for African leaders to stop the practice. All of these factors tended to reinforce one another. Once Africa became established as the leading exporter of slaves, the trade gained a momentum that was very difficult to reverse.

Nowhere in the world, though, have I ever encountered a more brutal, tribal and violent race of people than the Scots-Irish

I have just finished Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Probably a needlessly provocative title. As usual with Sowell, crammed with information and intriguing insights. In a series of essays, he covers a history of slavery, the question of German cultural fallibility, treatment of minority traders across geographies and time, a history of black education and other topics. However, the anchor essay is the eponymous Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Sowell's argument is that the distinctive aspects of Southern Appalachian Scots-Irish culture such as honor society, aggressiveness, licentiousness, extravagance, etc. are largely rooted in the cultures of those regions in the British Isles from whence the bulk of those immigrants originated; northern England, Scotland and Wales. He outlines the common and contemporaneous judgments of observers on the morals and manners of both populations pointing out how the conditions of one led to the other.

From this foundation, which seems reasonably established, he then goes further to argue that the negative aspects of those cultures eventually died out in the British Isles (though I note that one of the striking comments in one of Niall Ferguson's earlier books, probably The Pity of War, was Ferguson's observation of the ferocity and reckless courage of Scots in World War I, resulting in disproportionately high casualty rates). This is probably true, but Sowell doesn't document or discuss this demise of the original British Isles redneck culture.

He also alludes to the gradual erosion of some of the more destructive aspects of redneck culture in the American South among the white population. I suspect this is true to a degree but I would have wished for better evidence of the degree to which these elements have moderated over time and by what means.

The next step in his chain of argument is that what we now regard as black urban culture is really the most current version of that redneck culture originating from the border regions of the British Isles and transferred to the Appalachian Mountains. He points out many commonalities in terms of speech, presentation, sexual mores, violence, etc. The argument makes sense to a degree but there are a couple of weak links. How did the violent Appalachian Scots-Irish culture of the mountains reach into the plains and plantations of the low lands where the slaves were located? Given the travel limitations on blacks pre-Civil War by law and post-Civil War by economics, how did the Scots-Irish honor culture of the mountains spread apparently uniformly across the whole black population of the South?

Those two questions aren't necessarily insurmountable but they ought to be answered for Sowell's thesis to rest on a reasonably solid foundation.

I think Sowell, manages to make a case that his thesis is plausible and he presents some compelling information but ultimately I think his argument is incomplete. Possible that it is true but not yet compellingly true.

I'll post some excerpts over the next few days but I mention all this now because on the day I finished Black Rednecks and White Liberals, I came across a humorous article, Graveyard of Peaches: How Tennessee Will Win Its War Against Georgia by Andrew Exum. This is very much tongue-in-cheek; but cautioningly so.

The arcane context is that with its prolonged rapid growth, Georgia has begun to bump up against water constraints for manufacturing, agriculture and cities. Politicians, being the lesser cognitive life form that they too frequently are, have spent two decades arguing and negotiating with Alabama, Tennessee and Florida about access to their water resources instead of actually making the hard trade-off decisions to either pay to make more available within Georgia or to reduce demand. The politicians take these irresponsible postponing actions principally and regrettably because they accurately assess that the electorate, while mocking their moral courage, also willfully punish any politician who attempts to bridle the actions of the voters.

Pertinent to Sowell's argument about the aggressive nature of Scots-Irish culture, Exum, himself of that extraction, mentions:

The War Between the States ended almost 150 years ago, but the Georgia state senate is making threatening noises against its neighbor. It should think twice. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan is a cakewalk compared to the hellscape that southeast Tennessee poses for an invading army.

Last week, the Georgia state senate voted to sue the state of Tennessee in order to claim a sliver of land that would grant Georgia access to the Tennessee River. Georgia, readers must understand, has mismanaged its own water resources to the point where it now struggles to supply enough water for the residents of Atlanta (and its sprawling suburbs and exurbs) to fill their above-ground pools and wash the TruckNutz on their mini-vans. Dangerously, the state is actually seeking to redraw a border that has kept the peace for over 200 years, and all over a crucial resource — a resource belonging, rightfully, to the Tennessee of my ancestors.

[snip]

Invading Tennessee is easy enough, militarily. Occupying and governing Tennessee is vastly more difficult.

As a soldier, I fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan; as a scholar, I performed most of the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in southern Lebanon. Nowhere in the world, though, have I ever encountered a more brutal, tribal and violent race of people than the Scots-Irish of East Tennessee. Any Georgian occupation force would inevitably get sucked into our petty politics and family vendettas. We might share a language, but Georgia would struggle to relate to its new foreign subjects, let alone entrench its authority over us.

All of which, while humorously delivered, kind of calls into question just how reformed are those "brutal, tribal and violent" Scots-Irish.

For more reading on the Scots-Irish, see James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.

Reading by the numbers

From Jordan Weissmann, The Simple Reason Why Goodreads Is So Valuable to Amazon. He references research from the Codex Group who are the source of the following three graphs.

The first chart looks at who reads how much. These numbers are broadly consistent with our own TTMD research where we have estimated that 10% of the population reads about 80% of the books in a year, averaging 24 books per year. 40% of the population read the remaining 20% of books, averaging 6 books a year. 50% do no elective reading in a year. Codex puts the intense readers at 20% of the population, reading 80% of the books and 40% reading 20%.



Where do they find the books they are reading?


For all the talk about social networks, recommendation sites, etc. I think it is notable that 1) there is a 45% black hole in our knowledge, and 2) only ~15% of book purchases arise from online booksellers and social media.

Not only do online sources represent a small part of the market, they also have a very low yield rate.



It is an industry in turmoil with all business models under threat and with a corresponding opportunity for anyone who can figure out how to make money from connecting highly variable consumers to the books they are most likely to enjoy.

The low yield rate stretches beyond the web.

30-40% of books published are returned to publishers unsold.

According to the Jenkins Group, 30% of books purchased are never read, 30% are started but not finished and only 40% of books purchased are read to the end.

So:
1) The percent of the public who are enthusiastic readers are only 10-20% of the population and they consume about 80% of all books.
2) 50% of the population does no elective reading.
3) Only 40% of books purchased are read start to finish.
4) 30% of books printed are unsold.

These are huge inefficiencies. So large that at some point we will get to a better process. Commerce is like biological life and the process of evolution; it is good at generating variations and killing off those models that don't work. We currently have a lot of commercial mortality which is evidence of rapid change.

The questions I ponder is whether the low percentage of enthusiastic readers is culturally determined, whether that concentration is a bad or good thing, whether there is something we can do about it, and if there is, what that something ought to be. My current answers are 1) I suspect so, 2) I suspect bad but can't prove it, 3) I hope so, and 4) I don't know.

All this is exacerbated by the fact that different cultural groups have distinctly different reading habits and values so whatever might be done regarding increasing a reading culture has to be done in a culturally heterogeneous environment.

Trying to study a tiny minority with a random sample--even a large one--is very difficult, and maybe impossible

From Can Gay Marriage Solve Our Adoption Problem? by Megan McArdle.

There are so many things we want to be true and from a man in the street perspective ought to be true. Megan McArdle and Thomas Sowell are two go-to-authors for common practical sense numeracy. They aren't always right but they are usually asking the right questions.

McArdle has a nice description of what I refer to as the knowledge frontier - that space in argument where we have the concepts to discuss but not the data to resolve.

During oral arguments over gay marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia remarked that there is considerable disagreement among sociologists about the effect of gay parenting on children. Having looked into this question a bit myself, my take is that this is not correct: there is no legitimate grounds for disagreement among sociologists, because neither side has any decent empirical evidence upon which to base an authoritative pronouncement. The studies of the subject showing that gay parenting is no different from--or even better than!--heterosexual parenting tend to be, as sociologist Mark Regnerus notes, "small, nonrandom 'convenience' studies of mostly white, well-educated lesbian parents, including plenty of data-collection efforts in which participants knew that they were contributing to important studies with potentially substantial political consequences".

Meanwhile, the main study showing negative outcomes--authored by one Mark Regnerus--has better methods, but is not studying the children of stable, committed gay couples who chose to have a child together, because until recently, there weren't many such couples who were able to adopt. So it's hard to disentangle any possible negative effects from the effects of divorce and other family instability. Trying to study a tiny minority with a random sample--even a large one--is very difficult, and maybe impossible.

In terms of the potential impact of gay marriage and adoption, McArdle deftly brings us back to reality.

There are, to a first approximation, zero healthy adoptable babies in the US foster care system.

[snip]

The kids in the foster system are mostly the ones who are hard to adopt because they are older, come in a large family group, or have some sort of fairly severe disability or behavioral disorder. Just to drive that point home: if you search for a single adoption of kids under seven, you get 114 results. If you search for a single adoption of kids under sixteen, you get several thousand.

It is so easy to get distracted by emotionally comfortable assumptions and to not ever get to answering the crucial question: Will this actually make a worthwhile difference to the problem we are most in need of solving?

We had the experience but missed the meaning

From T.S. Eliot in the Quartet poem, The Dry Salvages.

We had the experience but missed the meaning

About 7,500 generations have passed since our ancestors lived on the savannas of eastern Africa

Though just a little dated at this point, I did enjoy Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins by Steve Olson which I have just finished. Page 29.

In a way, the details of how modernity in humans arose are not important. What must count as one of the most profound biological insights of all time is the recognition of our remarkable genetic similarity. About 7,500 generations have passed since our ancestors lived on the savannas of eastern Africa. In evolutionary terms, that's the blink of an eye. The chimpanzees living on a single hillside in Africa have more than twice as much variety in their mitochondrial DNA as do all 6 billion people living on the earth, because today's species of chimpanzees have been in existence much longer than have modern humans.

This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence

David Hume in Treatise of Human Nature.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it … [I] am persuaded, that a small attention [to this point] wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.”

"This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence" - Rings true. I notice this most in news and magazine articles rather than in books (though I perhaps ought to be more alert).

Rarely is the article so unsophisticated as to use the terms "ought" or "ought not". Instead, they often move from a series of statements of fact to a series of unstated assumptions which actually hide the embedded "ought". If you agree with the assumptions, you never even notice. And if you don't agree with them, you are left wondering how you arrived at an indefensible conclusion from uncontested premises.

But reading Hume's passage, I was thinking of his point from a slightly different perspective. When dealing with "is", you are reporting facts as you understand them: in other words, non-fiction. However, when dealing with "ought" you are dealing with facts not as they are but as you would wish them to be. One might characterize such unproven desires as fictions. In which case, in reading the article, you are slowly led from a non-fiction reportage to a fictional piece. And you often don't notice it at all.

But think of characterizing a book as such, a book that goes from a non-fiction account to a fictional account. Are there any such out there? Non-fiction books with so much incorrect information that it feels to be fictional - sure. But I can't think of any book that is deliberately structured as a non-fiction book and then transitions without comment to fiction. It is an odd concept which, for some reason, I find intriguing.

It is a premise of science, not a finding.

From The Heretic: Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him? by Andrew Ferguson

Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn’t account for the “brute facts” of existence—it doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn’t plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. These failures, Nagel says, aren’t just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. “There is little or no possibility,” he writes, “that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.”