Make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens

From the Federalist Paper No. 10 November 22, 1787 by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. This particular paper was written by James Madison. The whole piece is not only worth reading but ought to be required reading in both school and of all adults. Regrettably the schools pay greater obeisance to critical theory than to the genius of the founding fathers. A reflection on the intellectual poverty of the education establishment rather than on the quality of the founding fathers' thoughts.

Disparate impact, property, vested interests, regulatory capture, etc. Madison foresaw it all.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Really, read the whole thing for its prescience. This is the central challenge to progressives today, factions in the old terminology - how to deal with the variance in human capabilities, interests, choices and outcomes, and how to keep factions from privileging their own and punishing the other. A goal to which everyone ought to ascribe. Too often though, the ideal of rule of law is dismissed in pursuit of a specific preferred outcome. "Principles? We don't need no stinking principles!"

Many in the progressive movement are eager to divide the citizenry up into factions - feminists, races, gender identity, class, religion, etc. There is an inherent internal contradiction in that virtually no one self-identifies as a single attribute. They identify across numerous attributes with varying degrees of intensity, usually based on circumstances. The mixes of potential identity are so numerous and complex, that it is essentially meaningless to pull out one attribute over another. Madison understood the multiplicity of identities as an antidote over factionalism (single identity).

The other point of difference is, the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.

Ideas versus identities

Ahh. The dust is finally beginning to settle on the November 4th reordering of the political deck, though the consequences remain to be seen.

I have posted several times on what appears to me to be the inversion of the two parties between my youth and today, here, here, and here.

It seems to me that there is another aspect of that inversion. The Republicans of my youth were stereotypically the party of interests; banks, oil companies, insurance companies, automotive, etc. The Democrats were the party of ideas and public intellectuals - Galbraith, Schlesinger, etc. Of course these stereotypes were simply that, stereotypes and there were intellectuals in the Republican party and the Democrats were just as subject to the blandishments of rent seeking interests as the Republicans.

Now, as with much else, it seems the parties have switched places. The Democrats are the party of interests (single elite women in general and particular strands of the feminist movement in particular, Wall Street moguls, public unions in general and teachers unions in particular, Race and African-Americans in particular, the clerisy of academics, journalists, and Hollywood). The Republicans appear now to be the party of ideas but also with a dozen shades: traditionalists, Burkeans, Hayeckians, Randians, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, Lockeans, Classical Liberals (of the Adams tradition), etc. Old traditional liberal think tanks such as the Brookings Institution appear to be evolving towards conservative positions and newer conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute seem to be generating much more of the agenda driving research than the old faithfuls such as the Rockefeller Foundation.

You look at the leading lights in the respective parties and I get the same sense. Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Justice Thomas and others are clearly sharp minds and thinkers. You might not agree with their conclusions but they can't be dismissed out of hand. They have convictions based on a system of thinking, evidence and arguments and they can defend those positions. In terms of elected or appointed officials, who is there on the Democrat side of comparable capacity?

All this is brought to mind by this short piece by Ross Douthat. The Wendy Davis Experiment.

Now: It should be said, and many people are saying it, that Davis and her team ran a poorer-than-expected campaign overall, and that the allegedly-brilliant team running the Democrats’ new Texas ground game were not in fact so brilliant. But the more important issue, surely, is that the Democrats decided that it made sense to run, well, Wendy Davis as their “change-the-map” candidate in Texas. Nunn and Carter in Georgia were nominations that fit reasonably well with the facts on the ground, and while they obviously disappointed Nunn did at least outperform the last two Democratic Senate nominees in her state. Davis, on the other hand, actually underperformed the Democratic nominee’s totals in the last two head-to-head races against Rick Perry … which is, again, pretty much exactly what you’d expect when you nominate a figure who owed her prominence to a filibuster on late-term abortion to contest a statewide rate in Texas.

Yes, the social conservatism of Hispanics, while real enough, is sometimes overstated; yes, polling on abortion is always fluid and complicated, in red states as well as blue. But it still should be obvious that if your long-term political vision requires consolidating and mobilizing a growing Hispanic bloc in a state that’s much more religious and conservative than average, nominating a culture-war lightning rod is just about the strangest possible way to go about realizing that goal, no matter what kind of brilliant get out the vote strategy you think you’ve conjured up or how much national money you think she’ll raise. It would be a little bit like, I don’t know, nominating a political-novice Tea Partier who owed her prior fame to a pro-abstinence campaign to contest a winnable race in a deep-blue, more-secular-than-average northeastern state. Not that the Republican Party would ever accidentally do anything like that, of course.

But even that joke is part of the point: The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state. Of course she had a much more impressive resume than O’Donnell, with less witchcraft and real political experience, and in that sense she made a more credible candidate overall. (Though, ahem, O’Donnell actually outperformed Davis at the polls in the end …) But in terms of their signature issues and their public profiles, they were equally absurd fits for the tasks they were assigned; it’s just that in Davis’s case nobody on the left of center wanted to acknowledge it.

Mark Udall in Colorado (reproductive rights), Wendy Davis in Texas (reproductive rights), Jason Carter in Georgia (teachers unions), Martha Coakley in Massachusetts (elite women). It seems like there were a lot of races Democrats ran based on narrow interest groups within their coalition and were soundly defeated.

It is critical to the health of our democratic traditions that there be two competitive parties. I don't think that Democrats were so soundly set back that they become irrelevant but I do suspect they will continue trending towards irrelevance as long as they are the party pandering to narrow interest groups (whose agendas conflict with one another). Just as 2008 served as a catalyst for Republican reflection and renewal, I hope that this election will similarly serve as a catalyst for Democrats to perhaps shake themselves free from identity politics and reenter the fray with ideas pallatible to the nation at large.

ACLU against freedom of speech

I used to love the ACLU when they were actually a civil liberties organization, particularly when they focused on defending the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Over the years, as all institutions are inclined to do, their remit has widened in scope to the point that they have ended up in odd places.

Their most recent press release, FTC Needs to Make Sure Companies Aren’t Using Big Data to Discriminate by Rachel Goodman, brings together the Social Justice Warrior's obsession with Disparate Impact and the Luddite's general paranoia of Big Data in a fashion completely at odds with a commitment to Freedom of Speech.

In the pre-digital era, advertisers could only target particular kinds of consumers in fairly general terms. Ads placed in the New York Times, for example, would reach a different audience than ads placed in the Amsterdam News, New York’s African-American newspaper. But this form of market segmentation was limited—advertisers would have no way of keeping News readers from seeing, and responding to, the Times ad.

That proposition is very different in the era of big data. Behavioral targeting allows advertisers to decide which ad to show a specific person based on the data known about that person. So, for example, advertisers may opt to show users different prices for products based on data functioning in the background, such that Mac users, or those who live in more affluent zip codes, or those who live farther from a competitor’s store see higher prices. Although many of us find this more precise targeting more troubling, and the existence and aggregation of the personal data that enables it certainly raises privacy concerns, the consensus view is that this kind of price discrimination isn’t illegal.

ACLU grants that a merchant trying to find those people most likely to want to buy their product and placing his/her ads in a very targeted fashion is not illegal. So what are they concerned about? It is the Social Justice Warrior's concern that people exercising their freedom of speech might have a disparate impact and affect some races more than others, or classes, or genders, etc. But of course that is the very nature of targeted advertising. If only people who live in snowy climes are likely to buy snow mobiles and their racial/class/gender/religious distribution is different from that of the country at large, then the ACLU does not want you to be able target those denizens of snowy climes and buyers of snowmobiles. They want to proscribe your speech in advance, not because of what you are doing but because they are concerned that it might have a disparate impact.

They hide their disparate impact argument in slightly different language, but that is what they are saying.

Except that price discrimination can also be race discrimination, if it’s based on data about race or factors closely linked to race (it can also be sex discrimination, or disability discrimination, or some other form of discrimination, depending on which data an algorithm relies upon).

The amazing thing to me is that this is a prospective fear, not a documented real problem. They want to curtail people's freedom of speech just in case it has a disparate impact even if it is perfectly legal speech.

Ack! These times. Bring back the old ACLU, please.

When progress doesn't at first seem like progress

Very interesting data anlysis and history in Presidential Speeches Were Once College-Level Rhetoric—Now They're for Sixth-Graders by Derek Thompson.

Thompson relays the results from a study of the complexity of presidential speeches from Washington to Obama. Yes, yes, all speech measurement tools have some flaw in them but they do also serve a purpose.

Here are the results using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

Presidential speeches have been declining in complexity since 1800, with a big drop in complexity circa 1925. How to interpret?
Thompson has a couple of other observations, but this is the one I found most interesting.

1. Presidential rhetoric is becoming simpler because the country is becoming more democratic.

“It's tempting to read this as a dumbing down of the bully pulpit,” says Jeff Shesol, a historian and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. “But it’s actually a sign of democratization. In the early republic, presidents could assume that they were speaking to audiences made up mostly of men like themselves: educated, civic-minded landowners. These, of course, were the only Americans with the right to vote. But over time, the franchise expanded and presidential appeals had to reach a broader audience.”

Indeed, the major shift downward in presidential complexity happens around 1920, which coincides with at least four positive developments: (1) the 17th Amendment allowing direct election of senators in 1913; (2) the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920; (3) the movement to make public education mandatory in the 1920s; (4) the invention of radio, which passed 50 percent penetration among US households by the 1930s. TV passed the 50-percent threshold in the early 1950s.*

Another way of putting this is that extending the franchise and achieving universal education leads to simpler, less complex communication. A great example of unintended consequences.

I wonder if this insight does not extend to other fields. Specifically, reading.

As the barriers to entry for both writing and reading have plunged to the vanishing point, has not, perhaps, the average cognitive density of books declined at the same time that reach has increased? Free blogging platforms and self-publishing software and Amazon associates, etc. all make it possible for anyone to write anything for anyone, anywhere. There are no gatekeepers.

In the environment of plenty, the challenges are different than those in times of constraint. When only 1,000 books were published a year, there had to be a lot of filters to ensure what got through warranted the cost of production. When the cost of production is near zero, anything of any quality or content can get through. Before the reader was challenged by a dearth of books. Now it is a surfeit. It is no longer a challenge to find a book at all. Now the challenge is to find a worthwhile book.

Coalitions based on group identity and partisan fragility

Over the past year or two I have read a couple of treatments along the lines of: Political gridlock is primarily a function of our government design - it is performing as expected by preventing changes that do not have clear and broad majority support. Our system of government was explicitly designed to protect the rights of minorities and therefore, where there is low degree of agreement, there should be little legislation, i.e. gridlock.

In both articles, there was an attendant observation. Since the 1960's both parties have become more ideologically homogenous. In 1965, Democrats had a lot of conservative moderates in their ranks and Republicans had a lot of moderates and even liberals in their ranks. The observation was that it is not so much that Democrats and Republicans have drifted apart, it is that Liberal Republicans have moved into the Democrat party and conservative Democrats have moved into the Republican party. Even though a comparison between parties makes it seem like Republicans have become more conservative and Democrats more liberal, that is wrong. Both parties have become more pure around their ideology. An example is much of the mid-sixties civil rights legislation which could only pass on a bipartisan basis. For example, the Voting Rights Act had a majority support that was made up of significant representation of both parties. Democrats could not have passed the Act without significant support from the moderate/liberal wing of the Republican party.

I accept that the nation hasn't become more polarized, but that the parties themselves have become more homogenous, thus creating the impression of greater polarization.

In the past couple of months, I have read a couple of articles making the case that A) most electoral noise is just that, noise. There are slow trend changes over multiple electoral cycles but that on a current election cycle basis, most differences are simply noise. 2) That as Democrats have become more pure ideologically, that it has made their electoral position more precarious compared to that of the Republicans.

The argument goes that as Republicans have widened their base geographically (but narrowed it ideologically) that they capture a wider set of demographics than do Democrats. Demographics that are voting based on ideas rather than identity. In contrast, the argument goes, the Democrats are becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of specific identity demographics: principally single women, Minorities in general (and African-Americans in particular), Unions (and government unions in particular), the poor, urban residents, and the clerissy (media, K-12, the academy, popular culture). The implication is that Democrats will have a greater and greater challenge compared to Republicans in the future because each demographic has very particular interests which are often inconsistent with and even counter to the agendas of other demographics within the Democratic coalition.

I suspect that this argument of the consequences arising from party homogenization is probably directionally correct but also probably underplays the challenges for Republicans. It is not clear to me that the priorities and agendas of traditionalists, libertarians, small government enthusiasts, fiscal conservatives, and gimlet-eyed classical liberals are all that easy to bridge. But I do accept it is probably easier to bridge than the similar task for Democrats.

There have been a couple of contretemps and articles in the past month that lend credence to this analysis regarding the inherent instability of the Democratic coalition.

One was the notorious and already well discussed implications of the video released by Hollaback (A non-profit and movement to end street harassment), 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman. The intent of the video was to raise awareness about the degree and pervasiveness of street harassment experienced by women. The claim is that "100+ instances of verbal street harassment took place within 10 hours, involving people of all backgrounds. This doesn't include the countless winks, whistles, etc." followed by a solicitation of donations.

What's the problem? We can all agree that street harassment is a real problem and not just for women. It includes not only instances exemplified here but also aggressive pan-handling, begging, raucous exercises of free-speech, etc. Real problems but also ones that bump up against other values such as freedom of speech. In dense, complex cities there is criminal law, then there are civic ordinances and then there is always the temptation to try and legislate manners, which never ends well.

But there has been a fairly vicious backlash within the constituencies of the Democratic party as touched on in the NPR article. The nominal criticism is that despite the claim of 100+ verbal harassments from people of all backgrounds, the video does not support that claim. Depending on your count, there are only about 20 harassments. Within these, they range from concerningly creepy (fellow walking beside the woman for five minutes), to the lude, to the mildly objectionable, to the seemingly innocuous. If these were the worst 20 of 100, then the guess is that the remaining 80 might not rise much above normal city interactions experienced by all residents.

But that's just the nominal criticism. The viciousness arises, and not unreasonably, from the other segments of the Democratic coalition. If this is a video dealing with issues of concern to single women, it might be OK in isolation. However, those concerned about class and race are very vociferous in pointing out that virtually all the haranguers on the video are minority and apparently lower class. So is Hollaback a defender of women's rights not to be harassed or are they racist for showing that the harassment appears to be concentrated among some demographics and not others. This is the coalition fragility that the articles were talking about. All these are real issues but they are much more important to some coalition members than to others. How to reconcile?

BTW, no hot button issue is complete without a satire, in this instance, 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man.

The second example lending credence to the Democrat coalition fragility hypothesis is summarised in Megan McArdle's post, Is Your House Red or Blue?.

It is often remarked that blue cities, full of people who purport to care about affordable housing and reducing inequality, have some of the highest rates of inequality as well as the highest housing prices in the nation. Along comes Trulia with a graph that demonstrates this phenomenon dramatically. The online real estate site compared home prices in local housing markets to the percentage by which President Barack Obama won or lost the popular vote in the 2012 election:

McArdle's commentary teases out a lot of the inherent incompatibilities between the clerisy (gentrifiers), the poor, urban residents, and minorities.

Neither article resolves the hypothesis of Democratic coalition fragility by any stretch of the imagination, but they are consistent with it. However, I think maybe the more interesting formulation might be: Which is more challenging to manage, a coalition of groups based on identity and with individual agendas based on group-interests (i.e. the Democrats), or a coalition of groups based on closely related but not identical ideologies (the Republicans)?

Nepotism and the definition of Diversity

There will be a tide of commentary on the momentous election of 2014 and I cannot meaningfully add to that. I do have a couple of purely speculatively observations.

I wonder if there isn’t a lesson about diversity in some of the results. But diversity defined differently than is customary among the clerisy. Republicans swept all the state-wide seats in Georgia. There was nominally quite a difference in degree of diversity in terms of the slate of candidates each party advanced. For the statewide races, the Democrats had a slate that was 60% (six out of ten races) female and 50% African American female (five out of ten races), a seemingly admirable degree of diversity. In contrast, the Republican slate was 100% white males. Since they won all the races, it means that the state’s electorate chose a markedly non-diverse group of winners. If you accept the traditional definitions of diversity.

However, if you look at the candidates' backgrounds, you get a different story.

All of the Republicans have a business background ranging from founding prominent law firms, to family firms, to farms, to major corporations. All also have some combination of volunteer activities in their local communities, civic positions (Chamber of Commerce officer and the ilk) and local elected positions. About a quarter have some military service in their background. Their age range is 44-76 with the median age around 60.

Three of the Democratic candidates only have experience in government positions. Two more have only worked in NGOs over their entire career. Only four have some business background at all and that tends to be fairly limited, i.e. all of it is white-collar services work, primarily for the education sector. Their age range is more limited, 39-61 and younger with a median age around 55.

It might be unfair, but not inaccurate, to describe the Democrat candidates as being primarily younger and their careers to have been entirely within NGOs, Government, and Education, with those few having some business experience being quite limited. Likewise the Republican candidates seem to have a lot more public accomplishments (big businesses, important positions, more executive experience), a much greater variety of experience within business, a broader range of industries, and a much greater mix of experience of civic roles, business, and government. They are also older.

All the explanations I am seeing in the papers for the Republican sweep seem to be inside ball and focusing on alliances and relationships and race and urban versus rural and changing demographics, and national trends, etc. I wonder if there might be a simpler explanation for the Republican sweep which might be as simple as that Republicans ran older, more accomplished, and significantly more broadly experienced candidates than did the Democrats. The Republicans ran an experientially diverse slate whereas the Democrats had a much more experientially homogenous slate.

The second observation is about family dynasties. At the national level, who lost by surprisingly robust margins? Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Michelle Nunn (Georgia), Jason Carter (Georgia), Mark Pryor (Arkansas). What do they all have in common? They are all from old southern political dynasties with their roots in a Democratic South which has evaporated. Are they losing because they are Democrats in the South or because the public is tired of family dynasties in an era of political dysfunction? I don’t know but I have a suspicion that the general public exasperation with crony capitalism, rent seeking, regulatory capture and perceived ineffectiveness of politicians is exacerbated when there is a whiff of nepotism and entitlement.

Forgotten Caribbean battles in the sunshine

I love the byways of history, stories not brought to the fore but still interesting in their own right. In the past month, I posted about Puritans establishing a colony on an island off the coast of Nicaragua in the 1600s.

In Wreck of 17th-Century Dutch Warship Discovered by Megan Gannon, there is the story of newly rediscovered wreck from a battle between the French and the Dutch over the island of Tobago in the Caribbean in 1677.

The wreck of a 17th-century Dutch warship has been discovered off the coast of Tobago, a small island located in the southern Caribbean. Marine archaeologists believe the vessel is possibly the Huis de Kreuningen, which was lost during a bloody fight between Dutch and French colonists.

On March 3, 1677, the French Navy launched a fierce attack against the Dutch in Tobago's Rockley Bay. European settlers coveted Tobago for its strategic location; in fact, the island changed hands more than 30 times after Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World.

The abbreviated story of this particular battle is, "Everybody dies, and every ship sinks," according to Kroum Batchvarov, an assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the University of Connecticut. Indeed, about 2,000 people were killed and up to 14 ships went down during the skirmish. But until now, none of those sunken vessels had been recovered.

[snip]

Because of the size of the cannons found at the site, the archaeologists suspect the wreck could be the 130-foot-long (40 meters), 56-gun warship Huis de Kreuningen. Only one other Dutch vessel, the flagship Bescherming, could have supported such large guns, but it survived the battle, Batchvarov said.

The French boarded the Huis de Kreuningen during the Battle of Tobago. To avoid capture, the Dutch captain, Roemer Vlacq, blew up the ship. The blaze spread and destroyed the French flagship Glorieux. Despite their major losses, the Dutch, led by commodore Jacob Binckes, were ultimately successful in holding back the French. (Years earlier, Binckes had re-captured New York for the Dutch; the city was, however, returned to England shortly after.)

Here's the wonder. These guys were one to two months sailing from their home countries, fighting to the death over specks of distant land. The ships they built (and sank) represented enormous amounts of capital. 2,000 lives were lost in countries that were then a fraction of what they are now in terms of size. Assuming half the losses were borne by the Dutch, that would be a thousand lives lost in a country of 2.1 million. In one battle. The comparison would be if we were to fight a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan and were to lose 143,000 men.

And yet, other than a few maritime history specialists, Dutch historians or historians of the Caribbean, how many people know of this battle today. When we bewail the challenges and tragedies of our times, it is useful to maintain some perspective on what has gone before.

I am currently reading Victor Davis Hanson's Wars of the Ancient Greeks. I enjoy Hanson's prose and marvel at his erudition but sometimes feel he overstates his case somewhat. In this book he identifies eight distinctive attributes of Greek war making that were distinctive from other cultures and the past and which inform western military traditions today. Looking at the Battle of Tobago, you can find support for most of those eight. In particular, there is the evidence of the Greek tradition of fully prosecuting a battle. Compared to in the past where battle was often an exercise in signalling, the Greeks held the view that if it was worth fighting, it was worth fighting to win completely. From Hanson's book:

5. Choice of decisive engagement: the preference to meet the enemy head-on, hand-to-hand in shock battle, and to resolve the fighting as quickly and decisively as possible, battle being simply the final military expression of the majority will of the citizenry. The Persians felt a destructive madness had come upon the Greeks at Marathon, and so it had, as they ran head-on into the Persian ranks, a practice frightening to behold for the easterner, as the battles at Plataea, Cunaxa, Granicus, Issus and Guagamela attest.

It is something of a paradox. Both Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Steven Le Blanc in Constant Battles make the point that pre-civilization, small unit battle between villages, tribes and hunter-gatherers were characterized by engagements that were frequently indecisive. A day spent shouting insults, some spears, arrows, clubs deployed, a couple of charges and then a retirement of both parties. Usually not more than a couple of deaths involved. But both Le Blanc and Pinker point out that these low level engagements were very frequent and that while the per battle death rate was low, the cummulative death rate over time was enormous compared to what we are accustomed to. Western warfare, as part of its Greek heritage, did become characterized by high death tolls per battle owing to a strong commitment to the idea of a decisive engagement. However, in aggregate, over time, the death tolls owing to conflict were much lower than in hunter-gatherer societies. Even the 20th century with WWI, WWI, the Russian revolution, the Chinese Revolution, etc. had much lower global death rates due to conflict than did hunter-gatherer bands.

I see the CDC protocols for isolating and sanitizing errors remain in effect

This is interesting as an example of the uneven dissemination of known knowledge through a community.

My oldest son came home to visit a month ago and as is often the case, we quickly became immersed in a wide ranging conversation. At some point, we touched on the Ebola epidemic. Neither of us are doctors but both of us are curious about things and are wide-ranging in our reading.

In that conversation we touched on several known issues including:

Ebola has a relatively high rate of mutability and so one of the challenges is to stay on top of emergent versions that might pose even higher risks.

That there was dispute about the appropriate duration of quarantine - 21 days or 45? Apparently 21 days gives you a 95% certainty that you can accurately know the person is uninfected. 95% is probably acceptable for sociology research but when the consequences of the 5% is death by dissolving organs, that probably might be considered too low a threshold of confidence.

That there seemed to be an almost deliberate effort to obfuscate the difference between airborne infection and infection by direct contact. Ebola is not an airborne virus but it can be spread through the air by coughing and sneezing. Those international institutions who acknowledged this seem to be issuing guidelines of maintaining a distance of between 3 and 12 feet from the potential infected patient (the variance depending on the particular institution.

That the administration and the CDC seemed to be spending much more effort (and very ineffectively) trying to control panic about Ebola rather than trying to actually control the Ebola outbreak itself.

Speculation as to why the administration might be motivated to focus on control of panic rather than focusing on controlling the spread of Ebola.

Speculation about why the CDC seemed more focused on the theater of action rather than making decisions based on evidence and critical thinking.

As I say, our conversation was not powered by any degrees in epidemiology. It was based on the reading of The Hot Zone and a couple of other books like that, books about the Black Death, Justinian's Flea, and other books touching on the history of health, medicine and plagues. The science sections of newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Archaeology, The Economist, New Scientist, etc. These aren't either esoteric sources or hard to access.

Here we are, a month later, and according to Political Cycles; Sternutation Nation by James Taranto, the realization that Ebola can be spread by coughing and sneezing is being treated as a revelation and is still causing the CDC to act in ways contrary to making evidence-based decisions.

If this story from the New York Post doesn’t restore your faith in government, we don’t know what will:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control on Thursday yanked a poster off its Web site explaining how Ebola can be spread by contaminated droplets—from a sneeze for example—a day after The Post reported on the frightening revelation.

The fact sheet was taken off line, and a link that led to it a day before now sends viewers to a different page with a different message.

“The ‘What’s the difference between infections spread through air or by droplets?’ fact sheet is being updated and is currently unavailable. Please visit cdc.gov/Ebola for up-to-date information on Ebola,” it read Thursday.

Officials with the CDC remained mum on the issue, refusing to respond to questions for the original story and again on Thursday.

“I see the CDC protocols for isolating and sanitizing errors remain in effect,” quips John Hayward on Twitter. We checked the CDC website and found this:

Can Ebola be spread by coughing or sneezing?

There is no evidence indicating that Ebola virus is spread by coughing or sneezing. Ebola virus is transmitted through direct contact with the blood or body fluids of a person who is sick with Ebola; the virus is not transmitted through the air (like measles virus). However, droplets (e.g., splashes or sprays) of respiratory or other secretions from a person who is sick with Ebola could be infectious, and therefore certain precautions (called standard, contact, and droplet precautions) are recommended for use in healthcare settings to prevent the transmission of Ebola virus from patients sick with Ebola to healthcare personnel and other patients or family members.

You could legitimately ask what is going on with the administration and the CDC and that would be a good question.

What is also interesting is why this is being treated as a new fact. Ebola being spread by coughing and sneezing was well established more than a month ago, and probably much longer ago than that. Why has it taken so long to percolate through to public awareness?

Absent a huge time discount, leave it to the market

Decades ago, I came home from university for holidays, filled and thrilled with the knowledge acquired from a course in international energy. "The world only has twenty years of oil left!" My father, an independent in the international oil industry with more than thirty years experience in the cycles of the industry, and an engineer's engineer, quietly responded, "The world always only has twenty years of oil left." He then elaborated on the cost of capital, the lead times between exploration and production, the cost of finding oil for which there is no market, and the delicate interplay of trying to find enough oil to produce for the volume of oil you think will be needed at a price you think the market will be willing to pay a decade or two in advance.

I probably learned more in that brief exchange than in the entirety of the rest of the course (which was, in the scheme of things, a pretty good course despite my callow naievete.) My take-away was that there are two miracles in play: 1) the science and engineering miracle of finding and producing the oil and gas and 2) the miracle of coordination, communication, and the delicate interplay of multiple parties with multiple agendas and priorities. Only later would I come to understand the second miracle as The Problem of Knowledge as explicated by Friedrich Hayek, the great Austrian economist.

I am reminded of this by A Rare (Earth) Case of Wisdom by Alex Tabarrok. The story essentials are that half a decade ago there was a sudden alarm about the concentration of rare earth production in a near monopoly held by China. The lesson of my father told me that while this might conceivably be concerning if your horizon was a week, a month, or a year, that in fact, if it were a real issue, that the market would adjust and the monopoly would be eroded.

Four years ago we were being warned that China’s monopoly on rare earths was a threat to the United States. Since rare earths are key resources for both national defense and green technology, the crisis united right and left in fear and anger.

[snip]

Yet you probably haven’t heard much about this crisis recently. Why not? Ans: The crisis was exaggerated and what wasn’t exaggerated the market alleviated. Eugene Gholz of CFR has a balanced examination of what happened. I summarize:

The Chinese government might or might not have wanted to take advantage of their temporary monopoly power (it’s still unclear what the fishing incident was all about) but Chinese producers did a lot to evade export bans both legally and illegally.

Firms that had been using rare earths when they were cheap decided they didn’t really need them when they were expensive.

New suppliers came on line as prices rose. Innovations created substitutes and ways to get more from using less.

It is surprising how some of our best "experts", or at least our loudest commentators with the most confident pronouncements, get it so wrong. I suppose it is function of the desire on the part of the totalitarian "to do something" and who therefore ignores, forgets, or simply fears simply waiting for the complex system of the market to work its way around the purported problem.

I also suppose that the issue is not, "What should be done?" Broadly and in most instances, we should wait for the market to clear, even if that takes time. Rather, the question becomes, "Is there a pressing reason to address this problem faster than the market will adjust?" There are times when the answer may well be Yes. But probably not as often as special interests, rent seekers, special pleaders and other accretions of the regulatory system wish it to be.

This is similar to the issue of economic development. Post World War II, and particularly with the lessons learned about central planning for the war effort and then the success of the Marshall Plan in reigniting the German, Japanese, French and British economies, there was a huge time discount regarding economic development. We couldn't leave it to the market. People around the world were in poverty! For three decades in both the developing countries themselves and among the aid donors, there was an immense amount of project-based central planning. The clerisy ran from the chaos of constantly adapting open markets.

Then in the late seventies and eighties, emerging frustration with the wasted dollars and low levels of progressed led to a slow and reluctant adoption of freeish market economies. And the rest is history in terms of reducing poverty.

The lesson seems to be that your default solution should be to let people have choices, you should facilitate free exchanges, and you should provide the rule of law if you wish to really want progress towards abolishing poverty. Too often, policy makers still rely on their belief in themselves to arrive at better answers than their track record would justify.

The virtues of a business model that charges us for our ambition rather than our behavior

An interesting observation in How Highbrow Wins in a Lowbrow World by Derek Thompson.

The fact that HBO has no ads means the network has no money tied up in its ratings. If each of its 43 million US subscribers watch 1,000 hours, 100 hours, or zero hours of "Game of Thrones" this year, it's all the same to the company's bottom line. Technically, HBO doesn't need viewers. It just needs subscribers.*

Compare HBO's business to most broadcast networks, like Fox, CBS, and NBC, who make most of their revenue from advertising, which depends on ratings. Broadcast TV won't survive on cable subscribers, alone. It needs viewers—and it tests and re-tests its shows to ensure that they will be watched by a sizable and sellable audience.

These are two business models living inside the same bundle. HBO is in the business of selling a brand. Broadcast networks are in the business of selling tickets.

If you don't think you can see microeconomics at work, just turn on your television. The networks relieved of the pressure to maximize audience tend to be the leaders in quality programming. HBO has won the most Primetime Emmy Awards for each of the last 13 years; its highbrow competitors, like Showtime and Netflix, follow a similar business model of subscriptions over ads. (Even AMC makes the majority of its income from subscription fees rather than advertising). Meanwhile, in the broadcast world over the past 13 years, the ad-dependent networks have played a mass-appeal game that has bequeathed to us populist entertainment with little chance of winning a best actor statue, including five Law & Order's, three NCIS's, and infinity reality shows.

[snip]

This idea runs bigger than television and subscriptions. When you see a tower of unread New Yorker magazines spilling out of a bathroom wicker basket—or when you look at the November calendar page and realize you haven't been back to the gym you've paid since January—you are witnessing the virtues of a business model that charges us for our ambition rather than our behavior.