Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars is one of the most painful accounts to read, relating, as it does, the tearing apart of the golden age of Ancient Greece. From Thucydides, III 69-85, The Civil War at Corcyra come words that have a contemporary ring.

In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.

Trust is very low at this point in time, in part because of the actions taken by formerly trusted institutions and in part because those actions have been hidden by making words "change their ordinary meaning" as if the citizenry wouldn't recognize that they are being lied to.

Of course it isn't a new problem. George Orwell classically had his Politics and the English Language addressing this very issue as well.

It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

We call it a political movement

When one person doesn't understand economics, we call it ignorance. When millions don't, we call it a political movement.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 3, 2016

That half of the argument is pretty much the whole of the argument

Interesting information from Donald Trump and America’s Post-constitutional Politics by Fred Siegel.

Siegel's argument is something along the lines of "the plutocrats win."

The winners in Obama’s America, where the stock market has doubled even as wages have stagnated, have been the big guys—big business, big labor, big government. Unelected bureaucrats have never had it so good. The Affordable Care Act, for instance, created 159 new boards, commissions, or programs. Elected officials more and more resemble these job-for-life bureaucrats, likelier to die in office than to be fired (or voted out) for cause. In 2014, 95 percent of sitting members of the House of Representatives won reelection, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; most of those who left went to work as lobbyists or political operatives. Washington, D.C. recently passed Silicon Valley as the richest region in the U.S.: seven of the nation’s ten wealthiest counties are in the D.C metro area. Not incidentally, Washington now has the highest rate of fine-wine consumption in the United States.

But here is the information that caught my eye.

In this context, liberal complaints that the “mainstream media” have given Trump extensive free coverage don’t add up to much. In truth, there has been no such thing as a “mainstream” press since 2008, when, in a manifestation of the country’s political polarization, much of the media enlisted in the Obama campaign. The presidents of CBS and NBC have siblings on Obama’s national security staff who helped orchestrate the catastrophe at Benghazi. Key members of the White House staff are married to prominent national reporters for ABC and CNN. The morning news at CNN is anchored by Chris Cuomo, son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and brother of current New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has considered a presidential run. George Stephanopoulos, the anchor for ABC’s Sunday morning show, is a former senior advisor to President Clinton and maintains a connection to the Clinton Foundation.

I have seen this type of information in bits and pieces before but nothing quite as extensive as this. And I am not sure that even this list is complete. I think there are more examples of the marriage between the Democratic Party and Media.

The question for me is whether there is a comparable listing on the other side of the aisle. Are there mainstream media figures married to members of the Republican Party? Granted, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly Democrat, but still, it is possible. Even the average Fox and Wall Street Journal reporter leans Democrat (as opposed to their editorial boards).

I am sure there must be some comparable examples of leading Republicans married to mainstream conservative reporters, but I can't think of any.

We have one half of an argument with no voice for the other half but I suspect this is an instance where that one half of the argument is pretty much the whole of the argument.

We have been distracted for several centuries

From The ages of distraction: Busy, distracted, inattentive? Everybody has been since at least 1710 and here are the philosophers to prove it by Frank Furedi.

The rise of the internet and the widespread availability of digital technology has surrounded us with endless sources of distraction: texts, emails and Instagrams from friends, streaming music and videos, ever-changing stock quotes, news and more news. To get our work done, we could try to turn off the digital stream, but that’s difficult to do when we’re plagued by FOMO, the modern fear of missing out. Some people think that our willpower is so weak because our brains have been damaged by digital noise. But blaming technology for the rise in inattention is misplaced. History shows that the disquiet is fuelled not by the next new thing but by the threat this thing – whatever it might be – poses to the moral authority of the day.

The first time inattention emerged as a social threat was in 18th-century Europe, during the Enlightenment, just as logic and science were pushing against religion and myth. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1710 entry from Tatler as its first reference to this word, coupling inattention with indolence; both are represented as moral vices of serious public concern.

Philosophers and moralists at the forefront of cultural construction characterised the ‘habit of inattention’ as not simply a stand-alone moral failing but the source of other vices. In An Essay on Truth (1770), the Scottish moral philosopher James Beattie, who gained a reputation for voicing the moral anxieties of his epoch, located inattention as the source of the ‘criminal habits’ that ‘debase the moral faculty’. He asserted that ‘we have contracted many evil habits, which, with proper attention, we might have avoided’. Beattie associated inattention with ‘unkindness and dissatisfaction’ and warned that if this vice was allowed to flourish, social order would be undermined.

Interesting throughout.

Furedi's comments got me to thinking. What does the data say?


Click to enlarge

It says that we have, as Furedi indicates, long been concerned about distraction, inattention and laziness (and the connection between the three.) Those concerns subsided somewhat post-1850 to a long term steady state till circa 1980 when concern about distraction once again began to rise. We are twice as concerned about distraction as we were three of decades ago.

Both Ngram Viewer and Google Trends both indicate that we express much more concerned about distraction than we do about inattention.

That is an interesting distinction. Distraction generally comes from the outside (such as the internet, Twitter, or Facebook) whereas inattention is almost strictly a personal failing of the individual. Interesting to speculate about that distinction.

25% of the world's billionaires . . .

Interesting testament against credentialism in education. From Facts about billionaires by Tyler Cowen (he is quoting another journalist).

Research shows that about a quarter of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs dropped out of university or high school before going on to join the financial elite, a greater proportion than those who achieved masters degrees.

On the other hand, about 5% of global billionaires have earned a PhD compared to 1.7% in the population at large, so PhDs are significantly overrepresented.

Hocktide

Previously unbeknownst to me, today is Hocktide. Thank you twitter.

The origins are here:

It's Hocktide, the second Tuesday after Easter, a day with some pretty odd customs in medieval England... pic.twitter.com/BH4y6I6w4x

— Eleanor Parker (@ClerkofOxford) April 5, 2016

Click to enlarge

Love the attributed origins. We forget so much.

Women for the noble act that they did in the destruction of the Danes, whych so cruelly reigned in this realme have a date of memorye thereof called hoptide, wherin it is leaful for them to take men, bynde, wasshe them, if they will give them nothing to bankett . . . (Quoted in Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 178)

This account also contains the popular explanation of the custom, that it commemorates a time when a group of Saxon women outwitted and captured some invading Danes.

As people become more mobile, we lament the loss of a sense of community. But more is lost than that sense of belonging. We lose the community memory of times past as commemorated in local customs, sayings, and adages. Not all memories are committed to paper. Some of them are embedded in our customs and habits.

Technology cycles and marginal productivity improvements

A thought prompted by The Breathless Rhetoric (and Prosaic Economics) of Virtual Reality by David Sax.

Sax says, in the context of the current excitement over virtual reality technology,

As Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, pointed out in his recent book “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” past digital panaceas have not even tended to lead to economic progress, let alone to transformative leaps. Though we may view the ability to summon warm cookies to our doors with the tap of a finger as a great advance, in reality, Gordon cautions, the greatest economic benefits Americans are likely to see from digital technology may already be behind us.

Curious, I called Gordon up, to ask whether he thinks virtual reality will be any different. He was predictably skeptical. “We had a period of about thirty years where we went all the way from offices filled with typewriters and reams of paper and file cabinets to the modern flat-screen, paperless office,” he told me. That transformation spurred productivity, and, in turn, growth, in numerous ways, for instance by freeing workers from some repetitive tasks and jobs. “I don’t see V.R. as [bringing the] same kind of productivity gain as that,” Gordon said.

Why not? Because, he argued, V.R. only has the power to incrementally shift existing practices. Gordon cited the steady introduction of new classroom technology in Northwestern’s lecture halls as an example. It has slightly changed the way he teaches, he said, but not what, how, or how much his students learn. “The reality is that students are learning the same material, and getting the same scores on tests as ever before,” he said. He saw little to suggest that the results would be different if his students were learning from home with V.R. goggles on.

The fleshy truth, it would seem, is that the business world’s great challenges are challenging precisely because they’re complex in ways that individual technological solutions cannot adequately address. V.R. may provide a boost to the entertainment industry, or, as Zuckerberg hopes, to social-media platforms, but translating these gains into widespread progress will be another matter. The problems that businesses and economies face involve a messy nexus of data, culture, circumstances, and human behavior—problems that, for now at least, must still be wrestled with in actual reality.

A couple of related but separate thoughts.

I have long argued that we do not focus enough on productivity as an end goal in itself. We focus on improving education, improving our transportation infrastructure, improving our governance, all with very specific end goals in mind. That is fine as far as it goes. It i, however,s not entirely coincidental that the outcomes are, aside from their particulars, an increase in overall productivity. But few, if any, of these projects/policies are, in their own right, justified solely on their impact on productivity. I think that is a conversation we need to have. It will save us from empty promises and overheated rhetoric (to some degree.)

The second thought is to do with cycle times. Out technology cycle times have shrunk dramatically from 45 years (at the beginning of 1900) to fifteen years and they are on track for even shorter cycle times. I wonder, though, whether this is in part because any individual technology platform is unlikely to lead to the type of aggregate productivity improvement we have seen in the past. In those days, a new technology, such as electrification, came in and spread across all sectors of the economy and private life. It was a pervasive technology that yielded productivity improvements everywhere.

Today, I suspect, our "new" technologies often only touch some segment of the economy. Yes, they increase productivity but only in a narrow sliver. Perhaps we are experiencing shorter cycles because each platform is pertinent to a narrower and narrower range activities and therefore have a declining marginal impact on overall productivity?

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

I become frustrated and jaundiced with the constant ideological focus of authoritarians who seek to deprive others of their liberties, often under the auspices of critical race theory and its ilk. The constant manufacture of fake outrage and race hoaxes is simply a surfeit of cognitive pollution. It is easy to become so jaundiced as to discount all racial injustices, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The horrors of slavery past become easy to gloss over owing to the advocacy excesses of today. Those past accounts rendered in words are often simply not read. They are too jarring. Fortunately there are those such as J.M.W. Turner with his Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on, 1840 who can serve to keep the awareness and horror of that past institution alive.

From Wikipedia:

J.M.W. Turner was inspired to paint The Slave Ship in 1840 after reading The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade by Thomas Clarkson. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. This event probably inspired Turner to create his landscape and to choose to coincide its exhibition with a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Although slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire since 1833, Turner and many other abolitionists believed that slavery should be outlawed around the world. Turner thus exhibited his painting during the anti-slavery conference, intending for Prince Albert, who was speaking at the event, to see it and be moved to increase British anti-slavery efforts. Placed next to the painting were lines from Turner's own untitled poem, written in 1812:

"Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon's coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne'er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?"

The refrain from Rudyard Kipling's much later poem, Recessional, from 1897 seems oddly fitting, "Lest we forget"

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word-
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord![

Trojan Horses in Vietnam

Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh is a goldmine of interesting details.

Discussing the First Vietnam War between the French and the Vietnamese in the early 1950s, Burleigh makes a dreadful pun.

Although there were itinerant brothels, staffed by brave and colourfully dressed women from the Algerian Ouled Nail tribe that honoured the activity as a way of earning matrimonial dowries, many French troops acquired a permanent congai or common law wife, a popular practice too among their Vietnamese comrades, who simply moved their real wives into camps de maries. The vulnerability this created was manifest, and a third of the French posts that fell were betrayed from within by Viet Minh Trojan whores.

Newtonian determinism versus statistical probabilities

From Critical Mass by Philip Ball.

The shift from Newtonian determinism to statistical science is what makes a physics of society possible. It was not a smooth ride; but as we shall now see, it may have been bumpier still if scientists and philosophers had not already begun to appreciate that society itself is fundamentally a statistical phenomenon.