JDN 2456395 EDT 11:25.

 

Jennifer Ackerman's Chance in the House of Fate is a joy to read, its finely-crafted prose effervescent with the childlike curiosity and wonder that characterizes the greatest visionaries and scientists. It will thoroughly refute the claims of anyone who thinks that science diminishes the sense of awe and wonder in our lives; Ackerman will fill you with a sense of wonder and mystery unlike any you could ever find except through science.

Passages like these will resonate in you and expand your mind:

 

"Every genealogical tree has its holes, its secret boughs and branches, the upshot of poor records or unspoken rules about keeping mute on family trouble. Imagine the leaves that might quietly wilt away from official family history--the secret liaisons, discreet separations, the bachelor or spinster howling from some moldy, worm-eaten limb, the wayward running weed that started off a new offshoot." (p.8)

"This duality of the double helix, this changing and staying, is its real genius. If replication were perfect, there would be little invention, only a planet of onerous repetition; if mutation were unfettered, things would be a chaos of change, nothing with identity, nothing abiding, nothing resembling family. A yin-yang system, one part devoted to stability, the other to reform, has allowed life both to persist and to dream its way into wild variety." (p.19)

"I was fascinated by the disembodied cell itself, which looked for all the world like its own creature, if not a cephalopod then a protozoan from Leeuwenhoek's scummy pond. It certainly acted independently, crawling about its culture dish as if it were bottom-feeding or seeking out its brethren. Under the right conditions, Hoffman-Kim explained, any cell can enjoy a kind of free existence no less sophisticated than that of a single-celled creature rioting in a roadside pool. Neurons, in particular, have something like a mind of their own." (p.59)

"Imagine the task. Take two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom and make them into a molecule shaped like a V. Make the angle between the arms 104 degrees and the distances between the atoms--the dashes in H-O-H--precisely 0.095718 nanometer. Make the molecule conservative and self-loving by giving it an odd electrical asymmetry, clustering the electrons near the oxygen atom, allowing one molecule to bond easily with another so that rivers, lakes, and oceans hold together, so that water remains liquid at room temperature when it should be gas, so that my metabolism, the basic business of my bodily living, does not bring on a temperature that would set my bones afire." (p. 211)

 

And yet... Ackerman does not seem to be much of a scientist herself. She cites Gould, who systematically misrepresents other researchers; she also cites Elaine Morgan's Aquatic Ape Theory, which has gone beyond falsehood into outright quackery. She occasionally makes absolutely egregious errors, as on page 130 when she says "48 percent in the chimpanzee; and 50 percent in the gorilla, the primate species most closely related to us." (I'm afraid you have that backwards.)

We have here what Stephen Pinker called the "Igon Value Problem", the failure of translation that often occurs when someone who is trained only in writing attempts to do science writing. They interview experts and do their best to take down what they say, but something is lost in the oral conveyance, science as a game of Telephone. The result is a subtle distortion of science, not completely wrong, but also not quite right, often spreading misconceptions that infest the lay population.

To be fair, science writers who are just practicing scientists who attempt to write to the lay public suffer their own pitfalls; they are often encumbered by jargon and mathematics, and the Curse of Knowledge leads them to overestimate what others already know. You may notice I've just cited Pinker twice; this is no accident, as he is almost certainly the finest science writer of our generation. Pinker knows how to do science and how to write. His is peered only by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking; I honestly can't think of anyone else who deserves the same title. There are other science writers who are good; but these three, they are great. If I can one day be half as good a science writer with half as many readers as Pinker, I shall count my life a success.

I'm afraid there is no easy path here; you must be good at both. Perhaps Pinker cuts the knot a little by being a cognitive linguist; his expertise is language, tying together the two domains. (Then again, Noam Chomsky's writing isn't nearly as good.)

So I can't really fault Ackerman; she's doing her best as an intelligent layperson and a stellar author. How could she know that Gould is such a dubious source, when he is probably the best-selling and most famous science writer of all time? The Aquatic Ape Theory sounds so reasonable when you first hear it, and the underdog tale of a brilliant idea suppressed by a corrupt establishment is a familiar and dramatic one. (It's also, in this case, utterly false; evolutionary biologists examined this hypothesis carefully and objectively, finding that it simply did not fit the evidence. If you seek a scientific martyr, perhaps Galileo or Giordano Bruno, or even Darwin, would be a better choice.)

Still, I can't give it five stars either. It's good, not great. Especially that part about saying gorillas are closer to us than chimpanzees.

I have mixed feelings about this article on Jezebel. Obviously sexual harassment is a problem, and we do need to talk about it... but is this the right way to talk about it? 

(By the way, as to what Obama said, here is the full quote: “You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” the president said. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.” I honestly have trouble seeing this as offensive. He was layering on compliments, most of them relevant to her position, and then happened upon a generic statement of physical attractiveness. Would it be insulting or sexist of me to say that I think Obama is not only a better President than George W. Bush, but also far better-looking?

Like many feminist responses, I think it doesn't work hard enough to understand the psychology of men who are responsible for inadvertent sexism.

We need to make a distinction here: There are some men who intentionally insult, degrade, and humiliate women. They are beyond the pale, and your words are unlikely to reach them anyway. 

But there are also other men, who really are honestly confused about where the boundaries are supposed to be. And yes, much of that is their internalized gender norms, and some of it is ultimately founded upon misogynistic ideas. But at a conscious level, they don't think they are being harmful. They aren't trying to cause insult or injury. And so, when you tell them, "Just treat women like people! Respect them!" it makes no sense to them, because they thought they WERE respecting them. They didn't understand why their behavior was inappropriate.

I come at this from the perspective of someone mildly autistic; the social norms of our culture are in large part things I have had to consciously formulate and actively direct my behavior toward, rather than things that simply come naturally as part of normal functioning. A lot of those norms are sensible; most are arbitrary; some are outright nonsensical. But I am expected to follow all of them, every moment of every day, and make it appear effortless. And if you aren't on the autism spectrum, you may just do so, literally effortlessly; but I assure you, I do not. Just knowing how to start a conversation, how much to give eye contact, how close to stand; these are things I had to actively learn, and while I'm rather good at them now, they still aren't quite effortless. 

So I can appreciate what it must feel like to be told that you are disrespecting people by violating some norm that you didn't even know was in place. It must be all the more frustrating to be told, "What's wrong with you? It's OBVIOUS." No, it isn't obvious, not always. It may seem obvious to you because you have internalized it; but that doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone.

Indeed, I know what it feels like for such challenges to be attached to sexuality in particular. I think the reason that I spent such a long time sexually frustrated was that I didn't know how to navigate the complex social norms of sexual overtures. I didn't know when it was appropriate to make a sexual advance, or what was an appropriate method of doing so. So, typically... I didn't. And that basically meant never having sex with women, ever, because men are expected to make the first move. (I realize a lot of feminists don't like that either; but the norm is still here, and it's important to understand inadvertent harassment in that context.) With men it was a little easier, since sometimes they would make the first move. But then there was the barrier of heteronormativity, the cultural shunning of LGBT people. So I was still, in some sense, forced to break norms.

I do like some of what this post says; particularly, the part about focusing on context is a very good one. What it would be appropriate to say in a bar is typically not appropriate to say in a business meeting. I also like the idea of gauging reaction, moving slowly, and apologizing if you overstep boundaries.

But what really annoyed me about this was the "it's not a game". No, actually, it totally is. Social norms have a complex system of arbitrary rules that are attached to incentives. Not only is it a game in the mathematical sense, it's really pretty much a game in the traditional sense as well. Men aren't supposed to wear dresses, you're supposed to make eye contact 40% of the time and stand 0.6 meters away, this uncomfortable thing around your neck makes you look formal, shorter sleeves are more casual, these are swim trunks (acceptable) but these are boxer shorts (unacceptable), these are the appropriate euphemisms for this context... there are literally hundreds if not thousands of rules, and many of them are completely arbitrary.

And if you don't think the rules are arbitrary, well... you clearly know nothing about cultural variation, which makes your arguments for cultural inclusivenses and intersectionality fall pretty damn flat. Not all social rules are arbitrary, but the ones that people most often slip up on generally are. There is no inherent reason why 70% eye contact is creepy or standing 1.2 meters makes you aloof; but in American culture, you WILL be read that way.

So these men are struggling with the fact that the norms they learned before are now invalid. Maybe they should always have been invalid; maybe they're bad rules (some of them clearly are). But the fact remains that when these men learned them, they understood them to be "the way it's done". It seemed, well, OBVIOUS. Men open doors, tell women they're pretty, always pay for the meal. Men are aggressive, women are meek; that's how it's "supposed to be". It no more seems sexist to them than gender-segregated bathrooms seem sexist to most people (even though, in a strict sense, they really are).

You need to approach them with that in mind, actively pointing out the norms you are challenging and the norms you want to replace them with. Don't try to pretend that your way is the obvious and natural system, because it isn't; there is no such obvious, natural system, and actually if there were one, it would probably be quite sexist. The Onion is oft insightful.

And no, I DON'T think you get to use all the other sources of sexism that women face when addressing a particular comment. Because the man speaking that comment IS NOT RESPONSIBLE for all of that, and may well oppose it as strongly as you do.

I guess I can see why some level of sensitivity might be in order, but it only goes so far. Here's an analogy: You were attacked by a cat as a small child, and as a result have a paranoid phobia of cats. You can't stand to look at, think about, or have any interaction with cats. Knowing this, I should rightly be careful about bringing up cats around you; but if I should slip up and show you a picture of a cat, you really have no right to blame me for causing you psychological damage. Showing a picture of a cat is, in fact, an inherently harmless activity. Now, if I knew of your phobia and went out of my way to show you pictures of cats in order to cause you distress, that would indeed be wrong; but that's not what we're talking about here. Obama does not have an established pattern of sexual harassment (unlike, say, Herman Cain).

JDN 2456392 EDT 11:55.

 

I was thinking today about centrifugal force, and how to decide whether it really qualifies as a real force, rather than an artifact of a bad reference frame. What does it mean to say that a force "really exists", and how could we tell?

Well, I came to the conclusion that it really isn't a real force, because there's no mechanism for it to happen, no virtual particles exchanged. Also, it's always directly proportional to your inertial mass, which is pretty darn fishy. What kind of weird force is directly proportional to your mass?

But then it occurred to me: Actually there is another such force, we call it gravity. But what if gravity is like centrifugal force, actually an artifact of a bad reference frame?

General Relativity already sort of implies this, actually; it explains gravitation as a curvature of spacetime itself, such that a particle traveling along a gravitational geodesic does not feel any acceleration. You only feel a force if you try to resist the curvature of space.

There is of course one problem with such a view: What curves the space? Why is space consistently curved a certain amount around every set of a certain number of protons? And what does this have to do with the Higgs mechanism, which we now pretty much need to factor in, seeing as we found the Higgs?
So here's a theory, or rather a sketch of a theory without any of the mathematics: The Higgs is not a particle, but a packet of curved space. Such packets have a charge that attracts them to particles like the proton (in much the same way as in the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model). But then, this is why they create inertia: Curved space resists movement. Inertia is the resistance space has to being curved out of shape.

This would explain, at last, why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same thing; inertia and gravitation are the same thing!

This can even point to a solution to the divergent integrals in quantum gravity: The Higgs is quantized, therefore the curvature of space is quantized. Maybe space itself is quantized... or maybe not, maybe just its curvature is.

On the other hand, what to do about quantum nonlocality versus Lorentz invariance... yeah, that one has me stumped. Copenhagen is a non-starter; it just hand-waves the problem by saying "you can't predict it exactly!" True, there is Bell's Theorem, so... what's going on then? It really seems like we have to deal with nonlocal realism, rather than this silly local nonrealism.

I don't have quite the math skills necessary to work this out formally. I'm sure I could learn, but it would probably take awhile...

Reflections on TEDxUM 2013

 

JDN 2456390 EDT 16:06.

 

Two days ago (JDN 2456388, Friday 5 Apr 2013) was TEDxUM 2013, the fourth annual installment of the University of Michigan's chapter of TED. In case you didn't know (where have you been?), TED is a global conference series, originally "Technology, Entertainment, and Design", but now an eclectic memetic beast dedicated to all things innovative. If you haven't watched any TED videos, you must do so; but be sure you have some time to spare, for you will find you can't watch just one.

TED itself is marvelous; it is also horrifically expensive. TEDx is a far smaller, cheaper event, a sort of bite-size TED.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and I suppose I did get some good things out of it (not least, I networked with someone who sounds like he may offer me a job); but it certainly wasn't nearly as impressive as the real TED.

There were 20 speakers, each for about 15 minutes; yes, that's 5 hours of lecturing. Another few hours were taken by lunch, musical interludes (mostly awful, especially the first one) and brief breaks, and then there was a dinner reception; so overall I arrived at 9 AM and did not leave until 9 PM. The speakers were quite a mixed bag; some good, a few even excellent, most mediocre, and some quite disappointing.

The first speaker, Robert Quinn, was one of the worst; apparently he is a professor of management, and his talk was based on his experience of managing companies and training others to do so. As a result, he used examples that had no resonance with anything else, to make arguments that probably apply least to the field in which he was applying them. He was trying to argue that a sense of purpose makes you happier and more productive, but his examples did nothing to show that. He did a ridiculous demonstration that involved the crowd jumping up and down in unison, and he had a saccharine feel-good philosophy that is useless to anyone who actually has real struggles. His entire talk would have been better if it were replaced by just the following parable:

Three men are lifting rocks and carrying them from one place to another. A traveler asks them, "What are you doing?" The first sighs and says, "Whatever the boss tells me to do." The second shrugs and says, "We're lifting some rocks and carrying them somewhere." The third smiles and says, "I'm building a skyscraper."

Fortunately, the second speaker, Kathryn Clark, was excellent; she has an illustrious career including several years at NASA, and her speech was dynamic and moving. The central message was one I've been trying to explain to people for years: "The most underappreciated benefit of space travel has been the generations of people inspired by it." "What we really lose when we stop trying to reach for the stars... is the very idea that we can."

Oliver Uberti was quite good as well; his experience is in graphic design, which is ironic because I felt that the least impressive aspect of his project was its graphic design. (The chart was very pretty, but its layout was confusing and not useful.) The project itself was quite compelling though; he had mapped out the lives of a hundred geniuses in various fields--art, music, science, literature--and compared their timelines. He found that contrary to popular imagination, the master works were not achieved in their precocious youths, but rather in the middle of their careers; some 2/3 of the achievements were between the ages of 30 and 50 years old. This pattern was quite consistent across fields. It also gave me personally a sense of renewed hope; for several years I'd had people telling me that scientists do their best work before they are 25, and then I turned 25 and still hadn't published a scientific paper. Well, it turns out that's simply not true; I still have another 20 years to do my master work.

The fourth presentation was a pair, Maria Castro and Pedro Lowenstein; they are neuroscientists working on a gene therapy for brain cancer. Their project is one I wholemindedly support; their lecture, on the other hand, was quite boring. It was all about the technical details, not the broader implications. It would be suitable for a presentation to a medical conference or a funding committee, I'm sure; but it did not belong at TED.

Dan Morse's presentation was annoying. The basic concept was sound: an entrepreneur tried to caution us against excessive hero worship and rugged individualism, pointing out how flawed and mutually dependent we all are. But along the way he insisted upon coining (and using, over and over again) ridiculous, awkward portmanteaus like "heropreneurship". I was glad to see it end.

Sterling Speirn's presentation was quite good; he is the CEO of the Kellogg Foundation, and his lecture was about how we can balance social responsibility and financial returns--we don't have to sacrifice our principles to protect our budgets. He was talking specifically about charitable foundations, but we can extend the reasoning much more broadly; businesses and individuals need to learn to think this way as well.

John Bacon's presentation was all right; his central point is that we write and read history the wrong way, making it sound like an inevitable logical progression when it was in reality anything but. Individual choices and random events have an enormous, far-reaching impact. "History was never inevitable." He credits Jackie Robinson almost single-handedly for the civil rights movement; I wouldn't go that far, but it did convince me that individual moments can be hugely important.

The last lecture before lunch, by Sharon Pomerantz, was extremely boring. She went through a long story about her life as an entry-level journalist, and really had nothing compelling to say. I guess somewhere in there was a message of perseverance, a reminder to keep trying amidst rejection; but the lecture was disorganized and didn't convey this message clearly.

After lunch session 2 began with Mike Barwis, an athletic trainer who works with paralysis victims. It was much like the neuroscience lecture earlier; while I strongly support the work he does, the talk itself really didn't have much to say.

Next came the strangest presentation, a piece of "spoken word art" (roughly, slam poetry) presented by Gina Ulysse that then segued rather arbitrarily into the story of her life and a rant against the depiction of Haiti in Western media. She was angry that Haiti is usually depicted as victims, of poverty, of natural disasters; never as a vibrant community with much to contribute. I guess I can appreciate this critique, but then again... Haiti is a horrible place to live. No, really, by any objective metric, you do not want to live there. Famine, disease, and disaster surround you there. So portraying them as victims is... pretty accurate, frankly. It really felt like a sort of ethnic inferiority complex, where a sense of "national pride" becomes so elevated that you are unwilling to accept the fact that the nation of your birth is a place of truly horrible conditions. It's a little unseemly, frankly; it reminds me of "America: Love It or Leave It" people who refuse to listen to facts about economic inequality, poverty, and incarceration in the US.

Julie Steiner gave a pretty good presentation; it started out slow, but eventually culminated in an argument millions of people need to hear: Social welfare policy isn't just good, it's also cost-effective. She compared the costs of schools versus prisons, homes versus homeless shelters, preventative care versus emergency rooms; in virtually every case, the more compassionate policy was also the more economical one. I wish she had brought up foreign aid versus military spending, but that's a minor omission. This is what the world needs to understand; helping people doesn't waste resources, in fact, it saves them.

Michael Williams went beyond mediocre to become outright bad; he had a similar ethnic inferiority complex, this time applied to Detroit. He was trying to convince us that Detroit is due for a massive revival and a golden age, which I can frankly call nothing less than fantasy. Detroit is corrupt, impoverished, and degraded. Yes, it has a few good parts, and maybe it will get better eventually. But you must not let your sense of pride overwhelm basic facts about the problem you're facing. By the way, Williams has no particular qualifications; he's just a student interested in social justice. Thus concluded session 2.

The final session began with Merry Michelle Walker, whose presentation was basically an advertisement for her organization, Vort Port International. They talked about various development programs they have done in the Third World, many of which sound like very good ideas; but there was no real message to the talk, nothing for us to take home and spread. She wasn't even asking for donations!

The next mediocrity was James Robert's presentation. He is a high school teacher in Ann Arbor, much like my father; except that apparently he has clout with the school administration, because he was able to get permission to run a Socratic dialogue philosophy course that my father would certainly have done if he weren't repeatedly forced into teaching the semi-literate sweathogs that no other teachers want. I don't know, maybe this sense of bitterness has clouded my judgment; but I really got the sense that his lecture was all about how amazing his own teaching methods are, and had little in the way of broader applications and no consideration at all of the obstacles that other teachers would face in implementing these methods. Get rid of standardized tests! Engage in mutual dialogue! That sounds great; now how did you talk the principal into that? How would we talk the state legislature into it?

The next presentation was a little better. Evelyn Alsultany came to tell us about the depiction of Arabs in Western media. I had expected her to simply rant against the unfair stereotypes, but she actually took a quite nuanced approach, pointing out positive depictions as well as negative ones; also her recommendation was emphatically not censorship, but rather a flourishing of new and diverse perspectives. She also talked about something that might not otherwise be obvious: Many of the positive depictions are of Arabs as counter-terrorists, which still reinforces the association between Arabs and terrorism.

The presentation after that---the sixteenth in the series---had such potential, but squandered it. Mary Heinen came before us to talk about mass incarceration, which is surely one of the worst and most underappreciated problems facing America today. Heinen railed passionately against this problem, but failed to acknowledge what I think any advocate of de-incarceration must: Some criminals deserve to be imprisoned. There are violent psychopaths in the world, who must be deterred when possible and incapacitated when not. Heinen made no distinction between different types of crime or different types of criminal, and so she came across as saying that we should set all the murderers and rapists free. I assume that this is not really what she meant; she probably intended to be talking about our massive numbers of incarcerated drug addicts and mentally-ill homeless people. But she didn't specify that; she didn't come across as making any distinction between different types of prisoner at all. Anyone who wasn't already convinced that mass incarceration is a problem would not have become convinced by her presentation; in fact, those on the fence might well have been turned the other way. A far better source to read is When Brute Force Fails, which is a rigorous and nuanced pragmatic approach to the problems of crime and imprisonment.

Zafar Razzacki's presentation was all right; from his background in chemistry he made an analogy between collaboration and catalysts; collaborators "lower the activation energy" for difficult tasks. It was really sort of a banal point, but he was a very dynamic and humorous speaker.

David Chesney's presentation was fairly good; though his background is in computer science, his presentation had virtually nothing to do with that. Instead, it was about the courses of our lives, how choices and events shape them. He compared two kinds of events, "shouts", like weddings and graduations, which we recognize as turning points at the time; and "whispers", like people we meet and ideas we have, which seem unimportant at the time but can grow to change our lives just as radically. The talk was deeply personal, as he relayed some of the shouts and whispers in his own life.

Melissa Gross's presentation was also quite good; she is a kinesiologist and also a dancer, and she talked about how we can combine arts and sciences to create a new generation of scientists who are also creative. I wish she had gotten more into the importance of creativity in science, but maybe she simply took it for granted.

The final presentation was even more personal. Chris Armstrong, the first openly-gay president of the University of Michigan student government, spoke about his experiences with an event so bizarre no one would believe it in a work of fiction. The assistant attorney general of the State of Michigan stalked and harassed him for several months, writing a blog that compared him to Hitler and Stalin, denouncing his "radical homosexual anti-Christian agenda", and even accusing him and his friends of participating in gay orgies. Armstrong contextualized this story in terms of the bullying and hatred that LGBT people face around the world, and while he didn't have any particular solutions to offer, his speech was a moving call to do something to take action against this injustice. It was the only presentation that brought me to the verge of tears.

Overall, I guess it was worthwhile; but it's not quite the true TED.

JDN 2456387 EDT 16:50.

 Since I won $2500 of his money (The James Randi Educational Foundation scholarship), I felt I should probably read some of James Randi's books. I happened upon Flim-Flam!, which is older than I am, and yet... the nonsense it catalogues and refutes is pretty much the same stuff we're dealing with today. Why, just this last Tuesday I had someone try to convince me that quantum mechanics allows precognition, citing Daryl Bem's 2010 precognition experiments, which really serve to indict research standards in social science more than anything else. Flim-Flam! contains a number of examples basically indistinguishable from these claims.

Randi is a magician by trade, so he doesn't have any erudite academic qualifications. This makes his writing breezy and easy to read; it also makes him more willing than most to actually call people out as frauds and charlatans. Dawkins does not suffer fools well; Randi does not suffer them at all. He has tested a great many paranormalists, and can thoroughly catalogue their frauds and failures.

Most of the book is exactly that; Randi goes through a long list of paranormalists whose claims he has tested experimentally; not surprisingly all of them fail, and some of them fail catastrophically. The numerous frauds were to be expected; but a large number of Randi's subjects seem to be true believers. They really think they have mysterious paranormal powers, and are shocked and disappointed when they fail Randi's tests.

Somewhere between hilarious and pathetic are the excuses they all make; whatever the result, they can always come up with a reason that doesn't involve abandoning belief in the phenomenon. At some level, they know exactly how things will turn out, exactly as non-paranormal science would predict; and yet, they still believe.

Randi doesn't try to make any deep philosophical arguments against the paranormal, preferring instead a strictly empirical approach. He rigorously tests every claim using the best scientific tools available. Provide compelling scientific evidence of a paranormal event under appropriately controlled conditions, and Randi will shower you with apologizes, fame, and above all, money. In 1982 his prize was $10,000 ($24,000 in today's dollars); today it is $1 million. No one has won it, and like Randi I strongly suspect no one ever will.

Fuzzy-headed paranormalists will of course argue that the reason for this is that Randi doesn't play fair, or his "negative energy" ruins the process; some even go as far to say that he is himself a psychic who suppresses other psychics for personal gain. But from reading his work, I get the strong impression that Randi really does play fair, and really would be delighted to see evidence of paranormal events. The reason I don't expect him to ever pay out is not that he would refuse, but that the phenomena simply do not exist to be found.

Randi also makes a point that I've found to be true in my own life: If you don't place a bet, people say you aren't putting your money where your mouth is; and then if you do, they say you are showboating and being theatrical. I had precisely this reaction when an acquaintance of mine made the preposterous claim that he could justify morality without making any assumptions at all. I offered him his choice of $100 or a 10% share in the Science of Morality, and he naturally refused and complained about my theatrics. When he finally did reveal his brilliant theory... suffice to say it was underwhelming. I think I experienced a little taste of Randi's life in that moment.

There are two reasons why I'm not sure Flim-Flam! succeeds. The first is that the sort of people who believe in the paranormal are unlikely to read it at all. The second is that I think paranormal claims fail even before they have to be empirically investigated.

How can I be so sure that we will never find anything paranormal? Randi would say he isn't completely sure, just 99.999% sure after all the negative results. That's certainly a scientifically respectable position, and it's definitely the one I take on certain things, like unicorns, yetis, and faster-than-light travel.

But when it comes to claims of the paranormal, I think we may be able to go a bit further than that. Still not absolutely certain, since nothing is; but as close to certainty as we are ever going to get. There is a fundamental logical reason why paranormal, and also magical, and also miraculous, phenomena cannot exist: If they existed, we wouldn't call them that.

It's funny how paranormalists abuse quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics really does say a lot of baffling, marvelous, mind-bending things about the universe. But the reason we don't call it "magical" or "paranormal" is that it's actually real. It works. It can be quantified and verified. Indeed, quantum mechanics has been verified to a level of precision that is almost impossible to conceive: The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron has been predicted to one part in a trillion. This would be like measuring the width of the United States to within a human hair or the distance from Earth to Mars to the nearest inch. Far from being the "anything goes" that most people seem to think it is, quantum mechanics is so incredibly precise that it can tell the difference between 1.42582 GHz and 1.42584 GHz. The reason it seems so weird is that we are so weird; we're these huge 10^28-nucleon monstrosities that operate in the bizarre world of large-scale decoherence.

But suppose we do find something very different from what we currently predict. Suppose we find a way to achieve faster-than-light travel, or discover telepathy, or even, wonder of wonders, verify that Bem was right about precognition all along. Once that new discovery became verified, explained, and fitted into our scientific paradigm, people would stop calling it paranormal. Yesterday's magic is tomorrow's technology.

This is really the problem with supernatural beliefs in general: They couldn't possibly be true, for if they were, you wouldn't call them "supernatural". For most people, things stop seeming magical once they start making sense; this is an incredibly dumb approach to the world, because it means that the better you can function the more disillusioned you feel, but it's also the way most people seem to work. This may be the fundamental difference between scientists and the rest of humanity; when scientists figure out how something works, it feels more fascinating to us, more magical if you like that word. Perhaps this mindset is trainable; if it is, we must endeavor to train it in as many people as possible. People must learn to take joy in the merely real, to see the magic in what is called mundane.

Most people, however, are exactly the opposite. When something becomes explained or even explainable, it loses its sense of wonder for them. And they tend to project this attitude onto scientists: "Your life must feel so meaningless! You take all the wonder out of everything!"

But of course, any wonder that knowledge can take away... wasn't really there in the first place. If it's not cool enough that we can communicate thoughts to each other's minds thousands of miles away--because we do it using hands and eyes and Internet connections--then how would it ever be cool enough? Suppose we had telepathy that used quantum physics, or Slipspace, or even the spirits of the dead; once we understood it, you'd say that wasn't magical either.

If it's not wondrous enough that we can manipulate objects in space, even create whole new classes of objects that can then be sent off autonomously into the void, then what would be wondrous enough for you? Suppose we had telekinesis or astral projection; once it was explained in terms of energy conservation, you'd find it boring again.

 

 

Writing fiction often gives us opportunities to explore different ways the world might be. I devised a tax system for the Terlaroni that suits their social-democratic and mathematically-minded approach to the world... and discovered that it actually seems like a pretty good idea.

The current US tax system is progressive, but not very much. We still require people below the poverty level to pay taxes, capital gains rates are much lower than ordinary income rates, and there is basically no difference in tax rate between an income of $1 million and an income of $1 billion.

I have devised a mathematically elegant tax system that solves these problems. The basic principle is a proportional tax on luxury, that is, the tax claims a fixed proportion of the extra utility you receive from wealth above subsistence.

The utility of wealth is widely believe to be logarithmic, such that $100,000 is as much better than $10,000 as $10,000 is than $1,000. While this tends to break down near the subsistence level, it works quite well above that, which is where we'll be using it anyway. Normalize so that the subsistence level yields utility of 0.

For a subsistence level s and income x, this yields utility U:

 

U = b ln[(x-s)/s]

 

Now, if the government takes a proportional tax on luxury, this defines a parameter k that decides the tax rate for any given income level (though be careful not to confuse it with the tax rate itself). Let x2 be after-tax income and x1 be before-tax income.

U(x2) = k U(x1)

b ln [(x2-s)/s] = k b ln[(x1-s)/s]

 

The parameter b becomes irrelevant (it's basically a measurement unit), and we can solve this explicitly for x2:

 

x2 = s (1 + (x1/s - 1)^k)

 

This results in a progressive tax rate, which is 0 at x1 = 2s, increases in x1, and approaches 1 as x1 approaches infinity. Note that higher k indicates more take-home pay, that is, a lower tax rate.

There is one other wrinkle; as written, this would mean a net negative tax rate on incomes between 1s and 2s, and even weirder, an undefined tax rate for incomes below s. We can solve this problem easily, by saying that incomes below 2s (that is, below twice the subsistence level) are untaxed. If the subsistence level is set at half the median income (as it is in Europe), then this means that incomes below the median are untaxed.

I added another feature as well: incomes less than subsistence receive a subsidy, which raises them up to the subsistence level. This could essentially eliminate the need for all other means-tested welfare programs.

Note that there are no "tax brackets" in this system, just a smooth progression of tax rates; furthermore, an increase in gross income will never result in a decrease in net income. In the regime x1 < s, net income remains constant at s due to the subsidy; at s < x1 < 2s, net income is just gross income; and then at 2s < x1, net income is a monotonically increasing function of gross income which increases at a strictly decreasing rate. Due to rounding to the nearest cent, we could say that income is actually a step function, but for realistic amounts of wealth, the steps are quite short; even into the millions you get another cent of net income at about every 4 cents of gross income.

Moreover, there is no maximum net income; a gross income of 10^20 s still produces a larger net income than a gross income of 10^19 s, even though these are ludicrously huge amounts of wealth better attributed to gods than men. (Assuming a subsistence level of $10,000 per year, 10^19 s would be about a billion times the world's present GDP; these individuals own galaxies.)

I created a computer simulation of this tax system using Monte Carlo methods. I randomly generated 1 million different incomes according to a Pareto distribution (with some noise added), and simulated the resulting revenue from using this system with different values of the rate parameter k.

I even included an adjustment for the Laffer effect (higher taxation slows economic growth); this adjustment was admittedly not very precise, but this is hardly my fault, as the Laffer effect has never been pinned down quantitatively. We all agree that it should have some effect; the debate is about the size of the effect. For the model, I used a rather strong effect, as will be apparent from the results. I don't believe the effect is actually this strong, but I wanted to be fair to those who do.

 

Rate Constant: 0.1 Revenue: 788033

GDP: 1.96501e+006 Per capita: 1.96501

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 105886 Subsidized: 732728

Taxable fraction: 0.105886 Subsidized fraction: 0.732728

Revenue fraction: 0.401032

 

Rate Constant: 0.2 Revenue: 961836

GDP: 2.25564e+006 Per capita: 2.25564

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 160220 Subsidized: 595526

Taxable fraction: 0.16022 Subsidized fraction: 0.595526

Revenue fraction: 0.426414

 

Rate Constant: 0.3 Revenue: 1.47999e+006

GDP: 2.89757e+006 Per capita: 2.89757

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 204407 Subsidized: 483638

Taxable fraction: 0.204407 Subsidized fraction: 0.483638

Revenue fraction: 0.510769

 

Rate Constant: 0.4 Revenue: 1.6487e+006

GDP: 3.21021e+006 Per capita: 3.21021

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 243337 Subsidized: 397248

Taxable fraction: 0.243337 Subsidized fraction: 0.397248

Revenue fraction: 0.51358

 

Rate Constant: 0.5 Revenue: 1.9732e+006

GDP: 3.71347e+006 Per capita: 3.71347

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 278129 Subsidized: 329426

Taxable fraction: 0.278129 Subsidized fraction: 0.329426

Revenue fraction: 0.531363

 

Rate Constant: 0.6 Revenue: 2.14879e+006

GDP: 4.12788e+006 Per capita: 4.12788

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 309204 Subsidized: 275932

Taxable fraction: 0.309204 Subsidized fraction: 0.275932

Revenue fraction: 0.520555

 

Rate Constant: 0.7 Revenue: 1.91983e+006

GDP: 4.22614e+006 Per capita: 4.22614

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 338792 Subsidized: 231781

Taxable fraction: 0.338792 Subsidized fraction: 0.231781

Revenue fraction: 0.454277

 

Rate Constant: 0.8 Revenue: 2.13355e+006

GDP: 4.98527e+006 Per capita: 4.98527

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 368044 Subsidized: 193993

Taxable fraction: 0.368044 Subsidized fraction: 0.193993

Revenue fraction: 0.42797

 

Rate Constant: 0.9 Revenue: 1.56116e+006

GDP: 5.37341e+006 Per capita: 5.37341

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 394985 Subsidized: 162370

Taxable fraction: 0.394985 Subsidized fraction: 0.16237

Revenue fraction: 0.290533

 

Rate Constant: 1 Revenue: -26892.7

GDP: 5.48033e+006 Per capita: 5.48033

Population: 1000000 Taxable: 420554 Subsidized: 135556

Taxable fraction: 0.420554 Subsidized fraction: 0.135556

Revenue fraction: -0.00490713

 

 

Due to the randomization, different runs of the model will produce slightly different results, but the model appears to be fairly stable against such variation. Only take the first two decimal places literally.

Notice the Laffer effect: Per capita GDP at k=0.1 (a tax that takes 90% of luxury) is only 1.97 times subsistence, while per capita GDP at k=0.9 (a tax taking only 80% of luxury) is 5.37 times subsistence. At s=$10,000, these would be per capita GDPs of $19,700 and $53,700 respectively. Surely no one can claim a stronger Laffer effect than that; otherwise how would Norway have a per capita GDP PPP higher than that of the US despite taxing at almost twice the rate?

Note that in fact the revenue as a fraction of GDP is lower under k=0.1 even though the tax rates are all higher; this is due to the effect of subsidies. At very high tax rates, the strong Laffer effect yields an economy in such poor condition that a large portion of the population falls below subsistence and needs to be subsidized. Since my model calculates net revenue for the government (after these transfers), it results in a smaller fraction of GDP as government revenue.

I've also included k=1 for comparison, which is a system in which there is a subsidy up to subsistence but no taxation at all. As you might imagine, the government runs a deficit in this scenario, though the deficit is not all that large because the assumed Laffer effect leads to economic growth that lifts most people out of poverty anyway.

The highest revenue is obtained at k=0.6 and k=0.8, and since k=0.8 has less poverty and overall higher GDP, it's obviously to be preferred. This results in government revenue of 37% of GDP (comparable to Norway). You might think that this would yield a massive, draconian tax rate; on the contrary, most of the population would less than they presently do.

The following table compares gross income, net income, and effective tax rate:

 

Gross Net Tax rate
1.00 1.00 0.00%
2.00 2.00 0.00%
3.00 2.74 8.63%
4.00 3.41 14.79%
5.00 4.03 19.37%
6.00 4.62 22.94%
7.00 5.19 25.81%
8.00 5.74 28.21%
9.00 6.28 30.24%
10.00 6.80 32.00%
20.00 11.54 42.28%
30.00 15.79 47.37%
40.00 19.74 50.64%
50.00 23.50 53.00%
100.00 40.49 59.51%
200.00 70.04 64.98%
300.00 96.62 67.79%
400.00 121.44 69.64%
500.00 145.04 70.99%
1000.00 251.99 74.80%
2000.00 438.17 78.09%
3000.00 605.76 79.81%
4000.00 762.31 80.94%
5000.00 911.14 81.78%
10000.00 1585.77 84.14%
100000.00 10000.92 90.00%
1000000.00 63096.68 93.69%

 

For incomes up to 5 times subsistence (i.e. $50,000), the rate is actually lower than what one would pay under the current US system. For incomes up to 10 times subsistence ($100,000), it is about the same 

You'll notice that the rate becomes exceedingly high at the end of the table; at the bottom row, you're paying over 93% of your income, which reminds of "one for you, nineteen for me" in the Beatles song "Tax Man", which would be a rate of 95%. (This was in fact the marginal rate on very high incomes in Britain at the time, and the Beatles were new millionaires unaccustomed to tax avoidance.)

You should also note the gross income at the bottom of the table: one million times subsistence, that is, about $10 billion per year. The only people who would pay this rate are the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Moreover, they would still be left with 63,000 times subsistence, that is $63 million per year.

If implemented in the US, this might yield a flight of the very rich to tax havens (which totally doesn't happen at all right now, right?); but if it could be implemented in most of the world, it would actually leave the ordinal distribution of wealth exactly the same, affecting only the cardinal distribution. Anyone who obtains their sense of self-worth from being the richest person they know would still be the richest person they know. And the people hurt the most would be precisely those with the most to lose.

Occupy says "tax the rich!"; they may be onto something here.

 

The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories is a very mixed bag, as I suppose is to be expected from an anthology of short stories by different authors. It's extremely long, and not very quick to read, which is why I took so long to get through it. Most of the stories aren't that interesting, but a few are excellent and they make it worth getting the book just to read them.

 

"The Raft of the Titanic" I found spectacularly boring; it doesn't go anywhere and takes many pages to get there.

 

"Sidewinders" I found interesting, but a bit too weird; it's more standard science fiction than most of the others, but doesn't have quite as 'alternate history' a feel. Also, there's no explanation given for the central premise of jumping between timelines; some people like that, but I always find it annoying.

 

"The Wandering Christian" requires you to take Christian mythology far more seriously than I did even when I considered myself Catholic.

 

"Hush My Mouth" is definitely original, but honestly a bit too dark; it starts with a scenario that seems like it would be a good thing, and then it leads to a really quite horrible conclusion.

 

"A Letter from the Pope" is the most historically thorough, and while it deals with a part of history that isn't of particular interest to me, it does an excellent job of applying the butterfly effect appropriately; by changing just a few key variables a little bit, it results in a radically different outcome in a very plausible way.

 

"Such a Deal" tries to do the same thing, but doesn't do nearly as good a job of it; it's hard to take seriously the idea of Ferdinand and Isabella surrendering to a merchant in Grenada simply because they had failed in their conquest of the Aztecs.

 

"Ink from the New Moon" is quite intriguing, and reasonably plausible (we do know that the Chinese had quite a naval empire in their day), but it isn't done all that well, and the conceit of calling it the 'United Sandalwood Autocracies' just to keep the acronym grated at me.

 

"Dispatches from the Revolution" imagines what would have happened if the 1960s in the US had erupted into full revolution, and frankly seems like a paranoid fantasy borne of exaggerated misrememberings.

"Catch that Zeppelin", however, is excellent, an instant classic; it's also one of the few alternate histories bold enough to imagine a life better than the one we are living today.

 

"A Very British History" seems to have a bit too much, well, British nationalism; it imagines that if the British (instead of the Americans) had captured the Nazi rocket scientists, the result would have been a golden age of space exploration.

 

"The Imitation Game" is also a gem in the rough; it actually is the only story in the set that might actually have happened, for it is arranged such that we would not actually know if it had. Perhaps Alan Turing did not commit suicide after all, but instead MI5 tried to kill him and he made a daring and devious escape!

 

"Weinachsabend" imagines what might have happened if the Nazis won WW2, and is not as bleak as one might first think. It's quite plausible, but I didn't find it terribly interesting.

 

"The Lucky Strike" is another one that does a nice job of making a small change at a critical moment. The Enola Gay and its crew are destroyed in an accident, and it is replaced by the Lucky Strike for the delivery of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. The new bombardier hesitates at the last moment, sparing Hiroshima from destruction.

 

"His Powder'd Wig, His Crown of Thornes" imagines what might have happened had the British won the Revolutionary War; it's a weird take though, because it manages to at once propose that the Native Americans would have avoided the worst genocides yet somehow ended up worse off. (Personally I think genocide is pretty much the worst possible outcome.)

 

"Roncesvalles" is a very interesting premise... that spends the entire time telling the story to set up the premise, instead of actually carrying out the narrative of the consequences. It ends with Charlemagne professing Islam; not begins, ends. We never see any of the consequences of that.

 

"The English Mutiny" didn't particularly interest me, but it is fairly well-executed. It turns the tables on the British Empire, imagining what might have happened if India had conquered Britain instead of the other way around.

 

"O One" is brilliant; it achieves what "Ink from the New Moon" failed to do, making a plausible and compelling story out of Chinese world conquest. The domination of the abacus over the calculating engine, and the stagnation of technology that would result, is all too plausible, frankly.

 

"Islands in the Sea" makes the same mistake as "Roncesvalles", telling in detail the story of how the Bulgarian Empire becomes Muslim, but not telling us the really interesting story, what would happen to the world if they had.

 

"Lenin in Odessa" is pretty good, and based on real incidents that easily could have gone the other way, but its ending is a bit unsatisfying; it seems to rely too much on the idea of historical inevitability.

 

"The Einstein Gun" isn't a great story, but it's cute; it offers a bit of a warning about time travel, because the bad events they try to prevent end up leading to far worse events in the history we know.

 

"Tales from the Venia Woods" is one of three stories that imagines a Rome that didn't fall; it's the most closely tied to Roman history, and it is well-executed but ultimately not that compelling. It focuses a little too much on telling the story of the transition to the Second Republic and not enough on telling us what the world of a future Rome is like.

 

"Manassas, again" is the second Rome story, or tries to be; instead it's really a pretty dumb story about a war that doesn't make any sense and isn't put into any context. Apparently we've invented artificially-intelligent mechs by now (which isn't too implausible, given the loss of technology in the Dark Ages), but we're still stupid enough to think that war is fun and makes you feel alive.

 

"The Sleeping Serpent" is a neat little story; it imagines what might have happened if the Mongols had achieved their dreams of global empire. It's really a brilliant choice of protagonist as well: Our hero is the Mongolian ambassador to the Iroquois.

 

The final story, "Darwin Anathema", is a cautionary tale about theocracy that, while heavy-handed, is an anvil that needed to be dropped. We stand even now on a precipice quite close to this horrific outcome, and we must remain vigilant lest we tumble over it.

 

But my favorite is the penultimate story, "Waiting for the Olympians". It's the third and best story of Rome still standing, and it does a very good job of showing both the enormous benefits and the enormous harms (to the point where one is left agonizingly ambivalent). It tells a compelling story in its own right, fitted into a rich and realistic world that is nonetheless radically different from our own.

This passage particularly struck me, because it is completely true of myself:
"You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.

I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when I've been drinking. It isn't a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don't even look very Roman. There must have been a Northman or two in the line, because I'm tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was."

 

It's a weird feeling reading such a paragraph, as you might imagine. Also, the character is a science fiction author, though that I can attribute to the fact that the author is a science fiction author (Frederick Pohl) perhaps taking "write what you know" a little too literally. (In fact, the character is in an alternate history writing an alternate history that turns out to be much like our own....)

It also picks a crux event that almost anyone would have to agree upon (and a literal crux at that): Jeshua of Nazareth is pardoned, and his radical Judean sect collapses for lack of a martyr. Would that really save Rome? It might. Would our improved technology allow us to contact aliens? It might! 

JDN 2456375 EDT 22:14.

 

There is a segment of our culture that prides itself on pleasure without consequences; "party all night"; "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints"; "wrong in all the right ways"; "so delicious it's sinful", "YOLO". A lot of people who speak this way seem to think of themselves as very rebellious and counter-cultural; I don't think they are at all.

I actually think this kind of hedonism is deeply puritanical. It inverts the conclusions of puritanical culture, but it does so only by accepting their premises. It does not challenge the basic principle that pleasure is sinful, harmful, and destructive. The attitude is that pleasure means throwing caution to the wind and living only for today, but we should do it anyway. But this of course just makes you seem stupid and irresponsible; it doesn't make any sense to sacrifice years of your future for a few moments of pleasure today.

This is the assumption we should be resisting in the first place. Pleasure is not inherently harmful. In fact, when something is harmful, it is mainly by causing pain or reducing the capacity for pleasure. The problem with unprotected sex, drug abuse, profligate spending, and unsafe driving is not that they cause pleasure now, but that they take it away later.

But when you live in a society such as ours which is ashamed of pleasure, it's an easy distinction to elide: you say unprotected sex is bad because it's harmful, I say it's bad because it's fun, let's call it even. Puritans say that pleasure is bad; hedonists say that bad things are pleasurable. But really what we need to be doing is separating the two altogether.

It's really amazing just how much our society hates pleasure. Upon discovering that Norway is doing what every developed nation should be doing, relaxing because their productivity now far exceeds their needs, a bunch of American economists proceeded to shudder in terror at the thought that people aren't working full-time anymore. The sort of people who previously worshiped GDP at any cost are now saying that maybe Norway has too much GDP, because people aren't working themselves to death at jobs that aren't worth doing. The same neoclassicists who say that individual self-interest is the panacea of all the world's problems are suddenly upset because people are enjoying life instead of spending all their time in cubicles. (Admittedly, Norway is going to have a serious problem when the oil exports run out, and they should be investing in alternative energy ASAP; but the fact that they are working fewer hours? It makes sense, given the level of automation and productivity we have today. The 40-hour work week made sense in 1953; it does not make sense in 2013.)

Or for another example, I really like what Ryan Gosling said about movie ratings, but it's clearly not just women. Sexual pleasure is considered pornographic; while horrific, gory violence is considered mainstream. Fellatio is R (or NC-17 if you actually show a penis), while genocide is PG-13 (or even PG, if it's just aliens).

It's not going to be easy to make this change. Advocating for pleasure will always be accused of advocating for mindless, irresponsible hedonism. But if we really want to make a better world, we have no choice.

JDN 2456358 EDT 16:00.

 

A review of When Brute Force Fails by Mark Kleiman.

 

Kleiman is one of the few self-identified centrists who actually seems really centrist to me. Unlike someone like Shermer, he isn't ideologically committed to the idea that liberals and conservatives are equally right and equally wrong. Instead, Kleiman has few ideological commitments, and seeks pragmatic solutions to problems. He agrees with liberal views when the data supports them, and conservative views when the data supports them instead. It's a refreshingly nuanced approach. I'm also thrilled to see science applied to moral questions; I want to see more of this.

Kleiman is a professor of public policy, but he's also really a criminologist and a behavioral economist. He analyzes the problem of crime and incarceration in the United States in behavioral economic terms, asking how much harm crime does and how much it would cost to fix it by various means. His basic methodology is "let's look at the data and see what is most cost-effective, and then do that"; it's pretty hard to disagree with frankly. Ironically, it's also vastly different from the standard approaches, which are bound up in ideological assumptions.

The pragmatic approach does have some flaws, though, as it fails to create a unified vision to follow and risks being reduced to a series of unrelated bullet points. Indeed, the last chapter is literally a list of bullet points, without much to connect them. The closest Kleiman gets to unifying principles are "treat arrests and punishments as costs, not benefits" and "shift the mix of correctional budgets away from prisons to community corrections". Beyond that, he gives a long list of ideas to implement, most of which sound pretty good; but the whole thing doesn't feel like a cohesive vision.

He also has a tendency to qualify his own statements, never making them as forceful as they should be. "Yes, if the jails delivered more infectious-disease control and the health-care system more anti-violence efforts, we might end up both healthier and safer. But we might also wind up with worse-managed jails and hospitals as a result of divided managerial attention." (p.170) This sort of "it might work, it might not" hedging is a good way to never be proven wrong, but it's not a good way to make policy. Are we reorganizing hospitals or not? Doing it halfway could well be worse than not doing it at all. (My favorite joke about false compromise is becoming perilously close to reality: The Republicans want to build a pipeline, the Democrats don't, so we'll compromise and build half a pipeline.)

Most of his suggestions just seem like common sense, which is alas not so common in our political system: "Add police to areas that are under-policed", "Prosecute felonies committed by parolees as new crimes, rather than allowing them to be treated as mere parole violations", "Stop tolerating inmate-on-inmate violence", "reward good behavior as well as punishing bad behavior"; who could possibly disagree with those?

A few of his suggestions are notable for being bold in our political climate, yet well supported by the scientific data: "The movement toward for-profit prisons has not been noticeably successful", "Some of the features which make prison most horrible--especially inmate-on-inmate violence--may not make them more aversive to offenders", "Assertive Community Therapy can improve the lives of probationers and parolees with serious mental-health problems", "raise alcohol taxes and abolish age restrictions", and "permit the private production and use of cannabis, but not its commercialization" are all backed by sound research and could make a lot of people's lives better.

In general, I'd like to see some policymakers read this book and apply its suggestions. As Kleiman himself admits, they might not work; but they might work, and they could offer us the chance to have less crime with fewer people imprisoned and less spent on incarceration. Who could disagree with that?

Today, it's externalities and public goods!