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Progress is a funny concept. For instance, here are some things that have undoubtedly progressed in human history:

1. Math
2. Physics
3. Biology
4. Chemistry
5. Engineering

Nobody disagrees, right?

Here are some more things:

1. 100m dash
2. High Jump

Still with me, no doubt. It’s difficult to deny that the greatest sprinter in history is Usain Bolt (after all, we can see everyone’s times).

But what if I said that Aristotle would have been no more than a moderately successful professor at a decent college if he were alive today? Think of it this way: he was the smartest guy in a city-state of, what, 500,000 people (most of whom were slaves)?  Let’s say this total civilization had about 1,000,000 people in it.

What if I said that no tennis player in history could compete with today’s players? Tennis, like swimming, is a tricky example because technology is difficult to disentangle from ability, but is it not safe to say that if sprinters are better, so should tennis players be?

I once ran into Jonathon Power at a party in Toronto and shamelessly geeked out for a few minutes. He said something interesting: each generation of athletes is demonstrably better than the preceding generation. That is to say that if Power jumped into a time machine to the 50s, he’d have absolutely crushed everyone he faced. He’s a pretty confident guy and literally said as much.

The corollary, of course, is that he’d himself get crushed by today’s best. He wasn’t about to admit that, though.

So progress exists in bodies of knowledge, which makes sense, and in sports, which is easily measured, but what about something creative like music?

I’d say it’s probably uncontroversial that musicians today are much better technically than in years past, but are writers more creative?

My head starts hurting pretty quickly when thinking about this. Tyler Cowen is persuaded by this:

It’s glaringly obvious that all the astounding, time-space rearranging developments in the dissemination, storing and accessing of audio data have not spawned a single new form of music.

Which is ballsy coming from a guy that loves classical music. If you judged by his tastes, you’d have to conclude that stagnation is impossible, there has never been any progress!

Surely musical relativism can be taken to an extreme and appreciation of music is an intensely personal affair. I’m reminded a bit of Adam Smith’s speculation on the sympathy of sentiments, where he said that the goal of much of human interaction is to come to a common feeling on some topic (it’s raining out: man, don’t we just hate the rain!? Yeah!!).

Music seems to me to be something that we have a feeling that we should agree on but often don’t.

Anyway, I’d argue that cultural output cannot be immune from progress and therefore older music would be in some fashion demonstrably worse than newer music.

Here’s the thought experiment: if you tossed Mozart into a time machine and played a Britney album for him, or whatever, would he be blown away?

Ergonomics is a pretty important field and one of those things that people probably don’t know nearly enough about. I’m lucky enough to have a mother whose job requires a heavy dose of ergonomics expertise, so I’ve been aware of it for longer than most.

Anyway, one of the ongoing debates in the discipline is over what the optimal workstation configuration is for office workers (i.e. people who get paid to sit on their butts all day and stare at a computer). This article starts with something most people probably don’t know:

Sitting for more than 1 hour has been shown to induce biochemical changes in lipase activity (an enzyme involved in fat metabolism) and in glucose metabolism that leads to the deposit of fats in adipose tissue rather than these being metabolized by muscle, and extensive sitting also relates to heart disease risks, so people are advocating standing to work because this use more muscle activity (burns about 20% more calories). These changes happen in both fit people who regularly aerobically work out and also unfit and obese people, so regular exercise doesn’t address this.

And here comes a typical ergonomic follow-up:

But, standing to work has long known to be problematic, it is more tiring, it dramatically increases the risks of carotid atherosclerosis (ninefold) because of the additional load on the circulatory system, and it also increases the risks of varicose veins, so standing all day is unhealthy. The performance of many fine motor skills also is less good when people stand rather than sit.

Ambiguity.

I really like this quote, because it cuts through the prescriptive garbage and examines what people actually DO:

studies have found that the use of sit-stand stations rapidly declines so that after 1 month a majority of people are sitting all the time.

People are lazy, mostly, and for whatever reason, it is in our nature to want to sit. We’re compelled to sit. So don’t worry about fancy-pants workstations, optimize your sitting environment so you don’t hurt yourself.

And the older you are, the more important all this is, for exactly the same reason there weren’t any 60-year-olds in my soccer league last summer. Bodies break down.

Cringely again, this time on Yahoo! firing its CEO. I don’t particularly care about Yahoo!, mostly because…

These are companies built purely on intellect — companies where there are a few individuals who are capable of doing things that are unique in their enterprise. Imagine a General Motors where there was only one worker who could make really fine exhaust systems. That wouldn’t work in Detroit but it does work in Silicon Valley because the output of that one person can be amplified a thousand or a million times.

That’s a funny dynamic, actually. Scaling, by itself, is a procedural kind of exercise. Rebuilding and growing the product so that it can withstand scaling is a completely different challenge. Inventing products at-scale is a lowest-common-denominator kind of slow motion disaster. There’s something anti-creative about thinking big right out of the gates.

Every single candidate that could conceivably drive Yahoo! back to its glory is running a startup of his/her own right now. If Yahoo! wants its next leader to have any kind of vision, it should acquire small companies with great teams and treat them well.

Alas, like it or not, the status quo in Yahoo! is mediocrity, in which many have a big stake. So here’s the choice you’d offer some hotshot startup CEO:

1. Come into this mediocre environment, fire all the mediocrites (they know you will do this and hate you and fear you and will curse your name to the grave) and abandon your pet product because it doesn’t yet have the scale to improve results in the short term.
2. Fight us and perhaps beat us at our own game with your superior skills, 50%+ ownership and rock star team.

HA!

A $25 computer? What the what?

Here are the stats:

• 700MHz ARM11 (I don’t really know anything about computer architecture, but I’ll be keen to find out what all this means)
• 128MB or 256MB of SDRAM
• OpenGL ES 2.0 (for animation?)
• 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decoder (for video/audio)
• Composite and HDMI video
• USB 2.0 (no power transfer, though)
• SM/MMC/SIO memory card slot
• General-purpose I/O (here’s wikipedia onthis. Still don’t get it myself.)
• Optioanl integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller (wow, that’s awesome)

So I’ll be buying one of these. Getting stuff to actually work on this thing would be such an awesome way of learning how computers tick.

I’m also reminded of Cringely’s idea for stringing together a bunch of mac minis could be implemented with the GPIO. You could get a a super-cheap, super-powerful computer for a few benjamins.

Parallel computing, baby.

Here is my first post.

The discussion below is mostly inspired by Michael Pettis’ piece. I wanted to strictly write a review of his ideas, but got totally carried away (this is long).

One general comment I’d make, though, is that Pettis take cares to relate his conclusions and insights back to historical examples. We get a lot of vacant speculation among the talking heads; this was a refreshing change of pace.

Ok, let’s get started.

GDP is measured as G + I + C + NX. Government spending, investment, consumption and net exports.

Your living standard is what you get for C, not what you spend on C. In China, C is a (relatively) small and declining share of GDP. Judging by the lack of popular uprising, the Chinese must feel they’re getting more C each year. Good for them.

This also means that there’s a big bullet sitting in the macroeconomic gun. C can (will? ok, will) eventually rise. Pettis points to Japan’s “stagnation” where the Japanese economy went from an investment-driven growth machine to a consumption-driven leisure zone. Are they worse off? Gosh, perhaps they aren’t.

[I’ve got this pet theory that Chinese leaders are terrified of getting their brains blown out (literally?) when the demographic transition lands at exactly the same time as the end of the catch-up growth / investment boom. It’s like a brick wall at the bottom of a ski hill; it’s gonna hurt. Maybe the consumption transition is the free pass?]

I’m going to avoid the net exports part, because I’m sick of hearing about it. Let’s talk about I. China’s got a lot of that, too. How does one (economy) get so much I?

Well, the answer here, it seems, might be government-directed construction projects funded by state-bank debt issuance.

That’s right, debt. Heaps of the stuff.

Now, you can only build so much infrastructure; eventually you just catch up and investment slows down. That’s ‘realignment’. Well, if it’s coming anyway, muses Pettis, maybe wise technocrats will get ahead of the trend and voluntarily nudge things along? Yeah, right.

Enfranchised players hold all the cards in an autocracy (the bums don’t ever kicked out), so they’ll ride this structure, tweaking the system only to perpetuate the status quo, until it breaks underneath them. In other words, autocratic governments are pro-cyclical institutions.

The result is more debt at the peak and this probably means debt crisis.

Wait, ANOTHER debt crisis?

Debt, on a macro level, is a very strange thing to think about. Debt comes from banks, which get their money from savings. Bad debts means that the bank is taking your hard-earned-and-saved money and destroying it without telling you (liabilities aren’t marked to market!).

The debt crises is the moment that ‘everyone’ finds out this has been happening right in front of them for years and it’s too late.

Imagine that you’re a hard-working citizen in a country having a debt crisis. Here are the ways forward:

1. If deposit insurance doesn’t exist, you just lose all your savings. Liquidations affect all asset values, so don’t go thinking you’re safe with your money in your house. You aren’t. You’re toast, too, just toast with a roof.

2. Under deposit insurance, the government pays for everything

Ah, but #2 is no free lunch. How does a government pay for deposit insurance if it really needs to use it?

2a) “bloody liberals!”: taxes go way up, either increasing the cost of stuff (consumption tax) or decreasing income (income tax).

2b) “Zimbabwe!”: Print money and inflation skyrockets, increasing costs of stuff relative to increases in income. Those savings you protected by choosing door #2 are destroyed here, too.

2c) “turn back the clock!”: governments stop doing things. This ain’t no tea party, though, ’cause rolling back health care and social security (let’s ignore defense) doesn’t lower taxes. That money’s for debt repayment. Now you just need to replace the social safety net with those private savings you got to keep.

2d) “Argentina!”: the government just defaults on the debt. Most debtors are domestic, so there go your savings again. The currency collapses, which causes that inflation you skipped in 2b.

Pettis makes a few interesting observations: choosing from the above resolutions is a political question and politicians struggle when the path is murky and the stakes are high (someone is getting effed over). In practice this means radicalized parties, finger-pointing and the dance of the cognitive-bias fairies. Truth has no place in this sausage factory.

I don’t even know who I’m talking about anymore as this situation is (an admittedly extreme version of) what’s going on everywhere.

And what happens when you put this kind of pressure on an autocracy? Who knows.

Anyway, There is a solution #3: do nothing and hope. Extend maturities, cut the interest rate, hope to God the problem takes care of itself.

Growth always fixes these problems, right?

We’re driving back to NYC from Florida. 1000 miles. Nothing like a good road trip.

We’re trying to make use of the Diners, Drive-ins and Dives iphone app, which doesn’t have any NYC entries. Love the show and love pigging out a bit when we’re on the road.

Sparing a thought for the economics of this, I wonder whether the fast food establishment cares about triple D. The food’s better and the iphone makes finding them easy.

Then again, these eateries are already running flat out and probably suffer from negative economies of scale. Even the collective spare POTENTIAL capacity for these places is only a drop in the ocean of MacDonald’s top line. All we do is make the lines longer at peoples’ favorite local haunts.

And so the big chains probably don’t care. Unless you can scale at a higher quality level than them, you’re a gnat.

Speaking of scale, it wasn’t until this evening here in North Carolina that I got my first taste of the size of this migration.

Obviously the fact that I couldn’t get a flight that landed anywhere within 4 hours of NY until Wednesday was a clue. The roads should be just as jammed.

I worked at a hotel for a couple years in college and Sunday nights are notoriously slow. Big surprise for the service industry all up the Eastern Seaboard tonight!

My hotel is packed and Ruby Tuesday across the street (salad bar!) had a line out the door at 830pm.

Irene’s timing couldn’t have been better if she wanted to demonstrate capitalism’s ability to absorb shocks.

Is there a more fascinating country than North Korea?

Alex Tabarrok at MR is reading a book on it. It is amazing how effective brainwashing can be.

I remember listening to a podcast with some kind of ‘expert’ (for the life of me I can’t find it online) who was of the opinion that the one reason the brainwashing is effective is that it taps into the human inclination to racism that’s caused so much trouble in history.

Basically, goes the story, the Korean race is superior. Even if it looks like other countries are prospering, it’s an illusion: how could they if they aren’t Korean?

But a contradiction is developing. North Koreans have to deal with the dissonance of having a racially identical, much richer country next door. I get a warm feeling inside when racist ideologues squirm.

His windmill:

Literally every single job on earth is becoming more automated and standardized by and using computers. That’s the economic growth the dotcom bubble mistimed.

Many of the systems being built to replace existing processes are crap, though. The problem is that programmers lack deep knowledge of the processes and the process experts are clueless programmers.

I believe THE economic story of our times in 100 years will be the flourishing of programming skills, which maybe should be called something else.

Think of it this way: some people probably call a plumber to unclog their toilets, I suppose, but most will roll up their sleeves and grab a friggen plunger.

Computers are about enhancing productivity. The more control people can learn to have over them, the more productive they’ll be.

I look around my own company and see low-hanging productivity-enhancing fruit all over the place. The barrier isn’t technology, it’s human capital.

The most valuable skill one can develop is an understanding of computers. This statement will one day sound ridiculous.

The day will come when people will be as appalled of computer illiterates as they are of adults that can’t read or count.

The day will come when every single non-menial job will involve managing a computerized process.

The day will come when advanced programming technology and increasing aggregate programming skill combine to make programming ubiquitous and invisible.

The best companies of tomorrow realize this today.