‘Why the technical stuff?’

George Rebane

I was asked that question recently by a regular RR reader.  He went on to opine that not many of my readers would make the effort to understand all that high falootin’ stuff and just skip over it.  In short, I’m wasting time and effort in offering up such posts.  And, of course, he may be right.  When you’re selling, you never want to discount what a customer tells you.  And make no mistake about it, I am selling my little heart out here on RR.

As I later reflected on the reader’s question, it occurred to me that it’s been some years now since I posted anything on the larger purpose and objective(s) for flogging the keyboard and debating various esoteria with RR commenters.  Being a rewarded lifelong teacher has provided some intrinsic impetus to this enterprise – first in the Army, then with my kids and grandkids (no claims of success there), as a professional engineer/scientist/academic, and now again working with high schoolers.

RR is structured to continuously build on what has been written and discussed before in its pages.  I attempt to back-link all of its pieces to their appropriate ancestors, in addition to the usual outside references.  To the extent that this is successful, RR is an accumulating body of thought offered by me, and subsequently expanded and critiqued by the blog’s commenters.  Relatively few pieces here start out of whole cloth.  I make a considerable and not always successful effort to circle the barn as few times as possible; previous orbits on any given topic are always available by searching RR through its built in function or with an engine like Google (just add ‘rebane’ to the keyword list, and voila!).

Ideologically I am a conservetarian, promoting a careful and hopefully coherent amalgam of conservative and libertarian thought as seen through the Austrian lens.  For good or ill, I am an elitist.  I know I cannot reach everyone with all possible ideas/notions through my heartfelt diatribes, so I just try to target and contend with a small number of interested readers, all of whom should evince that they have at least three solid digits in their IQ.  In that and other things, I am terribly incorrect according to the dominant political perspective of the day as spouted by both Republicans and Democrats.

One of the ‘great truths’ I’ve stumbled on over the decades is that social issues owe their prominence and import to the numbers that define them, the numbers that make them significant and worthy of consideration.  If such issues are promoted on the basis of other factors, then there’s perfidy afoot and examples of this abound in our public life.  And if we don’t understand the underlying numbers of a social issue, then all we are qualified to discuss about it are our feelings and anecdotal experiences.

The corollary to this is that a modicum of numeracy (q.v.) is required to understand and coherently communicate about social problems.  And therein hides a greater problem.  According to the results presented by the National Center for Education Statistics in its decades-running longitudinal National Assessment of Adult Literacy in America, we are an innumerate nation.  Fewer than five adults in a hundred have the skills that comprise numeracy (also known as ‘numerical literacy’) for the non-technically trained adult – arithmetic facility, understand elementary logic, utility, and decision making, structuring simple problems in terms of their components, recognizing elements of taxonomic analysis (this is or is not like that), comprehending simple relationships, especially in the graphic displays of information (charts, graphs, etc) in the public media, … .

Additionally, in this forum the ability to understand and use conditionals (if/then, given that ...), the subjunctive case (If the deficit were lower ...), and counterfactuals (If China had not bought our Treasuries, then Germany would have) is definitely a plus for the complex stuff that we seek to understand and communicate.

Consider that we are the only developed nation with a culture in which one can declare without shame that ‘I don’t do numbers.’  And we offer almost no educational programs that recognize our deficit in adult numeracy; other advanced nations do recognize this intellectual shortfall in their citizenry and have dedicated courses and programs that teach numeracy to post-schooled adults.  We falsely recommend our innumerates to enroll in elementary math classes at community colleges – definitely a wrong approach to addressing the problem.   Innumeracy has been treated in many books and essays since John Allen Paulos wrote Innumeracy – Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1988), still a classic.

About this volume, Pulitzer prize winning author (Gödel, Escher, Bach) and internationally celebrated cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstedter, who also coined ‘innumeracy’, states unambiguously that "To combat [innumeracy] John Allen Paulos has concocted the perfect vaccine: this book, which is in many ways better than an entire high school math education! Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person truly understood the ideas in this marvelous and important book. It is probably hopelessly optimistic to dream this way, but I hope that Innumeracy might help launch a revolution in math education that would do for innumeracy what Sabin and Salk did for polio."

Arthur C. Clarke made it more plain when he said, “In today's world, 'innumeracy' is an even greater danger than illiteracy, and is perhaps even more common. Advertisers and politicians exploit it; intellectuals (self-styled) even flaunt it.”

Let me put it more bluntly, numeracy is the essential tool that gives a person the ability to think critically – without it such a pursuit is not possible.

Returning to the technical stuff in RR - it is difficult if not downright futile to discuss the important social issues without resorting to the tools from science and the various fields of engineering that are still accessible to the numerate person with a non-technical background.  Some of these tools such as Bayesian reasoning and utility are critical to integrating new information with what is known, and making/understanding decisions in an uncertain environment, especially in public policy.  In these pages I will continue to introduce such tools, and show examples of their use and relevance to the questions at hand.  As in the past, all such posts will be accessible to readers with a modicum of numeracy, and facility in the algebra that today is taught to eighth graders.  But you will have to do some work to slog through the developments; and frankly, readers with adult-onset attention deficit disorders or syndromes of elevated hubris need not apply.

Finally, I sincerely hope that readers who consider themselves astute observers and students of the 21st century human condition - and we all do ;-) - will avail themselves to these ‘technical’ posts so that our deliberations on the issues can proceed apace and systematically to mutually understood if not mutually accepted conclusions.

Comments

[Russ Steele]

I would like to remind your readers that you have posted ten Numeracy Nuggets at SESF if they would like to test their skills and learn something in the process. http://sesfoundation.org/numeracy/

[Douglas Keachie]

Technical comic shot of the day, in a press release announcing the USGS brand new world wide survey of oil and gas, a shot of icebergs off the coast of Greenland, and a subheading noting underseas resources there. That's all we need, iceberg into oil platform, boot to the head!

http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/usgs_top_story/worlds-oil-and-gas-endowment/?from=title

[Russ Steele]

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

By Robert Nozick at CATO Instutue in 1998.

It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly.

Not all intellectuals are on the "left." Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left.

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism. This opposition to capitalism is mainly "from the left" but not solely so. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound opposed market society from the right.

The opposition of wordsmith intellectuals to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information.

We can distinguish two types of explanation for the relatively high proportion of intellectuals in opposition to capitalism. One type finds a factor unique to the anti-capitalist intellectuals. The second type of explanation identifies a factor applying to all intellectuals, a force propelling them toward anti-capitalist views. Whether it pushes any particular intellectual over into anti-capitalism will depend upon the other forces acting upon him. In the aggregate, though, since it makes anti-capitalism more likely for each intellectual, such a factor will produce a larger proportion of anti-capitalist intellectuals. Our explanation will be of this second type. We will identify a factor which tilts intellectuals toward anti-capitalist attitudes but does not guarantee it in any particular case.

You can read the rest of the article HERE.

The essay then goes on to make a plausible case for why this should lead to rejection of capitalism or the free market. As they get left behind by their more quantitatively oriented peers, who begin earning greater material and immaterial rewards, a feeling of injustice sets in among the newly un-advantaged, who cast about for remedies. A political ideology that apportions to the “deserving” what is their “rightful share” then becomes an attractive proposition as a way to right a perceived wrong.

Thanks to Dr Motl for this insight.

[Douglas Keachie]

Sounds like he is a pretty long winded wordsmith himself.

"We will identify a factor which tilts intellectuals toward anti-capitalist attitudes but does not guarantee it in any particular case."

So get on with it, already....

[Ryan Mount]

The Austrian vs. the Keynesian

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/91689761

Even Krugman, whether you believe him or not (I do), is pro-capitalist. He even says so, just not the the degree that some would prefer.

I find this exchange fascinating once you get past Mr. Krugman's smugness and Ron Paul's 2000 year fiscal history tour in 15 seconds.

My economic dove friends immediately dismissed this exchange witw snarky comments such as:

"'...you're living in the world as it was 150 years ago' --pretty good summary of Ron Paul's world view"

and

"I don't understand why it's always Krugman vs. half-wits instead of Krugman vs. credentialed economists who disagree with him."

Note the ad hominems in both instances from people I considered to be well educated. I did not attempt to engage them else they would turn their ire on me. (it's happened many times in the past)

What a fiscal hawk wants to know, is what what does a dove economy look like? What does a liquidity solution look like? And where does it end? And what does it mean if, let's say, the Dollar isn't the reserve currency anymore. Noble laureate Professor Krugman seemed very uncomfortable with this line of questioning.