Can “Charter Cities” Change the World?

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Can “charter cities” change the world? Well, Paul Romer’s doing something right if the New York Times is even willing to ask him about his “crazy and/or revolutionary plan” to build First World cities in Third World countries:

Rules about public sanitation are a simple and familiar example. Without them, a city can’t be a healthy place to live; but these rules don’t just happen. The rules for a city are different from the ones for a village, but as a village slowly gets bigger, a city may be stuck with the rules of the village.

In a village, it might be O.K. to rule that anyone can urinate anyplace they want. In a modern city, it is better to have a rule saying that people have to urinate into toilets connected to the sewer system. According to a recent news report, the city government in Paris is having trouble enforcing this rule. They have special police units that give tickets to men who urinate against walls. So when we speak of rules, we must understand both rules on paper and an effective system of enforcement.

In many cities in poor countries, health is bad because governments don’t enforce basic rules about sanitation. The crime rate is appallingly high because the government doesn’t enforce rules that prohibit theft and violence. Traffic fatalities and congestion are both high because they don’t have good traffic rules or if they do, they don’t enforce them. The fact that people still flock to cities with such bad rules tells us something about how big the other benefits from living in a city must be. But given the choice, they would surely rather go to a city with good rules instead of one with bad rules.

This is the big question though: Why will governments, particularly the entrenched, corrupt governments found in many countries, be willing to cede control of these zones?

First let me push back on an assumption that many people make and that seems to be implicit in your question. This assumption is that “bad guys” are why so many people are stuck living under bad rules. If you were a good guy and were the mayor of New York, would you be able to build enough consensus to implement congestion pricing for traffic, at least within our lifetimes? Or would you be strong enough to be able to coerce the people who don’t want it to go along?

Narratives about good guys and bad guys are always entertaining, but there is a deeper reason why people get stuck under bad rules. For those of us who live in the United States, it is easier to understand in a context like New York that is more familiar. It is quite possible that its existing political system will never allow an improvement like congestion pricing, and yet many people would happily move to a new city that had sensible pricing and smoothly flowing traffic at all hours of the day. Systems of rules are “sticky”; they are difficult for any leader or group to change.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent

Monday, October 5th, 2009

The gentlemen of a century ago, Porphyrogenitus explains, knew that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent:

Therefore, in order to de-incentivize certain forms of warfare, they did not extend the protections of international law given to lawful combatants to insurgents, terrorists, and the like. The Geneva Conventions did not cover those who did not themselves follow them. In that era, it was accepted as a given that it was necessary to give such persons less protection, to deter people from engaging in activities that would make conflict less clear, and thus more destructive and more prolonged. Thus the Geneva Conventions, for example, declared that such combatants could be shot when captured.

It’s not controversial, but simply factual, to observe that today insurgents are extended more rights than lawful, uniformed enemy soldiers would be, and that the argument is whether or not to extend them even more. Most of the Alliance’s members send small forces to Afghanistan and compel them to operate under such restrictive rules of engagement that they are militarily useless, and indeed would be hostile to fortune if deployed in a combat zone, so they are kept out of harms way. Even those members whose forces are used in combat (primarily Anglosphere nations and the Netherland) operate under rules so increasingly constrained as to nearly, but not quite, tie their hands with an ever-tightening cobra. The enemy’s propaganda complaints of collateral damage are listened to, and thus they are encouraged to use that as one of their main weapons in the conflict to thwart the Alliance.

We are told we need to accept these constraints, less we lose the “hearts and minds” of the local population. But the enemy quite clearly does not have to operate this way. The intimidation tactics and outright brutality which insurgents use to cow the population is also one of their weapons. Why? Because the “hearts and minds” strategy concentrates mainly on the hearts of those sympathetic to the enemy, their collaborators, and not on the minds of those who oppose them or are otherwise innocent, simply wanting a better life than the Taliban offers, but afraid they’ll be left to die or otherwise suffer when we pack up and abandon the area, after concluding that our efforts are futile or even counter-productivly “alienating people”. This mindset involves listening primarily to the complaints of those sympathetic to the insurgents, rather than those who would be our natural allies. Again, mercy to the guilty becoming cruelty to the innocent.

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How Growth Happens: CostCo Edition

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Bryan Caplan normally ignores self-congratulatory corporate publications, but he makes an exception for Costco:

See economic growth at work: How their product designers identify high-quality competitors, and figure out how to make them a little better and a lot cheaper. (Hint: Packaging, transportation, and shelf space all figure prominently).

See reputation at work: CostCo doesn’t just improve products; it figures out where the competition is cutting corners — and then boldly makes its products with their corners intact.

One of Costco’s goals with its Kirkland-brand products is to achieve pallet efficiencies:

For example, when the jars containing Kirkland Signature cashews were changed from round to square, the number of jars that could fit on a pallet increased from 288 to 432, saving 600 truck-loads per year.

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Sapolsky on Religion

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Prof. Robert Sapolsky teaches a class on Human Behavioral Biology. In his lecture on The Biology of Religion, he notes two traits that are often destructive and isolating in a secular context but quite adaptive in a religious context.

First, a “good” shaman is half-crazy — displaying what we now call a schizotypal personality, or, more simply, a quirky personality.

Second, a “holy” man in most orthodox religions excels at performing highly detailed, hours-long rituals, which revolve around cleanliness, food preparation, entering and leaving holy places, and numerology — that is, he’s obsessive-compulsive.

(Hat tip to Mike.)

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Alfred Duggan’s Past

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

There are actually two quite distinct kinds of historical novel, John Derbyshire explains — hard and soft:

On the one hand the writer of historical fiction may attempt to capture the inner life and motivations of some real and well-documented historical figure. Robert Graves’s Claudius novels offer outstanding examples of this “hard” sub-genre. Our author might, on the other hand, center his story on some invented person, who is then let loose amidst historical scenery: think of Gone With the Wind or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories. (As a slight variant of this “soft” sub-genre, the same thing can be done with a historical figure sufficiently obscure he might as well be an invention.)

The “hard” sub-genre is less often attempted because it is much more difficult to pull off. To give a convincing account of the thoughts and emotions of, say, Charlemagne, you need to do a great deal of research into the man, his family, friends and colleagues. You also need a good understanding of human types, an imaginative appreciation of people who may be quite unlike yourself. This combination of diligence and insight is not often found among fiction writers, who tend if anything to be more lazy and self-obsessed than the human average. “Soft” historical fiction, on the other hand, can be tackled by anybody, including the kind of novelist whose central characters are really nothing more than self-impersonations. It is, in fact, rather amusing to imagine oneself wandering around in old Carthage or fighting at Manzikert. Probably anyone who has contemplated fiction writing at all has had the urge to write a book of this sort; and it is plain from the proliferation of low-grade “bodice-rippers” that lots of people want to read such books.

The parallel to science fiction is clear:

Science fiction fans like to speak of the “sense of wonder.” Kingsley Amis, for instance, said that the purpose of science fiction is “to arouse wonder, terror and excitement.” Some similar sense is stimulated by good historical fiction. To think that this person actually lived! (Or, in the case of the “soft” style: To think that some such person probably lived!) Everyone who has reached middle age has a sense of the remoteness and strangeness of life even a scant few decades ago. Children in iron lungs; drama on the radio; having your feet X-rayed in the shoe store; people smoking cigarettes all the time, everywhere. How much odder things were a century before that! And a millennium? Two millennia? Even to try to imagine such worlds one needs help. The writer of historical fiction supplies that help.

Yet ultimately historical fiction is, like all art, an illusion. Here are people just like us: same facial features, same limbs, their desires and hates arising from the same springs as ours. And yet their actions were often bizarrely, fathomlessly inexplicable to us. When the clergy of Seez filled an episcopal vacancy by election without consulting Geoffrey of Anjou, their lay lord, Geoffrey had the lot of them castrated, and the bishop-elect, too. An earlier Count of Anjou, Fulk the Black, in penance for his sins, voluntarily shuffled to Jerusalem and back three times — total 15,000 miles, much of it trackless mountain and forest — while shackled in irons. What on earth were they thinking? We cannot know. By the narration of such things, though, a skilful writer can rouse us to wonder and awe.

I have not read Lord Geoffrey’s Fancy, by Alfred Duggan, which describes 13th-century Greece under the rule of Frankish knights, but I was just making the point to a friend that a modern audience would never recognize, say, the Old Testament, with the names changed — and that the original Battlestar Galactica was a thinly veiled retelling of Mormon mythology:

All the geography and ethnography of that place is refracted through the language and sensibility of these knights. Athens is “Satines”; Corinth is “Chorinte”; the natives are “Grifons” (Greeks) or “Esclavons” (South Slavs). The effect is to render the whole story as taking place in a completely imagined world, a Tolkeinian fantasy without the magic; yet the history is sound and well researched.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Media | No Comments »

Early Love

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Rory Miller discusses his early love of judo:

I loved the strategy, the feeling of flight and even the impact. I loved the work out, the exhaustion. Going to muscle failure in my hands and abs several times a night. I loved, loved, loved the sensation of finding the perfect moment and sending a bigger man through the air and I loved dominating big guys on the ground.

Here’s where judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu are very similar:

I dabbled in other things, but one of the things I liked about judo was that it was exactly what it was. Rokyu or godan, you were going to get on the mat and you couldn’t just say you were good. You either were or you weren’t and everyone knew. You couldn’t lie to yourself.

There was no mysticism — my instructors didn’t know mysterious secrets that I didn’t know, they were simply better at what I knew. And I have seen things presented in internal martial arts as deep truths about structure that were just basics in judo — how to rest while groundfighting and how to not use muscle are big parts of effortless power and using tendon and bone instead of muscle.

Posted in Martial Arts, Rory Miller | No Comments »

The Last Days of the Polymath

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Edward Carr laments that the last days of the polymath — the true expert in multiple disparate fields — are well behind us:

In the first half of 1802 a physician and scientist called Thomas Young gave a series of 50 lectures at London’s new Royal Institution, arranged into subjects like “Mechanics” and “Hydro dynamics”. By the end, says Young’s biographer Andrew Robinson, he had pretty much laid out the sum of scientific knowledge. Robinson called his book “The Last Man Who Knew Everything”.

Young’s achievements are staggering. He smashed Newtonian orthodoxy by showing that light is a wave, not just a particle; he described how the eye can vary its focus; and he proposed the three-colour theory of vision. In materials science, engineers dealing with elasticity still talk about Young’s modulus; in linguistics, Young studied the grammar and voc­abulary of 400 or so languages and coined the term “Indo-European”; in Egyptology, Jean-François Champollion drew on his work to decode the Rosetta stone. Young even tinkered around with life insurance.

When Young was alive the world contained about a billion people. Few of them were literate and fewer still had the chance to experiment on the nature of light or to examine the Rosetta stone. Today the planet teems with 6.7 billion minds. Never have so many been taught to read and write and think, and then been free to choose what they would do with their lives. The electronic age has broken the shackles of knowledge. Never has it been easier to find something out, or to get someone to explain it to you.

Yet as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great things in many fields has become a rare species. Young was hardly Aristotle, but his capacity to do important work in such a range of fields startled his contemporaries and today seems quite bewildering. The dead cast a large shadow but, even allowing for that, the 21st century has no one to match Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as a sculptor, an architect and a painter. It has no Alexander von Humboldt, who towered over early-19th-century geography and science. And no Leibniz, who invented calculus at the same time as Newton and also wrote on technology, philosophy, biology, politics and just about everything else.

Although you may be able to think of a few living polymaths who rival the breadth of Young’s knowledge, not one of them beg ins to rival the breadth of his achievements. Over the past 200 years the nature of intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.

Young was just 29 when he gave his lectures at the Royal Institution. Back in the early 19th century you could grasp a field with a little reading and a ready wit. But the distinction between the dabbling and doing is more demanding these days, because breaking new ground is so much harder. There is so much further to trek through other researchers’ territory before you can find a patch of unploughed earth of your own.

Even the best scientists have to make that journey. Benjamin Jones, of the Kellogg School of Management near Chicago, looked at the careers of Nobel laureates. Slightly under half of them did their path-breaking work in their 30s, a smattering in their 20s—Einstein, at 26, was unusually precocious. Yet when the laureates of 1998 did their seminal research, they were typically six years older than the laureates of 1873 had been. It was the same with great inventors.

Once you have reached the vanguard, you have to work harder to stay there, especially in the sciences. So many scientists are publishing research in each specialism that merely to keep up with the reading is a full-time job. “The frontier of knowledge is getting longer,” says Professor Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, where Young was a leading light for over three decades. “It is impossible now for anyone to focus on more than one part at a time.”

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

Racing the engine of the brain without engaging the gears

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique argues that Jews created or contributed significantly to various destructive pseudosciences and ideologies. (He does not seem interested in their positive contributions.) John Derbyshire reviews the book and notes some similarities between Mandarins and Talmudic scholars:

For instance: I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation which, like the diaspora Jews, awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material.

Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history knows that the guy who gets the girl — who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives” who are thereby denied to less intellectual males — is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position.

This went on for two thousand years. Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean.

Naturally, some found this insulting:

It is insulting, and borderline antisemitic, of you to describe traditional Talmudic scholarship as “content-free” and “meaningless esoterica.” The Talmud is chock full of content and very meaningful.

Is it? Then I can only say that I am surprised how little actual good has come out of all those centuries of intensive study. A person who has devoted his life to the study of Judaic texts ought, if those texts have meaningful content, to be wiser, better equipped to live in the world, better, than a person who hasn’t. Is this actually the case?

Possibly it is. I didn’t mean to insult anyone, and in fact I confess to a slight regret over this remark. By way of excusing myself, let me say that my own early training — my first degree, in fact — was in mathematics. Now, studying math at the higher levels makes you a terrible intellectual snob. No other discipline has the standards of rigor required in mathematics. Of course, none really can have, so this is a very unfair point of view. It is, though, one that mathematicians find hard to avoid. “When you’ve worked on a farm, nothing else ever seems like work,” said J.K. Galbraith. Similarly, when you’ve studied higher math, nothing else really seems like study. For this reason, I approach all the human sciences with an opening attitude of deep skepticism — though I am always willing to be convinced. I guess this attitude shows in my review.

Now, pure mathematics is a very peculiar thing. Consider the man I have just written a book about, for example, the 19th-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. On June 10, 1854, Riemann delivered a paper to the faculty of Göttingen University. In that paper he laid out the fundamental ideas of Riemannian geometry, a challenging and very beautiful branch of pure mathematics which he thought up entirely out of his own head. Riemann’s ideas were pure intellection, rooted in some philosophical ideas about the nature of space. They had no conceivable practical application. It was sixty years before Albert Einstein picked them up and used them as the basis for the General Theory of Relativity.

The kind of pure intellection that Talmudic scholars immerse themselves in is as abstract and, from a worldly point of view, useless as Riemannian geometry … but there is never an Einstein. Talmudic concepts never have any real fruit in the world of men. Talmudic scholarship consists (it seems to me) of racing the engine of the brain without engaging the gears.

Another influence on the way I think about this is my own studies of Chinese history and culture. Candidates for the Imperial examinations in old China had to engage in the same kind of years-long concentrated study of huge masses of accumulated written material that Talmudic scholars have to master. At the end of their studies, for the Imperial examinations, the Chinese scholars had to write an “eight-legged essay” — that is, one conforming to certain traditional patterns of style and presentation. You can find translations of prize-winning “eight-legged essays” in books about Chinese culture. I have one here. It is gibberish. It is content-free. However, if you passed the exam, you got a lifetime job as a Mandarin, a guaranteed income, and a choice of breeding partners.

The attitude of the Chinese themselves to the material these scholars had to master is encapsulated in the old proverb: “Learning is like a brick, which you can use to break down a door. When you have broken down the door, you can throw away the brick!”

Posted in Education, John Derbyshire, Science | No Comments »

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the Daily Show

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I haven’t watched The Daily Show in quite some time, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made a recent appearance to push his new book:

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Posted in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Media, Policy | No Comments »

Farmer’s daughter disarms terrorist and shoots him dead with AK47

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

About 20 miles inside India’s porous border with Pakistan, Rukhsana Kausar and her family had a run-in with the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who hide in the dense forests and demand food and lodging from the poor local villagers:

When they forced their way into Miss Kausar’s home, her father Noor Mohammad refused their demands and was attacked.

His daughter was hiding under a bed when she heard him crying as the gunmen thrashed him with sticks. According to police, she ran towards her father’s attacker and struck him with an axe. As he collapsed, she snatched his AK47 and shot him dead.

She also shot and wounded another militant as he made his escape.

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Globalization and Democracy at Loggerheads

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

John Derbyshire’s review reminds me that I’ve been meaning to read Amy Chua’s World on Fire:

Well, here comes Amy Chua to explain that over a large part of the Earth’s surface, globalization and democracy are at loggerheads, and may actually be incompatible. Ms. Chua, who is a professor at Yale Law School, knows whereof she speaks. Her family comes from the small but wealthy Chinese minority of the Philippines. Globalization has been very good indeed for that minority, opening up great new opportunities for them to practice their entrepreneurial skills and allowing them to network more easily with the overseas-Chinese commercial classes in other countries. It has probably benefited non-Chinese Filipinos, too, but by nothing like as much. Seen from the viewpoint of that majority, globalization has permitted the Chinese to soar up into a stratosphere of stupendous wealth, leaving ordinary Filipinos further behind than ever. Now invite that sullen, resentful majority to practice democracy, and what do you think will happen? Prof. Chua tells us. Her wealthy aunt in the Philippines was murdered by her own chauffeur, and the local police — native Filipinos — have not the slightest interest in apprehending the killer. In their report on the incident, under “motive for murder,” they wrote the single word: Revenge.

The key phrase in this book is “market-dominant minority.” The Chinese of the Philippines (and of Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, and several other places) are a market-dominant minority. So, though for considerably different reasons, are the whites of southern Africa, the Indians of East Africa, the Lebanese of West Africa, and the Eritreans of Ethiopia; so are the tall, pale-skinned elites of Latin America (except for those few countries whose indigenes were completely exterminated by the European conquerors). So were the Slovenes and Croatians of Yugoslavia, the Tutsi of Rwanda, the Jews of Weimar Germany … You get the picture. For all kinds of reasons, some the consequence of blatant injustice, some arising from temporary civilizational advantage, some from mere historical or geographical accidents, some the result of factors that may not be mentioned in polite society, all over the world there are wealthy and powerful outsider minorities imbedded in large populations of native “sons of the soil.”

The problem does not afflict societies only at the national level. It can be very local, as with the Korean storekeepers in American inner cities. It can be supra-national, as with the Israelis in the Middle East. Perhaps it can even be global: Prof. Chua develops a theory of anti-Americanism based on the concept of us as a market-dominant minority in the world at large. I personally think she got carried away a little with her idea there, but her analysis of anti-Americanism is no less plausible than some others I have seen. At any rate, she makes a solid case for her thesis at the national level and gives convincing and up-to-date explanations of phenomena like the triumph of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the seven billionaire “oligarchs” of Yeltsin’s Russia. (Six of them were Jewish.)

One possible, but non-democratic, strategy for a nation with a market-dominant minority is “crony capitalism.” A small clique, often military, of native sons goes into league with the minority, enriching themselves and their relatives, taking the edge off majority resentment by hiding minority dominance behind an ethnonationalist facade, staffing political and diplomatic positions, opening the economy to global markets while keeping democracy firmly at bay, sometimes admitting old non-entrepreneurial landed gentry classes in on the racket, as Marcos did with the Spanish-blood hacienderos in the Philippines. Suharto of Indonesia was a grand-master of the “crony capitalism” game until his overthrow in 1998, as was Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya. The outstanding current instance is the horrible SLORC dictatorship in Burma.

Suharto’s downfall was followed by anti-Chinese riots, with much destruction and killing. Hundreds of Chinese-Indonesians suffered the fate of Tutsis, Weimar Jews, Zimbabwe farmers, and other victims of democracy. This is the downside of being a market-dominant minority. It is astonishing, reading Prof. Chua’s case studies, how courageous and resilient some of these entrepreneurial minorities are. Landing in a strange country, they open little stores or set off alone into the bush as peddlers. After decades of hardship and risk, they attain wealth and, via crony capitalism or imperial patronage, some measure of power. Then comes the democratic backlash. They are killed and raped, their stores are burned, the survivors flee. Then, a year or two later, they are back — trading, peddling, dealing, bargaining, painstakingly building up again what was burned down. Speaking as a person with no commercial abilities whatsoever, I am in awe of these market-dominant minorities. And yet, of course, on the other hand, speaking as a person with no commercial abilities whatsoever, I find it all too easy to understand the resentments that build up against them among “sons of the soil.” Amy Chua gives a very telling quote from one of the latter, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia: “If we don’t know how to work well or do business, at least we know how to fight well!”

Posted in Economics, John Derbyshire, Policy | No Comments »

The human-science equivalent of alchemy

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

In the history of the human sciences, John Derbyshire notes, false trails and dead ends abound:

Two major world-historical intellectuals, Marx and Freud, as well as numerous minor ones, convinced themselves and millions of others that they had developed workable, rigorously scientific theories of human history or psychology, when in fact they had done nothing of the sort, only dressed up some pre-scientific concepts like sympathetic magic in ingenious and seductive vocabularies — the human-science equivalent of alchemy.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Science | No Comments »

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