In the past few months I’ve heard from both Eric Drexler and from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat that the Chinese government is run by engineers. This sounds important enough that I checked for confirmation on the web.
this page says “Every member of the Politburo in China is an engineer.”
An article titled Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds reinforces the point.
This must imply some interesting things about the policies of the Chinese government. I wish I could predict whether this is the result of forces that will persist for a significant time or whether (as this page hints) it was a one-time result of Deng Xiaoping’s personality.
Politics
The Bush administration’s abuse of innocent Muslims hasn’t been getting as much coverage as it deserves, so I’m encouraging you all to spread the word about this account of the government’s continuing abuse of Muslims that it admitted months ago were innocent (thanks to Andrew Sullivan).
What is Congress doing about this boost to Al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Trying to restrict the habeas corpus rights of the victims so that we don’t hear about them.
Monopolies tend to become insensitive bureaucracies, and governments tend to be some of the most monopolistic entities around. (If you think of monopolies as bad only because they get monopoly profits, or think other kinds of harm are avoidable given monopoly power, I recommend reading Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World). Democracy has sometimes been effective at reducing the extent to which governments have acted as monopolies, by creating competition between factions. In recent years, gerrymandering has virtually eliminated that competition for many legislative bodies.
California Proposition 77 would eliminate the conflicts of interest that make current gerrymandering a major threat to democracy, and would give us instead something that works more like our judicial system. Our judicial system isn’t ideal, but it’s better than what a legislature does when the voters are unable to influence the legislature.
Critics have complained that Prop 77 is imperfect, but haven’t provided a clear explanation of why the alleged imperfections could be considered large in comparison to the difference between the current gerrymandering and a competitive democracy, or why it would be harder to adopt improvements to Prop 77 later than it is to adopt it now.
For a while now I’ve been bothered by the absence of an eloquent phrase for monopolies on ideas that doesn’t perpetuate the recent claim that those monopolies deserve the same respect as ownership of physical objects. That claim has caused some presumptions which distort discussion of copyrights and patents, and lead to thoughtless conclusions such as this attack on Google’s Print Library (a project which sounds like it will respect copyrights more carefully than Google’s main search engine does).
Eric Drexler recently mentioned that “intellectual pseudo property” is an appropriate term, and pointed out that many of the rules it refers to are more like a lease than ownership. Apparently Markus Krummenacker used the phrase first (without a succinct argument that it should replace the phrase intellectual property).
Finally someone has produced a quantitative measure that tests the ideological biases of supreme court justices, and it shows a good deal of bias. It looks more like a collection of small biases rather than a simple polarization into left and right.
An article titled Alito isn’t “pro-life” or “pro-choice” but “pro-law.” by Jon Adler (who I knew when he was an undergrad and whose opinions I respect) has led me to believe that Alito will be less influenced by his personal biases than the average justice.
I’ve found most of the “debates” on gay marriage annoying because most of the debaters seem eager to show off their ignorance of what their opponents believe. But Maggie Gallagher recently attempted to change this, and managed to provoke an excellent response from Reason’s Julian Sanchez which directly targets the marriage-for-procreation ideal, showing that in addition to lacking strong arguments in its favor, that traditionalists are wrong to claim that was once the sole motive for having such an institution.
More evidence that people strongly overestimate the need for government.
The latest issue of Reason magazine has a nice report (based on this report in Motoring) that Ukraine fired all of the country’s traffic cops, and preliminary evidence indicates that the predictions of increased traffic accidents were false.
Why did many people decide not to leave New Orleans in advance of Katrina? Part of the problem may have been that they relied on storytellers rather than weather experts.
NBC’s Brian Williams reports on his blog NBC’s reaction to this weather alert:
URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005
…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…
HURRICANE KATRINA…A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.
MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER.
AT LEAST HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING
APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. … WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE
HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.
Williams says “The wording and contents were so incendiary that our folks were concerned that it wasn’t real”, and implies that he and others at NBC translated this into something less scary for their viewers.
My most memorable experience with hurricane forecasts was with hurricane Gloria in 1985 when I was in Block Island (off Rhode Island). I recall a TV weather forecast that winds might reach 135 to 175 mph, and marine weather radio forecasts of 50 to 70 knot sustained winds with gusts to 90 knots (i.e. less than 105 mph). The marine radio forecasts seem to be more direct relays of what the weather service puts out, and it was fairly simple for me to determine that the TV forecast was bogus (the marine radio forecasts proved pretty accurate).
So it’s easy to imagine that people are aware that TV forecasts have a habit of overstating the threat from storms, and thought they could infer expert forecasts from TV forecasts by assuming a simple pattern of exaggeration, when it may be that the storytellers have a more complex model of how viewers’ behavior should be manipulated by biasing their reports. Do people actually rely on TV reports rather than more direct and reliable sources of expert opinion when accurate forecasts are important? If so, is it because they use weather forecasts mainly as entertainment or a catalyst for smalltalk at parties, and don’t want to be aware of the flaws?
And of course there was the problem of key government leaders failing to believe the expert forecast: (from The Agitator) [then] FEMA Director Brown:
Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane
situation — not to say it wasn’t going to be bad, but that the
water would drain away fairly quickly. Then the levees broke and
(we had) this lawlessness. That almost stopped our
efforts…Katrina was much larger than we expected.
The reports in the news media of people shooting at rescuers have been puzzling, and it has been obvious that the storytellers didn’t know much about it. Now thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I’ve seen some reports from apparently informed people, especially this first hand account that includes repeated instances of government agents creating enough problems that reasonable people started treating those agents as threats. Also this report and this quote:
3:32 P.M. [Monday] Ben Morris, Slidell mayor: We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we’ve heard that they’ve gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they’d better be armed because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them deprive our citizens.
Add to this Louisiana’s refusal to let the Red Cross into the disaster area, and it becomes understandable that residents have been treating some government agents in a less friendly fashion than Gaza settlers have been treating their government.
Preliminary evidence suggests that many local, state, and federal officials ought to lose their jobs over this, but we should be patient about judging individual people until more people who were on the scene are able to make detailed reports.
And let’s not forget the government employees that did something right. The weather service didn’t screw up. There are reports of National Guard and LA Fish and Wildlife employees doing good jobs.
I was recently surprised to discover that California has price controls which are designed to encourage hoarding in emergencies and to discourage stockpiling in preparation for emergencies. The law in question is called an anti-gouging law, and temporarily limits price increases to 10 percent in some emergencies. I’ve seen conflicting reports about whether Bush’s declaration of emergency triggers the price controls, or whether it requires a state declaration of emergency. The governator has indicated that he has no plans to join the Bush/Lockyer exploitation of Katrina, but my limited observations suggest that gas stations in the bay area have limited their gas prices increases to 10 percent, and a few of them ran out of gas over the weekend.
It looks like the gas supply problems will ease soon enough that the price controls won’t have done much harm this time (diversions of gas shipments that were intended for other parts of the world will any week now spread the supply reduction over large enough regions that a fairly small price premium over what would have prevailed without Katrina should keep supply and demand in balance).
On a related note, Alex Tabarrok made a claim that suspending gas taxes won’t help consumers. I’m suspicious of his belief that a temporary suspension will have little effect on supply. I expect that oil companies will have an important incentive to draw down their inventory more than they otherwise would, especially just before the taxes are reinstated (since their profit margins will decline when taxes resume). I expect this effect to reduce prices to consumers by a modest fraction of the amount of tax relief. This will come at the cost of increased vulnerability to new supply disruptions. I doubt that the voters who have caused politicians to suspend gas taxes have given much thought to the wisdom of this tradeoff.