Graveyard of the Colorado, Part III

Upheaval Dome, via

[This is Part III of my dad's story about Cataract Canyon. Part I is here, and Part II is here.]

We begin to shuttle the people down to the beach at Ten Cent Rapid, the last one above the lake. Doug flies the people on a short detour round the field of spires and pinnacles known as the Doll’s House by way of accumulating actual vacationing points. We’re still having fun, right? Then he’s ready to take the gear and kitchen down to camp, only he doesn’t have a sling and it would take dozen trips to haul it all in the cockpit. “Throw it all on one of those boats,” he says, “I’ll just tie on to that.” 

“Are you sure?” I ask him right out, “We haven’t had the best luck trying to fly these things.” 

He fixes me with a cool eye. “Throw it on,” he says.

We use my boat, the “Tuolumne,” as the flying cargo container. There’s the kitchen full of cast iron cookware, stoves, food, tables; the toilet set-up goes in a hatch by itself.  I cram personal baggage into every hold till the lids will barely close and there is still a mountain of baggage on the beach. I look up at Doug. He’s leaning on the bubble of his chopper rolling a cigarette.

“Throw it on,” he says.

We pile the whole mound on the decks, personal gear, clothes, sleeping bags, tents, and more, run a rope through it, then make a sling out a couple of sternlines, the stoutest available rope. Last time we did this we had several days and a nearby hardware store to puzzle it out. Even then the first boat wouldn’t come off the ground till we had taken everything out but the oarlocks. I’m a little skeptical about the prospects this time and figure I’ll take my camera up behind a big rock away from flying debris to watch the attempted lift-off, in case there’s a dramatic photograph to be made. As if to raise the stakes, Doug says he would like us to push the boat out into the river before he takes off so he won’t have to worry about sand in the machinery. I have visions of Doug and his helicopter trolling my boat through the biggest white water on the continent like a seventeen-foot fishing lure, or perhaps hitting the end of its tether and being jerked from the sky like a broken kite. That’d serve him right, the cocky bastard.

Doug puts fire to the Llama, still smoking his handmade cigarette. A dozen of us tug the “Tuolumne” into the water and shove it out. I hightail it to my perch. Doug waits until the boat is fully in the current and picking up speed downstream before the copter rocks a little on the sand and bolts into the air. He doesn’t bother trying to gain altitude, instead just starts heading downstream at full throttle, and when he hits the end of the rope, the “Tuolumne” leaps into the air like a big red salmon in an explosion of spray and is instantly headed downstream at a hundred miles an hour, trailing the helicopter at a 45 degree angle.

Downwash is not a factor if the load is never below you.

Below the rapids, Doug sets the boat on the beach like I’d just pulled in with the bowpost bobbing in surge, hits release and heads for home. He’s almost out of gas. The rest of us will have to find our own way to camp. We’ve still got the snout rig, a formidable craft, 22 feet long, 36 inch tubes with a 20 horse Merc. It’s quicker to turn than the big rigs, and that’s what matters. To drive it, we’ve got a guy named Steve Bathemous, who was one of the last ones down before the Park Service cut everyone off. He is wearing a wetsuit and two lifejackets, and his hand shakes visibly on the throttle. Then there is our 17 foot Avon Spirit rowboat. They will both have to go to get us all there. Greg’s rescue party has doubled the size of the crew.

So we ran Cataract that day, which turned out to be the absolute peak day and were the only ones that did. Franklin, our trainee baggage boatman, rowed the whole thing by himself and was the only one on earth to do that too. We stopped above Niagara and stared down the steep incline into the depths of a hole that could have digested an uninterrupted stream of three bedroom houses moving by at 20 miles an hour. There was a narrow slot of continuous current directly off the right bank, but, though smooth, the water sloped down into the chasm of Niagara at an impossible angle. It seemed as if it would surely draw you in. 

It didn’t though. We survived and it was good. The people even enjoyed their trip across the lake the next morning and didn’t mention lawyers once. Mission accomplished, sort of. We still had seven dories abandoned in Cataract Canyon but I wasn’t interested in recovering them any time soon. Let the water drop for a couple of months. Let’s watch TV, play hearts or something.

Well, that wasn’t in the cards. There was unfinished business. The company needed the boats for other trips. The Park wanted them out too. Six days later we were back on the beach at Range Creek and the water was still Oh God Help Me high. Sixty eight thousand was the official tally of cubic feet of water hurtling by every second. We had always figured that thirty five was the top for dories because we’d had a trip go down at thirty three and their eyes were wide as saucers. We put two boatmen in each boat, everybody wearing two life jackets and did a little silent beseeching just in case. I was genuinely gripped. 

I don’t remember much about the trip down to the Drops. Mike Taggett, my partner that day, did a lot jumping around to the high side and we were slapped repeatedly by breaking waves that made a crack like the bow had been stove in. I was rowing a beautiful little Mackenzie dory that was set up for my wife who is 5’ 3”.  I couldn’t get my feet under the braces and was rolling around the deck like a bottle in the bilge water.  We got down to Big Drop I and made it across the rocketing current sheer into the eddy on the left that was filled with logs and all manner of spinning drift, where we stopped to scout Big Drop II, home of Niagara. A rapid going upstream in the eddy had standing waves a couple of feet high.

The river was still gnawing at its banks and the trip to the scout rock was through large loose angular rubble. The river looked the Brooks Range had been liquefied and poured into the canyon. Mike was next to me shouting in my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. The ground was vibrating and spray from minor waves pelted our faces from 50 feet away. I was trying to concentrate on my run and not to look at Niagara, which was still a sucking chasm. Everybody else thought the right slot was still open but it was narrower still and steeper yet and I thought the boats would surely fall off the sloping ledge of water and be vaporized. I was going left. I had made up my mind.

The left was a stupendous V wave. The left side of the wave was a huge crashing lateral that was flipping the motor rigs. The same thing had happened to all of them. They would come in powering right in hopes of blowing through the right side of the wave and tucking in below Niagara. It was going so fast and it was so hard to get the scale that they didn’t make it, and all ended up with the whole boat in the monstrous left lateral which was curtains. Guaranteed. Not only would you be flipped, if you didn’t get right after Niagara, whatever the reason, you were going straight into Big Drop III, through the quarter mile of continuous gnarl known as Satan’s Gut. The other side of the wave was a piedmont of water that rose to a peak near vertical. It had dual nature. One was a stationary tsunami of beckoning glass and the other, when the top had built beyond the vertical, was a towering mass of tumbling foam and solid water that broke upstream and rolled down the face like a liquid storm front. It would swallow a dory like a pea. The cycle took about 15 seconds.

Getting out of the eddy was a chore by itself and when we passed the first little marker wave I was truly shaken. The marker was huge. I began to push the boat forward like I had never pushed before. Everything was gigantic. We were moles on a heaving continent of brown water. The wave rose up before us and over the bow I could see nothing but sky. We were flying.

The wave broke right under the oarlocks. I could hear it rolling down the face behind us. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever done in a boat and it was sheer dumb luck.

[That's it for now! Hope you enjoyed the story.]

Elites and Intellectual Failure

I agree mostly with Matt Yglesias' diagnosis of the scariness of American political institutions, and the even greater uneasiness that European institutions inspire. I want to quibble with this graf however:

Think seriously about it and you'll see that it just can't be that everyone in Frankfurt and Brussels and Berlin and Madrid and Athens is incredibly stupid. Rather, the eurozone has blundered into a set of institutional arrangements that can't process the issues correctly and the rest of us can just stand and watch the wreckage unfold. Our problems are completely different in origin but similar in some important respects. Luce's book is the story of a United States that's suffering from a variety of fairly well-known problems that intellectually seem far from unsolvable. And yet our political system, for some fairly profound reasons, just isn't working on solving the problems. Instead, it's leaping toward another terrifying and pointless debt ceiling showdown even as political punditry remains excessively focused on personality conflicts rather than the structural roots of this dysfunction. It's time to start thinking.

Again, I think that this diagnosis of institutional failure is correct, and also that solutions to our problems are intellectually pretty easy. However I think the analysis of that failure has to include some room for straight-up inability to correctly understand things (for whatever reason, be it ignorance, stupidity, or some kind of prejudice). Check out this little segment with Paul Krugman and a couple British conservatives:



(As an aside, I do enjoy how the TV norms in Britain seem to lean more towards actual, back-and-forth discussion, rather than a bunch of hacks shouting carefully crafted talking points at each other.) It was striking to me how unable the conservatives were to actually engage with Krugman's points. He kept trying to separate the idea of being in a depression from other points about debt, deregulation, and the size of the state, and the conservatives simply didn't get it (see especially about 6:30). I'm reminded of 2010-2011, where Obama and his team made a "pivot" to concentrating on debt and deficits that was, from an intellectual or political standpoint, utterly boneheaded.

The whole political discourse these days is strongly reminiscent of the Great Depression years. Herbert Hoover presided over three years of disastrous economic failure, but went round saying things like:

Nothing is more important than balancing the budget with the least increase in taxes. The Federal Government should be in such position that it will need issue no securities which increase the public debt after the beginning of the next fiscal year, July 1. That is vital to the still further promotion of employment and agriculture. It gives positive assurance to business and industry that the Government will keep out of the money market and allow industry and agriculture to borrow the monies required for the conduct of business.

It wasn't just an institutional problem with Hoover. All the institutional incentives were lined up for him to fix the depression; he didn't, and as a result was utterly crushed at the polls in 1932. He was captured by an ideology that prevented him from operating in his own political self-interest. The same goes for most of the political elites in Europe, and Obama to a lesser extent. (Hoover deserves a bit more of an excuse, I suppose, in that there wasn't much of an economic consensus back in his day, but given how conservatives are prone to quoting his ideas nearly verbatim today I reckon even if Paul Krugman had been around back in 1930 Hoover would have done the same things.)

Being young and poor and therefore utterly divorced from the elites in this country, I can't say for sure what's happening here, but I have a suspicion that there is a rarefied culture among the elite (as Digby would call it, the Village) which basically makes them stupid. Elites are mostly very wealthy, which usually brings an enormous dose of self-regard and arrogance, as well as the belief that because they themselves became rich doing things in the economy, they therefore understand how it works. It's small and very insidery, and peer pressure and groupthink can make espousing out-group principles socially problematic. All that together and we have an elite culture which has a strong tendency to settle on simple, intuitive, emotionally appealing economic ideas like Hoover's, while excluding people like Krugman as "unserious" or unwilling to "make tough choices." That, maybe, is how you get career politicians doing the electoral equivalent of shooting themselves in the face.

So any institutional design should take this tendency into account, and somehow provide a way for political elites to be able to correctly predict the consequences of their policies. For more on elite culture, and how it develops, I very highly recommend Chris Hayes' new book Twilight of the Elites, available soon.

Job!

So, I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but I've got an official job at the Washington Monthly. It's basically a handyman kind of job, where I keep the business side going on a daily basis, and do anything else that needs doing, like some guest-blogging.

It's not exactly a well-paid job, and there aren't benefits, but given that it's the Monthly I think it's about as good as could be expected. Obviously there are a lot of opportunities here too, but I think the most important part is that I really like the place and the people. A lot of people I know these days are stuck in jobs making a lot more money than me, but doing things they hate with people they don't like. I'm young, with very low overhead, and I think the side benefits of having a job you really like in the right field is easily worth the low pay. I'll stay here for awhile, count my blessings, and try to get some more stuff published.

Burst DC Pipe a Glimpse at Our Rotting Foundations

Every once in awhile you get a look beneath the surface of things, usually when something breaks. Today it was a water main outside the Monthly office building, which meant that every building affected had to be closed by order of the fire marshal. You can see in the picture I took quite a lot of water was running down the storm drains, but that's nothing compared to the garage flooding nearby. Here's a little local news segment on it.

Apparently the main was 65 years old, which is actually younger than the DC average of 77 years old. (In case you're bad at math, that means the average pipe was put in 1935.) Some DC pipes are even older, dating back to the 19th century. As you might expect, this isn't the only time a pipe has burst--just by accident I found the story of another broken main in DC from earlier this month. Apparently, there are an average of 450 breaks a year. It's a nationwide problem, of course, due mostly to neglect, which is only getting worse, because no one wants to pony up the money.

This kind of thing is a particularly striking example of how foolish budgeting can lead to greatly increased spending in the long term (or, just general economic rot). We could have paid the money it would have cost to replace, maintain, or upgrade these systems, but instead we're scrambling from disaster to disaster, each causing expensive damage, which disrupt the local economy as emergency repairs are made, and only make the necessary maintenance even more urgent. The money must be spent, it's only a question of when and how. As Ezra Klein said awhile back:

We have literally trillions of dollars in unmet infrastructure needs. We have massive unemployment in the construction sector. Materials are unusually cheap because of a depressed global economy. Borrowing is unusually cheap because we're one of the few safe havens left in the global financial market. And it's cheaper to repaid an aging bridge today than rebuild a crumbled one 10 years from now. So waiting to do the bulk of our infrastructure passing a half-measure on infrastructure investment later is like waiting till after the big sale ends to buy your groceries. It's just bad financial planning. 

It's not a choice between big and small government, it's a choice between effective and hapless government. That we can't see that is a symptom of the political system's increasing inability to even try to address major challenges.

Broadband Could Be Cheaper

Matt Yglesias says if American broadband sucks, we should blame the customers:

But in this particular case, we're not really talking about innovation at all. What's galling—to those of us who are galled by it—about America's broadband infrastructure is that we don't need more innovation. The relevant technology has been invented. What we need are more holes in the ground so that we can fill them with fiber optic cables. This is an expensive proposition, and the basic problem here is that when Verizon dipped its toes into making the investment it turned out that customers didn't want to pay for it. People who write about tech policy on the internet for a living place an unusually high subject value on high-speed internet access, so the resulting situation is frustrating for us. But the problem is really with the customers rather than the companies. There simply aren't enough people who want to pay a premium price for premium service.

An iPhone, which I don't have.

Now, I suspect his views might be a bit more nuanced than that, given this column arguing for breakup of the broadband trusts, so this is mostly a convenient excuse to talk about something that pissed me off, but I think this is partially mistaken.

Yglesias is surely correct that we don't need more technological innovation to drastically increase the average American's internet speed, but we could stand for a whopping dose of business innovation, in the form of good old-fashioned competition. America's broadband trusts are simply too large and sclerotic to chase down the business that's waiting for them out in the hinterlands.

Here's an example: the other day the internet went down at work. I thought that perhaps I could just "tether" my internet-capable phone to my computer, which is how I got internet back in South Africa. (Back in those days, 2 GB for a month was a ridiculous extravagance, which I happily bought.) The best way to do it there was with Linux, which has all the relevant connectivity information built into the OS, for nearly any country in the world. You just bought some data for your SIM card, plugged in your phone, picked your carrier (either MTN or Vodacom, usually), and the rest was done for you. Once you have the data access, really all you need is to teach the computer how to talk to the phone.

So, since I have a Linux/Windows dual-boot setup on my new laptop, I tried doing that here. I set up the system, and got a screen from Verizon saying if I want to tether my phone, I have to pay $20 a month for it. This isn't a case of forgetting to turn something on--all I wanted was to use the data I have already paid for, just through my computer instead of my phone. There isn't some mystical portal needed here either, the relevant protocols are available for free. This is a case of Verizon deliberately crippling that particular functionality in order to extract money from their customers.

To me, this is overwhelming evidence that America's telecom trusts are roughly half about providing a service and half about extracting money from their consumer base. Is it any surprise they can't be bothered to extend broadband to somewhat dubious locations? That's hard, gritty work. Much easier to try and loot your subscribers through bullshit fees and the like.

UPDATE: I had forgotten about this piece of evidence from earlier this month:

Unless you're paying $26 a month for unlimited phone calls, unlimited text, free international calls, and 3 gigs of data, per month, you are being royally ripped off. Because that's what they pay in France for far more service on their iPhones, and other phones, than we pay in the states for three times as much.

More on the FDA

One of the posts I did at the Monthly was on the FDA's approval process. Rand Paul got a proposal passed saying the FDA must accept science done in the EU and elsewhere in the developed world into their approval process, with the idea of speeding things along. Alex Tabarrok proposed that any drug or treatment approved in the industrialized world (meaning Canada, the EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea) would receive automatic approval here in the US in 90 days, and I somewhat hastily agreed.

The background here is that the FDA is notoriously slow about new drug and treatment approval; personally I'd like to see the artificial pancreas delivered as fast as possible for my father, who despite being a generally healthy, slim guy, developed type I diabetes a couple years back.

Commenters on the post brought up thalidomide, which is surely worth considering. Briefly, that was a drug used for a short time in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere used to treat morning sickness. Turns out, it causes horrible birth defects, and the US mostly dodged a bullet when the FDA administrator of the day refused to approve it, saying more studies were needed.

But that was a long time ago, and before the modern rules were implemented. These days the big problem is pharma lobby capture of the approval process. These days, what is needed to demonstrate efficacy of a new drug is two positive-result studies. The drug companies can sponsor as many studies as they like, and don't have to reveal any they don't like (i.e., negative results), as they're considered proprietary and therefore confidential. That distorting influence is what leads to things like the Vioxx .

On further thought, I think the commenters that disagreed with Tabarrok are right. That kind of automatic process would probably lead to the pharma lobby concentrating their power on the weakest regulators to get mechanical, rubber-stamp approval. However, I still think Paul's proposal is good. More studies from credible sources can seldom hurt, especially in the current environment. I would combine it with mandatory open-access rules for publicly-funded studies, and more journals dedicated to publishing negative results.

Blogtastic

Reflecting back on my stint blogging for the Monthly's Political Animal headliner blog, I have a few thoughts:

1) It ain't easy. Being able to crank out ~12 posts in a day is, when I think about it, an extremely strange skill. You've got to be a fast writer, a faster reader, and able to come up with a coherent point (little ones count) about issues extremely quickly.

2) I have some talent at it. Not to toot my own horn, but I think given that it was my first time I did a reasonable job. By the standards of, say, Matt Yglesias, I'd say it was pretty amateurish--I had some repurposed posts from this blog, and a couple posts that I knew were half-assed when I was writing them--but on the other hand, I thought I had a couple of solid ones too. That was by far the most blogging I've done in a single day, and adjusting for my lack of experience I'd give myself a B+. Give me a bit of practice and I think I could keep up with the big dogs.

3) Most importantly, I had a great time doing it. Even though I felt intense pressure to perform, and barely slept the night before for nervousness, it was an absolutely great experience. It was the good kind of pressure, where you feel a chance to succeed in doing something that you love. And then I managed to, if not hit a home run, hit a double. That is a great feeling, and I am yet more convinced that I have chosen the right career.

Antietam

It seemed like a good idea for Memorial Day to go out to one of the Civil War battlefields, so we took a trip out to Antietam. A good time, but also practice for the future. Anyone know of some good, basic podcasts for the classic battles? Anything that gives social context and not just a dull accounting of who died where and how would be the best.

The Big Time

I'm doing an emergency guest-blog over at the Monthly's Political Animal blog. Check it out!

Private Equity and Extractive Institutions

Chris Hayes sparked a debate on Twitter last night with the following debate proposal:

Resolved: Bain Capital is bad for America. Or Resolved: It would be better if there was no private equity industry.

Which prompted Noah Smith to leap to private equity's defense:

Anyway, I generally support private equity. Why? Because of Japan.

Fact 1: In Japan, there is no big private equity industry, because it is very difficult to do a leveraged buyout of a company. The Japanese government allows companies to defend themselves from takeovers in ways that are illegal in America. Also, Japanese companies often hold each other's shares, a practice known as "cross-shareholding", which tends to prevent hostile takeovers. Cross-shareholding creates huge financial risks; however, many of the Japanese companies that engage in cross-shareholding are big banks that are backed by the government (much as ours are here in the U.S., but more explicitly), so this risk is assumed by the Japanese taxpayer. For a comprehensive primer on Japanese corporate governance, see here. 

Upshot: In Japan, private-equity firms cannot buy companies and force them to restructure. 

Fact 2: Japan has a productivity problem. We think of Japan as being super-productive, and in fact some industries (and most export-oriented factories) are. But overall, Japanese productivity kind of stinks. Since at least the 90s, Japan's Total Factor Productivity has lagged far behind that of the U.S. Nor is this due (as Ed Presott has tried to claim) to a slowdown in technology; it appears to be a function of how resources are allocated within and between Japanese companies.

And Matt Yglesias to theatrically scratch his head:

From where I sit, what we've actually been having is an extremely confused and confusing debate that has almost no content beyond affect.

But let's try to bring some substance to the debate. Noah Smith has an interesting laudatory post about private equity, suggesting a lack of leveraged buyouts explains some of Japan's problems, but the specific policy content is to disparage the huge legal tools the Japanese legal system gives incumbent managers to prevent their firms from being bought by outsiders. By contrast, Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt did a very disparaging policy report (PDF) for the Center for Economic and Policy Research back in February. They conclude that based on this that there ought to be more economy-wide limits on the permissable degree of leverage, and also that we ought to reduce the tax arbitrage opportunity represented by the deductibility of debt. They don't advocate adopting Japan-style rules to protect incumbent managers, and Smith specifically sites the tax arbitrage issue as a real one that should be curbed. Which is to say that Smith, who likes private equity, and Appelbaum and Batt who dislike it don't appear to have any policy disagreements.

Jay Gould, the
"Mephistopheles of
Wall Street"

I think Hayes is sort of mistaken in trying to point to any individual industry or business or company as being "bad for America." Surely Smith is right that it's eminently possible for businesses to become rotten, sclerotic, and dysfunctional, and that sometimes a buyout and restructuring can serve as a much-needed clearing out of dead wood. However, it's at least possible for Hayes to be right about Bain. Surely amoral rich people are more than capable of taking control of a good, functional business, and sucking the life out of it through financial trickery, or abuse of political influence, or manipulation of tax loopholes. Jay Gould was famous for doing this back in the Gilded Age. And while Countrywide was no one's idea of an honest business, Angelo Mozilo was still looting it back during the housing bubble.

I find, again, Why Nations Fail's extractive/inclusive spectrum to be useful here. When we're talking about whether private equity is bad or good, I think the relevant metric is whether they're (broadly speaking) serving as good faith entities, which play by the established rules of the market and try to make tangible improvements in businesses (which may lead sometimes to failure and mass layoffs, of course), or whether they're buying companies only to strip out their value into their own pockets. Smith's examples look like a different kind of extraction, where incumbent company managers use the law to protect their own position, which quickly turns into propping up tottering, failed companies.

I don't think we can a priori draw clear distinctions about what kind of law or business will be guilty of this. Hayes is wrong in that he draws too small a circle. As WNF says, all elites are potentially extractive (though I'd say due to their position astride the money streams financiers are more susceptible than most). From what I've read about Romney's time at Bain, they seemed to be on both sides of this spectrum.

That was a long time ago, and in my opinion the entire financial sector has become largely extractive since then, but in any case when we talk about the societal worth of financial companies this is what we're talking about.

Do Authors Have a Moral Right to Profit?

I'd like to come back to this post again, talking about copyright and author's right to sales. Since it's been awhile, let's establish again that it's a response to a point from Kevin Drum:

I am, as always, speaking only for myself, but I think this is too cramped. The Constitution says that the purpose of patents and copyright is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," but the fact that the Constitution says this doesn't mean it's the only reason to grant patents and copyrights. There's another reason too: because creators have a moral right to profit from their works. In real life, pretty much everyone acts as if they believe this, and I suspect that for most of us it's the real underpinning of our support for IP law.

 To which I replied:

I don't think this works, though as a broke-ass writer I would much like it to be true. The act of writing, or making music, or whatever, is not an intrinsically worthy undertaking. Suppose I write some book and put it in a cabinet in my basement. Do I deserve to profit from that, simply from the act of creating it? If Hitler yet lived would he have a moral claim to monopoly rents from Mein Kampf? Does everyone who borrows a book from a friend, or checks one out from the library, have a moral obligation to pay the author? This is absurd.

Which, reading again, sounds pretty cringingly stupid. (Seriously, Hitler? WTF was that about? Another foot of dirt on the already-buried corpse of my potential political career.) Anyways, I've been kicking this around in my head and I can't quite come to a decision. Here's my thought process, maybe you can help me.

There are two ways to think about this. We could say that intellectual property is merely a byproduct of a system to incentivize the creation something socially desirable, in this case artistic works, and so getting paid for producing it is just a knob on the art-making machine. If people got no money for their efforts that would be fine so long as society got a decent quantity of artistic works. Or, like Kevin, we could say that intellectual property is more like property. When you sell your property, you deserve any money that's to be made off it, and people have no right to access your work without paying you first if that what you want.

We could compare this to owning land, but I don't think that analogy works. Land, actually, seems even more than IP to be a case of "knob on a machine," in this case the machine of the economy. It's a good thing to develop land (in some cases, anyway), and property rights are a good way to accomplish that. But land is an inherently scarce commodity, the value of which is largely derived from external factors like its location, political developments, or rent-seeking from the landowner. As people move into cities and we're unable to deal with skyrocketing rents, more and more it seems like we're heading towards a society where most of the economic surplus falls through to landowners, who do nothing save sit on property, like the feudal days of old. So let's alter the point, and compare IP to a single, non-land possession like a jacket.

I find this idea at least a little appealing. Artists are people who often pour their heart and soul into their work. Surely they deserve to profit in some way from the copy and use of their work; after all, they made it! On the other hand the way all artists (and innovators generally) do that work is through copying and remixing previously existing ideas and material, often quite blatantly. Without copying and borrowing, there would be no creativity.





So I don't think I can accept Kevin's premise in a strong form. First, it would clearly rule out a lot of preexisting content distribution, like libraries and borrowing. After all, strictly interpreted, every checkout from the library is depriving an author of potential revenue.

I think it can be salvaged though, by attaching some important qualifications. Yes, authors have a moral right to profit from sale of that work. But, because all new art is built on previously existing work, 1) authors and publishers have a moral responsibility to make that work available with a minimum of hassle and expense. Thus we can make a space for some limited free lending, like libraries or borrowing a friend's copy. Additionally, 2) artists are obligated return their work to the public domain in a reasonable amount of time (which at the minimum means the moment the creator is dead). Creative works are built from the collective culture, so artists have a moral responsibility to feed and nourish that culture. To the extent that artists or corporations are violating these amendments, then they lose their right to profit from their work. You're not morally entitled to profits from the collective commons if you're free-riding on everyone else's fertilizer.

In my ideal world, creative works would be available online easily (but not free, if that's what the author wants), while copyright terms would be limited to 30 years or the lifetime of the author, whichever is shorter, and there would be strong, broad, and well-defined exceptions for fair use of copyrighted work. What do you think?

Poor Man Blogging

Pardon a bit of poverty bitching. I had what might be a decent post all planned out for last night, but instead of writing I spent most of the evening trying to fix a leak in my crappy inflatable mattress which came with the basement.

It's actually pretty good sleeping, by my standards anyway, but I like a firm bed and this one was getting saggy quick. I found the hole, but couldn't get one of the included patches to hold, so had to get up several times during the night to reflate.

Anyway, here's a picture from some National Park-ing I did last weekend with friends. Be with you later.

"Of course we believe these things..."

Stumbled onto this little clip here, and it really stuck in my head. Obviously, it's pitch-perfect for current times, but it's interesting to watch the self-control that FDR could muster. Watch his hands tremble as he touches his nose, but how he keeps the grinning jauntiness going, just short of smug but not hitting it. He looks every inch the confident leader.

Also funny how scathing folks could be with the sarcasm back then. Politics has never been for the thin-skinned.

Programming note

As much as I loathe low-density suburbs near heavy rail stations, it is sort of nice to walk around the quiet leafy streets near my house.

Anyway, I'm visiting a friend in Virginia today, so regularly scheduled posting will resume shortly.

TED and Economic Inequality

The above TED talk, by Richard Wilkinson, is from October 2011, and it's all about economic inequality. There's quite a lot of buzz today about another talk on economic inequality which was recorded, then quashed by TED officials. You can check out the full transcript here, from National Journal.

At first glance, this is quite a strange discrepancy. Both talks are on economic inequality, and they do differ a bit, but if anything the Wilkinson talk is more radical. The gist of his is that once a country has reached "developed" status, wealth doesn't much matter for the health of that society, broadly speaking (including things like longevity, mental illness, crime, prison population, poverty, etc). Instead equality is what matters. More equal societies are better.

The censored talk, given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, makes a fairly banal point that starting a successful business depends entirely on having a population of people with the ability to buy your product:

I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

Listen to his tone, though:

Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as "job creators" at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from "job creator" to "The Creator". We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a "job creator" is both an assertion about how economics works and the a claim on status and privileges. 

The extraordinary differential between a 15% tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 35% top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is a privilege that is hard to justify without just a touch of deification.

He's not just talking about inequality, he's saying that the title of "job creator" is undeserved. He's being blunt, and rude. We're all familiar with the titanic egos of the plutocrats, and how they react to sharp criticism. Check out this email TED curator Chris Anderson sent Hanauer, fisking his talk:

"Only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle." ...except when a company is thinking ahead of what the market wants; exhibit A: Apple ... 

"An ordinary consumer is more of a job creator than a capitalist." ...really? as an ex entrepreneur who agrees with your overall stance, I don't think that statement is literally true. There are numerous jobs that exist because of the imagination, energy and risk-taking of individual capitalists or entrepreneurs such as you... 

"hiring more people is a course of last resort, done if and only if rising consumer demand requires it". ...I launched numerous magazines for each of which, at time of their launch, there was zero consumer demand...I think a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted by that statement as given.

Emphasis mine. Setting Anderson's obviously bogus quibbles aside, it seems that the perceived slight to the status and value of the "entrepreneur" class is what doomed Hanauer's talk.

The interesting thing to me is how Wilkinson's far more radical talk inspired no controversy at all. Looking at the charts, the US is shown as the worst developed country, sometimes by an enormous margin (as in incarceration rates). And check out this section, starting at about 9:58:

The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways. The position of women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world. But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality. Sweden has huge differences in earnings, and it narrows the gap through taxation, generous welfare state, generous benefits and so on. Japan is rather different though. It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax. It has lower taxes. It has a smaller welfare state. And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same contrast. There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax. So we conclude that it doesn't much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow.

The political implications of this are enormous. Taken just to the next logical step, this means that the Republican ideas around incentives for work, and tax incentives for "job creators"--exactly the same thing Hanauer was talking about--are completely mistaken. The evidence is in, according to Wilkinson, and developed countries should forget everything else and pursue equality by any means at hand.

Now, that sounds good to me, but the point is it's rather remarkable how this kind of thing goes over fine with the rich job-creatin' TED attendees, while a more moderate but less polite version gets censored. It's almost like they're sitting in their seats, blissfully unaware of what the speaker is actually talking about, but feeling good about being part of a hip, trendy, high-status event.

UPDATE: They've since released the talk.



Dude isn't that great at giving a speech; it actually reads better in the transcript. But still, relatively moderate point from the view of mainstream American consensus--the middle class is the economic backbone of the country. In any case, good on TED for releasing it, other things equal. Anderson's view here.