Tag: economics

Shared Links for May 5th

  • How David Beats Goliath – When the rules are stacked against you, the intelligent thing to do is break them. (tagged: strategy law war insurgency guerilla gametheory basketball lawrenceofarabia )
  • Continuous bankruptcy – Bankruptcy as it stands now is a discontinuous process. Your legal solvency is binary: either you are bankrupt, or you are not. It doesn't have to be that way, and I think you can make a good argument that it's better if it isn't. Continuous processes work themselves out in small steps, with lots of information flow along the way. Discontinuous ones are like explosions. It's easier to muster resistance to an explosion once you see it coming, and delay it. But how much better to start getting signals early on, and avert it altogether? (tagged: finance policy economics bailout banks bankruptcy discrete continuous )
  • Digital Recovery of Moon Images – Ahh, NASA. Your data management has improved over the years, but that's not saying much. 20 tons of magnetic tape in an abandoned McDonalds houses the only extant copy of the pre-Apollo analog imaging of the Moon (still the highest resolution available in most places). It can only be read by one machine on Earth, which was recently rescued from a chicken coop, and refurbished by a man who is about to die. You can't make this stuff up. (tagged: information technology space nasa archive data moon )
  • Will the Future Be Geo-Engineered? – The future is already geo-engineered, and has been ever since we started burning coal on a large scale more than 200 years ago. The question now is whether we back off, and try to let the system return to the quasi-equilibrium that allowed our civilization to arise, or introduce new and exciting perturbations, with completely unpredictable non-linear effects. I know which one I'm hoping for. (tagged: geoengineering technology non-linear climate policy environment )
  • Hacking Scalia – Law professor gives class an assignment to dig up as much "private" info as possible on Justice Scalia, a notable anti-privacy force on the SCOTUS. This irritates Scalia. Exactly! (tagged: law privacy scalia scotus )
  • No new coal: what real direct action looks like – The $10 million spent on violently policing the "climate camp" protest outside Kingsnorth is absurd, given that a single motivated saboteur, capable of advance planning and actually willing to risk arrest and injury, can walk into the power plant and shut down 500MW of coal fired power generation. If governments fail to deal with greenhouse gas emissions effectively, and remain in thrall to the carbon lobbies, it seems likely that soon this kind of action will become more common, and truly disruptive. All it takes is a few thousand people who actually care, and our infrastructure can be brought to its knees. (tagged: energy environment green coal climate protest kingsnorth directaction )

Support AB 1186 for transparent parking costs

Dear Assemblymember Portantino,

I would like to urge you to support AB 1186, an effort to enhance the transparency of parking costs for easing the enforcement of California’s parking cash-out legislation.  This bill has been introduced by Assemblymember Bob Blumenfield (District 40), and is due for a hearing in the Assembly Transportation Committee on May 11th.  The cost of parking is enormous, generally hidden, and heavily subsidized, producing significant distortions in the transportation choices made by Californians.  Making the price of parking transparent, and enabling those who choose not to drive to recoup those costs, removing the hidden subsidies, is in the best interest of business, transit authorities, the citizens, and California in general.  For instance, at my own institution in Pasadena, the California Institute of Technology, we are forced by city regulations to provide what would constitute a vast oversupply of parking were employees and students required to pay the true price of providing those spaces, wasting $3 million each year (approximately $1000 per person on the campus), that could be better spent on our core scientific research and education mission.  While this bill unfortunately would not directly address this waste, it is a step in the right direction, and I strongly encourage you to consider other such steps.

Sincerely,

Zane Selvans

Shared Links for Apr 10th

Shared Links for Apr 8th

  • The secret, social lives of bacteria – Cooperative behavior between bacteria, both inter and intra species, coordinated via chemical messages. Behavior like "should we make light?" and "should we kill the host now?". Scary, awesome, and a beautiful system to investigate with algorithmic game theory! (tagged: cooperation biology technology bacteria science )
  • Computational Legal Studies – More people using machines to understand politics. A whole new class of dual use technology. Propaganda or transparency? Manipulation or clarity? Unauthorized social networking. (tagged: transparency technology government law )
  • Public Private Investment Partnerships a la Enron – Giving banks the ability to both buy and sell into the toxic asset markets being set up under PPIP is a recipe for market gaming in the tradition of Enron, as outlined in this example. Great, a trillion dollar Enron! (tagged: finance bailout economics policy enron ppip banks )
  • The New Nostradamus – Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses large game theory simulations to try and predict the outcomes of complex negotiations involving many parties, both economic and political. Sounds interesting. Also sounds a little bit like bullshit. But apparently the CIA did a prospective trial (no backtesting bias) and found that the models made accurate predictions something like 90% of the time, when the analysts providing the inputs to the model made wrong predictions. Not so surprising that computers are better at synthesizing massive logical datasets into an outcome. The hard part seems like it would be getting the right inputs, and also trusting that people behave rationally, and (perhaps) know what's good for them. (tagged: economics politics science math prediction gametheory technology )
  • Ice Shelf Instability Backgrounder – A good backgrounder from last summer on the Wilkins Ice Shelf (which has just collapsed), and shelf dynamics in general, with links to the relevant literature. None of this is quite as sudden and shocking as the media reports have made it out to be. (tagged: climate antarctica ice shelf )

Dijkstra, the Buxton Index, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

EW Dijkstra, the computer scientist, was fond of using a metric called the “Buxton Index“, which conveys the timescale on which an individual or institution makes its plans.  He thought that a lot of failures to cooperate, and other kinds of conflicts, were ultimately due to different actors having different time horizons.  Here are three of his short essays mentioning it:

It’s interesting in the context of, e.g. the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which only an indefinite (or infinite) timescale can reliably result in cooperation (as detailed in Robert Axelrod’s book, The Evolution of Cooperation).  It certainly seems like we should have some metric of this kind in mind when considering the behaviors of various institutions.

Dijkstra notes that interestingly (at least in the west) virtually all of the institutions which are more than 500 years old are universities (two churches and two governments also qualify, out of 66 total).

I think its funny that Dijkstra was essentially blogging, by fountain pen, for decades.  He wrote out hundreds of these short numbered essays longhand, and sent copies of them to friends, who then copied them, and sent them on, etc.  He kept doing it this way even after everyone had e-mail!  I had no idea he was such an interesting guy.

Shared Links for Apr 3rd

  • Stealing Commodities – Our infrastructure is (unwittingly) built around the assumption that the materials it is composed of are, and will remain, cheap, and not worth the trouble of stealing. If this assumption breaks down, copper power lines start disappearing from the desert, and iron manhole covers begin to vanish in the night. Problematically, the raw materials (even when valuable) are still only a small fraction of the value of the infrastructure, meaning replacement costs are high. If commodities were to remain "expensive" in the long run (i.e. worth stealing), how would we re-design our infrastructure systems? (tagged: sustainability economics security infrastructure commodities )
  • Dyson as Sociologist? Death Trains, Values, & Climate Action – Not sure I know quite what to make of Nisbet's take on Dyson. I agree that the catastrophe narrative is dangerous, and much prefer Richard Alley's precautionary point of view, but I really think Dyson is catastrophically wrong on this, and potentially dangerous as a figurehead, whether knowing or unknowing. (tagged: climate science policy propaganda politics )
  • Argentine economics and maker culture – An interesting and personal look at mass production vs. local/handmade goods based on currency strength and protectionist trade barriers. Where labor is cheap, the food and goods are often unique. Where it's expensive, you get mass production. Makes me want to bike S. America. Again. (tagged: economics argentina local money food )
  • China Out to Dominate in Electric Cars (and Why Not GM) – A short chronicle of GM's missteps toward electric vehicles, and China's long view of the same. Honestly, I don't care much who does the dominating, so long as somebody gets this market going. (tagged: cars transportation technology economics china )
  • Oregon’s mileage tax experiment – If you can imagine an America in which vehicle fuel economy increases with time (despite the fact that our national fleet today gets the same mileage as a Ford Model T), then eventually, funding road maintenance with a gas tax becomes a problem. Instead of taxing the fuel, you need to directly tax the road usage – miles driven, normalized by some kind of wear-and-tear factor for a given vehicle. Thus, the idea of a VMT (vehicle miles traveled) tax. Political suicide, you say, but it worked in this (politically insulated) trial in Oregon, and is going ahead gangbusters in the Netherlands and other nations, coupled with GPS enabled congestion charging, and time/location dependent parking fees, it could go a long way toward making personal transportation costs transparent and efficiently priced. (tagged: transportation privacy taxes vmt cars oregon policy )

Shared Links for Mar 31st

The Time Value of Information and Material Wealth

Conventional economics says money today is worth more than money in the future.  This is why people are willing to agree to pay interest on a loan (and why a creditor requires it).  How much more money is worth today than in the future is determined by the discount or interest rate (depending on what kind of calculation you’re doing).  This would hold true, say the economists, even if we lived in a hard money world (e.g. silver and gold), and even after accounting for the risk of default by the debtor, because of opportunity costs.  Creditors and investors presumably have a choice as to what they do with their money.  Sitting on your pile of treasure in a vault ensures that it doesn’t get smaller, but it also doesn’t get bigger.  When they choose to make a loan or invest in an enterprise, they are, it is assumed, seeking the best possible (risk adjusted) return, and so the value of a given present pile of money at some time in the future is the principal invested plus the return earned between now and then.  If you can make 10% per year on some investment, and you have $100, and someone offers to give you $105 a year from now in exchange for your $100 now, all else being equal, you refuse, invest at 10%, and end up with $110 next year instead.

This conception of money is somewhat problematic, as it tends to render everything in the time and world of your grandchildren essentially worthless in the present.  Even at a modest 5% discount rate, $100 a century from now is only worth $0.59 today.  I think the problem comes largely from the convolution of informational and material wealth, and our habit of representing both of them with the same currency.

Continue reading The Time Value of Information and Material Wealth

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins.  It’s his personal account of working as an economic forecaster for an international infrastructure engineering and consulting company called Chas. T. Main during the 1970s (it’s since been purchased by Pasadena’s very own Parsons).  If I remember correctly, I got this book from Arjun.

It was widely criticized when it came out as being the rantings of a conspiracy theorist, and I think that by the end of the book, it definitely takes on that tone.  This is unfortunate, because a lot of the problems that Perkins points out really do exist, and it actually doesn’t matter much whether they’re the result of a shadowy global conspiracy, or a structural problem with our international economic and development system.  But most good conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth, and at the very least they can provide a useful lens into how the same situation and facts can be interpreted differently by people in different positions, with different experiences, and different incentives.  In that light, the book is asking the reader to consider what debt-based foreign development aid looks like from the point of view of the poor people living in the countries receiving the aid.  This is actually a really interesting thing to think about right now, because our current financial and economic crisis has been described by some as similar in many ways to the kinds of crises which the IMF and World Bank have historically been called on to deal with in “developing” economies.

Continue reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

Shared Links for Mar 19th

  • A New Way Forward – Grassroots banking policy? Who'd have guessed? Their plan is "Nationalize. Reorganize. Decentralize." The N-word has some bad connotations, but what they're really advocating for is an FDIC style managed bankruptcy, i.e. letting the banks fail, cleaning out the shareholders and management, and applying real anti-trust laws to the financial industry. I never thought I'd go to a banking protest. (tagged: economics bailout finance fdic activism banking policy )
  • MailStopper – Is $20/year too much to pay to avoid junk mail? Would it really work? The self-monitoring aspect is interesting too. Would be great to be able to watch your name and address as it propagates through the ocean of direct marketing databases, and credit reporting agencies. (tagged: green junkmail sustainability internet )
  • YellowPagesGoesGreen.Org – I hate the two kilograms of cellulose that the phone company insists on littering my doorstep with each year. I was a little bit drunk when they showed up last week, and threw them in the street. I don't even have a land line. Why would I want a phone book? Who uses those things anyway? Thankfully, someone else has already created an opt-out system… too bad I'll have to wait a year to see if it actually works. (tagged: environment recycling paper yellowpages mail green sustainability )
  • The Age of Stupid – A new combination sci-fi documentary on climate change… framed as a man looking back and trying to understand why we failed to act, from the year 2055. The movie was "crowd funded" – the filmmakers sold shares of the profits to individuals (and the crew) in exchange for cash (about $1 million total). The trailer looks fairly good… (tagged: climate film green environment )
  • Mistrial by iPhone – Juries’ Web Research Upends Trials – Another example (cf death of record companies, newspapers) of technology upending previously stable social and legal systems. 9/12 jury members found to be doing research on the trial they were sitting on, via their cell phones and the internet. People don't consider the meta-brain to be a separate entity any more. Certainly not for weeks of sequestration on end… (tagged: law technology internet phone jury trial )