The economist's volcano

I went and read another bit of a book written by an economist, and after another chapter of him displaying what I wish were a bad parody of economist behavior, this illustrative scenario occurred to me.

Suppose you have a magic volcano. Not just any volcano; a special magic volcano. When you throw someone into the magic volcano and make a gainful wish, it calls up two immortal beings: An actuary and an economist.

The actuary tells the volcano how many years that person would probably have lived; the economist looks up the current estimated GDP per capita and current market prices of every commodity and manufactured good. Since this is a magic volcano, it can do multiplication, so it takes the GDP per capita and multiplies it by the years of remaining life that person was expected to have.

The next morning, on the slope of the volcano, you'll find whatever you wished for, in whatever quantity, to the market value of that much money - a whole productive lifetime of money right up front, and maybe that particular person wasn't that productive. The volcano doesn't care if they're a hard worker or chronically unemployed.

So, is throwing people into the volcano an act of public good sometimes, most of the time, always, or never? It's certainly a positive economic benefit more often than not, defined in terms of financial value or productivity. Would you want to throw someone in the volcano? What do you expect should - or would - be done regarding this volcano if the news of its abilities spread far and wide?

There's a point to prosperity. I just don't think it's especially important once you've figured out how to keep people alive and well.

Corporation as individual

One of the odder corners of legal philosophy and business is the invention and treatment of the limited liability corporation. The idea is that rather than an individual acting directly, they can bundle their money together with other investors while at the same time limiting their responsibility to a simple dollar sign.

A corporation can't be liable for more than what it actually holds on hand, and nobody in particular is responsible for it - not the executive officer, not the board, it's something of a blank empty void that can't be put in jail and whose maximum financial penalties are sharply limited.

It's either very good or profoundly problematic. Good, in that it allows small investors to take a share in large ventures without being worried about negligence on the part of those with more share over running said ventures; problematic, in that action that would lead to severe penalties for an individual can go unpunished or underpunished with nobody in particular clearly responsible.

The most bizarre turn is that under law, corporations are treated in many cases like individuals. While I can be convinced that the benefits to the efficient allocation of capital are great enough to warrant the construction of such an entity, it remains very difficult for me to buy that this non-jailable entity, so difficult to hold accountable, deserves the same legal protections and fundamental rights as a human being.

Moreover, the sheer scale of a corporation and its anonymity makes it highly difficult to keep damage in perspective. If I were to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater and caused a dozen people to be trampled to death and others injured, I could be put away for the rest of my natural life on multiple counts of manslaughter; for a large corporation, a dozen incidental deaths resulting from poorly-considered actions (such as failing to place a warning label "DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL," or knowingly selling batteries with a tendency to burst into flame) barely even qualifies as a speed bump.

We're already not equal. I am far more accountable than the corporation is; I can incur penalties and responsibilities well beyond the current value of my bank account, I can be imprisoned... and the corporation simply exists to help people turn a buck. If it has a "motive" for exercising political influence, it is for the crass motive of its own bottom line; a corporation, not being an actual person, has no morality, no soul, no religious or political dispositions, no reason for any personal "rights" at all beyond that of being created and dissolved in a manner according to its legal liabilities and its charter - in that order.

A right to privacy? Kid me not. A strong motive to keep trade secrets, yes; a reason for wanting to obstruct investigation, sometimes; but a corporation has no personal affairs, not being a person. It cannot have a sex life or write poetry about how depressing its life is; it is simply a framework for handling responsibility for financial adventures that no single investor wishes to hold personally.

Slavery

Today was Juneteenth, and so the historical ending point of slavery in the US has passed through more minds than it usually does this week. And yet, archaic institution or not, slavery captures a lot of creative thought.

There are several modern arguments hidden in the corners of the moral and ethical spectrum of opinions that favor slavery. All - well, almost all - are unwilling to say that the institution of slavery as practiced in the US was a-OK. Hereditary racially-based lifelong slavery in which the owners have unlimited rights to dispose of their property as they see fit? Certainly not!

But while I think that the wrong was in the humans-owning-other-humans part, others would suggest it is in the other details. Why, if it is entered into with agreement by the party being enslaved, appropriate rights left to the slave, has nothing to do with racial oppression, what of it? Shouldn't people be free to enter into such a contract?

It is a perfectly libertarian turn of phrase. If slavery is a transferable contract, shouldn't it be legal? Leaving aside the sticky issue of people being pressed into slavery under duress, false pretenses, et cetera. There is a subtle point in the works. While undoubtedly there are those foolish enough to sign themselves onto an open-ended transferable contract - and some of the more clever transferable labor contracts look something like that - there remains the freedom to walk away from a contract at any time - throw up your hands and walk off the job. You may be out money; you may even be liable for financial penalties; but you retain that liberty.

Perhaps most importantly, it retains a sharp distinction between people and property, which is a dangerous line to blur. And perhaps we should carefully look at the things that look like slavery - prison labor to fill pockets, transferable contracts, and the penalty clauses allowed to labor contracts - and ask ourselves "What is the difference between this, and some nicely cleaned-up version of slavery?"

And those of you in the BDSM crowd who are into the master-slave relationships and roleplay on a purely consensual basis, who can end it at any time? You can ignore all that.

Housing strategies

And so, my graduate housing saga continues. After being assigned the more expensive option, and accepting that option, I've received a lease. Within that lease, of course, are a number of restrictions...

... namely, there's to be no smoking anywhere near the building, and no pets whatsoever. At the start of the UC-I graduate housing application, there are questions about cats and smoking. You can apparently come with up to 2 cats.

Hypothesis: My optimal strategy, as someone with a limited budget and allergic to cats, would have been to claim to have 2 cats. This would have guaranteed that I was assigned to the cheaper housing; since they surely don't want too many cats per apartment, that probably would have minimized my chances of being assigned to another cat while saving several hundred dollars per month - on average, enough to keep me rolling in antihistamines in the event I turned out to have to deal with one.

Now, why this information wasn't presented at the start of the process, I can guess, but I have to say I don't like that system so far. And I still have a bone to pick about the affordability of their housing. I foresee an interest in committee-work in my future.

The Ecolitan Lesson

Some books teach you things. At times, I wonder if I am drawing the right lessons from the novels I peruse; in L.E. Modesitt's Ecolitan books, the lesson seems a fairly pointed one, so I feel nearly sure that the point is what I think it is:

Know what your priorities are. In the Ecolitan books, the protagonist always has some goal in mind - preserving a way of life, breaking an Empire, something monumental. The protagonist stops at nearly nothing to achieve this - and because they know exactly what their priorities are, it is the thought of a single moment to determine which priorities an action works for or against.

Most of the protagonists are highly pragmatic, and the results are bloody - but in the end, the trade-offs they have made, they are satisfied with. I think there's at least a grain of truth to that, and a grain of danger. People who put a single goal above all else risk becoming monsters in pursuit of that goal - whether the goal is destroying a nation, overturning a law, or accumulating wealth. The truth, though, is that most of the regrets I've had, and the mistakes I've made - or watched others make - are related to not knowing exactly what priorities fall where.

It's a simple lesson, but a difficult creed, and I'm still not sure if the danger in taking an ordering of priorities to heart is more or less than its utility.

The curious case of male sexuality and religion

Before I talk about any empirical evidence, indulge me in an anecdote, would you?

For about four years of my college career, I belonged to an all-male pop a capella group by the name of Higher Ground. Beyond any doubt, what held the group together was music, but I was always a bit of an odd duck. When I first joined the group, the core of it was from nearby Hickory, and most of the guys were fans of country music. Mainly country boys, but by the time I left, the founding old guard had all gone, and it had shifted from that to the more generic brand, the kind of fella who thinks about joining a fraternity.

Pigeonhole and stereotype away if you like. There were some interesting characters, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't, but the end result is that Higher Ground was the most "conservative" group I belonged to on campus, and also one of the more religious, at least nominally, and I learned a few interesting things.

One was that Campus Crusade for Christ meetings were apparently one of the best places to score. That was a surprise to me; less surprising was the constant locker-room talk. A very few were genuinely intensely religious, more interested in theology, and those few were willing to put sex aside until marriage. The rest? Conservative or not, religious or not, college was all about getting laid. Expressly and explicitly.

And it's from that experience, and the experience of liberal students who were very cautious about sex, that I started to wonder what exactly is going on here. There's no question in my mind that being told not to have sex until marriage over and over again should reduce sexual activity, but why is it that only some men (far fewer than women, it seems, and now I've gone and introduced empirical evidence) respond to this message, while others come out of the Southern Baptist church thinking that sex before marriage is sinful yet pursuing promiscuity as if it were the path into heaven?

Some of it surely is the traditional myth of hyperactive male sexuality, propagated in some abstinence-only programs and passed on unthinkingly by those who do not critically examine sexuality; but I cannot help but think that something else is involved. And what stands out is that in this day and age, more than ever, conservative young males fear being labeled as homosexual - and nothing is as effective at silencing locker-room backstabbers' quiet implications of homosexuality than having sex with a woman.

So now, whenever people jabber about men being unable to control their desires, I think about homophobia, and how it helps keep alive the idea that sex is some commodity that men demand and women supply.

Patterns from nothing

Today is the day several people I know have a birthday. Five, according to Facebook, which informs me that I knew four of those in high school, no less - what a remarkable coincidence! - and two of them were reasonably good friends with each other, enough to share a five-way birthday party with several other nearby May-birthday friends.

Yet while it's quite unusual to have to have a couple of close friends from the same circle with a May 23rd birthday, it's hardly unusual to have two friends share the same birthday. By the time you know 23 birthdays, the odds are better than even that you know two people with shared birthdays. A remarkable coincidence - but of course, you're special, and you probably had to go through around 250 friends to find one who shared YOUR birthday.

We are inclined to recognize patterns in life. It's a useful skill, one that serves us well every day of our lives, but we're not always good judges of statistical significance, so sometimes we recognize patterns that are in fact simply random noise. This is where superstitions come from, and those little errant beliefs that aren't quite rational. Rationally, I know that having an ice-cold draft from the bar won't improve my motor control, but I swear, it seems to improve my bowling from atrocious to merely terrible!

Once we've picked out a pattern, and consciously identified it, we start to become emotionally attached to them. We've invested time and effort in it; every time you wear your lucky underpants and make out with a cute boy, you've reinforced the idea that they're lucky in your mind. When you wear them out and go home frustrated, you focus on another cause - a black cat, maybe a friend causing drama, there was something out there that interfered with your lucky underwear.

Psychologists have found intermittent reinforcement works very well, which might explain not only gambling addictions, but how doggedly we hang onto our curious patterns; medical doctors have found that delusion is remarkably effective at influencing how our bodies work. And there, we've come full circle. Most of the false patterns we see in life don't cause us much harm, and some even help us cope with the varied vagaries of life.

And who knows? Maybe a beer does relax me enough to let my cerebellum handle everything; maybe I treat my friend Terry like a little sister because I share a birthday with her big brother; and maybe, just maybe, your lucky sock makes you run just a little bit faster. But if you look hard enough for a pattern, one will emerge; whether it means anything or not is another matter entirely.