Intelligence requires a high degree of feedback. The mind has to be able to smoothly compare and check any ideas it creates and sort and connect them with other ideas. That is why the disruption of feed back is so destructive. In fact that is one of the principal modalities in torture. The goal of torture is to deny the victim any chance of maintaining a feedback loop, destroying the individual's ability to adapt or maintain rational thought. Disruptive environments can be equally damaging. . This includes abusive families with children. The children are being tortured and fail to develop feedback. As they mature they typically attempt to destroy feedback in others through activities such as bullying. Their brains have developed a strong model of dysfunction and cannot adapt to function. Neighborhoods with high levels of crime produce a similar results.
Intelligence requires the brain to wander, matching and comparing concepts. then it must take the better parts and compare them with knowledge and experience, that is the feed back loop. Anything that disrupts it will reduce and individuals ability to learn and adapt. Dealing with incoherence in daily life makes people stupid and apathetic. This is the typical condition of people living under tyrannies.
This is also why people react so strongly to incompetent and unnecessary rules, either form government or business. People feel themselves being disrupted and react with anger. There is no way to avoid the damage unless the management is corrected.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Notes on Ayn Rand
Reading Atlas Shrugged is a reminder that it is futile to argue with psychotics. I will start with the easy targets, the low-hanging fruit. To begin with, there is no reason for that book to be more that two hundred fifty pages, the version I struggled through had about one thousand eighty. All of the additional ponderous verbiage can have no effect other than to shorten the useful life of the reader. No person with any sense of human decency would have assaulted the reader with the additional eight hundred fifty pages, but since Ayn Rand claimed she did not believe in charity, that lack of compassion could be explicable. Increasing the length of interminable speeches does not increase their useful content or add any additional perspective to a second rate idea that has already been flogged to death.
For a more specific criticism, there is Chapter 9, Sacred and Profane. Among the shattered debris of incoherent thoughts that amalgamate this chapter, Dagney Taggart, who is alleged to be both competent and an engineer, discovers an electric motor but cannot determine its power source. I can help her, I know somethings about engineering. If it is an electric motor its power source would be electricity. She is astounded to be unable to determine what fuel it uses; diesel? coal? If it were powered by fuel, then it would not be an electric motor. What that would be is an auxiliary power source producing motive power for a generator or alternator, depending on whether it is DC or AC, although frequently the word generator is used for both; the generator then powering the electric motor, as in a diesel-electric railroad locomotive. Upon brilliant reflection, she determines that the power source is static electricity.
I will now attempt to explain the concept of energy density. Insects have a carbon based body, that carbon could be used as a source of fuel. Driving down the road. all vehicles have bugs splatter on their windshields and front ends. Because of that, since they represent instant energy content, there is no need to purchase fuel, the bugs can be used for energy instead. There is, of course, a problem with this plan, which would be energy density. If a car gets thirty miles per gallon and is driving at sixty miles per hour, it would use two gallons, or about twelve pounds, of fuel per hour. Assuming that the bugs' bodies solid portion has the same energy per weight as gasoline, gasoline has carbon and hydrogen, bugs bodies have carbon and a bunch of other stuff, some of which burns, others that do not, and that bugs are eighty percent water, they are pretty juicy, sixty pounds of bugs per hour would have to be intercepted per hour by the car. It would also require the bugs would achieve efficient combustion. That would be a lot of bugs. Similarly with static electricity, there would have to be a high enough density of it, which there is not, for that idiocy to work. In a later, chapter, another charachter says the inventor, who turns out to be John Galt, has a whole new concept of energy. No, Albert Einstein had a different concept of energy, this is hooey.
In a later chapter, as the world is falling apart because great men are deserting society, Dagney has the brilliant idea to place men with lanterns in railroad tunnels under Manhattan to serve as signal lights when a piece of copper wire breaks and there is none to replace it, leaving the signal lights blank. This is stupid, the reason siganl lights exist is because railroad engine drivers do not know what is ahead, oncoming trains, switches set against the train's movement; for years railroads have resisted having radios in engine cabs believing that they will be stolen or vandalized in poorly secured railroad yards, which leaves open the question of why they do not use mobile radios, which could even have a moving map display to make the engine driver's work easier. Her plan was to set the switches and then run each train through individually, there would be no need for signal lights, since each train would know that the route is set for it, all it would have to do is proceed continuously at a safe speed. It might be a good idea to have a worker with an emergency lantern in case a switch does not move properly, so the engine driver can be warned to stop, but continuous signal lanterns would be unnecessary.
In another chapter, Hank Reardon, the inventor of Reardon Metal, invents a new type of truss. I assume that Ayn Rand had only vaguest idea of what a truss is, there really are only so many ways the pieces can be arranged.
What any competent writer knows, and Ayn Rand did not, is that writers should never actually try to pretend to introduce anything that they do not understand; if one is writing about a charachter who is claimed to be a great physicist, do not pretend to write equations he might write, similarly, if one is describing a great poet, do not try to actually write a poem. If a writer knows nothing about engineering, it is wide not to try to pretend to make engineering decisions or analysis. Or, as the old saying goes, if one does not say anything, no one will know how stupid one actually is.
The reader eventually arrives in the valley, somewhere in the state of Colorado, where all the capable people needed to run society had secretly withdrawn. Supposedly, all of these people are highly rational, Ayn Rand also claimed she was equally rational, alas, neither is true.
The people of the valley use only gold as currency, because they will only use for money objects with objective value, Ayn Rand insisted relabeling her social pathology as a philosophy she insisted on calling objectivism. The obvious problem is that gold has no objective value, in fact it is pretty worthless.
The reason gold has value is because it is bright and shiny and rare and people, like certain hoarding animals, like bright shiny objects. The fact that it does not tarnish is nice, but it is heavy and too soft to use for any useful purpose, nor does it form useful alloys. It really only has had any useful purpose for about fifty years, it is very good for the best electrical connections and it has been used to coat astronaut visors because it can be deposited thin enough to see through but still would absorb large parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum. The other semi-useful purpose of gold is electroplating other metals to form a corrosion proof coating, that is less than a hundred fifty years old, acids and electricity being needed for the process. Today, vapor deposition of aluminum can be used to form a corrosion resistant coating at lower cost. Even for usual electrical wiring copper is typically a better material, copper has higher resistance but most wires require some degree of self-support and copper is both lighter and stronger. Over all, gold objectively would be priced somewhat higher than copper but no more. In addition, with the augmentation of tin, copper forms bronze alloys which can be useful. The reason why gold prices have been rising for the last fifteen years or so has nothing to do with fierce individualists wanting a hedge against the collapse of decadent governments, it is because people in India really like gold jewelry, as the Indian middle class has expanded, the demand for that jewelry has exploded since people can now afford it, it is a consumer choice and as such can be considered irrational.
Iron, on the other hand is valuable, it can be used to make weapons, tools, machinery, automobiles, ships, buildings, bridges and sundry other objects. Iron is valuable gold is dross and people who want a gold standard have their heads up their asses.
The people of this valley also swear an oath, which is, of course, as useful as the oaths people swear before testifying in court or taking a public office, in both cases the ability of hose oaths to prevent lies and fraud has had the effect so many people have noted with disgust for many years.
Additional problems multiply beyond these. The valley is hidden by projectors which cause mirror images of surrounding mountains to appear to cover the valley which no one notices is missing, because it is unmapped. There is a branch of the United States federal government called the U.S. Geologic Survey, USGS, Notice the word survey in its title. They mapped the entirety of the american west, having to haul theodolite sections with thirty six inch graduated plates, the object and casing of which weighing in the hundreds of pounds, up mountain slopes where they took night time measurements allowing less thermal refraction and greater accuracy. In the nineteen fifties when Ayn Rand was dragging forth this misformed creation, there were no unmapped valleys anywhere in the continental U.S. In addition, I would note that photogrammetry, aerial photo surveying, had been developed. Usually the photos are taken with the camera facing straight down and the photos overlapped, the differing angles allowing a three dimensional analysis of the photographs, but by the nineteen fifties high oblique photogrammetry, where the horizon is visible in the photographs, was used to map northern Canada. It is less accurate, but allows for far more area to be mapped quickly, the Canadian government was not too concerned with property claims, they just wanted to know what was up there. There is no way anyone could have hid a valley.
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Ellis Wyatt is extracting oil form the ground, of course there is oil. They had to use mules and men to move the equipment to drill the well in its remote area. If they are such brilliant engineers they could have placed posts in the ground and then , over short segments, used motors to skid the equipment up and down the slopes by using the posts as anchor points for drag cables attached to the motors, perhaps this is a quibble.
A bigger factor is the weight of pieces to be moved. To drill, one needs a motive source, the engine block for an internal combustion engine of enough power would weigh hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. It could not be strapped onto the back of a mule. Perhaps a steam boiler could be assembled by welding together pieces, but the steel shapes, drill pipe and driving gear would also weigh in the hundreds of pounds, at least. There is similar idiocy told about the father of Osama bin Laden, that to build a road in Saudi Arabia he cleverly broke his construction equipment into pieces and shipped them by camel across the desert. At least one book purporting to be a serious history tell this story with any embarrassment. The engine block for a bulldozer can easily weigh several thousand pounds, as can the frame. Cutting the frame up and then welding it back together really would not work, the story is nonsense.
More astoundingly, John Galt has his static electricity to provide all the electric power neeed in the alley as well as run the projectors. Why are they using gasoline? John Galt originally designed his fabulous static electric motor for cars, so why are not the cars all powered by them? Do not suggest man-hours of labor as an issue, they are able to build projectors, static electric generators, haul an oil derrick and other sundry efforts, so this does not seem to be an issue of import.
More fundamentally, they are supposed to be absolute believers in the free market, but Ellis Wyatt says that when he can increase production he will lower prices. The concept of yield pricing says that one should sell a product at the maximum net profit for the seller. So why would he lower prices? He has a monopoly and if he increases production, which would entail some additional costs, he would drive his own prices down. The goal is to pick the point of highest yield. So, if he produces one thousand gallons of gasoline and sells it for one dollar each, he has an income of one thousand dollars gross, if his production costs are eight hundred dollars, he then nets two hundred dollars profit. If he increases production to fifteen hundred gallons and it hen sells for seventy cents a gallon he grosses one thousand fifty dollars, but his production costs are higher, say, nine hundred dollars and his net has fallen to one hundred fifty dollars. There idiot oath is swearing on their life that they will not live their lives for others benefit nor ask the same for themselves. So why would he plan to either raise production or lower prices? Could this be a case of; from each by his ability, to each by his need? No, that was the whole point of John Galt leaving society and beginning his fearless campaign to do something or other. Ellis Wyatt should probably actually reduce production to jack up prices and take the windfall, these great, independent geniuses surely do not seem to be very bright, they certainly do not understand economics.
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The valley is the personal property of Midas Mulligan, the man who never makes a bad investment,they all apparently rent property from him. How did he buy an unmapped valley? To buy property one needs to specify its boundaries, another minor point I suppose.
So why do not ehy just get rid of Midas Mulligan? Because Ayn Rand, in her avatar of John Galt, says tha no one has the right to initiate the use of force against another person. To which might be replied, why not? If a person's advantage over another is physical force, why not employ it? Remember we are being objective here. The normal argument goes back to the fact that the brain engages in mirror imaging, comparing others to oneself. That builds a set of mutual obligations between people to avoid harm that each would not want. Ayn Rand says that societal values and constraints do not matter, each person should only consider their own wants and needs. She says this destroys the individual nad his freedom, which is true, but if she is also arguing that society does not matter, why should that concern anyone?
This brings up the most obnoxious aspect of Ayn Rand, she loudly proclaims her atheism but she had the worst form of religiosity. Lots of people are atheists, lots are agnostic and their is another group who are just disinterested and being an atheist or an agnostic would require wasted effort. But she had deep religious beliefs even though she could not admit it.
She was a determinist, people's outcomes were determined entirely by their moral virtues or failings. In the nineteen seventies, in midtown Manhattan, there was a building called the Pan Am building. Its roof had been built reinforced to allow helicopters to land on it. For years this was not used, but then it was decided to try flying helicopters between the roof and JFK airport. Within the first week, a helicopter, in landing, had its landing gear strut fail from metal fatigue, it fell over on its side, its rotors shattering on the concrete deck of the roof. No one on the helicopter was seriously injured, but there were deaths on the roof and of a pedestrian two blocks away who was killed while walking down the street by a falling piece of rotor blade. Apparently, Ayn Rand would have found him morally lacking. Ayn Rand says that each person can rise to the person's level of excellence. Actually, it takes a starting point to have a starting point. There must be something that allows any person to be able to start and organize in order to succeed. At the same time, stuff can happen to interfere with any person's rise. At the end of the Soviet Union, a large number of soviet trained mathematicians came to the U.S., the number of papers published in mathematical journals by U.S, born mathematicians dropped sharply. The soviet trained mathematicians may very well have been better and they may have written better papers, but the effect was that american born mathematicians appeared to stop work. Not only the soviet trained mathematicians but their students as well had more papers published, better work pushed out good work, or to put it otherwise, stuff happens.
She was incapable of understanding statistics,she succeeded, so she assumed it was entirely through her own brilliance, lottery winners also feel the same way.
This is also a good illustration of how her fundamental point, that a relatively small number of people are essential to the running of a country and if they leave the country will fall apart is ludicrous. There is an enormous amount of talent, some is much better than others but it is not zero with a few high points, if the first rank ofAnthem, published in Britainn in nineteen thirty-eight. people is not there , there is still a very good second rank. But , again, this is the obnoxious range of religious thinking, That there is an elite which must be honored and all others must show them homage.
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She was also a believer in salvation through revelation. Most christian religions have tales of peagns falling to the ground wailing in remorse when they are told the revelation of redemption. they then eagerly submitted to baptism. In actual fact, many of them were threatened with being burned alive if they did no convert. Ayn Rand believed in a similar concept, that the truth of her philosophy would cause the scales to fall from men's eyes. Adolf Hitler believed the same thing. The original formation of nazi concentration camps were as reeducation camps. The stated belief of the nazis was that if a a person had German, Aryan, genetics, then the only reason he would disagree with the nazis would be if he did not understand their truth. They actually had a law, which was enforced, that when a person was released form a concentration camp, after having been reeducated, that person could not suffer descrimination in employment. So, too, Ayn Rand believed in reformation, which involves mysticism, although she denounces mysticism.
Hitler;s Mein Kampf actually is fairly similar to Atlas Shrugged, it is also an overbloated book filled with midless drivel parading as philosophy. The writing stylke and quality are similar, too. The interest of Hitler is that one can actually see the workings of a depraved half-wit who became a dictator, it holds a certain fascination. Hitler said that when reading a book one should ignore everything with which one disagrees, the proud statement of aman who reduced his country to an ash heap. It turns out that the only edition of Hitler that Iread was translated and abridged, which was merciful, I would also recommend abridged Ayn Rand if it ever becomes available.
What is hilarious in HItler, is the story of the art institute. Hitler says that he applied to study fine arts and presented his exemplars of his art work, but the individual who reviewed them said his true talent was architecture, with which Hitler heartily agreed, but for reasons I do not understand, the fine artts study was free but the architecture school required tuition that he could not afford. There are biographies of Hitler which provide the same story. It does not make any sense. Hitler's art work was of buildings, he did a good job of perspective, line control and color. But they were literally lifeless, there are no people in them. There is a pen and ink sketch he did during World War I of a destroyed farm house with a bicycle in front providing a focal point. It is a perfectly good still-life, but perfectly good still-lifes are a dime a dozen. There is no way from the paintings he did that anyone would surmise architectural talent, they are just illustrations of buildings, there is no indication that he could develop plans or improvements to them. But consider what an insult of one artist to another is, he is just a draftsman. Now, Austrians, and particularly Viennese, are famous for tact and politeness. The interviewer, seeing the dull, lifeless, renderings, would probably have been too polite to say, "Why don't you try architecture?" It is more likely that he said, "I see your talent is architecture." In either case, he meant, "please leave my office and do not come back and waste more of my time." In Hitler insanity, he was being told of his great architectural talent. "he recommended that I apply to the school of architecture." "You really should show these to the architecture department."
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There is also Raganar Danniskold, the great pirate who attacks charity ships because they are an unjust transfer of wealth to undeserving people. He gives Hank Reardon a bar of gold as partial repayment for everything the government had stolen form him. Where are they getting all this gold? No matter, I guess. Ragnar tells Hank that he is not ding this for Hank, he needs Hank's freedom for his own freedom. That , in short form, is the theory of social democracy, each person's freedom is dependent on other people having freedom. Ayn Rand says that social democracy is the road to slavery, she really did need to get her story straight. The point of social democracy is that if one wants to go skiing , there need to be a ski slope. Unless one has the money to build it oneself, there is a need to have enough people with enough money who want to go skiing for the ski slopes to be available. The same is true for going to the movies, enough people need to go to the movie theater for it to open and enough movie theaters must rent films for films to be funded, so, just like Ragnar and Hank people need each other.
There is also the question of where he built his pirate ship and why aircraft cannot find it, but maybe they made it invisible , too. One might also question the acquisition of ammunition. At the end of the book he says he will turn his pirate ship. a military vessel into a smallish ocean liner. That will not work, either. The compartments and sub-divisions of a warship would not work as an ocean liner.
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Ayn Rand was also an absolutist, things must be either white or black. She denounces any modern attempts to suggest that actions must be understood in context. That thinking developed as a movement way from rigid religious thinking, she does not like it because she has rigid religious thinking.
She also denounces charity and yet she accepted charity. She was hired as a writer by a Hollywood studio in the nineteen twenties, I have read two of her books, Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, she cannot write. Anyone who takes money for a job one cannot do is accepting charity. Politicians come immediately to mind. If I accepted a position as a theoretical physicist, that would be charity, because I cannot do that. Similarly, if I was placed on the payroll of a hospital as a neurosurgeon, that would be charity, too, because I cannot do that either. Ayn Rand was a classic example of a poorly socialized schizophrenic, her brain could not compare her actions or reconsider them and so she had no realization she could not do the job for which she was paid.
In the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, she said that she found it oppressive to work in Hollywood because they insisted that she write realistic characters when she wanted to write symbolic characters who represented ideals. They were probably as badly written as the characters in her books. Beyond that, consider a bricklayer who says that his employers wanting him to lay the bricks in a straight line is and affront to his ideals.
The story of how she got hired at a movie studio is that she moved to Hollywood hoping to work in pictures and met an executive of the studio while hanging around its front gate. What kind of person hangs around the front gate of a movie studio? Someone who is poorly socialized. So, the story is that Ayn Rand a Russian immigrant who is poorly socialized, meets an executive of a movie studio who is also probably an immigrant, since most were, and was probably also poorly socialized because that is the kind of people who accumulated around movies and who get promoted to executives. One poorly socialized hires another, there is no way her alleged writing talent could have been evident. She was hired as a writer and extra so maybe she slept with the guy.
She claimed that she lived the philosophy she pontificated, yet she wails helplessly that her writing was being rejected. If she rally believed in her nonsense, why did she not start her own movie studio? She also laments that The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers for, she insists, its revelatory philosophy. She appears to claim that not one publisher rejected it for being another thousand page droning bore. Her story is not believable. And, again, why did she not start her own publishing house? She wanted someone else to pay to take the risk while she would get a profit if it sold, this is the very behavior she denounces throughout her door stopper. Moochers who did not have the moral courage to take a chance. She was one of them.
What is called projection in psychiatry is the poorly socialized brain panicking when its internal model does not match the facts of the world around itself, the brain cannot contemplate that it is in error so it has to blame the nearest other person. The brain sends a partial description with the warning and panic, such as, it looks like hypocrisy, so the brain adopts that as the reason for the fault, someone is being a hypocrite form the facts so it must be everyone else, since I am the only truly honest person.
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Another bad religious trait she had was a belief in mysticism. Once again, she denounced it, yet her whole book revolves around it. People have auras and powers and can summon electricity at will, it is all mystic garbage. She claimed that she was representing ideal people, but the only trait they had in common was her belief that if such a warped world existed she would be the center of it.
She did not care much for democracy, but that is a trait shared by all authoritarian people. She did not seem to think that democracy could self correct, but then again she thought everyone would act like herself. She could not seem to decide whether she should have complete contempt for all people, or whether they could redeem themselves by agreeing with her insanity. She has the bad, old Russian, trait, of believing that there are better people and peasants. she grew up in Russia and it was because of people like her and probably her family, that the glorious revolution of nineteen seventeen occurred. She was only twelve at eh time but she has the right mentality to provoke a violent revolt. She had a lot in common with Alexandra, the last czarina.
Alexandra was the German borne granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she never learned proper Russian and the Russian people knew it. During World War I, she was called,"the German". Considering that is who they were fighting a war against, it was not a compliment. She once wrote a letter to her husband, in French, the czar, in which she said, "the Russian people are simple, they need to be told what to do, I know, I am their matushka (mother figure)." I would never be in favor of standing people up against a wall and shooting them, but she deserved it, she really did have it coming.
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Ayn Rand was also a believer in anointed persons who are essential. They fearlessly fly across the country in small planes to free John Galt, who smiles while being tortured, again, they are not doing that for john they are doing it because it helps themselves. Their planes are not detected by radar so they probably made them invisible, too.
When they confront his guards the guards all crumble because they cannot fearlessly think of twaddle like the valley people. This is the classic nonsense that our enemies are really afraid of us and will not fight. That idea usually ends with a mound of our own dead.
At no point does anyone betray them, even though the vast majority of people are too deluded to realize the4 brilliance of their ideas. And Ragnar wanders over the country after walking away form his pirate ship without interference. They have a perfect network of informants who they never fail to correctly recruit without betrayal, more mysticism. That is a statistical impossibility, but Midas never makes a bad investment, also statistically impossible.
She was right that crony capitalism is bad and that it is dangerous when a government becomes over involved in business decisions and she has to be given some credit for marketing a product that people buy,but it is a bad product. She was also an expropriator, her own highest crime, she took work from others, specifically her first bad book, Anthem, published in Britain in nineteen thirty eight, far too much of that book is obviously taken from The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, who was British. In Forster, a future civilization lives in underground rooms serviced by machines, where they have no individuality and are ruled by a committee which does not allow them true personal expression and where they increasingly remove themselves form experience which is a state they come to prefer. They are terrified of the world outside their tunnels.
They have tablet computers, wireless internet, and tele-conferencing, but only the outline people's faces can be seen, their emotions are not discernible. They had insufficient bandwidth, they must have been using copper wires. The story was written in nineteen nine, but they still needed to upgrade to fiber-optic, that is probably why the machine stopped. Forster also had a bit of the Edwardian sniff, he did not like the idea of people being reduced to protoplasm, he really would not have liked DNA research.
(The full text of The Machine Stops is available at plexus.org/forster/ with some typographical errors.)
In Rand, a future civilization has removed the word, "I", and has eliminated all scientific progress, they are terrified of leaving their cities and have a deep fear of the woods and mountains. Their committee also destroys individual expression. Both have controlled breeding of people. According to Ayn Rand, E.M. Forster would have had the right to hunt her down for her malignant theft, but she was a complete liar.
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She also said, through John, that happiness is living one's ideal, actually I think happiness is the absence of boredom and it would be nice if the secret police don not kick in your door in the middle of the night.
John actually says that people engaging in mindless pleasures are not truly happy, notice, once more, the sneering religious tone, " They think they're happy, but they're not as happy as me reading my bible, they're all really jealous that they can't read a bible like me."
She also judges people by appearance, all of the great independents are brilliant and good-looking, but Midas Mulligan , the money man was short and fat. She, of course, was actually unattractive, probable proof of her own incompetence. Actually , if you look at pictures of Noble laureates in physics, they are a pretty ordinary group, a few were somewhat athletic, some were unathletic, none of them would be remembered if they were passed on a street. The association of looks with ability arises from the inability of the brain to smoothly track information, poorly socialized schizophrenia.
It could also be noted that giving oaths is mysticism, which she said was bad.
In her book people all crave cigarettes, she was a heavy smoker and obviously could not imagine anyone would not be.
Her sex scenes are really fairly creepy, pseudo rape fantasies. Like Hitler, she is probably unintentionally self-revealing.
She says axioms are fundamental rules that must be addressed to be questioned. Actually, axioms come from mathematics, she has never gotten past Euclidean reasoning, Euclid believed axioms were fixed truths. For instance, Euclid said that given a plane and a line through any point not on the line, there would be exactly one line parallel, non-intersection, with the given line. An axiom is any group of a set of ideas that does not self contradict or which does not contradict other axioms in the set. In the example; there could be zero parallel lines, all lines intersect, the; the Euclidean assumption of one; or, an infinity, there can not be a fixed number greater than one because if there were two, there would be a dihedral angle between the two in which could be drawn more lines, in fact an infinity. It may not seem to reflect the real world, but that does not matter, there are no contradictions and so they are all acceptable as axioms.
She said she wanted government to consist only of the police, the army and courts that agreed with her. But if the soldiers are doing all the work, it would only make sense for them to take all the4 power, which is the way governments she describes tend to end.
Francisco d'Anconia controlled the world's copper, but he inherited mines from his family and so was acknowledging the collective wealth of is family, not individual achievement. He also arranges to have all his mines blown up destroying the world access to copper. There is a type of mining known as open pit., it involves removing the soil and rock and then extracting the ore through excavation. There is a very large copper mine in Arizona, among other locations, which is open pit. It is physically impossible to blow up a hole in the ground. A wall could be collapsed but then heavy equipment could fairly directly build a new access road.
The terribly corrupt government can only produce a sonic death and destruction machine in her book, as opposed to the deep thinking of big thoughts which she produced. this death machine had a handle which when pulled destroyed the machine and everyone in its control building, thqat wa useful to include in its plans, I guess. It can also be noted that The Machine Stops ends in the collapse of the machine civilization and the hope of its replacement by the few people made homeless and their descendants who live in the limbo world of above ground. Here, the corrupt civilization self collapses, also, and there is hope of rejuvenation by the hardy valley dwellers,clearly expropriation.
Ayn Rand was spending time with one of her male acolytes who was married, after some years, when he left her she had a nervous breakdown; she will not live for anyone lese or ask anyone to live for her, she has always lived her ideals, yeah, whatever.
I would also point out that any inheritance is collective wealth, which she abhorred. She denounces any theft of property but says the U.S. was formed with great virtues. In fact, all of the land in the U.S. was stolen, it is why settlers wer always accompanied by armed soldiers. There is now an Ayn Rand Institute to promote her supposed philosophy, did they take the collective wealth of the inheritance of her books?
For a more specific criticism, there is Chapter 9, Sacred and Profane. Among the shattered debris of incoherent thoughts that amalgamate this chapter, Dagney Taggart, who is alleged to be both competent and an engineer, discovers an electric motor but cannot determine its power source. I can help her, I know somethings about engineering. If it is an electric motor its power source would be electricity. She is astounded to be unable to determine what fuel it uses; diesel? coal? If it were powered by fuel, then it would not be an electric motor. What that would be is an auxiliary power source producing motive power for a generator or alternator, depending on whether it is DC or AC, although frequently the word generator is used for both; the generator then powering the electric motor, as in a diesel-electric railroad locomotive. Upon brilliant reflection, she determines that the power source is static electricity.
I will now attempt to explain the concept of energy density. Insects have a carbon based body, that carbon could be used as a source of fuel. Driving down the road. all vehicles have bugs splatter on their windshields and front ends. Because of that, since they represent instant energy content, there is no need to purchase fuel, the bugs can be used for energy instead. There is, of course, a problem with this plan, which would be energy density. If a car gets thirty miles per gallon and is driving at sixty miles per hour, it would use two gallons, or about twelve pounds, of fuel per hour. Assuming that the bugs' bodies solid portion has the same energy per weight as gasoline, gasoline has carbon and hydrogen, bugs bodies have carbon and a bunch of other stuff, some of which burns, others that do not, and that bugs are eighty percent water, they are pretty juicy, sixty pounds of bugs per hour would have to be intercepted per hour by the car. It would also require the bugs would achieve efficient combustion. That would be a lot of bugs. Similarly with static electricity, there would have to be a high enough density of it, which there is not, for that idiocy to work. In a later, chapter, another charachter says the inventor, who turns out to be John Galt, has a whole new concept of energy. No, Albert Einstein had a different concept of energy, this is hooey.
In a later chapter, as the world is falling apart because great men are deserting society, Dagney has the brilliant idea to place men with lanterns in railroad tunnels under Manhattan to serve as signal lights when a piece of copper wire breaks and there is none to replace it, leaving the signal lights blank. This is stupid, the reason siganl lights exist is because railroad engine drivers do not know what is ahead, oncoming trains, switches set against the train's movement; for years railroads have resisted having radios in engine cabs believing that they will be stolen or vandalized in poorly secured railroad yards, which leaves open the question of why they do not use mobile radios, which could even have a moving map display to make the engine driver's work easier. Her plan was to set the switches and then run each train through individually, there would be no need for signal lights, since each train would know that the route is set for it, all it would have to do is proceed continuously at a safe speed. It might be a good idea to have a worker with an emergency lantern in case a switch does not move properly, so the engine driver can be warned to stop, but continuous signal lanterns would be unnecessary.
In another chapter, Hank Reardon, the inventor of Reardon Metal, invents a new type of truss. I assume that Ayn Rand had only vaguest idea of what a truss is, there really are only so many ways the pieces can be arranged.
What any competent writer knows, and Ayn Rand did not, is that writers should never actually try to pretend to introduce anything that they do not understand; if one is writing about a charachter who is claimed to be a great physicist, do not pretend to write equations he might write, similarly, if one is describing a great poet, do not try to actually write a poem. If a writer knows nothing about engineering, it is wide not to try to pretend to make engineering decisions or analysis. Or, as the old saying goes, if one does not say anything, no one will know how stupid one actually is.
The reader eventually arrives in the valley, somewhere in the state of Colorado, where all the capable people needed to run society had secretly withdrawn. Supposedly, all of these people are highly rational, Ayn Rand also claimed she was equally rational, alas, neither is true.
The people of the valley use only gold as currency, because they will only use for money objects with objective value, Ayn Rand insisted relabeling her social pathology as a philosophy she insisted on calling objectivism. The obvious problem is that gold has no objective value, in fact it is pretty worthless.
The reason gold has value is because it is bright and shiny and rare and people, like certain hoarding animals, like bright shiny objects. The fact that it does not tarnish is nice, but it is heavy and too soft to use for any useful purpose, nor does it form useful alloys. It really only has had any useful purpose for about fifty years, it is very good for the best electrical connections and it has been used to coat astronaut visors because it can be deposited thin enough to see through but still would absorb large parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum. The other semi-useful purpose of gold is electroplating other metals to form a corrosion proof coating, that is less than a hundred fifty years old, acids and electricity being needed for the process. Today, vapor deposition of aluminum can be used to form a corrosion resistant coating at lower cost. Even for usual electrical wiring copper is typically a better material, copper has higher resistance but most wires require some degree of self-support and copper is both lighter and stronger. Over all, gold objectively would be priced somewhat higher than copper but no more. In addition, with the augmentation of tin, copper forms bronze alloys which can be useful. The reason why gold prices have been rising for the last fifteen years or so has nothing to do with fierce individualists wanting a hedge against the collapse of decadent governments, it is because people in India really like gold jewelry, as the Indian middle class has expanded, the demand for that jewelry has exploded since people can now afford it, it is a consumer choice and as such can be considered irrational.
Iron, on the other hand is valuable, it can be used to make weapons, tools, machinery, automobiles, ships, buildings, bridges and sundry other objects. Iron is valuable gold is dross and people who want a gold standard have their heads up their asses.
The people of this valley also swear an oath, which is, of course, as useful as the oaths people swear before testifying in court or taking a public office, in both cases the ability of hose oaths to prevent lies and fraud has had the effect so many people have noted with disgust for many years.
Additional problems multiply beyond these. The valley is hidden by projectors which cause mirror images of surrounding mountains to appear to cover the valley which no one notices is missing, because it is unmapped. There is a branch of the United States federal government called the U.S. Geologic Survey, USGS, Notice the word survey in its title. They mapped the entirety of the american west, having to haul theodolite sections with thirty six inch graduated plates, the object and casing of which weighing in the hundreds of pounds, up mountain slopes where they took night time measurements allowing less thermal refraction and greater accuracy. In the nineteen fifties when Ayn Rand was dragging forth this misformed creation, there were no unmapped valleys anywhere in the continental U.S. In addition, I would note that photogrammetry, aerial photo surveying, had been developed. Usually the photos are taken with the camera facing straight down and the photos overlapped, the differing angles allowing a three dimensional analysis of the photographs, but by the nineteen fifties high oblique photogrammetry, where the horizon is visible in the photographs, was used to map northern Canada. It is less accurate, but allows for far more area to be mapped quickly, the Canadian government was not too concerned with property claims, they just wanted to know what was up there. There is no way anyone could have hid a valley.
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Ellis Wyatt is extracting oil form the ground, of course there is oil. They had to use mules and men to move the equipment to drill the well in its remote area. If they are such brilliant engineers they could have placed posts in the ground and then , over short segments, used motors to skid the equipment up and down the slopes by using the posts as anchor points for drag cables attached to the motors, perhaps this is a quibble.
A bigger factor is the weight of pieces to be moved. To drill, one needs a motive source, the engine block for an internal combustion engine of enough power would weigh hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. It could not be strapped onto the back of a mule. Perhaps a steam boiler could be assembled by welding together pieces, but the steel shapes, drill pipe and driving gear would also weigh in the hundreds of pounds, at least. There is similar idiocy told about the father of Osama bin Laden, that to build a road in Saudi Arabia he cleverly broke his construction equipment into pieces and shipped them by camel across the desert. At least one book purporting to be a serious history tell this story with any embarrassment. The engine block for a bulldozer can easily weigh several thousand pounds, as can the frame. Cutting the frame up and then welding it back together really would not work, the story is nonsense.
More astoundingly, John Galt has his static electricity to provide all the electric power neeed in the alley as well as run the projectors. Why are they using gasoline? John Galt originally designed his fabulous static electric motor for cars, so why are not the cars all powered by them? Do not suggest man-hours of labor as an issue, they are able to build projectors, static electric generators, haul an oil derrick and other sundry efforts, so this does not seem to be an issue of import.
More fundamentally, they are supposed to be absolute believers in the free market, but Ellis Wyatt says that when he can increase production he will lower prices. The concept of yield pricing says that one should sell a product at the maximum net profit for the seller. So why would he lower prices? He has a monopoly and if he increases production, which would entail some additional costs, he would drive his own prices down. The goal is to pick the point of highest yield. So, if he produces one thousand gallons of gasoline and sells it for one dollar each, he has an income of one thousand dollars gross, if his production costs are eight hundred dollars, he then nets two hundred dollars profit. If he increases production to fifteen hundred gallons and it hen sells for seventy cents a gallon he grosses one thousand fifty dollars, but his production costs are higher, say, nine hundred dollars and his net has fallen to one hundred fifty dollars. There idiot oath is swearing on their life that they will not live their lives for others benefit nor ask the same for themselves. So why would he plan to either raise production or lower prices? Could this be a case of; from each by his ability, to each by his need? No, that was the whole point of John Galt leaving society and beginning his fearless campaign to do something or other. Ellis Wyatt should probably actually reduce production to jack up prices and take the windfall, these great, independent geniuses surely do not seem to be very bright, they certainly do not understand economics.
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The valley is the personal property of Midas Mulligan, the man who never makes a bad investment,they all apparently rent property from him. How did he buy an unmapped valley? To buy property one needs to specify its boundaries, another minor point I suppose.
So why do not ehy just get rid of Midas Mulligan? Because Ayn Rand, in her avatar of John Galt, says tha no one has the right to initiate the use of force against another person. To which might be replied, why not? If a person's advantage over another is physical force, why not employ it? Remember we are being objective here. The normal argument goes back to the fact that the brain engages in mirror imaging, comparing others to oneself. That builds a set of mutual obligations between people to avoid harm that each would not want. Ayn Rand says that societal values and constraints do not matter, each person should only consider their own wants and needs. She says this destroys the individual nad his freedom, which is true, but if she is also arguing that society does not matter, why should that concern anyone?
This brings up the most obnoxious aspect of Ayn Rand, she loudly proclaims her atheism but she had the worst form of religiosity. Lots of people are atheists, lots are agnostic and their is another group who are just disinterested and being an atheist or an agnostic would require wasted effort. But she had deep religious beliefs even though she could not admit it.
She was a determinist, people's outcomes were determined entirely by their moral virtues or failings. In the nineteen seventies, in midtown Manhattan, there was a building called the Pan Am building. Its roof had been built reinforced to allow helicopters to land on it. For years this was not used, but then it was decided to try flying helicopters between the roof and JFK airport. Within the first week, a helicopter, in landing, had its landing gear strut fail from metal fatigue, it fell over on its side, its rotors shattering on the concrete deck of the roof. No one on the helicopter was seriously injured, but there were deaths on the roof and of a pedestrian two blocks away who was killed while walking down the street by a falling piece of rotor blade. Apparently, Ayn Rand would have found him morally lacking. Ayn Rand says that each person can rise to the person's level of excellence. Actually, it takes a starting point to have a starting point. There must be something that allows any person to be able to start and organize in order to succeed. At the same time, stuff can happen to interfere with any person's rise. At the end of the Soviet Union, a large number of soviet trained mathematicians came to the U.S., the number of papers published in mathematical journals by U.S, born mathematicians dropped sharply. The soviet trained mathematicians may very well have been better and they may have written better papers, but the effect was that american born mathematicians appeared to stop work. Not only the soviet trained mathematicians but their students as well had more papers published, better work pushed out good work, or to put it otherwise, stuff happens.
She was incapable of understanding statistics,she succeeded, so she assumed it was entirely through her own brilliance, lottery winners also feel the same way.
This is also a good illustration of how her fundamental point, that a relatively small number of people are essential to the running of a country and if they leave the country will fall apart is ludicrous. There is an enormous amount of talent, some is much better than others but it is not zero with a few high points, if the first rank ofAnthem, published in Britainn in nineteen thirty-eight. people is not there , there is still a very good second rank. But , again, this is the obnoxious range of religious thinking, That there is an elite which must be honored and all others must show them homage.
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She was also a believer in salvation through revelation. Most christian religions have tales of peagns falling to the ground wailing in remorse when they are told the revelation of redemption. they then eagerly submitted to baptism. In actual fact, many of them were threatened with being burned alive if they did no convert. Ayn Rand believed in a similar concept, that the truth of her philosophy would cause the scales to fall from men's eyes. Adolf Hitler believed the same thing. The original formation of nazi concentration camps were as reeducation camps. The stated belief of the nazis was that if a a person had German, Aryan, genetics, then the only reason he would disagree with the nazis would be if he did not understand their truth. They actually had a law, which was enforced, that when a person was released form a concentration camp, after having been reeducated, that person could not suffer descrimination in employment. So, too, Ayn Rand believed in reformation, which involves mysticism, although she denounces mysticism.
Hitler;s Mein Kampf actually is fairly similar to Atlas Shrugged, it is also an overbloated book filled with midless drivel parading as philosophy. The writing stylke and quality are similar, too. The interest of Hitler is that one can actually see the workings of a depraved half-wit who became a dictator, it holds a certain fascination. Hitler said that when reading a book one should ignore everything with which one disagrees, the proud statement of aman who reduced his country to an ash heap. It turns out that the only edition of Hitler that Iread was translated and abridged, which was merciful, I would also recommend abridged Ayn Rand if it ever becomes available.
What is hilarious in HItler, is the story of the art institute. Hitler says that he applied to study fine arts and presented his exemplars of his art work, but the individual who reviewed them said his true talent was architecture, with which Hitler heartily agreed, but for reasons I do not understand, the fine artts study was free but the architecture school required tuition that he could not afford. There are biographies of Hitler which provide the same story. It does not make any sense. Hitler's art work was of buildings, he did a good job of perspective, line control and color. But they were literally lifeless, there are no people in them. There is a pen and ink sketch he did during World War I of a destroyed farm house with a bicycle in front providing a focal point. It is a perfectly good still-life, but perfectly good still-lifes are a dime a dozen. There is no way from the paintings he did that anyone would surmise architectural talent, they are just illustrations of buildings, there is no indication that he could develop plans or improvements to them. But consider what an insult of one artist to another is, he is just a draftsman. Now, Austrians, and particularly Viennese, are famous for tact and politeness. The interviewer, seeing the dull, lifeless, renderings, would probably have been too polite to say, "Why don't you try architecture?" It is more likely that he said, "I see your talent is architecture." In either case, he meant, "please leave my office and do not come back and waste more of my time." In Hitler insanity, he was being told of his great architectural talent. "he recommended that I apply to the school of architecture." "You really should show these to the architecture department."
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There is also Raganar Danniskold, the great pirate who attacks charity ships because they are an unjust transfer of wealth to undeserving people. He gives Hank Reardon a bar of gold as partial repayment for everything the government had stolen form him. Where are they getting all this gold? No matter, I guess. Ragnar tells Hank that he is not ding this for Hank, he needs Hank's freedom for his own freedom. That , in short form, is the theory of social democracy, each person's freedom is dependent on other people having freedom. Ayn Rand says that social democracy is the road to slavery, she really did need to get her story straight. The point of social democracy is that if one wants to go skiing , there need to be a ski slope. Unless one has the money to build it oneself, there is a need to have enough people with enough money who want to go skiing for the ski slopes to be available. The same is true for going to the movies, enough people need to go to the movie theater for it to open and enough movie theaters must rent films for films to be funded, so, just like Ragnar and Hank people need each other.
There is also the question of where he built his pirate ship and why aircraft cannot find it, but maybe they made it invisible , too. One might also question the acquisition of ammunition. At the end of the book he says he will turn his pirate ship. a military vessel into a smallish ocean liner. That will not work, either. The compartments and sub-divisions of a warship would not work as an ocean liner.
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Ayn Rand was also an absolutist, things must be either white or black. She denounces any modern attempts to suggest that actions must be understood in context. That thinking developed as a movement way from rigid religious thinking, she does not like it because she has rigid religious thinking.
She also denounces charity and yet she accepted charity. She was hired as a writer by a Hollywood studio in the nineteen twenties, I have read two of her books, Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, she cannot write. Anyone who takes money for a job one cannot do is accepting charity. Politicians come immediately to mind. If I accepted a position as a theoretical physicist, that would be charity, because I cannot do that. Similarly, if I was placed on the payroll of a hospital as a neurosurgeon, that would be charity, too, because I cannot do that either. Ayn Rand was a classic example of a poorly socialized schizophrenic, her brain could not compare her actions or reconsider them and so she had no realization she could not do the job for which she was paid.
In the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, she said that she found it oppressive to work in Hollywood because they insisted that she write realistic characters when she wanted to write symbolic characters who represented ideals. They were probably as badly written as the characters in her books. Beyond that, consider a bricklayer who says that his employers wanting him to lay the bricks in a straight line is and affront to his ideals.
The story of how she got hired at a movie studio is that she moved to Hollywood hoping to work in pictures and met an executive of the studio while hanging around its front gate. What kind of person hangs around the front gate of a movie studio? Someone who is poorly socialized. So, the story is that Ayn Rand a Russian immigrant who is poorly socialized, meets an executive of a movie studio who is also probably an immigrant, since most were, and was probably also poorly socialized because that is the kind of people who accumulated around movies and who get promoted to executives. One poorly socialized hires another, there is no way her alleged writing talent could have been evident. She was hired as a writer and extra so maybe she slept with the guy.
She claimed that she lived the philosophy she pontificated, yet she wails helplessly that her writing was being rejected. If she rally believed in her nonsense, why did she not start her own movie studio? She also laments that The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers for, she insists, its revelatory philosophy. She appears to claim that not one publisher rejected it for being another thousand page droning bore. Her story is not believable. And, again, why did she not start her own publishing house? She wanted someone else to pay to take the risk while she would get a profit if it sold, this is the very behavior she denounces throughout her door stopper. Moochers who did not have the moral courage to take a chance. She was one of them.
What is called projection in psychiatry is the poorly socialized brain panicking when its internal model does not match the facts of the world around itself, the brain cannot contemplate that it is in error so it has to blame the nearest other person. The brain sends a partial description with the warning and panic, such as, it looks like hypocrisy, so the brain adopts that as the reason for the fault, someone is being a hypocrite form the facts so it must be everyone else, since I am the only truly honest person.
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Another bad religious trait she had was a belief in mysticism. Once again, she denounced it, yet her whole book revolves around it. People have auras and powers and can summon electricity at will, it is all mystic garbage. She claimed that she was representing ideal people, but the only trait they had in common was her belief that if such a warped world existed she would be the center of it.
She did not care much for democracy, but that is a trait shared by all authoritarian people. She did not seem to think that democracy could self correct, but then again she thought everyone would act like herself. She could not seem to decide whether she should have complete contempt for all people, or whether they could redeem themselves by agreeing with her insanity. She has the bad, old Russian, trait, of believing that there are better people and peasants. she grew up in Russia and it was because of people like her and probably her family, that the glorious revolution of nineteen seventeen occurred. She was only twelve at eh time but she has the right mentality to provoke a violent revolt. She had a lot in common with Alexandra, the last czarina.
Alexandra was the German borne granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she never learned proper Russian and the Russian people knew it. During World War I, she was called,"the German". Considering that is who they were fighting a war against, it was not a compliment. She once wrote a letter to her husband, in French, the czar, in which she said, "the Russian people are simple, they need to be told what to do, I know, I am their matushka (mother figure)." I would never be in favor of standing people up against a wall and shooting them, but she deserved it, she really did have it coming.
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Ayn Rand was also a believer in anointed persons who are essential. They fearlessly fly across the country in small planes to free John Galt, who smiles while being tortured, again, they are not doing that for john they are doing it because it helps themselves. Their planes are not detected by radar so they probably made them invisible, too.
When they confront his guards the guards all crumble because they cannot fearlessly think of twaddle like the valley people. This is the classic nonsense that our enemies are really afraid of us and will not fight. That idea usually ends with a mound of our own dead.
At no point does anyone betray them, even though the vast majority of people are too deluded to realize the4 brilliance of their ideas. And Ragnar wanders over the country after walking away form his pirate ship without interference. They have a perfect network of informants who they never fail to correctly recruit without betrayal, more mysticism. That is a statistical impossibility, but Midas never makes a bad investment, also statistically impossible.
She was right that crony capitalism is bad and that it is dangerous when a government becomes over involved in business decisions and she has to be given some credit for marketing a product that people buy,but it is a bad product. She was also an expropriator, her own highest crime, she took work from others, specifically her first bad book, Anthem, published in Britain in nineteen thirty eight, far too much of that book is obviously taken from The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, who was British. In Forster, a future civilization lives in underground rooms serviced by machines, where they have no individuality and are ruled by a committee which does not allow them true personal expression and where they increasingly remove themselves form experience which is a state they come to prefer. They are terrified of the world outside their tunnels.
They have tablet computers, wireless internet, and tele-conferencing, but only the outline people's faces can be seen, their emotions are not discernible. They had insufficient bandwidth, they must have been using copper wires. The story was written in nineteen nine, but they still needed to upgrade to fiber-optic, that is probably why the machine stopped. Forster also had a bit of the Edwardian sniff, he did not like the idea of people being reduced to protoplasm, he really would not have liked DNA research.
(The full text of The Machine Stops is available at plexus.org/forster/ with some typographical errors.)
In Rand, a future civilization has removed the word, "I", and has eliminated all scientific progress, they are terrified of leaving their cities and have a deep fear of the woods and mountains. Their committee also destroys individual expression. Both have controlled breeding of people. According to Ayn Rand, E.M. Forster would have had the right to hunt her down for her malignant theft, but she was a complete liar.
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She also said, through John, that happiness is living one's ideal, actually I think happiness is the absence of boredom and it would be nice if the secret police don not kick in your door in the middle of the night.
John actually says that people engaging in mindless pleasures are not truly happy, notice, once more, the sneering religious tone, " They think they're happy, but they're not as happy as me reading my bible, they're all really jealous that they can't read a bible like me."
She also judges people by appearance, all of the great independents are brilliant and good-looking, but Midas Mulligan , the money man was short and fat. She, of course, was actually unattractive, probable proof of her own incompetence. Actually , if you look at pictures of Noble laureates in physics, they are a pretty ordinary group, a few were somewhat athletic, some were unathletic, none of them would be remembered if they were passed on a street. The association of looks with ability arises from the inability of the brain to smoothly track information, poorly socialized schizophrenia.
It could also be noted that giving oaths is mysticism, which she said was bad.
In her book people all crave cigarettes, she was a heavy smoker and obviously could not imagine anyone would not be.
Her sex scenes are really fairly creepy, pseudo rape fantasies. Like Hitler, she is probably unintentionally self-revealing.
She says axioms are fundamental rules that must be addressed to be questioned. Actually, axioms come from mathematics, she has never gotten past Euclidean reasoning, Euclid believed axioms were fixed truths. For instance, Euclid said that given a plane and a line through any point not on the line, there would be exactly one line parallel, non-intersection, with the given line. An axiom is any group of a set of ideas that does not self contradict or which does not contradict other axioms in the set. In the example; there could be zero parallel lines, all lines intersect, the; the Euclidean assumption of one; or, an infinity, there can not be a fixed number greater than one because if there were two, there would be a dihedral angle between the two in which could be drawn more lines, in fact an infinity. It may not seem to reflect the real world, but that does not matter, there are no contradictions and so they are all acceptable as axioms.
She said she wanted government to consist only of the police, the army and courts that agreed with her. But if the soldiers are doing all the work, it would only make sense for them to take all the4 power, which is the way governments she describes tend to end.
Francisco d'Anconia controlled the world's copper, but he inherited mines from his family and so was acknowledging the collective wealth of is family, not individual achievement. He also arranges to have all his mines blown up destroying the world access to copper. There is a type of mining known as open pit., it involves removing the soil and rock and then extracting the ore through excavation. There is a very large copper mine in Arizona, among other locations, which is open pit. It is physically impossible to blow up a hole in the ground. A wall could be collapsed but then heavy equipment could fairly directly build a new access road.
The terribly corrupt government can only produce a sonic death and destruction machine in her book, as opposed to the deep thinking of big thoughts which she produced. this death machine had a handle which when pulled destroyed the machine and everyone in its control building, thqat wa useful to include in its plans, I guess. It can also be noted that The Machine Stops ends in the collapse of the machine civilization and the hope of its replacement by the few people made homeless and their descendants who live in the limbo world of above ground. Here, the corrupt civilization self collapses, also, and there is hope of rejuvenation by the hardy valley dwellers,clearly expropriation.
Ayn Rand was spending time with one of her male acolytes who was married, after some years, when he left her she had a nervous breakdown; she will not live for anyone lese or ask anyone to live for her, she has always lived her ideals, yeah, whatever.
I would also point out that any inheritance is collective wealth, which she abhorred. She denounces any theft of property but says the U.S. was formed with great virtues. In fact, all of the land in the U.S. was stolen, it is why settlers wer always accompanied by armed soldiers. There is now an Ayn Rand Institute to promote her supposed philosophy, did they take the collective wealth of the inheritance of her books?
Thursday, February 16, 2012
More Economics
An important question is what happens under various distributions of choice.
The graph shows a normalized series of curves of gross product per capita. The values increase to the right. The upper line represents the maximum number of high choice people in the economy. It represents a modified choice level. Under current distributions that would be a point of $75 000/year divided into the available wage pool. The vertical axis, ordinate, represents the percentage of people who have achieved this level representing maximum happiness. If people earn less than this they would be valued at less than 100%, in proportion to their choice, if people earn more they are discounted as blocking others form entering the high choice pool. A person earning $150 000/ yr would be at 50%, someone earning $750 000/yr at 10%. Then all persons modified choice level would be added and the sujm divided by the number of people.
What happens on the curves is that to begin at the4 bottom with an inefficient distribution the economy barely exists, either people do not have enough money to make purchases or there are not enough customers to encourage business openings. Consider an isolated community of 100 000 people. Let us say at first That the gross product per capita is $100 for a total economy of $10 000 000. We will now assume that at this economic level that $25 000/yr achieves maximum happiness. At ht level, only 400 people would have income if all the money went to high choice people. That customer base would generate some business openings but not too many. If the income was distributed at $2 000 per earner, there would be 5 000 customers which would encourage many more business openings , but the4y would all offer low-end products. If one person earned the full $10 000 000, there would be very few businesses since they would all have only one customer to service. All of these models presuppose that everyone else in the community would earn no money, a few success in a sea of poverty.
As one moves up the curve, businesses open as customers become available. For the very low end, such as per capita of $100/ yr, the curve has a bulge as the money accumulates into a few hands. When evenly distributed, the $100 does not encourage much business activity nad certainly would cause very little business diversity, generating little choice. As the money accumulates into a relatively few hands, business opportunities begin to increase. Above a certain point, the increase of money per capita is offset by the fewer customers available and the number of businesses and choice will decrease. At these low levels the economy is not very interesting. It is also not very realistic, if a few people had all the income, they would inevitably hire people to at least do menial tasks and the wage distribution would flatten, moving down towards the bulge.
As the gross product increases, a stage is reached where the curve would be vertical above the bulge before a final series of stages are reached in which the curve always bends forward, this is the more interesting part of the graphs.
As the gross product curves move to the right an activation level develops in the economy. In order to have a Thai restaurant, there needs to be enough customers to service, enough people need to have enough choice. As the customer base grows, more than one Thai restaurant opens, this increases choice through greater options, but at some point the increase in choice diminishes. There can be a big increase in choice going from one to two restaurants, there is virtually guaranteed to be an increase in choice from one to ten restaurants, but going from twenty to twenty-one, in general produces little increase in choice. That is the origin of the bench shaped features of the curves. At first, moving up along a curve produces a slow increase in choice until there accumulates a core base of customers, at which point the choice rises rapidly, until a point is reached where moving further up the curve produces little effective change in total choice.
Third world countries are notorious for having most people earn very low wages and a small elite who are very rich, this guarantees low economic growth. They are down at the inefficient curves at the left of the graph.
The above graph shows an additional feature of the curves, there are upper and lower truncation lines on the graph. If the distribution of modified choice level falls below a key value, the given gross product curve cannot be sustained. It will move to the left in reduced gross product. If the modified choice rises above a given point, the curve moves to the right to increasing gross product. I think the truncation lines bracket the bench feature. The argument is that something had to be happening with the extra available choice when the curve rises above the bench, it is not effectively increasing diversity and choice and, therefore, it must be increasing the flow of money in the businesses, increasing there efficiency and raising the gross product. A similar argument applies to the the lower end of the bench, reducing gross product.
The upper truncation line takes a peculiar dip before rising. That is an artifact of the value at the origin being zero and then being expanded into a vertical measure from zero to one hundred. The source graph might look something like the following. The max choice line varies with the wage that produces maximum happiness. It will increase with available income because there are more choices which demand more money.
There is also a question of stability in an economy, an under stabilized economy is chaotic, in an extreme case it represents civil insurrection. An over stabilized economy prevents and slows business adaptation. The following graph represents that.
The point of the graph is that if there is no economy it does not matter if there is chaos or overbearing government. As the gross product increases, the range of control narrows to maintain the gross product. If the control falls outside the allowable range, the gross product will move to the left and be reduced. The curve to the over control may not be symmetrical to the under control.
Japan, for instance, has an over controlled economy, businesses needing the permission of other businesses to open. Stability is a choice if people want it, but it does slow economic activity.
The following is from EmptyTomb, Inc, www.emptytomb.org.
Table 32,33, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2005 Cash Contributions for Charitable Giving by Income Brackets.
Income Percent contribution
Level after taxes.
5 000- 2.6
9 999
10 000- 2.5
14 999
15 000- 2.3
19 999
20 000- 2.2
29 999
30 000- 1.9
39 999
40 000- 1.7
49 999
50 000- 1.6
69 999
70 000- 1.5
79 999
80 000- 1.5
99 999
100 000- 1.5
119 999
120 000- 1.7
149 999
150 000- 1.8
Up
What is notable in these numbers is that there is continuous reduction in per cent giving up to
$120 000. If I am right and charitable giving is a function of the ability to change choice and, consequently, of the rate of change of choice, This means that people experience the greatest change in choice with the initiation of income. At $120 000, there is a significant number of people who have saturated on choice, who believe they have enough money that they can afford to be generous, but they do not have the same confidence of people at the lowest wages.
The numbers level at their minimum of 1.5 at around $75 000, which is in accord with that being the point at which choice flattens and becomes increasingly expensive.
The graph represents the toe of the Curve of Choice. Previously, I said there was a toe, as a, that would seem to be wrong, it seems to enter the origin as b
Its effect on minimum wage is that if the net transfer point, the average of people paying for the service of minimum wage, T, is above the minimum wage point L, there will be a net increase in choice. If the minimum wage point is above T, as U, it will lower choice. This represents a significant limit on the setting of the minimum wage. The other condition is stability. If wages are over concntrated by the minimum wage, the economy loses the ability to adapt.
What happens on the curves is that to begin at the4 bottom with an inefficient distribution the economy barely exists, either people do not have enough money to make purchases or there are not enough customers to encourage business openings. Consider an isolated community of 100 000 people. Let us say at first That the gross product per capita is $100 for a total economy of $10 000 000. We will now assume that at this economic level that $25 000/yr achieves maximum happiness. At ht level, only 400 people would have income if all the money went to high choice people. That customer base would generate some business openings but not too many. If the income was distributed at $2 000 per earner, there would be 5 000 customers which would encourage many more business openings , but the4y would all offer low-end products. If one person earned the full $10 000 000, there would be very few businesses since they would all have only one customer to service. All of these models presuppose that everyone else in the community would earn no money, a few success in a sea of poverty.
As one moves up the curve, businesses open as customers become available. For the very low end, such as per capita of $100/ yr, the curve has a bulge as the money accumulates into a few hands. When evenly distributed, the $100 does not encourage much business activity nad certainly would cause very little business diversity, generating little choice. As the money accumulates into a relatively few hands, business opportunities begin to increase. Above a certain point, the increase of money per capita is offset by the fewer customers available and the number of businesses and choice will decrease. At these low levels the economy is not very interesting. It is also not very realistic, if a few people had all the income, they would inevitably hire people to at least do menial tasks and the wage distribution would flatten, moving down towards the bulge.
As the gross product increases, a stage is reached where the curve would be vertical above the bulge before a final series of stages are reached in which the curve always bends forward, this is the more interesting part of the graphs.
As the gross product curves move to the right an activation level develops in the economy. In order to have a Thai restaurant, there needs to be enough customers to service, enough people need to have enough choice. As the customer base grows, more than one Thai restaurant opens, this increases choice through greater options, but at some point the increase in choice diminishes. There can be a big increase in choice going from one to two restaurants, there is virtually guaranteed to be an increase in choice from one to ten restaurants, but going from twenty to twenty-one, in general produces little increase in choice. That is the origin of the bench shaped features of the curves. At first, moving up along a curve produces a slow increase in choice until there accumulates a core base of customers, at which point the choice rises rapidly, until a point is reached where moving further up the curve produces little effective change in total choice.
Third world countries are notorious for having most people earn very low wages and a small elite who are very rich, this guarantees low economic growth. They are down at the inefficient curves at the left of the graph.
The upper truncation line takes a peculiar dip before rising. That is an artifact of the value at the origin being zero and then being expanded into a vertical measure from zero to one hundred. The source graph might look something like the following. The max choice line varies with the wage that produces maximum happiness. It will increase with available income because there are more choices which demand more money.
Japan, for instance, has an over controlled economy, businesses needing the permission of other businesses to open. Stability is a choice if people want it, but it does slow economic activity.
The following is from EmptyTomb, Inc, www.emptytomb.org.
Table 32,33, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2005 Cash Contributions for Charitable Giving by Income Brackets.
Income Percent contribution
Level after taxes.
5 000- 2.6
9 999
10 000- 2.5
14 999
15 000- 2.3
19 999
20 000- 2.2
29 999
30 000- 1.9
39 999
40 000- 1.7
49 999
50 000- 1.6
69 999
70 000- 1.5
79 999
80 000- 1.5
99 999
100 000- 1.5
119 999
120 000- 1.7
149 999
150 000- 1.8
Up
What is notable in these numbers is that there is continuous reduction in per cent giving up to
$120 000. If I am right and charitable giving is a function of the ability to change choice and, consequently, of the rate of change of choice, This means that people experience the greatest change in choice with the initiation of income. At $120 000, there is a significant number of people who have saturated on choice, who believe they have enough money that they can afford to be generous, but they do not have the same confidence of people at the lowest wages.
The numbers level at their minimum of 1.5 at around $75 000, which is in accord with that being the point at which choice flattens and becomes increasingly expensive.
Its effect on minimum wage is that if the net transfer point, the average of people paying for the service of minimum wage, T, is above the minimum wage point L, there will be a net increase in choice. If the minimum wage point is above T, as U, it will lower choice. This represents a significant limit on the setting of the minimum wage. The other condition is stability. If wages are over concntrated by the minimum wage, the economy loses the ability to adapt.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Strong avoidance
The brain functions with multiple paths of processing working in parallel. In order to adapt it moves its primary focus from one parallel path to another. That is the basic formation of derailment, the brain shifts and processes information from a slightly skewed perspective. If that new perspective provides something interesting, the brain focuses onto it and tries to search for additional connections that would add to it. If it is judged useless, the brain rejects it and shifts position again to try to produce useful processing.
Diagnosable schizophrenia is the brain skipping too far or too frequently. The brain can spontaneously have erratic skipping, which can be debilitating in its total disruption of a person's function. However, people can be driven to insanity by being taught to panic, usually by abusive parents. This typically takes the form of abusive intrusion into innocuous actions of the child, You shouldn't be putting that much crayon on the paper, you should be using the colored pencils, instead. The brain can also not learn how to deal with any stress by failed parenting examples, We'll just go to the front of the line, these people aren't as busy as us. The parent is in a line, feels trapped and panics, at which point the parent teaches the child to panic and be obnoxious. Truly obnoxious actions can only be stopped by the use of force, unfortunately, law and society discourage and prevent that solution.
The person raised in this manner panics at any attempt to self reflect. The learned panic of never questioning one's actions leads to the need to produce elaborate cover explanations whenever the person is forced to reconsider actions, You said yesterday, that you would finish in two weeks, now you say it will take six weeks. That was a planning estimate, this is an operational estimate. They will create new words, abuse current definitions and insist on the acceptance of only there explanation. The alternative is they will just say that it never happened.
That constant need to avoid reviewing is related to the complexity of review. The person must hold the action under consideration in mind and then look at other alternate choices, memories of other experiences and consideration of what other people might do. If the brain is panicking, it skips, and if it skips it loses track of which action; remembering, recreating, comparison, it is performing. The brain senses an overload of activity and takes an escape route, which can involve a descent into fantasy.
The extremes to which a person will go to avoid admitting error can be stupefying; You killed five people, You don't know that, they might have died anyway. The first time the person is caught in an area where they have never been challenged, they might almost admit error, but if they are repeated subjected to criticism they will develop increasingly complex avoidance schemes and evasions, their brain essentially develops a protective crust through which reality cannot penetrate.
The whole process might be somewhat comical accept that these same individuals push themselves into positions of authority out of their own panic; They cannot be subordinates because that exposes them to criticism which would make them look at themselves which would make their brain tear itself apart in panic. So they endeavor to place themselves in positions of authority where they criticize others and avoid having to consider their own actions. They are aided in this by all the other poorly socialized who have already pushed themselves into supervisory positions, they are all friends because they all know they should never say anything that will force reflection, they can attack and damage others who are not in the group but they are protective of each other in a mutual pact of insanity.
If they cannot supervise others, at least hey can abuse their own children and generally they do, repeating the whole process for another generation.
Diagnosable schizophrenia is the brain skipping too far or too frequently. The brain can spontaneously have erratic skipping, which can be debilitating in its total disruption of a person's function. However, people can be driven to insanity by being taught to panic, usually by abusive parents. This typically takes the form of abusive intrusion into innocuous actions of the child, You shouldn't be putting that much crayon on the paper, you should be using the colored pencils, instead. The brain can also not learn how to deal with any stress by failed parenting examples, We'll just go to the front of the line, these people aren't as busy as us. The parent is in a line, feels trapped and panics, at which point the parent teaches the child to panic and be obnoxious. Truly obnoxious actions can only be stopped by the use of force, unfortunately, law and society discourage and prevent that solution.
The person raised in this manner panics at any attempt to self reflect. The learned panic of never questioning one's actions leads to the need to produce elaborate cover explanations whenever the person is forced to reconsider actions, You said yesterday, that you would finish in two weeks, now you say it will take six weeks. That was a planning estimate, this is an operational estimate. They will create new words, abuse current definitions and insist on the acceptance of only there explanation. The alternative is they will just say that it never happened.
That constant need to avoid reviewing is related to the complexity of review. The person must hold the action under consideration in mind and then look at other alternate choices, memories of other experiences and consideration of what other people might do. If the brain is panicking, it skips, and if it skips it loses track of which action; remembering, recreating, comparison, it is performing. The brain senses an overload of activity and takes an escape route, which can involve a descent into fantasy.
The extremes to which a person will go to avoid admitting error can be stupefying; You killed five people, You don't know that, they might have died anyway. The first time the person is caught in an area where they have never been challenged, they might almost admit error, but if they are repeated subjected to criticism they will develop increasingly complex avoidance schemes and evasions, their brain essentially develops a protective crust through which reality cannot penetrate.
The whole process might be somewhat comical accept that these same individuals push themselves into positions of authority out of their own panic; They cannot be subordinates because that exposes them to criticism which would make them look at themselves which would make their brain tear itself apart in panic. So they endeavor to place themselves in positions of authority where they criticize others and avoid having to consider their own actions. They are aided in this by all the other poorly socialized who have already pushed themselves into supervisory positions, they are all friends because they all know they should never say anything that will force reflection, they can attack and damage others who are not in the group but they are protective of each other in a mutual pact of insanity.
If they cannot supervise others, at least hey can abuse their own children and generally they do, repeating the whole process for another generation.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Economics II
Economists speak of the velocity of money, the number of transactions that money passes through in a given time. I believe it is better to consider the recirculation time, the amount of time it takes money when spent to move through the economy and return to the original user. Obviously, there is a relation between velocity and recirculation time, if there are ten steps through which the money passes before returning to the first user, the faster those steps occur, the velocity of money, the shorter the recirculation time. The recirculation is important because it establishes the value of money. The fact that the same value of money is used to purchase different goods and services links the value of those goods and establishes what the given monetary value can purchase, establishes the actual value of money.
I use recirculation for the simple reason that on the scale of an economy money is a fluid. It is a peculiar fluid as it has strange sticky resistances to flow, but it is still a fluid. Movements of money through an economy are better thought of as flows of a similar substance rather than discrete movements of particles, such as dollars.
In calculus there is the Theorem of the Mean, for any continuous graph, one which can be drawn without lifting the pencil from the paper, the curve must at some point equal its average value. The concept of average can be convoluted, but for any definition of average there must be a point on the curve equal to its average value.
There is a corollary to that theorem, if a curve has the same value at its endpoints, the curve must; be equal everywhere or have at least one maximum or minimum point. A curve could have an enormous number of both maximums and minimums.
I will now construct such a function. If a person has no money, they have no economic activity, clearly they cannot, at least in the cash economy. If a person had all the money in an economy, that economy could be a country or the entire world, that person also has no economic activity. Economic activity is the transfer of money from one entity to another, if one entity has all the money, there can be no transfer and therefore no activity.
Interestingly, that argument holds for both holding all the money value, which is static, and if that entity intercepts the flow of money through the economy, which is dynamic. In either case, there is a zero value at zero and another zero value at 100% of the money. Because of this, since it makes no sense that there is never any economic activity, zero everywhere, and there can be no activity below zero, there must be a maximum point.
That point has to be at less than the 50% point if the flow, gross product is the measure being used. At greater than 50% more money is being withdrawn by the entity than is being recirculated, eventually the flow must decrease and cease as the entity must turn a portion of the flow into a static holding. If the entity absorbs 60% of the flow, only 40% can be returned to circulation, the remaining 20% has to be statically held, reducing the flow of the economy. Unless there is a reduction to the intercept of money, eventually the economy will spiral down to zero.
The upper curve above illustrates this maximizing and then flow back to zero. The lower curve is actually more interesting, it is the normalized curve. It consists of the ordinate, vertical measure, of the upper curve, divided by the abscissa, horizontal measurement, or the upper curve rise divided by run. It is the tangent of the angle measured form the origin to a point on the curve and the x axis. Because the curve must flatten, after its initial rise, in its slope, the tangent will rise to a maximum value and then fall eventually back to zero. I believe that maximum value occurs at about $75 000 / yr, the same point at which choice starts to become inefficient (see post Economics). This is the most efficient pint of economic activity, it represents the minimum recirculation time. At its lower point, at point zero-zero, the curve is flattened before steepening. If this were not true then the most rapid growth of the economy would occur with the the slightest, initial, insertion of money into the economy, historically that is not true, the economy only growing rapidly after significant money is already in the economy.
The reason for why the two values of choice and total economic efficiency should coincide is that they ae both ultimately tied to the same variable, time. The reason why economic activity becomes less efficient with increasing money is that there is not enough time to spend the money.
An economy, at any given time, is constrained in the amount of service it can provide at any given level. Some levels are capable of meeting much higher demand than others. An economy can meet a demand for 50 million
$10 lunches but could not meet a demand for 50 million $500 lunches. If there is a constant level of demand eventually the economy will meet it. But that requires both time and capital expenditure. This means that for an economy to be effective, people's demands must roughly coincide with available production.
Most people could spend $100 per day if it were given to them, they could buy an expensive lunch with a couple of overpriced drinks. If given $1 000 per day they might be able to invite they might be able to invite their friends to lunch. At $10 000 per day most people would be lost. For every spending decision, no matter how small, time must be spent in making that decision, otherwise it is not a decision but a random purchase. A random purchase does not increase choice and is therefore economically worthless. The only way to increase the amount of money spent is to make increasingly expensive purchases. At some point the amount of money overwhelms even that and the economy can only adjust to a certain number of expensive purchases until it jams with an inability to meet demand. At some point the money cannot be spent rationally and it accumulates and is economically inefficient. That leaves the point at which people can make the maximum of smooth decisions that match current economic output at around $75 000 / year. It is the highest point of economic efficiency. It will shift with increasing gross product, but that shifting takes time. It might be somewhat higher than $75 000/yr, maybe $100 000/yr, but it will be relatively close.
In the lower curve, m, is the maximal point. Most likely the curve above m will look like b and not d, the curve will change slowly in a decreasing manner creating a plateau of high efficiency. Anywhere on that plateau would be almost equally good for the economy, however, the number of people at the lowest point can be increased most quickly, since it requires the least amount of money to create them, so it is the point at which one would focus to increase economic activity.
On the lower end, a represents a curve recommending free trade, since the loss of efficiency from jobs created at these lower levels does not seriously impede activity. Curve c would make free trade stupid. It would mean that jobs created at lower wages would significantly slow activity. Before free trade agreements are created, it would be a good idea to know what the shape of the lower curve is. If the money under trade with a developing country creates comparable rates of recirculation, the trade would be a guaranteed positive since it would increase choice in the form of lower prices for a given product. If the curve has a sudden drop the choice would be reduced since part of choice is making a next choice. The saving of money on a given product has to be considered in terms of the out years.
As a simplistic example: say that a person has a recirculation time of one year. That person makes a $100 purchase once a year, assume the choice is 100 george. Every year, for five years, that person has the $100, he makes a purchase, the money recirculates in one year, he makes another purchase. Five purchases at 100 george each equals 500 george. Now, let us say that person buys the same product for $50, for $50 he has 100 george of choice and another $50. He makes another 50 george purchase. But assume it takes three years for the money to recirculate. That would mean in year 1; 150 george of choice, year 2, 50 george, year 3, 50 george, year four, the money finally returns, 100 george, year 5, 100 george., total = 150 + 50 + 50 + 100 + 100 = 450 george, which is less than 500.
It is more complicated than that since a choice made today is worth more than a choice made tomorrow. But the point is that it is not just the price it is the return of the money.
The reason why recirculation is so important is that it allows for the economy to function without continuously printing money, all money that does not recirculate drains the money available and requires the printing of more money to maintain economic activity. That is potentially inflationary and inflation reduces choice by denying people the ability to save and plan. The potential for inflation is the danger of the money sloshing back into the economy, particularly all at once. With China the recirculation is in Chines purchase of debt which is hardly ideal as that is a debt which must be repaid instead of a credit in terms of purchase.
I use recirculation for the simple reason that on the scale of an economy money is a fluid. It is a peculiar fluid as it has strange sticky resistances to flow, but it is still a fluid. Movements of money through an economy are better thought of as flows of a similar substance rather than discrete movements of particles, such as dollars.
There is a corollary to that theorem, if a curve has the same value at its endpoints, the curve must; be equal everywhere or have at least one maximum or minimum point. A curve could have an enormous number of both maximums and minimums.
I will now construct such a function. If a person has no money, they have no economic activity, clearly they cannot, at least in the cash economy. If a person had all the money in an economy, that economy could be a country or the entire world, that person also has no economic activity. Economic activity is the transfer of money from one entity to another, if one entity has all the money, there can be no transfer and therefore no activity.
Interestingly, that argument holds for both holding all the money value, which is static, and if that entity intercepts the flow of money through the economy, which is dynamic. In either case, there is a zero value at zero and another zero value at 100% of the money. Because of this, since it makes no sense that there is never any economic activity, zero everywhere, and there can be no activity below zero, there must be a maximum point.
That point has to be at less than the 50% point if the flow, gross product is the measure being used. At greater than 50% more money is being withdrawn by the entity than is being recirculated, eventually the flow must decrease and cease as the entity must turn a portion of the flow into a static holding. If the entity absorbs 60% of the flow, only 40% can be returned to circulation, the remaining 20% has to be statically held, reducing the flow of the economy. Unless there is a reduction to the intercept of money, eventually the economy will spiral down to zero.
The upper curve above illustrates this maximizing and then flow back to zero. The lower curve is actually more interesting, it is the normalized curve. It consists of the ordinate, vertical measure, of the upper curve, divided by the abscissa, horizontal measurement, or the upper curve rise divided by run. It is the tangent of the angle measured form the origin to a point on the curve and the x axis. Because the curve must flatten, after its initial rise, in its slope, the tangent will rise to a maximum value and then fall eventually back to zero. I believe that maximum value occurs at about $75 000 / yr, the same point at which choice starts to become inefficient (see post Economics). This is the most efficient pint of economic activity, it represents the minimum recirculation time. At its lower point, at point zero-zero, the curve is flattened before steepening. If this were not true then the most rapid growth of the economy would occur with the the slightest, initial, insertion of money into the economy, historically that is not true, the economy only growing rapidly after significant money is already in the economy.
The reason for why the two values of choice and total economic efficiency should coincide is that they ae both ultimately tied to the same variable, time. The reason why economic activity becomes less efficient with increasing money is that there is not enough time to spend the money.
An economy, at any given time, is constrained in the amount of service it can provide at any given level. Some levels are capable of meeting much higher demand than others. An economy can meet a demand for 50 million
$10 lunches but could not meet a demand for 50 million $500 lunches. If there is a constant level of demand eventually the economy will meet it. But that requires both time and capital expenditure. This means that for an economy to be effective, people's demands must roughly coincide with available production.
Most people could spend $100 per day if it were given to them, they could buy an expensive lunch with a couple of overpriced drinks. If given $1 000 per day they might be able to invite they might be able to invite their friends to lunch. At $10 000 per day most people would be lost. For every spending decision, no matter how small, time must be spent in making that decision, otherwise it is not a decision but a random purchase. A random purchase does not increase choice and is therefore economically worthless. The only way to increase the amount of money spent is to make increasingly expensive purchases. At some point the amount of money overwhelms even that and the economy can only adjust to a certain number of expensive purchases until it jams with an inability to meet demand. At some point the money cannot be spent rationally and it accumulates and is economically inefficient. That leaves the point at which people can make the maximum of smooth decisions that match current economic output at around $75 000 / year. It is the highest point of economic efficiency. It will shift with increasing gross product, but that shifting takes time. It might be somewhat higher than $75 000/yr, maybe $100 000/yr, but it will be relatively close.
In the lower curve, m, is the maximal point. Most likely the curve above m will look like b and not d, the curve will change slowly in a decreasing manner creating a plateau of high efficiency. Anywhere on that plateau would be almost equally good for the economy, however, the number of people at the lowest point can be increased most quickly, since it requires the least amount of money to create them, so it is the point at which one would focus to increase economic activity.
On the lower end, a represents a curve recommending free trade, since the loss of efficiency from jobs created at these lower levels does not seriously impede activity. Curve c would make free trade stupid. It would mean that jobs created at lower wages would significantly slow activity. Before free trade agreements are created, it would be a good idea to know what the shape of the lower curve is. If the money under trade with a developing country creates comparable rates of recirculation, the trade would be a guaranteed positive since it would increase choice in the form of lower prices for a given product. If the curve has a sudden drop the choice would be reduced since part of choice is making a next choice. The saving of money on a given product has to be considered in terms of the out years.
As a simplistic example: say that a person has a recirculation time of one year. That person makes a $100 purchase once a year, assume the choice is 100 george. Every year, for five years, that person has the $100, he makes a purchase, the money recirculates in one year, he makes another purchase. Five purchases at 100 george each equals 500 george. Now, let us say that person buys the same product for $50, for $50 he has 100 george of choice and another $50. He makes another 50 george purchase. But assume it takes three years for the money to recirculate. That would mean in year 1; 150 george of choice, year 2, 50 george, year 3, 50 george, year four, the money finally returns, 100 george, year 5, 100 george., total = 150 + 50 + 50 + 100 + 100 = 450 george, which is less than 500.
It is more complicated than that since a choice made today is worth more than a choice made tomorrow. But the point is that it is not just the price it is the return of the money.
The reason why recirculation is so important is that it allows for the economy to function without continuously printing money, all money that does not recirculate drains the money available and requires the printing of more money to maintain economic activity. That is potentially inflationary and inflation reduces choice by denying people the ability to save and plan. The potential for inflation is the danger of the money sloshing back into the economy, particularly all at once. With China the recirculation is in Chines purchase of debt which is hardly ideal as that is a debt which must be repaid instead of a credit in terms of purchase.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Competitive service districts II
The process of competitive service districts can be applied to health care. The manager would be responsible for creating operating agreements with medical providers. This would allow for premium care, but those institutions who wish to provide premium care would have to give something in return. The availability of premium care would make some consumers happy and would help the manager in terms of rating but the manger could withhold an operating license unless they provide some general service as well. It is a system of mutual blackmail. There does need to be auditing to ensure there is only limited abuse.
Any fees assessed by the manage, such as five dollars for an appointment would also be included in the rating.
The rating does not have to be by only the consumers, it can also have ratings by doctors, nurses, other medical staff and pharmacists. They can be weighted in the rating in different ways. The manager would have to determine the best way of keeping them all relatively happy.
In addition to the ratings an additional factor could be actual outcomes. There would have to be thorough auditing of medical records for the ratings to be meaningful and to avoid fraud.
By holding managers responsible for both cost and outcome money can be saved. Studies have shown that performing a high rate of any given operation, such as heart transplants, increases the success rate of those operations. Currently there are too many heart transplant centers. Each center adds its fixed cost to the national health bill while actually killing patients through lowering success rates, because too many of the centers are performing too few operations to have the highest success rates. Under competitive service districts, there is no bonus given for vanity, each district must reduce costs, which means consolidating certain procedures with other districts benefits the manager through reduction in costs and improvement in outcomes.
Nationally, there is the question of adjusting costs between largely rural and largely urban districts. It would probably be sensible to do so, but any adjustment will produce an anomaly somewhere, the rules will have a poor match with reality in some area.
The other advantage is that by just taxing and setting up competitive districts nationally there is a workable system that provides effective service and is not unconstitutional by doing something like having the government order people to buy health insurance from private business, which is the kind of abuse the constitution was specifically written to prevent.
In government services, the service has to be one with which people have constant enough contact that they can actually accurately state the quality of service provided. Road repair, sanitation, street lighting, parks and policing may fall within those limits; schools and courts do not, since most people have no idea of the amount of nonsense occurring in either of the last two. People just do not see enough of them to have a legitimate opinion.
Parks, too, are problematic because unlike street maintenance and policing , they are not evenly distributed. Parks are often large facilities spaced at random and do not admit of smoothly divided boundaries of responsibility.
In sanitation an additional rating can be made of recycling, encouraging managers to experiment and try to find the best means of encouraging people to cooperate in recycling. In policing, it forces the police to respond to the people of the district, if the police are viewed as abusive, the manager will be gone.
Positively electing people, as is done in commission forms of government which Louisiana used to have, are disasters because as soon as political parties are introduced, people get stupid and crazy and will actually defend the incompetent to prevent the opposing party from winning. Competitive service districts rate people after they have actual performance so there is no question of promoting one group over another. And, once again, it removes the perverse incentive to spend the full budget, instead promoting people who manage savings.
With private sector utilities, there is the need to arrange for capital transfer in on orderly yet quick manner, it may bog down legally. Cell phone companies recently agreed to notify customers when excess charges are initiated. If they had been under threat of being fired, they would have done it years ago. The setting up of two cell phone companies in each area doubled the capital costs without improving service. Companies only actively compete when there is a high enough introduction of new businesses to threaten their profits. Established companies eventually inevitably come to accept their market share and make no effort to compete, which would entail at least a short term loss of profits. With the district system they have to compete against their customers expectations and are under threat of losing their entire profit base, it promotes companies who improve management even if they do it accidentally or at random because anyone with bad management will be removed.
Wire phones, cable and internet are best consolidated into a single wire company. No one knows haw cable companies got their franchises anyway. The three separate wires represent three sets of capital costs, it is wasteful. The company would have three ratings which can be combined. There could be one rating of multiplying all three ratings together, three of combing the ratings two at a time, and three individual ratings. The triple rating could have a limit of 1.5 standard deviations, the doubles 1.75 deviations and the singles 2 deviations or something like that.
In private utilities there would be no distribution of equal budgets, the costs they charge would be part of the ratings.
Banks and credit cards could be separated. In urban areas, the proliferation of bank branches does not improve economic production. Each branch drives up overall banking costs without improving service, certainly not in an area where there are five banks in three blocks. Having one bank per district would eliminate that. If banks want to impose nuisance charges people can fire them, the costs and services will equilibrate at some point, although it might not be ideal for the customers. Credit cards would be a separate entity from the banks and would be held accountable by the failure rate of payments. The credit card company would have to be a little more selective in issuing credit cards, which could reduce some abuse.
Airports would constitute competitive districts. They would be responsible for scheduling and pricing between airports, the origin airport would be held accountable. The airlines would be service providers. An airport would order a two hundred fifty seat airplane with a fifteen hundred mile range every weekday morning at eight o'clock, an airline would provide it. It is the rare person who cares what airline they fly on, they want to, on a given day, fly from one city to another. By making the airports the units of competition that service can be improved. Instead of ten airplanes from six different airlines each of two hundred fifty passengers flying form New York to LA every morning between eight and ten o'clock, the airport could schedule five five hundred seat aircraft. The flight could be more comfortable, having fewer aircraft would reduce delays and costs could be less. Similarly, there might be a market for two hundred fifty people to fly between New York and Kansas city every day, but because it is divided among airlines there are no direct flights and passengers have to fly into Dallas or Chicago and wait around and accumulate before there are enough passengers to fly on to Kansas City. It can improve customer service.
The airports would rate each other to prevent one duping its problems on another. It would encourage coordination on aircraft usage, a five hundred seat aircraft might make sense for the origin airport, but there might be no use for it at the destination.
Passengers can down rate for any reason, such as uncomfortable seats,lost luggage or bad peanuts. To encourage people filling in the rating card a deposit between twenty and fifty dollars could be paid. After arrival the passenger would fill out the card and insert it into what would b e similar to an ATM. After the card is inserted, the deposit would be repaid.
Air traffic control would be handed over to the airports to run, but strong government oversight should be maintained. Pilots could also rate the airport on scheduling and control.
Any fees assessed by the manage, such as five dollars for an appointment would also be included in the rating.
The rating does not have to be by only the consumers, it can also have ratings by doctors, nurses, other medical staff and pharmacists. They can be weighted in the rating in different ways. The manager would have to determine the best way of keeping them all relatively happy.
In addition to the ratings an additional factor could be actual outcomes. There would have to be thorough auditing of medical records for the ratings to be meaningful and to avoid fraud.
By holding managers responsible for both cost and outcome money can be saved. Studies have shown that performing a high rate of any given operation, such as heart transplants, increases the success rate of those operations. Currently there are too many heart transplant centers. Each center adds its fixed cost to the national health bill while actually killing patients through lowering success rates, because too many of the centers are performing too few operations to have the highest success rates. Under competitive service districts, there is no bonus given for vanity, each district must reduce costs, which means consolidating certain procedures with other districts benefits the manager through reduction in costs and improvement in outcomes.
Nationally, there is the question of adjusting costs between largely rural and largely urban districts. It would probably be sensible to do so, but any adjustment will produce an anomaly somewhere, the rules will have a poor match with reality in some area.
The other advantage is that by just taxing and setting up competitive districts nationally there is a workable system that provides effective service and is not unconstitutional by doing something like having the government order people to buy health insurance from private business, which is the kind of abuse the constitution was specifically written to prevent.
In government services, the service has to be one with which people have constant enough contact that they can actually accurately state the quality of service provided. Road repair, sanitation, street lighting, parks and policing may fall within those limits; schools and courts do not, since most people have no idea of the amount of nonsense occurring in either of the last two. People just do not see enough of them to have a legitimate opinion.
Parks, too, are problematic because unlike street maintenance and policing , they are not evenly distributed. Parks are often large facilities spaced at random and do not admit of smoothly divided boundaries of responsibility.
In sanitation an additional rating can be made of recycling, encouraging managers to experiment and try to find the best means of encouraging people to cooperate in recycling. In policing, it forces the police to respond to the people of the district, if the police are viewed as abusive, the manager will be gone.
Positively electing people, as is done in commission forms of government which Louisiana used to have, are disasters because as soon as political parties are introduced, people get stupid and crazy and will actually defend the incompetent to prevent the opposing party from winning. Competitive service districts rate people after they have actual performance so there is no question of promoting one group over another. And, once again, it removes the perverse incentive to spend the full budget, instead promoting people who manage savings.
With private sector utilities, there is the need to arrange for capital transfer in on orderly yet quick manner, it may bog down legally. Cell phone companies recently agreed to notify customers when excess charges are initiated. If they had been under threat of being fired, they would have done it years ago. The setting up of two cell phone companies in each area doubled the capital costs without improving service. Companies only actively compete when there is a high enough introduction of new businesses to threaten their profits. Established companies eventually inevitably come to accept their market share and make no effort to compete, which would entail at least a short term loss of profits. With the district system they have to compete against their customers expectations and are under threat of losing their entire profit base, it promotes companies who improve management even if they do it accidentally or at random because anyone with bad management will be removed.
Wire phones, cable and internet are best consolidated into a single wire company. No one knows haw cable companies got their franchises anyway. The three separate wires represent three sets of capital costs, it is wasteful. The company would have three ratings which can be combined. There could be one rating of multiplying all three ratings together, three of combing the ratings two at a time, and three individual ratings. The triple rating could have a limit of 1.5 standard deviations, the doubles 1.75 deviations and the singles 2 deviations or something like that.
In private utilities there would be no distribution of equal budgets, the costs they charge would be part of the ratings.
Banks and credit cards could be separated. In urban areas, the proliferation of bank branches does not improve economic production. Each branch drives up overall banking costs without improving service, certainly not in an area where there are five banks in three blocks. Having one bank per district would eliminate that. If banks want to impose nuisance charges people can fire them, the costs and services will equilibrate at some point, although it might not be ideal for the customers. Credit cards would be a separate entity from the banks and would be held accountable by the failure rate of payments. The credit card company would have to be a little more selective in issuing credit cards, which could reduce some abuse.
Airports would constitute competitive districts. They would be responsible for scheduling and pricing between airports, the origin airport would be held accountable. The airlines would be service providers. An airport would order a two hundred fifty seat airplane with a fifteen hundred mile range every weekday morning at eight o'clock, an airline would provide it. It is the rare person who cares what airline they fly on, they want to, on a given day, fly from one city to another. By making the airports the units of competition that service can be improved. Instead of ten airplanes from six different airlines each of two hundred fifty passengers flying form New York to LA every morning between eight and ten o'clock, the airport could schedule five five hundred seat aircraft. The flight could be more comfortable, having fewer aircraft would reduce delays and costs could be less. Similarly, there might be a market for two hundred fifty people to fly between New York and Kansas city every day, but because it is divided among airlines there are no direct flights and passengers have to fly into Dallas or Chicago and wait around and accumulate before there are enough passengers to fly on to Kansas City. It can improve customer service.
The airports would rate each other to prevent one duping its problems on another. It would encourage coordination on aircraft usage, a five hundred seat aircraft might make sense for the origin airport, but there might be no use for it at the destination.
Passengers can down rate for any reason, such as uncomfortable seats,lost luggage or bad peanuts. To encourage people filling in the rating card a deposit between twenty and fifty dollars could be paid. After arrival the passenger would fill out the card and insert it into what would b e similar to an ATM. After the card is inserted, the deposit would be repaid.
Air traffic control would be handed over to the airports to run, but strong government oversight should be maintained. Pilots could also rate the airport on scheduling and control.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Competitive service districts
There are two ways to generate competition; through selection and through comparison. Selection is the usual one of a having a variety of products and choosing between them. Comparison can be effective for goods and services which are generic and lack flavor.
The idea of comparison is to create a monopoly and then divide the customer base geographically into units of roughly even size and then have the customers vote annually, rating the service on a scale of 0 to 10. Each service district, for government services, would receive an equal amount of money, the amount actually spent would be divided by the average rating then the highest cost areas would have their management change.
Let us say that each district is budgeted $10 000 000 for a given service. The manager could spend as much or as little as he wants. Let us say that a manager spends $9 000 000 and has an average rating of 6. That would be $9 000 000/ 6 = $1 500 000. If another manager spends $8 500 000 and also gets a rating of 5.8, it would be $1 466 000, the second manager wins. This method eliminates the perverse incentive to spend the full budget while holding the manager accountable for performance.
There are a variety of statistical methods for determining the cut-off for dismissal, one is the standard deviation. For a normally distribution about 0.17 would be 1 deviation below average. That would mean a change in management, on average every 6 years. That might be a good rate of turn over. The turn over must be high enough that each manage feels an urgent need to perform and improve but it should not be so often that management continuity is reduced to shambles. The other need that should be addressed is the manager gaming the system by, for instance, only spending $1 000 000 and getting a rating of 1 and winning at $1 000 000. The goal is to get good quality service at the minimal cost. To prevent gaming a second criterion could be established on just the rating. 1 deviation is 16%, 2 deviations is 3% and 1.5 deviations is 7%, setting the rating cut-off at 1.5 or 2 deviations should prevent a manager deliberately providing low service.
Managers below the cut-offs would be removed and those empty slots transferred, with maybe 1/2 going to new managers and the others being offered to the best managers. The more districts a manager manages, the higher his pay.
Neighboring, or proximate, districts could also rate each other to force cooperation, eventually , the chain of district groups would stretch across the country, interlocking all districts to some extent, The rating could be done by either the senior managers of each district, or by all employees in that district. There could also be a rating within each district of the different services within that district, again, forcing cooperation.
Elected government could then provide the money and do audits to ensure compliance, letting the district residents fire people when they are unhappy with services. The one stumbling block is trying to allow for people within a given district who want to put more money into a given service. The rating could then be done on percentage of spending, unspent moneys being returned in proportion to there source. If the state allotment is
$10 000 000 and the district gives another $4 000 000 for a total of $14 000 000 and the manager spends
$12 000 000 for a rating of 7, then $12 000 000/ $14 000 000 = 86% / 7 = 12.2%. He would then compete with other managers based on their percentages. The $2 000 000 unspent would be divided $2 000 000 X 4/14= $570 000 to the district, and the remainder $1 430 000 to the state.
If the manager has more money, he clearly has an advantage over other managers, but people in his district would most likely expect better service for the more money and may very well rate him lower for the same performance. So, it might work out evenly, this system would have to be set up and run to be sure.
The managers could also be rated by their own employees to insure they are working with them. There are different ways of averaging the different ratings of customers, neighboring districts, groups in the district and employees. The two easiest are the arithmetic average which is just adding and averaging them, and the geometric average which is multiplying them together and taking the fourth root. The geometric average is more responsive to a single bad rating and is therefore probably the better,
The overall idea is to promote competence and force managers to adopt the best methjods of others at the most cost effective rate.
The idea of comparison is to create a monopoly and then divide the customer base geographically into units of roughly even size and then have the customers vote annually, rating the service on a scale of 0 to 10. Each service district, for government services, would receive an equal amount of money, the amount actually spent would be divided by the average rating then the highest cost areas would have their management change.
Let us say that each district is budgeted $10 000 000 for a given service. The manager could spend as much or as little as he wants. Let us say that a manager spends $9 000 000 and has an average rating of 6. That would be $9 000 000/ 6 = $1 500 000. If another manager spends $8 500 000 and also gets a rating of 5.8, it would be $1 466 000, the second manager wins. This method eliminates the perverse incentive to spend the full budget while holding the manager accountable for performance.
There are a variety of statistical methods for determining the cut-off for dismissal, one is the standard deviation. For a normally distribution about 0.17 would be 1 deviation below average. That would mean a change in management, on average every 6 years. That might be a good rate of turn over. The turn over must be high enough that each manage feels an urgent need to perform and improve but it should not be so often that management continuity is reduced to shambles. The other need that should be addressed is the manager gaming the system by, for instance, only spending $1 000 000 and getting a rating of 1 and winning at $1 000 000. The goal is to get good quality service at the minimal cost. To prevent gaming a second criterion could be established on just the rating. 1 deviation is 16%, 2 deviations is 3% and 1.5 deviations is 7%, setting the rating cut-off at 1.5 or 2 deviations should prevent a manager deliberately providing low service.
Managers below the cut-offs would be removed and those empty slots transferred, with maybe 1/2 going to new managers and the others being offered to the best managers. The more districts a manager manages, the higher his pay.
Neighboring, or proximate, districts could also rate each other to force cooperation, eventually , the chain of district groups would stretch across the country, interlocking all districts to some extent, The rating could be done by either the senior managers of each district, or by all employees in that district. There could also be a rating within each district of the different services within that district, again, forcing cooperation.
Elected government could then provide the money and do audits to ensure compliance, letting the district residents fire people when they are unhappy with services. The one stumbling block is trying to allow for people within a given district who want to put more money into a given service. The rating could then be done on percentage of spending, unspent moneys being returned in proportion to there source. If the state allotment is
$10 000 000 and the district gives another $4 000 000 for a total of $14 000 000 and the manager spends
$12 000 000 for a rating of 7, then $12 000 000/ $14 000 000 = 86% / 7 = 12.2%. He would then compete with other managers based on their percentages. The $2 000 000 unspent would be divided $2 000 000 X 4/14= $570 000 to the district, and the remainder $1 430 000 to the state.
If the manager has more money, he clearly has an advantage over other managers, but people in his district would most likely expect better service for the more money and may very well rate him lower for the same performance. So, it might work out evenly, this system would have to be set up and run to be sure.
The managers could also be rated by their own employees to insure they are working with them. There are different ways of averaging the different ratings of customers, neighboring districts, groups in the district and employees. The two easiest are the arithmetic average which is just adding and averaging them, and the geometric average which is multiplying them together and taking the fourth root. The geometric average is more responsive to a single bad rating and is therefore probably the better,
The overall idea is to promote competence and force managers to adopt the best methjods of others at the most cost effective rate.
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