Leverage this!

I sat through a presentation at a meeting last week in which the speaker, a really smart guy with an advanced engineering degree, kept using the word "leverage" as a verb. And I don't mean just in its normal-but-flaccid sense, but as a stand-in for just about every verb you can think of. He was making the case for an open source software project or at least standards which we could "leverage" (okay, I kind-of-see where that is going), but at one point he was saying just the opposite: "Companies are leveraging their own software because they can't find what they want though they would gladly use something else." How can you obtain the advantage of a lever from something which a lever would work against?

I mean, I thought "signage" was bad, but Chuy[1], this is getting out of control. My other language pet peeve is "preventative maintenance": it is not maintenance undertaken for the purpose of preventation, is it? No, it's undertaken for prevention. We are not trying to preventate anything.

Leverage is a thing, not an action. If you want to move something, you use a lever. When you have mechanical advantage, that state is called leverage. You do not leverage a boulder with a stick, yet that is exactly the way it was sometimes used in its quasi-understandable phase. I think the verb is actually, "to lever", though "to move" or "to heave" seem much less awkward. Nowadays, leverage simply means "to use". Why not just use, "use"?

I'm not the only person having this conniption/observation.

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[1] In Mexican-American culture, Chuy is the preferred nickname for men named Jesus, as in, "Que haria Chuy?" [2]

[2] Apologies to Mr. White, my 7th grade Spanish teacher. Clearly, there should be an accent over the "e" in Que and the "i" in haria, but I fear it would not display well in all browsers [3].

[3] Mr. White, through no fault of his own, did not anticipate these problems, otherwise I would still retain that information, too.

Incidentally

This line:

This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

never fails to draw a chuckle from me. In context, it is a perfectly reasonable response.

Walmart CSR again

So, here's my kindergarten summary of how the mass market apparel industry works:

You have a company (a manufacturer) that makes clothing. If you don't actually sew it (you contract that out), you are still called a manufacturer. You are selling your clothing through boutiques, the internet, and so on. You want to make the leap into large retail outlets like J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Sears, Dillards, Macy's, whatever, so you start trying to get into those stores.

Those stores have very funny (funny-strange, not funny-haha) policies on charge-backs, returns, and how they pay their bills. Basically, they make you take all the risk. You send them clothing, they send back what they don't sell, they charge you back for every non-compliant item they can find (e.g. the tags are crooked). And to top it off, they don't get around to paying the bills for 3, 6, 9 months on end. But still, you are moving a lot more product through them.

Eventually, you realize that the interest rates on the money you are borrowing is killing you, so you get involved with a factor. The factor acts as a bridge: they take over your accounts receivable, but they pay you faster. The factor holds lots of sway over the retailers because they represent lots of their suppliers exclusively. If the retailers wants product, they have to pay the factor. The factors, though, charge for this service, and charge a lot: 15-20%. And that comes from you, the manufacturer. But at least you're getting paid, right?

So by choosing to sell through a major retailer, your choices are either to borrow money and pay interest on that or get a factor and pay them (though effectively you become their employee, since they have now taken over your accounts receivable). If you want to keep making money at these volumes, you need to cut costs. The easiest way is to go offshore and get cheaper sewing contractors.

Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has the reputation of paying their bills in a timely manner. They berate you on pricing [1], but at least they pay on time and offer volume opportunities.

If the major retailers would pay their bills quickly, there would be no need for factors and thus less temptation to go offshore [2]. Perhaps people concerned about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are going after the wrong target? Perhaps they ought to be scrutinizing manufacturers' complaints about retailers' pricing and other policies, their business-to-business relations, rather than their employee or customer relations.

I'm just sayin'.

-------------------------------------------
This is Wal-Mart CSR again because I already wrote about it.

[1] Apparently, Wal-Mart also brow-beats its suppliers over their use of packaging and renewable fuel content, among other things. Wal-Mart is the world's largest buyer of organic cotton (WSJ-$), and becoming the largest purchaser of sustainably harvested shrimp and fish (WSJ-$). Is it green-washing? Could be. These efforts overlook more sustainable practices -- they are optimizing locally while sub-optimizing globally. But they aren't the ogres normally claimed.

[2] Why wouldn't they go offshore, for profit maximization, even in a factor-free world in which everyone paid on time?

1. Quality control, the ability to see and control problems

2. Flow, in Chandler's sense, the flow driven by the visible hand. This was the preferred method of operating a mass production business before WWII and the ascendancy of the GM/DuPont theory of management. You can't achieve flow with a 3 week or longer delay in the supply stream.

3. Leisure time; if you run a local business, you have the opportunity to blur work, relaxation, and other personal time, whereas when you run an international operation, you have to be "on" 24/7. This is the same problem faced by racing enthusiasts who are offered a sponsorship: do you really want it to be a job instead of a hobby?

4. Some other stuff that will have to wait for another post. Why do factors exist? Why doesn't someone vertically integrate textile, apparel, and retail? Or perhaps we can just shame my wife into writing that book.

Local, Action: Issues of Scale

In a recent debate hosted by Cato, Peter Leeson argues

In a recent study I compared Somali welfare under anarchy to welfare under government using all key development indicators for which data allowed comparison. According to the data, of the eighteen development indicators, fourteen show unambiguous improvement under anarchy. Life expectancy is higher today than was in the last years of government's existence; infant mortality has improved twenty-four percent; maternal mortality has fallen over thirty percent; infants with low birth weight has fallen more than fifteen percentage points; access to health facilities has increased more than twenty-five percentage points; access to sanitation has risen eight percentage points; extreme poverty has plummeted nearly twenty percentage points; one year olds fully immunized for TB has grown nearly twenty percentage points, and for measles has increased ten; fatalities due to measles have dropped thirty percent; and the prevalence of TVs, radios, and telephones has jumped between three and twenty-five times.
...
Should we conclude from Somalia's stateless improvement that it is a nice place to live? Of course not. But Somalia's pre- and post-government performance highlights an important point about the desirability of anarchy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is simply not true that any government is always superior to no government. If state predation goes unchecked, government may not only fail to add to social welfare, but can actually reduce welfare below its level under statelessness. Such was the case with Somalia's government, which did more harm to its citizens than good.

Dani Rodrik responded

I do not have any trouble with the idea that self-enforcing agreements (what Leeson calls "anarchy") can sometimes substitute for third-party (i.e., government) enforcement. Such self-enforcing agreements are maintained through the force of repeated interaction ("if you cheat me now, I will cheat you in the future,") through reputational mechanisms ("see, I am not the cheating kind of guy"), and collective punishment schemes ("if you cheat me, I will bring the wrath of my colleagues on you"). The literature is replete with examination of such informal institutions. See for example Avner Greif's work on medieval merchant guilds, John McMillan and Chris Woodruff's work on commercial dispute settlement in Vietnam, Marcel Fafchamps' work on firms' relations with their suppliers in Africa, and Elinor Ostrom's work on the management of common property resources around the world [1]. Leeson's own account of how pirates have developed self-enforcing arrangements to elicit cooperation fits squarely in this larger literature.

The problem with self-enforcing agreements is that they do not scale up. One of the findings from Elinor Ostrom's extensive case studies is that self-enforcing arrangements to manage the "commons" work well only when the geographic scope of the activity is clearly delimited and membership is fixed. It is easy to understand why. Cooperation under "anarchy" is based on reciprocity, which in turn requires observability. I need to be able to observe whether you are behaving according to the rules, and if not, I have to be able to sanction you. When the size of the in-group becomes large and mobility allows opportunistic behavior to go unpunished, it becomes difficult to maintain cooperation. Imagine that the pirates numbered in the millions and they could easily jump ship to join competing groups mid-voyage; would the arrangements Leeson describes have been sustainable?

Later in the essay, Rodrik concludes, "There is no example of a society that has become prosperous without a state machinery." He doesn't appear to be thinking about the fact that many societies that have not become prosperous in his sense (high GDP) have been sustainable over hundreds of years -- sustainable by definition.

In contrast to Leeson's note that it is not true that any government is better than no government, Rodrik arguees that more government is equivalent to good government. In fact, he is all but saying that state capitalism is the best option we have.

Unlike in pirate societies or pre-colonial Angola, modern economies require an elaborate and ever-evolving division of labor -- among owners of firms, managers, and their employees, among producers up and down the value chain, and between producers and providers of supporting services such as finance, accounting, and legal services. The complexity, fluidity, and geographic non-specificity of these activities leave too much room for opportunistic behavior for self-enforcing arrangements to work well. They require an external backstop in the form of government-enforced rules.
...
Which is why the scatter plot below, showing the relationship between per-capita GDP and the size of the public sector, should not be a surprise. There is a strong, statistically highly significant, and positive association between countries' income levels and the share of their economy that the government consumes. This highlights the complementarity between markets and the state. Those societies in which markets work best are the ones where the reach of the state is longer -- not shorter.

Alas, Rodrik seems committed to conflating the quality of governance to the size and scope of it, as he switches back from size to operation: "Prosperity is achieved when states are effective in setting and enforcing the rules of the game, not when they wither away."

I welcome Rodrik's entry to the blogosphere. So far, he is proving very valuable as a source of material showing that defense of state capitalism is something to which both the Chamber of Commerce Right and Crolyist Left agree. [2] It's a fight between two sides of the same coin, the one side saying that we need government to rationalize the entire economy (by which I mean, "to coordinate everything in accordance with a central plan") while ignoring the side effects (increasing concentration of wealth and power), while simultaneously claiming that it is the other side that is doing this. The other side claims to defend free markets while actually defending the businesses and people benefiting from state policies.

And, in the present essay, Rodrik provides a generous amount of material to help me with the third installment of the Local, Action series. In the first two essays, I explored local commerce and associational activity. In this one, I am more interested in discussing localism as a preferred method for governance. I will gladly concede that dividing the world into loose confederations of local or regional sovereignties will result in a lower rate of growth, but I will simultaneously assert that the median person will not necessarily be worse off, that the least well off will be much better off, and that the society will likely be much more sustainable than the existing system which Rodrik prefers.

It is well-known that interpersonal communications scale poorly with the number of people involved. The most effective means of communication is direct conversation; we evolved to convey and to receive a great deal of information via non-verbal means (gestures, facial expression, voice timbre). People cannot handle the cognitive load of more than a few other people. Anthropologist RIM Dunbar posits

there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size. The predicted group size for humans is relatively large (compared to those for nonhuman primates), and is close to observed sizes of certain rather distinctive types of groups found in contemporary and historical human societies. These groups are invariably ones that depend on extensive personal knowledge based on face-to-face interaction for their stability and coherence through time. I argued that the need to increase group size at some point during the course of human evolution precipitated the evolution of language because a more efficient process was required for servicing these relationships than was possible with the conventional nonhuman primate bonding mechanism (namely, social grooming). These arguments appear to mesh well with the social intelligence hypothesis for the evolution of brain size and cognitive skills in primates.

(hattip: Life With Alacrity blog, at which this is an interesting and related post)

Dunbar calculated that humans could effectively socialize in groups of about 150 people. He also notes that modern military organizations are limited to no more than 200, a limit arrived at by trial and error over several centuries.

Once language and then writing was developed, we had the means to communicate to but not with a wider group. Writing can allow one person to reach more people, it is more precise and can possibly unload some of the emotional content, allowing a more rational conversation, but it isn't interactive. Personal relationships maintained by physical interaction are closer than impersonal relationships maintained by broadcast, a difference of kind, not degree. In Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale cites research from sociology and anthropology to argue for two types of naturally sized community: the neighborhood, roughly limited to 500 people, and the community of 5,000 to 10,000, roughly corresponding to the two types of communication. A Pattern Language makes similar arguments for the optimal size of regions, towns, neighborhoods in political, economic, and architectural terms.[3]

Not being able to communicate with many people effectively means that our ability to find out about their activities and intents is limited. We might forgive someone for making a mistake if we understood their motivations. We might also allow a mistake to pass if we knew that person was usually very conscientious. So contract breaches can be handled in a very cost-effective way when we have personal knowledge of the deliverer, but contracts become much more costly to enforce as our physical, mental, and emotional distance from the other party increases.

Thus, reputation and other features of self-enforcing contracts are difficult to scale up because it becomes difficult for people to directly observe compliance and to sanction the non-compliant. Rodrik does not seem to be aware, however, that the same problems stalk state enforcement of its own regulations. [4] Not only can the state not monitor everyone, but citizens can not effectively guard the guardians the further removed they are from them. It is difficult (costly) to hold politicians to their promises, to know the content of laws, and to know the quality and activities of the bureaucrats charged with enforcing the regulations. Laws may therefore work to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful, they may not be enforced effectively, or they may be enforced selectively, giving rise to corruption.

Locally, citizens can engage more freely and more securely in give-and-take. One day, the majority may agree to something that puts some at a disadvantage. We all know it and can confirm it personally. Later, we can agree to do something that compensates the victim(s). We have a better handle on who is getting the shaft and who is getting more than their fair share, and when the numbers are small, we are capable of keeping a running balance sheet on the externalities of our collective actions. [5]

In From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, David Beito describes at length the activities of review committees sent to the homes of the covered. Their direct observation was not only an effective way of weeding out the fakers, but also provided stronger credibility for legitimate cases, so strong that when requesting special grants for hard cases, lodge members gladly forked over. After all, they weren't giving to charity, they were contributing to a mutual fund, one which they themselves might need to draw against one day.

Mancur Olson addresses the scaling issue in The Logic of Collective Action. He argues that small groups are able to use moral and social pressure to maintain group cohesion. The larger the group gets, the more costly it becomes to maintain cohesion. In large numbers, the group must offer some kind of tangible, excludable good in order to maintain he necessary cohesion. Because of the difficulty of herding large numbers to a common goal, small but focused groups may come to dominate the larger groups.

Scaling is the same argument that Tyler Cowen offers against the local food movement (sorry, no link). Sure, it may be possible for a few (usually wealthy or eccentric) individuals to obtain their food locally, and it should be of higher quality, but it becomes more difficult to attempt to feed entire cities from local farms. The Northeast corridor is unlikely to return to self-sufficiency in its current state, though this is interesting.

I would extend the arguments of the local food movement to the state: if you think that government is a good thing, local is better. Just as you can produce inexpensive food products by mass production techniques by giving up nutritional value, loading the environment with pollutants, and allowing national brands to push out local flavor, you can also mass produce your law by giving up legislative quality, loading the legal environment with barriers to entry and regulatory sclerosis, and allowing one-size-fits-all regulations to push out local custom. When your food is produced far away, you have little idea what ingredients or processes are being used. Just so, you have little idea how earmarks are getting into legislation or who stands to benefit from each 30,000 page bill. Transparency does not scale well, publicly or privately.



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[1] Let's also add Lisa Bernstein's study of the diamond industry and Jacob Loshin's delightful piece on how innovation and secrets are kept in the magic industry without Intellectual Property law.

[2] Need evidence of that fact? Check out this blurb for a book advertised on Max Sawicky's site:

In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of "nanny state" policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off.

I found it on a post arguing in favor of one of Rodrik's Crolyist, pro-industrial policy posts. Irony was not intended. When I pointed it out, Sawicky nominated me for a Blogalympics Long Jump medal, apparently oblivious to the obvious.

[3] Were the 300 M inhabitants of the US divided into towns of that size (say, 6667), there would be 45,000 such towns. Using Sale's calculation of one square mile per town (admittedly, he only had 5,000 inhabitants) and a 15 square mile green belt around each town, this would require about 720,000 square miles, which he calculated to be less than one-fifth of the nation's total land and less than one-half of the area given over to cropland at that time.

[4] Actually, that's not entirely true. Rodrik himself characterizes federal policies as "targeted on a loosely-defined set of market imperfections that are rarely observed directly, implemented by bureaucrats who have little capacity to identify where the imperfections are or how large they may be, and overseen by politicians who are prone to corruption and rent-seeking by powerful groups and lobbies." So, he seems to recognize it, or perhaps he is just using arguments he has encountered but not really understood or accepted for rhetorical effect?

[5] One way of looking at this is to consider the costs to obtaining consensus and the cost of externalities arising from the decisions. A dictator has nearly zero (0) cost of reaching a decision, but the externality cost is likely to be very high. On the other hand, it would be extremely costly to obtain a 100% consensus of a large group, but there would be no externalities. Given methods of reaching a decision, like log-rolling, the externalities of the final decision may be expensive. The larger the group, the higher the cost of reaching a decision, and given Olson's observations about the ability of small, focused groups to dictate to large, dispersed groups, the cost of obtaining and the external costs grow as the group grows. This is an insanely abbreviated version of one line of analysis in The Calculus of Consent.

Risks of libertarian societies

In this article, the technomadic packratt points out a risk of living in a libertarian society. To wit, involuntary servitude could occur in a place where laws against it and police to enforce those laws do not exist. As evidence, he cites four real occurrences; one in modern Florida, the Pullman strikes, Colorado mining communities, and the Ludlow Massacre.

The Packratt's post is extremely valuable. No matter how many times these stories and especially their interpretations are refuted, they bear repeating. It shows a high level of concern by the author to make sure that truth never goes unchallenged by compelling narratives.

One of the most instructive aspects of such narratives is the author's ability to distinguish between minarchy and anarchy. By pointing out that minarchists would not have laws, least of all against fraud, kidnapping, or assault, they find that minarchists are really anarchists. Then they argue that anarchist societies would look exactly like today's society, only without a police force. In this way, they can find the result they want: that large corporations would come to dominate anarchist societies, and from there, that large corporations would dominate any libertarian society.

It would seem that an obvious retort would seem to be that both the Pullman Strike and the Ludlow massacre depended not on a private army, but on the actual army (or national guard). Another obvious retort to this might be that we have such things as existing slavery despite the fact that we do not live in either a minarchist or anarchist society. Fortunately, people like the Packratt are here to show us that such rationalizations have no place in their understanding of the debate. We should not contemplate the fact that most slaves in the US today are caught on the wrong side of immigration laws, the fear of which is used to keep them in line. Neither should we consider whether workers could raise their own armies in an anarchist society. We should definitely not accept libertarians' hackneyed argument that fraud, kidnapping, and assault would still be illegal in a minarchy, or anarchists' dubious claims that management and owners would not be able to hide behind the the liability limiting legal fiction of "the corporation". For the Packratt and his fellow travelers, the fact that those four examples of slavery were real and that private actors benefited from them is enough to confirm the possibility that a minarchist or anarchist society would be a Dickensian Dystopia. That should be enough to persuade even the most committed anti-libertarian that we are blinded by our biases.

Can you poke a hole in this argument?

Yes.

I came across this in the comments to a Scott Adams blog post. People are awed by it. The author asks people to poke holes in the argument. Everyone who references it implies that holes can't be poked in it. Usually, they are people who don't really want to poke holes in it. It's Taleb's round-trip problem: "no evidence of holes" has become "evidence of no holes".

The argument revolves around this chart:

Warming \ Action	Yes	No
False	Cost & Global Depression	8~)
True	Cost	Catastrophes - Econ - Political - Social - Environmental - Health

The hole: The upper left corner should be identical to the lower right corner, in the generalized sense it is presented.

Argument: Recall what happened during The Great Depression (and other similar experiences).

• Economic: Collapse, 25% unemployment, people selling apples and pencils, people resorting to subsistence farming. In the Soviet Union, millions died during state-imposed famines, while in China and Cambodia, people resorted to cannibalism during the massive shifts of the Great Leap Forward and the Khmer Rouge ruralization. As he correctly notes in a follow-up, the Great Depression wasn't triggered by abnormally high government spending (the rest of his comments regarding state involvement in that period strike me as naive). However, note that he changes his own rules of debate at this point: in the beginning, he was inviting us to imagine the *worst* possible outcome. Now, he's saying that we're going to compare the worst possible outcome of that which he would like to avoid (climate change) with the mildest outcome of that which he's willing to accept (unecessary expense incurred when climate change turns out to be false). Also, note the fundamental differences between something like Manhattan or Apollo project to which he is comparing, where the costs were limited to a relatively small scope within the economy, and his proposed project, which is a large scale transformation of the economy. He wants you to think this is a difference of degree when in fact it is so great as to be a difference in kind.
• Political: The Rise of Totalitarianism (Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, arguably the era prior to the Supreme Court shoot-down of Roosevelt's corporative NRA). The Vichy French were easily persuaded to become a German satellite. After the war, Eastern Europe easily gave in to the Communist model. States tend to expand during crises, and the people are only too willing to accept or even ask for it.
• Social: Germany, 1933. Italy, 1925. Read Zinn's accounts of the Depression, too. We came this close ---||--- to following the European models, especially the Communist model. Remember, his rule was to imagine the worst that could happen.
  
• Environmental: The Climate Change believers want so badly to believe that they are ready to accept anything whose justification is reducing global warming. They believe that if everyone said, "Yeah, let's do it," the outcome will be wholesale development and acceptance of sustainability laws. Unfortunately, politics is a little more complex. What we are likely to get is laws like those that subsidize ethanol production, followed by the planting of corn on marginal lands, necessarily accompanied by more petroleum-based fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and GM crops, and also accompanied by rises in the price of corn, followed by protests and socio-political unrest in places like Mexico. Further, compare the environment in the Communist Bloc to that in Western Europe: despite absolute state control, indeed because of it, they were far more wasteful and polluting. But, you protest, the modern US is different! Go back and read the short summary of our ethanol policy. Additionally, you might look around at the number of dams created during the Depression, or consider how the REA killed the nascent wind generation industry, etc. What seemed like a good idea then has turned out to be an environmental disaster today.
  
• Health: Health and income are closely related. People living in wealthier nations are more healthy than those in poorer nations, and wealthier people in a nation are healthier than poorer people in that nation. The science teacher in the video is willing to give up a little wealth; he just doesn't know or concede that is an implied concession of health.
  

In the general terms and using his own rules, the two blocks should be equal. In more specific terms and using something a little more realistic, we will be intentionally accepting more state intervention but possibly averting a more severe environmental outcome by taking the action he prefers. The question, which rides on discount rates and probabilities, is how much of one should be accepted to avoid the other. I believe the answer cannot be calculated.

There are additional problems which lie outside his argument.

• When should we take action? The theory implicit in his argument (made more explicit in one of the follow-ups) is that if we take action now, we avoid costs later. However, that leaves aside the important point that we will have more resources in the future with which to take action: more wealth, more knowledge, more technology. Thus, action taken later may actually be less costly.
  
• What about actions that are already underway? Some of them are being taken by the state, others by private actors. What he is really demanding is drastic, collective action, taken almost exclusively by the state. He explicitly asks you to support "policies" rather than goals; it is not apparent whether he understands how drastic they need to be.
  
• What is the optimal climate? It may be slightly warmer than the current one.
  

My response to his third installment, is located here. The bottom line: yes, climate scientists seem to be largely in agreement about AGW. But his argument that we are not qualified to judge whether or not climate change is occurring disqualifies the physical scientists from making policy recommendations since those fall to social scientists.

The entire series of videos is very entertaining, I would recommend the original and second response (linked above). I especially like his emphasis on civil debate.

Talk radio

I drive a lot, and when I get bored with NPR (which I support; I have even been in the StoryCorps ... ah, "studio") I will listen to AM talk radio. That's about once or twice a week, rarely the same show, so I've heard all of these people, but not frequently. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but haven't figured out how to organize it. I am also finding myself in conflict with The Pledge. So what follows is a quasi-random set of observations to which I hold no particularly strong affinities (i.e. you could convince me I'm wrong):

• Bill O'Reilly: Very opinionated, very populist, fairly informed, sometimes contrarian, but succumbs easily to confirmation bias. I've mentioned his economic illiteracy before. I'm not sure why he has a co-host - she's worse than Ed McMahon.
  
• Michael Medved: incredible memory for political, legal, and historical fact, but condescending and occasionally uses the loaded question trick [1]. I think he gets contrary views more often than others, though they are sometimes not very bright. He also brings on contrary guests, which is very fair. I was convinced he was gay when I first started listening; I'm not convinced now that he is not.
  
• Rush Limbaugh: occasionally funny but frequently whiny and obtuse. Too bad he hasn't learned his lesson about The War on (Certain People who Use Certain Kinds of) Drugs. The bumper commercials and satire are great and we need a left-wing version of them, but once a month is enough to catch up on the latest satires. His concept of the "drive-by media" is accurate; that should be resonant with everyone, no matter what part of the political space you occupy. I used to like Walter Williams' guest host spots, but he seems to cover the same material every time.
  
• Sean Hannity: maddeningly single-minded. I would totally believe that he gets a talking points memo every morning. Uses the loaded question trick almost exclusively when he has a caller who disagrees. I do a great impression of him.
  
• Dr. Laura: My father used to apologize to the radio if he accidentally let her on. I don't understand why anyone would subject themselves to the humiliation of calling in. "Hi, Dr. Laura, I'm a lesbian who is living with both my lover and the father of my child. They don't seem to be getting along, and I'm afraid my son is caught in the middle, so I was wondering: should I ask my mom to move in with us so she can help keep the peace while I run my Teenangel Tattoo and Tanning business?"
• Jim Villanucci: A local in Albuquerque, I think he's on after Rush and therefore instead of Hannity (thank God). Interesting, entertaining, sometimes very contrarian.
  
• Dr. Dean Edell: Although he has that "I'm a highly trained doctor, so you're probably not going to understand this huh-huh-huh" attitude, he is generally very good. The entertainment value, though, is mostly in the things that people call in with and make you think, "yeah, what is the deal with that?!"
  
• Michael Savage: Completely unpredictable. I used to think badly of him, now I think he's laugh-out-loud funny (not always intended on his part). One day he may be defending Bush as the defender of borders, language, and culture against the "depraved commies" who defend the Islamonazis, the next day he may be ripping him as the Amnesty President and then go off and listen to some rockabilly music or talk about birds in the park. If Hillary is elected, I plan to buy a radio, tune it to Savage, turn it up, and break the dials off so I can answer the koan, "What does a supernova sound like?"
  
• Michael Reagan: Just some guy, really. Not entertaining at all.
  
• Mark Levin: The Worst One. Like Sean Hannity but louder and without the wit and charisma. I do a great impression of him.
  
• Alan Colmes: Could be better, but he seems to be playing beneath himself. Even when he's winning the argument, sometimes he goes to the loaded question almost gratuitously.
• Laura Ingraham: Okay, but too populist and pandering.
  
• Al Franken: Way below his potential. It would be worthwhile to let him get ripped and then go on the air just to see how it went. I think that he's too close to his subject, and he tends to think that his best subjectivity passes for objectivity. Maybe he peaked with Stuart Smalley.
• Rusty Humphries: Why?
• Coast to Coast: Are they serious? They certainly sound that way.
  

[1] The loaded trick question works extremely well in the talk format. It works like this: the caller asks the host a question about something he has been pontificating on, to which the host responds by asking a related but heavily loaded question. For example, an exchange might go like this:

Caller: Hi X, long time listener and first time caller.
Host: Thanks for calling.
Caller: I've been listening to you and I guess I disagree with your stance on GitMo. I mean, we're Americans and the rest of the world looks up to us and expects us to do the right thing, but this just doesn't seem right. How can you support freedom and the right to a fair tri...
Host: Oh, I see where your coming from. Well, answer this, my left wing friend, if you could save a million people by torturing a terrorist, wouldn't you do it? I mean [at this point, the host reiterates what he has been saying for 45 seconds while the caller is turned down] so wouldn't you torture a terrorist to prevent a nuke from going off in downtown New York?
Caller: ... but that's ...
Host: I see, so you won't answer the question? [at this point, the host reiterates what he has been saying for 45 seconds while the caller is turned down] so wouldn't you torture a terrorist to prevent a nuke from going off in downtown New York?
Caller: ... okay, I'll answer your question, but first you answer ...
Host: Oh, no, we're not going to play that game, my friend. You answer my question first. Why won't you answer?
Caller: ... but it's a loaded ...
Host: C'mon, what's it going to be, 4 million innocent children or the terrorist's "right" to a trial? What about the rights of 4 million children?
Caller: ... but tortured people just tell you what you want to hear and how do we know he's really a terrorist ...
Host: These points are lib'ral straw men, but just to humor you and to show you how fair I am, I'll address your questions, but I want you to stop ducking mine. Let's say that I get the world's most accomplished interrogator and we definitely know the guys a terrorist. Now what's it going to be - 4 million innocent little virgins or an islamofascist with a nuke?
Caller: Okay, fine, if you're going to load the dice like that ...
Host: Just like I thought, you're not going to answer the question, thanks for calling, let's go to a break.

I'll generally listen to someone who is reasonable even if I disagree with them because I might learn something. The loaded question trick is so maddening and transparent that I turn off right away when it starts. At least NPR is a little more nuanced in overlaying their frames on the news; maybe I'll do something similar on those shows one day (Fresh Air, Car Talk, etc.).

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome

It was such a good book title, I had to use it as a post title (link).

Although this isn't what I would normally consider "my" kind of book, I'm glad I picked it up. Mainly, the initial appeal was that I went to high school with the author, though I can't claim to have known her well.

The book has a certain amount of resonance with me, having just completed Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Times, a book about farmers in the Dust Bowl. Diana's [ahem] Dr. Davis' thesis in RtGoR is that the French colonists created a narrative in which Algeria was once a vast green sea of forests and grain, but that the nomads (read: barbaric Arabs) had ruined it with their primitive farming and especially herding methods. This "declensionist narrative" was used to justify the obvious outcome: the French were morally obligated to re-civilise Algeria and restore the region to its former glory.

The trouble was that it wasn't true.

There were three topics in the book that intrigued me. The first was the discussion of various types of property recognized by the indigenous Algerians, including communal property used to rotate grazing animals to allow for leaving some land fallow. The second was the interrelationship between deforestation and dessicationist [1] theories that instructed 19th century environmentalism and their foundation in Christian mythology. The third was the idea of environmentalism as social control.

The first is interesting to me as an example of alternative social organization. Davis describes briefly the concepts of melk, achaba, habous, and arsh [2]. The first is private property, the second is a "pasture contract" exchanging grazing rights for labor, and the third is land reserved for religious insttitutions. The fourth, the idea of communal property (mostly pasture but some cultivation) is curious: if the system is stable, it challenges my notions of the sustainability of commons found in narratives such as this description of the pilgrims' attempts to establish communal agriculture. Perhaps the tragedy is not as inevitable as Hardin would have us believe. Under some circumstances -- perhaps only those of small, nomadic, strictly religious tribes -- communal property may be sustainable and productive.

The second theme is interesting to me because of an embarrassing moment I suffered shortly after university. I had a friend there who was into environmental issues, and he preached that North America had once been entirely covered in forest [3]. I remember the look of bemused disbelief when I professed this at work one day, and realized how silly it was. It is one of the most striking memories I have about how I had acquired what I thought was knowledge, only to discover that it was pseudo-knowledge I had bought hook, line, and sinker based on no more than the strength of conviction of the source. On another occasion, I ran into a co-worker who believed that England had recently been completely barren of forests, the mirror image of my error. It would have been awfully difficult to build half-timbered houses, hide in the Sherwood forest, build pipes out of wood [4], build the world's most fearsome navy in the 19th century, or any number of other things if there were no trees on the island.

Indeed, both ideas are born of the same myth, the idea that the world was once covered in forests (Eden), but since man's fall from grace, the forest has gradually given way to hot deserts (reminiscent of what biblical location?). Because they contribute to this decline through their use of fire as an agricultural tool, natives (Algerians, North American Indians) must be deprived of their traditional ways of life and, not incidentally, of their property. Call them reservations, cantonments, or concentration camps, nomadic peoples must be controlled, "attached" to the land, and turned into farmers if possible and imprisoned if not. In Algeria, they also forced them to use money by forcing them to pay taxes in cash rather than in kind. Having deprived them of their traditional, nomadic, pastoral ways, and having also forced them out of barter and into the cash system, many had no choice but to enter the workforce as a laborer for the new French masters. That is my synopsis of Davis' thesis on environmentalism as social control; I related similar arguments earlier under this post.

The parallels between those conservation-as-state-expansion efforts and the intent of modern Global Warming enthusiasts are too obvious to overlook. Of course environmentalism is about social control. Although there are thoughtful believers who would like to see genuine threats to our future existence mitigated, there are others who latch onto any fad as a means of advancing state power. Sometimes called "watermelons" -- Green on the outside, Red on the inside -- such people move from one cause to another in hopes of finding the magic lever for bringing about a technocratic utopia. It seems to escape their notice that their causes are frequently the cover story for the simultaneous expansion of state-capitalism (which Davis rightly identifies by its simpler name, capitalism). Algeria went from a land of traditional herding and farming to a colony of small farmers to a corporation-dominated extension of France. Likewise, the American Plains transitioned from the land of the buffalo to a land of small land-grant farmers to ADM's central production facility. Both changes happened under cover of conservationist narratives - as it happens, those providing moral cover with a Christian-fall-from-Eden myth were almost literally Baptists to the corporate-colonial Bootleggers.

This revisionist history seems to me to be a great companion to recent responses to Jared Diamond's version of the Rapa Nui myth. Diamond claimed that the decline of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was due to stupid and greedy human tendencies to destroy their own environment. In his version, they cut down all of their trees in a fit of one-upsmanship, with devastating consequences. The revisionists are finding two alternatives to the story: one is that rats caused the deforestation and that there was no long period of stability followed by collapse. Of course, the rats probably arrived at the island with the natives, but at least the humans intentional actions are off the hook. A second version (pdf) points out that the first Europeans verified trees on the island, were greeted by natives bearing palm leaves, and saw natives living in palm-thatched huts. Shortly after their arrival, the trees disappeared and the natives went into decline; Benny Peiser argues that this was no coincidence. His version, sometimes called The Rape of Rapa Nui, is a direct, though compressed, version of the Algerian story.




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[1] Despite Dr. Davis' dissection of the dessicationist theory, I am under the impression that recent research has indeed shown a relationship between deforestation in the Amazon and decreasing rainfall. Without pulling up lots of research and trying to figure out which findings are most reliable, all I can do is point out that (a) her reference was old (though she cited more recent research on the dessicationist narrative, I think the only physical science paper cited in refutation of the dessicationist theory was from 1982), and (b) her argument still seems correct. That is, I don't believe that the nomads destroyed so much vegetation that they created the Sahara; it seems rather more likely that they adapted to an existing fact. In a future edition, I would like to see her present and then answer stronger versions of the dessicationist theory.

[2] She also notes beylick and mokhzen, properties of the Ottoman state, and muwat, unproductive land that could be cleared, cultivated, and claimed.

[3] It's still a tempting myth given misleading maps like these - what does "virgin" mean? A recent National Geographic described in detail the number of modifications the natives had been making to their environment before the European arrival. The map creators are either unaware of natives' use of fire or unconcerned by it. The latter is consistent with the Noble Savage myth. It is perhaps notable that Rousseau was a popularizer of the myth, and Frenchmen would have been familiar with it even as they conquered the savages in Algeria. In fact, could this explain why they favored the sedate Berbers over the nomadic Arabs?

[4] This is a reference to something I recall reading in T. S. Ashton in which the poor were supposedly confined to neighborhoods where greedy developers couldn't even be bothered to use iron pipe. Ashton found that developers' greed wasn't the problem. It seemed that the neighborhoods in question had been built in the early 19th century, when England was busy fighting someone named Bonaparte. Iron was scarce and expensive, so the inhabitant-builders used wood for their own sewer pipes.

[5] As I noted in the review of Egan's book, Roosevelt's pet conservation method was to introduce forests to the Plains. Not only did that not work, but it made things worse as the trees soaked up what little groundwater there was. The Algerian experience was similar: in the 1870s, Francois Trottier tried to introduce eucalyptus trees throughout the country. The trees interfered with natural springs and soon enough they were removed and forgotten. The first repetition is tragedy, the second is farce.