Dysfunctional Hierarchies

I just read a blog posted by an Army Sgt. about, among other things, the unseriousness of soldiers receiving promotions. I believe that good organizations have a natural tendency to degenerate over time, and this tendency must be resisted strenuously. Good organizations come about through a confluence of good luck and exceptional individuals with strong motivation. Neither will last very long. For that reason, the most important function of an ongoing organization is the recruitment and promotion of those people who will best preserve and extend the aspects of the organization that make it "good". Personnel evaluation is the most difficult and most easily corrupted aspect of that function. Disinformation and performance theater will gradually overcome integrity and actual performance. And once inappropriate assignments are made, the next cycle will be even more vulnerable to suboptimal choices.

The cure for this process involves a dedication to two principles. 1) Trust but verify. 2) Cultivate diversity.

Reality checking is neglected for many reasons, but mostly for its labor saving aspects. You need to budget a certain percentage of your effort to proving yourself wrong, to testing the obvious. Every man a scientist! Most importantly, you should test whatever you are most emotionally invested in. I have talked about the need for red-teaming before, and it applies in this context.

So what do I mean by diversity? I'm talking about different points of view, different methods of processing information. People who agree with you should make you uncomfortable. They are encouraging your natural tendency toward assuming too much, and not adding anything valuable. Sometimes diversity of thought follows diversity of background and demographic classification. Not necessarily though. And no matter what the organizational taboos are against it, you have to find out what people think depending on their hierarchical position. When it comes to personnel evaluation, that means you have to determine what the peers and subordinates of the individual have to say on the subject.

In politics, this natural degeneration of organizations tends toward the extreme. Personnel evaluation in the political world is dysfunctional, almost counter-productive. I've often thought that we would have a better Congress if our representatives were chosen at random from a telephone directory. Is that too harsh? Yes, it is. There are many well meaning individuals who have been honestly elected, but they are essentially helpless to accomplish anything. The sea of influence, horse-trading and gamesmanship that they swim in controls their every motion. It's a problem. But it's a problem we must solve if we expect to prosper.

Shortfall

The economy shows, according to various ostensibly independent news reports, some signs of recovery. New unemployment claims are down. That doesn't mean that anyone has got a new job yet; it just means that though the disaster is larger each week, the rate of increase of the disaster has subsided somewhat. One note that is usually struck -- we no longer seem to be in free-fall. I'm inclined to agree. We are a little more knowledgeable than we were in FDR's day, but we aren't doing much better on the political score.

The fiscal conservatives, among whom I usually reside, have started to claim that this recovery is proof that we didn't need to spend so much money. On the contrary, my sensible friends, think about it this way. The economy is underperforming by about $1T per annum. We are spending about $0.4T this year and next year to purchase this reserve capacity. The difference of $0.6T is the part that will be translated into joblessness and various other forms of human suffering.

In February, Media Matters identified a few economists who agreed that the stimulus was too small -- too small by far. I have followed up to see whether they still seem to feel that way. Yes they seem to. Here are some links for those listed.

Eileen Appelbaum - visiting professor at Rutgers, New Brunswick
Dean Baker - Center for Economic and Policy Research
J. Bradford DeLong - professor at UC Berkeley, visiting scholar SF Federal Reserve
James K. Galbraith - Levi Institute, Bard College
Paul Krugman - Princeton and NYTimes (China speech here)
Joseph Stiglitz - Nobel Laureate
Mark Zandi - Moody's ( here, and here as well)

Lords of the Lemmings

Why the Green Program is Hypocritical and Doomed to Frustration

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have a new article in The New Republic called The Green Bubble comparing the waxing and collapsing of environmental sentiment, not coincidentally, to the labored breathing of the ailing business cycle. They point out than in actuality we have done nothing of significance to address the Global Warming problem, and that we are not likely to. All of our actions for the environment are symbolic, more addressed to guilt management than anything else. Several times since Earth Day was started, the American people have gotten all worked up about the issue, only to change their minds when the economy shifted.

The authors point out the hypocrisy of green-strutting (my word), posing their green poses like prairie partridges on the lek, as if their actions were significant. CFLs and Priuses are not going to do the job. Not when the systems that drive our daily lives burn on unchanged. Nobody is going to make significant sacrifices. Understand that. Nobody is really prepared to return to the idyllic pre-industrial life, where life was so noble ... as well as nasty, brutish and short.

Green philosophy would have the aspirations of the world's impoverished billions redirected into a Utopian myth. These people are not that dumb. Chinese people want to drive cars. Indonesians want air conditioners. Nobody really wants to work the fields by hand. They want what we have, and now we're telling them that they can't have it ... just when hope finally begins to seem justified. Good luck with that.

Cap and trade appears to be off the table. All suggestions of a carbon tax generate massive resistance from Americans of both parties, even when it is suggested that other taxes can be reduced. Americans get angry at HOV lanes for God's sake. No Daddy is big enough to make us take our medicine. The Kyoto treaty itself has not been successful at creating CO2 reductions. Don't expect that to happen any time soon either. IMO, only the nuclear treaty that Bush negotiated with India is of sufficient scale to matter. Nothing else presently under consideration addresses the concerns of the developing nations and provides any hope of addressing environmental concerns.

Americans, in spite of the example of French success, are unwilling to encourage nuclear energy as a clean alternative. Obama is afraid to bring it up. In fact, our irrational preference for solar and wind power, both expensive and unsuitable for base energy needs, has reduced the likelihood that new nuclear will be affordable. Nuclear is a suitable base, actually more reliable than coal, since it doesn't rely on frequent deliveries. Coal untaxed is, however, the cheapest form of energy. Any preferences applied to solar and wind will come at the expense of nuclear rather than coal.

It appears, when everything is weighed up, that what we must do, we cannot do. Environmentalists lack the necessary knowledge, vision and clout, and Americans in general lack the conviction and willingness to sacrifice. Under the current civic regime, it's not going to change.

I say that when you finally see that a problem cannot be solved, you are free to solve it. You do it by backing up a few steps and including the problem within the context of a larger system. The system that we must change is our collective method for generating decisions. Democracy is effective only in a contributory context, where the best of our thinking is collected and distributed. We are, today, being tyrannized by the Least Common Denominator.

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Links:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/mf_burning

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6cd5578a-85ab-4627-b793-680ea8d44c7f

http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2007/05/al_gores_soluti.html?cid=69025842#comment-69025842

http://soundofthemushroom.blogspot.com/2009/03/stardrive.html

http://current.com/items/89963405_bushs-india-triumph.htm

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Chronology-of-the-Indo-US-nuclear-deal/articleshow/3575350.cms

http://www.hindu.com/2009/05/07/stories/2009050755551000.htm

http://soundofthemushroom.blogspot.com/2006/07/skeptics-discuss-wind-and-nuclear.html

Beyond the Labor Arms Race

So how is my idea different? What does it contribute? It looks just like a regular employees' union, don't you think? Who needs more unions?

Now, that in itself is going to turn off about half of you. People who know business owners tend to sympathize. I guess that's where my sympathies are as well. I worked in a union shop long ago, run by the Teamsters. I ran afoul of them for various reasons, and their first impulse was to threaten me. They also took far more of my monthly paycheck than could be justified by any reasonable person. What could they be doing with all that money? Not only that, they kept my wages low. I knew that people were getting literally three times what I was earning across the river for the same exact job. (If I'd had any brains at the time, I would have taken one of those jobs and bought a car with the extra money.) Are you getting the picture yet? The union was in bed with management. Somebody was getting paid to run a charade union, and shop stewards were being paid to keep people in line. Did I know this at the time? I knew that Rock and Roll is Here to Stay ... and not much else.

How can we characterize such an organization? It was top-down, recruitment driven, parasitic, authoritarian, and probably counter-productive. The company went out of business a few years later. I sometimes wonder what happened to those shop stewards. Companies that specialize in recruiting stupid people and keeping them stupid are not exactly in touch with their Model Modern Business Practices.

I am also opposed to card-check, but not without reservations. We've all heard stories of companies that have been raked over by unions, and we've all heard of workers that have been raked over by management. Privately owned companies will do just about anything to stop a union from forming. They own the business. They don't want outsiders to tell them what to do. It's understandable. I've heard of cases where the owners closed down the company, fired everyone, sold the inventory at a loss and left the state – all rather than accept union representation. People can be very bull-headed – or very principled, depending on your point of view.

Unfortunately, good owners and nasty, rotten no-good owners that really need union supervision all have the same response. I've had managers that qualified for sainthood and others that smelled of brimstone. I was reasonably suspicious that one VP, on that Teamsters job, was actually a Nazi, and not just because of the accent. None of them, the good, bad or ugly, would tolerate real unions.

The tactics that Management uses to discourage unionization are famously deceitful and cruel. So union people – honest union people that is – often come to the conclusion that you have to fight fire with fire. And they are often fired up with righteous wrath, justifiably if you ask me. In those days I knew a real Red communist. He had the zeal, the rage and the knowledge, and remarkable courage. He couldn't get very far with that crowd of workers, or with me either, but he had our respect. He didn't need no stinkin' card-check, though. What he needed was a cultural shift that wasn't going to happen.

In today's business environment, people just accept union and management because they have to. Nobody really likes either. Yet, here I am trying to sell you on my voters' union approach to the world. So what's the difference? What makes me think that it won't turn into some top-down, parasitic something or other?

The organization I'm proposing is home-grown. Recruitment is anathema. You click with your friends. You inspect them for the trust that you share. The only objective is to grow an information entity, starting with a tendril of reliability spread outward into the unknown soil of modern life. It is a worthy effort in itself. Representation is organic, not functional or confrontational. We are simply trying to get things straight here. Anonymity is helpful to keep out the control freaks and the spies and the zealots. We don't need to be manipulated and tricked into our choices. We will make up our minds according to the channels of trust that we construct. It's more of a defense against disinformation and arm-twisting than some power-seeking entity. I want it to become part of life, not part of the job, and I want it to be fun.

Membership is not exclusive to specified groups. Everyone is invited in, union and management if you honestly trust one another, but invited not as agents, only as friends. The idea is to start with trust and build on it, testing and strengthening it. In time we will grow a tree of trust. Things of importance can flow though the body of that tree without arousing animosity or suspicion, without causing polarization.

I'm not pushing mysticism. I'm proposing a calculated methodology conjoined with a shared philosophy, a social algorithm for calibrated connection.

Unions are like the Blob, growing constantly larger by spreading out and moving into new territories, engulfing and absorbing whatever organized relationships already exist. Only the Blob chooses. Well the Blob hasn't been very successful lately because the victims know how to defend themselves. And the Blob is not very happy about it. Voter's unions – I don't really know what to call them yet – are more like Tinker Toy sets, where the toys construct themselves and piece themselves into progressively larger groups, according to fixed rules of node and branch.

Well, OK. But what makes me think it will not degenerate into the Teamsters, or the Pinkertons for that matter? Americans have had nightmares about cabals and secret societies. We don't like to be told what to do. We don't like to defer to others. So how can I square the organization I've described with the individualism of America. I don't know yet, but I've been trying to convey my vision in a convincing way for a couple of years now, a vision still under development, I'm afraid. If you have any suggestions, I'll be glad to entertain them.

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The glimpse of an unintended motion,
The shake of a head, an unexpected shift of the eyes,
Teaches more in a flash than you'll learn
From eight patient hours of listening to lies.

Optimal Mesh

The Swine Flu is spreading very efficiently. It seems like modern society has the ideal configuration for spreading it. So, just as a thought experiment, what would be the ideal organization for spreading the flu? It would not be, I think, like our goods distribution system.

Let's say the flu began with a little rubber duck made in Shanghai. After getting punched out of the mold, it would tumble along the conveyor belt infecting other rubber ducks along the way and get dumped in a box, mostly with those other rubber ducks already infected. Who knows, maybe someone, a Chinese woman, would do some inspection and touch-up. Would she be wearing gloves? Maybe she'll paint on cute little eyes and eyelashes and lick the tip of the brush. I've seen people do that. But our little duck and its friends would end up in a box pretty quickly. The box would be sealed, placed in a pallet with other boxes of rubber ducks, containerized, stacked for weeks in some ship and then in higher stacks at the port in Seattle, then finally shipped to Toys-R-Us in Peoria, IL. From the truck to the shelf is a pretty efficient process these days, but someone in Peoria would have to handle these ducks. Children might play with the ducks. The customer would pick one up and place it in a cart. The cashier would scan it and bag it. And it would find a nice home. Direct customer shipments might be neater, but somebody will still be exposed.

So basically, there would be two growing nodes of infection due to transportation of goods, the one in Peoria and at the origin in Shanghai. Our global system for the distribution of goods is designed to minimize handling and reduce unnecessary dispersion. The rubber duck would have very few opportunities to infect anyone. More importantly, the rubber duck would never move very far again.

Transportation of people is an entirely different thing. Everybody drives to work to be with others where they shake hands, kiss cheeks, pick up the wrong cup, cough on the bathroom fixtures. Then they come home -- where they lick their fingers to wipe bits of jelly and chocolate off of smiling faces. The kids get shipped to school where they have even more interesting ways of uploading their microbial history. The teachers collect assorted papers and projects that have little smudges and sticky spots. Then they take the subway home, and drive to conferences or night school in the next town over. The professors mingle with their students after class, responding to questions by laughing, scratching their heads in thought, borrowing pens perhaps to sign papers. Then they fly to San Diego for their conferences.

I've heard it said that every drop of water we drink has been excreted by a thousand dinosaurs. I think about that whenever I'm breathing the air on an airplane, and possibly sitting next to a large individual. Sometimes when I come up the ramp and pass through the waiting area, there's a new crowd waiting to get on the same plane. Sometimes they crowd around, making it difficult to exit the area. There's a lot of jostling. They seem eager to be on their way. Maybe they're going to Shanghai. Maybe they'll bring some toys home for their kids.

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So how would I maximize the spread of the flu? For a specific pathogen, I think it depends on the mode of transmission. For a virus that requires contact, I think the best environment is the happy suburban shuffle, where kids are carpooled to preschool in the morning, playdates and playgrounds in the afternoon, and then maybe group Suzuki lessons, with swimming on the weekends. Maybe the perfect group size is five or ten.

But for flu, it seems like jumbo jets and stadiums can't be beat. If the guy selling hotdogs is coughing on his customers, things can spread pretty quickly. Bowl games bring people from all over and drunks don't cover their coughs either. The Olympics seems like a potential Perfect Storm of infection. Thousands of sports fans, young and friendly people for the most part, will be meeting and mixing with others from every three-letter national entity that can carry a flag around an oval track. These folks will all go home on airplanes and share their experiences, visiting perhaps, all the schools and churches and arenas in a thousand scattered Peorias.

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Two related questions occur to me: If we organize our networks to optimize the speed of an epidemic, does that have any bearing on the likely severity of the cases? And second, does the pyramidal structure of my proposed league of voter unions strike you as being in itself a pretty good vehicle for disease transmission?

No Immunity for This Disease

The Swine Flu is probably not something to panic over, but here's my problem. There is an asteroid out there with our name on it. There is a supervolcano ready to blow. And there is a potential pandemic that could destroy Civilization. So what are we doing about it? Do we even care?

If humanity were able to speak for itself, if we were able to produce a coordinated response to challenges, to take an enforceable decision and to actually protect ourselves, what would we be doing now?

Oh, I know this is crazy, but here's my take. One long term policy: We should not allow the people of the planet to integrate into a single unified global continuity. We can't afford, IMO, to be aligned into a single vulnerable monoculture. You can see what happened to our unified financial community. The "global meltdown" is, however, a risk we are going to be facing continuously from now on. In the past, economic problems in one place could be partially ameliorated by success in other places. Not so any more. In a sensible world, this would at least be a topic of serious conversation. The key phrase would be: "What are we going to do about it?" And the implication would be that a solution was naturally forthcoming.

One theory about the success of European society, my reading of Jared Diamond actually, is that there were multitudes of semi-independent societies. The geography of Europe protected them from each other for a while and allowed them to develop in isolation. These societies were able to evolve, make mistakes, make discoveries, lose or win. Oh, they copied each other, no doubt about it. Everybody had to have a cathedral and a clock tower, but they were also different from one another. They had variation and, as a consequence, there was natural selection going on. Some groups were subsumed by others, and then promptly separated again. People didn't move more than a few miles in their lifetimes, but their societies ebbed and flowed. And their little societies lived or died based on the hereditary benefits of their meme system. OK, they started from a very low place, but they developed systems that were robust, resilient and effective. Unlike China, Europe was memetically unfragile. Unlike America, Europe was epidemiologically unfragile. (But that was another story, one that we shouldn't like to repeat.)

Right now, the US has a version of the Swine Flu that is relatively mild. If it turns out to be something more than a statistical fluke, Mexico may well have a dangerous strain. So what should we do about it. I'm reading a lot of nonsense that it's "too late" to close the borders. I don't think so at all. If I were in charge ... I know this is even crazier ... I would be doing my best to be sure that everyone were exposed to the American strain of the virus as soon as possible ... before the Mexican strain gets here and before the American strain mutates into something more virulent and destructive. There's no vaccine in the works, but there is the next best thing -- a mild version of the disease.

This is the kind of counter-intuitive decision that we are incapable of thinking about now. That's why we need to apply conscious changes to our own society. We need to be capable of marshaling our thoughts. We need to recognize that we are a product of evolution, understand the mechanics of evolution on all its levels, and apply its deepest lessons. Once again, that is where I see my double pyramid system fitting in.

I'm not saying that my rather radical approach to the Swine Flu is the best one, or even a good one. I don't really know. Better minds than mine should be thinking about it. All I'm saying is that we are presently incapable of processing the idea. If, however, we could determine that it was the most beneficial course of action, would we be able to grab it close, to own it, and make it happen? I don't think so. I think, as we are now, we would rather accept our death with "dignity", meaning without too much thought.

Iraqi Civilian Mortality

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an analysis of mortality among Iraqi civilians during the 5 year period from the inception of the war until March, 2008. It's fascinating. It's not quite a refutation of the Lancet/Hopkins study that talked about 600,000 "excess" deaths, but it is certainly an example of a non-hysterical approach to the subject.

The detailed data table give a breakdown of deaths by cause as well as children vs. adults, male vs. female. The most telling number is the high percentage of "executions" (33) and "executions with torture" (10). Various other nastiness from AIF (anti-Iraqi forces) accounts for an additional third, leaving at most a third of the 60,000 total civilian deaths at the doorstep of coalition forces.

I have argued against the inflated estimates of the Hopkins study. These estimates are much more convincing, but just to be clear, they represent a low-end figure.