David Brooks' "The Social Animal"

I enjoyed this book, just as I enjoyed David Brooks' earlier book Bobos in Paradise. But now that I know him better, I struggled with this book more than with the earlier book. I find Brooks' conservatism bothers me. In this book he attacks liberals and libertarians and put forth a kind of conservative agenda that just doesn't ring true for me. The problem is that David Brooks has lived his life among the top 10% of society so this book, which claims to have a main character, Erica, up from the bottom of society who gets ahead in the best traditions of Horatio Alger.

The book follows a man and woman from childhood, through marriage, to death to provide the platform for Brooks to present his social views and what he considers to be the best of "brain research". I have no complaint about the style of using fictional characters to make social observation. He does that well. I enjoyed the storyline. But I just don't buy his "science" and I don't care for his social views.

He holds that modern America has gone off the rails for over 50 years by pushing "freedom" and not looking to "social obligation and social relationships". I'm sympathetic, but ultimately don't buy the argument. I'm more than happy to read criticisms of libertarianism, the dominant right wing ideology of Brooks entire adult life and to which he signed up loyally until sometime late in George Bush's presidency. I came of age in the 60s generation so I'm still quite sympathetic to the ideals of freedom and self actualization that came out of the 1960s.

I understand Brooks' unhappiness with the seedier side of 1960s idealism turned sour. He sees it as "statism" and an attack on the institutions of family, church, and state have created dysfunctional families. I would disagree and say that while state paternalism was dysfunctional (the misguided urban renewal that destroyed communities with sterile Bauhaus functionalist cold concrete high rise "housing" like Chicago's Cabrini-Green). But I view Brooks' romanticization of kind of throwback Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Brooks endows relationships and institutions of the past with more glory than they deserve. He has a Father Knows Best view of perfectly harmonious families before the dissolution of marriage once divorce became easier. Similarly he has a sepia-toned view of institutions which for most of the poor were in fact callous institutions that offered no real help to the dispossessed and down-trodden. He seems to think that people can simply will themselves into a better world in a wonderfully "upwardly mobile" America. The truth is that after 40 years of rampant right wing politics, the US has less social mobility than Europe.

Here are a few snippets to give a flavour of the book. First his attack on rationalist reductionist science in favour a gauzy everything-is-connected-and-complicated view of the world:

Rationalism gained enormous prestige during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it does contain certain limitations and biases. This mode of thought is reductionist; it breaks problems into discrete parts and is blind to emergent systems. This mode, as Guy Claxon observes in his book The Wayward Mind, values explanation over observation. More time is spent solving the problem than taking in the scene. It is purposeful rather than playful. It values the sort of knowledge that can be put into words and numbers over the sort of knowledge that cannot. It seeks rules and principles that can be applied across contexts, and undervalues the importance of specific contexts.

Moreover, the rationalist method was founded upon a series of assumptions. It assumes that social scientists can look at society objectively from the outside, purged of passions and unconscious biases.

It assumes that reasoning can be fully or at least mostly under conscious control.

It assumes that reason is more powerful than and separable from emotion and appetite.

It assumes that perception is a clear lens, giving the viewer a straightforward and reliable view of the world.

It assumes that human action conforms to laws that are akin to the laws of physics, if we can only understand what they are. A company, a nation, a universe -- these are all great machines, operated through immutable patterns of cause and effect. Natural sciences are the model that the behavioral sciences should replicate.

Eventually, rationalism produced its own form of extremism. The scientific revolution led to scientism.

This of course is a completely distorted view. Science isn't "rationalism". Science does build on reason, but it is a community effort that achieves objectivity by relying on the refinement of replicable experiments and a critical community who collaborate to refine thought and experiment into theory that guides further thought and experiment. There is no need to bring in passion, emotion, appetite, etc. Those don't and won't help you build a useful scientific theory.

Even Brooks' rhapsody about emergent systems is misguided because the scientific method is perfectly able to explore and theorize about emergent behaviour. You don't need to get swept up in a romantic anti-rationalist fever to appreciate complexity. Traditional science has been busy for half a century developing theories of complexity and chaotic system, and of emergent phenomena without Brooks telling them how misguided they are in ignoring the unconscious and emotions.

Brooks is right in his attack on the social scientists who have tried too hard to develop a "hard" science. His attack on economics are perfectly correct:

This scientism has expressed itself most powerfully, over the last fifty years years, in the field of economics. Economics did not start out as a purely rationalist enterprise. Adam Smith believed that human beings are driven by moral sentiments and their desire to seek and be worthy of the admiration of others. Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek expressed themselves through words not formulas. They stressed that economic activity was conducted amidst pervasive uncertainty. Actions are guided by imagination as well as reason. People can experience discontinuous paradigm shifts, suddenly seeing the same situation in radically different ways. John Maynard Keynes argued that economics is a moral science and reality could not be captured in universal laws calculable by mathematics. Economics, he wrote, "deals with introspection and with values... it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One had to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogeneous."

But over the course of the twentieth century, the rationalist spirit came to dominate economics. Physicists and other hard scientists were achieving great things, and social scientists sought to match their rigor and prestige. The influential economist Irving Fisher wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of a physicist, and later helped build a machine with levers and pumps to illustrate how an economy works. Paul Samuelson applied the mathematical principles of thermodynamics to economics. On the finance side, Emanuel Derman was a physicist who became a financier and played a central role in developing the models for derivatives.

While valuable tools for understanding economic behavior, mathematical models were also like lenses that filtered out certain aspects of human nature. They depended on the notion that people are basically regular and predictable. They assume, as George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller have written, "that variations in individual feelings, impressions and passions do not matter in the aggregate and their economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government actions."

Within a very short time economists were emphasizing monetary motivations to the exclusion of others. Homo Economicus was separated from Homo Sociologus, Homo Psychologicus, Homo Ethicus, and Homo Romanticus. You ended up with a stick figure of human nature.

I wouldn't put it the way Brooks has. Economics ran off the rails because it fell in love with mathematics and modeling. There is nothing wrong with these tools, but when you allow them to seduce you into assumptions and simplification which fundamentally change your subject of study -- from "man" to "homo economicus" -- then you have problems. But this isn't caused by "scientism". This is simply a community of researchers who fell in love with a theory and its simplifications and got stuck in a rut. Physics and chemistry similarly had periods where they made similar misguided assumptions and strayed into wrong-headed theories.

You can use mathematics and model things that are at heart unpredictable. That is precisely the situation with quantum physics! That people have emotions and are unpredictable doesn't mean economics is impossible. It just means that simplistic homo economicus style theories are inadequate. Brooks gets it all wrong when he claims that "mathematical models filter out aspects of human nature". The math doesn't do that. Math is simply a tool. It is the theorist using the math that does that. Brooks has profoundly misunderstood the nature of science, math, modeling, and theory building.

Finally, here is a taste of his thesis that "freedom" of the 1960s hippies and the 1980s libertarians ran America off the rails because it overlooks relationships and institutions:

...the cognitive revolution had the potential to upend these individualistic political philosophies, and the policy approaches that grew from them. The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of these relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.

Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior. They can either create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them. While the rationalist era put the utility-maximizing individual at the center of political thought, the next era... would put the health of social networks at the center of thought. One era was economo-centric. The next would be socio-centric.

I would say that Brooks is guilty of the sin of all great system builders: he oversimplifies. It is not "freedom" versus "relationships". It is both. You need a certain conservatism in society, a respect for relationship, but you also need to give people freedom to realize their potential and the ability to politically organize and overthrow oppressive institutions and outdated hierarchies.

Brooks is too conservative. His lauding "the focus of political activity is the character of the society" sounds too fascistic for my taste. I admire institutions, but they are not the goal. Times change so institutions and relationships must change. He fails to appreciate the balance that is needed between individual, family, and institutions. This is a complex dance that is ever-changing through history. We no longer live under patriarchal families. We no longer have institutionalized aristocracies. Things change.

On the whole, the book is enjoyable and does make you think. But it is too easy to simply fall into Brooks' trap and accept his argument uncritically. You need to question every page. He has insights worth digesting, but don't let Brooks become a spider who quickly rolls you up in the webbing he spins to trap you into his viewpoint.

The Gospel of Global Warming

Here is the opening bit from an excellent article by Larry Bell in Forbes magazine:

Global warming (aka “climate change”) has become a religious mantra, a call for action in a crusade against larger evils we have perpetrated against nature, a punishment for our sins. Author Michael Crichton articulated the essence of this creed in a 2003 speech in which he observed:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with Nature; there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for all of us. We are energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment, just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.


Let’s recognize that Crichton was not arguing against the importance of living more environmentally responsible lives that apply resources in sustainable ways, or against the central role that religion plays in guiding most of us, whether we subscribe to a particular orthodoxy or not. But that idyllic view of an Eden in the “good old days” before industrialization and modern technology wrecked everything warrants some objective reflection.

Realities going back a few hundred years and more reveal a different picture; one displaying widespread poverty, starvation, disease and hardship. Yes, throughout human history, people have had to adapt to climate changes – some long, some severe, and many unpredictable. They have blamed themselves for bad seasons, believing they had invoked the displeasure of the gods through a large variety of offenses.

High priests of doom told them so, extracting oaths of fealty and offerings of penance for promised interventions on their behalf. In this regard, at least for some, it seems little has changed. That penance today comes at a very high cost…our present and future national economy.

Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming a “new religion.” Its temple is built on grounds of faith rather than scientific foundations. Climate change is not Mother Nature’s retribution for human audacity to multiply and survive, any more than a tornado that destroys a particular church is God’s retribution for belonging to the “wrong” congregation” Get over it! It’s not all about us!

Climate changes and shorter-term weather events are the way nature balances itself, move heat and moisture around, and provide motivations for species to evolve. CO2 is a small but nonetheless important part of the system. Without it life would not exist at all. No polar bears, no penguins, no coral reefs – and certainly no rain forests that directly breathe in lots of the stuff. Don’t call it “pollution.” At least show it a little respect!

Global warming has been effectively marketed by doom-speakers because it provides really exciting visual impressions: icebergs calving, polar bears exhausted from swimming, and such. Endless “authorities’ will back up these images with scary prophesies regarding just how bad things are likely to get based upon speculative theories and unproven computer models offered as articles of faith.

The rest of the article is filled with interesting bits. Go read the whole article.

Handy Guide to CO2

Luboš Motl has a post on his blog The Reference Frame where he notes the range of interesting CO2 concentrations:

It may be useful to summarize some important values of the CO2 concentration:

• 150 ppm - the minimum concentration below which many plants may face problems to run photosynthesis and stop growing


• 180 ppm - the concentration during ice ages


• 280 ppm - the concentration during interglacials, i.e. also the pre-industrial concentration around 1750


• 391 ppm - the concentration today


• 500 ppm - the concentration around 2060-2070 (unlikely that before 2050 as they claim)


• 560 ppm - the concentration around 2080-2110 (the "doubled CO2" relatively to the pre-industrial values) relevant for the calculations of climate sensitivity)


• 700 ppm - the concentration in an average living room


• 900 ppm - concentration in an average kitchen


• 1,270 ppm - the concentration used to double the growth of Cowpea in a famous video


• 4,500 ppm - the concentration 400 million years ago; see other values in geological epochs


• 10,000 ppm - sensitive people start to feel weaker


• 40,000 ppm - the concentration of CO2 in the air we breath out


• 50,000 ppm - toxic levels at which the animals like us get weaker in hours; the value is 5 percent of the volume

The warming induced by the increase from 391 ppm to 500 ppm is smaller (by about 20%) - because of the logarithmic law - than the warming by the same 109 ppm between 282 ppm and 391 ppm which was about 0.7 °C and pretty much unnoticeable without accurate gadgets and contrived statistical methods.

Cultural Relativism

This observation by Robert X. Cringely is interesting:

Remember, after the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, those stories about wallets filled with money being found and turned-in to the authorities, still stuffed with cash? That’s one positive aspect of Japanese culture, but does it also make them too trusting? Sony’s loss of first 77 million customer records and now another 24.6 million suggests that may be the case. A society with low crime rates and comic book criminals screams of unsophistication, which was confirmed for me this week when I heard from a reader who is a payment system auditor. He looks inside Japanese institutions and often doesn’t like what he sees.

“For whatever reason (low crime rate, maybe?),” my reader says, “the Japanese cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that unencrypted cardholder data sitting on servers in unsecured areas and being transmitted across public networks is a bit of a risk. Every other country in Asia has grasped this easy concept, but not Japan. I have tried many times to explain why this is bad but am usually met with blank looks and checking of watches.

Many will moan about how racist this observation is and how naive and how silly it is to paint a whole people with a culturally relative paintbrush.

I agree that generalizations are "generally" false. But they are a tool. They are a useful way to slice and dice the world. And -- surprise, surprise -- most generalizations have some relevant factual basis. The danger is blind use of them and especially the use of them to justify prejudice.

I sit in Canada and love to watch the generalization that Canadians are more modest, deferential, and polite than Americans. Generally true, but not universal. It makes Canadians "nice" people. On the other hand, Americans are more honest, up front, and aggressive. Generally true, but not universal. But as a first approximation, they serve as a framework to work in and are useful.

The idea the Japanese are slow on the uptake on criminal deviance makes sense to me. If you live in a generally polite, honest, and highly socially structured society where everybody conforms then crime and the worst of criminal thinking is probably a stretch, a little hard to conceive.

I also find this bit that explains how big business thinks to be very interesting. I'm not big on business, so I am incredulous. But I do believe that Cringely has it right:

Now back to Sony. With now over 100 million accounts exposed, Sony finally sent lame duck exec Kaz Hirai out to take one for the team and apologize. Hirai offered — just as I predicted — a month of free service. What now? Lawyers will sue, Sony will fix their systems, and gamers once again will game. But while Sony may escape large economic losses from the current problems plaguing its various networks, there is one group that will continue to be rightly upset with the electronics giant — credit card companies like MasterCard and Visa.

The credit card companies have published standards for the management of customer data. These standards are a good combination of requirements and best practices. Anyone who does a significant amount of credit card-based business is required to meet these standards, which Sony appears to have ignored. Independent audits are required. To enforce the credit card company rules there are fines and the death penalty — being cut off.

Since Sony processes credit card transactions — and even offers its own credit cards as you’d know if, like me, you obsessively watch Jeopardy — they are going to be under a very uncomfortable microscope very soon.

The auditors are coming. Worst case they might tell Sony to buzz-off — to refuse Sony’s credit card charges for those 100+ million accounts. Then something really interesting stuff might happen.

Sony might not care.

If Sony is busted by Visa or Mastercard, Discover or American Express, all that probably means is they’ll have to hire a middle man — usually a big bank — to do the credit card transactions for them. Different servers in a different data center would handle the money and all would once again be right with the world, though at the cost of an extra service charge to Sony.

But what if Sony chose a different path? What if Sony cut a payment deal with, say PayPal, instead?

It’s a tempting gambit. PayPal would like nothing more than to pick up those 100 million accounts. They’d pay Sony for them, turning a loss into a gain and a loss of face into an industry transition.

PayPal has been looking for a chance to kick the credit card companies down a peg, grabbing some business.

I can almost hear the phones ringing in Tokyo….

The world is an interesting place. And business is like weeds. No matter how much you hack away at the ugly undergrowth, it finds a way to spring up again. We live in a weedy world.

A Nice Summary of the Bin Laden Demise

Here is a bit from the start of a post by Juan Cole which surveys the current situation with the killing of Osama bin Laden:

Obama and the End of Al-Qaeda

An American president, himself the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, has taken down notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden. Despite being a Christian, Obama, it seems to me, had a personal stake in destroying someone who had defamed the religion of his birth father and his relatives. His 2007-2008 presidential campaign was in part about the need of the US to refocus on the threat from al-Qaeda. He said that the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball by running off to Iraq to pursue an illegal war and neglecting the eastern front, from which the US had been attacked, and where riposting was legitimate in international law. Obama began threatening to act unilaterally against al-Qaeda in Pakistan in August 2007, during the early period of the Democratic primary.

Ironically, Obama had to admit that Pakistani intelligence helped the US develop the lead that allowed the US to close in on Bin Laden. So the operation was not unilateral, and young candidate Obama was too over-confident. The US story that the Pakistanis were not given prior notice of the operation is contradicted by the Pakistani news channel Geo, which says that Pakistani troops and plainsclothesmen helped cordon off the compound in Abbotabad. CNN is pointing out that US helicopters could not have flown so far into Pakistan from Afghanistan without tripping Pakistani radar. My guess is that the US agreed to shield the government of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari from al-Qaeda reprisals by putting out the story that the operation against Bin Laden was solely a US one. And it may be that suspect elements of the Pakistani elite, such as the Inter-Services Intelligence, were kept out the the loop because it was feared they might have ties to Bin Laden and might tip him off.

Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy, for which so many Tunisians and Egyptians yearn, as a man-made and fallible system of government, and advocated a return to the medieval Muslim caliphate (a combination of pope and emperor) instead. Only a tiny fringe of Muslims wants such a theocratic dictatorship. The masses who rose up this spring mainly spoke of “nation,” the “people,” “liberty” and “democracy,” all keywords toward which Bin Laden was utterly dismissive. The notorious terrorist turned to techniques of fear-mongering and mass murder to attain his goals in the belief that these methods were the only means by which the Secret Police States of the greater Middle East could be overturned.

This is an excellent and well-informed summary of the current situation. A reader will be amply rewarded by carefully reading the whole post.

I especially enjoy this bit of personal details that Juan Cole includes in his post:

Hence the horrific attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.

It was those attacks that created Informed Comment. I started it in spring of 2002 initially to cover al-Qaeda and to present analysis about how to defeat it. Like all Americans, I was personally devastated by September 11. I was depressed for a year. I felt it in distinctive ways because I had lived nearly 10 years in the Greater Middle East. Most of that time I was a student or, later on, academic researcher. But although I studied history, I was living in the present. I had been in Egypt in the late 1970s when Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad began becoming notorious. I lived in Pakistan off and on in the early 1980s and went up to Peshawar and talked with Mujahidin.

I supported the first phase of the Afghanistan War, which involved a light Western footprint in that country. There were 40 al-Qaeda training camps, which produced thousands of potential terrorists, and if they had not been destroyed they would have gone on manufacturing threats to the US. I discovered that there was a lot of good information on the Arabic internet about al-Qaeda, and I paraphrased the reports I thought significant. I began being invited to private security conferences in Washington, sponsored by think tanks at the request of government agencies, where the audience was typically inter-agency. There, I presented my analyses of al-Qaeda along with other academics and security experts. I hoped that the insights might be useful to State Department, Pentagon, CIA, DIA and other officials on the front lines of dismantling al-Qaeda. I had opposed the Vietnam War, something that had been painful for my father, who was a 20-year man in the army. But if the US government could benefit from my studies of al-Qaeda and other radical fringe movements trying to hurt Americans, I was just delighted.

(Just a note: I often challenged Washington orthodoxies, the honoraria were small, and I was only invited a few times a year, so the suggestion of some of my detractors that I sold out by doing these presentations is frankly silly. I just want my government to be as informed as it can be, and I’ll tell them the same things I tell the peace groups who also invite me to speak. If I had wanted to sell out, I could have formed a consultancy and purveyed the party line and made big bucks).

I was deeply dismayed when it became apparent that the Bush administration intended to use September 11 as a pretext to launch an illegal invasion of Iraq. I thought it was most unwise, and would be seen as an act of neo-imperialism and resisted. I told friends that if the UN Security Council voted against it, and Bush proceeded, I’d be out in the streets protesting. But then the UNSC never really was given a chance to vote, and Bush ran off to war. I prefer peace to war, but am not a pacifist. I don’t believe the use of military force is always wrong or counter-productive. I am from an army family after all. But I do believe that wars should be like abortion: rare and legal. The UN was established after the horrors of the Axis in WW II in an attempt to deploy collective security to stop the practice of aggressive wars of conquest and annexation. President Dwight Eisenhower invoked the UN Charter when he made Britain, France and Israel withdraw from Egypt in 1956-1957. By waging a war that was neither in self-defense nor authorized by the UNSC, in contravention of the UN Charter (a treaty to which the US is signatory), W. and Dick Cheney were throwing away the achievement of the founders of the UN, and returning us to the international jungle, where the strong fall upon the weak with no framework of law.

That last paragraph is the damning judgement which history will make of the idiot George Bush and his perversion of US law and international law. Bush might have been successful as a cheerleader at university, but he was a disaster for the American people. Sadly about 40% of the American people have not yet realized this fact. It will take another generation before most of this 40% will pass from the scene and their children and grandchildren will open their eyes and make the judgement of history. The wheels of justice do turn slowly, ever so slowly.

Here is the truth about the mis-guided Bush years:

What pained me most of all, aside from the sheer scale of destruction in Iraq set off by Bush’s illegal and ill-considered adventurism, was that the Iraq War clearly gave al-Qaeda an opening to grow and expand and recruit. I think if Bush had gone after Bin Laden as single-mindedly as Obama has, he would have gotten him, and could have rolled up al-Qaeda in 2002 or 2003. Instead, Bush’s occupation of a major Arab Muslim country kept a hornet’s nest buzzing against the US, Britain and other allies.

And here is the reality on the ground in the Middle East:

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.

Juan Cole is more optimistic about the role of Obama in history than I am. I am more cynical than Cole. I would be more than happy to be shown to be wrong. Time alone will tell.

Canada's Federal Election

The 5 week election is now over. For Americans that must be a real puzzle. Their presidential elections are now two year marathons. I'm pretty sure they can't imagine electing all of Congress and a president with just a 5 week campaign. But that's how we do it in Canada. Quick and dirty. Oh... maybe not that dirty. The politics in Canada is pretty clean. No mud slinging like in the US even though "attack ads" are on the rise as parties here emulate more and more of what they see south of the border.

I'm depressed that the right wing Conservatives have won a clear majority and a mandate to rule unhindered for the next four years. The Conservatives won 37.65% of the votes but get 167 out of the 308 seats. So the 62.35% that voted for something else will be over-ruled by the Conservative "majority". Worse, since only something less than 62% of the electorate bother to vote, the "majority government" was in fact elected by only roughly 20% of the electorate! That isn't much of a "mandate" but under the Canadian parliamentary system, the Conservatives have a mandate and pretty well can do whatever they want.

I’m frustrated that the left & centre parties didn’t unite to fight the right wing Conservatives. Prior to the election there was lots of talk of "coalitions" which in a minority government which we've had for several elections, these coalitions can rule by pushing the major party aside. But a majority party has over half the seats. It is more than just a "major" party. It can rule with very little power to stop in by all the other parties.

I simply can’t understand why anybody in this latest election would have voted “Green”. That is asking for a Conservative MP. In this election a sizeable number of people sensibly gave up on the Liberals (and the Bloc Québécois). This may represent a shift in Canadian elections to a 2 party system where left & right fight for votes from the centre. That would be the best news possible. But it requires that the Liberals & Green “see the light” and get with a 2 party system: a united left under the NDP against a united right under the Conservatives.

I generally prefer the Liberals because they were more centrist and I hated the NDP’s big plank on “global warming” (which is stupid and ends up taxing everybody by shackling the economy to fight a condition which to my best estimation is still not "settled science"). My other bone of contention with the NDP is that they will push for a “preferential voting system” even though it isn’t in their platform. I dislike that because it tends to fragment politics into lots of little parties so you get single-issue parties like the BQ and the Greens getting “representation”. The first-past-the-post system helps gravitate toward a two party system, or at least forces parties to move to the centre so they can maximize votes.

I’m worried about a majority Conservative parliament under Harper. The fact that Harper put out a memo telling the bureaucrats to remove “Government of Canada” on everything and instead title everything as “Harper’s Government” makes me fear that we are in for the reign of a personality cult. Hopefully it won’t become that, but I do worry that Harper is a closet megalomaniac.

Pimco CEO Worries about Unemployment

This is unusual. The rich normally are ecstatic to see lots of unemployed because it keeps wages down (cheaper to run a business) and it keeps inflation low (bond holders love low inflation). But here is Mohamed El-Erian who runs one of the world's largest bond investment companies.



At 3:50 into this video he says that the US is "sleep-walking through the unemployment crisis" and that unemployment is the "most pressing" issue on the economic front. This surprises me because he shows real concerns for the economy of the bottom 90% of the population. That is wonderful. If only more of the fat cats would turn over a new leaf and show this same concern for the great majority of the population!

At 11:20 he again surprises me by saying that the US economy still needs more stimulus. But he admits that the political "debate" has made stimulus "more difficult". That is tragic for the bottom 90% because it means that the economy won't grow as fast as it needs to which in turn means that wages will stay low.

I keep looking for a sign that the hard rightward swing of politics over the last 40 years is finally going to move to the left. This is one possible sign of a leftward trend. The fact that Buffet & Gates and other billionaires have decided to compete as philanthropists is another. I just wish the deadly fascination with glitter and excitement over "the rich" can go away and people see that these people are now "making jobs" for others and there are no "crumbs" falling from their table to allow wealth to trickle down. I thought the 2008 financial crisis would have made that case, but apparently most people have not yet woken up to the obscene and insatiable greed of the multi-billionaires.