For my mother on Thanksgiving

I really enjoyed this presentation because at its heart it is about the meal with family, not the bird. Don’t worry about how the bird comes out. That is what gravy, cranberries, stuffing and wine are there for.

Turkey is not meant to stand on its own at any dinner. It is meant to support and enhance the taste of everything else.

My memories about my mother and the bird do not stem from the manner she cooked them in. It was usually about the timing so that everything came out at the right time – after the Dallas game. How she cooked the bird seldom impinged on my consciuousness.

My Mom always had a great Thanksgiving dinner but I really never remember the bird itself. It was her Waldorf salad – sometimes with oranges added, I think –  giblet gravy, the smell of sweet potato pie (that I never ate but was a favorite of my father), mashed potatoes, crescent rolls, cranberry sauce – first just the jellied kind but advancing to the whole berry as I matured – and the dressing – which changed greatly over the years as she experimented but which never failed to be my favorite. And sometimes we might have kernels of corn or green beans but to my mind they simply added color

I would simply pile my plate high with turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, with gravy on each of them. A huge amount of cranberry sauce and a couple of rolls on the side. Each bite would have a bit of turkey, potato and gravy. Or turkey, dressing and cranberry.

After finishing one plate where I politely ate a bit of everything laid out – except the sweet potato pie which I simply have never been ale to swallow. The small bit I might put on the plate always sat alone when I went back for seconds – I return to get more of my favorites.

Turkey, cranberry sauce, gravy  and dressing. The magic four that I live for.

Hot turkey sandwiches were my reward for the next few days.

I am lucky that my own family does appreciate much of the same – although I am the only one who eats dark meat. We have some different opinions on what type of bird to get and how big but we all agree that turkey, cranberries, gravy and dressing make the meal.

Thanks Mom for providing so many great Thanksgiving memories.

Message to my Mom IV

from Wikipedia

It has been a while but I thought I’d bring up an excerpt from this email to my Mom from last Fall. It fits with my mention of the accretion of power by the Unitary Executive.

I was writing my mother about the Citizens United case, the corruption of our government by corporate money and gave her a thumbnail view of Roman history – particularly the fall of the Republic. I may have some details worng – I was working from memory on much of it – put it is correct in its focus – the corruption of power in Rome by money made it easy for the legislative side to give more power to a Unitary Executive.

Here is the relevant part (with some small editing):

What I would like is a constitutional amendment to create a Plural Executive, along the lines of what Texas has. The Executive branch has aggregated way too much power over the last 30 years.

You know, the Roman Republic used a plural executive, electing two consuls every year to run the government.

This worked well until the First Triumvirate came into existence which eventually resulted in the end of the Roman Republic. The First Triumvirate was made of 3 men – Pompey and Julius Caesar, the greatest military minds of the time and Crassus, the richest man who ever existed in Roman History if not all history. (He made much of his fortune because he ran the only fire brigade in Rome. When a home would catch on fire, he would negotiate a fee to put it out. If it ended up burning to the ground, he bought it for cheap.) His wealth has been estimated at $2 trillion – the richest man in the world today has about $50 billion. His wealth was equal to the entire Roman treasury at the time. Think about someone whose wealth was equal to the entire US budget.

There was tremendous turmoil during that time, with slave revolts and populist revolts. There was an attempt by the farmers to kill Senators, which resulted in a lot of clamping down on rights. This is when Spartacus ran amok throughout the peninsula, scaring the Romans probably every bit as much as we were scared by 9/11, maybe more because the guys who wanted to slit every Roman throats were actually a large army in the heart of the country. IN addition to his wealth, Crassus gained a lot of political power by defeating Spartacus – using decimation of his own troops for motivation and crucifixion of the slaves as example. Other generals had failed so Crassus was viewed as the one who saved Rome)

So, the richest guy in the world got together with two of the greatest generals ever (who also happened to be quite wealthy)  and formed a secret group – the First Triumvirate –  to control the government in 59 BC. They decided who would be consul (the executive branch  of the Republic, who got the plumb jobs, etc. And made it happen. Using money and influence, they corrupted members of the Senate, who went about removing rivals of the Triumvirate, often by violent means (two of the greatest speakers in Roman history, Cicero and Cato, were politically destroyed at this time because of their opposition), while the trio enjoyed aggregating more money and power as consuls, often together.

Crassus died in 53 BC and within 4 years, Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, Pompey was killed and Caesar was in complete control being declared dictator for life and effectively ending the independence of the Roman Senate. The Roman Republic would effectively end 5 years later in 44 BC with Caesar’s assassination.

A weak and corrupt Legislative branch allowed money to corrupt it, resulting in the emergence of strongmen with money to destroy the Republic. The huge fortune of one man was able to do this (although the huge wealth of the other two can not be discounted).

Not a happy story but one I think about a lot these days.  From the time when Spartacus scared the Romans spitless to the consolidation of power by the wealthy trio was about 10 years. The end of the Republic was about 15 years after that. Twenty five years from the catalyzing incident that drove the Romans to look to strong Executive powers for protection to the end of the Senate and a Unitary Executive with complete legislative powers – an emperor. The end happened very quickly after the corruption of government began.

Our Founding Fathers knew this and  did everything they could to limit the power of the Executive branch. But they did not come up with a good way to prohibit the corrupting influence of large amounts of money, especially on Congress.

Until we figure out a way to deal with that, we will never by truly functional, no  matter who is in charge. And we will be in terrible danger of completely losing our Republic.

At one time, I had hoped Obama might be able to repair some of this damage. In fact, I think he really tried to allow Congress to do its job of legislating and just focus on carrying out the will of Congress. BUt things are so broken that we can not actually function without a strong Executive spending most of his time telling Congress what to do.

We have to fix things but the efforts that are taking place are, to my mind, actually more conducive to strengthening the Executive rather than weakening. Nothing is being  done to reform Congress and especially the corrupting influence of unlimited amounts of money from corporations. It may well be that history records the Citizen United decision as one the most corrupt decisions of a corrupt age.

Video of Gulf of Mexico rigs

from The Swordpress

While working on my latest Message to my Mother, I ran across this website which had done some wonderful graphic analysis of the number of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Using data from the government, he put together a video looking that the location, depth and time for currently active rigs in the Gulf. That is , rigs that are currently installed and have not been removed or abandoned.

And these are only the ones in American waters.

He was able to do this using publicly available data. A nice example of how an ‘amateur’ can create something of real beauty and usefulness. Open access to data makes this possible.

Human interactions with data produces information, whose transformation creates knowledge which permits an action to be taken.

Message to my Mom III

My mother sent me a link to an article in the Chronicle entitles Shallow water, deep anxiety . It discussed the de facto moratorium on new drilling in the Gulf even by shallow platforms, Lots of new paperwork was preventing rig operators from starting new wells in the Gulf. Lots of ‘this government delay is costing me money” sorts of quotes. It was written to really support the idea that the government is purposefully preventing any new oil rigs from being built, presumably for some nefarious reason.

I did a little checking and believe I have an explanation that is not nearly as nefarious and one which the actual data, rather than anecdotes, seems to support. Here is my reply to my mother, with some editing to make it a little more coherent.

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Well, I call confirmation bias ;-) The article appears to presents facts in a misleading way to keep angry those that already are. Here is an alternative view that I got from reading his article and doing a little research.

The article buries the lede in a big way – the new regulations apply to ALL rigs, new and existing. [That is how I read the new rules. Existing wells have to supply an Application for Permit to Modify (APM). Maybe someone who is a real expert can help me. The fact remains that a lot of APMs have to be dealt with. RBG]

“Officials with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management say they have issued many permits for work on existing shallow-water wells since April. They deny any effort to stall the approval of permits for new wells under drilling rules, called notices to lessees, issued in June.”

Catch that – existing wells.

The agency – BOEMRE, a brand new one by the way as the MMS is no longer – has to approve all of them. There are 45 new ones, from the article and almost 4000 active ones, which many if not all have to send in new forms (mostly one called NTL-05 which certifies the blowout preventer or NTL-06, which deals with blowout scenarios):

from NOAA

So, a new agency, whose rules did not even exist until the middle of June, has to deal with the approval of thousands of new forms. If there are 4000 existing wells and 45 new ones then one out a hundred of those forms will be for new wells. 99 out of a hundred will be for existing wells. And the author spends his time on the 1, not the 99.

Finally according to the agency’s website, – which is updated every business day – only 4 new shallow well requests have been pending since June 8 and one has been approved. So where are the other 40? The agency has approved 68 modified permits in shallow water since June 8 with only 3 pending.

The narrative of the article feels a little biased to me. I see no evidence of stalling or slowing down the approval process to prevent new wells.

I would call this another misleading MSM article. It presents information in a misleading way to keep people angry who already are angry, not to inform them.

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I am not 100% sure just how many wells have to get new permits but it seems to me that the number is substantially greater than the number of new rigs. It makes sense that the agency is swamped with a lot of new permits that have to be examined. But there does not seem to be a huge number pending permits for shallow wells backed up in the system.
That is the real question I have. Why have so few new well permits even been submitted? The agency’s data does not show a backlog of submitted forms. The article implies it is the agency that is slowing stuff down but how can the agency approve permits that have not even been submitted?
I understand how government bureaucracy can slow stuff down. But in this case there was a horrible accident that killed 11 people, injured 17 and spilled a huge amount of oil into the Gulf doing billions in damage. A little bit of caution should be called for. Asking news wells to get the BOP certified and to provide a realistic scenario of how they would deal with a catastrophic failure seems like a reasonable thing to ask.

Messages to my mother II

My Mom and I have some great email discussions – which are at least coherent. Our phone conversations usually operate on a wavelength of shared communication that render them virtually impossible for others to follow or understand. In person it is usually even worse for bystanders. One of the many reasons I love discussing things with her – she understands me, even when she disagrees with me.

She usually throws out some great remark that sends me out to the web in order to refute it (always the most fun for me) or admit she was right (always the most fun for her).

My mother and I had another nice email dialogue about my previous post today dealing withPhoenix, mistruths and Cargo Cult Worlds. I’ve edited my reply for clarity and hope you like it.

My Mom explained that what she was more focussed on was the real problem of women being abducted off the street, raped and then dumped. That may not show up in any statistics, particularly in Phoenix, but is still kidnapping.

I replied:

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That is exactly what I am talking about. People have taken a narrative – girls getting kidnapped off the streets of Phoenix and America – that is horrible and needs to be addressed. But the statement that is used use to support this narrative – Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of America – is not based on any facts. It is not based on anything that exists in the real world. It is completely made up.

Thus the Cargo Cult World. One where people try to create a reality, a narrative, based on facts that are not real. And, it should be obvious that constructing a Cargo Cult World is not only seen in one political party or one economic class. I think it comes from an attempt to understand something quite complex by applying simplifications and metaphors that just do not work. Much as the Pacific Islanders did not understand the principles and facts behind air flight but thought that building replicas of planes would recreate the reality they saw during World War 2.

Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns and at constructing fairly complex metaphors in order to survive. I personally think that this ability is one of the things that has made us such a potent species. But sometimes the metaphors get scrambled, the narrative describes a false reality. That seems to happen when societies are undergoing some fundamental changes such as from agrarian to industrial. We have a ton of actually stories that reflect this, from The Jungle to The Grapes of Wrath to Cry the Beloved Country. Each describes creating a new societal narrative as the old one crumbles away, and the social strife that destruction entails.

Humans and societies produce narratives to help their members understand the world and how to react to it. But when things are changing, when new narratives may need to be produced, well these are the most dangerous times. That is when Cargo Cult Worlds come into existence for many people, where false narratives are used to create only a simulacrum of reality.

I just do not understand how anyone can honestly create an argument using untruths and falsehoods, especially one dealing with such a potent horror as kidnapping and raping girls. Wouldn’t the best solutions in the real world involve using real facts, not lies? Why not create a narrative based on facts? That is actually quite easy.

Why not just say that many vulnerable women in the undocumented population are being kidnapped and raped and we need to discuss ways to stop it? How does continuing to discuss a false narrative help solve that problem?

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My mother and I have had some great back and forth on this. One upshot is that she does not like the term narrative as, to her, it implies a story which is obviously made up and not true. But any really good fictional story is true. It may be based on events that have not occurred but it describes something about ourselves that touches truth or requires us to examine our own truths.

I’m using it more in the psychological, cognitive sense as the stories and metaphors we create to deal with the world, to make sense of the reality we experience. They are our best attempts to say something true, even as the best made-up stories try to say something true.

Even made-up stuff can be useful if leads to truthful revelations. But basing stories and narratives on lies can never lead to truth in a deeper sense.

Humans create rules of thumb and heuristics to deal with the world. They are usually in the form of pithy sayings, stories and narratives. Good ones allow us not only cope but make very fast decisions based on ‘common sense’ because they do a good job describing the real world.

However, narratives based on lies will result in ‘common sense’ solutions that are not based on reality and will likely lead to poor results. It will lead to a Cargo Cult World which only mimics reality.

If my rule of thumb is that all felines are docile, loving and playful creatures that would never hurt me, then I am in trouble if I approach a cat with an arched back, fur on end and snarling. I am even more in trouble if I approach a wild tiger for the first time.

Doing our best to make sure that the personal narratives that we use to support our view of the world are based on truthful data and not lies will be necessary if we hope to solve the tremendously complex problems that the real world is now throwing at us.

Because those problems are much more complex than what to do when a tiger crosses our path.

Messages to my mother Ia

I had a couple of followups to my message to my mom about deflation, since it seems to be on a lot of people’s mind. I sent these on to her also, so I’ll include them as an addendum to the previous post.

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http://www.kansascity.com/2010/07/26/2109337/optimistic-consumers-can-save.html

Has some numbers. Same upshot as me – only by boosting consumer confidence. This can really only be done by getting the people with jobs to spend money now. Which means they need to have jobs and feel comfortable that they will have one in the future.

Also, here is a great Forbes article about deflation that just came out:

http://blogs.forbes.com/investor/2010/07/27/deflation-dissected/

He backs me up about the deflationary aspects of reducing government spending. The worst thing the government could do during deflation is to stop spending.

Lacy Hunt, in another article, talked about what we might do. He said we need a technological breakthrough. We broke the Deflation after the Civil War by a tremendous number of such (railroads, McCormick reapers, etc., telegraph). New technology might work if it can create jobs.

But normal companies just do not create enough jobs in deflationary periods.

Oh and he mentions something I am also coming around to. Just as the Republicans and Conservative Democrats are pushing cutting spending, which would be suicide during deflationary times, liberal Democrats want to allow the Bush tax cuts to go away. During normal times, I would be for this. Just as I would be for more responsible spending. You worry about debt during good times. Which is what we did in the 90s. The best economic times of the last 30 years. We actually had no deficit spending and reduced our government’s debt.

But during a deflation, any sort of tax raise of almost any kind will make things worse (see what I mean about solving deflation. Too much debt may be a problem but raising taxes or reducing spending will actually have no positive effect in deflationary times and would most likely be harmful.) So keeping the Bush tax cuts around for a while longer would be fine, as long as we do not also try to reduce spending.

The only thing worthwhile the government can do during deflation is to spend money creating jobs, not to simply stimulate the economy indirectly (as the guy said in the first article – the multiplier effect of a normal economy does not hold during deflation). They need to do anything to boost consumer confidence in order to break the deflationary cycle. Having a job is task number 1.

The party that solely focusses on jobs programs will be on the right track. But it will require some real education of the population. And it may require about faces of politicians (such as spending for NASA, etc.) which is never very likely.

I am not really very hopeful that we will actually do the right thing until after it is too late to prevent.These changes may not happen at all until our policies provoke real deflation. That is, America is much better dealing with emergencies after they have happened. There is still too much political capital on both sides to ignore the deflation warnings and keep pushing their current views, views from either party that will only make things worse.

That is why Krugman, and others, pushed so much last year for the stimulus program to not only be bigger but to really only focus on jobs, not lowering taxes. He may turn out to be very prescient but no one in politics really listened to him. The Dems used the money for Keynesian type stimulus and the Republicans got their tax cuts, and the final package was too small to stop what might be coming.

I’ve been hoping so much for the last year that Krugman was wrong, that he was a doomsayer and it would be okay. I have become more and more convinced that the political policies of both parties will drive us directly into the arms of deflation.

The key is doing anything and everything to create jobs directly, not relying on the invisible hand to do it. That will only happen when we return to economically normal times.

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I also found a couple of recent articles – all from this week – that discuss deflation, stimulus and/or unemployment. Seems that it is on everyone’s minds.

Paul Krugman Permanently High Unemployment

Brad deLong David Altig Says That Our Cyclical Unemployment Has Started to Turn Structural

Mark Thoma The Cost of Convenient Optimism

NYT In Study, 2 Economists Say Intervention Helped Avert a 2nd Depression (without the stimulus, we would already be in a deflationary spiral)

Messages to my mother I

My mother is a disruptive innovator, like me. She has a wide range of connections across many communities, is not afraid of new things – she has had a Mac for over 20 years, makes her opinion known – thus the disruptive, and loves letting other people know about new information she gets.

So she sends me links to interesting stuff she reads all the time. Oh and we tend to vote for different political parties, so our world views are different but, as any creative person knows, you learn the most from people who see the world differently.

Anyway, I end up writing these long emails back to her. They often have a reasonable amount of research in them. So I thought I’d kill a couple of birds with one stone and repurpose them for my blog, removing all the personal stuff like endearments. I’ll do some editing and mash together several emails if there is a thread.

Here we go.

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She sent me this article from the Houston Chronicle. I replied:

He is talking about deflation.

A subject very dear to my heart (so sorry of I get a little didactic) and one that I’ve written about this many times over the last decade: https://amanwithaphd.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/scary-graph/

https://amanwithaphd.wordpress.com/2003/06/24/wed-25-jun-2003-033038-gmt/ (from Robert Reich)

https://amanwithaphd.wordpress.com/2002/08/21/thu-22-aug-2002-004006-gmt/ (from 2002)

Deflation sounds great (prices dropping) but is horrible. People do not have jobs so there is reduced spending. There is little economic action because no one is spending. Since money is worth more in the future than now, no one (either consumers or companies) spends anything.

My take home – the government needs to spend money not for Keynsian reasons (nothing they do, whether it is stimulus or lowering taxes will work while some things can be detrimental) but to keep people employed. They are the employer of last resort. If the jobless level comes down, people will be ready to spend money. They will have more money to spend. Only if they feel confident to spend money will we be able to live through the deflationary cycle. So, do whatever is necessary to directly create jobs, to keep people employed, even if they have to create new public works programs to do it.

And continue doing that until we get out of the deflationary spiral (at which point, we should no longer need the support of the government to create jobs).

The columnist is being a little misleading, making it sound like Keynsian economics – which states that the government can stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates (monetary policy) or by stimulus (fiscal policy) – does not work at all and that we have been lied to for decades. Not true. What the economist talks about is a very specific type of economy – deflation (and realize that during deflation, supply side economics will not work either. It is the demand side that is the problem).

If we are entering a deflationary period, we are in trouble because NOTHING we know to do will change the economy except time, which is what the economist said in other articles. Not cutting taxes. Not cutting the deficit. No sending stimulus checks to people. No one really knows what to do except wait for people to start buying again. What needs to happen during deflation is that the debt needs to be reduced but it can not be because the economy is not producing enough revenue. (By the way, the same thing happens with companies. They lower the price of goods in order to raise revenues to pay off debt. But revenues do not increase so they lower things more. And so on. Why it is called deflation.)

During deflationary periods, neither monetary nor fiscal policies will be effective. In fact, nothing the government nor corporations can do will be effective at changing things unless they change people’s perceptions. The only known solution is time, time for people to start spending again.

Deflation is the thing I fear most because we have no known way to deal with it. Cutting taxes will not fix it and raising government spending will not fix it. There is no policy that either party can do at the government level to solve the problem.

And there is little corporations can do to fix it either. We know this because Japan has been dealing with deflation for almost 20 years. They have tried everything, both tax cutting and government spending. Nada.

During a deflationary period, debt, which can be great during inflation, is now bad. Anyone holding any debt at all can be in trouble. The problem is that to pay down debt requites greater revenues, which are not forthcoming, for the government or for companies.

It is not that Keynesian economics does not or has not worked in the past. It has done wonderfully during normal, inflationary, or depression eras. It will not help much during deflationary times. During deflation, money gets more valuable as time goes on (opposite of inflation). So, no one with money spends any of it because it will be worth more later. Anyone holding debt (bonds at first but eventually stocks) will be in trouble. That is one reason why Getty made out like a bandit. During the deflation of the early 30s, he had cash when no one else did.

Apple is in great shape because of their huge amount of cash. Everyone else is toast. If deflation hits, time to stuff the mattresses. Even gold will not be useful.

Deflation is the worst possible thing. And no one wants to really face it. Everyone hopes it will not materialize.Both political parties are sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “LA.LA.LA!” So the Democrats pray that Keynsian economics will work and the Republicans still pray that reducing taxes/debt will work. They both may be whistling in the dark here. Neither policy will have any effect.

Krugman has been worried about this for quite some time. Interesting to see other economists feel similarly. The only thing that has ever gotten an economy out of deflation is time.

Why? Because it really gets down to human emotions. People really do not care as much about inflation or deflation as long as they have jobs. Deflation only gets broken when people feel comfortable enough to spend money again. And that only happens when they have jobs with an income that supports them. Get them jobs and we

So remember that while government spending can not alter the deflationary spiral, it can provide a buffer for people living in those times. This is, for me, a key reason for government spending. Not for some Keynsian or ivory tower reason. It will keep people employed while we wait this out. The government is the employer of last resort. Lowering taxes in a deflationary period will not accomplish this. Because the money returned will not be spent. It will be socked away because in deflation, money is worth more next year than today. It will not create jobs.

Many major programs of the New Deal were not really implemented simply because of the macroeconomic effects. They were to provide jobs directly. I may not like the war in Afghanistan but it is keeping a lot of people employed.  I’d prefer the government spend the money on developing green energy than war – technological breakthroughs that create new industries provide new jobs – but the thing is to keep people employed. For example, in a normal economy, it would be worth letting the private sector deal with a space program but now the NASA needs to make sure all those jobs are still around.

We can deal with deflation if people are working, just as we dealt with inflation. Without jobs, there is no good news for either political party.