Don't Indulge. Be Happy

An NYT op-ed this morning by two researchers on happiness:

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

 

Marxism Rising?

Marxism is on the rise again, says the Guardian. It is ironic, of course. Far from the communist proletariat overthrowing capitalism, they have mostly been propping it up.

 

The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

 

Marxism is growing more attractive partly because younger people are forgetting its horrors:

 

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags.

There is a youhful buzz around people like Zizek.

In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

 

I have always been deeply suspicious of the labor theory of value. At some point I suppose I will have to read more of the current leftist stuff, including Zizek, before I can really grapple with it . But i suspect the more general point is a confusion about needs and values. The market price of a good or a service does not measure all aspects of its value, of course. That goes beyond the usual Econ 101 problems of missing markets etc., towards deeper problems with revealed preference.

For me, the crucial problem is there are different kinds of needs at different times, rather than one systemic gap between different measures of value. And economic institutions need to adapt to those changing needs.

There may be something here, but "use value" in particular seems to have an old-fashioned, musty air about it. Beyond basic survival needs, there isn't really use value: there's value defined relative to particular purposes. It becomes purpose value. Without a purpose, you have no way to identify or measure use value.

 

Automate or Perish

 

"Successful businesses will be those that optimize the mix of humans, robots, and algorithms," says the MIT Technology Review. 

... although the first trading robot was built 25 years ago, most of the change on Wall Street has occurred during just the last few years. When it comes to automation, we may be in the elbow of an exponential curve.

Some say what's taking shape is a more productive symbiosis between man and machine—and successful businesses will be the ones that optimize it. Rodney Brooks, founder of ReThink Robotics in Boston, believes that a new type of general-purpose robot could reinvigorate manufacturing. The machines he's building aren't hardwired for any one job; they're flexible, so many types of businesses could use them for a variety of production tasks. The company's aim is to democratize automation the way the PC did for computing, spurring similar efficiency gains.

 

Fourth Fireworks

The Hudson River fireworks were maybe more spectacular than ever last night. The colors seemed more vivid.

We watched the beginning of the PBS show from the National Mall before we went up to our roof to watch the New York skies. Then we watched a recording of our NY display with music on the NBC show after the display was over.

Poor DC. They had Kool and the Gang singing their big hit .. from 1980. New York got Katy Perry with on-stage fireworks, dancers, and the lit-up skyline. Two different worlds.

After Automation: Purpose

Here's a very interesting interview with Stephen Wolfram, the brilliant mathematician/ computer scientist who, among other things, founded the company that makes the math program Mathematica, and the Wolfram Alpha search engine. He wrote a major book, A New Kind of Science some years back about cellular automata and how nature is more like a program than an equation. (I haven't read it, just the reviews).

He thinks most expert opinion can be automated, and his company is working on it. What then, though?

But the question remains what we humans should do if everything became automated. The answer, I think, is that we figure out what we should do. Let’s assume that everything is automated and wonderful. What do you choose to do in that case? As humans and as individuals, we have certain purposes that we are trying to achieve and which cannot be automated. Highly advanced artificial intelligence can be programmed to have a particular purpose but it cannot answer the question of what’s the right purpose to have. I find it highly interesting to figure out how human purposes evolved and how technology might affect them. At different times in history, we have said that our purpose is religion, or maximizing pleasure, or maximizing money. Some of the purposes we have today would seem rather bizarre from a historical perspective. Imagine a paleolithic ancestor trying to figure out why someone would walk on a treadmill indoors! So when lots of things are automated and possible, what purposes will we value? My personal and rather bizarre answer is that future generations will return to the wisdom of the ancients. The times we live in right now mark the first time in human history that data is permanently recorded on a large scale, so future generations can study us and say: “These people lived finite lives and had to make tough choices. So maybe those choices can tell us something about what it means to be human, and about what endpoints our idea of progress should aspire to.

 

That is of course highly relevant to the issues of purpose I often discuss here on this blog.

He also believes (on a quite different note) that computational irreducibility - when you just have to wait and see what a program produces - is a way to solve the ancient dilemmas about free will versus determinism.

(h/t AI Daily)

 

Two fascinating energy stories

Here's two fabulous posts about energy in short succession on Via Meadia, both of which came as news to me.

• India's great power potential could be undermined by growing energy shortages. Geopolitical power could be diminished by a lack of actual electrical power. The government subsidizes kerosene, gasoline and other basic necessities, and is reluctant to change that because of the potential destabilizing effect on the poor. But it also means there is little or no incentive to grow capacity.
• In contrast, Israel is suddenly turning into a potential energy power. It has potentially vast shale oil and gas reserves. (I had to google this in other places before I believed it.) There are already some geopolitical consequences, with Russia and India showing interest in cooperation with the Israelis. The Gulf Arabs may have much less clout abroad.

 

Lie-BOR!

Ha! It's now the Lie-BORgate scandal. Clever.