Times.konradturski.com – Political and Economic Commentary by a Postgrad in London

Consider an experiment in which the experimenter pre-establishes not  only his or her assumptions, but also the data, the method, the observations and the conclusions of their trial. It’s the empirical equivalent of a one-man judge, jury, and executioner, and it’s a common practice in philosophical novels and America’s new superhero genre.

It’s not entirely a bad thing: many atheists have long held the Bible to be just this kind of deterministic morality play, and many more, myself included, find moral proselytizing to be valuable regardless of whether viewed through a secular or faith-based lens. But therein in lies the catch.

There is a difference between, on the one hand, finding a train of thought valuable for its normative or moral pedigree (“Value by Induction”), and, on the other hand, equating that value with a sound logical foundation (“Value by Deduction”). Both Ayn Rand and Director Christopher Nolan should be commended for continuing the long tradition of the former; we, on the other hand, should know better than to do the latter.

(more…)

An unattributed remark from the Cold War went something like this: “Milton Friedman is the most popular thinker in Russia; unfortunately, his works are not yet available there.” This quote has reminded me of a certain other thinker – G. W. F. Hegel – who also held a certain cult appeal in the Wild East. As legend has it, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Hegel’s writings found themselves smuggled from Germany and read by candlelight in St. Petersburg and Moscow by hundreds, until the pages were torn and threadbare and disintegrated from the oil of too many fingertips.

Some things never change; we idolize scraps of paper. Relativism, the overarching and tyrannical ideology of our post-modern age, has steadfastly destroyed centers of truth, so we have found it de-centralized, hidden on little torn sheets, read under environmentally friendly bulbs, in strange, labyrinthine, libraries.

It’s also in novels; we find truth in letters. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera chronicles two years of love letters, “soaked by rain, soiled by mud, torn by adversity,” whose very tenacity speaks more than words. Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian, wrote in The Master and Margarita that truth does not burn; when an attempt is made, the Devil comes to Moscow and retrieves the manuscript from the scraps of ashes.

And then there is democracy. Those who followed the news at the turn of 21st century new that a certain fetishism for “hanging chads” had infected the state of Florida. State employees spent weeks on end revisiting countless scraps of paper, trying to read the truth of the 2000 election from tea leaves hidden in ballot boxes, across the state.

There is – there has been – something about it. Scraps of paper are not free of guilt: they are the stuff of bureaucracy, and propaganda dropped from the sky. Yet one cannot help but sympathize with them; their fragility gives them a certain innocence. What is the verdict then? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

This was the title of a long-forgotten essay by Russian Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the latter 19th century. In its time, it was the most popular publication among Russia’s Liberal Elite (born 1848, died approx. 1904), and the title was in fact adapted by a self-aware Lenin in a 20th century pamphlet on Socialist Democracy. The contrast between the two pamphlets – whereas Chernyshevsky imagined a kind of unfeasible utopia, Lenin’s vision was immediate and approachable – is appropriate, given the contrasting Hegelian and Marxist milieus that inspired each writer. Whereas Hegel always emphasized the means of progress, Marx went further in identifying (incorrectly) its ends in the form of Proletarian Utopia. More importantly, Chernyshevsky, Marx, Lenin, Hegel, and all the others are dead, and the question remains: What is to be Done? We seem to live in a state of flux where the short term answer to that question is always clear, while the medium and long term answers are anything but. I guess Keynes had an answer. But he’s dead too.

Lost in the coverage of Spitzer’s resignation is the fact that so much – if not all – of whom and what Spitzer was battling represent the things that we despise, and for all the most basic reasons. He fought Wall Street power brokers, corrupt legislators, and, yes, prostitution rings. I cannot help but worry that another political generation will grow up with the resignation that comes from the experience of knowing that it is not even worth trying to fix some the base evils. Look what happened to the last one who tried.

Indeed, we are so disenchanted and sometimes enthusiastic to catch Spitzer at the universal sin – hypocrisy -  that sometimes it easy not to appreciate that that chasm that we understand to separate Spitzer’s words and his deeds, is more human than so much of the tacit, synthetic pragmatism that we accept when we lower our expectations to the point, where by some measure, we elevate ordinary politicians above Spitzer because, by not trying, they never raised over expectations. Spitzer failed because he dared to raise our expectations to where they were, where they should have stayed, before our first heartbreak, or our first political scandal, or our first encounter with that smoke-filled world of money, power, and wickedness.

That Spitzer not only lost, but succumbed to those vices – $80,000 for prostitutes is no blue collar crime – does not change the fact that he fought the good fight, and no one can doubt that the his wager – his political career, his own credibility, his own marriage – was placed because, like too few people, this was a struggle he thought he could win, and he bothered to try.

I would like to think that for Spitzer, like for too few others, the chasm between words and deeds assumed a Manichean dichotomy between right and wrong; he lost that fight, but does that change the fact that he fought the only thing worth truly fighting for? Could there be anything else? A bridge-building project for your district, added to the latest federal budget, perhaps?

So He lost the battle between words and deeds, and now that is hypocrisy. I accept that, but there is more to the story. Let me just say that I believe words can be more important than actions, if they are spoken for the right reasons, honestly, candidly, and with the best of human nature in their sights.

The purpose of today’s exercise will be to offer a simple proposal for the source of happiness, generalize it, and extrapolate the implications.

(1) A Simple Proposal for the Source of Happiness

The proposal, admittedly up for debate, is that happiness lies in the difference between expectations and reality. Given E, your level of expectations, and R, reality, then

H = R – E

Thus, if your expectations exceed reality, then your happiness is negative, and if the opposite is the case, then your happiness is positive. Let us assume that happiness exists to be maximized; the higher (positive) number it is, the better.

(2) Generalization

Let us suppose now that, rather than being based on expectations and reality, happiness is based on any other two variables. However, it is still based on the difference between them. Thus,

H = X -Y

X minus Y could be the difference your income and that of your neighbors, or the difference between your cash supply and your preferred cash supply, etc. et. al.

The purpose of the generalization is to reach a point at which our equation for happiness is sufficiently agreeable that the following implications, in section 3, can be considered without outright skepticism.

(3) Implications

Given a simple H = X – Y relation, you invariably fall into what I will term the maximization trap. The reasoning behind this maximization trap, are as follows:

• Variable Confusion implies that the direct relationship between Y (previously E, expectations) and happiness, may cause individuals to attempt to maximize Y instead of X. Since Y is subtracted from X, and thus reduces H, this would decrease, rather than increase, happiness.
• Correlated Factors implies that actions (such as working harder) may influence both X and Y, and at different and changing magnitudes over time. For example, working harder may raise expectations (Y) more than it raises results (X), resulting in a negative relationship between a marginal hour of work and happiness.

Perhaps it is the case that a lot of unhappiness in the world comes from a misunderstanding of the maximization trap.

No.