This is an equation, courtesy of a certain Robert H. Topel, published in the American Economic Review. What is x, subscript i, superscript jm? What does theta stand for? What on earth is big F? Sadly, Robert H. Topel refrains from explaining any of that. The exception is dotted z superscript jm, which is defined, of course, as the cost-sharing weighted average of five aforementioned skill groups.

Dear economists: purposefully making your papers absolutely unintelligible to all but the uninitiated just to prove how handy you are with the Greek alphabet and how proficient you are with Word’s Equation Editor, is not acceptable. Please revise your work, this time properly defining all variables, subscripts, and randomly-placed dots. Thank you.

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.

In Value by Induction, we observe an anecdotal case study (“the novel”), with arbitrary and malleable (by the author) parameters, reach a certain conclusion, and then we draw broader conclusions about proper behavior based on a generalization of that example (in other words, induction). So, a modern morality play such as the new batman film, would have us (according to reviewers) question our own response to the arbitrariness of evil by sitting us through a two hour case study of characters and situations which are, by all means, imaginary and impossible. We are inclined to accept the broader implications of moral ambiguity and didacticism for our own world, despite them being coached in a storyline about man dressed up as a bat. This is a common feature of many morality plays, from Marlowe to Ibsen. No one is complaining.

The mistake lies in the second case: value by deduction. The label I’ve used here, deduction (a process of sound logical reasoning), is actually misleading, because the process of logical reasoning is omitted in the first place, in favor of assuming that compelling rhetoric implies logical cohesion. Ayn Rand’s complex and enjoyable works are an exemplary case of this, as demonstrated by the development of “Objectivist” societies dedicated to promoting the philosophy that Rand herself based her epics on. To the best of my knowledge, these societies are not philosophical in the sense that they attempt to establish universal suppositions by which to deduct universal principles. On the contrary: they practice a kind of pop-philosophy, based on the assumption that the rhetorical weight of Ayn Rand’s prose translates into logical consistency or reasoning, and a proper world-view. It doesn’t. There is no reason it should. Like any piece of art, from Batman to Kafka to Don Quixote, it’s entertainment stems in large part from its arbitrariness, logic be damned.

It’s best to be aware of this distinction to avoid being carried away by the supposed logic of any story, whether it be Icarus under the sun or any of this summer’s superhero flicks. The laws of physics do not apply in man-made stories. There is nothing wrong with drawing lessons and implications from these stories; indeed, some of the best lives often imitate art. But we must remember, in spite of this, that the rules governing people are not the rules governing characters. The “ten commandments” of any story are still subservient to the rules of nature, and gravity.

There is a certain logic to this shift. Perhaps because it also begot a period of weakness – crowned by the apologist presidency of Jimmy Carter, and replaced by the ideologic vigor of the Reagan era – many in the Left have followed Obama and other party leaders without regret. We have proven increasingly willing to abandon  uncompromising anti-war and anti-government stances in favor of a quiet acknowledgement that excesses were made.

This is a mistake.

Since it is often said that those who were there would never remember the Sixties, I can perhaps hope that my own experience – having been born two decades later – can provide the narrowest insight into what is lost by abandoning a generation of youth protestors to the dustbins of impracticality or extremism. Or history. Like the Europe-wide”Springtime of Peoples” in 1848, the 1960’s marked a global tidal wave of transformation that was as political as it was social. History has a way of remembering those political changes – whether they unravel a Hapsburg dynasty or Richard Nixon – while quietly sanitizing the elan, or the spirit, of those generations that stood up to say no. Consequences are remembered, but actions, motivations, and dreams are sanitized to the point where they cannot be related to and, importantly, cannot be re-dreamed.

In a curious irony, politics has maintained a memory that history has yet to convincingly record. By fighting a futile battle to uphold the Sixties – from Carter to Dukakis – the Democrats held true to the twentieth century’s own “Springtime of Peoples.” It was Clinton’s concept of New Democrats and Obama’s new-found centrism that have now marked the slow abortion of these ideals.

On July 4th, 2008, Obama and the United States have come full circle: we are back at a symbolical 1959 traveling backwards through the decades. Obama’s calls for patriotism and unity are the rallying cries of Cold War insecurity, and World War valor. The Sixties, by contrast, have been institutionally abandoned by the very forces that waged them.

This is not a proud day for Progress.

As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world. …”

The implication being that, given the state of events, America cannot afford not have military bases in Iraq, double negative and all.

Oh yes it can. Here are the three reasons McCain has some explaining to do, if he thinks Baghdad can be transformed into another West Germany.

1. We Promised not to: America entered Iraq with a promise not to occupy it. By maintaining bases in Iraq for 100 years, the White House would be curtailing Iraq’s sovereignty for a century, and using Iraqi soil to launch increasingly nasty rhetoric at Iran. If America wants to protect its ‘reputation’ in the world, keeping its word would be a good place. to start.
2. Fuel for Islamist Rhetoric: Osama bin Laden listed three reasons for his antipathy towards the United States; military bases in Saudi Arabia (a country as stable as Iraq will ever be in the near future) were one of them. If the U.S. wants to expand, rather than contract, its foothold in the Middle East, there better be a good reason for it, other than “we’ve already got three Burger Kings in the Green Zone.”
3. Lessons of Colonization: Europe spent the past 70 years leaving the Middle East because occupation didn’t work and violence spiraled out of hand as a result. Irony? America itself promoted this exodus. In 1956, President Eisenhower himself hammered the last nail on Britain’s imperial coffin when he opposed a British-French-Israeli offensive on Nasser’s Egypt, following the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The motive? Decolonization.

The BBC reports today that Britain’s lovable Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, is politely asking everyone to restrain themselves to 2% wage increases this year, to fight inflation.

But John Nash and his “friends” proved this does not work, forty years ago! And then they all got Nobel Prizes. How will Chancellor Darling overcome incentived cheating, collective action problems, and human rationality to prevent a catastrophic descent into Nash Equilibrium hell?

Raw Unadulterated Charisma.

It is  called the “Strong” fallacy, and it is what convinced Hillary Clinton to vote in support of the Iraq War five years ago. It was Obama’s common sense that allowed him to understand, back in 2003, the logical inconsistency of a “strong” national policy that leads your nation to war and ruin. To put it bluntly, Obama grasped the fact that it doesn’t matter how much you love your country, if you destroy it in the process.

Unfortunately, that stroke of common sense seems – like so many a college student this summer – to have gone on holiday. Consider these four recent examples:

• His underreported refusal earlier this year to avoid negotiations with Hamas, in defiance of his own Obama Doctrine to negotiate with all world leaders (including, purportedly, democratically-elected ones like Hamas).
• His promise, in front of AIPAC this month, to adopt an upsettingly confrontational approach to Iran, mimicking the Neoconservative position that a Islamic country is Guilty Until Proven Innocent.
• His assistants’ widely-reported refusal to seat headscarf-wearing supporters behind him at a rally.
• His support today for a bill providing immunity for telecommunications companies that allow eavesdropping, under the pretext that the U.S. is facing “grave threats” (was the nuclear threat of the Cold War not grave? Are nation-states not intrinsically fictional constructs that exist to separate one man from another, leading inevitably to conflict? I digress).

These changes are regrettable, all the more so because the underlying  logic behind them – we have to get the strong-on-security  Americans on board - is no different from the logic which motivated Hillary Clinton to vote for the Iraq invasion in 2003. Simply put, it seems to me that Obama has drank the Kool-aid. Hardly a single Democrat (or Republican, for that matter) has entered D.C. without reneging on his own common sense in favour of the one giant “-ism” that is the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

But he is the only one who promised and, for a short while, delivered on that promise. And this is the reason he is where he is now.

So please, Obama, for the sake of your own candidacy, and America’s real security – not the security that comes from wearing flag pins while waving a fist at Iran, but security from an absence of war – please stop drinking the Kool-aid. You promised to change America without changing your principles. The false security of “Strong on Defense” is where you must draw the line.

What would the future have held for me if I had chosen these professions? Let’s take a look, shall we.

Finance or Economics: I graduated in May. Three months later, the subprime meltdown began, and banks and hedge funds across the globe rapidly lost three-quarters, or more, of their Market Cap. Hiring all but froze, and layoffs at enormous banks like Washington Mutual look likely.

Verdict: Working in an economic institution, like the Fed, would have been fascinating in this climate. The private sector? Not so much.

EU Policymaking: In 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitutional Treaty, putting Europe in a three year stasis. A week ago, Ireland rejected the Treaty of Lisbon. 2008, which was to be a fresh start for the EU, now looks like another headache as policymakers question the legitimacy of the only popular vote the Lisbon Treaty is likely to face.

Verdict: A sad day for everyone, including myself, who hoped to start a career in a new and improved EU.

Think Tank or Politics: Not many predicted Obama’s meteoric rise to the top of the Democratic heap twelve months ago, but I was one of the earliest converts.

Verdict: Obama takes the Democratic nomination; a victory for idealism and an exciting time for any graduate to be involved in the political world.

Which one of these fields would have been best? Certainly, progressive politics looks to be one of the few winners in a tumultuous twelve months. Most surprising of all, however, is that none of these game-changers – Obama’s nomination, the subprime crisis, the Lisbon Treaty fiasco – was predicted twelve months ago. If you’re a recent graduate – and I have some friends who might be reading this – I would only say, don’t try and rig the system; there are too many unknowns. Just do your best.

And last, you might be asking yourself: why of these inspiring fields did I choose to end up in?

None. As of today, I’m a penniless graduate students, subsisting on Tesco’s Spaghetti Carbonaras and bottled water. I’ve had the pleasure of watching these events unfold while quietly highlighting every PDF produced under the sun.

I couldn’t be happier.