I've been wondering for years what makes otherwise rational people disbelieve or fear economics. Arnold Kling asks the same question in a recent TCS article. To put the question in a simpler form, why do so many people believe that trade with a country such as India will make USA poorer? I can accept that people aren't hard-wired to understand market pricing. Instead, people may be hard-wired to understand sharing, and when a rich person shares with a poor person, the rich person becomes poorer (and the poor person richer). Or perhaps we understand individual trade of concrete objects, being perfectly willing as individuals to trade some of our excess grain for somebody else's excess fabric. It definitely becomes less natural to understand abstract money because that money has developed only recently in evolutionary terms: coins in 600 BC, paper money in 800 AD or so; checking accounts by the Italians around 1500, electronic money only in 1918, anonymous credit in 1937. Institutions to pool money or trade have developed along the same lines, so the concept of a "national trade deficit" (stupid concept, BTW) is a recent one. No wonder we have to think carefully about modern trade issues to understand them.

But I can't believe Kling's second hypothesis, that a fear of math is at fault here. I've known people with a University degree in Math (also Computer "Science", also the hard sciences) to have economo-phobia. Kling's sample must be too small for his hypothesis.

There are other possible models to explain economo-phobia, assuming of course it's a real phenomena (Kling and I could be deluded, after all...).

Economics goes against common sense, by which I mean pre-scientific models of trade and money. This is related to Kling's evolutionary psychology theory.

• Pre-scientific models are replaced by generational churn, more than by rational thought. (For that matter, scientific revolutions also happen only at the pace of a generation). International trade in labour is too new to understand.


• The data that falsifies common-sense models is too hard to see. We can't directly link a drop in the price of the new pants we buy to a friend losing an IT job and deciding to go back to school.


• Common-sense models lead to plans like rent control. When these don't work, we're notoriously bad at throwing out models-- in fact we may become emotionally attached to them, rather than go through the unpleasant process of admitting rent control is not really possible.

Economics seems to conflict with morality.

• Economics uses the same words or terms as moralists, only perverting those terms from what a moralist understands. For example, "correct" outcomes and "value". Not to mention, a "good". It's difficult for armchair moralists to accept that terminology.


• Economists must overcome a certain "gag reflex" when putting a value on certain things, such as a human life.
• Economists seem to oppose certain moral-seeming actions. Taking the example of rent control again, surely it's a proof of moral upstanding to want poor people to afford decent living quarters. When an economist opposes a plan like rent control, she seems to oppose the whole idea of providing poor people with decent living quarters.

If common sense and morality are arrayed against economics (even if economics isn't against them), it's not too surprising that we find an understanding and acceptance of economics so rare.

Two people sent me this link in the same day, which just shows how well they know me. I've spent quite a while since, exploring the branching links off it, learning about some geeky knitters I didn't know about.

Here's my own geek knitter cred: I actually knit Fibonacci-striped socks (described in more detail on my knit stuff gallery). I also want to do a cellular automata lace shawl, which you'll understand why when you see Debbie New's beautiful cellular automata sweater.

Here's quote from a different project I've proof-read some pages for: The Jesuit Relations. This paragraph is from Father Pierre Biard, in a letter to his superior, the General of the Jesuits at Rome.

Such are the marks of intelligence in the people of these countries, which are very sparsely populated, especially those of the Soriquois and Etechemins, which are near the sea, although Membertou assures us that in his youth he has seen chimonuts, that is to say, Savages, as thickly planted there as the hairs upon his head. It is maintained that they have thus diminished since the French have began to frequent their country; for, since then they do nothing all summer but eat; and the result is that, adopting an entirely different custom and thus breeding new diseases, they pay for their indulgence during the autumn and winter by pleurisy, quinsy and dysentery, which kill them off. During this year alone sixty have died at Cape de la Hève, which is the greater part of those who lived there; yet not one of all M. de Potrincourt's little colony has even been sick, notwithstanding all the privations they have suffered; which has caused the Savages to apprehend that God protects and defends us as his favorite and well-beloved people.

This is the kind of evidence that now leads many to believe that Europeans killed off "savages" through disease vectors. Guns, Germs and Steel was where I first read a bunch of stuff about this theory, it's a good book, but it's not the only place you see this nowadays. The letter quoted here was sent in 1611, one hundred years after the French believed they had laid claim to the area. Four or five generations after first claim, there were still "Savages" falling ill regularly. They weren't "breeding new diseases", of course.

Also in the original French:

Voylà les marques de l'esprit de cette nation, qui est fort peu peuplée, principalement les Soriquois et Etechemins qui avoysinent la mer, combien, que Membertou assure qu'en sa jeunesse il a veu chimonuts, c'est-à-dire des Sauvages aussi dru semés que les cheveux de la teste. On tient qu'ils sont ainsi diminués depuis que les François ont commencé à y hanter: car, depuis ce temps-là, ils ne font tout l'esté que manger; d'où vient que, prenant une tout autre habitude, et amassant de humeurs, l'automne et l'hyver ils payent leurs intemperies par pleurésies, esquinances, flux de sang, qui les font mourir. Seulement cette année, soixante en sont morts au Cap de la Hève, qui est la plus grande partie de ce qu'ils y estoient; et neantmoins personne du petit peuple de M. de Potrincourt n'a esté seulement malade, nonobstant toute l'indigence qu'ils ont paty; ce qui a faict apprehender les Sauvages que Dieu nous deffend et protége comme son peuple particulier et bien-aymé.

"As to diceing, I think it becommeth best deboshed souldiers
to play at on the heads of their drums, being only ruled by
hazard, and subject to knavish cogging; and as for the chesse,
I think it over-fond, because it is over-wise and philosophicke
a folly." -- Henry VIII, quoted in The sports and pastimes of the people of England, A new edition, with a copious index, by William Hone.

Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes,
That have been so bedazzled with Sun
   (apologies to Shakespeare).

OK, well it's certainly not the first time Sun has been perceived as an enemy of open source, and apparently there is good reason:

Sun should have owned Linux and should have owned the community. It is Unix, and all Unix developers should have been Sun developers with Linux.

This is from Ed Zander who just left Sun after being second to Scott McNealy for 5 years (ref).

If you've got IE, click on this link to "CNN" to see an interesting exploit. It's not new, but I'd never heard of it. The URL uses the username portion to fool the browser into displaying a string that isn't where it's being sent (forwarded from Keith Wannamaker).

My favourite charity has just posted their year-end appeal. I donate to Deep Roots because I think it's pretty close to maximizing my leverage: by funding the education of kids in some of the poorest countries of the world, I hope my donation will help these students out for life. Deep Roots has less than 10% expenses (verified by GuideStar) so a US dollar donation of only $75 can easily fund a kid's basic school education in Namibia for a year.

I just finished another knitting project, striped socks, so I updated my knitted projects page. I put up another couple old projects on the page, ones that I did years ago but didn't get pictures until recently: a mauve sweater and a pillow knit in part from handspun natural wool.

It's interesting how Bush's free-trade position, his steel tariffs, the WTO appeal and finally the repeal of said tariffs, may all have contributed to strengthen the idea of WTO-moderated free trade. The blog postings have been unanimously positive about the repeal (exhibits A, B, C, D). The obvious lessons to draw from the sequence of events are:

• The WTO can act quickly (15 months, I think) in its rulings


• The rules are effective, if even Bush must cave


• The rules are principled, because Bush's argument for the steel tariffs was based on convenience. The excuse for the tariffs was that they were only temporary. When you argue for such a weak exception to a rule, that can reinforce the principle beind the rule.

If Bush had never put the temporary tariffs in place, there wouldn't have been this clear an opportunity for the WTO to strengthen its hand.

The Kyoto agreement was dealt an unexpected blow or two in the last month, from Russia, casting a shadow on this week's discussions in Milan. I'm behind on this news but, intrigued, I spent some time trying to figure out exactly who said what. A condemnation from Putin could in fact trigger support in many other places depending on how poorly it was worded. Instead, the Russian opposition seems broad but reasonable: Putin mostly complains that Kyoto won't work, and would "doom Russia to poverty, weakness and backwardness" (ref). In some places Russia's recent response is described as "Russian officials’ outright rejection of the global warming theory" (ref), but that seems to be exaggeration because this article has more detail indicating that the head of RAS only described the "theory of rapid, catastrophic global warming" as inaccurate. However, Russia hasn't definitively said no - this could be pre-election posturing for the Russian public, and Russia could still sign on after the elections.

Seablogger has a good post on the event, including notes on the difficulty of agreeing that Kyoto is good even if we all agree that global warming exists.

A TCS article by Iain Murray includes this tidbit:

There are plenty of reasons people are proposing these new commercial ventures, however. One proposed wind farm in West Virginia, would cost $300,000,000 to build, but would recover those costs and then some through various tax shelters and subsidies equaling $325,434,600. In many cases, the profit from this government largesse exceeds the income generated from electricity sales. Wind farm owners enjoy windfall profits at taxpayer expense. Green is very attractive when there are greenbacks involved...

The article overall is whether wind farms are in fact an environmental win over gas consumption. It's a difficult issue, and often involves comparing apples to oranges (noise and bird death to chemical pollution, for example). But it certainly clouds the issues to have such large tax-payer-backed government subsidies. Just think how much that $325 million in subsidies could have done if it had gone directly to protecting wildlife or unspoiled areas.

Voting is, apparently, one of those "grass is greener" things. People are very aware of the drawbacks of whatever voting system they have, and idealize the voting system they don't have. I've tried to explain to friends what Dan Simon explains in a recent blog post -- that no voting system is immune from manipulation and disconcerting results. In fact, in any systematic voting system, one ought to expect unusual results every so often. If the US, with its electoral college system, never had a case where the winner of the popular vote lost the election, one ought to wonder if the system were broke in some way.

More evidence that Microsoft is insular: its security experts think security is uncool.

Microsoft security architect Carl Ellison said that one popular culture problem is that security just isn't considered cool. (ref)

That's not borne out by the security experts I meet outside Microsoft who revel in their elite status among geeks. Among sites like SlashDot security is very cool - "black hats" and "white hats" find and identify bugs for the coolness factor. There are also many, many books on security, including some really bad books - an indicator that the publishers are so hungry for books on the topic that they'll publish garbage and people still buy it.

One of the quandaries of modern technology and the modern economy is figuring out what it's buying us. Wireless is fun, but it will be even better if it improves productivity. Here's some pretty good evidence it is:

San Mateo's putting a wireless umbrella over the whole California county so that the cops don't have to come back to the police station to synchronize. They say they were spending as much as three hours per day driving back and forth to the police station. It completely changes things. (ref)

I'm sure out of those three hours gained, one is lost again browsing the Web and another is lost again in IMing with buddies, but that's still a significant productivity gain.

I talked with my Mom about violent movies recently. She can't watch movies like Reservoir Dogs at all. Movies I find innocuous she finds violent (she found my description of Office Space made it sound too violent for her). She made the inevitable complaint that these movies are trivializing violence and desensitizing us to brutality, blood and death.

I'd like to take the contrarian view that this isn't true but I'm not sure. I first argued weakly that perhaps we weren't really getting desensitized, that she had a sample size of one looking at herself and her reactions to movies and TV news. But I didn't really believe that argument myself - it seems obvious that if you see all of the Terminator movies you're not going to be shocked by Total Recall. My next ineffective argument was that perhaps video violence serves a useful purpose - that we're less likely to panic the first time we see somebody get in a car accident in real life, and we can respond more effectively. But that argument is actually the opposite of my first argument, assuming that desensitization does happen. Apparently studies have been done but I haven't seen anything particularly convincing either way.

It does occur to me that perhaps desensitization isn't the problem we think it is.

• How broad an effect does desensitization have? If you can watch Lethal Weapon and cheer when Riggs kicks the drug dealer in the nuts and breaks his arm (scene 19C), does this mean you'll cheer when you see somebody do that in the street? Not bloody likely (pun intended). Without the setup of movies, seeing this for real would be terribly upsetting, shocking, and not likely to make you cheer. So maybe desensitization is not that transferrable.
• What effect does desensitization have? Sure, we don't feel so much like vomiting after years of watching gut-churningly violent movies. But does it necessarily make us approve? Or does a movie like The Gift make us consciously condemn the wife-beater even though that role is played by Keanu Reeves?
• How does violent entertainment affect us differently? Surely there are many factors that change how violent entertainment affects us, such as age, upbringing, gender and personality. So I've watched a bunch of Jackie Chan movies, and now I take karate class and love it. I don't think I'm more likely to hurt somebody else now though, except in self-defence, and maybe not even then. Is it only a minute fraction of the population that is more likely to commit violence through exposure to violent entertainment?

After three years of effort, my book is out! Thanks to:

• Eric Rescorla for everything


• Jim Whitehead and Greg Stein for getting me started, reviewing chapters and writing blurbs


• Clay Shirky and Larry Masinter for writing more blurbs
  
• Radia Perlman for encouragement and having me in her series


• Brian Korver, Elias Sinderson, Andrew Sieja, Yaron Goland, Geoff Clemm, Terence Spies, Kevin Dick, Gary Gershon and Andrew McGregor for technical reviews and advice


• Peter Raymond and Rick Rupp for diagram ideas, Keith Ito for his tracer tool


• Everybody on the various WebDAV mailing lists


• Rachel Gollub and Rob Alvelais for friendship and support


• Prentice Hall editors and production staff: Mary Franz, Noreen Regina and Anne Garcia and Techne Group's Dmitri Korzh (for their patience)


• My mom and dad

My amazon sales rank is 863,536 so far. Whatever that means.

I've got some updates on the SUV-hating thing.

• My anonymous SUV-hating lunch buddy would like to assure NIH readership that he does not like Jeeps. He disapproves of unnecessarily high gas consumption and thus, on being informed of the gas consumption numbers, disapproves of the Wrangler more than the Rav4.


• OTOH, it appears there are some social communities where wimpy SUVs are disdained. Steve at PMStyle tells me that in certain Seattle 'burbs you'll get criticized for owning a lightweight SUV because it's wimpy, not because it's a SUV. If you care what your friends think the Rav4 is a bad choice either way.


• A friend of a friend just bought a H2. Apparently it's already gotten keyed just sitting parked in Palo Alto.

Yesterday at lunch with three others, I said something totally inappropriate for polite company. I said I was considering buying an SUV. I immediately was criticized by two of the other three: SUVs waste gas, SUVs create more pollution, SUVs cause more accidents of all kinds, more rollovers and more deaths in accidents, and if that's not enough, people will honk at you more and 'key' your SUV. Also they asked me, why should anybody ever need to buy an SUV unless they live at the end of a hilly gravel road in wintry country -- if you need a vehicle capable of bringing around your stuff, get a station wagon or a minivan. And finally, you can't park SUVs.

The first ironic thing is that none of these issues were brought up earlier when the fourth luncheon eater said he was considering buying a Jeep Wrangler. Apparently that's free from the Yuppie taint on SUVs.

The next ironic thing is that I specifically mentioned the Rav4. This is an SUV built on the Toyota Camry (Celica?) frame, which I pointed out early in the conversation. Yet that didn't save me from the parking/gas/pollution/accident critiques. In fact it was difficult for the anti-SUVers to believe that any SUV could be small, safe or have good mileage. In fact, the Rav4 gets 24 MPG in the city and 29 in the country, according to the US government. That's better than any of the minivans, and better even than many of the station wagons listed (for example, the Audi line of station wagons gets no better than 18/25 MPG city/country, and although the VW Jetta gets good gas mileage the VW Passat gets no better than 22/31 or worse depending on the model. And also it's pretty obvious that if a Rav4 is built on a Camry frame, it's no harder to park than a Camry, and I'll assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that the pollution is no worse. BTW, the Rav4 isn't the only SUV doing this - the Honda CR-V gets similar gas mileage and is a similar size.

Next the safety critique. It's true that the media loves to criticize SUV safety, but although the headline of this CNN article is "SUVs pose danger to cars", but further in you get a more nuanced view:

The group's report, an analysis of government safety data, will show that sport utility fatality rates have fallen sharply in recent years and are now almost even with passenger cars.

But O'Neill said the analysis will also show that because of their size and weight, sport utility vehicles can cause considerable damage to smaller passenger cars in side-impact crashes.

Does the overall SUV safety record apply well to a small SUV like the Rav4? There are a few ways to look at it.

• The theory/testing bsed scorecards from www.hwysafety.org give the Rav4 a poor score on side impact but otherwise good. Typically station wagons seem to be good all around, generally safer than the Rav4. But minivans and the Jeep Wrangler get worse safety ratings here.


• Another safety rating method is based on actual insurance claims for injuries (to vehical occupants), and vehicle damage. By this rating, the Rav4 is worse than average for injury claims but average on vehical damage. Heavier SUVs are all much better than average, protecting you from both injury and vehicle damage, but interestingly a couple light SUVs rate well (Honda CR-V again or Ford Escape). With claims-based ratings, the numbers can be biased by type of driver. So if the Rav4 attracts young dangerous drivers, while the Ford Windstar (minivan) doesn't, you'd expect the Rav4 to have more claims even if the vehicle itself is safe.


• It seems really hard to get data about danger to other vehicles. Still, if the theoretical objection that SUVs can kill the occupants of other vehicles due to their size, high center of gravity and high bumpers, then the Rav4 should not offend too badly. Its bumper may be higher but not as high as that of a transport truck, and it's just as light as a car.

So if you care both about safety and gas economy, but care a little about driving a cool vehicle and having room for bikes too, a Rav4 or CR-V seems a reasonable compromise. If you're a good driver and wear your seatbelt you might decide that the overall safety risks in SUVs are reasonably mitigated (personally, I haven't been in an accident in 10 years). But apparently this kind of choice is socially unacceptable. You're better getting a Jeep Wrangler which gets worse mileage and has a poorer safety record but at least your friends won't shun you and strangers won't honk at you.

I figure farm subsidies are one of the most pernicious US government programs around, causing more world-wide poverty than any other active program I can think of. Third-world countries tend to agree, and have started pushing the US and Europe to cut these subsidies in return for reduced trade barriers in other areas. So far, this pressure has had little effect, likely because elected US politicians pay more attention to campaign funding from special interest groups here, than to third-world trade negotiators. Is there anything that can be done to increase the pressure to drop these subsidies? I've done some looking, but I haven't found a charity or lobbying group yet that specifically opposes agricultural subsidies. I haven't even run across a lobbying group that opposes trade-distorting programs in general. Any pointers, anybody?

New finished work (rayon shawl) in knitting page.