Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I formulated this principle when I was programming mathematical models of financial markets. I noticed that my colleague who generated the models (that I then implemented) was never particularly attached to them. He would run them so long as they were indicating profitable trades, and then abandon them when they stopped. I was also writing Economics for Real People at that time, and grappling with the issue of the relevance of mathematical models in the economic world. Noticing the modelers attitude, one day I asked him, "Would you say that our practice is to use our models, rather than to believe in them?" "Absolutely," he replied. Mary Morgan's book reaches a similar conclusion.

"Writing down a model and manipulating it allows economists to think through in a consistent and logical way how a number of variables might interrelate, and to find solutions to questions about such systems. This habit of making and using models extends the powers of the mind to ask questions and explore the answers in complicated cases." -- Mary Morgan, The World in the Model , p. 258

"In his work on the evolution of social orders, Hayek thus abandons the individualist methodology he proposed in the wartime writings, thereby rectifying the inconsistency that that precept implied for the system of his thought." -- Andy Dennis, "Methodological Individualism and Society: Hayek's Evolving View," in Austrian Economic Perspectives on Individualism and Society , p. 18 That is correct.

Now, no one has a patent or copyright on the use of the word "naturalism," so anything one says about what it means can be contradicted somewhere in the works of people who call themselves adherents of naturalism. Therefore I am just going to describe a typical view that I have seen out there : "Nothing exists except the sort of things described in the theories of physics." (That exact definition of naturalism is not given in the Wikipedia entry, but I know I have seen it stated: if this were an academic paper, I would go hunt down the exact place I saw it, but this is just a blog post.) There is a rather obvious incoherence in this idea: One of the things that is very much not described by the theories of physics is.. the theories of physics. (These theories are about quarks and electrons and photons and forces and so on: they never are about theories themselves , or how theories come to exist, or causal relationships between theories, etc.) Therefore, the theor...

I actually had an economist tell me the other day that "utility" is a real "thing" out there in the world, and not just a theoretical construct to help economists understand it! Mary Morgan, in The World in the Model , has some good quotes explaining how this sort of thing happens: "(The triumph of modelling) has created a perspectival change in the way economist view their field: they began by looking at the economic world through the lens of their models and ended by seeing their models in the world" (379). "in the process, those small world models of their science became so familiar to economists that now, when economists look at their small mathematical models they see the real world, and when they look at that big real world they see it is a sequence of their small models" (409). You know how when you spend enough time staring at a white circle on a black page, and then look away, you see an after-image as if it is out there in the re...

Physics postulates a world explicable under the category of measurable quantities. Any such quantities it finds will be deemed "physical." The fact that everything physics finds is explicable in terms of the physical is not a hypothesis that physicists are testing, it is an assumption of their science. As such it is ridiculous to point to the work of physicists as "evidence" for a philosophy which one may refer to as "naturalism." It is not a flaw of physics or physicists to make this assumption. What forms any particular science is the set of postulates which it makes about the world, and through which it proceeds to investigate the world as it is seen under those postulates. But it is a mistake to forget that these are postulates and not discoveries. Consider an episode like the discovery of the weak nuclear force. Certain measurable phenomena cannot be explained through any of the other known forces. These phenomena have weird characteristics: certai...

I heard this phrase on some show that was touting the reality of the "supernatural." It is a bit of silliness that plagues both skeptics of and believers in the supernatural. The silliness consists in this: Anything observable and reproducible will be considered natural . When quantum physicists discovered wave-particle duality or non-local effects, things that had never been considered "natural" before, did they declare these things "supernatural"? No, they just said, "Well, nature is stranger than we thought." I am not trying to comment on the existence of the "supernatural" here: I am just noting that asking for or hoping for scientific evidence of the supernatural is absurd: whether or not any such thing as the supernatural exists, there will never be scientific evidence for it , because every sort of thing for which scientific evidence exists will be incorporated into the "natural."

Through the most difficult part, I think: the agents trade their goods until they reach an equilibrium. Here is the Python code that does this, formatted by Blogger, which seems to always want to reduce two spaces to one: """ edgebox_model.py An Edgeworth Box model where two agents trade goods. """ import logging import entity import spatial_agent TRADE = "trade" WINE = "wine" CHEESE = "cheese" GAIN = 1 LOSE = -1 Accept = True Refuse = False def util_func(qty):     """     Later, we want to be able to pass in arbitrary util funcs for each good-trader combo.     """     return 10 - .5 * qty class EdgeboxAgent(spatial_agent.SpatialAgent):     """     Agents who attempt to trade goods to achieve greater utility.     We are descending this from SpatialAgent, because later on we want     traders who can detect local prices but may not know ...

So I'm making a model of agents who might exchange goods. The initial idea is to have utility function for each good they might have or obtain, as well as a present endowment of each good (which may be zero). Now, for an Edgeworth Box, my initial price model, this is easy: we only have two goods, and we know what they are in advance. But eventually, we would like to have agents discover goods on the market that they know nothing about before encountering a potential seller. So how can they have a utility function for a good before they know it exists? (I have not solved this problem in my model, although I have ideas.) In fact, this reflects a problem that actual market actors face: how can they know how much they want of, or what price to pay for, a good they have never encountered before? As my mentor Israel Kirzner has noted, markets inherently involve discovery.

I am now coding up an Edgeworth Box model, in which two agents will trade goods until they reach an equilibrium distribution. Now, in the Edgeworth Box, there are only two agents, and each of them only has one good to start with. But there is no need to program those latter two facts into the model: it is pretty much every bit as easy to code a model with N agents and G goods, and let this particular model be a special case where it just so happens that N = 2 and G = 2. It will only add a couple of lines coding to this round to make this code more generalized, while saving me a great deal of work in the future.

As Mary Morgan notes in The World in the Model , one of the things we do with models is explore them, and hope that exploration tells us something about the world outside the model as well. I appreciate this more and more as I experiment with my agent-based models. Look at the following graph of a run of Adam Smith's fashion model: There are several very interesting things here: 1) Why does the number of followers wearing blue only once drop below the number of trendsetters wearing blue? 2) And why does that drop happen in the second period of the cycle? If I was going to get some one-off behavior from the model, I'd expect it in the first cycle, not the second. 3) And just why is that first cycle so minor compared to the others? 4) And what is going with the trendsetters in that middle stretch where they don't really seem to cycle along with the followers? Here is a larger point to take from this: Have you ever wondered why testing business cycle theories...

"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former." -- Jonathan Swift And the same goes for my life!

Updated with an expanded quote: "If we expand are small world [of the Edgeworth Box], we meet with considerably more difficulties. This expansion goes as follows. Suppose we had Albert's possession of money taken as a starting point, instead of his possession of cheese. And suppose that, after some bargaining, Beatrice is willing to give up to over bottles of wine in exchange for 100 of Albert's guilders. If Albert agrees, the border has resulted in the price of 50 guilders per bottle. That is the so-called equilibrium price. Other individuals, with the same convex characteristics as those of Albert and Beatrice, can now enter our small world and also bid for Beatrice's wine. We can also continue this process by exchanging money against all other goods. Thus, ultimately, it appears that it can be mathematically proven that, where there is free barter, equilibrium prices can be established for all goods. This is the so-called Nash equilibrium..." -- Arnold Merki...

As my agent-based modeling system develops, I am starting to hit the issue of how to uniformly and simply handle things like passing parameters into a program, reading initialization files, and saving program state. I decided I had better read up on this and see how others have handled it. Searching brought up this article , but the writers seem like a couple of knuckleheads, and I am having a hard time understanding what they did

I try to put my changes up to my git repository . It says the push failed, and I should try to do a pull first. So I run the pull command, and I get a message telling me I really ought to explain why the pull is necessary. I felt like typing, "Well, git dude, perhaps you should tell me, because you just told me I ought to do it!"

A decade ago, I used Perl quite a bit. It is a very handy language that makes it possible to do many things quickly and easily. Python also allows the accomplishment of many tasks with a few lines of code. It has some weird features that continue to annoy me: having to explicitly declare 'self' as a parameter to every class method while never explicitly passing it is close to the top of the list. Perl had a large head start on Python in terms of users and libraries. And yet Python seems to be passing it by. Why? My tentative answer: while Perl is very useful, it is clunky and cobbled together. Python, on the other hand, while it has its flaws, is beautiful. Human beings are attracted to beauty.

We all love those familiar Christmas songs around this time of year. But let's face it, their themes don't resonate with the modern listener like they did with those of the past. So here is my first effort to incorporate more modern charcters into these songs: Rusty the blowman Kept his twenties in a roll With a runny nose and a glass crack pipe And two eyes that never close Rusty the blowman Is a fairy tale, they say, He was made of blow but the crackheads know How he ran out one day. But there must have been some powder in That old dollar bill he found. For when he placed it up his nose He began to dance around! O, Rusty the blowman Was alive as he could be, And the crackheads say he could laugh and play Every morning until 5:30.

I am currently reviewing Mary Morgan's book, The World in the Model . (An excellent book, by the way, and one that shows the value of the history of economic thought for the practice of economics: economists who read it will, I think, have a much better understanding of what modeling is all about.) At the same time, I am busy building agent-based models. It is propitious that these two things are happening at the same time: my own modeling makes me appreciate Morgan's insights much better. In particular, she notes that models are away to explore how the world possibly works by exploring how the model works. The nature of models as something to explore has, I think, been underappreciated. I am fascinated, in working with my model of Adam Smith's theory of fashion, to see how much the results coming out of the model change based on tweaking the assumptions going into it. For instance, changing the amount of time that agents will tolerate a fashion scene not to their liking...

Here . American police are way too quick to resort to violence. The figures on the number of people killed by police in the US versus the rest of the developed world are startling. We need real reform here. But demonizing the police as "thugs," "pigs," and so on is no path to reform. It is the path to low-level warfare between the police and those most alienated from our current system. The more hostility towards the police is promoted, the more reason the police will have to fear being killed when dealing with such hostile people, and the more quickly they will resort to violence. And in this struggle, there is no doubt who will come out ahead: The police have resources that those prompted to violence against them simply lack.

Current, in a comment, shared this wonderful parody of git documentation. The unfortunate thing is that the actual git documentation is only a tiny, tiny bit more comprehensible then this spoof. Also, from this and other comments arises a question: is every single regulat reader of this blog except for Bob Murphy a programmer?

Thoreau has a good post on this topic. 99% of the time I have heard the term used, it is a way for very privileged white people to show how superior they are to less privileged white people. For instance, it is a very good way for tenured professors (an extremely privileged class) to bash working class whites. In the struggle of the elites currently underway in the United States, it serves a very useful purpose: if working class whites can be convinced that they are actually "privileged," then maybe they won't notice how all three of the elite factions in the struggle are screwing them over.

I recommend British idealism: A guide for the perplexed at The American Conservative Christmas reading list . Obscure, I know, but at least I didn't recommend the Python Cookbook !

I can understand someone robbing a store. Not that I approve, but it is perfectly comprehensible: they want money, and the store has it. I can even comprehend attacking a store employee who gets in your way. but attacking a baby in the store you were robbing? Was he afraid the baby might testify?

Open source software is nice in that it is free, and there are lots of great tools out there. But I'm not sure if developers, often upset by the fact this free software has not swept the field, are aware of how amateurish the design of the user experience often feels. I installed Ubuntu Linux on my Chromebook. (The operation of the Ubuntu GUI itself is very buggy, and it has the same "sophisticated" GUI-look of, say, Windows 3.) Then I began using 'git', a source-code control tool, to place my code in an online repository. The git documentation is pretty terrible: it is written by experts who cannot recall what using git was like when they started out. In other words, if you already know the system well and have forgotten some detail, it is probably excellent, but if you are trying to learn the system, it is incomprehensible. Worse yet, when a command just failed, I tried to pull up help for the command, and found that this attempted to display a 'man...

So my agent-based modeling system has succeeded in capturing the dynamics of Adam Smith's fashion cycle. Let's start with Smith's description of how fashion works: Fashion is different from custom, or rather is a particular species of it. That is not the fashion which every body wears, but which those wear who are of a high rank, or character. The graceful, the easy, and commanding manners of the great, joined to the usual richness and magnificence of their dress, give a grace to the very form which they happen to bestow upon it. As long as they continue to use this form, it is connected in our imaginations with the idea of something that is genteel and magnificent, and though in itself it should be indifferent, it seems, on account of this relation, to have something about it that is genteel and magnificent too. As soon as they drop it, it loses all the grace, which it had appeared to possess before, and being now used only by the inferior ranks of people, seems to ha...

Is how little understanding there is of the existence of the firm. The fact that there are at least four rival theories in economics explaining its existence is symptomatic of the darkness prevailing in this area. When the average person thinks of "the economy," perhaps the first thing they think of is "businesses." But economics cannot yet explain the existence of these businesses.

As Ed Feser notes : "As I have emphasized many times, what physics gives us is a description of the mathematical structure of physical reality. It abstracts from any aspect of reality which cannot be captured via its exclusively quantitative methods. One reason that this is crucial to keep in mind is that from the fact that something doesn’t show up in the description physics gives us, it doesn’t follow that it isn’t there in the physical world. This is like concluding from the fact that color doesn’t show up in a black and white pen and ink drawing of a banana that bananas must not really be yellow. It both cases the absence is an artifact of the method employed, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality the method is being used to represent. The method of representing an object using black ink on white paper will necessarily leave out color even if it is there, and the method of representing physical reality using exclusively mathematical language will necessaril...

Here . Indra is an agent-based modeling system written in Python and available for download. I just finished coding Adam Smith's fashion model using it, and one of my students is going through Schelling writing up his models using it. Contact me if you would like to try the system, and I will help you get going.

I realized that two of my classes were going to use a function identical in all respects except that one of them would test for amount x being greater than amount y, while the other would test for x being less than y. Right now, I have coded the function to accept a boolean parameter I call "gt" which controls an if statement as to which test the function does. But what I really wanted to do was to pass in the operator to use itself. However, generally speaking, programming languages do not accept operators as parameters to functions. Is there a way to do this without the if statement?

How many pieces of technology developed 45 years ago are now more popular than ever? I thought about this while running some UNIX shell commands in Linux (based on UNIX), which I am running as a alternate operating system on my Chromebook to ChromeOS (based on UNIX). So I picked up my iPhone running iOS (based on UNIX) to write this post, which I will put on Facebook, which runs on UNIX-based servers. Some of my friends will read my post on their Android phones, which run an operating system based on UNIX. Others will read it on their Macintosh computers, which run an operating system... based on UNIX. And the really amazing thing here is that the work of Thompson and Ritchie endured several decades of ridicule before becoming the most ubiquitous piece of software in the world. And the reason for its success is intimately connected to their humility: instead of believing that they knew everything a user would want and building it into a monolithic operating system, they built a minimal...

I've been reading agent-based modelling (ABM) literature the last week, and I am struck by its vindication of Mises's vision of economics. It turns out that to get phenomena like markets, firms, and market-clearing prices, the modelers only have to build agents that: 1) have a purpose 2) have some idea how to achieve it, even if that idea is sub-optimal 3) interact with other agents; and 4) face scarce resources. Well, folks, this is nothing less than the basis of Mises's much reviled "praxeology." Mises just lacked the tools to formalize his vision, but they are here now.

Rob Axtell, in his 2000 paper "Why agents? On the Varied Motivations for Agent Computing in the Social Sciences," attributes the existence of what he calls "artifacts" (program behavior that is not a part of the model being created, but a byproduct of a coding decision which was intended only to implement the model, but actually did something else as well) "partially" to the fact that, in agent models, a small amount of source code controls a large amount of "execution" code. As an example, he offers a system where millions of agents may be created and which might occupy up to a gigabyte of memory, even though the source code for the program is only hundreds of lines long. But this explanation cannot be right, because the causal factor he is talking about does not exist. In any reasonable programming language, only the data for each object will be copied as you create multiple instances of a class. The functions in the agent-object are not copied...

There is no essential difference between software and hardware except the economic difference. The people who put forth metaphors such as "hardware is like the brain and software is like our thoughts" apparently have no understanding of how computers work. Everything that is done in software can be done in hardware. In fact, the way software works is by reconfiguring the hardware. The introduction of the programmable computer was the invention of a machine that could be endlessly reconfigured without having to actually take tools to it and physically adjust its parts. And various features of computers have at various times moved from hardware to software or the reverse: The original Macintoshes could get by with so little RAM because a lot of the operating system was actually put into the hardware. The real difference between software and hardware is that it is cheap to reconfigure software and expensive to reconfigure hardware. So software is simply a way to cheaply and cont...

Is a rising elite trying to seize control of power from an existing elite. The ideas they use to gain their followers commitment and enthusiasm are what Pareto called "derivations": secondary phenomena of secondary importance.

Both "the right" and "the left" suffer from a one-sided focus on an aspect of poverty at the expense of the full picture. The right focuses on agency, and tends to dump the entire blame for their condition on the poor, failing to keep in mind adages like, "There but for the grace of God go I!" The left tends to focus exclusively on circumstances, which winds up denying the poor any agency themselves, and portrays them like shelter animals waiting for a good progressive to come along and adopt them. The reality is that both views are partial truths, each of which needs the other to round out the picture. Although Hegel was somewhat mad at times, teaching us to look at these supposedly irreconcilable divides like this was surely a great contribution to human thought.

There are ads running now during the football games saying that "every kid has to play, 60 minutes a day." So "play" is now a duty that has an allotted time scheduled for it in a day full of other duties.

In the field of Constitutional Political Economy, analysis often starts from the assumption that "political agents act to fulfill their interest just like everyone else." But then the analysis immediately assumes that the interest of political actors consists solely of seeking monetary gain. Since most of the people I read working in this area (for instance, this post is inspired by a paper I am currently refereeing in this field) are at least passingly familiar with Austrian economics, this is a somewhat surprising assumption. One of the things Mises was surely correct about is that "pursuing one's interest," if it is to be a priori true of all agents, must be interpreted extremely broadly. In this sense, as Mises taught us, "one's interest" must include anything that might motivate an agent to act: an aescetic's efforts to abjure all worldly goods, a hero's noble sacrifice of his life for his comrades, and a serial killer's att...

I have been asked to referee, I'd guess, about 15 papers. In almost every case I have figured out who the author is before finishing the paper, sometimes just by glancing at the bibliography. ("There is no way anyone but Jones would cite Jones 15 times!")

It is the only sort of capitalism that has ever existed anywhere. The people who chant, "But that's not real capitalism, that's crony capitalism!" should really be saying, "But that is not the fantasy capitalism that exists only in my head, that's real capitalism!" [Inspired by Matt Bruenig : "Under 'crony capitalism' (more commonly referred to as 'capitalism')..."]

Today, I saw yet another libertarian complaint that any check on people's freedom to exchange -- for instance, mandating store closings on Thanksgiving -- is a sign that the proponent thinks he "knows what is best for others." Ironically, this complaint came from an anarchist, who claims to know that no government would really be best for everyone in the world, despite the fact that 7.199 out of 7.2 billion of us disagree with him.

Many of my libertarian friends on Facebook are upset about the idea of possibly mandating store closures on Thanksgiving. But legal holidays are a pretty good solution to a collective action problem, and furthermore, there is no reason that they could not exist in ancapistan (although arranging them might be more difficult). The fact is, however much we appreciate the market (and I do appreciate it, despite thinking it should not be the entirety of life), we all need breaks from the busyness of buying and selling. In particular, it is nice to have some breaks when (almost) everyone else does as well: that way, we can have things like family reunions over a nice holiday dinner. The difficulty comes in the fact that it only takes one defector from a general agreement that stores are closed on holiday X to begin putting pressure on every other store to open as well: after all, if they stay closed, they're losing sales to a competitor. Someone who buys a washing machine or a televis...

I was talking to my next-door neighbor, in the private community I have mentioned previously, about our septic service. I said that I found it odd that the same company, X, that has the contract to test our tanks, also gets to pump the tank if the test proves pumping is needed. "It seems," I said, "as if this gives X a strong motivation to tell you that your tank failed the test." "Yes," he told me, "I think someone on the board of the community has a close relative high up in the company X, so it was a kind of 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' deal." So… crony capitalism does not depend on the existence of the state after all! It turns out to depend on the existence of human nature, in particular, our natural inclination to do better by our friends and relatives then we do by strangers.

Is crank self-protection. In this video a mathematician calmly explains why 0! = 1. In the comments, some crank shows up and declares the mathematician doesn't know what he is talking about, and he has offered no evidence at all. When they guy won't listen to anything anyone says, people note, "Well, every mathematician in the world disagrees with you." And of course he rolls out... "Appeal to authority." But when someone is so obsessed with some bugbear that he can't grasp the simplest arguments for some point, an appeal to authority is a perfectly valid move.

According to Waldron, liberalism rests on "a requirement that all aspects of the social should either be made acceptable or be capable of being made acceptable to every last individual" (quoted in Liberalism , Fawcett, p. 399). Waldron gives us two conditions joined by an "or." The first one sounds impossible to me, while the second seems vacuous: anyone can assert that everyone ought to agree with their politics, even though they do not, if only other people were reasonable.

The writing style of headlines is a frequent source of amusement. Language Log has often drawn water from this well. James Joyce famously cast one chapter of his novel Ulysses entirely in newspaper style, with many very comic takeoffs on the way headlines are written. My favorite headline from that chapter was "KMRIA," which was short for, "Kiss my royal Irish arse." Tonight I had occasion to recall a headline I once read in a tech publication in the late 1980s: "Sun Eyes Apple Gains." (Sun Microsystems was a major computer-market player at that time.) Imagine if we could send messages back in time, and we sent that headline to someone in 1960, and asked them to guess what it meant.

I posted a quote about the vitality of the High Middle Ages. The person quoted, Robert Bartlett, is Professor of Medieval History at St. Andrews. The book I am quoting won a top history prize. He has written several other books on the Middle Ages, and produced a number of BBC documentaries on the period. And he has spent the last 40 years of his life studying this period. He has spent that time pouring over original documents from the era, and tracking the work of other historians working on the era and of archaeologists excavating the period. He almost certainly can read original documents in at least Latin, middle English, old French, and Italian. He notes that the High Middle Ages were a period of intense creativity. After I posted that quote, several commenters showed up. One says that he prefers the view of the Middle Ages that he learned when he was young. But this view did not change because, with a given set of facts, historians simply decided to put a different spin on them. H...

"and from the 11th century until the slump and crisis of the 14th and 15th centuries stretch the High Middle Ages, and epoch of economic growth, territorial expansion and dynamic cultural and social change. "The vitality of European society between the late 10th and early 14th centuries can be seen in many spheres of life. The scale and speed of production and distribution were transformed: the population grew, the cultivated area expanded, urbanization and commercialization restructured economic and social life. Alongside the spread of money, and of banking and business devices, there developed in some areas a level of manufacturing activity that had never previously been attained. The same creativity is found in social organization. in many areas of life fundamental institutions and structures were given their decisive shape in the centuries: the incorporated town, the university, central representative bodies, the international orders of the Roman Catholic Church--all date...

While compiling a book review resume, I found online versions of reviews of mine of two books on Galileo , and one on Kepler .

Ken B., this may make clearer what I have been saying about the relationship of the historical investigation and practical concerns. Imagine that I am motivated to study computer science in order to get a high-paying job, or in order to impress the smart girl in my computer science class. While one of these factors may motivate my study, it should be clear that neither my plan to get a high-paying job or my dream of dating the girl are any part of computer science itself. And if I actually want to get the job or date the girl by this means, at some point I had better stop paying attention to the job market or the girl and start paying attention to computer science. So it is with history: of course, an historian may be motivated to study some episode in the past because of some present concern. But if that historian actually wants to understand what occurred in the past, at some point, he must set his concern with the present matter aside, and focus upon the past.

Fukuyama posits a tripartite model of good government: it balances a strong state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. It seems we might make a trigonometric model of government types to formalize this. We take the element of the three that is strongest, say, the rule of law, and make that hypotenuse. Then the relative strength of that factor and the two remaining ones can be expressed with the trigonometric functions. So we could say, for instance, that the sine of mainland China is much greater than that of Nigeria (depending, of course, on which other leg we put a strong state and which democratic accountability). And, of course, if we venture into generalized trigonometry , we can even drop the requirement that we pick out a hypotenuse, and deal with all possible relationships between the three factors. In any case, that is what I woke up thinking about this morning

I just found 19 unposted comments in my queue. For some reason, some comments get placed in my spam bucket instead of my inbox, and I only see them when I go into Blogger. And how often I do that variously enormously based on my schedule: today, for instance, was the first time in at least a week I got a chance to do this. But it does make for amusing moments: today I discovered that "Robert," responding to my post discussing Bob Roddis's comments at Murphy's blog (so I am assuming "Robert" is Roddis) had an entire argument with me, in which he became increasingly angry, and finally wound up calling me a "pathetic piece of sh*t," without my knowing he had ever posted anything . The disturbed are perfectly capable of working themselves into a rage all on their own, without any involvement by a second party.

A great post from Adam Ozimek.

There must be rooms full of executives who sit around and declare, "I know what mobile users of our website want: A really half-assed version of the site with most of the features missing!"

1) You will have many thoughts about topics brought up in the book, pet peeves about what the author claims, and opinions on the topics he discusses. These are an important part of your review, and give it its unique flavor. But your main job is to convey to your readers a sense of the book. Your unique insights on its subject matter should be like spices in a stew, and the bulk of your concoction should describe the book. My favorite book reviewer who flouted this principle was Michael Oakeshott, who, when reviewing a book on topic X, would often spend the first 10% of his review noting that the author addresses X, the next 80% offering his view of X, and the last 10% discussing how the author's view fell short of his own. But Oakeshott was a genius, and what he had to say on a topic was often more interesting than what the author under review had to say. We mortals should spend more time describing the book itself. 2) The table of contents is your friend! Keep referring to...

Reader Ken B. is puzzled : "I don't see how you can deny that without denying the use of historical counterfactuals in toto." First of all, to be very clear, no one is "denying the use" of anything in what follows, or in what went before. When I noted Fukuyama's remarks about "hijacking" the course of events, I was not trying to say he can't write like that: I was saying he is not writing as an historian when writing like that. And in what follows, I draw heavily on Michael Oakeshott. He was once asked, by my PhD advisor, David Boucher, if his ideas meant it was illegitimate for historians to write certain things. Oakeshott responded that he had no interest in telling historians what to put in their books. What he was (and I am) interested in is conceptually identifying a certain attitude to the past we can term "historical." And this is a very important point: Oakeshott made clear that there are pasts besides the historical p...

"What if modern people opted in large numbers to be bigots and racists? "Bouglé turn to that question in 'The crisis of liberalism' (1902). The persistence of intolerance had come as a surprise... Dogmatic or sectarian relapses looked at worst as temporary, unsustainable deviations from liberal modernity's happy path. Recent trends had woken liberals with a jolt. They were at a loss. Should they open-mindedly 'tolerate intolerance' or use the powers of state to curtail racial and confessional prejudice?" -- Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea , p. 168 The problem is, of course, unsolvable so long as liberals cling to the notion of liberalism being a "neutral framework." Liberalism is, in fact, its own value system, down on all fours, competing with every other one.

Kevin Drum makes a common error : "Does it matter that the working class barely pays for most of these programs in the first place, since their federal income taxes tend to be pretty low?" The government can control from whom it collects taxes. It cannot control who pays them. That is determined on the market. As Caplan puts it , "Tax incidence depends on supply and demand elasticity, not legislative intent." To take a simple example: Imagine you are a billionaire with a large domestic staff. You want to trust them, so you pay them a wage above the prevailing one. You're planning on giving them all large Christmas bonuses, when you read that a new tax law aimed at high CEO pay is going to cost you $50,000 this year. That happens to be the exact amount you were going to give out in Christmas bonuses, and so you decide simply to skip the bonuses this year. The government purportedly aimed to tax high-wage CEOs, but in this particular instance, the entiret...

Pages does not seem to be able to get me a word count on my documents. How in the world is any professional writer supposed to use a word processor that does not give word counts? Basically, every book review I have ever written, I start out by writing one and a half to two times my maximum word limit. The last week of work I spend constantly trimming out and refining what I've got. I'm going back and checking my word count every half hour or so, to see how close I am getting to my goal.

I have been using Apple's program Pages lately in an effort to make my Chromebook work as an editing platform. (Google Docs simply does not cut it: it wipes out all memory of MS Word styles when you convert a file to Google's format, and messes with the existing formatting tremendously.) Not bad, so far: I am very happy with the fact I can now edit on my iPhone. But as a software engineer, I have found one great puzzle: I was always annoyed that whenever I tried to re-format a paragraph in my "blockquote" style, MS Word would "leak" the style change over into the previous or subsequent paragraphs. Bizarrely, Pages does the exact same thing! Perhaps, in their effort to capture MS-Word-style logic, Apple engineers also imported the bug in MS Word?

From a historical perspective, there is no "course of events," other than what actually occurred, to be "interfered with" or "hijacked" by some "intervention." As Oakeshott noted, the actions of some monarch or pope were not "interferences" with the course of events: they were the course of events. Generally when you see phrases like this, you are in the presence of partisanship. So, when Fukuyama says that democratic movements were "hijacked" by nationalists, what he means is that the actions of the nationalists are unfortunate from his point of view. When a modern libertarian claims that Progressives "hijacked" liberalism, all it really means is that he wishes liberalism had developed differently.

"Having sat out World War I, [Japan] experienced a vigorous period of economic expansion..." -p. 347 In fact, Japan declared war on both Germany and Austro-Hungary in August 1914. It sank an Austro-Hungarian ship in the Far East, and seized several German territories in the area. In 1917, at the request of Britain, its navy ventured all the way to the Mediterranean, and provided escort services for troops of the Triple Entente. While this in no way constitutes participating to the extent that the major combatants did, it is also hardly "sitting out" a la Switzerland.

By default, Google maps on my iPhone offers me a satellite picture of the place I am trying to get to. I find this a ridiculous default choice: I am not interested in how tree covered the property in question is! I just want to see black lines on white space so I can figure out how to get there. And yet there is no doubt that the satellite view is more realistic than a typical street map.

"Model-making is a skilled job. Perhaps it is not yet evident, but will become so in the chapters that follow, that learning how to portray elements in the economy, learning what will fit together, and how, in order to make the model work, are specialized talents using a tacit, craft-based, knowledge as much as an articulated, scientific, knowledge. It is not easy to pinpoint in any general way the skills of articulation and construction, or to see how economists acquire them except through apprenticeship." -- Mary Morgan, The World in the Model , p. 15

In a discussion of how the American system of checks-and-balances and federalism produces wildly inefficient legislation, Fukuyama notes that: "Congress created fifty-one separate programs for worker retraining, and eighty-two projects to improve teacher quality." (p. 497) I have been making this point even before reading this latest work of Fukuyama's. But he has an interesting perspective on why this occurs. The problem appears to me as a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma (see Schelling). To take an example: whatever level of taxation one prefers, from zero all the way up to 90% tax brackets for the very rich, it is surely preferable for everyone (except tax accountants) that the level of taxation that winds up being chosen be collected as efficiently as possible. You might hate paying 40% of your income to the taxman, but if you were going to do so, surely you would like to do so without having to undergo a lot of work on your own part in order to pay that tax, right?...

This one is from Bob Roddis, in the comment section of Bob Murphy's blog: "What do we do about the drug problem? Answer: druggies could be prohibited from driving on private roads and entering private neighborhoods and schools. "What do we do about the porn problem? Answer: porn producers and consumers could be prohibited from driving on private roads and entering private neighborhoods and schools. "What do we do about the problem of religious fanatics that won’t let us smoke dope? Answer: anti-drug fanatics could be prohibited from driving on private roads and entering private neighborhoods and schools. "As a bonus, everyone will be safe, secure and prosperous." But, in ancapistan, every road in neighborhood will be private, so "druggies," pornographers, and religious fanatics will be prohibited from going anywhere. Which, of course, will be a death sentence for them. So, in the new, "liberal," world of ancapistan, to do drugs, produc...

"Economists (just like their astronomer forebears) understand that a model stands in for their economic universe to enable them to explore certain properties of that world represented in the model." -- Mary Morgan, The World in the Model , p. 33 (emphasis mine) The models of physics are no different: they stand in for certain properties of the real world, and allow us to study them in abstract isolation.

Mary Morgan, in her book The World in the Model , likens models to caricatures, and offers the following graphic during her discussion: That this process of caricature is interesting and informative I do not doubt: I am no critic of caricatures or of models! Seeing Louis Philippe as a pear, and seeing the world as simply an interrelated system of mathematical equations, are each interesting perspectives. But if someone asks me if caricature of Louis Philippe as a pear is perhaps not the actual cause of the real Louis Philippe, who is a sort of cognitive illusion, I must admit I am so flabbergasted that I hardly know how to reply. I spent several years modeling options in the financial markets. The programs I wrote to do that made a fair number of traders a good deal of money. but imagine their surprise if, one day when their actual trading lost money, I told him that this was of no regard: my models were the real thing, and those models had made money, and the traders' f...

"It is not the human conduct must in principle be taken to occlude regularities (other than self-imposed circumstantial practices), or even that there may not be some brooding providential Intelligence that accounts for them; The point is that these considerations do not mix with and cannot take the place of an historical understanding concerned with what was actually the case, there and then, in terms of situations composed entirely of mutually related occurrences inferred from record." -- Michael Oakeshott, On History , p. 65 I make note this for the reason that it demonstrates that for Oakeshott, as for Collingwood, history is intelligible in and of itself, without the application of further laws or theories.

"Capitalist use of technology would extract surpluses from the labor of the proletariat, leading to greater concentration of wealth and the progressive immiseration of workers. The bourgeoisie who ran this system could not, despite their wealth, consume everything that it produced, while the proletariat whose labor made it possible were too poor to buy its products. Ever increasing levels of inequality would lead to a shortfall in demand, and the system would come crashing down upon itself." -- p. 436 Thomas Sowell, who wrote his dissertation on Marx and published an entire book on Marxism, gives the true picture: "Crises are inherent in capitalist commodity production because producers cannot accurately predict the demand of the consumers or the supply of other producers... "Neither underconsumption nor a permanent 'breakdown' plays any role in this picture..." -- Marxism , p. 92 (emphasis mine) Marx and Engels in fact ridiculed underconsumptionist th...

While Fukuyama has toned down the extreme claims he was making in his book The End of History , he has not abandoned the thesis. History has still been on a "road" democracy. Societies are still judged by whether they have achieved "stable" democracy. (Which, of course, being stable, will mark the end of history for that society.) Western Europe is still the goal for him (sometimes he phrases it "Denmark"), and everyone is, or at least should be, trying to get there.

"In the hands of good leaders, such a system [of autocratic rule] can actually perform better than a democratic system that is subject to rule of law and formal democratic procedures like multiparty elections. It can make large, difficult decisions without being hampered by interest groups, lobbying, litigation, or the need to form cumbersome political conditions or educate the public as to their own self interest... So too with China: its post-1978 performance has focused on widely shared goals such as economic growth, stability, and the broad provision of public services. Deng Xiaoping and the leaders of the party who followed him understood that the party's survival would depend on legitimacy, which could no longer rest on ideology but would have to be based on their performance in governing the country." -- p. 383

For a long time, people in the west made a big deal of the date 476: it marked the "Fall of the Roman Empire." But: "Fra gli uomini del V secolo, invece, essa passò quasi inosservata. L'impero, infatti, era in mano ai barbari già da tempo. Barbari riempivano i vuoti lasciati dai romani nelle campagne è nell'esercito, collaboravano all'amministrazione dello stato, comandavano le truppe imperiali. Alcuni, potentissimi, sposavano figlie, nipoti, sorelle di imperatori, altri facevano da tutori, cioè da guide e protettori, ai piccoli principi romani destinati a regnare." -- Il racconto dello storico "For the people of the fifth century, instead, it went almost unnoticed. The Empire, in fact, had been in the hands of the barbarians for some time. Barbarians had filled the gaps left by Romans in the country and the army, collaborated in the administration of the state. Some, powerful, had married daughters, nieces, and sisters of emperors, others had been ...

"The changes in the nature of Chinese government after 1978 where at least as great as those that took place in economic policy. Indeed, one could argue that the massive shift from a centrally planned economy to a more open and marketized one could not have occurred without corresponding changes in the nature of government." -- Fukuyama, p. 371 "One could argue"? Well, is one arguing? And who would that "one" be? Why not just write, "I argue that"?

"I would argue that the state that has emerged in China since the beginning of reforms in 1978 bears more resemblance to this classical Chinese state than it does to the Maoist state that preceded it, or even to the Soviet state that the Chinese tried to copy. Contemporary China has been engaged in the recovery of a long-standing historical tradition, whether or not participants in that process were aware of what they were doing." -- p. 371

"Da molti italiani il fascismo fu considerato un male che era necessario accettare. La mancanza di libertà sembrò un prezzo che era giusto pagare per avere un'Italia ordinata, senza scioperi né agitazioni popolari, senza minacce di rivoluzione." -- Il racconto dello storico "For many Italians fascism was considered a bad that was necessary to accept. The loss of liberty seemed a just price to pay to have an orderly Italy, without strikes and popular unrest, without the threat of revolution."

I want to be around to console my ancap friends when all the angry young kids on the Internet are posting slogans like: "Defense agency fees are theft!" "A defense agency is nothing but a criminal gang that has duped people into thinking it is legitimate!" "The network of ancap defense agencies is a massive conspiracy to extort money from people!"

You should really read this great piece by Dan McCarthy on James Burnham. Machiavelli was a realist, and of course was despised for being one. But the most interesting thing to me was the influence of Vilfredo Pareto on Burnham. Pareto pointed out that every society that has ever existed has had an elite. But when a rising elite is struggling for power with an existing elite, it will often use anti-elitist language to inspire its followers, since "Give us power" is a slogan unlikely to attract many supporters. Contemporary libertarians might ask themselves, "Is there a rising elite class who is using our idealism and energy in an attempt to gain power?" (Ahem, ahem, Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel.)

When I first started encountering deer on the road, 30 years or so ago, real deer acted like figurative deer in the headlights. But they have adapted to cars remarkably quickly. Now I see them calmly standing on the side of the road, waiting for my car to pass, after which they casually trot across the road.

"Latin American institutions are overdetermined: that is, there authoritarian and illiberal character has multiple sources and does not simply lie in the material conditions found by the colonialists." -- Fukuyama, p. 242 Outside of the world of controlled laboratory experiments, doesn't almost everything that happens in the world have "multiple sources"? Collingwood notes this in a discussion of causation: we can say "the high winds caused the tree to topple," but so did its weak roots. And the weak roots were caused by the poor soil in the area. And the poor soil was caused by overfarming in past centuries. And the overfarming was caused by…