Scott Adams' Blog

Gangnam Style

Posted September 28th, 2012 @ 2:52pm in #General Nonsense

Okay, I’ve been doing my best to avoid looking at the new viral video called Gangnam Style by a Korean musician named PSY. I could tell from the headlines the video would involve some Korean guy dancing in a dorky style to bad music. How good could that be, right?

But curiosity got the best of me. I had to know what makes this particular video a global phenomenon. So I clicked, and I watched, expecting to be underwhelmed. I was wrong. It’s totally awesome and thoroughly recommendable.

For me, the fascination involves figuring out what makes this video ridiculously entertaining. The music is so generic I feel as if I’ve heard it before. The dancing is literally laugh-out-loud funny. The star, PSY, is the very definition of extraordinarily uncool. The videography looks random and amateurish. When you put all of those bad elements together you get…awesome? WTF?

On some level I thought I was laughing at the star. But I couldn’t quite commit to that point of view because something about the entire video absolutely works. Is this one of those million-monkeys-with-typewriter situations applied to Internet video? Is it pure luck that the seemingly bad elements all come together to create an awesome whole? Or is there some sort of clever genius at work? I absolutely can’t tell, and that’s what makes this thing so fascinating.

Remember that genius comes in many forms. I think we’d agree there’s no musical genius happening with this video. But someone involved with this video imagined all of the pieces together, produced it, and hit it out of the park. Is the music video director the genius, or maybe a choreographer, or is PSY the brilliant one?

Or is it just dumb luck that the elements came together?

My best guess is that serendipity plus some sort of visual arts genius is involved.

What do you think? Is it luck or genius?

(If you haven’t seen the video yet, turn up the sound and get ready to have a good time. It’s a good way to start a weekend.)

Air Tunnels

Posted September 26th, 2012 @ 12:48pm in #General Nonsense

Suppose you built a huge tunnel with one end at a cold beach and the other end thirty miles inland. Warm air rises, so you’d be sucking in the cold air at the beach and exhaling it at the warm inland side. You would literally have a wind tunnel.

Now suppose the warm end of the tunnel has lots of little hoses distributed to individual homes that require air conditioning. Now you have air conditioning as a public utility. Every home would draw in cool air from the beach and exhale it though a sun-warmed chimney.

At night, when the homes don’t need as much air conditioning, everyone shuts their hose, opens their windows and goes to bed. There’s still a temperature differential because the beach end of the tunnel is always colder. So at the warm end of the tunnel a huge door slides open to allow a new direction for the air to escape, past windmill-type generators. The generators would produce electricity all night and help pay for the tunnel.

In the winter, when you want warm air, the beach side of the tunnel is sealed and a solar concentrator one mile up from the beach comes online. It uses mirrors to focus sunlight on thermal mass around the tunnel to superheat it. The warm air would travel up the tunnel to the homes. The thermal mass at the solar concentrator side would stay warmer than the air for hours after the sun went down.

I realize none of this is practical or economical. It just bugs me that I need to pay money to change the temperature of air in my home when there’s plenty of free air at exactly the right temperature just a few miles away. And that air wants to be where I am. It just needs a tunnel.

Is there a smarter (economical) way to solve this problem?

 

Imagination Interface

Posted September 24th, 2012 @ 1:26pm in #General Nonsense

Economies are driven by imagination. We give it other names, such as consumer confidence, expectations, and forecasts. It all boils down to imagining the future. If you imagine you’ll have plenty of money tomorrow, you’ll spend more of your savings today. If you think tomorrow will be challenging, you hoard your cash to be safe.

Our current economic situation is often described as a lack of demand. The country has capital to invest, and savings to spend, but people aren’t so sure this is the right time. You wouldn’t, for example, buy a house unless you imagine property values to be heading up instead of down.

A recent study showed that you can influence how much people save for retirement by having subjects simply imagine themselves older. When you imagine an old version of yourself, it changes how you act today.

Presidential election years are especially good for imagined futures. At the moment, both the supporters of Mitt Romney and the supporters of President Obama see a brighter future ahead because both groups imagine victory, and with it the improved economy they crave. The problem is that the day after the votes are counted half of the country will turn deeply pessimistic and imagine tragedy. According to the imagination theory of economics, you’d expect stocks to zoom with optimism as we approach a close election (check!) and a deep pullback right after the election when half the country turns to instant pessimism.

The three presidents who did the best job of manipulating citizen imaginations were probably Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton. The economy was strong under each of their administrations.

President Obama is a master at manipulating our imaginations with his hope and change message. But I think Republicans have done an effective job of blunting his imagined future with their large doses of obstructionist reality and imagined drift toward greater socialism. The President’s plan of taxing the rich doesn’t feel like optimism; it feels more like the stranded survivors of a plane crash voting to eat the fat people first.

If society descends into chaos after the elections, for whatever reason, and I am forced into my role as Emergency Backup Leader (EBL), I’ll use the country’s collective imagination as my user interface to steer civilization back on course. I’ll literally tell people to imagine being generous to the people in need, and imagine the wheels of commerce rolling forward. I’ll ask people to remember how constipated and bloated the government was before civilization imploded and to imagine how we can learn from past problems and design a better model.

Rationalists will scoff at my methods and deride the idea of an imagination interface as new-age magic. They will compare it to the bestselling book The Secret. They will demand data-driven executive decisions, not gazing at crystals and thinking happy thoughts. I’ll make all of the rational decisions that are needed, especially in cases where it will improve confidence. But I think science supports the notion that the job of a leader is to control imagination. When you get the imagination right, capitalism has all the direction it needs.

When things get so tough that only the rich have resources to spare, I’ll ask the wealthy to imagine a future conversation in which someone asks what they did to help the country through its tough patch. I’ll ask them to imagine remembering with pride how they intelligently opened the spigots to their capital and let it flow into the economy, boosting demand and increasing optimism when it was needed most. Perhaps some of the rich will imagine hiring more people than they needed. Others might imagine they invested in more projects than they would have normally bitten off. Some might imagine feeding the poor. It will be a source of great imagined pride - sort of a Greatest Generation thing - and an opportunity for the rich to regain respect in society.

Let’s hope the economy self-corrects before I need to test that approach.

Motivation Drug

Posted September 20th, 2012 @ 3:55pm in #General Nonsense

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

  ———————————

Studies show that people have different levels of intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is another way of saying a person’s body chemistry is such that it produces enthusiasm for doing hard work and creating great things. I predict that someday a drug will be able to mimic or stimulate whatever body chemistry produces intrinsic motivation. When that drug is developed - and I predict that it will be, or maybe it already exists - could it ever become legal and widely prescribed?

For a drug to become legal it needs to be safe, and it needs to address a real medical problem in a way that benefits society. Let’s assume this motivation drug produces the same body chemistry that any naturally-motivated person enjoys. That sort of drug seems safer than introducing entirely foreign chemistry to a body. It would probably be no riskier than testosterone injections or other hormone therapies, meaning there would be some risk, but not enough to keep it off the market.

The next hurdle involves labeling a lack of motivation as a medical problem. I think that would be the easy part. Any pharmaceutical company that creates such a drug would spend huge amounts to get that designation. And their argument would be solid. A lack of motivation can ruin a person’s life as well as the life of anyone who is economically linked to that person. That’s a strong argument. The definition of a medical need is fairly flexible.

Obviously some unmotivated people are influenced by their circumstances more than their body chemistries. It’s hard to feel motivated if you’re surrounded by people who feel doomed, look doomed, and tell you that you are doomed too. Still, we see highly motivated people emerge from just about any form of poverty. So we know that chemistry - if it is just right - can overcome environment. As a practical matter, it might be cheaper and easier to tweak the motivational chemistry of people who are in bad circumstances instead of trying to fix their circumstances and hope that’s enough to stimulate their natural motivation.

I can also imagine Republicans and Democrats being on the same page and supporting such a drug. Republicans think poor people lack motivation, so a motivation pill would fit right into their ideology. Democrats tend to go where the scientific consensus leads (evolution, climate change), and if science says unmotivated people can be helped by a prescription drug, why not?

This idea is easy enough to test. I believe the medication for ADHD acts like speed (and feels like motivation) for people who don’t have ADHD. Just pick a poor community and put a random sample of volunteers on the drug and see what happens. If the drugged kids get better grades and the drugged adults increase their incomes compared to peers, and they have no worse side effects than ADHD patients, you have everything you need to allow doctors to prescribe the drug off label.

I think you’ll see some version of this happen after science finishes chipping away at the glorification of free will, and society starts to understand itself as a bunch of moist robots that sometimes need chemical tuning.

Quote Approval

Posted September 19th, 2012 @ 1:46pm in #General Nonsense

In a New York Times opinion piece, David Carr worries that the practice of quote approval is diminishing the news. In recent years, government and business leaders often agree to interviews only on the condition that they have approval over their quotes. The reason for that condition, obviously, is to scrub out any accidental truth-telling that sounds bad when taken out of context. The problem for the media is that a large amount of what qualifies as “news” is nothing but quotes taken out of context. If you take that away, it’s bad for business.

Consider the news this week about Mitt Romney’s comments at a fundraiser. He said, “I don’t care about them” when talking about the 47% of voters who pay no federal income taxes. Taken out of context it sounds like a rich guy saying he doesn’t care about the poor. But in its proper context it’s nothing but smart campaign strategy. According to Romney, the people who depend on government support have made up their minds to vote for Obama, so it makes more sense for Romney to focus his campaign message on the undecided folks. Who would argue with that? I assume President Obama’s campaign is also focusing on undecided voters while ignoring hard-core conservatives that have made up their minds.

Also in the past week, a quote from 1998 is surfacing in which Obama said he supports wealth redistribution “at least at a certain level.” Out of context it sounds like he wants to take money from people who work and give it to those who don’t. In its proper context it means he supports the current tax system which gets most of its revenue from the rich and uses it to create opportunities for the poor, through education, and other social programs. Almost every citizen supports wealth redistribution “at a certain level” just by supporting public funding of schools.

I’ve been interviewed several hundred times in my career. When I see my quotes taken out of context it is often horrifying. Your jaw would drop if you saw how often quotes are literally manufactured by writers to make a point. Some of it is accidental because reporters try to listen and take notes at the same time. But much of it is obviously intentional. So much so that when I see quotes in any news report I discount them entirely. In the best case, quotes are out of context. In the worst case, the quotes are totally manufactured.

I’ve also been in a number of interviews in which the writer tried to force a quote to fit a narrative that’s already been formed. The way that looks is that the writer asks the same question in ten different ways, each time trying to lead the witness to a damning or controversial quote. It’s a dangerous situation because humans are wired to want to please, and once you pick up on what a writer wants you to say, it’s hard to resist delivering it. That looks like this.

Writer: What is your opinion on leprechauns?

Famous person: I don’t have one.

Writer: So you wouldn’t say you like leprechauns?

Famous person: Probably not.

Writer: Probably not what?

Famous person: I wouldn’t say that about leprechauns.

Writer: Wouldn’t say what?

Famous person: I wouldn’t say I like them.

At that point the writer has his quote about leprechauns: “I wouldn’t say I like them.” The context will be removed later. The manufactured news will say that a famous person is a racist leprechaun-hater. The evidence is that he said so in his own words.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, you probably haven’t been interviewed several hundred times. If any famous people are reading this, I assume they are chuckling with recognition.

The cousin to the manufactured quote, and even more dangerous, is the interpreted quote. That’s when a person with low reading comprehension, or bad intentions, or both, misinterprets a quote, then replaces the actual quote with the misinterpretation. That path might look like this:

Original quote: “Some men are rapists. Society needs to punish them.”

Morph One: “He says men are rapists.”

Morph Two: “He says all men are rapists by nature.”

Morph Three: “He excuses rape because he says it’s natural.”

One of the lessons I learned the hard way is that you never mention a topic in an interview that you fear might be misinterpreted. When I’m asked about my family upbringing, for example, I usually just say it was “normal” and try to change the subject. When I’m asked my opinion about other cartoonists, I usually say I don’t comment on other peoples’ art.

Quote approval is certainly bad for the news industry because it reduces the opportunities for manufacturing news and artificial controversies. But on balance, I’d say quote approval adds more to truth than it subtracts.

Link War! (Stimulus vs. Austerity) - Results

Posted September 17th, 2012 @ 1:58pm in #General Nonsense

[Update: Here’s a new study on tax cuts and the impact they have on economic growth.]


In my last post I declared a link war on the question of whether government stimulus or austerity is the best approach for fixing an economic slump. Results were fascinating.

Apparently both sides of the stimulus-versus-austerity debate can point to historical data and say, “See, my way always works.” I was not expecting that. I mean, isn’t everyone staring at the same historical data?

It turns out that the historical data is more like a Rorschach test. One economist can look at the data and see a bunny rabbit while another sees a giraffe. You and I haven’t studied the raw data ourselves, and we probably aren’t qualified anyway, so we are forced to make our decisions based on the credibility of economists. And seriously, who has less credibility than economists? Chiropractors and astrologists come close.

Prior to declaring a link war on this question I assumed one set of economists were data-ignoring political partisans and their critics were honest patriots raising their voices to save a troubled world. After reviewing the links I have ruled out that interpretation. I think it’s more likely that the data is legitimately subject to interpretation and economists are filtering what they see through their political biases.

I reject the notion that one side is cynically ignoring the data to help get their preferred political party in favor no matter the consequences. I think the data is genuinely ambiguous.

I have read (okay, skimmed) the links that many of you provided. I’ve sorted the better ones into categories so you can judge for yourself. And I am ready to declare a verdict in the case of stimulus versus austerity.

My judgment is that while some of the economists involved might be entirely right, while the economists on the other side might be nothing but clever crackpots, there is no mechanism for citizens such as us to sort the credible from the crackpots. If you read the links below and declare one side an obvious winner, you just might be a special sort of idiot who thinks he’s brilliant. It looks to me as if both sides have equally strong-sounding arguments based on data. But to be fair, I can’t rule out the possibility that I’m an idiot; the circumstantial evidence is piling up.

When faced with a decision of this complexity, in which experts disagree, and I have no reliable mechanism to discern truth, I choose the path that is least expensive to me in the short run. Whenever the long run is 100% unpredictable, it makes sense to maximize your short term situation. In my case that means favoring lower taxes and huge cuts in government spending. If your income is directly influenced by government spending, you should be in favor of stimulus and lower taxes.

If you believe one set of economists over the other because one side’s arguments sound more convincing, you’re either an idiot or an economic genius, and realistically, you can’t be sure which one you are.

Below are the better links that many of you provided, grouped by category. At the end I included links from people who argue that monetary policy is the real solution, not stimulus versus austerity.

I dare you to study the links and conclude that one side is a clear winner.

Most Entertaining Link

This musical video of economists John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek debating is awesome in just about every way. Starts slow but worth the wait.

http://econstories.tv/2011/04/28/fight-of-the-century-music-video/

 
Austerity is Bad Links

http://www.manifestoforeconomicsense.org/

http://www.manifestoforeconomicsense.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

http://www.voxeu.org/article/procyclicalists-fiscal-austerity-vs-stimulus

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/01/1096532/-Austerity-or-stimulus-A-quick-note-about-that-jobs-report

http://articles.philly.com/2012-07-03/news/32509117_1_austerity-stimulus-program-new-jobs

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/sam-janet-and-fiscal-policy/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/17/end_this_depression_now_paul_krugman

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/public-investment-in-the-slump/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17836624

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/03/29/compare-how-the-uk-and-usa-recovered-from-recession/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/19/david-cameron-austerity-measures-interview

http://www.conservatives.com/Video/Webcameron.aspx?id=b3b3d2c1-353a-4d53-bef2-c5ab79fbae5d

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12190.pdf

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/what-part-of-austerity-isnt-working-dont-people-get-20120617

 

Austerity is Good Links

http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2012/06/26/fiscal-austerity-and-economic-prosperity-pt-iii-why-government-spending-retards-growth/

http://www.adamsmith.org/research/articles/the-results-are-in-spending-cuts-not-tax-hikes-are-the-road-to-recovery

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_2017USp_13s1li111lcn_G0t

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_2017USp_13s1li111lcn_F0t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2006/04/21/chartistry

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/realworld-cases-prove-spending-restraint-works

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/spending-restraint-works-examples-from-around-the-world/

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/canadas-spending-cuts-and-economic-growth/

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/spain

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/greece

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299233/show-me-savage-spending-cuts-europe-please-veronique-de-rugy

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/austerity-works

http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1322&theme=home&loc=b

 

Monetary Policy is the Thing

http://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-scott-sumner-2012-9

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/getting-nominal/

http://www.ngdp.info/nominal-GDP-level-target-proponents.aspx

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/woodford-on-monetary-and-fiscal-policy/

http://www.ngdp.info/

http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2012/04/17/fiscal-and-monetary-policy-in-a-liquidity-trap

http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2012/04/20/fiscal-and-monetary-policy-in-a-liquidity-trap-part-ii

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/liquidity-trapped/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-05/the-sorrow-and-the-pity-of-another-liquidity-trap-brad-delong.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_monetarism

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/

Link War! (Stimulus vs. Austerity)

Posted September 13th, 2012 @ 1:28pm in #General Nonsense

I’m fascinated that there’s still a debate on the question of whether the best way to help the economy in the long run is by higher taxes on the rich plus government stimulus versus austerity and lower taxes. You would think that with so many governments around the world trying one policy or the other for the past hundred years we would have an unambiguous track record to inform us. One of those approaches - stimulus versus austerity - must be better than the other, right?

Instead of clarity, I see proponents of government spending and higher taxes cite the Clinton administration as a time when higher tax rates coincided with a booming economy and a more balanced budget. Proponents of austerity point to Estonia’s recent success in belt-tightening. Where’s my clarity, damn it?

I declare a link war! In the comments, give me links to support one argument or the other with historical examples. Keep your comments brief, please, with just a summary of the link. I’ll compile them and declare a winner.

My bias going into this is that the best approach to stimulus versus austerity depends on whatever else is happening in the economy. If you have a dotcom boom happening, you can probably raise taxes with impunity and balance the budget too. If not, perhaps the austerity thing makes more sense. That’s my starting point. I’d like you to change my mind.

Link on!

[Update: This link will be hard to beat. Thanks to Kuvuplan for that.]

Picking a President

Posted September 11th, 2012 @ 3:09pm in #General Nonsense

If I were to compare either Mitt Romney or President Obama to the model I hold in my head of an ideal president, both would miss the mark by about the same distance, but for different reasons. Unfortunately we only have two choices at this point so I thought I’d help the three or four independent voters in the United States work through the decision. I’m neither Republican nor Democrat, so I have the advantage of being able to start writing this post without knowing which side I’ll come down on. This is as close as you can get to objectivity.

Let’s start by examining President Obama’s record on the economy. He inherited a massive debt and added quite a bit of his own in the name of stimulus. The vast majority of economists agree that cutting spending or raising taxes when the economy is in free fall would kill it. That’s why I assume that a President Romney, or any other president, would have done exactly the same thing President Obama did. Any president would have followed the consensus of credible economists. That’s the only way to cover your ass.

When the shit is heading toward the fan all zealots become pragmatists. That’s probably why Chief Justice John Roberts abandoned conservative ideology when he cast a deciding vote to protect Obamacare, thus saving the credibility of the Supreme Court. Likewise, a conservative Republican president would have done pretty much what President Obama did and run up the debt to keep the economy from the ledge.

Then there’s the question of whether the Republican effort to thwart President Obama at every turn is the President’s fault or Congress’ fault. I think “fault” is the domain of non-thinkers. A better question to ask is what will work in the future. We can be sure another four years of gridlock will be risky. I think the advantage goes to a Republican president because the Democrats in Congress are less Kamikaze-like and more willing to compromise.

The next question that must be asked is whether an effective get-things-done Romney presidency would be a good thing or a bad thing. Here we have very little to go on. If you look at his track record, he seems the ultimate gamer. No matter what game you drop him into he learns the rules and finds a way to win. Examples:

1. School (excelled)
2. Business (excelled)
3. Family (awesome)
4. Church (leader)
5. Governor (won)
6. Olympics (fixed it)
7. Presidential primaries (won nomination)

My Fix-the-World Fantasies

Posted September 10th, 2012 @ 1:01pm in #General Nonsense

One of the things that make me feel good is imagining a brighter future. I think that’s why I spend a weird amount of my time thinking up creative solutions for the world’s biggest problems. In my fantasy world - the place to which I escape when I need a shot of hope - I often come up with an idea that makes the entire world - at least the imaginary one - a better place. As long as it’s a fantasy there’s no reason to think small. How cool would it feel to fix the entire world? Pretty good, right?

Interestingly, our brains are wired in such a way that we can experience the sensations associated with our fantasies almost as if they are real. That’s why you cry at movies and get attached to characters in books. You can know something is fiction and still get moved by it.

Today I give you some feel-good fiction in the form of a fix-the-world fantasy. You might see some wrinkles in my plan, so to speak, but no matter. Simply imagining this awesome future will feel good even as you reject it with your rational mind.

Are you ready? This will feel cool. Here we go…

In the long run, the last thing I’m worried about is national unemployment levels. At the moment, unemployment is a nightmare for lots of families, and it will stay that way for a few years no matter who gets elected. So I’m certainly worried about unemployment in the near term. But eventually so many boomers will leave the workforce because of retirement, health problems or death, that employers will be begging for workers. We’ll be importing talent from other countries like crazy. Wages will climb.

Long term trends don’t help if you’re unemployed today. But in terms of government policy that looks far into the future, or should, projections about the future make a difference for allocating resources today. When I talk about government resources in the context that follows I mean jawboning, leadership and any form of non-monetary influence.

When you make your list of national priorities, one that should be near the top is the unprecedented number of seniors racing toward retirement without sufficient savings to support themselves. Addressing the challenge of an aging population requires a multi-prong strategy.

First, you need a doctor assisted suicide option. If that sounds cold, I assure you that I’d like the option for myself in case I need it someday. It feels like compassion to me. Doctor assisted suicide gets rid of the expensive and brutal final year or more of life that many people prefer not living.

The second prong is figuring out a system of senior living - a community structure and a physical building structure - that takes advantage of everything we’ve learned in the past fifty years about psychology, health, and technology. Surely we can find ways to keep independent seniors happy at far lower costs than today.

Obviously job one is fixing the existing economy. It’s hard to make any kind of long term change without the flexibility of some free cash. Let’s stipulate that the current economy is the top priority. But is there a way to juice the current economy by long range planning?

Suppose the government encouraged society to prepare for the issue of the aging population and start serious planning now. We all want to control government spending, so imagine the only direct role of government is appointing a project leader who would organize the planning through an open source model.

Subgroups of the project might have narrow scopes. For example, one group of volunteers - perhaps graduate students or industry volunteers - might be in charge of figuring out the best air conditioning system for the city of the future - a city that is designed with senior living in mind.

The city of the future need not be senior-only. One proposed solution might involve equipping every family home with an in-law apartment above the garage. That would work well with the assisted suicide strategy too because if a senior signed up for the service over the Internet, the doctor would just need to pull into the garage and keep the engine running.

Anyway, I would think that in three years the open source project would have enough of a plan completed to attract financing, find a location, and start building the prototype. It probably makes sense to wait on the second location until the bugs are found in the first, after a year or two of operation.

Here’s the clever part of the plan, according to me: If the planning for these future cities starts now, people will soon get a good idea what sort of job skills will be in demand in three years. That allows states to decide if they want to encourage job training in the appropriate fields, or at least encourage companies to start funding training if they want to participate in the coming construction boom. Government’s role could be as small as promoting the transition to a senior-friendly economy by setting up the planners, kicking off the project, and keeping the public informed of how it’s going. Government just needs to be the mouthpiece and the cheerleader, i.e. leader.

I could imagine the next global economic wave to involve the transition to a senior-friendly civilization. Done right, the new living arrangement would be an order of magnitude better for the environment and be a direct benefit to climate change management. And I would imagine many of the ideas developed during this economic wave would apply to retrofitting existing homes and communities. Every community would get an economic stimulus because everyone is directly affected by the aging population.

Is my plan politically feasible? Ask yourself who votes. I’m advocating a transfer of resources toward the most important category of voters - older citizens. But I’m doing it in a way that should create jobs for the young. And I’m doing it all with government leadership as opposed to direct meddling and financing. Which politician hates that plan?

I know I’m full of shit. But I’ll be interested to read your comments to see if you agree on exactly why.

Preferences

Posted September 5th, 2012 @ 2:09pm in #General Nonsense

When I was a kid, all enlightened people knew that gender stereotypes were the reason that boys preferred playing with trucks and girls preferred playing with dolls. The only people who didn’t believe that gender stereotypes controlled childhood behavior were the uneducated and … parents trying to raise their kids in stereotype-free conditions. For some reason the little boys were fashioning imaginary guns out of bananas, sticks, and their own genitalia while little girls were doing whatever you do when you’re not pretending to shoot people. The common explanation for the differences in boys and girls was that there’s no such thing as a stereotype-free environment. There’s always leakage, and kids are like sponges when it comes to role models. That explanation sounded reasonable to me for years.

Recently scientists have discovered that adolescent male monkeys prefer playing with trucks while adolescent female monkeys prefer dolls. As it turns out, toy preferences are more about chemistry than society.

You might say the monkey study is one more step in humanity’s slow-motion “discovery” that human behavior is caused by whatever chemicals are sloshing around in our skulls. On one hand we all know that the physical composition of our brains at any given moment dictates our choices, and yet we cling to the superstition that we exercise some sort of free will. Science, being awesome, keeps chipping away at that magical thinking.

In another study that I find more mind-boggling than the monkey research, scientists have found that women change their preferences in men when they go on birth control. Before the pill, women prefer men with high testosterone. After the pill, they prefer men with low testosterone. That process sounds like this: “Gee, Ted, I was hot for you until I started taking birth control pills. Now you look like an arrogant douche.”

The interesting thing is how a woman would interpret this revised view of Ted. I think a normal human in that situation would assume that either Ted became a worse human being or his existing bad qualities became harder to hide over time. No one would ever say the apparent changes in Ted are caused by a pill, or diet, or exercise, or any change in the observer’s brain chemistry. We believe our changes of opinion are caused by changes in the environment. It’s similar to the way parents once believed gender stereotypes caused little boys to prefer toy trucks. Our reflex is to blame the environment and not our own brain chemistry.

Yesterday I found myself getting angry because something that had been in a closet in the garage wouldn’t fit back in. I had two conversations happening in my head at the same time. The irrational part of me was pretty sure my anger was sparked by the frustrating closet situation, i.e. my environment. The rational part of me realized that I hadn’t exercised for two days, which is unusual for me, and I get grumpy 100% of the time in that situation. So today I’ll play tennis to fix my brain. By tonight I will be immune to the frustration of uncooperative storage spaces.

My neighborly advice for today is this: If you think your environment has taken a turn for the worse, consider the alternative explanation. Maybe the only thing that changed is your brain chemistry. Take a nap, drink some coffee, go for a walk, pet the dog, and try again.