I read yesterday an absolutely brilliant article by Greg Nuckols (really outstanding, you must also read it if you have the most passing interest not just in barbell sports, but in the human condition in general, it's that good: What it takes to break world records) that shocked me for its sincerity amidst an environment (let's call it "strength and conditioning Internet literature") notable for its zaniness and overall lack of respect for the truth. In most articles of this kind you typically start reading how the author (be it a "true" record holder like Nuckols, who I admire a lot, or a more suspect one in some obscure federation with limited reach, lax judging and very lenient regarding gear in both senses -equipment and steroids, for those not in the iron subculture) was a lanky kid, not specially strong or gifted, and through sheer grit, determination and some smarts ended up being strong as hell...
Well, in this case Greg openly states he was damn strong already the first time he put his hands around a bar (a Xmas gift that allowed him to bench 150 pounds and deadlift 250, not having more plates to test... when he was 10 years old! for reference, my 15 year old son, albeit I've never allowed him a true 1RM, is currently benching in the 80s and deadlifting below 200). He recognises hard work and smart programming are important, but they definitely pale in comparison with the genetic predisposition the different individuals already have. He puts himself again as an example and states that although he underwent the most idiotic programming and didn't pay much attention to recovery or any other variable that gurus today say is a top priority he managed to squat 700, bench above 400 and deadlift above 600 when he was still a teenager. For reference again, after many, many years in this game, and knowing a thing or two about programming, recovery, nutrition and staying injury-free I'm still inching, ever more slowly, towards a 400 pounds squat, 300 pounds bench and 500 deadlift... and I consider myself pretty strong.
That's something I more or less already knew: when I see Chad Wesley Smith, or Brad Gillingham, or Andrei Malanichev, or Konstantin Knostantinovs lifting I know that even if I could train consistently for a million years I would get nowhere near the amazing weights those guys move, and I really don't care if some of them are on the juice or not, even with free access to a swimming pool full of steroids and no conscience or care for the consequences would I ever squat, bench or deadlift in that league. And what applies to the powerlifting world, where I consider myself more accomplished (at least I'm an "advanced" lifter according to most tables in the three powerlifts) applies even more to weightlifting and shot putting (maybe even more so, as I retook those endeavors being already quite old, and age affects much sooner the ability to move explosively, the fast twitch fibers of the muscles being the first to start withering away), where putting half the distance Werner Guenthoer or Randy Barnes putted, or lifting overhead half the weight Ilya Ilin lifts seems an utterly unachievable feat.
Which is essentially OK, as Nuckols gently reminds us being stronger or lifting more weight has very little to do with how good a human being you are (I like to believe I would be so nonchalant about the importance of strength vs character were I so damn strong as him, although the general bent towards arrogance of my mindset makes it difficult to be too confident about it). And that takes me (in the usual somewhat roundabout fashion) the the main theme of my post today: the pursuit of strength is, except for the chosen few that had the luck to win the genetic jackpot, a most solitary enterprise. Before I set up my home gym I used, like every other Joe, to go to commercial gyms to train and get stronger, and I remember being utterly shocked to witness how little committed most people there seemed to be: not only did you see them moving the same weights month after month, year after year, but the way they approached the iron was pretty telling: with their smartphones around so they could talk to some distant friend between sets, chatting with one another about the most mundane matters, failing to properly record the reps, sets, weights and RPE (rate of perceived exertion) in order to track progress and adjust their program accordingly... until it finally dawned on me: most people go to gyms (at least to your generic neighborhood gym) with a distinct lack of purpose: "be more in shape" (¿in what shape?); "shed some fat" (¿how much? and if they are not morbidly obese ¿why on earth would someone want to shed fat, when it is a wonderful store of energy and allows for longer, more intense training sessions); "look good naked" (¿to whom?) or just to socialize a bit, make friends or pass some time without too much exertion or pain. Well, my friends, I have moderately bad news: getting strong requires exertion, pain, discomfort, effort, sweat, torn calluses, sometimes crippling soreness, and enough panting and straining to make communication between sets a hopeless intent for anything beyond "bro, that was hard!". The news are only moderately bad, because, in the depths of their hearts, nobody (specially in a globo gym) gives a potatooie about getting strong.
So in the end you do this: train being so sore you can hardly walk; taping the open wounds in your palm so you can make that extra set of pulls to complete the session as programmed; go to the gym although you feel like shit with the flu, or not having slept at all, or with a serious hangover; daring to go under the bar although the previous set with 10 kg less almost stapled you to the ground and you seriously doubt you can make it but you will rather die trying than renounce the attempt; exchanging your workout for lunch because that's the only hour of the day you have free of other commitments, and all the little insanities that you end up doing for yourself and for nobody else. Not to get to any podium (not the right genetic material, baby), not to achieve anybody's admiration, not to "share" in Facebook or to get any amount of "likes" from people you do not even know, not to attract the ladies (most definitely! they tend to consider most things about strength mildly abhorrent if not downright scary), not to impress friends (they couldn't care less), not to leave a legacy with the kids... just because you were bitten by the iron bug, and you have that friggin' unexplainable desire to get better than... yourself, and nobody else.
Friday, January 30, 2015
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Who is pushing for a UBI today? Who is against? (the unsavoriest associations!)
A good friend sent me recently a link to an interesting discussion in a Spanish blog with calculations about the cost of implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the Country which seemed to reach exactly the opposite conclusion I had reached, concluding it was unaffordable without an extraordinary increase in the fiscal load (the taxes paid by the citizens as a total of the country's economic activity) that made it for all practical purposes unimplementable. Here is the original post: On the economic viability of creating a UBI
Let's start with the positive: the total cost figure he arrives at matches nicely with the one I ballparked in my own post on the subject (for those curious but too lazy to use the "search" function: Where would the money for a UBI come from?), assigning about 8,000 €/year per citizen (with a better rationale than mine, the author quotes studies concluding that to live decently one needs an income around a 60% of the median, whilst I came at the same figure adding what intuitively a young person starting in life and without many pretensions would need to pay rent and utilities, buy food, use public transport and spend a bit on some leisure).
But from there on things go fast downhill, as then the author assumes that the only savings would be the unemployment benefits and a minimal part of the current pensions (so he envisages paying pensions on top of the UBI, which for me doesn't make the slightest sense... as I said in my original post, ¿what does a 80 year old person more worthy of the society's largess than a 20 year old kid? ¿the fact that he has worked and "paid his dues"? puh-leeeeze! that would justify denying pensions to those that have not contributed -for example, homemaking moms, and assumes that retirees somehow receive back what they have saved -or been forced to save-, which is far from true, as if pensions were tied to what everybody has contributed they would stop being perceived at around 75 years of age). If that is all you "save" we absolutely agree an UBI is unaffordable, as the total disbursements of the state become too big, so to sustain them the amount it should take from its citizens in taxes goes completely off the charts, and out of line with the average of the OECD.
But of course that is not what I argued, as I already identified the additional areas that should be cut in exchange for this more uniform (also called non-means-tested) way of distributing the states money. As the state already guarantees the survival of every citizen, no more subsidies and transfers to sustain make believe work, and let prices fully reflect the cost of providing every service (transportation, communication, energy, higher education...), and let every service that can not find enough citizens to show their interest in it by paying the full price be discontinued. That means a country with no subsidized films (ouch, how much would the army of "artists" howl against that!), no subsidized travels for islanders (in times of budget airlines it is shocking that we still pay Iberia to run those routes at thrice the cost) or for dwellers of small cities who are now blessed by high velocity train stations almost nobody uses, no free highways that are better maintained than the toll ones (maybe no free highways at all), no subsidies to leave the land fallow, or not to harvest (be it linen or olives), or to keep unsafe and uneconomical mines, or shipyards open... And probably a substantial reduction in the number of public servants, as many government departments would simply close their doors for good.
That's why I have always been surprised to see proposals for a UBI in the platforms of left wing parties (Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, the example we will see afterwards in the UK). As they approach winning an election they precipitously drop such proposals, as they realize they would only be feasible with substantial cuts to very entrenched interests, some of which happen to be part of their base constituencies. A truly feasible UBI is not a leftist's dream come true, its a libertarian's dream come true, as it means that the state relinquishes control of a substantial part of its budget, and instead of micromanaging who receives what (giving it ample opportunity to derive a substantial portion to friends and cronies, the state as distributor of favors that has transformed representative democracy in a game of knaves, and political parties in pork distributors, enabled by a permanent electioneering system that ensures they arrive to office already pre-bribed) just gives most of what it takes back to the people, and lets them use it as each individual sees fit, independent of merit, desert or alignment with what one considers more virtuous.
In my particular view, as noted by the budget elements I did not touch, the state keeps on providing those services that the market has shown conspicuously it can not provide as efficiently: security, healthcare, basic education, and legislation (writing the rules of the game so all the rest of economic actors know reliably what the regulatory framework will be).
Unfortunately, so far the idea seems to be widely associated with a certain leftist utopianism, which brings me to the UK case, when recently it was incorporated to the platform of the Green party, where it was analyzed, and made a mockery of because it lacked much consistency: The UBI proposed by the Green party hits the poor hardest When numbers where crunched, the original proposal of paying everybody 75 pounds a week (which translates to approximately 4,700 €/year) was found to leave the poor worse off than under the current means tested payments, whilst paying more was considered unrealistic (too much money) and paying less but supplementing it for the neediest case eliminated the ease of administration of the original proposal (as then you need the administrative apparatus to determine who can receive the extra money and who can't). It seems not to have occurred to these geniuses (they are the greens after all, so we shouldn't be that surprised they are not well versed on economics, or logic for what is worth) that no governmental expense is too high or too low until all the effects have been tallied, and that rather than reduce a expenditure (thus making it almost useless, or just another boondoggle in a welfarist behemoth) you may try to balance it by reducing other expenses, and may be increasing a bit some receipts (the UK tax code, which has moved sharply in the last two decades towards less redistribution and more inequality, leaves ample room for tax increases for the richest, btw). But of course the platform does not mention cutting other expenses, or substantially reducing the role of the state in the economy, as that would sound... Thatcherist, and that's the last thing any self-respecting green would like to sound like.
So after those two pieces of opinion I'm a bit disheartened. The proponents of UBI support it for all the wrong reasons (more handouts from a state that can hardly meet the entitlements their citizens have already come to expect, without having the audacity or the imagination to see how most of those would be substantially undermined once a new compact for the distribution of resources is put in place), and its opponents are already hardening in their opposition because of what they associate it with (the left! so it must mean more intrusion of the nanny state in their citizens lives and less efficiency, less growth and more poverty for all). So the chances of ever seeing it happen in my lifetime (even in my children's lifetime) seem to grow dimmer by the day. However, until I find something better, I still think is the best way to substitute capitalism with something better, more humane, and more conductive to the flourishing of their citizens. As being right does not equate with being popular, or holding only majority opinions, we will keep on reasoning, keep on thinking and eventually proselytizing. Let's not forget after many months of reflection, the kind of UBI I favor is what I settled that "had to be done".
Let's start with the positive: the total cost figure he arrives at matches nicely with the one I ballparked in my own post on the subject (for those curious but too lazy to use the "search" function: Where would the money for a UBI come from?), assigning about 8,000 €/year per citizen (with a better rationale than mine, the author quotes studies concluding that to live decently one needs an income around a 60% of the median, whilst I came at the same figure adding what intuitively a young person starting in life and without many pretensions would need to pay rent and utilities, buy food, use public transport and spend a bit on some leisure).
But from there on things go fast downhill, as then the author assumes that the only savings would be the unemployment benefits and a minimal part of the current pensions (so he envisages paying pensions on top of the UBI, which for me doesn't make the slightest sense... as I said in my original post, ¿what does a 80 year old person more worthy of the society's largess than a 20 year old kid? ¿the fact that he has worked and "paid his dues"? puh-leeeeze! that would justify denying pensions to those that have not contributed -for example, homemaking moms, and assumes that retirees somehow receive back what they have saved -or been forced to save-, which is far from true, as if pensions were tied to what everybody has contributed they would stop being perceived at around 75 years of age). If that is all you "save" we absolutely agree an UBI is unaffordable, as the total disbursements of the state become too big, so to sustain them the amount it should take from its citizens in taxes goes completely off the charts, and out of line with the average of the OECD.
But of course that is not what I argued, as I already identified the additional areas that should be cut in exchange for this more uniform (also called non-means-tested) way of distributing the states money. As the state already guarantees the survival of every citizen, no more subsidies and transfers to sustain make believe work, and let prices fully reflect the cost of providing every service (transportation, communication, energy, higher education...), and let every service that can not find enough citizens to show their interest in it by paying the full price be discontinued. That means a country with no subsidized films (ouch, how much would the army of "artists" howl against that!), no subsidized travels for islanders (in times of budget airlines it is shocking that we still pay Iberia to run those routes at thrice the cost) or for dwellers of small cities who are now blessed by high velocity train stations almost nobody uses, no free highways that are better maintained than the toll ones (maybe no free highways at all), no subsidies to leave the land fallow, or not to harvest (be it linen or olives), or to keep unsafe and uneconomical mines, or shipyards open... And probably a substantial reduction in the number of public servants, as many government departments would simply close their doors for good.
That's why I have always been surprised to see proposals for a UBI in the platforms of left wing parties (Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, the example we will see afterwards in the UK). As they approach winning an election they precipitously drop such proposals, as they realize they would only be feasible with substantial cuts to very entrenched interests, some of which happen to be part of their base constituencies. A truly feasible UBI is not a leftist's dream come true, its a libertarian's dream come true, as it means that the state relinquishes control of a substantial part of its budget, and instead of micromanaging who receives what (giving it ample opportunity to derive a substantial portion to friends and cronies, the state as distributor of favors that has transformed representative democracy in a game of knaves, and political parties in pork distributors, enabled by a permanent electioneering system that ensures they arrive to office already pre-bribed) just gives most of what it takes back to the people, and lets them use it as each individual sees fit, independent of merit, desert or alignment with what one considers more virtuous.
In my particular view, as noted by the budget elements I did not touch, the state keeps on providing those services that the market has shown conspicuously it can not provide as efficiently: security, healthcare, basic education, and legislation (writing the rules of the game so all the rest of economic actors know reliably what the regulatory framework will be).
Unfortunately, so far the idea seems to be widely associated with a certain leftist utopianism, which brings me to the UK case, when recently it was incorporated to the platform of the Green party, where it was analyzed, and made a mockery of because it lacked much consistency: The UBI proposed by the Green party hits the poor hardest When numbers where crunched, the original proposal of paying everybody 75 pounds a week (which translates to approximately 4,700 €/year) was found to leave the poor worse off than under the current means tested payments, whilst paying more was considered unrealistic (too much money) and paying less but supplementing it for the neediest case eliminated the ease of administration of the original proposal (as then you need the administrative apparatus to determine who can receive the extra money and who can't). It seems not to have occurred to these geniuses (they are the greens after all, so we shouldn't be that surprised they are not well versed on economics, or logic for what is worth) that no governmental expense is too high or too low until all the effects have been tallied, and that rather than reduce a expenditure (thus making it almost useless, or just another boondoggle in a welfarist behemoth) you may try to balance it by reducing other expenses, and may be increasing a bit some receipts (the UK tax code, which has moved sharply in the last two decades towards less redistribution and more inequality, leaves ample room for tax increases for the richest, btw). But of course the platform does not mention cutting other expenses, or substantially reducing the role of the state in the economy, as that would sound... Thatcherist, and that's the last thing any self-respecting green would like to sound like.
So after those two pieces of opinion I'm a bit disheartened. The proponents of UBI support it for all the wrong reasons (more handouts from a state that can hardly meet the entitlements their citizens have already come to expect, without having the audacity or the imagination to see how most of those would be substantially undermined once a new compact for the distribution of resources is put in place), and its opponents are already hardening in their opposition because of what they associate it with (the left! so it must mean more intrusion of the nanny state in their citizens lives and less efficiency, less growth and more poverty for all). So the chances of ever seeing it happen in my lifetime (even in my children's lifetime) seem to grow dimmer by the day. However, until I find something better, I still think is the best way to substitute capitalism with something better, more humane, and more conductive to the flourishing of their citizens. As being right does not equate with being popular, or holding only majority opinions, we will keep on reasoning, keep on thinking and eventually proselytizing. Let's not forget after many months of reflection, the kind of UBI I favor is what I settled that "had to be done".
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Of Science, Philosophy of Science and pseudo-science (aka Humanities)
Reviewing my reading log for 2014 I confirm that I've been very focused on History (economic history, cultural history, social history, history of ideas, but at the end of the day I mostly read about what people did, built, exchanged, thought and published in the past). Well, when I've not been reading Freud, which forces me to go on a small sideways rant that towards the end of the post will turn out not to be so much of a distraction, as it has lots to do with the main argument I want to develop:
Beginning of rant:
To put it colloquially: "dude, what's up with this fella?" yesterday I could not avoid chuckling when finding (in a little volume entitled "The origins of psychoanalysis" containing his early correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) the first draft of his paper on the aetiology of neuroses (a condition that deserves its own historical perspective, as I am more and more convinced it was a sick invention of the era's shrinks, albeit they probably did it unconsciously -something psychologists, as well trained as they are nowadays in identifying unconscious biases, tendencies and ideas in others, seldom perceive in themselves). He asserted with an absolute confidence worthy of better uses that in the origin of every neurasthenia was the frequent masturbation of the subject (so there you are, kids: stop jerking off so much or you will end up neurasthenic, whatever that may be). But the bad news didn't end there: any sexual practice within marriage that was not geared to reproduction (from using a condom to coitus interruptus; I can only wonder what the good doctor thought the frequent practice of oral and/or anal sex may cause...) accelerated the onset of the condition, and ended up in complete impotence of the husband. That impotence, in turn, caused the wife to become hysteric (not with laughter, mind you, that would be a very modern interpretation of the term... typical hysterical symptoms for Freud were paralysis, temporary loss of conscience, obsessive behavior, loss of speech and a long etcaetera). He supposedly had confirmed the link between onanism, neurosis and impotence in "hundreds of instances" (he didn't have that many patients in those times, so we have to adjust for some exaggeration on his part), as to not allow the slightest sliver of doubt about it. About something we do know, as clearly as anything can be known by man, that is utterly, uncompromisingly, unhesitatingly, undoubtedly, unambiguously, blatantly and almost self-evidently false. Not just slightly false, or even your run-of-the-mill, based-on-a-mistaken-impression false, but flabbergasting false, all-the history-of-mankind-tells against-it false. To put it in non-academic terms, it's bullshit. A load of crap. Baloney, malarkey, an intellectual legerdemain of the highest order.
It could be argued that Freud was just starting in life, feeling the waters, and that his great discoveries about the unconscious and their consequences for human well-being and the structure of society were still in the future. A youthful indiscretion of an otherwise brilliant and most excellent sage, towards whom we are still much indebted. Indeed, the paper on sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses dates from 1898 (when he was already 42 years old, not exactly a young gun), but let's have a look at a position the doctor held much later in his life, as found in Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), published in 1929. We can find there the opinion that civilization and women (yep, he used to talk in those generalizing, slightly patronizing terms) are opposed. Although civilization started because of the love men felt by women (love for him was another name for the desire to bang 'em... even when applied to one's own children, or to the whole of humanity, it was just "inhibited-aim" love, where the real goal -bangin'- had been replaced by a more easily attainable object not to expose the subject to the pain and suffering of a potential rejection), women soon become an obstacle to it, as they were (are) constitutionally incapable of diverting their psychic energy to "higher" goals as men do, and kept attracting them to "home and sexual life" instead of improving culture through those higher pursuits they alone can follow.
So there you are, and I'm breaking no new ground here: the founder of that "crowning achievement of Western civilization, psychoanalysis, that completes the original Greek injunction to know thyself" was not only a crackpot that spouted theories off his cuff without much care about how well they fit with real observation, but stayed all his life subjected to a rigidly traditional and misogynistic worldview were half of humanity (women) were just defective versions of the other half, slaves to their passions and unsuited for speculative intellectual work.
The real core of my dissertation work, by the way, is trying to understand how a whole society accepted that claptrap not only without derision, but giving it the highest recognition. It befuddles me beyond description that not only are there still people who profess to be "psychoanalysts" and that talk about the founder in a highly respectful way, but that some of them are women.
End of rant
Whew, that felt good! now, back to my original train of thought, so I read mostly history these days (leaving aside the occasional delirant writings of a XIXth Century Viennese guy trained originally as neuropathologist), although it was not always like that. In my youth I was a science nut, and (apart from numerous servings of fiction) that's what I mostly read: physics, chemistry, astronomy, cosmology, biology... and then of course my first career, power engineering, which where and when I studied was mostly nuclear engineering. From that time I still keep not only a burning passion for knowing how things "really are", but also a more than passing acquaintance with the very distinctive way we have developed in the last four centuries for ascertaining it: the scientific method.
So it drives me bananas every time I see that method (and I don't want to go in the discussion about it being a "method", or a mindset, or a program) conflated with other disciplines, be it to degrade it (what we may call the "postmodernist" twist: Science is just another ideological construct used by the powerful to subjugate the powerless, and its "truths" are socially constructed statements, equivalent as to the validity of their truth-values to any other statement within any other type of discourse) or to somehow exalt it aver and above any other human interest (which has the unfortunate consequence of hectoring the rest of human fields of research to be "more like -true- science", as exemplified in this now famous exchange between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier: Science vs Humanities III round in which I side wholeheartedly with the latter, and which made me realize what a doofus the "neurolinguist", or whatever fancy title he sports these days, happens to be).
What I see once and again in those debates is that a) with some honorable exception (Spain's Jesus Mosterin, with whom I disagree in many, many things, would be one) most people coming from the humanities are pretty clueless about what Science does or aspires to; but b) Scientists who occupy themselves with those arguments (which make them suspect scientists in the first place) are even more clueless about most humanistic disciplines, and tend to end up parroting, without knowing, the opinion of some long dead philosopher or social theorist but in less subtle and illuminating ways.
So I'm going to take the advantage of writing "the world less read blog" to give my two cents of opinion in the subject of what differentiates both approaches to understanding the world, and where each academic field belongs. For simplicity's sake I'm going to call the two approaches "Science" and "Humanities", and hope that by the end it is clearer what I mean with both. I'll try to do it with aphorisms, as what I've written so far in this post, being just the introduction, is already too long:
S.1 The best definition of Science is still the one given by Aristotle: "the discourse on the necessary" (on that which can not conceivably be any other way)
S.1.1 Thus by definition Science deals with universal & eternal truths, it seeks those rules that apply everywhere and every time, and which are observer independent
S.1.2 A universal statement can never be definitely proved (unless all the instances of its major and minor premises were empirically verified, which in most cases is impossible within a finite human life, or even within the aggregated life of the full species), but can be disproved by a single instance that contradicts it. Thus a feature of scientific statements is that they should be subject to disproof (in Popper's terms: "falsifiable")
H.1 Humanities deal with what is distinctively human in the cosmos (the universe perceived as orderly): the fact we are conscious and can communicate recursively about that consciousness with other beings that appear to us as being conscious too
H.1.1 Thus by definition the Humanities deal with the most contingent of all: the isolated features of each conscience, in its unique and ireplicable set of circumstances
H.1.2 Humanistic statements are not subject to proof or disproof, they can be endlessly argued, and some arguments can be more convincing than others (better connected to a wider network of accepted meanings, fruitful to guide thinking in new and unexpected but internally consistent paths)
So far we have covered pretty common ground, immediately evident when you start studying a STEM subject (Where nobody cares if Bernoulli's theorem was actually discovered by Bernoulli, or who Bernoulli was, as the validity of the theorem is established with independence of who it is named for) as opposed to a humanistic subject (where the fact that an opinion was held by Aristotle carries a lot of weight by and in itself, and is always open to new interpretations and discussion about how it relates with everything else)
S.2 there are only two main sciences: Physics (includes astronomy, cosmology, thermodynamics, structural dynamics, materials science, particle physics and so on and so forth) and Chemistry (includes molecular biology, biochemistry, etc.) and it could be argued that they are really only one (since the material properties of the different elements and compounds derive from the structure of their outer electron layer it could be argued that Chemistry is a part of Physics)
S.2.1 Once a scientific field is mature enough to admit of practical applications, the heuristic rules for applying it to everyday use (that enable the science to translate into a technology) coalesce in a discipline called engineering (thus civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, etc.) Engineers are not scientists, and have to be just conversant enough with the underlying science to apply it to their respective fields (so, not much). The particular class of engineers that deal with complex biological systems (to repair or enhance them) are called physicians (and any of their specialities), or veterinarians
S.3 Biology is not a Science... so far. It comprises a lot of interesting observations about life in this planet (the only one we have found so far) and a stupendous overarching principle (the "theory" of evolution, which describes with awesome parsimony how in extraordinarily circumscribed and precise circumstances life has adapted here and acquired its current complexity... although many have lately tried to apply it as a universal principle to the whole cosmos what they have produced so far is at best interesting speculation, and at worst metaphysical hocus pocus), but no universal rules, no "natural laws" so far that allow for any kind of prediction or that admit of being falsified.
H.2. there are countless Humanistic disciplines (and each Century seems to bring some new ones): History, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Literary criticism, Economics, Politics... None of them are sciences (thus "Political Science" or "Economic Science" are pretty ugly and conceptually confusing oxymorons, even when they are the titles for some University careers, and academics in those fields may even consider themselves scientists)
H.2.1 The equivalent of engineers in the humanities are "philosophers of". Almost for all humanistic discipline there is a "meta field" of study to identify the different currents, trends and underlying assumptions that operate in them that require just enough knowledge of the discipline to write authoritatively about it, but not as much as to make advances IN it. Thus philosophers of mind, of sociology, of history, political philosophers... (even philosophers of science!)
That's it for today, in my next post I'll probably tackle, given those generic truths, what each discipline can and cannot claim to tell us about what we can know, what we can hope, and what we should do
Beginning of rant:
To put it colloquially: "dude, what's up with this fella?" yesterday I could not avoid chuckling when finding (in a little volume entitled "The origins of psychoanalysis" containing his early correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) the first draft of his paper on the aetiology of neuroses (a condition that deserves its own historical perspective, as I am more and more convinced it was a sick invention of the era's shrinks, albeit they probably did it unconsciously -something psychologists, as well trained as they are nowadays in identifying unconscious biases, tendencies and ideas in others, seldom perceive in themselves). He asserted with an absolute confidence worthy of better uses that in the origin of every neurasthenia was the frequent masturbation of the subject (so there you are, kids: stop jerking off so much or you will end up neurasthenic, whatever that may be). But the bad news didn't end there: any sexual practice within marriage that was not geared to reproduction (from using a condom to coitus interruptus; I can only wonder what the good doctor thought the frequent practice of oral and/or anal sex may cause...) accelerated the onset of the condition, and ended up in complete impotence of the husband. That impotence, in turn, caused the wife to become hysteric (not with laughter, mind you, that would be a very modern interpretation of the term... typical hysterical symptoms for Freud were paralysis, temporary loss of conscience, obsessive behavior, loss of speech and a long etcaetera). He supposedly had confirmed the link between onanism, neurosis and impotence in "hundreds of instances" (he didn't have that many patients in those times, so we have to adjust for some exaggeration on his part), as to not allow the slightest sliver of doubt about it. About something we do know, as clearly as anything can be known by man, that is utterly, uncompromisingly, unhesitatingly, undoubtedly, unambiguously, blatantly and almost self-evidently false. Not just slightly false, or even your run-of-the-mill, based-on-a-mistaken-impression false, but flabbergasting false, all-the history-of-mankind-tells against-it false. To put it in non-academic terms, it's bullshit. A load of crap. Baloney, malarkey, an intellectual legerdemain of the highest order.
It could be argued that Freud was just starting in life, feeling the waters, and that his great discoveries about the unconscious and their consequences for human well-being and the structure of society were still in the future. A youthful indiscretion of an otherwise brilliant and most excellent sage, towards whom we are still much indebted. Indeed, the paper on sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses dates from 1898 (when he was already 42 years old, not exactly a young gun), but let's have a look at a position the doctor held much later in his life, as found in Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), published in 1929. We can find there the opinion that civilization and women (yep, he used to talk in those generalizing, slightly patronizing terms) are opposed. Although civilization started because of the love men felt by women (love for him was another name for the desire to bang 'em... even when applied to one's own children, or to the whole of humanity, it was just "inhibited-aim" love, where the real goal -bangin'- had been replaced by a more easily attainable object not to expose the subject to the pain and suffering of a potential rejection), women soon become an obstacle to it, as they were (are) constitutionally incapable of diverting their psychic energy to "higher" goals as men do, and kept attracting them to "home and sexual life" instead of improving culture through those higher pursuits they alone can follow.
So there you are, and I'm breaking no new ground here: the founder of that "crowning achievement of Western civilization, psychoanalysis, that completes the original Greek injunction to know thyself" was not only a crackpot that spouted theories off his cuff without much care about how well they fit with real observation, but stayed all his life subjected to a rigidly traditional and misogynistic worldview were half of humanity (women) were just defective versions of the other half, slaves to their passions and unsuited for speculative intellectual work.
The real core of my dissertation work, by the way, is trying to understand how a whole society accepted that claptrap not only without derision, but giving it the highest recognition. It befuddles me beyond description that not only are there still people who profess to be "psychoanalysts" and that talk about the founder in a highly respectful way, but that some of them are women.
End of rant
Whew, that felt good! now, back to my original train of thought, so I read mostly history these days (leaving aside the occasional delirant writings of a XIXth Century Viennese guy trained originally as neuropathologist), although it was not always like that. In my youth I was a science nut, and (apart from numerous servings of fiction) that's what I mostly read: physics, chemistry, astronomy, cosmology, biology... and then of course my first career, power engineering, which where and when I studied was mostly nuclear engineering. From that time I still keep not only a burning passion for knowing how things "really are", but also a more than passing acquaintance with the very distinctive way we have developed in the last four centuries for ascertaining it: the scientific method.
So it drives me bananas every time I see that method (and I don't want to go in the discussion about it being a "method", or a mindset, or a program) conflated with other disciplines, be it to degrade it (what we may call the "postmodernist" twist: Science is just another ideological construct used by the powerful to subjugate the powerless, and its "truths" are socially constructed statements, equivalent as to the validity of their truth-values to any other statement within any other type of discourse) or to somehow exalt it aver and above any other human interest (which has the unfortunate consequence of hectoring the rest of human fields of research to be "more like -true- science", as exemplified in this now famous exchange between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier: Science vs Humanities III round in which I side wholeheartedly with the latter, and which made me realize what a doofus the "neurolinguist", or whatever fancy title he sports these days, happens to be).
What I see once and again in those debates is that a) with some honorable exception (Spain's Jesus Mosterin, with whom I disagree in many, many things, would be one) most people coming from the humanities are pretty clueless about what Science does or aspires to; but b) Scientists who occupy themselves with those arguments (which make them suspect scientists in the first place) are even more clueless about most humanistic disciplines, and tend to end up parroting, without knowing, the opinion of some long dead philosopher or social theorist but in less subtle and illuminating ways.
So I'm going to take the advantage of writing "the world less read blog" to give my two cents of opinion in the subject of what differentiates both approaches to understanding the world, and where each academic field belongs. For simplicity's sake I'm going to call the two approaches "Science" and "Humanities", and hope that by the end it is clearer what I mean with both. I'll try to do it with aphorisms, as what I've written so far in this post, being just the introduction, is already too long:
S.1 The best definition of Science is still the one given by Aristotle: "the discourse on the necessary" (on that which can not conceivably be any other way)
S.1.1 Thus by definition Science deals with universal & eternal truths, it seeks those rules that apply everywhere and every time, and which are observer independent
S.1.2 A universal statement can never be definitely proved (unless all the instances of its major and minor premises were empirically verified, which in most cases is impossible within a finite human life, or even within the aggregated life of the full species), but can be disproved by a single instance that contradicts it. Thus a feature of scientific statements is that they should be subject to disproof (in Popper's terms: "falsifiable")
H.1 Humanities deal with what is distinctively human in the cosmos (the universe perceived as orderly): the fact we are conscious and can communicate recursively about that consciousness with other beings that appear to us as being conscious too
H.1.1 Thus by definition the Humanities deal with the most contingent of all: the isolated features of each conscience, in its unique and ireplicable set of circumstances
H.1.2 Humanistic statements are not subject to proof or disproof, they can be endlessly argued, and some arguments can be more convincing than others (better connected to a wider network of accepted meanings, fruitful to guide thinking in new and unexpected but internally consistent paths)
So far we have covered pretty common ground, immediately evident when you start studying a STEM subject (Where nobody cares if Bernoulli's theorem was actually discovered by Bernoulli, or who Bernoulli was, as the validity of the theorem is established with independence of who it is named for) as opposed to a humanistic subject (where the fact that an opinion was held by Aristotle carries a lot of weight by and in itself, and is always open to new interpretations and discussion about how it relates with everything else)
S.2 there are only two main sciences: Physics (includes astronomy, cosmology, thermodynamics, structural dynamics, materials science, particle physics and so on and so forth) and Chemistry (includes molecular biology, biochemistry, etc.) and it could be argued that they are really only one (since the material properties of the different elements and compounds derive from the structure of their outer electron layer it could be argued that Chemistry is a part of Physics)
S.2.1 Once a scientific field is mature enough to admit of practical applications, the heuristic rules for applying it to everyday use (that enable the science to translate into a technology) coalesce in a discipline called engineering (thus civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, etc.) Engineers are not scientists, and have to be just conversant enough with the underlying science to apply it to their respective fields (so, not much). The particular class of engineers that deal with complex biological systems (to repair or enhance them) are called physicians (and any of their specialities), or veterinarians
S.3 Biology is not a Science... so far. It comprises a lot of interesting observations about life in this planet (the only one we have found so far) and a stupendous overarching principle (the "theory" of evolution, which describes with awesome parsimony how in extraordinarily circumscribed and precise circumstances life has adapted here and acquired its current complexity... although many have lately tried to apply it as a universal principle to the whole cosmos what they have produced so far is at best interesting speculation, and at worst metaphysical hocus pocus), but no universal rules, no "natural laws" so far that allow for any kind of prediction or that admit of being falsified.
H.2. there are countless Humanistic disciplines (and each Century seems to bring some new ones): History, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Literary criticism, Economics, Politics... None of them are sciences (thus "Political Science" or "Economic Science" are pretty ugly and conceptually confusing oxymorons, even when they are the titles for some University careers, and academics in those fields may even consider themselves scientists)
H.2.1 The equivalent of engineers in the humanities are "philosophers of". Almost for all humanistic discipline there is a "meta field" of study to identify the different currents, trends and underlying assumptions that operate in them that require just enough knowledge of the discipline to write authoritatively about it, but not as much as to make advances IN it. Thus philosophers of mind, of sociology, of history, political philosophers... (even philosophers of science!)
That's it for today, in my next post I'll probably tackle, given those generic truths, what each discipline can and cannot claim to tell us about what we can know, what we can hope, and what we should do
Monday, January 26, 2015
2015 training layout
One of the things that worked really well for me last year was dividing the training calendar in big blocks of 2-3 months in which to focus on different aspects of training. That kept it fresh, avoided stagnation and plateaus (the most dreaded word) and probably helped prevent overuse injuries. Done judiciously, the qualities that are emphasized in each block can be harnessed in the next to further improve the next set of qualities. The novelty I plan introducing this year is allowing for some competition, just for fun. That forces me to extend a bit the first cycle over what I would have chosen, but I hope in the end it pays off. So without more ado, this is how the main blocks will mostly look like (I may make minor adjustments based on feeling and on the exact competition calendar of each discipline):
Jan-Mar: Powerlifting I
Apr-Jun: Shot Put
Jul-Sep: Weightlifting
Oct-Dec: Powerlifting II
Jan-Mar: Powerlifting I
Apr-Jun: Shot Put
Jul-Sep: Weightlifting
Oct-Dec: Powerlifting II
- Powerlifting I: no surprises here, I'll just keep on doing what has worked pretty well for the past two months. Training every other day (so the duration of each microcycle is about 8 days, as I always have some day in which I can not train due to unexpected commitments, they tend to be 9 days long) One day around each of the competition powerlifts and a fourth day of active recovery doing Olympic lifts with moderate weights. For each of the power lift centered day I go first to a daily max, then do some back off sets at 75%, 85% or 95% of my training max (depending on the mesocycle) of 5 reps, 3 reps or singles. I finish the session with some accessory work to round off the frequencies (so I squat everyday, pull almost every day, and push almost everyday):
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 |
| Low Bar Back Squat to (daily) max | Bench Press to (daily) max | Deadlift (conventional stance) to (daily) max | Full
Snatch (5 x 2 @ 80% or To daily max) |
| Low Bar Back Squat AMRAP set (@75%, 85% or 90%) 4 x 5 @ 75% or 4 x 3 @ 85% or 5 x 1 @ 95% |
Bench
Press AMRAP set (@75%, 85% or 90%) 4 x 5 @ 75% or 4 x 3 @ 85% or 5 x 1 @ 95% |
Conventional
DL AMRAP set (@75%, 85% or 90%) Sumo DL 2 x 5 @ 75% or 2 x 3 @ 85% or Conventional DL 4 x 1 @ 95% |
Full
Clean & Jerk (4 x 2 @ 80% or To daily max) |
| Push press 4 x 5 @ 80% |
High Bar Back Squat (4 x 5 @ 80% of weight used in back off sets of prev day) | Front Squat (4 x 5 @ 80% of weight used in HBBS sets of prev day) | Paused
High Bar Back Squat (4 x 5 @ same weight used in Day 2) |
| Chin ups 5 x 6 |
Power
Clean 4 x 2 @ 80% |
Power
Snatch 5 x 2 @ 80% |
weighted
dips (5 x 4 @ 1,5 BW) |
- Shot Put: I'll shift to a routine where I Put twice a week in the park (plus some outdoor accessories oriented to speed gains) and lift twice a week in the weight room. Lifting days will be centered in explosive lifts (both Oly and their power versions), plus squats to become stronger overall. Bench Press stays, but changes from powerlifting style (big back arch plus pause) to thrower style (touch and go, and I may even put the feet up in the bench to engage more of the upper pecs and delts). DL goes not to be seen again for a long time:
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 |
| Backwards
overhead throw 5 x 6,25 |
Full
Snatch 6 x 2 @ 90% |
Backwards overhead throw 4 x 7,25 |
Power
Snatch 5 x 3 @ 110% |
| Standing shot put 5 x 6,25 |
Power
Clean 5 x 2 @ 90% |
Standing shot
put 4 x 7,25 |
Full
Clean & Jerk 4 x 2 @ 85% |
| Gliding shot put 15 x 6,25 |
BTN
SG Push Press 5 x 2 @ 90% |
Gliding shot
put 15 x 7,25 |
Bench
Press 5 x 3 @ 90% |
| Hill Sprints 9 x 30 m |
High
Bar Back Squat 5 x 3 @ 80% |
Spinning
shot put a few, just for funsies |
Front
Squat 6 x 2 @ 90% |
| Box jumps 4 x 3 @ 45 cm |
Chin
ups 5 x 7 |
Broad
jumps 5 x 3 as far as possible |
Farmer's
walk 6 x 30 yds x 50 kg/ hand |
- Weightlifting: I may leave one day outdoors just to stay fast and well conditioned (and to enjoy Madrid wonderful summer weather, which, being hot as hell, will force me to train either early in the morning or late at night), and lift 3 to 4 days a week (the fourth day being optional, depending on how rested and energetic I feel). Lifting days will be, obviously, centered mostly around the snatch and the clean & jerk, with some accessories to work around technique flaws and polish troublesome transitions, plus high bar back squats and front squats to keep the overall strength level moving upwards. Bench Press goes the way of the Deadlift, not to be seen in a while:
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 (optional) |
| Snatch to daily max |
Snatch 6 x 2 @ 80% |
Backwards
overhead throw 4 x 7,25 |
Power
Snatch 5 x 3 @ 110% |
Snatch
Balance pyramid to a solid triple |
| Snatch High Pull 4 x 3 @ 110% |
Clean
& Jerk to daily max |
Standing
shot put 4 x 7,25 |
Power
Clean 4 x 2 @ 95% |
Jerks
from rack (alt feet) 4 x 6 @ 65% |
| Hang Cleans 4 x 3 @ 70% |
BTN
SG Push Press 5 x 2 @ 90% |
Gliding
shot put 15 x 7,25 |
Push
Press 5 x 3 @ 80% |
Press
from snatch 4 x 3 @ 40% |
| Clean & Jerk 5 x 2 @ 80% |
High
Bar Back Squat 5 x 6 @ 80% of prev day |
Hill
Sprints 10 x 30 m |
Front
Squat 6 x 2 @ 90% |
Weighted
chinups 5 x 3 @ 1,3 BW |
| Low Bar Back Squat 5 x 3 @ 85% |
Chin
ups 5 x 7 |
Broad
jumps 5 x 3 as far as possible |
Farmer's
walk 6 x 30 yds x 60 kg/ hand |
- Powerlifting II: right now I'm thinking in a rinse & repeat of the first cycle, although I may put more volume at lower intensities at the beginning not to burn out too much the CNS. I'll define it when it gets closer, based on how the end of my current cycle looks like and how I arrive at that point
Friday, January 23, 2015
Intertemporal Discount Rate and Demographic Collapse
For a change of pace, read a mildly interesting article in "El Pais" (originally a Spanish newspaper, but for the last two decades the propaganda organ of certain branch of the Country's main Socialist Party) about the impact of an aging population in the Intertemporal Rate of Discount (Taxes Against Deflation). The conclusion was that relatively small increases in the percentage of old people in a society can significantly depress the aggregate discount rate (as geezers supposedly have a smaller preference for present over future consumption compared with youngers, even preferring money in the future to money now, which translates to a negative IRD), which can in turn be understood from two vantage points: from the side of the lenders, it lessens the average of what the society asks for in exchange for renouncing present consumption (freeing the money for investment); but from the side of the borrowers it is ready to lend them money asking for less in return. The IRD is a theoretical construct, its relevance being that the average rate the banks charge their customers (and pay their depositors), as well as the average rate the state pays for financing itself, tend to gravitate towards that value. And those rates in turn have been (more markedly in the Keynesian tradition) one of the main tools of the rulers (through their central banks, which are universally in charge of setting monetary policy and have more influence than any other institution in setting those rates... except if you enter in a monetary union and relinquish the control of such a tool, which, in light of developments over the last four years, doesn't necessarily seem as the wisest thing to do, but I digress).
Normally high interest rates (consistent with a high IRD) are seen as a bad thing: people is so fearful or so uncertain about the future that they ask for a lot of additional money in order to accept to forgo present consumption. That high price of money drives it away from investments, so the economy does not grow as much as it could. But ironically, the fact that even at those high rates the market clears means that there are people (or institutions) willing to run the risk and part with their cash at that price, even knowing that their expectations may be thwarted and they may never recover that cash. Behind every loan there is a potential disillusion, from the borrower, that believed that his lot would improve and he would be able to pay back (with the corresponding interest) and from the lender, which expected to recover the principal after receiving the interests. What both lender and borrower have to share for the money to change hands is the common belief that the economic fortunes of the latter are going to improve. The more uncertainty there is about the likelihood of such improvement, the more reluctant would the creditor be, and the more reward he would ask for running the risk. That is why typically central banks would only rise rates (with the expected effect of "cooling" the economy, making it grow less to the point, as Paul Volcker famously did at the beginning of the Reagan years, of causing a depression and actually shrinking it) to avoid what is considered a worse situation, which is the existence of persistent high inflation. Now what gets tricky is that inflation affects in turn the IRD, as if people expect the overall price level to go up they will be more than willing to part with their money as soon as possible, as it becomes less valuable with every passing day, and will ask a much higher price to agree to dispose of it at a later time, to compensate for its loss of value, driving the rates further up.
So you would think that the effect I mentioned of depressing IRD by having more old people that intrinsically tend to prefer to consume later would be a blessing, as they blunt the effect of inflation on rates, right? wrong. It happens that, as having too high rates is bad for society (makes most investments unattractive in comparison, and those that stay attractive are usually wildly risky and thus unpredictable), having too low rates is no walk in the park, and in the current historical moment those low rates seem likely to become a fixed feature of the landscape, as we are in the precise instant in the development of the Western civilization at which economy catches up with demography....
Let's see first why and when a low IRD may be bad. Basically, the problem with rates of return of money is that they have a lower bound of zero. You don't want to have to pay to spend money, as that means that everybody expects it to gain value with time just by holding onto it (i.e. a deflationary scenario, something that in practice has been exceedingly rare in our economic history, except for the last three decades in Japan, and most likely in Europe right now). Now if your money will allow you to buy more goods with it next month, why on earth would you spend it today (except to satisfy your most basic, non-delayable needs)? of course you wouldn't, and the effect of everybody delaying their purchases is a contracting economy, idle capacity, increasing unemployment (who would manufacture goods that will have great difficulty finding buyers?) and overall despair.Although a very-low-rate scenario sounds like a great time to go into debt (it is cheap to get that money to spend today above your current income and pay a pittance for it down the road), it actually isn't, as a deflationary scenario continuously increases the real value (in goods) of the amount that has to be repaid. If we link the intertemporal rate of discount with the economic prospects of society as a whole, we can say that a high IRD is the consequence of a society that thinks its economy is going to grow, that incomes overall are going to increase, so debts will on average be less burdensome and most will finally be repaid, that valuable opportunities for investment abound, and thus that money should command a high reward, as it will be worth less in the future. On the other hand side, a low IRD befits a society that has lost faith in the inevitability of growth, that assumes that incomes will be stagnant or even decrease, that debts will be as burdensome to pay a year hence (or a decade hence) as they are today, that opportunities for investment are few and far away, so money (even the current supply, no need of authorities printing more of it) will be abundant, but not so much as unsold goods, and thus will increase in value.
Now of course material output could not keep on growing at the breakneck speed it has been growing since the XVIII Century, so at some point in time we would have to transition to something closer to the "steady state" envisioned by Stuart Mill. Of the two variables that drive the growth of that material output (population growth -there is more people to produce thingies- and productivity growth -each individual person can produce more) we know the first one (population) petered out in the West about four decades ago. Now we have been witnessing that the second, whose main engine is technological advance, is also petering out (as I expounded in this post: )Decrease in the rate of technological progress). And most likely that second deceleration is a consequence of the first (older people tend to innovate less than young ones). So we better get used to a scenario of permanent deflation (see the failure of Japan's growingly desperate attempts to escape their deflationary trap, after more than tripling the balance sheet of the BoJ -the closer thing we have witnessed of a government showering the population with money from helicopters, and still no increase in prices, or in aggregate demand for that matter), and of low interest rates (which probably will not preclude a tiny sliver of the population to grow increasingly much more richer than the rest, as even that meager return is likely to outstrip even more anemic inflation, as per Piketty).
What we have to turn our attention to, then, is why we have collectively decided to commit demographic suicide, as the economic scenario is the unavoidable consequence of the population collapse which is just starting to unfold. But this post has grown already too long, so we will leave the answer for a following one...
Normally high interest rates (consistent with a high IRD) are seen as a bad thing: people is so fearful or so uncertain about the future that they ask for a lot of additional money in order to accept to forgo present consumption. That high price of money drives it away from investments, so the economy does not grow as much as it could. But ironically, the fact that even at those high rates the market clears means that there are people (or institutions) willing to run the risk and part with their cash at that price, even knowing that their expectations may be thwarted and they may never recover that cash. Behind every loan there is a potential disillusion, from the borrower, that believed that his lot would improve and he would be able to pay back (with the corresponding interest) and from the lender, which expected to recover the principal after receiving the interests. What both lender and borrower have to share for the money to change hands is the common belief that the economic fortunes of the latter are going to improve. The more uncertainty there is about the likelihood of such improvement, the more reluctant would the creditor be, and the more reward he would ask for running the risk. That is why typically central banks would only rise rates (with the expected effect of "cooling" the economy, making it grow less to the point, as Paul Volcker famously did at the beginning of the Reagan years, of causing a depression and actually shrinking it) to avoid what is considered a worse situation, which is the existence of persistent high inflation. Now what gets tricky is that inflation affects in turn the IRD, as if people expect the overall price level to go up they will be more than willing to part with their money as soon as possible, as it becomes less valuable with every passing day, and will ask a much higher price to agree to dispose of it at a later time, to compensate for its loss of value, driving the rates further up.
So you would think that the effect I mentioned of depressing IRD by having more old people that intrinsically tend to prefer to consume later would be a blessing, as they blunt the effect of inflation on rates, right? wrong. It happens that, as having too high rates is bad for society (makes most investments unattractive in comparison, and those that stay attractive are usually wildly risky and thus unpredictable), having too low rates is no walk in the park, and in the current historical moment those low rates seem likely to become a fixed feature of the landscape, as we are in the precise instant in the development of the Western civilization at which economy catches up with demography....
Let's see first why and when a low IRD may be bad. Basically, the problem with rates of return of money is that they have a lower bound of zero. You don't want to have to pay to spend money, as that means that everybody expects it to gain value with time just by holding onto it (i.e. a deflationary scenario, something that in practice has been exceedingly rare in our economic history, except for the last three decades in Japan, and most likely in Europe right now). Now if your money will allow you to buy more goods with it next month, why on earth would you spend it today (except to satisfy your most basic, non-delayable needs)? of course you wouldn't, and the effect of everybody delaying their purchases is a contracting economy, idle capacity, increasing unemployment (who would manufacture goods that will have great difficulty finding buyers?) and overall despair.Although a very-low-rate scenario sounds like a great time to go into debt (it is cheap to get that money to spend today above your current income and pay a pittance for it down the road), it actually isn't, as a deflationary scenario continuously increases the real value (in goods) of the amount that has to be repaid. If we link the intertemporal rate of discount with the economic prospects of society as a whole, we can say that a high IRD is the consequence of a society that thinks its economy is going to grow, that incomes overall are going to increase, so debts will on average be less burdensome and most will finally be repaid, that valuable opportunities for investment abound, and thus that money should command a high reward, as it will be worth less in the future. On the other hand side, a low IRD befits a society that has lost faith in the inevitability of growth, that assumes that incomes will be stagnant or even decrease, that debts will be as burdensome to pay a year hence (or a decade hence) as they are today, that opportunities for investment are few and far away, so money (even the current supply, no need of authorities printing more of it) will be abundant, but not so much as unsold goods, and thus will increase in value.
Now of course material output could not keep on growing at the breakneck speed it has been growing since the XVIII Century, so at some point in time we would have to transition to something closer to the "steady state" envisioned by Stuart Mill. Of the two variables that drive the growth of that material output (population growth -there is more people to produce thingies- and productivity growth -each individual person can produce more) we know the first one (population) petered out in the West about four decades ago. Now we have been witnessing that the second, whose main engine is technological advance, is also petering out (as I expounded in this post: )Decrease in the rate of technological progress). And most likely that second deceleration is a consequence of the first (older people tend to innovate less than young ones). So we better get used to a scenario of permanent deflation (see the failure of Japan's growingly desperate attempts to escape their deflationary trap, after more than tripling the balance sheet of the BoJ -the closer thing we have witnessed of a government showering the population with money from helicopters, and still no increase in prices, or in aggregate demand for that matter), and of low interest rates (which probably will not preclude a tiny sliver of the population to grow increasingly much more richer than the rest, as even that meager return is likely to outstrip even more anemic inflation, as per Piketty).
What we have to turn our attention to, then, is why we have collectively decided to commit demographic suicide, as the economic scenario is the unavoidable consequence of the population collapse which is just starting to unfold. But this post has grown already too long, so we will leave the answer for a following one...
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
The Speenhamland laws and the demise of capitalism (big consequences of small changes)
This week, reading Polanyi's The Great Transformation I found a piece of information that greatly assuaged my concerns about the potential discrepancy between the end I was ultimately aiming at (the overcoming of those features of our current socioeconomic system, which I had characterized as "Digital Capitalism", that I judged more detrimental to human flourishing) and the means I was proposing to support to achieve those ends (the guarantee by law of a Universal Basic Income -UBI for short- for all citizens, irrespective of their age, sex, wealth or potential additional sources of income, whilst leaving all the rest of social norms -property laws, market, exchanges, civil codes, electoral system, parliaments...- essentially untouched).
Of course that doesn't mean I think every single institution of every single country of the West is hunky dory: the electoral college and penal laws (that condemn and disenfranchise up to a 30% of some minority populations) in the USA are vestiges of a barbarous era; the powers invested in the President of France's V Republic are excessive, and make the office too prone to corruption; Spanish monarchy (any monarchy, come to think about it) is an affront to common sense, and its electoral law almost guarantees endogamy and control of the judiciary and the media by the governing party, and thus the creation of a "caste", as denounced by the latest entrant on the political game (which is soon looking like just wanting to get a place at the trough, rather than jettison the trough altogether)... but most of those institutions can (and my hope and innate optimism tell me they all eventually will) be reformed without a major overhaul of the social architecture that defines and supports them, given the people caught up in them are given the opportunity to prosper and think by themselves, being freed from the pressure to toil in makeshift jobs and incentivized to produce material goods the whole of society has no need for, and is much worse off for them being produced.
And of course, the key to a free, critical citizenry that can take the best collective decisions is to redistribute more fairly the total social product to ensure everybody, regardless of capability (including the capabilities for hard work, grit, discipline, self-denial and focus on unpleasurable tasks that are rightly celebrated today, seemingly without realizing they are as much heritable, and thus undeserved, as eye colour or height) has enough to live and (modestly) prosper, and has a much greater panply of choices regarding how to employ his or her time than in pursue of a meager salary in exchange for as many hours as possible of drudgery and degradation. And that is what a UBI would accomplish, without any other change.
What about the Speenhamland laws I mentioned in the title, and the interpretation Polanyi makes of them? The law was an amendment to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, devised in the Pelican Inn of the city of the same name by magistrates seeking to alleviate the problem of rural poverty created by the diminution of common lands (enclosures) and exacerbated by the rise in the price of basic food derived from bad harvests (although some contemporaries blamed middlemen and hoarders for the rise) to ensure every man was paid a minimum (today we would say subsistence) wage, which varied with the size of his family and the current price of bread. The system was in wide use in most of England (in all the early industrializing parts at least), met with great resistance between the landlords (that payed the "poor rates" from which the system fed) and their liberal representatives (both Ricardo and, specially, Malthus thundered about it), which blamed it for the poor productivity of the workers (which found they needn't work that much, as the system would pay the difference between the salary they managed to get, or no salary at all, and what they needed), although it allowed them to pay well below what those workers would require just to stay alive... it finally was abolished by the new poor laws of 1834.
What is, then, the historical significance of this obscure and brief piece of British legislation, and how it is relevant to the contemporary discussion about a UBI? According to Polanyi's analysis, the repeal of the Speenhamland system was an absolutely key element in the creation of a free market for labor, without which Capitalism (with a capital "C") would have never taken off. It was (and here he takes a long and illustrious line of argument in the tradition of Marx and Engels) the capstone of a long struggle to pauperize the mass of the population so they could be exploited by the budding capitalists (so they had no option but to provide, that is to say, their surplus value to be appropriated by the factory owners in what was to become the original seed of capitalist accumulation from which all of the modern capitalist system derives). They were by that legislative act turned in the "industrial reserve army" that ensured wages would be low enough as to guarantee a rate of profit that would make the whole capitalist enterprise attractive. It has to be noted that the Speenhamland system differs from a UBI in a very substantial way: it made for the difference between what the worker earned and what was deemed acceptable to live fr him and his family. That meant that, if his salary were to be below that guaranteed minimum (as most were), he had no incentive to work at all, as he would end up with the same. No incentive other than the social stigma attached to "being on the rates", which after the vast majority of the working population was on them ceased to be an stigma at all. As a UBI is perceived by the recipients regardless of any other source of income they may have, everybody would still have an incentive to work, as the salary received would always imply an increment in his disposable income by the end of the month.
But the key point to take home is that the elimination of a system of guaranteed income was a precondition to create the need not just to work, but to put all of one's life in the market for sale, which is exactly the key feature of the modern system we identified as needing to be overcome (in this post: What should be done IV). So guaranteeing everybody that they would enjoy an income enough to live (without luxuries, but that would eventually allow even for the formation of a family) is the precondition to unravel that labor market, and prevent human life from being considered a commodity. By the way, I felt happily vindicated by Polanyi's contention that it is a conceptual error to consider labor and money as commodities (a view I expounded in this first post Our current socioeconomic system and expanded in this one Of value and wages). When I reached that same conclusion I felt somewhat isolated, as from Marx to Milton Friedman, going through Keynes, every economist worth his salt (including staunch progressives like Krugman and Stiglitz) seems to think its perfectly OK to treat them as marketable commodities, as exchangeable and as subject to the vagaries of offer and demand to set their prices as any other piece of stuff you may think to trade. That has got me thinking why Polanyi has fallen so much out of favor, and how his insights, brilliant as they are have to be rediscovered, as they are conspicuously absent from the discussions raging in the media and in academia about the (possible) end of Capitalism and what to replace it with... but that would probably require a separate post.
Of course that doesn't mean I think every single institution of every single country of the West is hunky dory: the electoral college and penal laws (that condemn and disenfranchise up to a 30% of some minority populations) in the USA are vestiges of a barbarous era; the powers invested in the President of France's V Republic are excessive, and make the office too prone to corruption; Spanish monarchy (any monarchy, come to think about it) is an affront to common sense, and its electoral law almost guarantees endogamy and control of the judiciary and the media by the governing party, and thus the creation of a "caste", as denounced by the latest entrant on the political game (which is soon looking like just wanting to get a place at the trough, rather than jettison the trough altogether)... but most of those institutions can (and my hope and innate optimism tell me they all eventually will) be reformed without a major overhaul of the social architecture that defines and supports them, given the people caught up in them are given the opportunity to prosper and think by themselves, being freed from the pressure to toil in makeshift jobs and incentivized to produce material goods the whole of society has no need for, and is much worse off for them being produced.
And of course, the key to a free, critical citizenry that can take the best collective decisions is to redistribute more fairly the total social product to ensure everybody, regardless of capability (including the capabilities for hard work, grit, discipline, self-denial and focus on unpleasurable tasks that are rightly celebrated today, seemingly without realizing they are as much heritable, and thus undeserved, as eye colour or height) has enough to live and (modestly) prosper, and has a much greater panply of choices regarding how to employ his or her time than in pursue of a meager salary in exchange for as many hours as possible of drudgery and degradation. And that is what a UBI would accomplish, without any other change.
What about the Speenhamland laws I mentioned in the title, and the interpretation Polanyi makes of them? The law was an amendment to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, devised in the Pelican Inn of the city of the same name by magistrates seeking to alleviate the problem of rural poverty created by the diminution of common lands (enclosures) and exacerbated by the rise in the price of basic food derived from bad harvests (although some contemporaries blamed middlemen and hoarders for the rise) to ensure every man was paid a minimum (today we would say subsistence) wage, which varied with the size of his family and the current price of bread. The system was in wide use in most of England (in all the early industrializing parts at least), met with great resistance between the landlords (that payed the "poor rates" from which the system fed) and their liberal representatives (both Ricardo and, specially, Malthus thundered about it), which blamed it for the poor productivity of the workers (which found they needn't work that much, as the system would pay the difference between the salary they managed to get, or no salary at all, and what they needed), although it allowed them to pay well below what those workers would require just to stay alive... it finally was abolished by the new poor laws of 1834.
What is, then, the historical significance of this obscure and brief piece of British legislation, and how it is relevant to the contemporary discussion about a UBI? According to Polanyi's analysis, the repeal of the Speenhamland system was an absolutely key element in the creation of a free market for labor, without which Capitalism (with a capital "C") would have never taken off. It was (and here he takes a long and illustrious line of argument in the tradition of Marx and Engels) the capstone of a long struggle to pauperize the mass of the population so they could be exploited by the budding capitalists (so they had no option but to provide, that is to say, their surplus value to be appropriated by the factory owners in what was to become the original seed of capitalist accumulation from which all of the modern capitalist system derives). They were by that legislative act turned in the "industrial reserve army" that ensured wages would be low enough as to guarantee a rate of profit that would make the whole capitalist enterprise attractive. It has to be noted that the Speenhamland system differs from a UBI in a very substantial way: it made for the difference between what the worker earned and what was deemed acceptable to live fr him and his family. That meant that, if his salary were to be below that guaranteed minimum (as most were), he had no incentive to work at all, as he would end up with the same. No incentive other than the social stigma attached to "being on the rates", which after the vast majority of the working population was on them ceased to be an stigma at all. As a UBI is perceived by the recipients regardless of any other source of income they may have, everybody would still have an incentive to work, as the salary received would always imply an increment in his disposable income by the end of the month.
But the key point to take home is that the elimination of a system of guaranteed income was a precondition to create the need not just to work, but to put all of one's life in the market for sale, which is exactly the key feature of the modern system we identified as needing to be overcome (in this post: What should be done IV). So guaranteeing everybody that they would enjoy an income enough to live (without luxuries, but that would eventually allow even for the formation of a family) is the precondition to unravel that labor market, and prevent human life from being considered a commodity. By the way, I felt happily vindicated by Polanyi's contention that it is a conceptual error to consider labor and money as commodities (a view I expounded in this first post Our current socioeconomic system and expanded in this one Of value and wages). When I reached that same conclusion I felt somewhat isolated, as from Marx to Milton Friedman, going through Keynes, every economist worth his salt (including staunch progressives like Krugman and Stiglitz) seems to think its perfectly OK to treat them as marketable commodities, as exchangeable and as subject to the vagaries of offer and demand to set their prices as any other piece of stuff you may think to trade. That has got me thinking why Polanyi has fallen so much out of favor, and how his insights, brilliant as they are have to be rediscovered, as they are conspicuously absent from the discussions raging in the media and in academia about the (possible) end of Capitalism and what to replace it with... but that would probably require a separate post.
Friday, January 16, 2015
What to train for
In most endeavors in life, knowing what your are after and where exactly it is you want to get is an essential condition to get there. For those of us that still pursue physical excellence regardless of our age, given the amount of trade offs to be made and the extent of information available (much of it contradictory) on how to excel in any given field, it is paramount to determine what you want to achieve if you want to put together a program that works.
I would assume everybody has some basic understanding of this, as most people tend to instinctively make fun of people pursuing too many incompatible goals at a time: the proverbial guy that wants to grow his muscles, shed body fat, grow stronger as to impress everybody in his Globomax gym, run a marathon under three hours and compete in the local basketball league and take fencing (or boxing, or MMA) normally doesn't get too far in any of those areas, although I would venture to say that just being mediocre in all of them at once takes a considerable amount of gumption already (when excellence reaches the level our hypercompetitive and resource-rich societies allow it to reach, even being mediocre requires a lot of dedication).
So in this post I'm going to deal with what kind of distinct abilities can be improved through training, and what kind of directions should be followed to develop each of them. Some of the abilities can (even should) be developed in unison, some are antagonistic, and typically improving one would result in loosing (or at the very least not progressing) the other. Understanding why that is so should give us clearer guidelines about what it is realistic to try to achieve or, as the title of the post suggest, what to train for:
I would assume everybody has some basic understanding of this, as most people tend to instinctively make fun of people pursuing too many incompatible goals at a time: the proverbial guy that wants to grow his muscles, shed body fat, grow stronger as to impress everybody in his Globomax gym, run a marathon under three hours and compete in the local basketball league and take fencing (or boxing, or MMA) normally doesn't get too far in any of those areas, although I would venture to say that just being mediocre in all of them at once takes a considerable amount of gumption already (when excellence reaches the level our hypercompetitive and resource-rich societies allow it to reach, even being mediocre requires a lot of dedication).
So in this post I'm going to deal with what kind of distinct abilities can be improved through training, and what kind of directions should be followed to develop each of them. Some of the abilities can (even should) be developed in unison, some are antagonistic, and typically improving one would result in loosing (or at the very least not progressing) the other. Understanding why that is so should give us clearer guidelines about what it is realistic to try to achieve or, as the title of the post suggest, what to train for:
- Strength: I'm putting this first as it is the foundational quality for many of the more specific attributes I'll describe later on. It reflects the ability of the muscles to overcome a certain resistance, so the more resistance that can be overcome, the stronger the muscle is. Although muscular action is local (a man could theoretically have very strong biceps brachialis, but very weak hamstrings and quadriceps, as many regular gymgoers obsessed with curls and averse to squats seem to have) it tends to develop holistically, specially if the right exercises are chosen (the aforementioned squats have a global organic effect that somehow manages to make people who do them consistently and forcefully strong overall). It is probably the easiest quality to develop, it admits an almost infinite level of progress (albeit, thanks to the law of diminishing returns, the same amount of progress becomes more and more costly as one approaches his genetic potential) and it doesn't start to diminish after reasonably late in life (I'm 45 myself, and still growing fairly stronger every month, and know of goddamn stronger people well in their fifties). There is no black magic or secret principles for developing it: as many series of 3-5 reps of a few basic, compound, multi articular exercises (basically squat, deadlift, bench press, press and their variations, plus chin ups and dips is all you need to grow obscenely strong), increase weight on the bar in each one of them, and after an initial phase of quick gains, periodize (alternate phases of higher volume and lower intensity with lower volume and higher intensity, reaching new peaks after each cycle).
- Speed: reflects the ability to move the body through space as fast as possible. It is even more systemic than strength, as I've never seen anybody have fast feet but slow hands (or any such imbalance). It is considered a highly innate quality, based on genetic factors like insertion points of the tendons and proportion of muscle fibers of each type (fast twitch vs slow twitch), so the most optimistic coaches tend to say it is difficult to improve it beyond a 20% of its baseline value. A school of thought maintains that for most applications there is little value in trying to train a quality so little amenable to improve, and thus recommends focusing on strength increases (so, even if force is applied as slowly as before, more force can be transmitted, and more acceleration obtained, applied to running mechanics there is a lot of merit to that approach, but applied to shot putting not so much). I tend to agree, with a small caveat: I've noticed (mostly in myself) that moving a limb really fast requires not only a contraction of the muscle that accelerates the limb, but the quick relaxation of the agonist muscle that would decelerate it. So although the speed at which a muscle contracts can not be much improved, the speed at which it looses tone can, and that alone contributes to a more significant increase in speed. The by now traditional way of increasing speed is through "shock training" (vertical jumps, depth drops, bounded jumps, medicine ball throws, very short sprints) and barbell explosive movements. As I wrote in a previous post (The Olympic lifts and their power versions), I think the reason full Olympic lifts are better than their power versions is because they teach the organism to relax fast. All those movements are best trained with many sets of very few reps (1-2, maybe a max of 3), rested enough as to allow for maximum speed in each set, and with weights that allow for a safe execution
- Endurance: consists in the capability of the organism to keep moving during longer periods of time. It is even more systemic than speed, as it heavily relies in systems (cardiorespiratory and endocrine) that are shared by all the muscles. When the movement requires displacing the whole organism without the aid of a supporting medium (like in swimming, when water keeping us afloat greatly reduces the disadvantage of a heavier frame, or in cycling, where the bicycle supports the load) it substantially favours lighter people, to the point where carrying a substantial body mass (regardless of it being mostly fat or mostly muscle) is an insurmountable handicap in most endurance events. In its initial stages of development it can be trained very efficiently with very short and intense bursts of activity (sprints) interspersed with rest periods at a more leisurely pace, although at higher levels it requires the drudgery of going out to train for long duration sessions of "pavement pounding" of some sort. As far as I know, only Alex Viada thinks this kind of capability can be consistently developed in parallel with being stronger overall, and for the rest of the universe they are utterly antithetical, as the enmity between joggers and meatheads attest
- Coordination: under this final tag I'm grouping all the qualities that demand a fine motor control and an exact sequence of motor firing in order to obtain a very precise path for the involved body parts (both in terms of trajectory and velocity). It is shown in things like throwing a basketball towards the hoop, pitching in baseball, swinging in golf (not a sport, but an activity with some very subdued physical demands that tend to be overemphasized by their practitioners), putting the shot or performing a snatch or a clean & jerk. Specificity for this feature is the key, thus the only way of improving it is to accumulate endless hours of quality practice (that is, practice initially under the watchful eye of an expert that can correct and guide the development of a perfect movement pattern, and even when mastery has been achieved, under conditions that allow for as much feedback as possible)
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Where would the money for a (really big) UBI come from
A couple of posts ago I waddled in the intricacies of state budgets to determine if it was feasible to pay everybody residing legally in a country a fixed amount, enough for a comfortable (but not luxurious) existence without any need to prove merit or desert, and without having to substantially increase the amount of the economic activity taken by the state in the form of taxes. That exercise was done with a medium to small sized country with a moderate welfare structure, and after validating the essential validity of the scheme I wondered if it could be extended to a bigger, less interventionist state. Of course, the ultimate example would be the Ol' US of A, and in this post we are going to take a look at how a UBI would look like exactly there.
So let's start by taking a look at how the Federal budget for 2015 looks like:
So let's start by taking a look at how the Federal budget for 2015 looks like:
| M $ | M € | ||
| Current expenses | 3.042.000 | 2.433.600 | |
| Medicare + Medicaid (Publicly provided healthcare) | 800.000 | 640.000 | |
| Social Security (pensions) | 808.000 | 646.400 | |
| Defense, VA and Security | 822.000 | 657.600 | |
| Other expenses (rest of agencies and departments) | 612.000 | 489.600 | |
| Total expenses (w debt interest) | 3.265.000 | 2.612.000 | |
| Debt servicing | 223.000 | 178.400 | |
Given a total US population of 319 M in 2014 (according to the CIA Factbook: Population figures for the USA), it is interesting to note that the federal government expends about 11.700 $ per inhabitant per year (9.000 €), not very different from the 9.500 € per inhabitant per year of the supposedly more welfarist Spain, although of course the structure of those expenses is very different (surprisingly, the expenditure in healthcare is much bigger, even when a much smaller percentage of the population is covered, and unsurprisingly the expenses in defense are stratospherically higher, as befits the "weaponized Keynesianism" the USA has been pursuing for the last eight decades, under the occasional guise of free market economy, supply side economics and other false labels).
Where does the money come from? the projected federal revenues in 2014 are (rounding up a bit):
| 2014 Federal Income | 2.720.000 | 2.176.000 | |
| Income tax | 1.300.000 | 1.040.000 | |
| SS/ S insurance taxes | 950.000 | 760.000 | |
| Corporate taxes | 250.000 | 200.000 | |
| Other | 220.000 | 176.000 | |
It is also worthy to note that, thanks to the same legerdemain we noted in the Spanish case, the state gets away with spending a 20% above what it receives, but presents it as an increment of the deficit of only a 3,3% (as it measures it over the full GDP, about 16,72 American trillions, or 16.720.000 M$)... Also interesting that the average American citizen, that rugged individualist that basically lives without the nanny state interfering in his free pursuit of enlightened self interest, in a political system supposedly geared towards keeping state intervention at a minimum, pays to that unobtrusive state about 8.500 $ a year (6.800 €), or a 17 % of the wealth he adds to the economy (the GDP per capita being 49,800 $), whilst the average Spanish citizen in his semi socialist economy hobbled by supposedly massive state intervention is taxed about 6.000 € a year, although that amount represents a somewhat higher percentage of what he adds, a 25 % (the GDP per capita being a more modest 30,100 $).
So how much would a Universal Basic Income cost int he case of the USA? given a population of 319 M, of which 62 M are under 14 years old, and assuming the same amounts to be paid we used in the Spanish case (translated to PPP $, at a rate of 1,25 $/€, that means 10,000 $/year per person above 14 YO and 5,000 $/year for the under 14) we are talking about the state disbursing 2,88 trillion USD/ year (that's 2,880,000 M$).
Now, if we want to use that money to give security to people it is obvious it can not come at the expense of the meager (by its results to cover the full population) effort done to provide a modicum of medical security (a medical emergency being already the primary cause of bankruptcy for individuals), so, as we did for Spain, the budget for Medicare and Medicaid should not be modified. Unfortunately, as all the rest of the expenses of the state amount already to less than the cost of the UBI (2,242,000 against 2,880,000) and there are minimal amounts that have to be spent to keep even a minimalist state functioning, in the USA implementing a UBI would require a major restructuring of the tax code in order to raise the taxes so the new outlays could be paid for. How much would those taxes have to be raised? it depends of course on what the final cost of running the state would be, which in the end boils down to how much does the American public wants to keep on subsidizing special interest groups (starting with the famous military industrial complex). For the sake of completeness, let's contemplate an scenario in which defense, VA and security spending were halved, and the expenses of the rest of the departments reduced in a 70% (as the justification of a vast amount of subsidies would be eroded if all the population -the current subsidies recipients included- were receiving instead a direct payment from the state):
| M $ | M € | ||
| Hypothetical expenses (w UBI) | 4.295.000 | 3.436.000 | |
| Medicare + Medicaid (Publicly provided healthcare) | 800.000 | 640.000 | |
| Social Security (pensions) | 0 | 0 | |
| Defense, VA and Security | 411.000 | 328.800 | |
| Other expenses (rest of agencies and departments) | 204.000 | 163.200 | |
| Cost of UBI | 2.880.000 | 2.304.000 | |
| Total expenses (w debt interest) | 4.518.000 | 3.614.400 | |
| Debt servicing | 223.000 | 178.400 | |
So we are basically saying the USA would need to find 1,253,000 M$ of additional revenue if it wanted the UBI to be "deficit neutral" (not to add more to the deficit than its current spending patterns, which are already considered unsustainable by a significant portion of their electorate -until their elected representatives come to office, at which moment they find a totally unexpected tolerance for current levels of federal spending, but that would be the topic for another post), elevating the average fiscal pressure to 14,163 $ per citizen per year, a 28% of their current per capita GDP, instead of the comfortable 17% at which it stands now (and much closer to the rest of the advanced world, where it hovers around a 25%)...
So in the USA the discussion of a UBI faces a much higher hurdle, as to implement it it would require much deeper cuts in their current spending patterns plus a significant increase in taxation (an increase that would put it more in line with the rest of the civilized world, by the way). The obstacles to ever overcome such a hurdle are compounded by the fact that the US political system has historically been very successful to disenfranchise those segments of the population that would benefit the most (the poor and undereducated) whilst giving disproportionate weight to those that would pay the most (the rich and entrepreneurial). I thus think that efforts should focus on implementing it in the rest of the economically advanced world, and hoping that seeing how it translates into a much better, fairer, more humane society the progressive elements in the hegemon would start pushing for it from the inside (not in my lifetime, more likely than not).
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Arrighi's cycles and gonadal vote
A couple of posts ago I mentioned I was reading Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Time. I finished it a couple days ago and I've found it one of the most intellectually stimulating works that have passed through my hands in the past year. It not only illuminates the past in unexpected ways, but also provides tools for thinking about the present, and having some more clarity about what the future may hold for us, if current tendencies continue to develop (unfortunately for those loving their futurists clear, unambiguous and surefooted, Arrighi sees our civilization at a crossroads, so he always hedges his bets and delineates a number of possible future development paths we may follow).
In that post I discussed his use of Braudel's (and Pirenne and Hicks) concept of financial expansion and how it related with my own dimension of dominant form of payment (now I'll readily admit their name -and the construct behind it- is much more solid, and more exhaustively researched, than mine). Today I want to delve in a concept he only hints at towards the end of the book, which also dovetails with a persistent concern of mine: how our current civilizational phase has failed to create conditions amenable to the well being of its members, which are "outvoting" it in the most resolute and irreversible manner they have at their disposal: with their gonads.
To center the discussion, I'll use a table Arrighi presents us with to summarize the nature of each successive "cycle of accumulation":
Arrighi contends that each cycle is superseded by a more comprehensive one, which can successfully internalize more functions and thus generate additional surplus than the previous one, thus displacing it from the summit of the capitalist system.We could say that the Genoese was an entirely parasitical system that "exploited" the biggest and most dynamic territorialist states of its time (my Iberian countrymen, no less), outsourcing to them the protection of commerce enabled by their armies, and relying on goods produced abroad, from food to precious metals and budding manufactures (textile and weapons). The Dutch innovated internalizing the cost of protection, carving themselves a "thin" empire in the far East, extended enough to ensure the entrepôts where the goods were exchanged and stored where under their control. But this empire still relied on external sources for food, raw materials (from Baltic timber to spices) and most manufactured goods. The British, in turn, become more competitive through the internalization of the production process, which in turn enabled/ forced them to extend their empire territorially much further (so they could directly control the food, coal and metal sources their manufacturing industries consumed, and then exported to the rest of the world). The Americas, finally, displaced the British by creating huge corporations that regulated (and achieved greater efficiency) the "vertical" process between the extraction of the raw material to its distribution and final sale.
What the American world system could not do was internalize (and properly reward) the brute cost of reproducing the system, from two points of view: demographic (it just doesn't seem able to reward people enough to breed at least to replacement levels) and ecological (it doesn't incentivize the sustainment of an ecologically stable environment, as the rampant loss of biodiversity, acidification of oceans, topsoil degradation, freshwater exhaustion and potential anthropocentric climate change all attest). Indeed, the financial expansion characteristic of the terminal phase of each cycle of accumulation is triggered by the impossibility of generating surplus value at a rate considered "acceptable" in traditional production activities within the current technological system and social structures, and this is more or less what we are seeing since the 70's (with some admitted bumps along the way): the great era of economic growth in the West is essentially over due to the sudden stop of demographic growth, and probably, the great era of technological discovery which rode on the coattails of that economic progress has come to a stop as well, and for the same reasons (as I wrote in this post: About the decrease in the rate of technological progress).
For the non-western world things haven't seemed so dire, as they had a lot of technological (and to a certain extent, social) catch-up to do, and so could keep growing crazily even whilst adopting our very exhausted model (we have to keep things in perspective here, our model has allowed us to have it unprecedentedly good in most aspects, so it comes as no surprise every other social group is emulating it), but the more westernized they become (not just technically, as you can not adopt only part of the package, but also socially) the more abruptly their birth rates plummet, and the more quickly they realize that demographic suicide was just part of the deal... it is just the unavoidable consequence of harnessing the power of every member of the society to produce material goods to the fullest of their capabilities: you end up with lots of goodies, but not too many babies, as people is just not incentivized enough to have them.
Not that I am necessarily decrying that state of things. Earth has a finite capacity, and our species could not and can not keep growing as in the 60's indefinitely. Technology can push the boundaries of that capacity for some time, and I do not honestly know (nor do I think anybody else does) if that boundaries currently stand at 7 billion, 9 billion or 14 billion. What I do know for sure is that the boundary is not infinite, so at some point something had to give and reconduct things to a state closer to the stationary that is the norm for every other species, and for our own for most of its history. What rests to be seen is how the return to a stationary state works, and how it potentially may wreak havoc on an economic system built on the premises of uninterrupted, eternal growth. Our responsibility towards future generations (a responsibility more keenly felt by those of us that have chosen to still reproduce, I can not help but note) is to manage that transition as swiftly as possible, in that old republican spirit of leaving to future generations a natural and social world in better shape than the one we received (a task at which it is difficult not to perceive we are failing abysmally, I have to note...)
Monday, January 5, 2015
Where would the money for a UBI come from
Today's post has to be, unavoidably, quite wonkish, as I'll be discussing the fascinating issue of State Budgets, how they are divided and how they should change to become more democratic and foster a more humane society. The bottom line is to decide if it would be realistic to push for a Universal Basic Income (a certain amount of money to be paid by the state to any individual, regardless of their status or additional income), and what level could that income achieve.
Let's start with the case of a medium sized European country with a sizable public sector, devoted mainly to a moderately progressive welfare state, which started the 2008 recession as a model of fiscal prudence (deficits well below the 2% of GDP prescribed by the UE), but which saw its credit go fast to hell mainly because of its geographic position (it was in the wrong half of Europe, the South) and had to do a drastic fiscal consolidation (substantially reduce public expenditures in the middle of a recession, which pretty much aggravated it and sent the unemployment rate above 25% of the working age population, and to a whooping 50% of the youth) and even with it, saw its debt interest payments soar. This is how such country (Spain) has allocated its expenses budget for 2015:
This country has a population of roughly 46 million people, of which 7,2 million are under 14 years old. Lets assume the UBI would consist in a yearly payment of 4.000 € for each citizen below 14 years of age, and 8.000 € for each one above that age, with no strings attached (may be in the case of those under 18 there are some minimal supervision required indeed, to ensure irresponsible parents do not spend it on themselves whilst leaving the kids starve, but the principle here is that parents or legal tutors can dispose of that income as discretionally as possible). That means the state would be distributing roughly 340.000 M€/year equitatively between all its citizens, not leaving much else for the rest of its endeavors. Assuming it leaves the expenditures for health care, most of I+D+i and all of the security apparatus in place, this is how the budget would look like:
Let's start with the case of a medium sized European country with a sizable public sector, devoted mainly to a moderately progressive welfare state, which started the 2008 recession as a model of fiscal prudence (deficits well below the 2% of GDP prescribed by the UE), but which saw its credit go fast to hell mainly because of its geographic position (it was in the wrong half of Europe, the South) and had to do a drastic fiscal consolidation (substantially reduce public expenditures in the middle of a recession, which pretty much aggravated it and sent the unemployment rate above 25% of the working age population, and to a whooping 50% of the youth) and even with it, saw its debt interest payments soar. This is how such country (Spain) has allocated its expenses budget for 2015:
| Current ordinary expenses (M€) | 344.200 | ||
| Justice, defense, security, prisons & foreign affairs | 16.500 | ||
| Pensions, unemployment benefits, SS mgmt | 180.500 | ||
| Health care, education & culture | 6.800 | ||
| Economic interventions | |||
| Agriculture, fishing, commerce, tourism, transportation | 17.900 | ||
| Infrastructures, I+D+i | 12.500 | ||
| "General character" interventions | |||
| Transfer to other public administration | 47.000 | ||
| "General character" svcs | 28.000 | ||
| Public debt | 35.000 | ||
| Total expenses (M€) (prev + financial liabilities) | 440.000 | ||
This country has a population of roughly 46 million people, of which 7,2 million are under 14 years old. Lets assume the UBI would consist in a yearly payment of 4.000 € for each citizen below 14 years of age, and 8.000 € for each one above that age, with no strings attached (may be in the case of those under 18 there are some minimal supervision required indeed, to ensure irresponsible parents do not spend it on themselves whilst leaving the kids starve, but the principle here is that parents or legal tutors can dispose of that income as discretionally as possible). That means the state would be distributing roughly 340.000 M€/year equitatively between all its citizens, not leaving much else for the rest of its endeavors. Assuming it leaves the expenditures for health care, most of I+D+i and all of the security apparatus in place, this is how the budget would look like:
| Current ordinary expenses (M€) | 389.983 | ||
| Justice, defense, security, prisons & foreign affairs | 16.500 | ||
| Health care, education & culture | 4.533 | ||
| Economic interventions | |||
| Agriculture, fishing, commerce, tourism, transportation | 0 | ||
| Infrastructures, I+D+i | 6.250 | ||
| "General character" interventions | |||
| Transfer to other public administration | 23.500 | ||
| "General character" svcs | |||
| Public debt | |||
| Total UBI cost (M€/year) | 339.200 | ||
| Total expenses (M€) (prev + financial liabilities) | 485.783 | ||
So essentially the whole 180.000 M€ for pensions, unemployment and and social security management disappear (are replaced by the UBI), as well as the economic interventions that in practice represent transfers to special interest groups. So no more subsidies for agriculture (payments not to cultivate terrains in order to "keep traditional ways of life", which are ethically unacceptable and economically dubious), or to prop up unprofitable industries, or to distort the electric bill so big utilities keep on having stratospheric benefits... Some other chapters are more or less openly shorn under the idea of giving people more choice on how they spend the money, without the government telling them what's best (so for example I would expect subsidies to culture to diminish, as people would directly have the money to decide how they want to spend their leisure time, and to some extent that may also happen with higher education -not with basic and pre-K one). Transfers to other administrations are halved to support at curernt levels the competencies they have now regardng health care and education, but to eliminate their discretionary investments in (spectacularly bad) infrastructure and local power groups.
It may be noticed that there is no need to reduce the security apparatus (although it may be argued that in a more equal society where everybody has enough to live decently crime should be substantially reduced, and specially the need for costly prisons abated), or foreign aid (a moral imperative), and that specially health care, basic education and I+D-i could keep on being paid for by the state at current levels, as most evidence available nowadays seems to show that the market makes an abysmal job trying to provide them.
It may also be noted that this schema is 40.000 million euros more expensive that the current one, with no UBI, so there is still a legitimate question of where those extra 40.000 million may come from. Lets take a quick look at what the Spanish state expects to receive in that same year 2015 (as estimated in the same state budget where the expenses have been taken from):
| Income | 291.700 | ||
| Direct taxes and SS payments (*) | |||
| Personal Income taxes | 73.000 | ||
| Company taxes | 24.000 | ||
| VAT | 60.000 | ||
| Special | 20.000 | ||
| Other | 20.000 | ||
| Financial assets | 19.000 | ||
| Indirect taxes | 44.000 | ||
| Excises | 7.000 | ||
| Other (transfers & income from assets) | 24.700 | ||
| (*) after deducting 40.700 M€ of exemptions | |||
To put things in perspective, Spain's GDP is projected to be in 2015 around 1,1 trillion € (that's an American trillion, or 1.100.000 million €), so those 40.000 M€ of additional expenses would mean and addition of "just" four percentage points to the fiscal deficit currently projected (it is a little legerdemain that the deficit is typically expressed as the amount in which the expenses exceed the receipts as a percentage of the GDP, so we can talk of a few percentage points... if it were expressed as a percentage of the total amount received all countries would have deficits around 50% year after year).
However, even that four percent could be easily offset by a increase in the VAT (that would be an almost 66% overall increase if all the shortfall were to be recovered this way), by the increase in "other taxes" (like inheritance, which I can not avoid thinking it is an unearned wealth) or, my preferred option, by substantially increasing taxes on companies (as they would be the great beneficiaries of putting an additional 160.000 M€ in the hands of the public, most of them going to people with a very high marginal propensity to consume, which would substantially increase the demand for their products and services).
So all things considered, an UBI could be instituted in order to be fiscally neutral with a minor tweak in the tax code, but it would mean a seismic change in the way the state distributes its largess. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am it would be a change for the better, taking discretionary power away from big corporations and special interest groups and devolving it to consumers and, specially, citizens.
it could be argued that such a schema could work in a little economy like Spain's, but not in a big one. In a next post I will do a similar exercise for the biggest economy for which we have reliable data, to analyze how things look like in a very different scenario, where there is not so much welfare state, so it may be assumed that there is not so much to distribute (hint: things do not look that much different)
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