"Trade is to culture as sex is to biology."

This sparkling wit flows from the keyboard of Matt Ridley, a libertarian zoologist who once was on the staff of the Economist. He calls himself "the rational optimist" (the title of his new book), and offers a neat summary of his evolutionary thinking in the Wall Street Journal ("Humans: Why They Triumphed"). In his view, the way sex is essential to biological evolution, trade is at the heart of cultural and technological progress. It was the invention of trade that unleashed a process of increasing specialization and exchange of ideas. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, never adopted trading practices and ended up in the dustbin of history, despite their larger brains. From the very beginning of urban-based civilization, though, the spread of trade was marked by an enormous injustice: "Tax and even slavery began to rear their ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern that would endure for the next 6,000 years — merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalize it." This should probably apply to bankers, too - as Ridley was able to observe first-hand in his capacity as "non-executive chairman" of Northern Rock. He was pocketing GBP 300,000 a year there - until he was forced to resign when the bank cried uncle in September 2007. Luckily, there is light at the end of the tunnel: "Given that progress is inexorable, cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and specialize, then globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century — despite the usual setbacks from recessions, wars, spendthrift governments and natural disasters."

Haltura

I am looking at the site of a Bulgaria cram school called Magnet (www.magnet-edu.com). One of the subjects they teach is Bulgarian language and literature. On its welcoming page, in Bulgarian, there are four brief paragraphs of text. In those four paragraphs, there are at least 10 commas that have been left out. There is only one word that can capture such a breath-taking degree of careless sloppiness, and it happens to be Russian. Or - the people who wrote and proofread Magnet's sales pitch are scrupulously meticulous, but this is the educational level they were able to reach after maybe a combined 138 years of education. Frankly, I am not sure which is worse.

The market knows best

William Keegan writing in the Guardian/Observer: "Although there is no getting away from the fact that Greece woefully mishandled its financial affairs, the financial markets seem to have put many eurozone countries in a classic Catch-22 position: they 'short' whole countries whose fiscal position is considered unsound. And then when the fiscal masochism they advocate is put into practice (or promised) they 'short' them again, because of the inevitable effect this will have on prospects for economic growth."

Childhood dreams

Jordan Romero, a beaming American boy, holds the American flag in his stretched hands. The picture was taken at some peak in Indonesia, and now he is climbing Mount Everest accompanied by his father and three sherpas. At 13, he hopes to become the youngest person to climb the highest peak in the world. Someone could say: what better icon for the American dream of making it - with guts and determination - to the very top? Except that now kids from around the world are rushing to tackle superhuman challenges, with solo navigation around the world being the most common choice. The young climber, of course, blogs about his exilarating experiences. He recently wrote: "Every step I take is finally toward the biggest goal of my life, to stand on top of the world." You must admire this unchildish focus and dedication. And yet, what happens to you when you reach the highest goal of your whole life at 13? It must be all downhill from there. Peaking too early in life is not always the best strategy, but I do hope it will work for Jordan.

"Do Nice Gals Finish Last?"

This NYT blog post by economist Nancy Folbre says one of the reasons women get lower pay is that they are less pushy or Machiavellian when negotiating their salaries - and will often shrink from bringing the whole embarrassing issue up. The author asks: "Shouldn't we try to reward nice behavior?" This is the funniest question I have seen or heard in about 18 months. The first step Folbre suggests sound a bit more realistic: "We could start by making stronger efforts to penalize bullies and cheats." If only that "we" still existed...

Simply the pursuit of wealth

Harvard economic historian David S. Landes explains vividly ("The Enterprise of Nations," Wilson Quarterly) how in the past China clung stubbornly to silly traditions and missed out on 400 years of technological and social progress. Now the Chinese have learned their lesson, unlike some even more thick-headed holdouts. In other regions, all the recent success stories are countries which, like China, have jumped bravely into the global maelstrom of ideas, money, stuff, etc. In Latin America, for example, Brazil, Chile, and - er - Columbia have "done well" (curiously, no mention of Mexico). Now some naysayers are grumbling about the loss of jobs as companies move production to more efficient locations. Take the governor of Massachussetts who had the following comment on the decision of the new owners of Polaroid to shut down the company's main factory in his state: "I think it has been fairly sinister the company has been cut apart like a stolen car at a chop shop while the employees are left holding the spare tire." To Prof. Landes, such populist rhetoric is quite misplaced. As he patently explains, "the process of job transfer ('outsourcing') is a central aspect of contemporary entrepreneurship and globalization." Well, entrepreneurs do "prefer profits to sentiments," but how can you expect them not to? Landes could have quoted here Milton Friedman who once famously stated that "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." The Harvard professor, though, does make clear that, with the inevitable collateral damage wrought by the whirlwind of creative destrruction, outsourcing is a natural next step in a natural process which goes back thousands of years. This process is "simply the pursuit of wealth" - case rested. Of course, we don't even need to be reminded that any attempt to somehow constrain this process (maybe using as an excuse the excesses of unregulated entrepreneurship which allegedly created the current economic mess) leads inexorably down that slippery slope, onto the road to serfdom, directly into the gulag. As it happened in that former quasi-satellite of the Soviet Union, Finland.

"Exploring the Complexities of Nerdiness, for Laughs"

This is a NYT review of the sitcom Big Bang Theory which features, unbelievably, a couple of young physicists. The article offers the following quote by one of the actors: "A lot of people thought it would be a show that poked fun at smart people, but it has become a show that defends smart people much more often than that. These guys, as socially inept as they might be, are the type of people that are molding our future as a society." I knew there was something wrong with this sitcom. Indeed, the producers have picked the wrong genre. They should have concocted a dystopian miniseries about the coming merger of humans with machines. This hot topic was already discussed at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference held at Oxford two years ago. It's now time for the science popularizers to step in and prepare us for the coming "singularity."

Why worry now?

This is the headline of a post on one of the NYT multiple blogs: "Ash Falls on Reykjavik, and Icelanders Shrug." Apparently, they did the same when their banks and a few buccaneers embarked on that financial binge which sunk Iceland's economy. But maybe this is mere coincidence.

Death to Facebook?

"A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business." As the NYT article makes clear, they have already raised on the internet more than twice the money they would need to design the open-source software intended to decentralize social networking. In their nerdy naïveté, they wanted to do this without promising big returns to venture capitalists. They should learn from the people who launched that web site last November allowing kids to make anonymously disparaging comments and ask embarrassing questions of each other. They knew their ECO 101 and had amassed 2.5 million dollars in venture capital before starting work on their similarly creative project.

Babies do need to grow up

Dr. Paul Bloom writes in the New York Times about his work aimed at pinning down "The Moral Life of Babies." It turns out, they are pretty uncooperative subjects - "because, even compared to rats or birds, they are behaviorally limited: they can’t run mazes or peck at levers." But he and his colleagues at Yale's Infant Cognition Center used some very clever experiments to elicit reliable data on the babies' ethical preferences. They found something quite disturbing - babies are, to put it mildly, intolerant. Gordon Brown might have even called them "bigoted." In other words, from a very early age, they exhibit clear-cut in-group preferences. How could I have been so naive? All that scholarly literature on nationalism I have devoured maintains that it is quite natural for millions of people of various colors, ethnicities, religions, etc. to live in perfect harmony in complex multicultural societies; and the bigotry of Serb nationalists or Hutu thugs is a cultural aberration which can be explained only by sophisticated conspiracy theories. It turns out this was all wrong: "in fact, our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind." Happily, this primitive morality can be transcended in modern societies with market economies, where rational individuals are able to negotiate the impartial morality needed to oil the wheels of commerce. According to Dr. Bloom, our morality must have such impartiality at its core in order to be truly mature. This reminds me of another NYT article, "When the Ties That Bind Unravel." It describes an increasingly common phenomenon in American society - "parents who have become estranged from their own children." At some points a son or a daughter decides that maintaining a strained relationship with his or her parents is too burdensome, and cuts them off. What could be more impartial than that, really - treating one's parents as chance acquaintances whom you can easily leave behind and move on with your life?

The joy of motherhood

A 62-year old Bulgarian woman gave birth to twins. This, in itself, would not bee news - geriatric parenthood has long become a perfectly acceptable stab at happiness. The fact that she appeared before cameras made up as a clown cannot be held against her either - who can say what forms of self-expression are spooky these days? The twin girls were born from donated eggs and are severely underweight (one is a kilo, or a little over two pounds, the other half that weight), but this also turns out to be very much the norm in such cases. In fact, what seems most unusual about the elderly mother is her occupation. She is a certified psychiatrist. Now, this is precisely the kind of medical expert who can get you out of the doldrums if you have serious mental health issues.

The algorithm of creativity

This is from a NYT piece the booming scientific study of creativity: "'Creativity is a complex concept; it’s not a single thing,” [Dr. Kounious] said, adding that brain researchers needed to break it down into its component parts." He studies the neural basis of creativity, and defines it as "the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way." I wish the scientists doing such research could show some creativity in their own work - in addition their natural impulse to take things apart to see how they work.

Brave new Britain

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on David Cameron: "Ex-Conservative MP Quentin Davies, who defected to Labour on 26 June 2007, branded him 'superficial, unreliable and [with] an apparent lack of any clear convictions' and stated that David Cameron had turned the Conservative Party's mission into a 'PR agenda'." These, of course, are gripes coming from an avowed personal enemy. And PR strategizing has already become a job requirement for political leaders anyway. Just think of the powerful Obama brand. One comment about Cameron's performance on the third prime-ministerial debate said that, as the BBC-hosted show progressed, "he began to look increasingly like a made up mannequin," but we shouldn't be so judgmental in our tastes. Another comment suggested that Cameron's thick hair in fact saved him from looking like a plastic mannequin.

Rule of law

There are reports that the parking lot adjacent to the Bulgarian parliament, used for the cars servicing the MPs, was set up illegally. It turns out the Sofia municipality never issued a permit for part of the public square to be fenced off.

Two boys, 13 and 14 years old, sneaked out of their homes to take a midnight walk in Sofia. Chased by a pack of stray dogs, they climbed on the side of an overpass. The younger boy slipped and fell on the boulevard below. A van immediately hit and killed him, and the driver sped away. This avoidable tragedy seems to capture in a teardrop the unrelenting unraveling of Bulgarian society.

An examined life

In the NYT, Gary Wolf describes a new trend among computer geeks (“The Data-Driven Life”). Using various sensors and gadgets, they are now trying to collect as much data about their personal lives as possible. One has even compiled a searchable database of all ideas he has discussed with others or considered himself since the early 1980s. The idea behind this “self-tracking” is apparently not only to achieve greater efficiency in specific areas, but also to make sense of their lives – in the only way that can make sense to a geek. To some, it has obviously become a compulsion they see no reason to resist. In his sympathetic account, Wolf asks: “We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?” Why not, really – it does sound quite logical. The early adopters are keenly aware that they are abnormal geeks, but are confident that what seems socially awkward now will soon be the new normal. That, I guess, is logical, too.

The mystery of the universe

Stephen Wolfram argues on TED that "our universe is the product of a simple computational rule." But, of course - what could be more logical than this?

Who said political scientists can't be hip?

Following my previous comment, I took a solemn vow of blogosilence. I decided I would not write ANYTHING for at least two hours, and use that precious time to reevaluate my whole take on blogging. If my scattered thoughts appeal to the wrong target audience, would any neurotypicals take interest in them? This required some careful analysis. But then I got in my inbox a piece of news so exciting I couldn’t resist the itch. Can you believe it – the European Consortium for Political Research is now on Facebook and Twitter! Finally! What took them so long?

I, Robot

Last week, during pre-registration, a student came by to check my body temperature. I didn't turn him back since I am always thrilled to see students who are genuinely curious. His curiosity stemmed from the following comment he had read about me on www.aubg.org: “He is a robot! Very knowledgeable, indeed, but also routine-driven to the extreme... at the same time, he maintains a pretty interesting blog.” I am still wondering if I should feel hurt. Like his pals, the author is a übergamer who humbly styles himself as “Gatekeeper” (for the uninitiated, this would make him a Doom junkie). He apparently wants to keep the civic spirit AUBG so cherishes alive by dispensing empowering knowledge to the downtrodden and inexperienced (he has posted something like 8,000 comments already). Judging by his writing style, I probably gave him a C-, if I was in good mood. I should have known that no good deed goes unpunished. Anyway, it seems the opening qualification shouldn’t bother me much. Really, how could I hope to come alive for someone used to the electrifying excitement of immersive gaming? I would need to be a creature out of Avatar to achieve this. Plus, it’s quite obvious that Spaceship Earth will soon be taken over by cyborgs who hide their empty eyes behind dark glasses. If this is the case, becoming an early adopter of Al Gore’s* presentation style could give me the sharpest competitive edge. Ergo, I should be quite OK with "Gatekeeper" calling me a “robot.” His praise for my blog, though, nags me big time. His brain has surely been toasted from those 10,000 hours** of gaming he must have clocked in his second life (that order may have been reversed if he is still stuck in some dreary Bulgarian city, chained to a job incommensurate with his bloated self-importance). Hm, if such a persson can still find what I write “interesting,” there is perhaps something I am not doing right...

* Al Gore is a former US vice president and current environmental campaigner. He was once rumored to have a winding key sticking between his shoulder blades. That bulge is no longer visible under his suit, so “he” must have upgraded to a more powerful source of energy.

** How do I know it’s 10,000? Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers) has calculated that this is roughly the amount of practice it takes to achieve superb excellence in almost any area – even the silliest.

Saved by the geeks

On FORA.tv, the creator of "Heroes," a cross-platform franchise which in the past would have been a mere TV series, explains the beauty of "audience sourcing." You see, there are all those millions of kids (some over 20, even 30) who, as a matter of principle, would never watch TV but would rather download - hm, illegally - their favorite shows. This is a fact of life, so this fickle audience must somehow be tapped. How do you do it most efficiently? Very simple - by creating a string of clever web sites through witch the digital fugitives will click compulsively (after they see, for example, the address for one of them flashed on the screen - all ingeniously embedded in the plot line). And bingo - you have delivered millions of surplus eyeballs to the advertisers chasing after this elusive demographic. You must really admire such inventive genius. At one point the creator makes a reference to a new survey which says US kids and teens now spend on average 7.5 hours (11.5 if you factor in multi-tasking) glued to screens of different sizes. What is his first thought? Wow, what an opportunity to reach into the brains of all those young addicts! And you can do it incessantly, practically all the time while they are awake - on behalf of advertisers and anyone willing to invest into that all-out effort. You must admire such clear focus and determination, too. But if you think the guy is merely bent on making a quick buck from his creative brilliance, you will be completely wrong. His "heroes" are all involved in frantic efforts to save the world - and his stated goal is to inspire all young minds watching them to follow in their footsteps. This, apparently, is the only feasible way to avoid all those environmental and other disasters which would otherwise ruin human civilization in the future. This reminds me of another talk on FORA - by a young neuroscientist who lists "six easy steps to avert the collapse of civilization." One of those steps is linked to the way the internet opens the gates of education. A "motivated teen" anywhere in the world, he says, can have access to the totality of human knowledge collected since the invention of writing. There is a slight problem here - all that compulsive clicking may not exactly contribute to the development of the focus and motivation essential to learning. But, of course, we all know that the Luddites' resistance to the onward march of progress was silly and futile, and we don't want to repeat their mistake all over again.

Your monetized second life

On FORA.tv there is a round table on some exciting efforts to bring "smarter TV" to the masses. One of the participants works for a company which offers its customers the opportunity to point a remote at, say, the watch worn by a celebrity actor and buy it on the spur of the moment. He explains that this is part of an overall project aimed at monetizing all sorts of emotional communities of people - fans of this and that. It's curious how many companies build their business plans on inducing customers to buy impulsively and incessantly, for themselves or nagged by their kids. Some sullen conservatives still think, though, that decorum and self-restraint in modern society are undermined primarily by a few feminists and other liberal intellectuals. Of course, they reject all conspiracy theories as hopelessly naïve.

We've come a long way, baby

"At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business" (NYT):

So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins “to challenge corporate and government leaders.”

Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.

For this year’s celebration, Bahama Umbrella is advertising a specially designed umbrella, with a drain so that water “can be stored, reused and recycled.”

In part, said Robert Stone, a independent documentary filmmaker whose history of the American environmental movement is being broadcast on public television this week, the movement has been a victim of its own success in clearing up tangible problems with air and water. But that is just part of the problem, he noted.

“Every Earth Day is a reflection of where we are as a culture,” he said. “If it has become commoditized, about green consumerism instead of systemic change, then it is a reflection of our society.”

Taking the high road

Mary Billard, "A Yoga Manifesto" (NYT)

Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.

“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”

Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that.

The freedom to smoke

The Bulgarian parliament has finally found an issue many MPs feel passionate about - the proposed lifting of the ban on smoking in public places before the latter even went into effect. The battle lines were drawn quite clearly between smokers and non-smokers - which must have been a coincidence since we know that MPs are solemnly committed to putting broader societal interests before their own narrowly conceived lifestyle preferences. One heavy smoker took a really principled stance: "As a free-thinking person I don't want to be told by law what to do and what not to do." If there is one sentence which brilliantly distills the whole dazzling complexity of modern Bulgarian political culture, this is it.