text:
A Buddhist economicist's perspective
Suppose we consider the demand for a commodity, say cigarettes and consider that it has been showing an increasing trend. This trend will be supported by an increase in production of cigarettes. These cigarettes are then put into the market and purchased and consumed by people. When it is consumed, the demand is satisfied and normally, nobody bothers about the stage after consumption. But Buddhist Economists go beyond that and investigate how these trends affect the three intertwined aspects of human existence: The individual, society and the environment. Specific to an increase in the consumption of cigarettes, Buddhist Economists try to decipher how this increase affects the pollution levels in the environment, its impact on passive smokers and active smokers and the various health hazards that come along with smoking, thus taking into consideration the ethical side of economics. The ethical aspect of it is partly judged by the outcomes it brings and partly by the qualities which lead to it.
If you haven't read it, check out Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.
Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition"
I deplore corporate colonialism but not viscerally. The story isn't presented in a way that rouses me. Apple seems like such an affable outfit; I like my iPhone. Occasionally I hear some yarn about tax avoidance or Chinese iPhone factory workers committing suicide because of dreadful working conditions but it doesn't really bother me, it seems so abstract. Not in the same infuriating, visceral, immediate way that I get pissed off when I buy a new phone and they've changed the fucking chargers, then I want to get my old, perfectly good charger and lynch the executives with the cable. They make their own product, which they've already sold me, deliberately obsolete just to rinse a few more quid out of us.
But profit is not a dirty word. I hate big banks and banking and bankers but when they rip us off and do us down with derivatives and foreclosures and bundles, I roll my eyes. However when I see that I'm getting a £3.50 surcharge at a cash machine I want to put their fucking windows through. This is the selfish impulse the right expertly engages but ought to belong to the left. We have to see that all these things are connected. We have succumbed to an ideology that is 100 per cent corrupt and must be overthrown. The maintenance of this system depends on our belief that "there's nothing we can do"; well, the government seemed pretty shook up during those riots. They snapped out of their Tuscan complacency quick enough then, and that was for a few pissed-off kids.
Those kids weren't apathetic either. They felt impotent because they are given no status, structure or space. Perhaps in a system where legitimate, peaceful protest was heard that may have been an appropriate option for them, but Stop the War marches don't stop wars, at the top of the pyramid larceny is rewarded with big bonuses. They may have been misdirected but they certainly had some vim. How beautiful it would be to see their passion utilised and directed at the source of their grievances.
The system is adept at turning our aggression on to one another. We condemn the rioters. The EDL condemns immigrants. My new rule for when I fancy doing a bit of the ol' condemnation is: "Do the people I'm condemning have any actual power?" The immigrant capacity to cause social negativity is pretty slender. Especially if you live in luxury in Hollywood and the only immigrants you meet are Gabby, my Mexican second mother, and Polo who looks after the garden. It probably seems more serious if you're in a council flat in Tower Hamlets. Still the fact remains that an immigrant is just someone who used to be somewhere else. Free movement of global capital will necessitate the free movement of an affordable labour force to meet the demands that the free-moving capital has created. The wrath is directed to the symptom, not the problem.
We British seem to be a bit embarrassed about revolution, like the passion is uncouth or that some tea might get spilled on our cuffs in the uprising. That revolution is a bit French or worse still American. Well, the alternative is extinction so now might be a good time to re-evaluate. The apathy is in fact a transmission problem, when we are given the correct information in an engaging fashion, we will stir.
The hypocrisy – me, working for MTV with my fancy shoes – is a problem that can be taken care of incrementally. I don't mind giving up some of my baubles and balderdash for a genuinely fair system, so can we create one? We have to be inclusive of everyone, to recognise our similarities are more important than our differences and that we have an immediate ecological imperative. This is not a job I'd place in the hot, clammy, grasping palms of Cameron and Osborne. I shook George Osborne's hand once, by accident, it was like sliding my hand into a dilated cow.
We require a change that is beyond the narrow, prescriptive parameters of the current debate, outside the fortress of our current system. A system predicated on aspects of our nature that are dangerous when systemic: greed, selfishness and fear. These are old, dead ideas. That's why their business is conducted in archaic venues. Antiquated, elegant edifices, lined with oak and leather. We no longer have the luxury of tradition.
Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old buildings from which they now govern us. It's not that they're malevolent; it's just that they're irrelevant. Relics of an old notion, like Old Spice: it's fine that it exists but no one should actually use it.
We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by post-Clintonian trends.
We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if our species is to avoid expiry. We can't be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.
We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: "It doesn't matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour, once you light a match it is illuminated." Like a tanker way off course due to an imperceptible navigational error at the offset we need only alter our inner longitude.
Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.
The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a limited amount of resources.
The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in - clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.
In 2013 (another made-up imaginary concept) we cannot afford to giggle, drivel and burp like giant, pube-covered babies about quaint, old-fashioned notions like nation, capitalism and consumerism simply because it's convenient for the tiny, greedy, myopic sliver of the population that those outmoded ideas serve. I will never vote because, as Billy said, "It encourages them." I did a job with Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard not long ago and the three of us shared a dressing room. Eddie believes in democracy and spoke sincerely of his political ambitions. "One day I'd like to be a politician …" he said. I spoke of my belief that change could only come from within. "I'd like to be a spiritual orator …" I said grandly.
Billy eyed us both, with kindly disapprobation. "I'd like to be a nuisance," he said. "I want to be a troublemaker, there in the gallery in parliament shouting RUBBISH and PROVE IT." Who am I to argue with The Great Trickster Connolly? I will never vote and I don't think you should, either.
To genuinely make a difference, we must become different; make the tiny, longitudinal shift. Meditate, direct our love indiscriminately and our condemnation exclusively at those with power. Revolt in whatever way we want, with the spontaneity of the London rioters, with the certainty and willingness to die of religious fundamentalists or with the twinkling mischief of the trickster. We should include everyone, judging no one, without harming anyone. The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds of years, the Technological Revolution took tens, the Spiritual Revolution has come and we have only an instant to act.
Now there is an opportunity for the left to return to its vital, virile, vigorous origins. A movement for the people, by the people, in the service of the land. Socialism's historical connection with spiritual principles is deep. Sharing is a spiritual principle, respecting our land is a spiritual principle. May the first, May Day, is a pagan holiday where we acknowledge our essential relationship with our land. I bet the Tolpuddle martyrs, who marched for fair pay for agricultural workers, whose legacy is the right for us to have social solidarity, were a right bunch of herberts if you knew them. "Thugs, yobs, hooligans," the Daily Mail would've called them. Our young people need to know there is a culture, a strong, broad union, that they can belong to, that is potent, virile and alive. At this time when George and Dave pilfer and pillage our land and money for their oligarch mates, at this time when the Tories are taking the EU to court to stop it curtailing their banker pals' bonuses, that there is something they can do. Take to the streets, together, with the understanding that the feeling that you aren't being heard or seen or represented isn't psychosis; it's government policy.
But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up.
The revolution of consciousness is a decision, decisions take a moment. In my mind the revolution has already begun.
The Internet destroyed the middle class
By: Jaron Lanier
Salon, May 12, 2013
Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. "Lanier is often described as 'visionary,' " Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, "a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills."
Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who'd escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he's been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He's also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.
His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves "spying" on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.
This week sees the publication of "Who Owns the Future?," which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways. (How is a pirated music file like a 21st century mortgage?) Lanier argues that there is little essential difference between Facebook and a digital trading company, or Amazon and an enormous bank. ("Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies.")
Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various "levees" that give the economic middle stability.
"Here's a current example of the challenge we face," he writes in the book's prelude: "At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?"
"Future" also looks at the way the creative class – especially musicians, journalists and photographers — has borne the brunt of disruptive technology.
The new book – which has drawn a rave in the New York Times — has already received a serious challenge from Evgeny Morozov in the Washington Post. The Internet-skeptic author of "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism" challenges Lanier's proposed solution that regular people be rewarded in micropayments when their data enriches a digital network.
But more important than Lanier's hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, "Future" is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows," Robert Levine's "Free Ride" and Lanier's own"You Are Not a Gadget."
We spoke to the dreadlocked, Berkeley-based author from the road, where he's on a massive book tour.
You talk early in "Who Owns the Future?" about Kodak — about thousand of jobs being destroyed, and Instagram picking up the slack — but with almost no jobs produced. So give us a sense of how that happens and what the result is. It seems like the seed of your book in a way.
Right. Well, I think what's been happening is a shift from the formal to the informal economy for most people. So that's to say if you use Instagram to show pictures to your friends and relatives, or whatever service it is, there are a couple of things that are still the same as they were in the times of Kodak. One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same. Instagram wouldn't work if there weren't many millions of people using it. And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable. People have to, there's a constant tending that's done on a volunteer basis so that people can find each other and whatnot.
So there's still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It's reputation, it's barter, it's that kind of stuff.
So instead of somebody paying money to get their photo developed, and somebody getting a part of a job, a little fragment of a job, at least, and retirement and all the other things that we're accustomed to, it works informally now, and intangibly.
Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He's a friend so I don't want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.
And you know, that's all kind of true when you're young and if you're not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you're a person in the West, in the developed world. And then meanwhile this loss, or this shift in the line from what's formal to what's informal, doesn't mean that we're abandoning what's formal. I mean, if it was uniform, and we were all entering a socialist utopia or something, that would be one thing, but the formal benefits are accruing at this fantastic rate, at this global record rate to the people who own the biggest computer that's connecting all the people.
So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there's this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There's not a middle-class hump. It's an all-or-nothing society.
Right, and also I think part of what you're saying too is that it's still in most ways a formal economy in that the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can't pay his rent with cultural capital that's replaced it.
Yeah, well, people will say you can find a place to crash. People who tour right now will find a couch to crash on. But, you know, this is the difference … I'm not saying that there aren't ever benefits, like yeah, sometimes you can find a couch. But as I put it in the book, you have to sing for your supper for every meal. The informal way of getting by doesn't tide you over when you're sick and it doesn't let you raise kids and it doesn't let you grow old. It's not biologically real.
Actually, can we stick with photography for a second? If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don't think of it that way. One of my favorite stories, which might be apocryphal — I can't tell you for sure that this is so, although photographers traded this story for many years. But the way the piece of folklore goes is that during the Civil War era, and a little after, the very earliest photographers would go around with a collection of photographs of people who matched a certain archetype. So they would find the photograph that most closely matched your loved one and you'd buy that because at least there would be representation a little like the person, even if it was the wrong person. And that sounds just incredibly weird to us.
And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot. So the thing is, why not just paint the real person, because painting was really a lot of work. It takes a long time to paint a portrait. And you have to carry around all the paints and all that, and you could just create a stack of photos and sell them. So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that's less hassle than the previous thing, there's still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that's easier?
People often say, well, in Rochester, N.Y. — which is a town that kind of lived on the photography business — they had a buggy whip factory that closed down with the advent of the automobile. The thing is, it's a lot easier to deal with a car than to deal with horses. I love horses, but you know, you have to feed them, and they poop a lot, and you have to deal with their hooves. It's a whole thing. And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don't get paid, because, after all, it's fun to drive. And it is. And they're magical.
And so there could really easily be, somebody could easily have asserted that photography is so much easier than painting and driving cars is so much easier than horses that the people who do those things — or support it –shouldn't be paid. Working in a nice environment — if you go to Sweden and you visit the Saab factory, it's really nice. Why should you even be paid to do anything?
We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?
Right. Well, until about the year 2000 or so, some jobs had been destroyed by new technology. This goes back to the industrial revolution and earlier. But more jobs were created than those destroyed. So what changed?
Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That's the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn't be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren't terrible.
So it wasn't inherent in the technology. In other words, there's nothing inherently different about digital technology or the Internet than there is with factory technology or the assembly line or these other technological shifts that have developed?
Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn't have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you're not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.
But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don't have that you can't really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn't a broad distribution of wealth.
And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you're an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there's a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth. So there's no reason technically for any technology to ever create a job. In other words, we could have had motor vehicles, and we could have had film cameras, we could have had all these technologies without any formal jobs. We just had a social contract in which we decided that we'd allow formal jobs in factories and in drivers and in users of cameras and creators of cameras and film.
It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.
Well, a lot of your book is about the survival of the middle class in the digital age, the importance of a broad middle class as we move forward. You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown?
Well, there's a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There's always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There's often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.
In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.
Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it's this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.
One of the things that really annoys me is the acceptance of lies that's so common in the current orthodoxy. I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there's this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media. And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote "Gadget" I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that's where it happens the most right now.
So when we're talking about the whole of the business – and these are not 50 people who are doing great. Or here's another example. Do you know who Jenna Marbles is? She's a super-successful YouTube star. She's the queen of self-help videos for young women. She's kind of a cross between Snooki and Martha Stewart or something. And she's cool. I mean, she kind of helps girls with how to do makeup, and she's irreverent. She's had a billion views.
The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, "Oh, what an incredible life. She's this incredibly lucky person who's worked really hard." And that's all true. She's in her 20s, and it's great that she's found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that's worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success. And that's good for a 20-year-old, but she's at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life. And I don't want to dismiss that. That's great for a 20-year-old, although in truth, in my world of engineers that wouldn't be much. But for someone who's out there, a star with a billion views, that's a crazy low expectation. She's not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they're not even making it into the 1 percent.
The issue is if we're going to have a middle class anymore, and if that's our expectation, we won't. And then we won't have democracy.
You mentioned a minute ago that there's about 50 in hip-hop. What kind of estimate did you come up with for music in general?
I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It's really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it's just not a way you can build a society.
The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you're living in the slum or something, so you're desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That's what's called development. But this is the opposite of that. It's taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.
You say early in the book, "As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive only if we destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, photographers." I guess what you seem to be saying here is the creative class is sort of the canary in the digital coal mine.
Yes. That's precisely my point. So when people say, "Why are musicians so special? Everybody has to struggle." And the thing is, I do think we are looking at a [sustainable] model.
We don't realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody's this abstract robot that won't ever get sick or have kids or get old. It's like everybody's this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.
The way society actually works is there's some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That's the thing we're destroying, and that's really the thing I'm hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.
It wasn't too long ago that it was unskilled people on assembly lines who answered phones or bank tellers and it's just crept up in the decades since. You've mentioned a few times this sort of digital utopianism that still emanates from Silicon Valley. Where does that kind of thinking come from and why does it exist despite all the evidence to the contrary?
Well, it's an orthodoxy now. I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, "But isn't open source software the best thing in life? Isn't it the future?" It's a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians. It's one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don't work. We've already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don't want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.
Speaking of politics, your concerns are often those of the political left. You're concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don't seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?
I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.
The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.
I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them. It just doesn't work. So my own take on it is, actually another way I've been thinking about it lately is a balance of magisteria. "Magisteria" was the term that Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion. And I've been thinking that way about money and politics, or computers and politics, or computers and ethics. All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.
Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn't need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they'll see it's not true.
My cyber-friends think if you can just come up with a perfect scheme, that some perfect digital scheme will solve all the problems. My belief is that if we deal with all of these things, they can balance out each other to prevent the worst dysfunctions of each one from happening. And at minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe. And that's the minimum requirement. Maybe not the ideal.
So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria. And that is doesn't concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we'll really be fine. I'm actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I'm the most modest person in the conversation. I'm just trying to avoid total dysfunction.
Let's stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars? Military research and labs at public universities. And many of the people whom the Internet has enriched have become libertarians who earnestly tell you that they are "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," and resist progressive taxation because of it.
Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that's there anyway. In fact, it's even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That's also true of Google.
Near the end of the book you talk about the changes in the book business. It doesn't sound pretty. What's going on there and what have you learned as someone who has now written several books?
I don't hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There's a lot of discussion about that, and I think it's misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
To me a book is not just a particular file. It's connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I'm concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They're divorcing books from their role in personhood.
I'm quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they're reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you're listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you're listening to, but in truth it's hard to get to those services.
I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn't know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn't know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you're listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn't work. So what's supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
So in practice you don't know who the musician is. And I think that's what could happen with writers. And this is what we celebrate in Wikipedia is pretending that there's some absolute truth that can be spoken that people can approximate and that the speaker doesn't matter. And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.
I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don't see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don't know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.
Let's close with music then. You're a longtime musician and composer. You're a collector of obscure and archaic instruments. How does your interest in music and especially pre-modern acoustic music shape your thinking and your life as well?
Well, the original way I got into it is very personal. It's just that my mother died when I was young, and she was a musician. My connection to her. I got involved in more and more unusual music because I didn't want that connection to become something that was too static. It had to be constantly changing or it would become a cliché. So that's how I got into it.
But as far as the connection to computers, the thing to me is that I've always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfaces are such profoundly better user interfaces than anything we've done with a digital computer. They have better acuity. They create more opportunities for virtuosity. They work with the human body more profoundly, the nervous system. I mean good musical instruments. And I've just been intrigued by them. It made me realize that just because something is the latest, newest thing that seems like the cleverest thing we can do at the moment doesn't make it better.
So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.
Did your life as a musician show you some of the things that you ended up excavating in "Gadget" and the new book?
Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that's now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.
I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn't actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.
Garry Gutting's review of "How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life"
Under capitalism, businesses sell us goods and service that are essential for living well, and most of us get the money to buy these things by working for businesses or, less often, profiting from investments in them. We need capitalism because no other economic system can produce sufficient goods to meet our essential material needs such as food, shelter, clothes, and medical care. But these goods are not enough. A good life mainly depends on intangibles such as love, friendship, beauty, and virtue—things capitalism cannot produce and money cannot buy. Given a sufficient minimum of material goods, the good life does not depend on the world of commerce.
Nonetheless, for most of us, work takes up the bulk of our time and energy, leaving comparatively little for living a good life. Some see their work itself as a pursuit of beauty, truth, or virtue. But most find what they do valuable primarily as a means of earning money to buy material necessities. And capitalist society itself insists that a good life requires much more than a minimum of material goods. A truly good life, it urges, requires fine food, a large and well-furnished home, stylish clothing, and a steady diet of diverting and enriching experiences derived from sports, culture, and travel—all of which are expensive.
We all agree that there's a limit beyond which more material goods would make little difference to the goodness of our lives. But almost all of us think we are considerably below that limit. In general, then, capitalism works against the good life from two directions. It requires us to engage in work that makes little contribution to our living well, beyond supplying our material necessities, and it urges us to believe, falsely, that a good life is mainly a matter of accumulating material possessions. The Skidelskys sum it up this way: "The irony is that…now that we have achieved abundance [in advanced capitalist countries], the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly."
Their view of capitalism is critical rather than revolutionary. They decry its tendency to sacrifice the human good to the goods of the market, but think we can curb this tendency and harness capitalism's productive power for our pursuit of the good life. For them, the core problem with capitalism is "economic insatiability"—the intrinsic drive for increasing production (and therefore profits) without limit. The limitless demand for more can even lead, as we have recently seen, to economic catastrophe. More important, capitalism is morally deficient because its drivers are the vices of "greed and acquisitiveness," which pile up "goods" that take us away from the good life.
The insatiability of capitalism exploits the corresponding insatiability of individual desires. No matter how much I possess, I find myself desiring more than I have. As I become rich enough to satisfy all my old desires, I develop new ones. Moreover, beyond a certain level of wealth, I begin to desire the best of everything, where the "best" (rare wines, exclusive resorts, the paintings of Old Masters) are in such limited supply that hardly anyone can afford them. And in addition to our spontaneous individual desires, we develop other desires simply because there are things others have that we don't. Capitalism's endless need to sell more and more is met by our need to buy more and more.
five policy rules that can help us to establish antifragility as a principle of our socioeconomic life
By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. If this were so, our institutions would have no self-healing properties and would need someone to run and micromanage them, to protect their safety, because they cannot survive on their own.
By contrast, natural or organic systems are antifragile: They need some dose of disorder in order to develop. Deprive your bones of stress and they become brittle. This denial of the antifragility of living or complex systems is the costliest mistake that we have made in modern times. Stifling natural fluctuations masks real problems, causing the explosions to be both delayed and more intense when they do take place. As with the flammable material accumulating on the forest floor in the absence of forest fires, problems hide in the absence of stressors, and the resulting cumulative harm can take on tragic proportions.
And yet our economic policy makers have often aimed for maximum stability, even for eradicating the business cycle. "No more boom and bust," as voiced by the U.K. Labor leader Gordon Brown, was the policy pursued by Alan Greenspan in order to "smooth" things out, thus micromanaging us into the current chaos. Mr. Greenspan kept trying to iron out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system, which eventually led to monstrous hidden leverage and real-estate bubbles. On this front there is now at least a glimmer of hope, in the U.K. rather than the U.S., alas: Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has advocated the idea that central banks should intervene only when an economy is truly sick and should otherwise defer action.
Promoting antifragility doesn't mean that government institutions should avoid intervention altogether. In fact, a key problem with overzealous intervention is that, by depleting resources, it often results in a failure to intervene in more urgent situations, like natural disasters. So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. In the long run, bailing out people is less harmful to the system than bailing out firms; we should have policies now that minimize the possibility of being forced to bail out firms in the future, with the moral hazard this entails.
Rule 2: Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.
Some businesses and political systems respond to stress better than others. The airline industry is set up in such a way as to make travel safer after every plane crash. A tragedy leads to the thorough examination and elimination of the cause of the problem. The same thing happens in the restaurant industry, where the quality of your next meal depends on the failure rate in the business—what kills some makes others stronger. Without the high failure rate in the restaurant business, you would be eating Soviet-style cafeteria food for your next meal out.
These industries are antifragile: The collective enterprise benefits from the fragility of the individual components, so nothing fails in vain. These businesses have properties similar to evolution in the natural world, with a well-functioning mechanism to benefit from evolutionary pressures, one error at a time.
By contrast, every bank failure weakens the financial system, which in its current form is irremediably fragile: Errors end up becoming large and threatening. A reformed financial system would eliminate this domino effect, allowing no systemic risk from individual failures. A good starting point would be reducing the amount of debt and leverage in the economy and turning to equity financing. A firm with highly leveraged debt has no room for error; it has to be extremely good at predicting future revenues (and black swans). And when one leveraged firm fails to meet its obligations, other borrowers who need to renew their loans suffer as the chastened lenders lose their appetite to extend credit. So debt tends to make failures spread through the system.
A firm with equity financing can survive drops in income, however. Consider the abrupt deflation of the technology bubble during 2000. Because technology firms were relying on equity rather than debt, their failures didn't ripple out into the wider economy. Indeed, their failures helped to strengthen the technology sector.
Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.
Experts in business and government are always talking about economies of scale. They say that increasing the size of projects and institutions brings costs savings. But the "efficient," when too large, isn't so efficient. Size produces visible benefits but also hidden risks; it increases exposure to the probability of large losses. Projects of $100 million seem rational, but they tend to have much higher percentage overruns than projects of, say, $10 million. Great size in itself, when it exceeds a certain threshold, produces fragility and can eradicate all the gains from economies of scale. To see how large things can be fragile, consider the difference between an elephant and a mouse: The former breaks a leg at the slightest fall, while the latter is unharmed by a drop several multiples of its height. This explains why we have so many more mice than elephants.
So we need to distribute decisions and projects across as many units as possible, which reinforces the system by spreading errors across a wider range of sources. In fact, I have argued that government decentralization would help to lower public deficits. A large part of these deficits comes from underestimating the costs of projects, and such underestimates are more severe in large, top-down governments. Compare the success of the bottom-up mechanism of canton-based decision making in Switzerland to the failures of authoritarian regimes in Soviet Russia and Baathist Iraq and Syria.
Rule 4: Trial and error beats academic knowledge.
Things that are antifragile love randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—that they can learn from errors. Tinkering by trial and error has traditionally played a larger role than directed science in Western invention and innovation. Indeed, advances in theoretical science have most often emerged from technological development, which is closely tied to entrepreneurship. Just think of the number of famous college dropouts in the computer industry.
But I don't mean just any version of trial and error. There is a crucial requirement to achieve antifragility: The potential cost of errors needs to remain small; the potential gain should be large. It is the asymmetry between upside and downside that allows antifragile tinkering to benefit from disorder and uncertainty.
Perhaps because of the success of the Manhattan Project and the space program, we greatly overestimate the influence and importance of researchers and academics in technological advancement. These people write books and papers; tinkerers and engineers don't, and are thus less visible. Consider Britain, whose historic rise during the Industrial Revolution came from tinkerers who gave us innovations like iron making, the steam engine and textile manufacturing. The great names of the golden years of English science were hobbyists, not academics: Charles Darwin, Henry Cavendish, William Parsons, the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Britain saw its decline when it switched to the model of bureaucracy-driven science.
America has emulated this earlier model, in the invention of everything from cybernetics to the pricing formulas for derivatives. They were developed by practitioners in trial-and-error mode, drawing continuous feedback from reality. To promote antifragility, we must recognize that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of formal education that a culture supports and its volume of trial-and-error by tinkering. Innovation doesn't require theoretical instruction, what I like to compare to "lecturing birds on how to fly."
Rule 5: Decision makers must have skin in the game.
At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who don't take personal risks. But the idea of incentive in capitalism demands some comparable form of disincentive. In the business world, the solution is simple: Bonuses that go to managers whose firms subsequently fail should be clawed back, and there should be additional financial penalties for those who hide risks under the rug. This has an excellent precedent in the practices of the ancients. The Romans forced engineers to sleep under a bridge once it was completed.
Because our current system is so complex, it lacks elementary clarity: No regulator will know more about the hidden risks of an enterprise than the engineer who can hide exposures to rare events and be unharmed by their consequences. This rule would have saved us from the banking crisis, when bankers who loaded their balance sheets with exposures to small probability events collected bonuses during the quiet years and then transferred the harm to the taxpayer, keeping their own compensation.
In these five rules, I have sketched out only a few of the more obvious policy conclusions that we might draw from a proper appreciation of antifragility. But the significance of antifragility runs deeper. It is not just a useful heuristic for socioeconomic matters but a crucial property of life in general. Things that are antifragile only grow and improve under adversity. This dynamic can be seen not just in economic life but in the evolution of all things, from cuisine, urbanization and legal systems to our own existence as a species on this planet.
We all know that the stressors of exercise are necessary for good health, but people don't translate this insight into other domains of physical and mental well-being. We also benefit, it turns out, from occasional and intermittent hunger, short-term protein deprivation, physical discomfort and exposure to extreme cold or heat. Newspapers discuss post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody seems to account for post-traumatic growth. Walking on smooth surfaces with "comfortable" shoes injures our feet and back musculature: We need variations in terrain.
Modernity has been obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability, but by making ourselves too comfortable and eliminating all volatility from our lives, we do to our bodies and souls what Mr. Greenspan did to the U.S. economy: We make them fragile. We must instead learn to gain from disorder.
Economic Bricolage: We should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.
WSJ review by Matt Ridley of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book "Antifragile".
You don't need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover "heuristics," or rules of thumb, by trial and error. These are then formalized by academics into theorems and taught to new generations of traders, who become slaves to theory, ignore their own common sense and end by blowing up the system. In a neat echo of its own thesis, Mr. Taleb's paper making this point sat unpublished for seven years while academic reviewers tried to alter it to fit their prejudices.
Mr. Taleb, a former trader and expert on probability, tells this story in "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder" to illustrate the point that "we don't put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice." It is a startling insight, which he applies not just to finance but to medicine, science and philosophy. Successful medicine was a "craft built around experience-driven heuristics" that had to fight against entrenched, top-down theorizing from Galen and other wise fools.
Discovery is a trial and error process, what the French molecular biologist François Jacob called bricolage. From the textile machinery of the industrial revolution to the discovery of many pharmaceutical drugs, it was tinkering and evolutionary serendipity we have to thank, not design from first principles. Mr. Taleb systematically demolishes what he cheekily calls the "Soviet-Harvard" notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to—that is to say, that theories of how society works are necessary for society to work. Planning is inherently biased toward delay, complication and inflexibility, which is why companies falter when they get big enough to employ planners.
If trial and error is creative, then we should treat ruined entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers, Mr. Taleb thinks. The reason that restaurants are competitive is that they are constantly failing. A law that bailed out failing restaurants would result in disastrously dull food. The economic parallel hardly needs spelling out.
The author is a self-taught philosopher steeped in the stories and ideas of ancient Greece (a civilization founded, of course, by traders like Mr. Taleb from Lebanon, as Phoenicia is now known). Anti-intellectual books aren't often adorned by sentences like: "I have been trying to bring alive the ideas of Aenesidemus of Knossos, Antiochus of Laodicea, Menodotus of Nicomedia, Herodotus of Tarsus, and of course Sextus Empiricus." So he takes his discovery—that knowledge and progress are bottom-up phenomena—and derives an abstract theory from it: anti-fragility.
Something that is fragile, like a glass, can survive small shocks but not big ones. Something that is robust, like a rock, can survive both. But robust is only half way along the spectrum. There are things that are anti-fragile, meaning they actually improve when shocked, they feed on volatility. The restaurant sector is such a beast. So is the economy as a whole: It is precisely because of Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" that it innovates, progresses and becomes resilient. The policy implications are clear: Bailouts risk making the economy more fragile.
Biological evolution, too, is anti-fragile. The death of unfit individuals is what causes a species to adapt and improve. The body is anti-fragile: Without stress it weakens. To build muscles, you must push them to the point of failure. Though he has no truck with homeopathy, Mr. Taleb is intrigued by hormesis, an old idea, now enjoying a revival, that a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial.
It follows that, in Mr. Taleb's world, the greatest sin is to be a "fragilista," somebody who encourages an institution to become fragile. This word is defined in the book's glossary thus: "somebody who causes fragility because he thinks he understands what's going on. See Iatrogenics." The latter term is from medicine, meaning when doctors do more harm than good, for example, by bleeding the patient in the past, or by putting ice on swellings today.
The Federal Reserve, in Mr. Taleb's view, is an iatrogenic institution run by fragilistas doing more harm than good by trying to root out randomness. This might seem a cheap shot were it not for Mr. Taleb's track record in spotting some of the ingredients of the recent financial crisis. In particular, after 2003, he took a lot of criticism because "I kept telling everybody who would listen to me, including random taxi drivers (well almost), that the company Fannie Mae FNMA 0.00% was sitting on a 'barrel of dynamite.'" He has little mercy for the Keynesian economist Joseph Stiglitz and the Orszag brothers, Peter and Jonathan, economic consiglieres to Democratic administrations, who insisted around the same time that the probability of default in the government-sponsored enterprises was "so small that it is difficult to detect."
As this illustrates, Mr. Taleb doesn't suffer fools, a category in which he includes virtually the entire profession of economics and many other academics. Consider the definition of "touristification," from his glossary: "the attempt to suck randomness out of life. Applies to soccer moms, Washington civil servants, strategic planners, social engineers, 'nudge' manipulators, etc." The opposite, strategy, which he approves, is to embrace "optionality"—like a traveler without an itinerary feeding off randomness by grabbing opportunities as they arise. The author's heroes, from Thales of Miletus, the first Western philosopher, to his intuitive street-wise trader friend Fat Tony, are people who find out how to do things empirically.
There are a few places in the book where I thought Mr. Taleb went wrong—for instance, he seems to underplay the degree to which unnatural medicine, while occasionally doing harm, also greatly prolongs healthy life; and he doesn't notice that climate models deserve as much of his scorn as economic ones. Sometimes he is led astray by his contrarianism, but then that is his point: If you don't take risks, you don't get results.
This is a bold, entertaining, clever book, richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides. Does it achieve its goal, or does it cram and twist the world on to a Procrustean bed of one theory, thereby somewhat contradicting its own empirical and pragmatic outlook? I am not sure. I will have to read it again. And again.
Complexity of Crisis Control
Catching a frisbee is difficult. Doing so successfully requires the catcher to weigh a complex array of physical and atmospheric factors, among them wind speed and frisbee rotation. Were a physicist to write down frisbee-catching as an optimal control problem, they would need to understand and apply Newton's Law of Gravity.
Yet despite this complexity, catching a frisbee is remarkably common. Casual empiricism reveals that it is not an activity only undertaken by those with a Doctorate in physics. It is a task that an average dog can master. Indeed some, such as border collies, are better at frisbee-catching than humans.
So what is the secret of the dog's success? The answer, as in many other areas of complex decision-making, is simple. Or rather, it is to keep it simple. For studies have shown that the frisbee-catching dog follows the simplest of rules of thumb: run at a speed so that the angle of gaze to the frisbee remains roughly constant. Humans follow an identical rule of thumb.
Catching a crisis, like catching a frisbee, is difficult. Doing so requires the regulator to weigh a complex array of financial and psychological factors, among them innovation and risk appetite. Were an economist to write down crisis-catching as an optimal control problem, they would probably have to ask a physicist for help.
Yet despite this complexity, efforts to catch the crisis frisbee have continued to escalate. Casual empiricism reveals an ever-growing number of regulators, some with a Doctorate in physics. Ever-larger litters have not, however, obviously improved watchdogs' frisbee-catching abilities. No regulator had the foresight to predict the financial crisis, although some have since exhibited supernatural powers of hindsight.
So what is the secret of the watchdogs' failure? The answer is simple. Or rather, it is complexity. For what this paper explores is why the type of complex regulation developed over recent decades might not just be costly and cumbersome but sub-optimal for crisis control. In financial regulation, less may be more.
In Praise of Leisure
let us imagine that everyone has enough to lead a good life. What is the good life? And what is it not? And what changes in our moral and economic system are needed to realize it? Such questions are seldom asked, because they do not fall neatly into any of the disciplinary boxes that make up modern intellectual life. Philosophers construct systems of perfect justice, unmindful of the messiness of empirical reality. Economists ask how best to satisfy subjective wants, whatever those may be. We need to bring together insights from both disciplines—economics for the sake of its practical influence, philosophy for the sake of its ethical imagination. It's time to revive the old idea of economics as a moral science, a science of human beings in communities, not of interacting robots.
Let's begin by pondering the reasons for the failure of Keynes's prophecy. Why, despite the surprising accuracy of his growth forecasts, are most of us, almost 100 years on, still working about as hard as we were when he wrote his futuristic essay? The answer is that a free-market economy both gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work and inflames our innate tendency toward competitive, status-driven consumption. Keynes was well aware of the evils of capitalism but assumed that they would wither away once their work of wealth creation was done. He did not foresee that they might become permanently entrenched, obscuring the very ideal they were initially intended to serve.
Keynes was not alone in thinking that motives bad in themselves might nonetheless be useful. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse—even Adam Smith in bolder moments—all granted such motives a positive role as an agent of historical progress. In the language of myth, Western civilization has made its peace with the Devil, in return for which it has been granted hitherto unimaginable resources of knowledge, power, and pleasure. This is, of course, the grand theme of the Faust legend, immortalized by Goethe.
The irony, however, is that now that we have at last achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly. The Devil, it seems, has claimed his reward. Can we evade this fate? Perhaps, but only if we can retrieve from centuries of neglect and distortion the idea of a good life, a life sufficient unto itself.
Why Millennials Want To Be Rich
A new study on different generations' priorities does not make Millenials look good. The report from the American Psychological Association [PDF] claims we are selfish, fame-seeking, politically disengaged, anddon't give a shit about the environment. We also want to be rich. A stunning 75 percent of Millennials said that being wealthy was very important to them, compared to 45 percent of baby boomers and 70 percent of Generation X.
Contrary to middle-aged pundits' rants, Millennials are not inherently more selfish or materialistic than previous generations. It's just that we are seeing the middle class vanish before our eyes. Even before the recession, we heard the message loud and clear: If you don't want to be poor, you have to be rich.


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text: The band Fun. and designer Rachel Antonoff have joined forces to create The Ally Coalition (TAC) with the purpose of inspiring people, in particular their peers in the music, fashion and entertainment industry, to take action in the fight for LGBTQ equality. TAC believes that it is the responsibility of allies to support LGBTQ causes and fight against discrimination through education, awareness and advocacy.


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Whether it's a small construction project or large one as well as construction projects, our work force have the necessary resources, essential, technical, expertise and devoted commitment to undertake large and sophisticated takes and projects.
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Pixar Advertising and digital printing company established on January, 2010 by high qualified Afghan expertise, whose aim is to provide superior print, design and media solutions, together with unparalleled customer services.
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Simal Group is the fastest growing cooperate house in Islamic republic of Afghanistan. In the new ere of progress and growth of Afghanistan, Simal Group comes forward to lead the match of progress and prosperity.
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Roz Afghan News are one of the famous news agencies in Afghanistan. It broadcasts political, social, economical, entertainment and sports news from all over the world.
Web Designwww.burjghazanfar.com
Ghazanfar Tower is designed to keep your overheads to a minimum while supporting your company and helping it to grow. The size of your business is irrelevant, as flexibility is our benchmark and we are proud of our success in providing a base in Mazar-i-sharif for international, national and local businesses. This business center will provide you all the facilities that will meets the needs of your business.
We play an important part in the development and success of all the businesses that have chosen their serviced office at Ghazanfar Tower. Our commitment is to assist you in the smooth and successful operation of your business, free of staff or property problems, leaving you to take the money you would have invested into facilities, people and infrastructure and invest that money in other areas.
Web Designwww.sam-corps.com
SAM Corps is one of the leading electrics supplier and engineering firms in Afghanistan. With offices in Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat and Mazar cities, SAM Corps maintains a market focus on all commercial, industrial, and institutional market segments throughout Afghanistan. As an electrics supplier and engineering contractor, SAM Corps has maintained a long-term reputation for unmatched quality and excellence in supply, design, construction, and project management since 1981.
Over the past 30 years, SAM Corps has especially excelled in the area of design-build services, fast becoming a premiere specialty contractor known for, conceptual pricing expertise, quality supplies, and excellence in fast-track, design-build delivery methods.
SAM Corps also maintains a constant supply service and maintenance department, specifically organized for small, competitive tenant improvements and responsive emergency service needs on all types of commercial and industrial applications.
Web Designwww.wzcc-const.com
Wazir Zoi Construction & Road Making Company is established in the year of 2007, with main aims of participating in the construction process of war sacked Afghanistan. With its main two office in Kabul & sub offices in Khost, Logar & Paktika provinces of Afghanistan.
The basic target of the company, construction Afghanistan with latest machineries, is the only code of WZCC; our goal is to rehabilitate Afghanistan.
The order to be the pioneers in construction area, WZCC has recruited high motivated engineers and operator staff from foreign countries and has imported the latest machineries from top international companies.
Web Designwww.fzn.af
Farkhunda Zahra Naderi is one of the successful members of Afghanistan Parliament and Afghan Women activist in the country.
Web Designwww.afghanismailia.com
The official online publication of Afghanistan Ismailis where they publish their reports and news and information about Islam philosophers, scholars and authors.
Web Designwww.chadari.af
Chadari is an organization which is established and run by Farkhunda Zahra Naderi, one of the successful MP and women rights activist in Afghanistan.
Web Designwww.icaaf.comInsurance Corporation of Afghanistan (ICA) was established in 2007 in response to the demand for an officially licensed and capitalised private multi-line insurance company, meeting the insurance needs of companies operating in this country. ICA offers a comprehensive range of cost-effective commercial insurance solutions, providing business risk protection for multi-national and Afghan companies in all key industry sectors. ICA has reinsurance backing using only major 'A' security rated International re-insurance markets including Lloyd's of London, providing access to global expertise and superior claims capacity. We have provided clients with in excess of US$ 16bn insurance coverage to date. Our highly experienced team of international insurance professionals, along with qualified Afghan graduates, is available 6 days a week to discuss and give advice concerning the protection of business risks in Afghanistan, as well as throughout the South Asia region.
Web Designwww.khaama.com
Khaama Press is one of the largest Online News Portal launched in October 2010. With a vision to spread awareness amongst the online readers about the political, social, cultural and economical developments in Afghanistan and across the globe, the website has currently close to 2000 visitors daily and expected to reach the figure of 5000 per day by the end of this quarter.
Khaama Press promises to provide its readers cent percent authenticated and latest news from across the world based on the facts, evidences and truths!
Web Designwww.muqamlogistics.com/
Muqam Logistics is one of the successful logistic companies in the country. This company's major projects are US Governments logistics and procurement services.


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Creative Hut Institute of Photography
Creative Hut Gurukulam (Institute) introduces to you all the unique way of learning in an unlearning and or learning environment to express & explore your creativity with the finest and creative medium of self-expression through Media and Communication. An Institute where you are taught to find a world further than books and analyse your skills to find your own path to live and fulfil your dreams. Creative Hut situated in the natural picturesque rural area is a calm relevant place with River flowing along its one side and hillock on the other side. It is far away from the busy crowded area with learning environment that supports one to act artistically in eco- friendly surrounding with today's modern technology. Here you learn along with your mentor taking forward the tradition and new modern technicalities all together in a Gurukul way of learning understanding the purest relation between learners and their guru.
An inherent passion for the media and communication fields with a wide range of Photography, Videography and specialization courses like Fashion photography, Wildlife Photography, Product Photography, Wedding Photography, Architecture Photography, Event Photography, Micro Photography, Interior Photography, Event Videography, Wedding Videography etc... coupled with professional training can make it a lucrative profession. It can be an interesting proposition for a creative individual interested in aesthetics, creativity and technical expertise and aspired to create magic with their thoughts, concepts and cameras. Creative Hut Gurukulam also conducts Basic and advance Photography workshops and crash courses


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Part 3 of our guest series on the remarkable transformation of a hospital power plant in St. Louis. Last week detailed how the hospital complex modernized over the first half of the 20th century; today's post explores how the second half brought closure and neglect. Read the series to date.
The Power Plant's windows were missing by 1994.
The closure of Homer G. Phillips Hospital in 1979, along with gradual cutbacks in Saint Louis and Washington University medical student interns, increased the burden on City Hospital. Mayor Vincent C. Schoemehl, Jr. set up an Acute Care Task Force to study the hospital in 1983, strongly hinting that he wanted to see the hospital closed. Frustrated, the task force soon voted themselves out of existence.
That same year, Schoemehl told the Saint Louis Globe-Democrat, "We are shooting for a November 1st [1983] close date. City Hospital is finally so far out of repair that it cannot continue to operate." But others, especially African-American members of the board of aldermen, balked at the idea of shutting down the city's last public hospital.... Read More →
The National Trust for Historic Preservation works to save America's historic places. Join us today to help protect the places that matter to you.
Michael R. Allen is the Director of the Preservation Research Office in St. Louis, which he founded in 2009. Recent activities include learning video editing and naming his cat after Oscar Niemeyer.


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Posted: 5/7/2013 4:24 PM
Posted: 5/7/2013 4:29 PM
MrPadre19 wrote: Jaguars sign 10 year veteran CB Marcus Trufant.Thought I'd start a thread to discuss all the new players and how they look in Camp and the Pre Season.Competitions at positions,etc....Trufant will obviously be in the DB rotation.Veteran to help the youngsters/Nickle package player.Anyone know if he can still handle a 16 game season physically and can he keep up speed wise?Obviously Bradley is as familiar with him as one can be and he wanted him......so a good sign.
Posted: 5/8/2013 1:59 PM
Posted: 5/8/2013 3:59 PM
MrPadre19 wrote: A LOT of youth in that defensive backfield.Even if he's only here for one year it's worth bringing him in.
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800-364-7111, 918-596-7122
110 E 2nd St
Tulsa, OK 74103
Located in the heart of historic downtown Tulsa, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center is the design of Minoru Yamasaki, ... read more...
888-655-2278, 918-592-3382
317 S Trenton Ave
Tulsa, OK 74159
Garden Deva, located just outside downtown Tulsa, is a 3,000 sq ft gallery stocked with creations by artist Lisa ... read more...
9 E Brady
Tulsa, OK 74103
The Tulsa Artists' Coalition (TAC) Gallery is located in Tulsa's downtown Brady Arts District. TAC is a nonprofit ... read more...
Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art
2021 E 71st St S
Tulsa, OK 74136
The Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art educates visitors about the Jewish experience in Oklahoma, the United States, ... read more...
2727 S Rockford Rd
Tulsa, OK 74114
The Philbrook Museum of Art is the premier cultural institution in the city of Tulsa and a statewide leader in the ... read more...
101 E Archer St
Tulsa, OK 74103
Run by the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, the Hardesty Arts Center is an explosion of art and creativity in the ... read more...
1610 S Boulder Ave
Tulsa, OK 74119
Oklahoma's only professional opera company, Tulsa Opera was founded in 1948, and produces three main stage grand operas ... read more...
888-655-2278, 918-596-2700
1400 Gilcrease Museum Rd
Tulsa, OK 74127
The Gilcrease Museum contains one of the world's most comprehensive collections of American Indian and Western art. ... read more...
19 E Brady St
Tulsa, OK 74103
Located in downtown Tulsa's Brady Arts District, the Tulsa Glassblowing School is a fun place to go whether you're ... read more...
1381 Riverside Dr
Tulsa, OK 74127
Boo and hiss and laugh and sing at the Spotlight Theater's presentation of "The Drunkard" and the "Olio." The Drunkard ... read more...
Email: email@example.com


text:
- Sumit Dagar
- Delhi
- India
Interaction Designer, National Institute of Design, India
This conversation is closed.
Should an interface have an emotional connect with a user?
..some fun, when you ride..
..some joy, when you understand..
..some connect, when you fall..
..some excitement, when you explore..
..some life, when you remember..
..some imagination, when you dream..
..some hope, when you loose..
..some charm, when you have a Scooter!
Cant say so, for the ubiquitous interfaces of the day.
As we get more and more advanced, the technology gets smarter and smarter (faster and increasingly interconnected). The face it presents starts to say "I am supersmart, I am trying to adjust to your comprehension level"... and not what it could have said "It's simple! try it! it will be fun!".
We have already being through alienation during industrialization that saw us getting increasingly lonely in a society. Is this the new alienation? Are we getting more and more disconnected with the machines we use everyday?
At some point of time, can we dream of "some charm", in the connect we have with devices we are spending our days with.
May be, may be not? may be worth exploring....
Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.
Jun 22 2011: I feel as though we are edging towards the emotion-eliciting UIs Sumit refers to. If we were to look simply at operating systems through time, human-machine interaction is becoming more and more interconnected and intimate. I, however, disagree with this change. The more we rely on technology to replace humans, the more we will isolate and alienate ourselves from real social interaction. We will be reduced to a society of machines and artificial intelligence, and everything will seem mechanical and predictable. To fully capitalize on emotional responses, a capricious disposition is necessary and machines should not be able to recreate the human unpredictability that makes emotional responses poignant and significant.
It will definitely be 'cool', but I feel as though we don't need machines to recognize, evaluate and analyze human emotion, we have humans for that :P
Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.


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Angels 3, Rangers 0: Mike Trout homered and Garrett Richards worked seven superb innings as visiting Los Angeles posted its eighth win in nine games.All-Star Erick Aybar recorded two hits and an RBI while David Freese also drove in a run for the Angels, who had scored more than five runs in each of their previous 14 victories. Richards (11-2) extended his winning streak to seven games, allowing five hits and walking two while striking out eight, and Kevin Jepsen pitched the eighth before Joe Smith tossed a perfect ninth to preserve the shutout and notch his 13th save.Alex Rios registered two of the six hits by the Rangers, who have lost 20 of their last 23 contests. Nick Tepesch (3-5) pitched well in defeat, yielding three runs and six hits over six innings.Tepesch retired the first 10 batters he faced before Trout lined a 1-0 pitch over the left-center field wall to snap the scoreless tie. The Angels notched two more hits in the fourth before Tepesch settled down, recording seven straight outs before running into trouble in the seventh.Aybar made it 2-0 by plating Albert Pujols with Los Angeles' third consecutive single to open the frame, chasing Tepesch in the process. Neftali Feliz came on and retired Howie Kendrick before Freese delivered an RBI single to increase the lead.GAME NOTEBOOK: Texas LF Jake Smolinski left the game after two innings with a left elbow contusion suffered when he was hit by a pitch in the second. ... The Rangers fell to 9-25 in their last 34 home games. ... Aybar is 11-for-29 (.379) with six RBIs during his seven-game hitting streak.
Recap: Angels 3, Rangers 0
POSTED: 11:59 PM MDT Jul 11, 2014 UPDATED: 11:59 PM MDT Jul 11, 2014
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RGM Italian Plus Painting Knife
These high-quality painting knives are offered at an exceptionally low price. They are manufactured of quality, seamless carbon steel and feature solid brass ferrules and hardwood handles with peg holes. Each blade is tempered and ground by hand to assure consistent flexibility and quality.


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The Alfred T. Brauer Library
CB# 3250, Phillips Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3250
Phone: 919-962-2323
Fax: 919-962-2568
zkamarei at email.unc.edu
M.L.S. Master of Library Science -- Chemical Information Specialist, Graduate
School of Library and Information Science and Chemistry Department,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, December 1983.
B.S. Bachelor
of Science in Physics, minors, Mathematics and Computer
Science, Department of Physics, Indiana University, Bloomington,
Indiana, December 1981.
Work Experience
Brauer Librarian:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Brauer Library contains Computer Science, Math, Operations Research, Physics,
Statistics collections.
Science Information Specialist:
Isfahan University of Technology,
Information Science Lecturer:
Isfahan University, Medical Library School, Isfahan, Iran, 9/98-12/98
Isfahan University, Library School, Summer 1997, Summer 1998
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
School of Information and Library Science , Fall 2000- 2001 ILS 162
Computer/Math Instructor:
Western Dakota Technical Institute,
Physical Sciences Librarian:
University of Notre Dame, Notre
Responsible for Chemistry/Physics, Mathematics libraries.
Chemical Information Specialist:
Library Assistant:
part time, 1/81-8/83.
Professional Membership
Special Libraries
Committee: Physics/Astronomy/Math
Chair of International Relations Committee of PAM 2001-2004
Treasurer of PAM 2004- 2006
Library Association University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Committee: Secretary of Board (2001-2002)
Chair of the Conference Committee (2004-2005)
President Elect (2006-2007)
President (2007-2008)
Edited: An Index to Standard
Interest Profiles in Science and Technology, 3rd edition
(220 pages),
An Index to Standard Interest Profiles in Science and Technology, 5th edition,
(200 pages), Chemical Information Center, Department of Chemistry, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana, August 1991.
Book Review: Artificial Intelligence in
Chemistry: Structure Elucidation and Simulation
of Organic Reactions, By Zdzislaw Hippe, Translated by Andrezej Przyjazny. Studies in
Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Vol. 73. Elsevier:
987460-0. Reviewed in Journal of Chemical Information, Vol. 032, 1992.
Other Notable Contributions
Holding CAS online workshops
at Notre Dame's Chemistry/Physics library 1988-1991.
Creating an
Obstacles to Doing Research in The Third World Countries, paper presented at Library
Association UNC,
Obstacles to Doing Research in Developing Nations, paper presented at Special Libraries Association
Annual Meeting,
Moderator of the session on Information Access in Developing Nations, Special Libraries Association
Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, June 9, 2002.
Updated April 5, 2007


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Low water levels bring delays, boat congestion
Friday, May 23, 2014 — Low water levels may disrupt some activities during and after Eagle Lake's May 24 Memorial Day opener.
After another dry winter, the water level in the lake is extremely low, according to a press release from the Lassen County Sheriff's Office. The only boat launch available at the lake will be the low-water ramp at the south marina. Due to the water level, the ramp at Spalding will not be available.
The press release added that, as a natural lake, Eagle Lake has a number of hazards not mapped or identified by buoys or markers. The release warned some of the areas are hundreds of feet from any shoreline that appear to be out in the middle of the lake. Also, some of the areas the water is extremely shallow and hazards are just below the surface.