Category: General Thoughts

We are always trying to measure things and make comparisons.  Our measurements should be accurate but more important is that they are useful.  Sometimes we study things for the fun of it, but that is a luxury.   For practical professional business we should not bother to do research unless we can and are willing to use the resulting information to change our behaviors.

It is often true that large organizations do research that they don’t use. Sometimes it is because what it measures is just too big or impossible to influence.  We often prefer to be involved with the big things rather than those we can really do something about. Beyond that, something consultants would prefer not become generally accepted is that Some of the most useful research is really simple and often free.

The Economist publishes a “Big Mac Index”.     The idea is that Big Macs are sold similar all over the world and available pretty much worldwide.    It is not scientific but it is useful.  You can guess about how much it will cost you to visit the city and how much local currencies are overvalued or undervalued in relation to the U.S.

Now they have a variation. Instead of the cost, it shows how many minutes an average worker has to work to afford the big Mac in his city. It turns some of the relationships around.   America is the cheapest in terms of time spent to earn the Big Mac because Americans are well paid in relation to what they buy.  It takes an average American just over ten minutes to earn enough to buy a Big Mac.  Interestingly, Tokyo is second cheapest.  Everybody knows that things are really expensive in Japan, but the Japanese make a lot of money and Big Macs are relatively cheap.   

Take a look at the article.   You get a different idea when you just look at how much the Big Mac costs.  See the article about that here.

The whole idea of the Big Mac Index is based on purchasing power parity.   For those unfamiliar with the concept, it measures how much you can actually buy with a particular currency.    Supposedly, you should be able to buy the same things in each currency with the equivalent amount in another.   If 1 Euro = 1.40 dollars, in theory you should be able to buy $1.40 worth of stuff for one Euro.  In fact you cannot, which indicates that the Euro is overvalued compared to the dollar.    That is why it is expensive to travel in Europe and it explains why the Brits can usually save money (when you consider hotels, food etc) flying to Disney World in Orlando instead of crossing the much shorter distance to go to Euro Disney.

We created a “Banana Index” in Iraq, inspired by the Big Mac Index.  It was meant as a measure of security and progress rather than currency values, but it also had the virtues of being simple, inexpensive and useful.   I wrote a post about that and other forms of measurement we used.  

A famous Bollywood actor, a Mr. Khan, was stopped at an American airport for that extra search.   He claims it is because he has a Muslim name.   Read this absurd article and look at some of the comments.   If it doesn’t annoy you, you might indeed be deluded yourself.

Khan and I have some things in common.  I got that extra search at airports several times, so did Mariza and Espen (when he was only 12).  If airports are profiling, I am not sure why I come up so often.  Maybe it is my Midwestern accent or my blue eyes.  I suspect it is my baldness.  Bald men suffer terrible discrimination. I still cannot explain Espen or Mariza, however.

This whole profiling thing at airports is BS.  Airport personnel are extraordinarily careful NOT to do it.  In fact, they go too far, IMO, searching grandmothers in wheelchairs at the same rate they search healthy young men.  Yes, granny COULD be a bad one.  But you have to go with the probabilities. 

Speaking of probabilities, nobody has ever been able to show a statistical probability of being searched at an airport  based solely on race or ethnicity.  There are lots of suppositions and innuendo but no facts.  Of course, there are other factors that sometimes correlate, but as we all learn in Statistics 101, correlation is not causality.   In my case I think I was “profiled” because I traveled several times to particular areas of the world and I was often traveling on one-way tickets.   These things are uncommon enough to raise a little suspicion.  But who knows?

It is more likely that simple random chance is the cause.  Random chance will NOT spread out evenly.  In fact, if you find perfectly even results, you can be sure that random chance is NOT involved.  It is counter intuitive but true. 

If airport security stops me, two Irish students, a couple from Milwaukee returning from Polish-fest and Khan, who do you think is being “profiled”.  If you answered “none of the above” you are correct.   But will any journalists reporting on this know or care?   Indeed, it will look wrong.   But sometimes we have to accept looking wrong when doing the right thing. 

Consider the amusing case of Bob Dylan.  He evidently is a complete unknown to many in the younger generation and somebody called the cops because he seemed suspicious as he walked around a residential neighborhood.  Was he profiled? I suppose he was based on his behavior.   The reports didn’t mention any other sort of profiling because it wouldn’t make sense, so we just pass it off.  It doesn’t make any more sense to claim profiling at the airport.

We are not energetic  enough in defending ourselves against these accusations. There, IMO, are three big reasons.   Most serious is that we don’t want to “look wrong” or seem intolerant, so we accept a hypersensitivity to perceived slights as natural.  We preemptively apologize and feel guilty for the operation of random chance.

The second is related to privacy rules. Government offices often CANNOT defend themselves because their accusers have privacy rights. I remember the frustration of trying to explain denied visa cases.  As a press attaché I would get calls from journalists saying that someone had been treated unfairly at the Embassy and what was my comment.  Even if I knew the particular circumstance, the person was lying or there was a really good reason why he/she didn’t get a visa, all I could do was quote the general rules.  His privacy rights protected his dishonesty and our “no comment” was seen as an admission of guilt.  

But the biggest reason we don’t properly defend ourselves is a simple misunderstanding of random chance coupled with a human tendency at infer patterns even where they don’t exist.  Kids play the game of looking for faces or animal figures in clouds.  Seaching for patterns is hardwired into our thinking. If I randomly choose ten people, each will come up with a reason – good or bad – why he/she was “singled out.”   And he/she will believe it, but it won’t be true.   

The “shit happens” argument is often valid, but never sounds very convincing. The fictional pattern is usually more interesting.  More nefarious in our litigious society if you can impose a pattern, you might be able to hit the jackpot with some kind of payout. 

Profiling makes for a good story. It sells newspapers and books. It provides publicity for upcoming movies.   It allows people to at once pose as victims and vindicators as they “stick it to the man.”   Sometimes it is even true, but more often there are better but boring explanations.

Bigotry and Racism

As long as I am ranting about these things, let me just give another example. This is from a story in the NYT.  I have put in a blank space to give you a chance to picture the kind of person who would make such a comment.  Tell me if you think that is racist before you look at the article.  If you heard a neighbor disparaging an ethnic or national group in those terms, what would you call it? Would such a blanket condemnation of a whole group ever be justified?  

“You should know that we hate all ____. From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.”

I got a taste of direct democracy when we lived in New Hampshire. Our little community still used septic tanks, which required regular maintenance and were leaking sewage into local waterways.  It made sense to connect them up to a larger municipal line.  After about five years, the change would pay for itself and after that it would yield consistent cost savings. 

The problem was the five-year payoff.  Some of the older or more mobile residents figured that they would not be around long enough to reap the benefits, which were far in the future but knew that they would be stuck with the upfront costs of the investments today.   So you get the picture right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.  Old Mr. Parker, wearing his simple red plaid shirt, stands up in the town hall meeting to oppose the plan.  Nobody wants to be rude to the old guy and – besides – he is right.  Very likely HIS costs will outweigh HIS benefits.  

The fact is that reaching consensus on many hot issues is almost impossible. That is why they are hot issues.  The frustrating part is that everybody is right from his own perspective. There are no villains. People have figured it out right.

We see this in all large scale reforms and many small ones.   The most recent big examples were the aborted attempts to reform Social Security a few years ago and the probably truncated health care proposals we see today. The dynamics of the situations and even many of the participants (many now opposing health care reform opposed SS reform) are the same.  In both cases, opponents had correctly figured out that the changes would probably leave them net losers. Everybody saw the need to reform in general but everyone could also find places they would suffer in the details of any real world proposal. 

We don’t think rationally about gains and losses.  A loss generally causes a lot more pain than the pleasure we get from a similar gain.  That is why most people would act quicker to avoid the loss of $100 than they would to take advantage of the opportunity to gain it.   From the accounting standpoint, the two are identical. In both cases the subject has $100 less than they would have.  But it sure doesn’t seem the same.   Researchers have consistently shown this happens even in very serious situations and even the semantics makes a difference. People are much more likely to accept the need for an operation that has a 95% success rate than they are one that has 5% failure.   This aspect of human nature plays into every debate about political changes.  It is always powerful and it is always irrational.

Frankly I don’t think it is possible to make sweeping changes that are at the same time effective and popular, which is why Social Security reform failed and why health care will probably not achieve its objectives. Unfortunately, I think the same goes for climate change. Current benefits must be perceived to be significantly higher than costs, especially costs in the future or the logical choice is stand pat.   It might also make sense just to be caution. 

When you think about it, most change is potentially harmful. I can think of very few changes that would make me immediately much healthier, for example, but lots of things could happen to make me worse off.

That is why I think you have to go with incremental, imperfect and differential change.  Change a few key things at a time and see how they evolve.   It is a kind of iterative change where you learn from each step and then incorporate the learning into your next move. It takes a longer time and it is not as exciting.  Probably most problematic is that it is hard for any politician to get credit.  But it tends to work better.

It is really hard to get all the people, or even most of them, to do the right thing all at once.  All serious change starts with a small group of innovators and then spreads more widely. The people – united – will often be shortsighted.  (BTW, you have to chant that like the old student protestors used to)  But they are pretty good at making good individual decisions about what really matters to them and these add up to a lot.  Maybe they are right to resist the big changes.  A variety of ideas is better than one big one.

My New Office

We made the move.  I am in my new office now.  It is smaller than my former office but much better because it has windows that have decent views.   Although construction of the new American Institute of Peace blocks my direct view, over my shoulder is the Memorial Bridge and the Potomac, as you can see in the picture above. 

The building is in a less convenient location than old SA 44, but I figure I will adapt. It has what I need, i.e. natural sunlight, showers & a refrigerator for my Coke Zero.

Below is the construction crane across the street.  Notice the airplane.  This is on the flight path, but we don’t get much noise. 

I have a few odds and ends postings. 

Ponderosa  Pine Smell

NPR had a good article about ponderosa pine.   Listen to it at this link.   I wrote an article a while back about the smell of ponderosa pines, among other things.  I didn’t know it was such an issue.  Everybody agrees that the smell is distinctive.

Chrissy and I are going out the Arizona in November and we can spend some time in the pines in the mountains there.

Primitive Climate Change

The Economist has an article about how early human agriculture set off the first round of human influenced  global warming.   Good thing too.   W/o that shot of CO2 and methane back around 7000 years ago we may have slipped back into the ice age.   I read about this a while back, how early agriculture may have diverted the return to ice age conditions, but there is evidently now even more evidence for it.   

Our early ancestors were small in numbers and primitive in technology, but they could be very active.  Because agriculture was so much less efficient back then, they had to slash and burn a lot of land to support their small bands and all that slashing and burning put lot of greenhouse gas in the air.  Soon after, they took up rice patty farming in some parts of the world, which is a big producer of methane, a more potent gas than CO2.