Category Archives: The System

The forces of change on the US legislature

The System

As of 2012, the major forces operating on the legislation of the US government are, unscientifically speaking:

  • 60% path dependence
  • 20% regulatory capture
  • 10% marginal progress
  • 9% political posturing

Everything else, I’d guess, is a rounding error that fits in that last 1%.

Path dependence, in short, means that once you decide to do something, it’s difficult to unwind all the decisions that follow that original decision. Once you build a military-industrial complex, farm subsidy program, or medical program for the elderly, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop doing those things. You’re invested.

Regulatory capture is a phenomenon where a regulated industry, say telecom, becomes sufficiently cozy with the institutions regulating them that they can manipulate the regulators to ease the boundaries they must operate within, or even impose rules making it difficult for new competitors to enter the industry. To some extent, the prisoners run the asylum. Barring an extremely jarring event, like a financial emergency, the regulated can grow their profit margins, comfortable knowing that competitors are increasingly unlikely. More often, regulatory capture is about protecting the golden egg. Path dependence, in the form of subsidies and existing contracts, often goes hand-in-hand with regulatory capture.

Marginal progress is exactly what politicians are not rewarded for. They are rewarded for having strong ties to those with strong ties, for saying the right things, and staying out of the public eye. Politicians don’t enhance their career by doing what they tell their voters they seek to do.

Political posturing is what legislators are rewarded for. If they fail to accomplish what they’ve told voters they will do, they can always blameshift it away: not enough political will, distasteful political advesaries, more pressing problems elsewhere.

This seems cynical, but I’ve got my reasons:

  • I find it helps to understand the forces at play before you try to figure out what to invest optimism in.
  • Understanding a system is the first step towards making meaningful changes within it.

Actually, that’s a pretty good way to summarize my approach to understanding the systems of the world: understand the forces, learn the mechanisms, figure out how this system is interconnected to the other systems. The interconnections are the fun parts!

How to make a CIA spy, and other anecdotes

Curated, The System

And the hilariously incompetent, such as the OSS operative whose cover was so far blown that when he dropped into his favorite restaurant, the band played “Boo! Boo! I’m a Spy.”

Interesting, new-to-me tidbits on what goes into making CIA spies, what they actually do in the field, and how the practitioners of spy craft have changed over the years. The bad news: spies recruitment doesn’t exactly work like in Spies Like Us. The good news: the CIA and its spying is closer to “just as bad/inept as you’d think” than “as diabolical as a James Bond villain”.

The Year In 4 Charts: Planet Money does an excellent job collecting four economic charts (themselves chosen from three collections of best-of charts). I’m a dilettante as far as economics and economics go, but these charts do a great job of rolling up what seemed to have been the essential stories of the year.

Spendingandrevenues custom

A picture can nullify a thousand talking points, no?

Organizing and decoding problems

Code, The System,

My favorite sort of problem involves the interactions between individuals, groups of people, and mechanical rules generated by individuals and groups. Speculating on how the rules were shaped by the experiences of the individuals and groups is a fun game to play when presented with a curious set of circumstances. Conversely, my least favorite problems are those generated by the institutional brain damage of certain kinds of groups. Software and systems shaped by regulations and the particulars of monetary exchange are tedious at best.

I find it quite amusing when answers aren’t “clean” and technological systems aren’t the best solution. Often, no amount of analysis and brilliant coding can make an improvement. What is needed is to understand what people do, why they do it, and persuade them to do otherwise.

This brings me to economics, specifically behavioral economics. If you take away all the math, economics is largely about how people behave in aggregate. It’s a useful tool in understanding how to work with systems that involve people. But there’s more to economics than explaining how people interact in markets.

Russ Roberts, in the process of explaining how economics is not useful as a mechanism for answering questions like “did the stimulus work?” or “when will the housing market recover?”, gets to what really interests me about economics and finance:

“Is economics a science because it is like Darwinian biology? Darwinian biology is very different from the physical sciences. Like economics it is a very useful way to organize your thinking about complex phenomena. But it is not a predictive or very precise science or whatever you want to call it.”

The crux of the biscuit, for me, is right in the middle. Economics is a useful way to organize an intricate and interconnected problem and figure out how to reason about it. In casually studying economics and finance over the couple years, I’ve come to form a better mental model about how the world works.

Its possible that this mental modeling is what I do when I’m coding. I’m poking how some code works, looking at its inner workings, trying to understand how it interacts with the code around it. I sift through revision logs to see how it got to where it is today, talk to others on the team about the code and why it ended up one way and not another. I’m organizing and modeling the code in my head, building up a model that describes .

Lately, I’ve been describing my work as tinkering with lines of code until numbers appear on the screen in the right order. This is invariably greeted with a comforting-to-me response like “I could never do that”. But I really enjoy this. I’m not just debugging my code; I’m sharpening the way the program is organized in my head. Once I’ve got my head around it, I decode that organization into words, code, drawings, etc.

With programs, there is some system of rules, forces, and interactions which describe how the code works or doesn’t. Economics, too, describes a system of rules, forces, and interactions that predicts how a puzzle of human beings operate. Organizing and decoding these technical and social puzzles is great fun.

Clips from unfinished pieces

Code, Erudition, Expanded ideas, The System,

On the crux of America’s challenges:

Part of the American experiment is answering the question, “how can we best take advantage of abundance?” Beginning with manifest destiny and evident in the machinations of Wall Street, one of the story lines of America is the quest to make sure resources of all kind are abundant and generating wealth. But we’re arguably at a pivot point. Our money and energy don’t go as far as they used to.

How do we make the transition from resource abundance to resource scarcity?

On helping people troubleshoot the Gowalla API:

While this level of self-documentation is quite helpful, sometimes people have questions on the developer list. For this, I’ve found that asking people to show me whatever it is they’re trying to do using curl is invaluable. It’s a win-win situation. Often, dropping down to a lower-level tool like curl helps to focus your thinking and makes silly error obvious. If it doesn’t become obvious to the API developer, they mail the list with the command they think should work. At that point its either obvious to me and I tell them what to change, or I have a nice, isolated test case from which I can easily try to reproduce their problem.

Who gets screwed when a borrower declares bankrupcty?

Is it possible that bankruptcy-declaring-borrowers are screwing lenders in aggregate? I find it really hard to believe that the banking industry, with its legion of lobbyists and regulatory capture, that any group of uncoordinated individuals could screw the banks.

On the other hand, there was lots of screwing on the part of the banks that led to the financial crisis. Whether it was predatory lending, relying on moral hazard to double down on terrible bets, or asinine compensation structures, the financial industry did something very human. They violated social norms. Except, corporations of this size don’t have social norms. They have only market incentives; when the executives, board members, and majority shareholders look at the books, the numbers devoted to “doing the right thing” are probably a rounding error.

On tail recursion and compilers:

Fact of life: modern processors don’t execute your code in the order the compiler spits it out.

If your code has, for instance, two adds followed by an if statement, it’s pretty likely that second add is going to be executed concurrently or after the conditional. In the world of computer architecture, they call this out-of-order execution, and it’s just another service your hard working processor offers to make sure your code runs faster than you ever intended it to.

On shorter cycles of production and the need to get past perfectionism:

Our modes of production are causing us to change how we produce. More and more mediums, be it journalism or software, are produced on shorter timelines. This is leading us to optimize production such that we can bang the content or code that matters into templates that mostly work, but have a tolerance for the rough edges where things don’t work.

On Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union speech that preceeded the health care debate:

Just for grins, I went and read the GOP response to the State of the Union. While they had some vague counterpoints policy-wise, it read mostly as subtle and useless jabs combined with carefully-constructed language to console their base. The GOP is a cynical, gutless organization.

On refactoring and deleting code:

People often say that they would miss having a refactoring browser in languages like Ruby, JavaScript, or anything that is reasonably dynamic. My glib response to this sort of comment is invariably “well, the best refactoring I know is to select the code to modify, hit delete, and start over.” Let’s take that apart.

I’ve observed that, despite our best intentions, we are often loathe to change code that we suspect is working, or that we suspect we don’t know why it’s there. And so, like the planet on which we live, applications accrete into Katamari balls of overly-coupled code that is bound only by locality. Cutting this Gordian knot is often the first step in reclaiming a project.

Deleting code is the knife with which we can attack this problem. Many will acknowledge the goodness of deleting code; it is, quite nearly, a virtue unto itself. I’ve observed that some of the best developers I know are always on the lookout for ways they can obviate code. So, by way of a strawman, I hope you see that I’m quite correct in this regard.

Warning: politics

Expanded ideas, The System

Embedded within the migraine that is American politics are some very interesting ideas. Economics, markets, ethics, freedom, equality, education, transportation, and security are all intriguing topics. Recently, I figured out that the headache comes not from people or trying to make the ideas work, but in politics. Getting a majority of the people to agree on anything is a giant pain of coordination. When you throw in fearmongering, power struggles, critically wounded media, and the fact most people would rather not think deeply about any of this you end up with the major downer that we face today.

All that said, here are some pithy one-liners about politics:

* If I were part of the Democratic leadership, I’d be wondering how you take the high road in a race to the bottom. And win.

* If I were a Republican, I’d be wondering how to dig myself out of this giant hole I made by winning a race to the bottom.

* If I were a libertarian, I’d be wondering how to convince people that the Tea Party is different from what I believe in.

* If I were a leader of the Tea Party, I’d be wondering what I’m going to do when someone who claims to be a part of the Tea Party blows up a building or goes nuts with an assault rifle.

* If I were a politician, I’d wonder how much I have to compromise my values and what I really wanted to accomplish but still get enough votes to keep my job.

* If I were skeptical of climate change due to human activity, I’d be wondering how I’m going to find a spaceship, because this line of reasoning leads to the conclusion that the Earth is about to become very inhospitable.

* If I were a nihilist, I’d wonder…nothing.

There, have I offended everyone?

On American political insanity

Curated, The System

Still crazy after all these years:

Politicians should tone down the rhetoric. Protesters should read some history before making Hitler comparisons. Talk-show hosts should stop pretending that paranoid nitwits are asking reasonable questions.

The Economist does well to explain the insanity that is propagated by American political media. Reading articles like this help me stay sane. Also: ignoring media with deadlines shorter than a week, and consuming as much constructive satire as possible.

Free Parking Is Not Free

Curated, The System

Free Parking Isn’t Free. Turns out those parking lots, while sometimes handy, are actually pretty gnarly, if your goal is to build a nice place to live:

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, as automobile use became prolific in the United States, parking became a problem, congesting streets and overflowing into neighbors' lots. In response, most municipalities instituted off-street parking minimums requiring developers to provide all the parking that the residences or shops would need on-site. This seemingly sensible notion has created a cascade of problems. It encourages sprawl by spreading buildings apart to make room for more parking (requirements usually demand more area for parking than the building it supports). It also weakens urban design, as urban buildings are torn down to make room for desolate surface lots, and hulking parking garages sprouted in downtown areas. It discourages revitalization of existing historic buildings, since developers have trouble meeting modern parking requirements in neighborhoods that were built before auto dominance. And the requirements drive up the cost of development: parking spaces can cost between $10,000 and $50,000 – typically more than the cost of the car that occupies it. High parking requirements can raise the price of homes and apartments by $50,000 to $100,000, a serious challenge to affordability.

When I have more money that I know what to do with, I’m going to start buying up parking lots and turning them into parks. It’ll be my little way of sticking it to people who drive over-large cars.