If You Are Wondering Why We Haven't Reached a Point of Autocatalysis Sufficient to Make Up for All the Entrenched Stupidity, Here's Some New Academic Disciplines Trying to Find the Answer

A long-time friend and colleague valued for many reasons, not the least of which is the expansive range of his scholarly interests, writes:

I often get lost in the soup of new economic titles that try to capture the behavioral side of economics, an area that has languished until recently. Books on neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, economic sociology, game theory, behavioral finance, hedonic psychology, intertemporal choice, and other such juicy domains have proliferated to a point that I cannot keep up with the reviews, let alone read all of the texts.

I received his note several days ago and have been in a funk ever since. If this guy—I mean, he says he’s read 600 books in preparation for finishing his doctoral dissertation—is having that much trouble staying up with today’s explosion of knowledge in fields that any decent “cutting edge”-oriented management theorist should have passing knowledge of, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

But, several days’ funk is enough. Let’s at least get more familiar with some of the more unfamiliar terms in his list:

Hedonic psychology. According to the American Psychological Association’s Observer, this is the study of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, both as they are experienced in the present and as they are remembered later. A key researcher here is Dr. Daniel Kahneman, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. For more on Kahneman and hedonic psychology, go here: "Memory vs. Experience: Happiness is Relative”

Economic sociology. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, defines this field of inquiry as “the sociological analysis of economic phenomena…. Current economic sociology focuses particularly on the social consequences of economic exchanges, the social meanings they involve and the social interactions they facilitate or obstruct. Influential figures in modern economic sociology include Mark Granovetter, Harrison White, Richard Swedberg and Viviana Zelizer. To this may be added Amitai Etzioni, who has popularised the idea of socioeconomics, and Chuck Sabel and Wolfgang Streeck, who work in the tradition of political economy/sociology.” For more, go here: "Economic sociology”

Intertemporal choice. To put it simply, as an economics instructor at the University of Pennsylvania has, “Life is full of intertemporal choices: should I study for my test today or tomorrow, should I save or should I consume now?” Letting Wikipedia weigh in again: “Intertemporal choice is the study of the relative value people assign to two or more payoffs at different points in time. This relationship is usually simplified to today and some future date.” For a fascinating brain-studies-oriented discussion of “ic,” go here: "Is There A Neurobiology of Intertemporal Choice?”

Behavioral economics. InvestorHome Web site observes, “Much of economic and financial theory is based on the notion that individuals act rationally and consider all available information in the decision-making process. However, researchers have uncovered a surprisingly large amount of evidence that this is frequently not the case…. A field known as ‘behavioral finance’ has evolved that attempts to better understand and explain how emotions and cognitive errors influence investors and the decision-making process….As an example, some believe that the outperformance of value investing results from investor's irrational overconfidence in exciting growth companies and from the fact that investors generate pleasure and pride from owning growth stocks. Many researchers (not all) believe that these humans flaws are consistent, predictable, and can be exploited for profit." "Psychology & Behavioral Finance”

Maybe a worthy perspective on the subject matter of all the above fields of inquiry and other contemporary scholarly endeavors along these lines is provided by two quotes from the article referenced immediately above:

• "Recently we worked on a project that involved users rating their experience with a computer. When we had the computer the users had worked with ask for an evaluation of its performance, the responses tended to be positive. But when we had a second computer ask the same people to evaluate their encounters with the first machine, the people were significantly more critical. Their reluctance to criticize the first computer 'face to face' suggested they didn't want to hurt its feelings, even though they knew it was only a machine."—Bill Gates in The Road Ahead

• "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."—Albert Einstein

Posted on December 27, 2005

While the Greedy Merchandisers of Children's Electronic Entertainment Are Counting Their Shekels, Their Viewers—or So It Appears to Grammie and Me—Are Simply Learning to Count

I see by today’s New York Times that there is a hubbub brewing over whether electronic entertainment is a good thing or a bad thing for infants and toddlers.

That there is a hubbub over the issue of whether electronic entertainment is a good or a bad thing doesn’t surprise me one iota. As a society, we still haven’t decided whether electronic entertainment is a good or bad thing for adults yet, much less children.

But for the past three years and a few days, give or take about four months when the subject of the experiment was temporarily ensconced elsewhere, Grammie (as she was quickly named by the youngest speaker of our house) and Pappaw (yours truly) and the subject's parents have all had a ringside seat to the question: “See Baby Watch, Touch, Giggle, Point at and Leave Fingerprints on the Screen. But Does Baby Get It?”

From the moment he was able to sit erect, our young grandson Ian has been an avid consumer of, progressively, Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart, Baby Shakespeare, The Best of Elmo, Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type, Chica Chicka Boom Boom, train videos, firehouse videos, puppet videos, farm videos and just about anything else that got passed the approval standards of the adults in his life. (It was mostly Grammy's standards; she's the one who scours garage sales, library sales and thrift shops to wag in videos by the car trunk fulls.)

What he “got” out of the videos we’ll never really be able to pin down. Because the videos were simply part of a much broader, much deeper environment of stimulation and learning that, given the presence of four adults in his life around the clock, he has been subjected to. But we were not startled when we first realized that he knew his ABCs or that he’d learned to count to 70 long before we remember our own children being able to do so. After all, by then, he’d spent hours watching and listening to the alphabet and the numbers being endlessly explored on the screen.

We would certainly not want his only outlet on the world to be the boob tube or computer screen. But then, as already noted, it is anything but.

Yesterday, his Grammie was driving him home from day care. Ian noticed a school bus.

“Grammie,” he said, “there’s children on the bus.”

Grammie is quick as a woodpecker’s beak to spot an opportunity. She replied, “Oh, really. Do you think they are riding with their mommies and daddies?”

After a moment, he answered, “No.”

“Well, do you think they are riding alone?””

He thought about it.

“No,” replied, “they are riding by themselves.”

I don’t know what an exchange like that is worth in the life of the mind of a child but I like the looks of it. Perhaps the children’s video producers should do a video called “Ian’s Grammie Takes a Drive,” but as long as Grammie is around, there’s no need to. Grammy is much better at the task of teaching. But then Grammie or Pappaw or Mommy or Daddy can't be there every moment, even if they are pretty much around 24/7, and that's when, in my opinion, the electronic entertainment does have its uses and make its contributions.

The one thing I really don’t like about the children’s video movement is the greed of the promoters and marketers of the products.

For example, Ian’s latest video obsession will come as no surprise to anyone who has young kids. It involves Greg, Murray, Anthony, Jeff, Dorothy the Dinoasur, Wags the Dog, Henry the Octopus and Captain Feathersword. The Wiggles, in other words.

Out of curiosity, I went to the Web site of the fabulously successful Australian music group with the young fan base. And frankly, the degree of commercialization is a bit over the top. Well, nauseating, actually. Maybe there’s a cultural thing that I just don’t get about how the Aussies promote things, but I don’t really think so. I think this is just what the sons and daughters of Disney and DreamWorks and the rest of Hollywood and its now worldwide counterparts do when they strike gold in the consciousnesses of millions of onlookers’ minds, young or old.

(You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the Wiggles’ online merchandising showroom "The Wiggles” and you can decide for yourself.)

But as I watch Ian dance with the Wiggles and listen to him sing their songs in a seemingly never-ending sing along, my sense is unshakable that the experience is triggering synapses and laying down neural pathways that would likely not have been activated this way or this thoroughly without the benefit and assistance of electronic entertainment.

By all means, I want the researchers to learn all they can about what all this video watching means to a child. But I think the verdict is already in on the question “But Does Baby Get It?

Assuredly, baby gets something—and likes it and benefits from it.

Posted on December 16, 2005

Here's a Book that Supports "The Best Guess I've Ever Had": That No One Really Has Much of a Clue About What's Supposed to Be Happening Here; That Everyone Is Guessing

Anyone—and it might be anytwo, or at best anyfive or anysix—who has been paying attention to the progressive content of my thinking through the years understands that I’ve been on some sort of journey.

It is my belief that it is not all that remote from a journey that most all who have ever lived participate in.

The road map that I like best, and one to which I’ve devoted a substantial part of my lifework, is that provided by the late Dr. Clare Graves, the psychologist. He traced the route as a spiral, with well-defined stops. In my most recent book, I shared the view that much of the time I'm now experiencing “life its own self” at Graves’ Stage 7 or, as I renumbered it in this work, Stage 2.0.

From the perspective of the 2.0 mind, one of the key understandings that I keep butting my nose into—like a door jam in the dark—is this: Everyone who has ever tried to explain why the world is, what humans are doing here, and the totality of how it all works has been guessing. Once you are armed with this insight, then it is both fascinating and sometimes a little fear-provoking to see just how many guesses have been put forth about what’s happening and how and why, and how much influence even very bad guesses can have.

A question then: Which of those guesses deserve to be labeled the best guesses ever made, even if they are no longer attention-attractors except for serious scholars, and sometimes not many of these?

Somehow, I have always intuitively suspected that the cultural mentality most likely to take such a question seriously, and attempt to answer it, would belong to a citizen of the United Kingdom. The question itself just sounds very…British.

And so it was a vindication of sorts to come across British critic, biographer and poet Martin Seymour-Smith’s book, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written. Published in 1998, this work was just such an attempt—to define the guesses in history that have had "the most decisive influence upon the course of human thought.”

I can’t imagine anyone ever reading Seymour-Smith’s book from cover to cover. At least, I don’t have this kind of ocular or intellectual stamina. But this is one of those books that prompts me to get it down off the shelf every once in a while, open it at random and marvel anew at the origins and consequences of all the guessing that has been going on.

This time, 100 Most Influential fell open to book No. 83, Italian intellectual Vilfredo Pareto’s The Mind and Society. I have always thought that Pareto was an economist, because of what has come to be called “Pareto’s 80/20 Principle.” (Seymour-Smith calls it “Pareto optimality,” and says it was unpopular from the first because of its “the trival many—the critical few” character. In other words, that an economy is best off when the largest proportion of its participants are badly off.) But what do I learn? That Pareto, a congenital sourpuss of a thinker, is consider one of the fathers of sociology. And that The Mind and Society puts forth one of the best guesses for why, to use T.S. Eliot’s notion (as Seymour-Smith does), “Mankind cannot bear much reality.” Pareto’s ideas of the early 20th Century are very much in vogue again in the early 21st Century: that the foundations of the social system are very much anchored in the nonlogical, not the rational, actions of humans.

So Pareto’s best guess is, by other names and because of other systems of inquiry, back in town. I suspect that if I ever summon up the stamina to read this entire work, I’ll find that this is true again and again. That there can only be so many guesses of sufficient quality to be considered very good guesses about what’s happening here even though they all remain just that—guesses—and that most of them have already been fleshed out at one time or another by a very fine, if now perhaps largely ignored if not totally forgotten, mind. But good or bad, they remain mostly that: guesses.

Seymour-Smith died on July 1, 1998, at the age of seventy. For a list of Seymour-Smith's Top 100, go here: "100 Most Influential Books Ever Written”.

Posted on December 10, 2005

Our Reader in Jakarta Reminds Us of Michael Persinger's Quest for "the God Spot" in the Brain

Alyson Capreol in Jakarta writes:

Per your religion discussion ... have you ever read Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs by Michael Persinger? I read it many many years ago while at University. The author, a professor at Laurentian University in Canada, got repeated "GOD" experiences while putting an electrical impulse through the temporal lobe of subjects brains...much like the "temporal lobe transients" which he figured might be typical of many historical mystics. Interestingly enough (or not), these experiences, if I recall correctly, often coincided with the subjects' belief systems. He referred to scientists with strong religious beliefs who dismiss everything that cannot be proven via the scientific method the "Dr. Jeckels and Mr. Hydes of academia." Personally, my philosophy is much like yours, yet I found this book really interesting.

Alyson, I didn't read that book but I did read about Dr. Persinger in Wired Magazine. Go here: "This Is Your Brain on God."

Posted on December 08, 2005

If Everything is Progressing Like the Idea of Progress Suggests It Should Be, Why Does It Feel Like Things Are Going Well for Only A Few?

This past week, I chanced upon two mostly forgotten books, and probably would not have spent much time with either had not both mentioned—on the very first page—an event that itself has been mostly long forgotten: the Century of Progress Exposition that the city of Chicago staged in 1933-34 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the city’s incorporation.

In The Next Hundred Years: The Unfinished Business of Science, Yale University chemical engineer professor C.C. Furnas lost no time in pointing out how disappointing and overblown the Hall of Science at the Chicago event was to many astute visitors.

Among his observations:

“They [visitors] found most of the loudspeakers on the grounds sadly out of adjustment and the television exhibitions to be more imagination than vision. They saw the latest, swiftest and safest airplanes on display, but during the Fair one sightseeing and one regular passenger plane fell in the vicinity of Chicago killing an even score of men and women.

“They saw exhibit after exhibit featuring the advance of modern medicine but were faced with a preventable and inexcusable outbreak of amebic dysentery, entering in two of the city’s leading hotels, which claimed 41 lives out of 721 cases….They saw a motor car assembly line in operation but, if they investigated carefully, they found that as mechanism for converting the potential energy of fuel into mechanical work the average motor car is only about 8 per cent efficient.

“They marveled at the lighting effects at night but, in talking the matter over with experts, they found that most of the lights were operating with an efficiency of less than 2 per cent.” There was much more—several more paragraphs, in fact—in the way of observations and cautions and laments from Professor Furnas based on his visit to the Century of Progress Exposition.

Bottom line to The Next Hundred Years: the Century of Progress wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Then I opened a copy of J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress and learned on the first page that the Century of Progress Exposition was partly why the Macmillan publishing house decided in 1932 to bring out an American edition of Cambridge historian Bury’s 1920 masterpiece of historical/economic analysis.

In it, Bury sought to pooh-pooh the idea that “the idea of progress” was a john-come-lately concept crystallized by self-promoting business people and thus was a rather superficial invention. He traced the roots of the idea back at least as far as St. Augustine in the Middle Ages (not that Augustine was a father of the idea of progress but rather that he and other Christian Fathers booted out the Greek theory of cycles and other ideas that stood in the way of a theory of progress) and charactered the idea as one of those rare world-makers.

But even so, after 300 pages of trenchant, sometimes breath-taking reporting and analysis, Bury—on the final page of his book—cautioned that the Idea of Progress might not be all it was cracked up to be. After all, he argued, the most devastating arrow in the idea’s quiver was the assertion that finality is an illusion, that the truth is that what comes, eventually goes.

Bury wrote, “Must not it (the dogma of progress), too, submit to its own negation of finality? Will not that process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel 'Progress' too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now, with apparent security, enthroned?…In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced stage of civilization; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced?”

Bury thought it might be centuries in the future before the Idea of Progress was dethroned and replaced.

But looking at an exceedingly rough start for the 21st Century, especially in America, it can be suspected that a persistent undercurrent of change may already be underway less than one century after Bury raised the question of whether the Idea of Progress was going to prove insufficient and undesirable as “the directing idea of humanity.”

Never in history have the shibboleths and ideals of the Idea of Progress been praised and promoted to the extent that they have in the U.S. in the past five years. And with each passing day, the conclusion seems to be more and more unavoidable: they are only working for a tiny part of our population, the very rich and powerful.

It is becoming more and more obvious that the highly stylized, sound-bite-polished, PowerPoint-presentation-perfected, U.S. flag-draped version of the Idea of Progress isn't all that is was cracked up to be.

Which leaves us to wonder if the time isn't much riper than we could have imagined a few short years ago for if not the emergence of a new directing idea of humanity, at least the beginning of the disintegration of the current one.

For as the late Peter Drucker argued in a book published in the 1960s that perhaps should be considered the third in a triology of works on this whole subject of progress, it appears that we may already be much deeper into an "age of discontinuity" that we had realized.

Posted on December 05, 2005

Mr. Papa Likes Most Things Texan, The House Band, Geb Foley, Celtic Music and My Comments on Religious Beliefs

Leo Papa in Detroit writes:

Just ordered a copy of Stonetown, by The House Band, from your online store because you had the best price and because you are located in TX. I am partial to all things Texan (except, for the most part, its politics) since I lived in Texas 20 years and have many friends in the state, from Denton to San Antonio (the birthplace of my wife).

One of my friends from Dallas (PTex) is copied here because, when I looked up your website, I found your blog [item] on religious belief systems very interesting. PTex and I had a discussion about this recently, so I wanted to make sure he saw it. I'm copying the URL to this article so that he can take a look at it.

I was turned on to The House Band, and one of its guitarists/vocalists Geb Foley, from my involvement in Celtic Music over the past 2 years. Glad you had a good used copy available.

Leo, thanks for shopping with us!

As you know, having lived here for two decades, Texas religion is like Texas politics, for the most part. It's a big boy's and big girl's contest, and it's played for keeps. That's why when someone asks me if I believe in God, they better be prepared for a very short or for a very long conversation. Hope PTex enjoys my observations ... and conclusions. Best wishes, and happy holidays!

Posted on December 01, 2005