Mind the Gap, liberals

As a self-claimed independent, it is fun to read Kevin Drum's Hack Gap.

I didn't watch any commentary immediately after the debate because I wanted to write down my own reactions first, and my initial sense was that Obama did a little bit worse than Romney. But after I hit the Publish button and turned on the TV, I learned differently. As near as I could tell, the entire MSNBC crew was ready to commit ritual suicide right there on live TV, Howard Beale style. Ditto for all their guests, including grizzled pols like Ed Rendell who should have known better. It wasn't just that Obama did poorly, he had delivered the worst debate performance since Clarence Darrow left William Jennings Bryan a smoking husk at the end of Inherit the Wind. And it wasn't even just that. It was a personal affront, a betrayal of everything they thought was great about Obama. And, needless to say, it put Obama's entire second term in jeopardy and made Romney the instant front runner.

Yes, it is expected that Foxnews or Drudgerport would just look other ways, if Romney had lost. MSM! hit the panic button!

He was my hero, once - Jack Welch

Jack Welch wrote an essay at Wall Street Journal defending his "questioning" of the latest job data on twitter. If those twits could be explained as lack of understanding of how BLS works, this piece proved that he is and was just trying to manipulate the public opinion.

I am no expert in labor statics, but all the economists who I respect and have followed in years agreed, republicans included, that it was impossible to manipulate the data. The trend line of the data agrees with overall big picture and other data, such as car retails etc.

To question the government data is one thing, to accuse the President of United States manipulating a key piece of data without any proof is another.
The data could be biased, skewed, or just an outliner due to statistical error. Manipulating the data could be a felony but I don't think any of the truthers can provide something to the DOJ.
Pointing out that the data contain errors and it is not golden is OK. We can try to compensate for the bias, take into account the statistical error, and we can defer our judgement till later. Data are all like this, but it is trust-worthy. Jack, don't dismiss it when you don't like it, and cite it all the time when it is in your favor.

Repressing the freedom of speech by the government is one thing. Pointing out the lies by experts is totally another.
Repressing of the freedom of speech happens in Soviet Russia or China. And the repressed do not have the opportunities to write a long defense on one of the most respected and widely-circulated newspaper. Questioning the sitting president does not absolve you from legitimate refute. 

Trying eliminate those differences, and implying that he was targeted based on political reasons by the government is flat out lie.

The WSJ piece contains certain valid points, but overall it is just propaganda. I sincerely doubt how much Jack knows about the real American economy. GE is a giant, where the head of a $1B business can hardly get face time with the CEO. I don't think Jack knows any one who is struggling to find a job. Not even his almost criminal friends once headed the Wall Street firms need to do that.

Here we are. One of the parties is determined that defeating a sitting president is job No.1 and will not even hesitate to kill any measures that could help the perspective of getting him reelected, even if, especially if that measure would help American people. When the number is going up, sending the heavy weight to publicly devalue the data, to stir the water, and at the same time, the campaign can play safe.

No wonder that same party wants to kill PBS and NPR. If they can, they probably are going to kill anything which is not Foxnews. 

Unfortunately, it works. At least if judged from the comments on the WSJ website. When only half the population believe that the President is even eligible, it is so convenient to accuse him of not cooperating. If we have poll today about the BLS data, it would be fairly close to the birth certificate one, I bet. It is a success of the GOP.

So, let's back to the definition of a moderate Republican. It used to some one who is willing to support tax increase under circumstances. Now any one who think that President Obama might have been born in the United States is definitely a moderate. Today, any one who thinks that President Obama did not manipulate the BLS data is already is a moderate, or a traitor to the GOP, who is trying the repress the respectable almighty Jack.

Mitt Romney might be a competent president, but he will bend to the pressure from his own party, just as he did in the primary. It scares me to imagine such an extreme party to control both chambers of the congress and the White House. And they may appoint more justices who think corporates are people, but care about the well beings the insurance companies more than the uninsured. 

So, Jack, you have enjoyed your retirement; why are you doing this?

The first debate between Obama and Romney

Almost everyone agrees that Obama lost it. He came in the debate unprepared for:

1. Romney's "pivot" to moderate,
2. Romney's attack lines, some of which predictable, 
3. his own data, such as $5 trillion tax cut, which Romney's denial met no challenge, 
4. his own opening and closing statement.  
5. and everything else. 

It seems he watched too much the well received Clinton's convention speech. The lines lost charm, when he was facing a energized, prepared, and confident opponent. He missed so many chances of hitting back. He appeared that he was not even there.

 Different theories why he lost and many  talks about how he appeared less confident. My question is that whether he was not confident.

Four years in White House does not lead to the eager to renew the lease of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.His achievement is nowhere up to the hopes he set up four years ago. The hostile congress won't change. His family is probably already exhausted.

The weak performance last night is not an outliner. His recent bounce is a Clinton bounce. Obama's own convention as weak as last night's.

The remaining question is whether we are going to see the Obama bounce.

An Unfortunate Decision by Peter Orszag - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic

James Fallows discussed An Unfortunate Decision by Peter Orszag, and, "change we can believe in."

US charges scientist with economic espionage: Scientific American

US charges scientist with economic espionage: Scientific American:

By Sharon Weinberger

Could publishing a scientific article constitute an act of economic espionage? That question lies at the heart of charges against a Massachusetts-based scientist accused of passing U.S. trade secrets to China.

Ke-xue Huang, a Canadian citizen and permanent U.S. resident, was arrested on July 13, and has been charged under a law designed to protect intellectual property held by U.S. companies. At a bail hearing last week in Massachusetts, the U.S. government claimed that the scientist provided secrets belonging to Dow AgroSciences, based in Indianapolis, Ind., to the Hunan Normal University in Changsha, China. If convicted of passing the secrets, said to be worth some $100 million, Huang could face up to 15 years in prison for each of 12 counts of economic espionage.

Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act in 1996 to counter an apparent rise in foreign spies trading in commercial, rather than military, secrets. Six other cases have been prosecuted under the law, but Huang's could set a precedent for the law to be applied to industry scientists and academic researchers publishing in the open literature. This isn't the first time a scientist has faced prison time for sharing research with China; a physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was last year sentenced to four years in prison for violating export control laws. He had provided technical data to scientists in China and worked on sensitive technologies with foreign graduate students.

"It is interesting that there are--or seem to be--more cases of research triggering some government reaction, whether this is due to export control or other issues," says Thomas Zurbuchen, a space scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been involved in efforts to reform export control restrictions on universities.

Huang's problems stem from research related to a review article. Co-authored with scientists at Hunan Normal University and James Zahn, a researcher at Coskata, a biofuel company in Warrenville, Ill., the paper describes work on a new class of insecticides that Dow has been making and marketing. The government alleges that the article contains confidential information--and that publishing it constituted theft of a trade secret, says James Duggan, Huang's lawyer. At the hearing, however, prosecutors indicated that the article is not the sole basis for the charges, which also involve e-mail communications relating to the research.

Huang worked for Dow from 2003 to 2008, but by the time of his arrest had moved to Qteros, a company based in Marlborough, Mass., that works on biofuels.

Originally from China, Huang had studied biology at China's Jilin Agricultural University, and earned a PhD in Japan. After a two-year postdoctoral stint in the mid-1990s at Texas A&M University in College Station, where he worked on sequencing biosynthetic genes for vitamin B12 production, he went to Rice University in Houston. His postdoctoral adviser there, George Bennett, says he "couldn't imagine" Huang intentionally doing something illegal. Dow has declined to comment on any specifics of the case.

Todd Sullivan, an attorney in Raleigh, N.C., who specializes in trade-secret laws, compares economic espionage prosecutions to "unicorn sightings" because the government so rarely pursues them. The government has, in fact, successfully tried only one of the other six economic espionage cases. In another case, last year, a jury acquitted two Chinese-born engineers who had been charged with stealing secrets from a Californian semiconductor company and passing them on to China.

Huang's case resembles the others in that all but one involved China and Chinese scientists. The challenge for the U.S. government will be proving that he provided intellectual property to benefit a foreign government, or an entity controlled by a foreign government. June Teufel Dreyer, a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida who follows Chinese espionage cases, says it will be "devilishly difficult" for prosecutors to prove that a university is controlled by the Chinese government.

But the Department of Justice is clearly determined to try. The government is fighting attempts to release Huang on bail, and has asked that, even if he is released, his use of the Internet and e-mail be restricted.

In the meantime, Duggan says that he does not concede that his client stole trade secrets, or even that he violated any employment agreement with Dow. He says that Huang was motivated not by espionage, but by his desire to improve insecticides and benefit crop production. "His motives were excellent motives," Duggan insists. "Dow's motives are to protect its profits."

Best Summer Jobs

Via NPR, a girl remembers her summer job at Seaworld Ohio:

And I would then pluck out the oyster, open it up with a knife and then just really plum around, dig around in that oyster for the pearl. I'd be really excited to find this pearl. If I wasn't excited, I'd feign the excitement. Then I'd wash it over, measure the diameter, and then I would tell them, I would appraise the pearl for them.

Mind you, I'm 15 years old, and the only instructions I really got from my supervisor was just to name two things: the color, the size. Then it was really my choice of how much price value to assign the pearl. So I would say: This rare black pearl measures eight millimeters in diameter. This would fetch you about $30 on the market, but here at SeaWorld, you only paid for the price of the mug. And, you know, of course, how could you not be excited by that? Look at that deal you just got, this treasure? These were seed pearls. They weren't, like, 100 percent pure, natural, rare pearls, of course not. Like, a seven-millimeter plastic ball with the thickness of, like, a fingernail coating of pearl on top. So kind of a sham, the whole appraisal.

I am kind of embarrassed to have been a teenage huckster in my very first job, but I'm really glad that I did. I think it's given me a lot of confidence. It really helped me to deliver what I have to say with assurance, and I can really see that now as a teacher.
No one wants a teacher who's just going to stand up and lecture about metaphor or simile or personification but, you know, if you can kind of make it more fun and deliver it in such a way that makes it interesting, then you're golden.

So, we were told that a sham appraisal experience as teenager helped her to gain confidence and be a good teacher.

I agree that teacher should make it fun and deliver it in an interesting way, but it is another thing when you try to make, or sell, a point by making things up. The distinction seems not to matter any more. Even those buying the pearls at Seaworld knew that the pearls are not authentic. A small "trick" is accepted. To tell "small" lies confidently is one of the most important traits needed for any job you can find today. If you can tell lies of any size confidently, that is even better. Maybe every teenager should take a job a husker or car dealer to help them to pursue their career later on.

World Cup 2010 and Referees

Every one seems to be frustrated by the frequency of mistakes of referees in the important matches. FIFA insist on not allowing the referees use video recording and other technologies means to resolve the problem. It is simply ridiculous to reject the means at hands to make huge improvement. Yes, injustice is part of life, and mistakes are inevitable even equipped with the best technology. Accepting the status quo is another matter. Most of the mistakes nowadays are so obvious to everyone in the world in front of the screens, but not those referees in the field. Do they need such information most? It takes only a second of replay to find out that the first goal of Argentina today should be discredited, but after we saw the replay, we witnessed that referees discussed it for another minute surrounded by feverish members from both teams and made the wrong call. What is the justification of refusing the access of such information to the referees in the field when they need it, especially when the rest of the world can see it? 

iOS 4

Updating my iPhone 3gs to iOS4. The jailbreak crashed weeks ago after updating Stanza. The phone died totally. I restore the iPhone to official os. With the multitasking and folders of iOS 4, less need to jailbreak. Will jailbreak if I am going abroad. Before that, I will stick with the official OS for a while. 

My Father's Day Essay for the WSJ, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Bryan's Father's Day Essay for the WSJ, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

I kinda like Jason's comment:

A bigger problem, I think, is that behavior genetics currently answers questions too crudely to be helpful to parents.

Can't parents who drop $100,000+ on a high status college education expect better outcomes for their children than parents who don't provide this opportunity? Logically, you would think that parents who provide costly opportunities would be dramatically affecting their child outcomes. But behavior genetic studies suggest that parental socioeconomic status doesn't do much.

Why not?

Is it because the poor parents are spending proportionately more on opportunities than rich parents? Or is it because children somehow compensate in proportion to their own abilities (e.g. making due with student loans)? Or is it because the supposed advantages of fancy colleges are a spurious reflection of student ability (consistent with Dale and Krueger)?

Behavior genetics doesn't yet help distinguish between explanations like the first and third AFAIK. But if parents take the research to indicate something like the third explanation, when the true explanation is the first, the consequences of that misinterpretation could be severe.

and:

By the way, this is one problem I potentially have with Dr. Caplan's new book. He is advocating the idea that behavior genetics indicates parents can invest less in their children without consequences. While I do suspect this is true, the same research could conceivably be indicating the opposite. Which would mean that Dr. Caplan's suggestions could be harmful.

I worry the money investment less. I probably gonna support my kids the best I can afford and the best they can get into. The implication in Bryan's essay that the education is less important than the gene, so parents can skip the nightly reading without feeling guilty troubles me more. Education is one of the most important part of raising the kid. I don't need statistics to tell what a nightly reading can do. I can see it, and I love it.

I'd like to see the original research, but I am still in doubt.

A best father's gift

Wall Street Journal gave me a best father's gift: a relief from the stress of raising kids.
The Case for Having More Kids - WSJ.com

Father's Day is a time to reflect on whether you want to be a parent—or want to be a parent again. If you simply don't like kids, research has little to say to you. If however you're interested in kids, but scared of the sacrifices, research has two big lessons. First, parents' sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and childless and single is far inferior to married with children. Second, parents' sacrifice is much larger than it has to be. Twin and adoption research shows that you don't have to go the extra mile to prepare your kids for the future. Instead of trying to mold your children into perfect adults, you can safely kick back, relax and enjoy your journey together—and seriously consider adding another passenger.

Thank you Bryan! I am watching World Cup 2010 on the couch with my son. At least I can rest my mind for today. This does not mean that I agree with you though.

I was wrong about Apple iPad | Betanews

I was wrong about Apple iPad | Betanews

Keyword: Immersion.

But I missed the iPad and couldn't quite say why at first. I didn't need the device. Functionally, iPad overlapped with smartphone and laptop.

I was wrong. On further reflection, I realized that iPad offers fresh functionality: Immersion. I find there are fewer reading distractions, and content is better presented than on a laptop and browser. I'm more focused and retain more of what I read. For reasons not easily explained, I find myself more thoroughly reading iBooks than defaulting to the skimming I sometimes do with physical books. Part of this immersive experience is the technology, but also how iPad is used. Apple's tablet is a sit down and focus device, as much because of size and shape as screen and user interface. The totality -- physical design and software benefits -- is immersion.

I would rather call it user experience, not functionality. And Steve Jobs got it right again, user experience is more important than functionality or the spec sheet.

Pre-order Iphone 4? Good luck!

It is a mess. After the pre-order going alive, ATT server seems unable to handle it, and gave various error messages. Later, to make matter worse, an alleged privacy breach followed by server shutdown. It is up now, but still unable order the much anticipated iPhone 4.

Is this bad for Apple, or it does not matter?

Gizmodo used words like  a total disaster, well, they have reasons to be angry. 

Wireless LAN security myths that won't die | ZDNet

Wireless LAN security myths that won't die | ZDNet

Waste of money, resources, time

• MAC filtering
• Disable DHCP and use Static IP addresses
• Signal suppression with expensive paint or antenna placement

Worse than no wireless security at all

• LEAP (adding EAP-FAST to the list)
• SSID Access Point beacon suppression (or "hiding")

Has nothing to do with security mechanisms

• Just use 802.11a or Bluetooth

I am using two of them: MAC filtering and hiding SSID. I think the key message in the article is clear and valid:

Any benefit against casual bandwidth thieves is already covered by real security measures... [and] they don't make you harder to hack.

Beware of Americans Proselytizing the Chinese Economic Model « Business in The Beltway - Forbes.com

Beware of Americans Proselytizing the Chinese Economic Model « Business in The Beltway - Forbes.com

My [Dan Ikenson's] bet is that China’s re-embrace of greater central planning will be brief, as it wastes resources, yields few if any national champions, and limits innovation. For similar reasons, U.S. opinion leaders will eschew central planning, as well.

After massive privatization, the tides are receding. The state-owned companies now claim themselves "eldest-son".

The mega-projects like World Expo, the hi-speed rails, and etc, can easily won China some champions, but can we ignore the "unavoidable" problems such as extensive waste? The long-term effects of such mega-projects are positive or negative?

A 2.5-year old uses an iPad for the first time

A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

I can imagine how my "iphone-savvy" 2-year old son would interact with the iPad. Touch is the way to go. It is intuitive and hard-wired in the brain. Just look at the toddlers and seniors. who are not typically target customers of gadgets designers.

Immigration overhaul

It seems that my guess is right. The NYT piece about China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S. has an agenda more than just research spending or competing with China. It is also an effort to push for immigration reform.
 

It minimizes access for future blue-collar foreign workers and favors visas for highly educated immigrants.

The plan’s emphasis is on making it easier for highly skilled and educated immigrants to come to the United States, including awarding residence documents known as green cards to those who receive advanced degrees in science and technology from American universities.

Currency Manipulator? - Reading List

Paul Krugman

James Fallows


Michael Pettis

China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S. - NYTimes.com

China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S. - NYTimes.com

The Chinese market is surging for electricity, cars and much more, and companies are concluding that their researchers need to be close to factories and consumers alike. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs here after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world’s solar panels by the end of this year.

...

With China’s economy gaining strength, Mr. Pinto and his wife, then living in Santa Clara, began insisting in 2005 that their sons study Chinese once a week.

Now 10 and 11, the boys are improving their Chinese and mastering the art of eating with chopsticks.

A large portion of Ph.D.s in engineering and science graduating in the U.S. are born in China (and India). They work for the exact same companies after the graduation in the U.S. The only differences are the working location and hassle of dealing with visas and immigration. The best and smartest are among these students. To be frank, many of them do not need a Ph.D. degree or the training in American universities to be good engineers. Many of them just use the graduate training as channel to get to the U.S. It is just convenient for the companies to open the R&D centers in China and lure the best and smartest with the companies' reputation as technology leaders and high (in local terms) pay before they spend the probably unnecessary years in American graduate school, and thus they surely will demand even higher salary.

Microsoft and Google started this long ago. Bill Gates said before the congress during a hearing about H1B visa that these students will work for the big name companies [after graduation], just a matter of where and which companies. And now, many of them may even skip the American graduate school step.

Complexity and Collapse by Niall Ferguson

Complexity and Collapse. By: Ferguson, Niall, Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Mar/Apr2010, Vol. 89, Issue 2

Section: Essays

Complexity and Collapse

Empires on the Edge of Chaos

THERE IS no better illustration of the life cycle of a great power than The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in The Course of Empire, he beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day.

Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first, The Savage State, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is The Consummation of Empire. Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes Destruction. The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting, Desolation. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.

Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole's great pentaptych has a clear message: all empires, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was that the young American republic of Cole's age would be better served by sticking to its bucolic first principles and resisting the imperial temptations of commerce, conquest, and colonization.

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large have tended to think about empires in such cyclical and gradual terms. "The best instituted governments," the British political philosopher Henry St. John, First Viscount Bolingbroke, wrote in 1738, "carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and, though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live."

Idealists and materialists alike have shared that assumption. In his book Scienza nuova, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico describes all civilizations as passing through three phases: the divine, the heroic, and the human, finally dissolving into what Vico called "the barbarism of reflection." For Hegel and Marx, it was the dialectic that gave history its unmistakable beat. History was seasonal for Oswald Spengler, the German historian, who wrote in his 1918-22 book, The Decline of the West, that the nineteenth century had been "the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and skepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money." The British historian Arnold Toynbee's universal theory of civilization proposed a cycle of challenge, response, and suicide. Each of these models is different, but all share the idea that history has rhythm.

Although hardly anyone reads Spengler or Toynbee today, similar strains of thought are visible in contemporary bestsellers. Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is another work of cyclical history--despite its profusion of statistical tables, which at first sight make it seem the very antithesis of Spenglerian grand theory. In Kennedy's model, great powers rise and fall according to the growth rates of their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to their GDPS. Just as in Cole's The Course of Empire, imperial expansion carries the seeds of future decline. As Kennedy writes, "If a state over-extends itself strategically . . . it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all." This phenomenon of "imperial overstretch," Kennedy argues, is common to all great powers. In 1987, when Kennedy's book was published, the United States worried that it might be succumbing to this disease. Just because the Soviet Union fell first did not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis.

More recently, it is Jared Diamond, an anthropologist, who has captured the public imagination with a grand theory of rise and fall. His 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is cyclical history for the so-called Green Age: tales of past societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: "Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their golden age, and perished." According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation, but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought, and soil exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally, collapse.

Diamond's warning is that today's world could go the way of the Maya. This is an important message, no doubt. But in reviving the cyclical theory of history, Collapse reproduces an old conceptual defect. Diamond makes the mistake of focusing on what historians of the French Annales school called la longue durée, the long term. No matter whether civilizations commit suicide culturally, economically, or ecologically, the downfall is very protracted. Just as it takes centuries for imperial overstretch to undermine a great power, so, too, does it take centuries to wreck an ecosystem. As Diamond points out, political leaders in almost any society--primitive or sophisticated--have little incentive to address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years or more.

Did the proconsuls in Cole's The Consummation of Empire really care if the fate of their great-great-grandchildren was destruction? No. Would they have accepted a tax increase that would have financed a preemptive strike against the next millennium's barbarian horde? Again, no. As the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December made clear, rhetorical pleas to save the planet for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now.

The current economic challenges facing the United States are also often represented as long-term threats. It is the slow march of demographics--which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers--and not current policy, that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. According to the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative fiscal scenario," which takes into account likely changes in government policy, public debt could rise from 44 percent before the financial crisis to a staggering 716 percent by 2080. In its "extended-baseline scenario," which assumes current policies will remain the same, the figure is closer to 280 percent. It hardly seems to matter which number is correct. Is there a single member of Congress who is willing to cut entitlements or increase taxes in order to avert a crisis that will culminate only when today's babies are retirees?

Similarly, when it comes to the global economy, the wheel of history seems to revolve slowly, like an old water mill in high summer. Some projections suggest that China's GDP will overtake the United States' GDP in 2027; others say that this will not happen until 2040. By 2050, India's economy will supposedly catch up with that of the United States, too. But to many, these great changes in the balance of economic power seem very remote compared with the timeframe for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan and then their withdrawal, for which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole's artistic representation of imperial birth, growth, and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic--at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

WHEN GOOD SYSTEMS GO BAD

GREAT POWERS and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder--on "the edge of chaos," in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis--a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England.

Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events--the low-frequency, high-impact moments that inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often  misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in The Black Swan as "the narrative fallacy": the construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Drawing casual inferences about causation is an age-old habit. Take World War I. A huge war breaks out in the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone. Before long, historians have devised a story line commensurate with the disaster: a treaty governing the neutrality of Belgium that was signed in 1839, the waning of Ottoman power in the Balkans dating back to the 1870s, and malevolent Germans and the navy they began building in 1897. A contemporary version of this fallacy traces the 9/11 attacks back to the Egyptian government's 1966 execution of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who inspired the Muslim Brotherhood. Most recently, the financial crisis that began in 2007 has been attributed to measures of financial deregulation taken in the United States in the 1980s.

In reality, the proximate triggers of a crisis are often sufficient to explain the sudden shift from a good equilibrium to a bad mess. Thus, World War I was actually caused by a series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914, the real origins of 9/11 lie in the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and the financial crisis was principally due to errors in monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve and to China's rapid accumulation of dollar reserves after 2001. Most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of half a million ants or termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system, or what Charles Sherrington, the pioneering neuroscientist, called "an enchanted loom."

The political and economic structures made by humans share many of the features of complex adaptive systems. Heterodox economists such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along these lines for decades. To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of central control, multiple levels of organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches, and the absence of general equilibrium. This conception of economics goes beyond both Adam Smith's hallowed idea that an "invisible hand" causes markets to work through the interactions of profit-maximizing individuals and Friedrich von Hayek's critique of economic planning and demand management. In contradiction to the classic economic prediction that competition causes diminishing returns, a complex economy makes increasing returns possible. In this version of economics, Silicon Valley is a complex adaptive system; so is the Internet itself.

Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit center devoted to the study of complex systems, are currently looking at how such insights can be applied to other aspects of collective human activity, including international relations. This effort may recall the futile struggle of Edward Casaubon to find "the key to all mythologies" in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch. But the attempt is worthwhile, because an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.

Whether the canopy of a rain forest or the trading floor of Wall Street, complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes--what scientists call "the amplifier effect." A vaccine, for example, stimulates the immune system to become resistant to, say, measles or mumps. But administer too large a dose, and the patient dies. Meanwhile, causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use. Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.

When things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is very hard to say: a forest fire twice as large as last year's is roughly four or six or eight times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern--known as a "power-law distribution"--is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Some researchers claim that conflicts follow a similar pattern, ranging from local skirmishes to full-scale world wars.

What matters most is that in such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate--and sometimes fatal--disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment, threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade. But blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

EMPIRE STATE OF MIND

REGARDLESS OF whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority--either a hereditary emperor or an elected president--but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social, and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems--including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognized because of the collective addiction to cyclical theories of history.

Perhaps the most famous story of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, Edward Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history, from 180 to 1590. This was history over the very long run, in which the causes of decline ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of monotheism. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, civil war became a recurring problem, as aspiring emperors competed for the spoils of supreme power. By the fourth century, barbarian invasions or migrations were well under way and only intensified as the Huns moved west. Meanwhile, the challenge posed by Sassanid Persia to the Eastern Roman Empire was steadily growing.

But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome's fall was sudden and dramatic--just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. As the Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins have argued, the final breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. Co-opted by an enfeebled emperor, the Goths then fought the Vandals for control of Spain, but this merely shifted the problem south. Between 429 and 439, Genseric led the Vandals to victory after victory in North Africa, culminating in the fall of Carthage. Rome lost its southern Mediterranean breadbasket and, along with it, a huge source of tax revenue. Roman soldiers were just barely able to defeat Attila's Huns as they swept west from the Balkans. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain, most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and southwestern and southeastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. Basiliscus, brother-in-law of Emperor Leo I, tried and failed to recapture Carthage in 468. Byzantium lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, king of the Goths.

What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century--inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle--shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls "the end of civilization" came within the span of a single generation.

Other great empires have suffered comparably swift collapses. The Ming dynasty in China began in 1368, when the warlord Zhu Yuanzhang renamed himself Emperor Hongwu, the word hongwu meaning "vast military power." For most of the next three centuries, Ming China was the world's most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure. Then, in the mid-seventeenth century, political factionalism, fiscal crisis, famine, and epidemic disease opened the door to rebellion within and incursions from without. In 1636, the Manchu leader Huang Taiji proclaimed the advent of the Qing dynasty. Just eight years later, Beijing, the magnificent Ming capital, fell to the rebel leader Li Zicheng, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself out of shame. The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time--a chance for revenge after Great Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War a decade earlier--but it served to tip French finances into a critical state. In May 1789, the summoning of the Estates-General, France's long-dormant representative assembly, unleashed a political chain reaction that led to a swift collapse of royal legitimacy in France. Only four years later, in January 1793, Louis XVI was decapitated by guillotine.

Although several narrative fallacies suggest that the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires were doomed for decades before World War I, the disintegration of the dynastic land empires of eastern Europe came with equal swiftness. What was impressive, in fact, was how well these ancient empires were able to withstand the test of total war. Their collapse only began with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. A mere five years later, Mehmed VI, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, departed Constantinople aboard a British warship. With that, all three dynasties were defunct.

The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly. In February 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was at Yalta, dividing up the world with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. As World War II was ending, he was swept from office in the July 1945 general election. Within a decade, the United Kingdom had conceded independence to Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Egypt, Eritrea, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Madagascar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire. Although it took until the 1960s for independence to reach sub-Saharan Africa and the remnants of colonial rule east of the Suez, the United Kingdom's age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy. This estimate is now known to have been wrong, but the Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff--rather than gently declining--it was the one founded by Lenin.

OVER THE EDGE

IF EMPIRES are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time--it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. All the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion--about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60 years--and another for 2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than double in the coming decade, from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent.

These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if not more so. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis. For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the deficit seem overblown, and 2080--when the U.S. debt may reach staggering proportions--seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news--perhaps a negative report by a rating agency--will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust--all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal measures that the Obama administration has taken in response. Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational expectations, demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations. In the same way, it is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece--it happened there at the end of last year, plunging the country into fiscal and political crisis.

Finally, a shift in expectations about monetary and fiscal policy could force a reassessment of future U.S. foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory entitlements, it is discretionary. A U.S. president who says he will deploy 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and then, in 18 months' time, start withdrawing them again already has something of a credibility problem. And what about the United States' other strategic challenges? For the United States' enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas military operations in the years ahead.

Defeat in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago, like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of The Course of Empire, the shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.

A more appropriate visual representation of the way complex systems collapse may be the old poster, once so popular in thousands of college dorm rooms, of a runaway steam train that has crashed through the wall of a Victorian railway terminus and hit the street below nose first. A defective brake or a sleeping driver can be all it takes to go over the edge of chaos.

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By Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. For an annotated guide to this topic, see "What to Read on American Primacy" at www.foreignaffairs.com/readinglists/american-primacy.

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Via Wikipedia

The Course of Empire is a five-part series of paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1833-36.

The first painting, The Savage State, shows the valley from the shore opposite the crag, in the dim light of a dawning stormy day. A hunter clad in skins hastens through the wilderness, pursuing a deer; canoes paddle up the river; on the far shore can be seen a clearing cluster of wigwams around a fire, the nucleus of the city that is to be. The visual references are those of Native American life.

In the second painting, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, the sky has cleared and we are in the fresh morning of a day in spring or early summer. The viewpoint has shifted further down the river, as the crag with the boulder is now on the left-hand side of the painting; a forked peak can be seen in the distance beyond it. Much of the wilderness has given way to settled lands, with plowed fields and lawns visible. Various activities go on in the background: plowing, boat-building, herding sheep, dancing; in the foreground, an old man sketches what may be a geometrical problem with a stick. On a bluff on the near side of the river, a megalithic temple has been built, and smoke (presumably from sacrifices) arises from it. The images reflect an idealized, pre-urban ancient Greece.

The third painting, The Consummation of Empire, shifts the viewpoint to the opposite shore, approximately the site of the clearing in the first painting. It is noontide of a glorious summer day. Both sides of the river valley are now covered in colonnaded marble structures, whose steps run down into the water. The megalithic temple seems to have been transformed into a huge domed structure dominating the river-bank. The mouth of the river is guarded by two pharoses, and ships with lateen sails go out to the sea beyond. A joyous crowd throngs the balconies and terraces as a scarlet-robed king or victorious general crosses a bridge connecting the two sides of the river in a triumphal procession. In the foreground an elaborate fountain gushes. The overall look suggests the height of ancient Rome.

The fourth painting, The Destruction of Empire, has almost the same point of view as the third, though the artist has stepped back a bit to allow a wider scene of the action, and moved almost to the center of the river. The action is, of course, the sack and destruction of the city, in the course of a tempest seen in the distance. It seems that a fleet of enemy warriors has overthrown the city's defenses, sailed up the river, and is busily firing the city and killing and raping its inhabitants. The bridge across which the triumphal procession had crossed is broken; a makeshift crossing strains under the weight of soldiers and refugees. Columns are broken, fire breaks from the upper floors of a palace on the river bank. In the foreground a statue of some venerable hero stands headless, still striding forward into the uncertain future, reminiscent of the hunter in the first painting. The scene is perhaps suggested by the Vandal sack of Rome in 455. A possible homage to Destruction was seen in the 2004 film Troy, when Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) decapitates a statue atop a hill during the ravishing of a magnificent imperial city.

The fifth painting, Desolation, shows the results, years later. We view the remains of the city in the livid light of a dying day. The landscape has begun to return to wilderness, and no human beings are to be seen; but the remnants of their architecture emerge from beneath a mantle of trees, ivy, and other overgrowth. The broken stumps of the pharoses loom in the background. The arches of the shattered bridge, and the columns of the temple are still visible; a single column looms in the foreground, now a nesting place for birds. The sunrise of the first painting is mirrored here by a moonrise, a pale light reflecting in the ruin-choked river while the standing pillar reflects the last rays of sunset. Sic transit gloria mundi.