The Bull in Full

Three Bogus Quotes

Following the Panthers' bizarre loss to the Buffalo Bills last Sunday, I was looking through the comments section on the Panthers coverage blog on charlotteobserver.com.  Basically, the rule of thumb is that if you didn't just win the national championship, there's someone out there on the internet angrily calling for someone to be fired.  The latest targets on the Panthers are coach John Fox, who's always played a conservative game but has had more success in Charlotte than either of the previous two coaches, and  quarterback Jake Delhomme, who truly does look like his career is about over.  Of course, after an ugly loss like the one to the Bills, the message boards are filled with calls for the quarterback to be benched and the coach to be fired.  One particular sage adamantly stated,

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.  John Fox must be clinical!

I'd seen this before, and always wondered where it came from.  If you Google it, you will quickly encounter one of the primary benefits of the internet -- its ability to very quickly come back with several versions of the wrong answer.  One site called "brainyquote.com" attributes this phrasing to Einstein:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Any number of other websites purporting to have quotes and answers will give you something similar.  Most attribute it to Einstein, but others give it to Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, or some other font of knowledge.  I had a hard time believing any of these, not just because of the conflicting tales, but of the general silliness of the assertion.  First of all, you'll have considerable trouble finding a dictionary that actually defines insanity this way.  According to Dictionary.com, the American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary defines it, most succinctly, as "persistent mental disorder or derangement." 

Not to mention this, but doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is often a realistic expectation of the world.  In very few things can you do exactly the same thing many times and get the same results -- I would wager that those who follow that expectation verge closer to true mental illness than those who expect different ones.  in any case, there is some slight trail.  Wikiquote, generally more trustworthy than many other soruces, may find the source of the Einstein attribution, finding that an obscure 1975 publication by the Wildlife Management Institute mentions the quote and attributes it to Einstein.  What is pretty clear is that by 1983, novelist Rita Mae Brown used the quote in her novel, Sudden Death.

For what it's worth, Einstein did say something which had somewhat of a similar rhetorical thrust, but it didn't involve insanity and it wasn't nearly so solipsistic.  In 1946, in the New York Times Magazine, Wikiquote finds this passage:

Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels."  Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking. In light of new knowledge…an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood, it is necessary for survival... Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.

Of course, this doesn't make for as pithy a denunciation of sports professionals, so it doesn't get used. That said, it did make me think of two others that are similarly misquoted.

Emma Goldman: If I can't dance....

This one is a bit harder for me to refute, simply because I like it so much in its simplest, misquoted form. There are several variants, but the pithiest is, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!" Happily, the quote is a fairly genuine representative of the original thought, but the quote is a paraphrase of Emma Goldman, the early 19th century anarchist, and not a pithy declaration by her. Again from Wikiquote, the full quote comes from Living My Life:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (p. 56)

So yes, Goldman was basically saying that if she couldn't dance, she didn't want to be part of the revolution. Somewhere along the way, someone came up with a pithy paraphrase of that. I wish we know who it was so we could quote him or her paraphrasing Goldman...

Of Burke and the necessary conditions for evil

This is the one I looked up most recently, simply because, again, it sounded too good to be historically true. This one's usually attributed to Edmund Burke:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

I could write about this, but quite frankly, it seems unnecessary, given the ongoing presence of a rather remarkable work of investigation into the quote. The long and the short of it is, Burke never said anything too close to this. The closest Wikiquote can find is this:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

The aforementioned investigative work on Burke does counter the "triumph of evil" quote at its conclusion with this fully cited quote, which seems like a good one to close a blog entry on bad quotes:

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as to the best. Of this stamp is the cant of not man, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

Dell Closes Winston-Salem Factory, after less than 5 years, over $300 million in incentives

Boy, I wish I could act surprised at this one.  After intense public criticism of the $305 million in incentives, between tax breaks, worker retraining, and flat cash grants to the massive computer maker, a scant five years later Dell is pulling up the stakes and decamping.

For the reading class on urban development I'm taking right now, I'm reading a fair bit of radical geographer David Harvey, but the one which comes to mind is his description and critique of the "entrepreneurial state," a mode of governance that started to come into vogue in the 1970s and has been growing ever since.  (FWIW, "state" here refers to governmental entities in general, not US states specifically.)  Rather than the previous New Deal model of the "caretaker" state, Harvey illustrates how state entities have reached the point of absurdity in some of these deals with the private sector.  In the literature I'm reading, most geographers chalk this up to the school of thought of "neoliberalism," running from Hayek through Goldwater and Thatcher and Reagan and Giuliani and so forth.  As irony would have it, though, some of the most vocal critics of these policies (at least in Durham) run in libertarian circles that venerate Hayek more than just about anyone.  So, now we've got both the radical Leftist geographers like Harvey criticizing this, and Hayek's true heirs criticizing it too.  What gives?  If two such divergent political schools loathe them so much, why do we do them in the first place?

The answer, of course, is that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't in a lot of these cases.  In the case of Dell, North Carolina was in the middle of the collapse of two of its most important, longest lasting, most durable industries: textiles and furniture.  With the job losses mounting up, the reigning coalition of pro-business Democrats felt they had to do something, both out of political expediency and, I'll give the benefit of the doubt, out of no small concern for the good of North Carolina.

But now whatever money got paid out is up in smoke.  (I should point out that I don't know how much of the incentives actually got paid out -- these deals usually have rider clauses on them that certain conditions have to be met over time.)  And what is North Carolina left with?  An empty shell of a factory and over a thousand folks who will have lost their jobs by early next year.

Again, I must point out the simple ease of the armchair critic.  Harvey and his cohorts generally advocate something along the lines of old school egalitarian liberalism, from FDR-style employment programs to Great Society poverty amelioration programs.  I certainly sympathize with this perspective, given my liberal upbringing, but even if I were to try to ignore the numerous failings of Left liberalism, politically it's quite apparent that the pure forms of mid-20th century liberalism are dead for good.  On the other hand, the libertarian critique that what we really need is to get the government out of the economy in every way, shape, and form frustrates me even more.  Look, I bristle at the amount we spend on highways these days, but it's impossible to look at any history or historical geography of North Carolina and not notice the dramatic improvements to the lives of its citizens that the investments in roads brought about.

So where does that leave us?  An interesting website on North Carolina in the Global Economy over at Duke, which pretty evidently comes out of much more mainline economics and public policy analysis than my Harvey readings, puts forth a number of recommendations on doing this kind of economic recruitment better.  Without endorsing the whole thing, it's an interesting read, and I certainly agree with a few points here.  First of all, worker training is a good idea, but not just for massive corporations like Dell.  There should be a standing offer for any business that's willing to pay half the price of work-related training for some small minimum number of its employees that some combination of the city, county, and state governments will cover the other half at a Technical school of some sort.  This not only makes the city more attractive to the big guys, but also helps workers who are already here and already have jobs, and helps businesses across the board without playing favorites. 

Second of all, and this is my personal hobby-horse, but instead of giving tax credits (which, as the Duke site points out, are only worth anything after you make a profit) or direct cash grants, I'd much rather see states put money into targeted infrastructure.  Look, if the Dell project had worked out, it would have been a big help to Winston-Salem's economy, and I can see that it would have been worth a shot.  But since it failed, North Carolina is left with nothing to show for its money.  Instead of giving out $300 million in grants and incentives, what if we'd spent $500 million in transportation and energy improvements in Winston-Salem to make it easier to get raw materials in, easier to ship built systems out, and cheaper, more sustainable energy to supply the factory?  What if Dell had an upgraded rail bed from W-S all the way to our fancy new shipping terminals at the coast?  All of these would have benefited the Dell facility, and made it more competitive over the long run had the project worked out.  But now that Dell's gone, if we had spent our money on infrastructure, rather than a bunch of broken dreams, there'd be a big shell with upgraded infrastructure sitting there waiting for whatever industry drove the next big economic expansion.

I find the notion that economic activity ever happens without at least some meaningful government-funded structures misguided and naive.  However, the Dell deal should be a cautionary tale in the long and sordid saga of economic incentives.  And if there's one lesson I wish we'd learn, it'd be this: don't ever just hand out cash, either in the form of tax breaks or grants.  Instead, do the things that government does well, like building infrastructure and educating the citizens.

Manzi, Hayek, and climate change

Since Andrew Sullivan came around to opposing the Iraq war and supported Obama, and I can't in any good faith refer to him as a rhetorical opponent in current ideological divisions, Jim Manzi has become my favorite conservative to read and wrestle my disagreements with.  I even had an oblique chance at dialog last year when Sully published a few of my e-mails on climate change, and Manzi responded.  He has consistently been one of those at a considerable ideological distance from me who I enjoy reading thoroughly.

I've appreciated Manzi's rigorous analysis on climate change, and was looking forward to a long form, updated perspective on climate change and carbon regulation as he was guest blogging this week.  Which is why I'm extremely disappointed in today's note on the social cost of carbon as he guest blogs at Sully's place.  This essay, to put it frankly, is an unholy mess.

Manzi is assuredly more versed in Hayek than I am, but my understanding of the basic warning is that more government planning of the economy leads to a decrease in individual liberty, which has a concomitant deleterious impact on productive economies due to the inflexibilities of a rigid state program.  If this is a fair summary, then I find Manzi's argument that carbon regulation is somehow akin to this in any but the most broadly ideological forms extremely underdetermined.

The meat of the post, I would say, offers what I would call a roundly convincing argument that meaningful quantitative analysis of the economic impacts of carbon regulation approaches impossibility, or as Manzi puts it, 'There is no analytical basis on which we can really “put a price on carbon”.'  I might add that he has equally demonstrated that there is no analytical basis on which we can really put a price on the costs of carbon emissions. 

I don't think this is a malicious or intentionally misleading error.  My understanding of Manzi's analytical personality is that his primary impulse is to try to tackle complex issues with highly sophisticated quantitative analytical methods, and shake out strong and useful conclusions.  From what I have read of him, he is remarkably good at it.  However, as the saying goes, when one spends all day using a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail, and in this case, I think Manzi is using his quantitative skills to pound a screw.

For one thing, Manzi brushes the entirity of "social cost of carbon" into the potential decline in world economic product (a loss of approximately 3%).  This not only excludes costs which I would deem "social" such as habitat and species loss, land degradation, and changes in local climate, but also aggregates the risk into a global pool, which is assuredly too crude a measure to make a meaningful judgment.  To take the extreme case, what if the 3% loss were entirely distributed in 6% of the world's population losing half their economic productivity?   The 3% measure looks small on paper, but in this instance 180 million people (over half the population of the US) just had their livelihoods utterly destroyed, to the point that they are now refugees.  While this extreme concentration of risk is certainly fiction, it is patently clear to both the casual reader and the sophisticated analyst that the costs of climate change will not be equally distributed.  The risks to the majority of the 160 million in Bangladesh should be enough to invalidate such crude aggregation of costs.

For another, in his association of all British driving taxes with "anthropogenic global warming (AGW)," he elides the myriad other costs of driving, including public health, land use, public land preservation, safety and enforcement, etc.  Yes, once again these costs are difficult to quantify.  This, however, does not mean they do not exist.

After dozens of paragraphs of analytical spinning, Manzi reaches the third to last, and engages in a breathtaking series of theoretical leaps.  Costs are impossible to quantify, therefore "It becomes pure power politics," and therefore is a state imposition of economic costs without quantitative justification, and is therefore akin to total state planning of the economy.  Excuse me, but WHAT?!? 

To put this as simply as I can, there is a vast universe between "inability to sufficiently quantify" and "a different theoretical justification [for socialism]."  What Manzi is experiencing is not the unearthing of socialist motives, but the limits of the quantitative revolution of the 20th century.  There was a time, as strict Enlightenment rationalism and to a lesser extent, positivism reached their zenith, that we supposed that all complex issues could be solved with sufficient quantitative analysis.  Difficult questions such as the costs of action or inaction on climate change demonstrate this as well as anything, but the lesson to take here is not that we have no analytical tools at all and retreat to pristine ideological tropes.  (In this, I think Manzi is unintentionally making what I might call the Bachmann move -- it's impossible to quantify, and it involves government action, therefore it is the first step towards tyranny.)  Rather, it should be a clarion call to dust off analytical methods tossed aside during much of the quantitative revolution, such as informal logic, deep description, dialectics, rigorous observation, ethics, and comparative studies.  (One can even retain critical rationalism, just without getting lost in numbers.) 

There are others attempting to do their best to apply broader principles to understanding the impacts of climate change.  Manzi's argument over the past 18 months has been to repeatedly emphasize that the correct response to this question is to quantify the costs and the benefits.  He now illustrates that those costs and benefits are impossible to quantify, and therefore takes it as Q.E.D. that we must retreat to extremely abstract arguments (as in, this kind of smells vaguely like Hayek).  This might be forgivable if Manzi put any effort whatsoever into a rigorous consideration of the situation, along the lines of what Hayek actually did in his critique of government planners.  Instead, he makes this jump in a few brief sentences which rely entirely on vague notions.  Unfortunately, I have to say I found this neither convincing nor even challenging.  Instead, it seems to mark for me the end of Manzi's meaningful contribution to the debate, which is really too bad.

A brief comment on the OK Great installation

After a couple of false starts in the the blogger relations category, some folks at a Flywheel Design-related blog called Ok Great dropped me (and I presume other bloggers too) a message asking us to check out an entry about their installation in the "Itsnota Park" where the old Geer building used to stand. 

Now, I generally like the stuff that Flywheel's been involved with, and I'm all for public art downtown, spontaneous and otherwise.  This crew probably has a lot of good work to come from them.  But here's a tip: if you find yourself writing this in a blog entry:

As a city that hails itself as the new cultural capital of the South and at the same time is rarely host to any public art, we figured this simple little tableau might stir up some kind of general reaction or at least spark a bit of curiosity.

Wrong.  I personally lurked in the bushes for an hour or two waiting to secretly photograph passersby only to be let down by the 50 or so folks that walked past only a few feet away from the couch and didn’t even notice (including a City of Durham employee who passed a record four times).  All the while, a Durham Housing Authority truck sat twenty feet away.

. . .

So what have we learned?  The City of Durham is thoroughly indifferent to street art.  The citizens of Durham are either as indifferent or just conditioned not to expect it and don’t think to look.  And some creepy dude lit candles in the dark and chilled hard on an old lady’s couch eating candies.

there may be more going on here than indifference and apathy.  Specifically, if the art installation you put up fails to generate any reaction whatsoever, I'll warrant that it's possible you're dealing with a jaded and artistically diseased populace, but I'd put better odds on you generally failing as an artist in this particular piece.  I have to say, I love me some public art, but had I seen this installation, I probably would have chuckled, shrugged, and kept walking.

And while that's no reason to quit trying, someone who writes that Durham "is rarely host to any public art" needs to have his eyes checked.

The Slow and Subtle Rot* of Tony Rand: Part I

The making of law in North Carolina is an insider game, full of murky corners and byzantine turns to the point that only the obsessive manage to keep track of it all.  While in name all of our representatives wield power in the General Assembly, in reality an enormous amount of the ultimate decision making lies in the hands of a very small number of individuals.  In the state Senate, for instance, Marc Basnight of Manteo has held sway over the body for over 15 years, and has enormous sway over which bills come to the floor and which don't.  While having this much power concentrated in a single individual may be dangerous, to my eyes, Basnight's decisions are on the whole more good than bad.  The second in command in the Senate, however, goes by a name that oddly seems to appear just about every time a worthwhile bill I support dies on procedural maneuvering, an under-the-table slop bucket gets passed to the UNC system (specifically Chapel Hill), or, as is the case today, a particularly odious budget suddenly slams out of the Senate.  That name is Tony Rand, Majority Leader of the Senate.

His influence, however, is subtle enough that it rarely makes the news and is hard to nail down when trying to describe it to others.  There's no smoking gun to pin on him that doesn't involve getting into bureaucratic bilgewater to some extent.  Frankly, though, I'm getting sick of his nonsense, so here's an attempt to start taking note every time Rand shivs a bill, takes writing another into secret conference, or slips questionable powers to some agency in the dark of night.

Our first installment comes from the invaluable NC Policy Watch:

The Senate gave final approval to its version of the state budget Thursday, though even if you happened to be at the Legislative Building in Raleigh, you would have almost certainly missed it.  The Senator who represents you had no opportunity to say anything at all about how the state should address a $4 billion shortfall and balance the budget, much less offer any amendments to protect human services or spare public schools from damaging cuts.

The Senate leadership made sure of that Wednesday when Majority Leader Tony Rand invoked a parliamentary maneuver to end discussion after budget writers described the plan's highlights, a few Republicans complained, and a few amendments were buried.

Under the Senate rules, ending the debate on Wednesday also ended it Thursday before it could begin.

There wasn't much discussion of the amendments either. Rand moved to table each one not long after they were explained and several of his Democratic colleagues enthusiastically vied to second his motion.

If you are tempted to brush all this off as a boring legislative procedure, resist the urge. The process is not only undemocratic and offensive, it is a symbol of the worst of the legislative culture.

For further reading on Tony Rand, while I don't have links handy, other interesting instances are: Rand killing a bill from Mickey Micheaux to give more magistrates and court staff to Durham County's horribly clogged and understaffed judicial system; Rand getting a bill to give all recipients of athletic scholarships at UNC and NCSU (and no other schools) in-state tuition; Rand giving UNC eminent domain power in all of Orange County for the purposes of building another airport.  More to come, I have no doubt.

* I want to note that I spent a good while with the thesaurus trying to come up with the right word here.  "Corruption" is a tad too strong for Rand, and I worry that "rot" is too.  Rand is bad for North Carolina, capricious in his decision making, and infuriating in his politics, but I have no evidence that he takes kick-backs or bribes.  (At least, no more than the standard campaign contribution racket.)

Friday's deep thought

I regret that security considerations in the present day logistically prevent me from throwing a pie at Michelle Bachmann.

April 1 Round-up

My day started off with the clock-radio playing NPR, with Frank Deford talking about lawsuits against teams like the Detroit Lions for defaming the good names of actual lions by being so bad.  I then managed to drop a decent one on my co-workers with a fake techie e-mail (for those who care, I said I was giving up and installing the new version of Exchange for Solaris.  It's kind of an inside joke...)  The News and Observer got into the act with a sports blog entry about how the Chapel Hill police were regulating the sale of light blue paint in order to prevent fans from defacing too much (and yes, I had to try to be the smart ass in the comments). 

Gary Kueber over at Endangered Durham goes for the comedy-at-the-extremes approach and takes on some of his favorite punching bags, including NIS, the Human Services parking lot, DOT, and a few new ones, including electronic billboards.  (And also ribs some fellow bloggers.)

Google's offering this year is, to my eye, highly disappointing compared to past efforts (particularly the sublime Google Romance) and features a supposed new artificial intelligence, which appears to be some kind of split parody between the Terminator franchise and bad personal websites.  

That's all I've found so far.  Anyone else find anything good?

Update: A couple more.  A new product to make your Kindle smell like a real book, and I totally walked right into this.

Jim Webb proposes prison reform commission

This is fantastic news:

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., wants a "top-to-bottom review" by Congress of the nation's criminal-justice system with an eye toward reducing the growing prison population.

With the support of the White House and some Senate Republicans, Webb is proposing a blue-ribbon commission spend 1½ years looking at law-and-order issues.

Webb's office says the panel should take a sweeping look at the way the nation controls crime, metes out punishment and returns felons to society.

A background document says of the commission: "Its task will be to propose concrete, wide-ranging reforms to responsibly reduce the overall incarceration rate; improve federal and local responses to international and domestic gang violence; restructure our approach to drug policy; improve the treatment of mental illness; improve prison administration, and establish a system for reintegrating ex-offenders."

Naturally, this is just one of those "blue ribbon commissions" and won't do anything on its own, but at least the conversation is starting at high levels. 

Yep Roc "Stimulus Package" sale

Heads-up: Yep Roc is having a clearance sale of sorts, with single CDs going for $5 and doubles going for $10, on what looks like a whole lot of their back catalog stuff.  I'd try to summarize some of the finds they've got on sale there, but there's more than I want to try to cut through, so suffice to say that, at least from my perspective, any time is a good time to buy a new Gourds album, but when it's only $5 is a particularly good time.

Go look.  It'll be fun.

Best Song Ever

This may turn into a showdown of sorts with Barry. 

Apparently they're back together and touring this spring.  They're in DC on the 18th of March, and dammit, I. Am. Not. Missing. Them. Again.  The Pogues top my list of bands that I want to see in my lifetime and haven't seen.  I don't care if Shane McGowan is overweight and on his 26th stint out of rehab.