The world we inhabit for such a brief moment in time is fragile.
"There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you". (Loren Acton)
In my next three posts to this site, I want to dwell briefly on three aspects of fragility: globalization and trade, the ecosystem, and human nature and civility. They are different but I contend linked. I mentioned the first a while ago, albeit rather briefly (if not cryptically) but want to return to it. The second ties into the first and my fear is that the third depends on events in the other two.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Risk postcript
In reading my prior post, one might interpret my observation as implying that bankers' decisions have less serious consequences than the decision of pilots. Unfortunately, that may not be the case.
Data collected by C. Pritchard (1990) suggests that suicides rise by 1.72 per million for every 1% rise in unemployment*, which has increased by 4.2% from May 2008 to May 2009. This would suggest that the deteriorating economy has contributed to about 1,700 additional deaths in the last year. This may be a conservative estimate since it does not take into account other factors such as home foreclosures. By contrast there were on average only 66** accident related aviation fatalities a year over the period 1989-2008, and only 16 per years between 2002 and 2008***.
However the point of my last post still stands; paying people more money does not seem to make us any safer.
* Panel data regression based on this data available on request.
** Deaths caused by an illegal act are excluded from the calculation.*** 2009 however is turning out to be a bad year - 49 died in the regional air crash in February in Buffalo, NY, the incident that prompted the Senate hearings mentioned below, and 228 perished in the Air France Rio to Paris flight on June 1st. Pilot error may have been a factor in the first; the cause of the second has not been determined.
Pritchard, C. 1990. Suicide, unemployment and gender variations in the Western world 1964–1986. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 25(2): 73-80.
Data collected by C. Pritchard (1990) suggests that suicides rise by 1.72 per million for every 1% rise in unemployment*, which has increased by 4.2% from May 2008 to May 2009. This would suggest that the deteriorating economy has contributed to about 1,700 additional deaths in the last year. This may be a conservative estimate since it does not take into account other factors such as home foreclosures. By contrast there were on average only 66** accident related aviation fatalities a year over the period 1989-2008, and only 16 per years between 2002 and 2008***.
However the point of my last post still stands; paying people more money does not seem to make us any safer.
* Panel data regression based on this data available on request.
** Deaths caused by an illegal act are excluded from the calculation.*** 2009 however is turning out to be a bad year - 49 died in the regional air crash in February in Buffalo, NY, the incident that prompted the Senate hearings mentioned below, and 228 perished in the Air France Rio to Paris flight on June 1st. Pilot error may have been a factor in the first; the cause of the second has not been determined.
Pritchard, C. 1990. Suicide, unemployment and gender variations in the Western world 1964–1986. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 25(2): 73-80.
Compensation and risk
In testifying before a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety and Security recently, Roger Cohen, President of the Regional Airline Association asserted that there was no data to suggest any relationship between pilot compensation and the risk accidents due to pilot error.
The same lack of relationship between compensation and risk-taking that puts others in jeopardy seems to exist elsewhere; for example in some large banks and one insurance company. Despite high compensation, the senior managers in the cockpits of some of the nations largest financial institutions were unable to prevent a crash.
We seem unperturbed that those in whose hands we place our lives earn minimum wage, while those who look after the money seem to make more mistakes yet are paid a thousands times better (literally).
Perhaps the banks' shareholders might think about this next time they take a regional flight to a shareholders meeting.
The same lack of relationship between compensation and risk-taking that puts others in jeopardy seems to exist elsewhere; for example in some large banks and one insurance company. Despite high compensation, the senior managers in the cockpits of some of the nations largest financial institutions were unable to prevent a crash.
We seem unperturbed that those in whose hands we place our lives earn minimum wage, while those who look after the money seem to make more mistakes yet are paid a thousands times better (literally).
Perhaps the banks' shareholders might think about this next time they take a regional flight to a shareholders meeting.
Type-casting
There are no good or bad people, per se: we simple ascribe these generalizations to others based on
- our experiences in interactions with us
- our observations of their interactions with others
- reports of their interactions with others
Friday, June 19, 2009
A fly by night rant
I'm a little tired this morning because I was woken at about 3:20am and couldn't get back to sleep. The cause of my insomnia was a comment made by a Fox "News" anchor that I found troubling (and regrettably consistent with my take on the channel's approach to broadcasting).
The comment in question involved the setting up of a segment following a commercial break which was to be devoted to ridiculing those (namely PETA) who suggested that President Obama's killing of a fly, and his seemingly indifferent attitude to the intentional ending of a life, might be something worth talking seriously about in terms of the questions it raises.
What bothers me about the Fox News anchor's comment (and its tone) is its lack of reflection. The implication was clearly "why the fuss; it’s only a fly". It is a predictable knee-jerk reaction to an organization that Fox likely labels "dangerous nutters" - yet in the organization's response was surprisingly low key.
Stripped to fundamentals, what we saw was the premeditated killing of a complex self-sustaining multi-celled organism. Fox chose to ridicule those who it imagined would take exception to the callous destruction of any complex multi-celled life-form - animals - while it vilifies anyone who entertains the possibility of destroying a non-self-sustaining single cell for any reason whatsoever - just because the latter is human.
It is this inability or unwillingness to make connections and consider comparisons between situations that might share some common underlying attributes that is troubling. It is the same kind of disconnect manifest in those who advocate killing doctors who perform abortions or suggest that right to life applies to embryos but not to those sentenced to death. Without taking a position on any of these questions, one inevitable conclusion is that the right to life is not absolute, but that it comes with implicit boundary conditions; what these are differs depending on who you ask.
It is this same lack of reflection that prevents one from seeing one person's terrorist as another's heroic freedom fighter, depending on ones vantage point. This could be said of those who fought a guerilla war to liberate the colonies from the British, the Basque separatists, the Taliban mujaheddin (who were widely seen as heroes during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but are now longer held in such high regard), the Irish Republican Army and even some who resisted the Coalition occupation of Iraq.
It is thoughtless compartmentalization - "that principle applies there but not here" - that allows a single person to hold two axiomatically contradictory positions. The typical workaround that allows inconsistency to be ignored is simply "oh, but that's different". The questions, too infrequently asked in the media, must be "How exactly are they different? and why does that particular distinction matter?" Ultimately, such unexamined contradictions reflect either intellectual laziness or indifference to a coherent ethical position.
All of this is not to say that killing a fly ranks along side water-boarding, the Iranian election, North Korea's antics, the regulation of the financial services industry, and health care reform; the fly, like Letterman's stupid joke, is not one of the pressing issues of the day. But it does offer a starting point for a discussion on the right to life that gets past the ideology dogma and into the realm of ethics and morality.
The comment in question involved the setting up of a segment following a commercial break which was to be devoted to ridiculing those (namely PETA) who suggested that President Obama's killing of a fly, and his seemingly indifferent attitude to the intentional ending of a life, might be something worth talking seriously about in terms of the questions it raises.
What bothers me about the Fox News anchor's comment (and its tone) is its lack of reflection. The implication was clearly "why the fuss; it’s only a fly". It is a predictable knee-jerk reaction to an organization that Fox likely labels "dangerous nutters" - yet in the organization's response was surprisingly low key.
Stripped to fundamentals, what we saw was the premeditated killing of a complex self-sustaining multi-celled organism. Fox chose to ridicule those who it imagined would take exception to the callous destruction of any complex multi-celled life-form - animals - while it vilifies anyone who entertains the possibility of destroying a non-self-sustaining single cell for any reason whatsoever - just because the latter is human.
It is this inability or unwillingness to make connections and consider comparisons between situations that might share some common underlying attributes that is troubling. It is the same kind of disconnect manifest in those who advocate killing doctors who perform abortions or suggest that right to life applies to embryos but not to those sentenced to death. Without taking a position on any of these questions, one inevitable conclusion is that the right to life is not absolute, but that it comes with implicit boundary conditions; what these are differs depending on who you ask.
It is this same lack of reflection that prevents one from seeing one person's terrorist as another's heroic freedom fighter, depending on ones vantage point. This could be said of those who fought a guerilla war to liberate the colonies from the British, the Basque separatists, the Taliban mujaheddin (who were widely seen as heroes during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but are now longer held in such high regard), the Irish Republican Army and even some who resisted the Coalition occupation of Iraq.
It is thoughtless compartmentalization - "that principle applies there but not here" - that allows a single person to hold two axiomatically contradictory positions. The typical workaround that allows inconsistency to be ignored is simply "oh, but that's different". The questions, too infrequently asked in the media, must be "How exactly are they different? and why does that particular distinction matter?" Ultimately, such unexamined contradictions reflect either intellectual laziness or indifference to a coherent ethical position.
All of this is not to say that killing a fly ranks along side water-boarding, the Iranian election, North Korea's antics, the regulation of the financial services industry, and health care reform; the fly, like Letterman's stupid joke, is not one of the pressing issues of the day. But it does offer a starting point for a discussion on the right to life that gets past the ideology dogma and into the realm of ethics and morality.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Quit "wining"
Wine, the windows emulator for Linux, is going nowhere - for good reason. Wine is an open source project relying on input and effort from volunteers. The Wine website explains the rational for the community's efforts (see also OS/2, Microsoft and Open Source) as aiming to provide an alternative to Microsoft's quasi monopoly in desktop operating systems by allowing those Windows applications to which we are now accustomed and find hard to do without to run under Linux. Yet 5 years after the release of Office 2003 SP1, the service pack install fails. Given the popularity of MS Office, appropriately described by Bill Gates as one of the "killer apps", this seems somewhate at odds with the community's mission.
Clayton Christian's work on the disk drive industry suggests why: the community listens to itself, not the larger market that it hopes to serve. It's hard to listen to the views of those with whom one as yet has no relationship but it turns out to be essential.
A quick look at the most popular Wine applications shows the problem. Of the 25, only two are not computer games, and both of these (Adobe Photoshop and Canon's Digital Photo Professional) serve one niche market. Together these two applications get only 7% of the community's 'votes'. Microsoft Office 2003 Installer gets only 5 votes (Final Fantasy XI Online Final Fantasy XI has 401) and is so far down the list that it doesn't even show up without filtering.
If the Wine community only works on projects its predominantly gaming community wants, few if any potential Office-under-Wine-under-Linux users will use Wine and thus will not join the community - and there will be no impetus to improve Office running under Wine. We have a vicious circle, ironically exactly the catch 22 situation that the Wine community talks about on it's "Why Wine" page. If Wine is serious about fostering an open source alternative to Microsoft's operating systems, it needs to break this cycle or end up like 3D0, a small footnote in history.
Clayton Christian's work on the disk drive industry suggests why: the community listens to itself, not the larger market that it hopes to serve. It's hard to listen to the views of those with whom one as yet has no relationship but it turns out to be essential.
A quick look at the most popular Wine applications shows the problem. Of the 25, only two are not computer games, and both of these (Adobe Photoshop and Canon's Digital Photo Professional) serve one niche market. Together these two applications get only 7% of the community's 'votes'. Microsoft Office 2003 Installer gets only 5 votes (Final Fantasy XI Online Final Fantasy XI has 401) and is so far down the list that it doesn't even show up without filtering.
If the Wine community only works on projects its predominantly gaming community wants, few if any potential Office-under-Wine-under-Linux users will use Wine and thus will not join the community - and there will be no impetus to improve Office running under Wine. We have a vicious circle, ironically exactly the catch 22 situation that the Wine community talks about on it's "Why Wine" page. If Wine is serious about fostering an open source alternative to Microsoft's operating systems, it needs to break this cycle or end up like 3D0, a small footnote in history.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Not quite what they had in mind?
Allan goes on a road trip in his father's car and gets into an accident. He calls his dad who wires him the money to get the car fixed. However, Alan's dad says there will be conditions - he'll have to drive more carefully in the future and he may have to take more driving classes when he get home. Instead of fixing the car, Alan spends half the money on drink, drugs and hookers, and expensive gifts for his friends; with the rest he hires an attorney to prevent his father from forcing him to take additional driving classes when he gets back. The car, unsurprisingly, is not fixed.
Key
Key
| Allan | Banks receiving bailout money |
| Alan's father | Tax payers |
| Money to get the car fixed | TARP + ... |
| Road trip | Writing CDSs and buying CDOs |
| Drink, drugs and hookers | "Performance" related bonus payments |
| Expensive gifts | Dividends |
| Attorney | Washington lobbyist |
| Additional driving classes | Government regulation and oversight |
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