I’m getting old enough know where my established curmudgeon status becomes, if not justified, no longer quite as outrageous.  I can almost think of today’s teenagers and college students as “youth” and I’m far enough into adulthood I can purse my lips at some of the choices my parents’ generation made and the burdens they will leave behind.  Deferring for now a screed against Greta Thornburg and the gerontocracy, I turn to a well-covered source of angst for my generation as well as others – climate change.

Not many days ago now the New York Times had a deeply disheartening story on the disappearance of 30% of bird life in North America over the past 50 years or so.  The spot-on allusion to the classic  Silent Spring made me think of what I haven’t heard, and perhaps never shall, in terms of birdsong.  As birds are only one part of the ecosystem and, I imagine, unlikelt to decline on their on without foregoing or knock-on effects, the headline felt much like a bodyblow I was powerless to defend against.  How can I swing back against an invisible opponent?  What can I do to help, or at least not to harm – this second part is I think the more important as many of us know we will never or at least seldom directly remediate the damage our consumption and lifestyles do, but we can at least adjust them.  A quick perusal of the now-common question “How do I reduce my carbon footprint?” brought me to a few points and immediate action items particular to my own circumstances (that is urban, car-less, homeowners, cooking my own meals, and willing to make changes):

The headline figure we are looking at is that, per capita, Americans generate 15-20 metric tons of carbon per year according to a variety of estimates I reviewed.  (Pounds or tons of carbon is clearly the de facto metric among most sources that discuss this issue.  Methane, estimated to be 25-30 times more potent than carbon as a greenhouse gas, also comes up.)  I saw an estimate that in order to stave off a 2 degree global temperature rise by 2050, the per capita carbon emission level must be brought down to 1.9 tons per person per year.  So we are looking at, on average, a 90% or so reduction.  Yowzer.  But of course, the precisely average person is hard to find, so I needed to know more about my production.  Another interesting article, admittedly from a decade ago, estimated the carbon floor of any American to be around 8 tons (this was for a homeless person living in a box) because we all bear the burden of our part in the national carbon infrastructure – roads, the military, social resources, and so forth.  This is a critical point – as I estimate my own emissions that I have agency to change, even in a world where I can significantly reduce my own footprint smugness is not in order because my government is emitting, as it were, on my behalf.

When it comes to estimating my own emissions, carbon calculators abound – good news!  Getting a good estimate, however, requires a surprisingly deep handle on our everyday habits, and even then the spread of outcomes is surprising.  I used carbon calculators from:

• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• The Nature Conservancy
• CarbonFootprint.com
• Terrapass.com

The EPA alone (and quite rightly given it is a government agency) allows you to download their calculator as a spreadsheet so you can see the assumptions behind it – the other sources are a black box.  Using the same inputs, I wanted to see if the calculators gave similar estimates of my household emissions.  My inputs were as follows:

• Household of 2 people
•  650 kWh of electricicty used per month
•  $46/month of natural gas usage
•  $720/year of water
•  100% of electricity is purchased from renewables
•  No car
•  Public transit use is 250 miles per year each of bus, light rail, and inter-city rail
•  Air travel – I use one “big” and one “small” round trip per year, with big being a 3,700 miles trans-Atlantic trip, and “small” being a 1,400 mile trip

With these inputs, what do I get as my household’s carbon footprint?

•  EPA: 6,982 pounds (or 3,491 per person) -> 19,702 pounds per person per year is their figure for the U.S. average
•  The Nature Conservancy: 29 tons (or 14.5 tons per person) -> 49 tons per household, or 24.5 tons per person, is their figure for the average
•  CarbonFootprint.com: 15.6 tons per person, or 31.2 tons total, although they have no clear option to note that 100% of my household electricity is bought from a renewable source, which accounts for 4.6 metric tons per person, so that would be an adjusted 11 tons per person or 22 tons for the household.  Their average per person is 16.5 tons.
• TerraPass.com: 13,762 pounds (or 6,881 per person) -> 63,934 pounds is their figure for the U.S. average

This is quite a spread! The EPA’s figure is only 3.2 tons of carbon for the household, while the Nature Conservancy says 29 tons – that’s almost an order of magnitude!  What gives?  To start, how comprehensive each calculator is.  The EPA ignore public transit and flights, focusing almost entirely on home energy use and car-based transportation, and also excludes the impact of diet and other secondary categories like shopping.  Indeed, the comprehensiveness of the Nature Conservancy and Carbonfootprint.com is laudable, while TerraPass at least adds flights to the mix.

What are my immediate takeaways from doing this analysis four times?

• Home energy footprint is clearly the primary carbon producer.  The fact that I buy 100% renewable electricity through my distributor takes the household footprint down by 4.6 tons (per Carbonfootprint.com) or 2.7 tons (Terrapass) – this is very chunky indeed.  Then again, the Nature Conservancy only estimates 1 ton of carbon saved by buying 100% renewable electricity.
• Not owning a car is a big one, and it’s impressive how strong public transit use doesn’t even come close to making a similar footprint.  If the other member of my household, C, drove her 2004 Mini Cooper 15,000 miles per year, that’s 5 metric tons of carbon.  Clearly, whether it’s the bus or biking, those of us who can avoid owning a car get a great head start.  Notably, the exact output of cars is eminently quantifiable thanks to the regulation around emissions.
• Travel by plane can easily negate any savings brought about from using public transit alone.  The two flights I input produce 2-3 metric tons of carbon, so frequent flyers are putting those of us on the ground to shame.  Fingers crossed battery-powered aircraft come into their own in the new few decades.
•  Diet can also produce an outsize result, but one that requires its own analysis to determine.  Meat is, of course, notoriously bad for the environment, particularly beef (for which almost 1/4 of the contiguous 48 states is reserved as pastureland) but just how to parse out all the steps in that supply chain is, frankly, an exercise I am not currently interested in pursuing.  Eating local and in moderation, and making ones own food as much as possible, seems to me to be a reasonable start.
•  A small one, but something that appeals to me, is to stop using the dryer for laundry whenever possible – simply hang dry clothes instead!  Composting food waste also reduces the amount of trash I send to landfill and creates more of a virtuous cycle.

Interestingly, the assumptions behind these calculations might moot all but the most concrete of actions I can take (line-drying clothes, diverting food waste to compost, not eating meat, biking, etc.).  The cost of gasoline and electricity, as well as the source of the latter, seem to be hovering behind these calculators.  As renewables grow as a share of energy production, their enormous environmental cost will shrink – suggesting that the government should continue to build a framework that advantages renewable sources over polluters.  Electric cars would do the same, with the proviso that their base load power source would need to be clean to make them live up to their apparent promise.  The multiplier effect of carbon-free electricity production therefore makes changing to renewable energy the most compelling thing we can do to reduce our impact.

I feel happy that I’ve taken two major steps in the form of not owning a car and buying my electricity from 100% renewable sources to reduce my footprint.  While I can do more around the edges (try to reduce my energy usage by simply consuming less, line-drying clothes, composting, etc.) I think the other clear step I can take is to re-run this analysis annually and buy carbon offsets.  TerraPass offers offsets to the tune of ~$25 for 1,000 lbs. of carbon.  If I’m doing 15 tons – my worst case scenario from above – that’s around 33,000 lbs. or $825 per annum.  That not a little, but it’s also not a lot.  If the government were to collect a tax on my for this amount and I had confidence it was actually working, I wouldn’t blink an eye.

I will return to the assumptions behind carbon footprint calculators in the future, but I’m at least happy that for the first time ever, I can put my own contribution to global warming in context of all the figures that get thrown around.

Several weeks ago a piece came out on Bloomberg that fit very much in their frequently used template of “academic research results – what it means and how it will effect you.”  I find these stories irksome for the predictability of the strikethrough, but I’ll come back to that, because the research here was quite important, if not actually that new, and it matters for me and, I think, for savers.

The research in question dealt with the skewness of individual equity returns.  I love skewness and its to-the-next-power brother, kurtosis.  Indeed, the whole progression of return, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis always seemed to me to be a ladder that clearly separated the knowledge level and sophistication of any financial practitioner.  The client rarely goes even so far as the second item on the list, but those doing the best thinking in the business seemed to inevitably be considering skewness and kurtosis even as return and standard deviation remained the statistics that got printed on the quarterly review.

Skewness highlights the lack of symmetry in the distribution of returns.  We often use the Bell curve as our hypothetical example of how stock returns are distributed, but of course here we have already made a simplification (make it as simple as possible, but do no simplify!) for our clients’ benefit that does more harm than good.  The average stock performs worse than the index, the research tells us.  That is, positive skewness – the presence of a few incredible performers in the index – pulls up the average performance figures, even though an active manager will be more interested, or perhaps better to say more captive to, median performance.  Quoting the doyen of smug grins and alternative indexing, Rob Arnott, the article states that with this in mind active managers are starting from behind the index, not even.  With news that assets under management in passive products were larger those in active products for the first time ever as of the end of August, the research seems to be another death knell for active management.  There was another article, months ago, citing recent research on active management that demonstrated how the presence of any kind of consistently alpha-generating active manager shrinks the opportunity set for others of the same kind, creating an ouroboros-like outcome where only a few elites manage to generate that performance consistently (and while the article doesn’t mention it, picking your winner of winners ahead of time must surely be an impossible task).

As the bell continues to toll for active management, I think less about fund flows and AUM than the actual work done in vain.  Years and years ago I remember a very bright researcher publishing a report on the number of buy-side analysts and how the figure had ballooned in the past few decades.  Anecdotally, in his career, Wall Street had gone from the repository of third sons to the hardest-charging, most lucrative (and therefore competitive) business in the country.  Only now does technology, and perhaps the rarified world of private equity, start to take the hand off for this designation, but the damage is done.  There are tens of thousands of professional analysts out there, be they fundamental or quantitative, and for every one employed by a D.E. Shaw or a Renaissance, there must be dozens at a firm that has added, after-fee, after-tax, precisely no value.  Think of all the ink that has been spilled, the spreadsheets updated, the conference calls listened to, the footnotes reviewed, the presentations and pitch decks assembled, all to start behind the finish line and never ever catch up.  It’s depressing twice over, in my mind, because not only has the analyst failed – all those years of work for naught – but the client is worse off as well!  I haven’t put enough thought into it to see if the idea holds, but there’s a thought experiment in which all the assets from the bottom-performing, say, 25% of actively managed funds over the past decade had instead been invested in an index fund.  Would that initial swap over have boosted the price at t-10, such that the whole exercise becomes recursive and self-defeating?  Were the choices of those bottom 25% part of the process that led to their own underperformance or to the outperformance of the others?  This is a question for Cliff Asness and Howard Marks, but given how the former has long since been trying to harvest premia and the latter’s deeply philosophical letters rather detract from the fact that at core he is buying junk bonds and other hard-to-value assets where the valuation and analysis are far more opaque, difficult, and therefore rewarding than the seasoned veteran trying to beat the S&P 500 using the tenets of Peter Lynch.

So much spilled ink, but to an extent so too is it spilled milk.  I can complain about the inefficiencies and failings of this industry because it is the only one I know – I have no doubt elsewhere there are attorneys or doctors or civil servants similarly pulling their hair out in frustration.  More to the point, the nit-picking about performance buries the lead on the fact that most people simply don’t have enough savings, or don’t have the ability to save.  Even for those that can save, the importance of taxes and timing are critical – as I learned to my chagrin, the tax math is so critical that it more than wipes out any of the alpha analysts might spend so much time in pursuit of.  The explosive growth of CFPs over the past several years is, I think, a partial acknowledgement of this fact (although equally an acknowledgement that, as paying for an advisor wasn’t producing outperformance, another value-add service was in order).  And yet, as much as my foregoing complaint clearly affects the small percentage of the country who can save and invest enough, it seems to me the silent drift towards the management of taxes and liability management and retirement and all that is…sad.  The romance is gone.  If the investing world used to be the Age of Sail, with swashbuckling masters of the universe delivering untold treasure to a fortunate few, lots of risk, and high barriers to entry, today’s world is that off container ships slowly and predictably delivering containerized cargo along well-traveled roots.  It’s better, but with the rough-edges shaven away, it simply isn’t as compelling for those of us who want to believe (likely mistakenly) that we can make an actual impact somewhere.  Whether that means I end up doing something entirely different, or if I take a job checking boxes while the container ships disgorge their predictable cargo – glancing all the while at an old model of a tall ship in a bottle on my desk – remains to be seen.

 

I was perusing the archives of the CIA’s in-house journal,  Studies in Intelligence, as I do periodically when I convince myself I might discern some secrets about today’s goings on from some accidentally-unredacted article.  As usual the answer was no, but also as usual I delved into the archives for juicier, if more outdated, tidbits.  I came across a piece released in 2014 under the Freedom of Information Act, recounting the heyday of the CIA’s canoe pool – that is, a number of CIA employees who canoed to work when Langley had just become the new headquarters but the Washington beltway made traffic from Maryland a nightmare.  The story itself is grin-inducing, but the final section contained honest self-reflection that was not only quite charming but startlingly relevant for today.  The author, Robert Sinclair, wrote in spring of 1984:

“Aside from the obvious benefits – the chance to see wildflowers and pileated woodpeckers, the exercise, the insights into the workings of nature – what do I get out of all this?  Part of the answer is that regular contact with the earth is as important for me as it was for Antaeus. Another part (and it may be saying the same thing in a less metaphorical way) is that for a moment I get to evade modern man’s almost complete dependence on secondhand information. People now are very largely containerized, physically and even mentally, and without really noticing it we have come to rely on what others tell us about the world beyond our narrow boxes. I suppose this has always been true, but the ratio between the great mass of secondhand data and the small amount we pick up on our own can never have been greater than it is now. It is all too easy to ignore the distinction – to forget that nearly everything has been through a process of selection, organization, and interpretation before we get it. This is a particularly serious danger for professional information-processors like me, but I think the proposition holds for most people. At an rate, the canoe commute does give me a firsthand glimpse of what is going on beyond the various manmade containers I inhabit; I benefit from regular access to information that is clearly unmediated.”

This in 1984, years before the web would even begin to make a dent on the collective conscience.  I loved his point about the ratio of secondhand data to what we truly pick up ourselves, yet I find myself strangely at a loss regarding what to do about it.  My first thought was that I need to canoe to work, but challenging the shipping channel in the Delaware seem likelier to acquaint me with death rather than an appreciation of nature.  The more serious follow-on was about something more topical of late, the Mueller report.  I’ve read a laundry list of summaries and reactions to the report, some of which were themselves clearly based on summaries, but have not picked it up myself.  And yet even that is, in its way, a secondary source – a ponderous, comprehensive one, but nonetheless not primary for my purposes.  My mind then turned towards my work, or at least the work I want to have.  I tout my experience as a primary and secondary researcher, but really the bias is strongly towards secondary.  So few people are doing (are qualified to do?) real primary research, but it’s so powerful when the results come through.  To be fair, that dismisses the enormous amount of work that is done but not published because only results get published.  Nonetheless, it makes me want to delve further into primary research, although I wonder at once if I’m qualified to do so and, more importantly, just what I want to research!

Food for thought to be sure, and it turns out Sinclair also publishes a monograph at around the same time about cognitive science in the intelligence field.  He describes it as having sunk without a trace at time of publishing, but a Center for the Study of Intelligence republishing in 2010 appears to have garnered it more attention.  I hope to read his “Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis” in more depth in the near future.

 

We’re approaching the tipping point and it’s time, I think, to begin preparing.  In the same way that pumpkin spice infiltrates food and Christmas tunes creep onto the radio earlier every year, election cycles become the primary ingredient of the news cycle as pundits grasp for something to fill the dead air earlier every time.  Labor Day is less than a week away, and with summer unoffocially drawing to an end, that – more or less – will mark a year and change until the 2020 election, ergo we have to speculate about that, ergo we have to speculate about primaries, ergo we have to speculate about what drives those, and so on and so on.  The wave is only beginning to build, but I suspect the next 434 days will be a test of endurance and drowning out the noise to try and find the things that matter – or, perhaps a healthier option, of drowning it out altogether!  In that vein, I want to memorialize a few things I expect to see, what I will keep my eyes open for, and what I will actually undertake myself.

To start with, we have the standards.  In the same way any calendar year that is a multiple of the 50th anniversary of a prominent event or person’s birth or death provides predictable coverage, we can predict the breathless news of the usual events as well as the corresponding meta-coverage:

• Iowa caucuses, with reflections on the character of Iowans and tactical necessities of winning a vote in a place that isn’t relevant to the country at large
  • Meta-analyses of how we still need to reform the political process and have all states hold their caucuses on the same day, or at least close together to avoid the months of useless grandstanding and political theater.  Look for a repeat of this topic in mid- to -late 2020 when the battleground states tap the fat vein of political ad and polling money and wizened commentators and battle-scarred Clinton supporters point out that we need to reform the electoral college.  For my own benefit, find the quote (Jefferson? Madison?) to the effect that the electoral college was stupid and we should abolish it.  Bonus points: conspiracy theories about disloyal electors now that courts have ruled electors don’t have to cast votes for the candidate that won the popular vote in their state.
• Debates, with hopes of substantive conversations dashed by moderators either intellectually unable to pose tough questions or hamstung by the need to funnel in questions from people who used the correct hashtag to participate in that evening’s event
  • Meta-gaming the Democratic cottage industry of debate participation and arbitrary math to determine who is and isn’t a real candidate such that they, too, may answer empty questions in timeframes too narrow to develop any real sense of what they think.  Whether there will be a challenger to Trump from the Republicans that garners a debate is almost moot as there isn’t much further he can drop in terms of lack of verbal aptitude.  Square footage of stage will vie with square footage of the digital backdrop as the de facto metric that TV producers try to maximize.  Bonus points: If there is a Republican debate, returning to Reagan as the ultimate American leader; for Democrats, racing to entirely dismiss or similarly lionize Obama as a way to stake out territory.
• Conventions are held in second-tier cities of Milwaukee and Charlotte, already an indication that the DNC and RNC are doing the equivalent of holding a management retreat deep in the woods, away from the big city so people won’t figure out just how febrile and fragile the situation has become.  Despite apocalyptic backroom meetings, presenters at the conventions will go through their lines with rictus grins that prevent the screams held in their chests from escaping.  No celebrities speaking to chairs here – just grim political stagecraft.
  • Meta-analyzing the future of both parties, commentators will be desperate to look for future contenders, listening for even a hint of charisma and vision from the up-and-comers granted the chance to speak.  Strong performances, if any, will immediately if briefly factor into vice-presidential calculus that has already been completed by that time; a dearth of results will instead cue pundits to roll out a pathetic list of “gone but not forgotten” names as a way to pass the time.  Look for Ryan and Palin’s names on one side, Webb and Panetta on the other.  Wild card a few generals and admirals for good measure, just to remember that some Americans get to watch all this nonsense while deployed in various misbegotten corners of the world.  Bonus points: Articles making comparisons to the ’68 convention in Chicago with overt references to ACO and Pelosi have no impact on the proceedings but further increase the enmity to two wings of the Democratic party feel for one another.  For myself, I’ll be interested to see if the official 2020 platforms of both parties are radically different from 2016, and if so how – the RNC’s was, if memory serves, the most conservative on record, while measuring how far the DNC moves left might be an indication of what the party will look like for the next two or three cycles.
• Vice-presidential calculus will remain, as ever, a dark art of polls, dirt-digging, favors, and seeing if candidates can forgive one another for the deep personal loathing that must surely develop on the campaign trail.  At least one potential candidate will have their chances torpedoed by a revelation around money or personal relationships.
  • Meta-stories on the powers and role of the vice-president, how they have evolved, and who has done a good or bad job in recent years will abound.  A low stakes way for budding pundits to start to take up a few seconds of airtime with vacuous guesstimates based on nothing but the latest Politico article they read.  Trump will likely keep Pence unless Pence is already preparing some golden parachute to take him away from the downward spiral, but even so his replacement’s identity (Jared?) would be mostly irrelevant; the Democrats will be doing multi-dimensional modeling of geography, race, age, leftness, and other factors.  Burnout from years of campaigning will devastate the field such that pundits will happily roll out names of prominent non-candidates. Stacey Abrams will have been on the short list from day one, but will eventually bow out to wisely win an office outright before turning to the 2024 race.  Bonus points: the (apocryphal?) quote on the vice presidency being worth a bucket of warm spit.
• Polls and modeling will be endlessly cited and then dismissed with a shrug because they “didn’t work” last time around.  (See my earlier post on Nate Silver’s wonderful review of 538 predictive performance.)  A race to the bottom of opaque statistical modeling will ensue as journeymen mathematicians are hired left, right, and center; even as high quality polls continue to do their good work in the background, their results will be roundly ignored by the news sites’ need to publish a “diversity of opinions” i.e. clickbait pieces from people who don’t understand math beyond PEMDAS.
  • 538 will remain the standard-bearer for excellence, although their overstaffed politics desk will mean that there will be far too much dross to pick through as well as “chats” that superimpose the qualitative views of the writers over the less informative polls as we wait for major updates.  The Upshot on the New York Times will try its best to keep up but will both fail to do so in a quantitative way as well as being hamstrung by the chaos and contradiction of the opinion page and house bias.  Fox News will do the usual and ignore any reality that does not have Trump winning unless it absolutely has to – either way, warnings about socialism will be grimly announced with increasing frequency as election day approaches.  Bonus points: A major pundit writes a piece dismissing statistics and polling entirely because America is people and people aren’t numbers, or something to that effect.  For my own part, I want to recreate the Bread and Peace model of Douglas Hibbs, which I find to be the most useful base scenario to build from.  At time of writing, real disposable income growth per capita during Trump’s term to date means he looks like a strong incumbent.  Democrats must, perversely, hope for a recession or a major uptick in American military casualties to have the odds turn in their favor.  (Although as Hibbs notes, there are other unscientific and idiosyncratic items that go into this – Trump’s unbelievable personal traits and actions may well be the tailwind the Democrats need.)
• Election security and foreign interference will be perennial favorites, sometimes explored in depth in a particular municipality that is doing an exceptionally good or bad job, sometimes a throwaway bugbear to stoke anxiety.
  • Meta-narrative on whether the Mueller report changed anything, continuing allusions to collusion, transitioning to issues such as laws affecting voting eligibility and “get out the vote” efforts, as well as potential dives into how technology and social media impact the election.  Bonus points: Cambridge Analytica gets mentioned, but not the overt ad buys by presidential campaigns.  For my own part, I’ll be interested to see how the new voting machines work and after the fact commentary from informed experts.

I’ve missed something, I’m sure.  Notice that I make no reference to issues, to causes, to what should be as opposed to what is.  All of those are topics are worth their own discussion, but perhaps that’s more easily done when the stage is set for the background distractions and the frustrations of the new cycle are already baked in.  Happy viewing!

Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, first came to my attention from an aside remark by a different writer who borrowed Zuboff’s term “surveillance capitalism” in a boarder discussion about social media and the firms behind it.  The terms accuracy and pithiness struck me immediately, and I made a note to chase down more of Zuboff’s work.  Not long after, reviews of her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism started to pur in, affirming that this was likely to be the magisterial account we have been waiting for around the history and implications of the companies behind this new paradigm.  I have been slow to actually pick up a copy of the book in my stubborness not to depart from my pre-existing stack of books to read, so I was delighted to find an avenue to cheat in the form of an episode of the podcast Hidden Forces.

I came across the podcast when I was tracking down their interview with Hong Kong investor David Webb, but saw that Zuboff had been interviewed around the same time.  I listened with great apprehension and was richly reward for my time – Zuboff is wonderfully articulate, makes things as simple as possible without simplifying, and the depth and breadth of her work makes her deeply compelling.  The host of the podcast isn’t particularly useful, but has the good sense to mostly stay quiet and listen.  A highly recommended listen, and on the basis of this alone I can declare Zuboff is truly one of the triumvirate, along with Lanier and Morozov, who cut through the noise on the reality of the internet, big data, privacy, capitalism, and how they all relate to today’s human experience.

https://www.hiddenforces.io/podcast/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism

 

I recently read “A Sport and a Pastime” by James Salter, a book that had been on my list for at least a year.  A friend pointed me (after the fact) to a profile of him in the  New Yorker from 2013 that stated his frustration with not quite breaking into the canon of top-tier writers.  One of the sentences was something to the effect of “he is tired of being seen as a writer of great sentences, of books with dogeared pages.”  It made me wince, because while I couldn’t bring myself to really love the book – it hasn’t aged well as the shocking intimacy of a 1960s affair seems almost banal today – I certainly underlined a few sentences and dogeared a few pages:

“If I had been an underclassman he would have become my hero, the rebel who, if I had only had the courage, I might have also become. Instead I did everything properly. I had good marks. I took care of my books. My clothes were right. Now, looking at him, I am convinced of all I missed. I am envious. Somehow his life seems more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star.”

“She has her moments. Still, it’s dangerous to believe in what she seems to be. One often has the impression there is another, desperate woman underneath, but this is the extent of her power, this intimation of sexual wealth. Billy always talks about how beautiful she is. It’s almost as if he’s protesting: but she is beautiful. And she is. Their life is arranged to exhibit this beauty. They treat it like the possession of a fine house.”

All of his early descriptions of France and Autun are superb, I can’t excerpt just one out of context.  I was also surprised to find the title comes from an unattributed translation of the Koran.  Looking it up on my own (Salter assigns the quote from 57:19, but I find it is 57:20 from the online Koran I found) the verse is essentially chastising the reader that this life is a delusion, that amusement and diversion (a sport and a pastime) are frivolous and that in the long term we should be thinking about obtaining forgiveness from Allah as we enter the eternal.  The word “delusion” in the translation I found seemed appropriate given the unreliable narrator, and knowing more about the quote makes me like the novel more.  I recommend the book for the sentences and dogeared pages, but as a modern classic I fear it fails to stand up.

July 4th.  The other 364 days of the year Philadelphians walk around with a heavy chip on our collective shoulders – we lost the opportunity to be the political capital of our nation in the 18th century, and the commercial heart slipped towards New York in the following decades – knowing that our city’s greatest day lays in its past.  Indeed, after ten of the city’s best years in post-WWII history, Philadelphia is only now retracing a total population level it first crested 1910.

I spent the holiday walking around Independence Mall, the area surrounding Independence Hall in Old City, the brick-clad neighborhoods of which hold many National Park and other historical sites of 18th century America.  The National Constitution Center, a museum dedicated to that document and its co-evolution along with our country, sits two blocks north of Independence Hall on slightly higher ground.  From its second floor, the plate glass windows give a lovely view down to Independence Hall itself – you can almost convince yourself, in the right light, that you can make out the replica of John Hancock’s desk on the raised dais where he presided over the Continental Congress – across two blocks of lawn and a low-slung building that houses the Liberty Bell.

As well as Independence Hall, the view was dominated by a large group of protestors set up in the midst of one of the lawns, themselves overlooking Market Street and the July 4th parade.  From a distance the protest looked properly permitted and set up, with participants stationary but for the signs they pumped up and down in the air – “Abolish ICE!,” “No concentration camps in America!,” “Reunite immigrant kids!” and the like – while uniformed members of the Philadelphia Police Department stood not far away, chatting idly enough that passerby suspected no escalation was in the cards.

At one point, a small group of protestors – perhaps two dozen – did leave their pre-determined protest zone (freedom of assembly is the often forgotten third child in the First Amendment, after freedom of religion and speech) to interrupt the parade.  With just enough people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder across the four-lane road, they sat with their signs while their spokeswoman made a speech inaudible from 20 feet away – a by-product of the abundant high school marching bands.  They were clearly protesting the Trump administration’s child detention policy.  A few signs likened the policy to the Holocaust, and it later came out that this sub-group, at least, were Jewish.  They deliberately interrupted the parade for news coverage, likely and correctly suspecting the authorized protest would garner them no headlines and perhaps not even a footnote of holiday new coverage, and so escalated to stopping the parade.

I don’t know if it was coincidental or purposeful, but the protestors cut off the parade just as a group of police officers and firefighters from a distant suburb were about to march past.  The officers were totally nonplussed and stood patiently despite the heat.  The crowd was less pleased.  Overwhelmingly white and strongly family-oriented, the general feeling seemed to hover somewhere between exhausted resignation and exasperation that this should be done on a day when they had gotten the kids out of the house.  The Philadelphia Police Department, apparently prepared for this eventuality, had the protestors arrested and in a van quickly, so there wasn’t much time for the mood to progress beyond the initial reaction, although the number of cell phones that came out to record increased by an order of magnitude when the van-loading began.

The reenactors were, as always, quite good.  In the shade of trees on the east side of Independence Mall, in front of the Constitution Center, several dozen had set up their “camp.”  Men and women in period dress (correctly made from the linen of the period, one of them explained to me – the loose-fitting fabric wicks moisture away beautifully as it moves) walked interested visitors through the packs of revolutionary war soldiers, explained the working of period weapons, household implements, and the colonial economy, with an accuracy I have only seen surpassed in detailed books and never in a museum.  As I aimed a Tower-pattern Brown Bess musket down the field (grinning, I admit, like a maniac as its owner explained how my left-handed nature would certainly have pissed off my neighbor in the firing line) I noticed that for every person questioning the reenactors there were likely twenty or thirty waiting in line for the free cupcakes that would be given away that afternoon.  The cupcake line snaked around the protestors, which I thought showed either Machiavellian planning by the police or (more likely) a certain lack of foresight by the planners.  Then again, a revolution does engender a certain amount of chaos.

As the protestors took benefit from their First Amendment rights and the parade continued (Miss Teen Philadelphia waved slowly as she rode in the back of a Corvette belonging to one of the members of the “Old Men with Corvettes” club) the reenactors shuffled into place in front of the Constitution Center.  Around a dozen of them had muskets and formed somewhat messy but still clearly defined ranks.  It was notable that two of them were women, and only one (one of the women) was not white.  The Constitution Center had reminded me that, at the time of independence, one in five people in the thirteen colonies was a slave.  Philadelphia has long since become a majority minority city, roughly 42% black, 12% Hispanic, and 5% Asian.  From 1990 to 2010, more than 260,000 white residents left the city, although the growth over the past decade makes the 2020 Census data of even more interest.  Standing on the second floor of the Constitution Center, with its exhibits discussing (or sometimes glossing over) the gradual expansion of rights, the absolute contended with the relative.  I am proud of my country and what it has achieved, but I’m also aware of how begrudging, difficult, unfair, and even hypocritical country was and continues to be.  The sea of white faces demonstrated (as they demonstrated) that there is more work to be done if Independence Day celebrations are to have the full diversity of the country come to the very spot where the seed of liberty first grew.

The second floor of the Constitution Center has a grand lobby outside the main exhibition, and shoved into a corner were voting machines.  While July 4th would actually be a wonderful day to have people vote, this was merely an opportunity for the electorate to see the new voting machines the city’s election commissioners purchased recently, which will be used in our upcoming citywide elections in November.  The three commissioners are under-resourced, but also – this being Philadelphia – frequently inept, corrupt, or preferably both, and the lack of transparency into the purchase process is a much lamented fact.  The new machines are slick, with a touch screen the size of a medium sized television and a voting card that resembles a short but very wide white belt made of paper.  I thought it was fine, but knowing that the machines would be used by elderly, uneducated voters (Philadelphia residents are among the least educated of any major city) I immediately saw the numerous complications such as text size and contrast that they would face.  It was less bad than it might have been, which in this city we count as a win given our long history of our reach exceeding our grasp when it comes to desirable things.

Just below the voting machines, the reenactors stood in ranks as their leader read the Declaration of Independence with great verve and fire.  It’s a longer document than it looks, and he was still mid-flow by the time we had finished testing the new voting machines and exited the building.  I had an “I Voted” sticker on my t-shirt, which made me pay particular attention to the Declaration, as though there was some direct temporal line between the fake reading of the document and my fake voting on the machines above.  As I pondered this, another reenactor came up to me, but in a uniform that seemed out of kilter; the woman’s green colors were not in sync with the reds, whites, and blues of the uniforms I saw scattered elsewhere.  She confirmed my suspicion by fixing me with a stare, jerking her head at the reading going on over her right shoulder, and firmly stating, “It’s treason, that – the whole lot of them will be hanged” before going on her way.  A Loyalist reenactor.  I disliked her on principle, then realized that this was not dissimilar to the tribal instincts behind the actions that had sparked the protestors the next block over.  My noble American instinct kicked in to remind me that We The People are all one tribe, although in a mental parenthesis I added that “us” meant a white man who owned property at time of writing.  Mental amendments are necessary from time to time.

Overall, the 4th did was it was supposed to.  It got me out to think about the country and what it means, refresh my memory as well as teach me a few new things about what it meant, means, and could mean to be an American, and to mull the problems we are facing today as we continue to stress test democracy.  I hope next year I see signs of progress, however it is in retrospect (and it usually is in retrospect) we define prospect.  And of course that the weather cooperates again!

 

 

A nice editorial (“The Land Where the Internet Ends”) in the New York Times the other day, not least because I was so taken aback that I had no idea its subject existed.

The author visits an enormous radio telescope array in West Virginia (telling named after the late Senator Byrd) whose extraordinary sensitivity demands that people in the area – read, about 12,000 square miles – do without cell phones, microwaves, and other electromagnetic-emitting devices that could mess with the instruments.  This creates, in essence, an oasis of late 20th-century technology.  Oasis is a loaded word, of course, and there’s more to say here, but it’s amazing to me that such a substantial area can exist in the “desert” of internet- and information-filled human habitation.  Such an unexpected haven is surely an oasis of sorts.

The article contains wonderful images as well – the photographer won the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago.  Perhaps it is appropriate most of the man-made structures in the images, beyond the vast mechanism of the radio telescope, are ramshackle barns right out of a movie, the very picture of quiet, pastoral, left-behind Appalachia.  The people the author speaks with and describes seem similarly out of central casting – so much character that they seem fictional.  The man who suffered a brain aneurysm.  The cell phone-less elder locked out of many modern activities.  The young woman who fled modern society and speaks of the rightness of her new life, but also how 80% of people couldn’t handle it.

It puts me in mind of Robert Caro’s ongoing biography of LBJ.  There was a wonderful and powerful anecdote as to why he was so compelling to the people of Texas.  “He brought the lights.”  Electricity coming to desolate areas empty of people, places, and things, simply having light and connection to the outside were enough to win him loyalty.  Would the internet win similar loyalty today?  We hear of billionaires’ philanthropic (but frequently wealth-creating) efforts to launch satellites to beam internet to the poorest parts of the world.  And yet I can’t believe Mark Zuckerberg would be similarly lionized by the inhabitants of, say, the Indian hinterlands.  There’s something active about the internet compared to the passiveness of electricity or phone lines.  Engaging with it is engaging with the work of other people, with portals made by them for you, to engage on their terms and no say of your own.  Electricity is selfish.  I power what I want, when I want.  It’s binary, not some incredible multidimensional spectrum.  Physics, not society.

I enjoyed the author’s description of the physical differences she noticed, feeling that people stood strangely alert before realizing they simply lacked the smartphone hunch.  That there was a shared physiological difference emphasized the feeling that she had truly entered some kind of lost world peopled by beings similar to but not the same as us, a lost colony of homo sapiens who had missed the last three decades, which feels like it might as well be three millenia.  As much pleasure as her descriptions of this lost world gave me – not much different, in its way, than the yearnings many city-dwellers feel for an idealized West, wild country they have never experienced and probably never will but serves as a nice mental escape – I wondered if there was much substance to it.  Is it that different from a piece one could write thirty years ago?  Instead of no internet, it might be a part of the country still without electricity or untouched by modern roads.  Thirty years before that, a town without cars.  Before that, the telegraph, and so on, and so on.

Recall the stories of James Herriot, writing accounts of being a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales in the decades immediately proceeding and following World War II.  He describes at one point coming on a house lonely even by the standards of that lightly-populated stretch of country, and peers into the window to find his erstwhile clients sitting on a wooden bench in silence, feet to the fire.  He is amazed, then realizes that this is what it must have been like not so long ago – no “wireless,” no electricity, just the glow of a fire and the presence of family.  To a 21st century reader, Herriot’s own life is already quaint, so this might as well be a window into the time of Dickens.  But that’s the whole point.  We think in terms of great swatches of history, but surely every generation has this tipping point where the advances of the past thirty years – or whatever time period you like – collectively become enough to feel as though a page has turned.  Am I just the latest in a long line?  There was, no doubt, someone who would have peered through that window alongside James Herriot and thought some measure of what they saw was good, was better, more desirable than the current state of the world.  But those a hundred years later can only laugh; it’s not even a question when you’d choose to live, and while a wood-burning fireplace is a wonderful amenity, not much of that lifestyle seems worth holding up as an ideal.

If I’m just experiencing the same thing that parts of every previous generation have experienced – a yearning for parts of the past we didn’t know to value, a discomfort with the pace of change, a feeling that something seems off even if we don’t have a good comparison for what would be right – how should I read this article?  Is it proof that, to an extent, we can always take the path of the stylites and retreat from the “sins” of this world?  Or that the best we can hope for by taking that path is to have a small community of fellow oddballs who become an interesting long read, but at best a small footnote in history?  Alas, I suspect it’s the latter.  But then again, sometimes the Buddha comes down from the mountain and the people find value in the message, so perhaps the lesson is to, as the French say, reculer pour mieux sauter.

Now, how to leap?

It used to be a regular habit of mine to check fivethirtyeight.com daily.  Ever since I read Nate Silver’s wonderful book “The Signal and the Noise” I have been a wannabe statistics snob.  My actually statistics knowledge might only extend to two courses in total and rudimentary sessions with R and STATA, but I am nonetheless constantly on the lookout for bad statistics and statements begging to be data driven.

The daily habit waned as fivethirtyeight’s success grew.  On the one hand, I was pleased to see someone I thought brought real numeracy and insight to a media desperately in need of empiricism, but on the other, its evolution into a “real” news site pushed it towards some of the same shortcomings the innumerate media possess.  The need to publish stories every day meant that the site’s writers has to apply Silver’s statistically-minded ethos to every more niche topics.  What began with superb modeling and arguments around major events – primarily national elections – began to dig into states, then counties, until it seemed like every school district was being analyzed.  This wasn’t a problem in and of itself, but the necessary expansion of confidence intervals and the verbal shrugs that the columnists had to resort to for protection (a la “we can’t draw conclusions from this but hey, here’s 2,000 words on it”) made the noise begin to outweigh the signal.  To be sure, my utter disinterest in professional sports didn’t help, as ESPN’s ownership of the website meant an ever-increasing volume of related models and discussion.  So noisy has the website become that I check it only ever few weeks.

But.

When I checked the website yesterday – quite possibly for the first time in 2019 – my eye caught on a story by the editor-in-chief himself.  “When We Say 70 Percent, It Really Means 70 Percent.”  Alarms went off in my head, and the voice of Philip Tetlock began whispering to me.  Sure enough, Nate had written a beautiful review of fivethirtyeight’s forecasts, scoring them on calibration and discrimination to deeply impressive results.  It reminded me of my participation in Tetlock’s superforecasting IARPA project when I was in college.  Why Silver swept this under the rug as a mere “housekeeping” item, without even an image to give it extra real estate on the screen, is beyond me (although being a few days late to its publishing, perhaps it was front and center the day of).  The fact that fivethirtyeight has an entire portion of their site tracking their predictions is not only a welcome act of transparency, but a laudable means of holding themselves accountable as well as educating the reader on how they should think about the forecasts of Silver and his team.  Digging into the offered data, I noted with interest the S-like fit of political forecasts (they tend to underpredict losers and overpredict winners) but that their track record is strong.  The sample size of athletic forecasts dwarfs those of elections and so tends to smooth out the overall sample in fivethirtyeight’s favor, but overall I found Silver’s post refreshing and indeed invigorating.  Despite the daily coverage that does more to make fivethirtyeight appear to be one of the media herd rather than separate them from it, the rigorous attention to results and transparent self-examination will make me return to fivethirtyeight for the 2020 elections with great anticipation, and confidence that 70 percent means 70 percent.

I read a piece – “Short Cuts” – in the March 21 edition of the London Review of Books that made me angry.  It had a certain tossed off air about it, as though the author was taking the chance to write on a long-held opinion without bothering to do any additional research.  The topic was Christopher Hitchens and his circle, sometimes called the New Atheists, and the author was Daniel Soar.  He ended the piece with a shrug saying their concern about religion was uninteresting and bizarre, calling them deranged.  Looking into Soar’s back catalog I noticed he had reviewed a novel by Martin Amis, who was also mentioned in the piece, in 2007.  Interestingly enough ‘the Hitch’ appeared here as well, and even in his brief appearance we can sense a well-established dislike brought on by Hitchens’ apparent conversion to neoconservatism (a vast overstatement).

My inner Herzog was roused and I wrote a letter to the editor.  They responded saying it was being considered for publishing, but alas in the event another letter-writer beat me to the finish line by having a personal Hitchens anecdote to share.  Fair enough.  I was proud of my letter, however, and the diligence I did while putting it together contained some facts that surprised me.  It may not achieve immortality in the archives of the LRB letters section, but I reproduce it here to at least give it a better home that a Gmail inbox.

I would also note that, in a coincidence of timing, a small furor broke out in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives shortly after I wrote this letter.  The House was seating its first ever Muslim member, but beforehand another Congressperson asked permission to deliver a prayer.  It was so overtly hostile that even the attempt to dress it up as thanks to God and blessings from Jesus etc. had no hope of hiding the reality of the utterer’s bigotry and foolishness.  I don’t see any signs of this stopping anytime soon.

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To The Editor,

Daniel Soar possesses an admirable ability, much like his subject Christopher Hitchens (LRB, 21 March), to stick to his guns.  Soar precisely matches the tone he used when reviewing a novel by Hitchens’ friend Martin Amis over a decade ago (LRB, 4 January 2007) – a review ‘the Hitch’ appears in only briefly but to the same faintly damning verdict.  Seven years after Hitchens’ death and with books like The Four Horsemen now dedicated to rather than written by him, Soar’s attempt at a definitive view of Hitchens as fixed in history could be the first of a flood tide.  He wonderfully captures the unwilling admiration and jarring notes many descriptions of the polemicist share, but needs correction on one item.

To Hitchens’ audience in the United States, where he lived from 1981 and became a citizen in 2007, religion is emphatically not ‘a question of precisely no interest’ to anyone – perhaps why two of the three remaining Horsemen Soar mentions are Americans Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.  50% of Americans remain deeply religious, while only 33% believe in evolution.  Among evangelical Christians, who make up an estimated one quarter of the total population, those figures are 88% and 4%, respectively.  Over 80% of white evangelical Christians voted for President Trump in 2016.

While ‘godly’ is an adjective few would apply to Trump himself (one of the few might be early supporter Jerry Falwell Jr. – Hitchens would not have been surprised) Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump appointees demonstrate the ongoing potency of religion as a political force.  Religious beliefs accordingly affect American policy on: climate change (Scott Pruitt, the late head of the Environmental Protection Agency, denies climate change and evolution on the same grounds of a lack of evidence); education (Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ comments on wanting to ‘advance God’s kingdom’ through political activity have received wide attention); and health and human services (as a Congressman in 2006 former Secretary Tom Price introduced a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman) to name but a few.  The Supreme Court of the United States continues to rule on religiously-tinged cases, from Masterpiece Cakeshop to the President’s Muslim travel ban, while lower courts confront issues such as prohibitions on nontheists delivering invocations to Congressional sessions.  I appreciate Mr. Soar and his acquaintances being uninterested in religion – such tedious immutability – but he is surely mistaken to dismiss as ‘deranged’ those among us who are acutely interested, not to say worried.

Hitchens’ presence is missed today because he spurred those affected by the rhetoric of his writing and oration – which is to say, nearly everyone who came in contact with them – to get interested and do their own research.  Surely we could use more of that.