Keynes, Capitalists, Communists, Cryptocurrency and Central Bankers

Cryptocurrency emerges from the notion that it is better to trust an algorithm than the judgement of a central banker. 

So before we evaluate cryptocurrency, let's evaluate central banks.

I stand with conservatives who argue for the importance of family, church, state, bank and corporation. Two-parent families raise children less likely to go to jail and more likely to go to university (speaking of institutions). People who go to church weekly live longer. If you live in a failed nation-state your income prospects are cut by tens of thousands of dollars and your life expectancy by a decade or more.  And a great financial system (what I mean when I say bank) helps to create trillions in wealth and enable R-n-D, infrastructure, consumption, and entrepreneurship. 

When healthy and strong, these institutions make lives better. Showing a disregard for these institutions is to show a naivete about who we are as individuals. (Spoiler alert: alone we're less able to survive than dodo birds.)

Where I depart from conservatives is in my conception of these institutions. I do think they are hugely important. I don't think they are sacred. Instead, I think they are just tools.

The church is just a tool, no different from a juicer. What a church makes is more important than what a juicer makes, though, and that is why it is more important. Through a church people make things like meaning, faith in an uncertain future, compassion, identity and community. Those things matter more than juice so churches are more important tools than juicers. It is both that simple and complex.

Once we conceive of institutions as tools, we realize a couple of really important things. One, they didn't always exist. Like a car or toaster, church, state and banks are inventions. Two, just like other products or tools, they can be continually improved. If the purpose of a church is to create compassion, we can design rituals and beliefs to better enhance that just like we can design a saw to more accurately cut wood or a car to more comfortably get us across town. We can judge the Mormon Church or Catholic Church or Church of Scientology by how happy its members are, how much grief they cause non-members, and whether they make the world around them better. (And we can leave it to various churches to discover later who - if anyone - gets sent to heaven and who to hell.) If a church forces its members to disregard the Copernican Revolution or evolution and as a result its members end up in more primitive, less prosperous, anti-science communities we can judge that as a design flaw that needs updating, requiring change no different than debugging needed when  software keeps crashing or works on a laptop but not a smart phone. Catholicism, the United States, IBM, a chest freezer and a bulldozer all share this simple characteristic: they are merely inventions and can - indeed should - be changed and improved. It's true that children do better in two-parent households than they do in one: those two parents may be two dads, two moms, a grandma and a dad, etc. There is no sacred formula for effective institutions but some designs are more effective than others. The best societies design their institutions for who they actually are, not who their ancestors thought they were.

Banks - like churches and nation-states - are not sacred. They are just tools. When effective, they are tools for the masses and not just the elite.

***

So many questions arise from this orientation but a key one is, Who gets to use these tools? The answer is that it depends on how evolved a community is. The nation-state that is a tool of the monarch is more primitive than the nation-state that is a tool of the people. Dictatorships are more primitive than democracies. No one was richer than King Louis XIV in France or Saddam Hussein in Iraq or is richer than Putin in Russia. A nation-state that is the tool of the elite is only partly evolved. The bigger the market for a tool, the more benefit. This was true of computers once bought only by nation-states and now by most people and is true of nation-states once conceived for the glory of the king.

The progress of the West has come in two phase for each of its big institutions. 

In the first phase, creative geniuses conceive of and create institutions like church, state, banks and corporations that make us part of a bigger us. These social inventions hack into our tribal instincts and - rather than leave us in a small tribe of 150 or so - make us the part of a larger group, more people than we can ever hope to meet. "I'm a Christian," we say or "I'm an American" and we feel affinity for a group of billions or hundreds of millions of strangers. Social inventions make us part of a bigger us and that makes us more prosperous. A tribe is poor. Always. A tribal economy doesn't have enough people to allow specialization, economies of scale or the growth in knowledge that comes out of millions or billions of people interacting with one another. The state economies in the US before the Civil War were not as prosperous as the national economy of the US after. The bigger the group, the greater the prosperity. This act of social invention is incredibly important to progress.

In the second phase, the institution is made the tool of the masses and not just the elites. Martin Luther's cry of "We are all priests" or Jefferson's cry of "All men are created equal," were revolutionary. Why? They called for a shift in power from popes and monarchs to the common person. They made church and state tools for anyone to use. In the wake of this reconception of church and state we have religious freedom and democracy and now church and state policy are the product of every- and any-one.

The simplest way to think about the central bank is that it is a means to do for banks what Luther and Jefferson did for church and state: the central bank is a means to make banks a tool for the masses and not just the elites.

Four times the West has created the great institutions that have come to define market economies. Three times it has turned those institutions into tools for the masses. (The corporation is only now changing from tool for the CEO to tool for the newly entrepreneurial employee; that is not something that I'll get into here.) 

It took centuries for the Protestant Revolution that transformed the church in the West to culminate in religious freedom. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses onto the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 and it was not until 1648 that the Treaty of Westphalia was signed to grant religious freedom. (And of course what they thought of as religious freedom we would think of today as hugely restrictive.)  It took about a century for democratic revolutions to transform monarchies across the West. So I guess one ought not to be surprised that the revolution that transformed the bank -  a revolution that largely played out between 1933 and 2000 - is still not really understood or appreciated. You have to understand that revolution before you can really understand cryptocurrency.

***

"You have made yourself the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out."
- John Maynard Keynes in an open letter to FDR in 1933

The revolution of the third economy - like the two before it - turned that period's dominant institution into a tool for the masses. The bank became a tool for everyone - and not just bankers - through a couple of mechanisms. The first was simply the work of social evolution - market forces at work. As capital became more abundant, the competition in capital markets shifted from households and businesses competing for capital to lenders and investors competing for customers of capital. The ads for credit cards, home mortgages, and 401(k) accounts late in the 20th century were evidence that capital markets had become as eager for thousands of dollars in business from tens of millions of people as they had earlier been for the tens of millions of dollars in business from thousands of elites. That alone helped with the popularization of capitalism from the wealthy elite to the average consumer. Keynesian policies were the second tool for turning banks into tools for the masses.

Before Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, the American economy had been in recession 48% of the 20th century. Half the time GDP was contracting. The good news is that capitalism was creating entirely new industries and technologies as transformative as electricity, radio, automobiles, and airplanes. Life was markedly better with the fruits of capitalism but it was also a world that generated about as many busts as booms. The bank obviously made capitalists rich but it wasn't as clear that it was benefiting workers. (Spoiler alert: it was but not not as rapidly or obviously.) Bankruptcy emerges after banks. From this turmoil of sudden wealth and poverty, income inequality and booms and busts communism was born. Communists knew the pain of that institution the bank and they wanted to be rid of it. It seemed to them wildly unfair and inefficient to have capitalists get rich while workers were losing careers each time a new industry emerged and an old one contracted. The innovation and automation that capital fueled could obsolete entire careers. Instead of banks, communists thought they'd use the nation-state as a mechanism for creating, investing and distributing capital.

The battle before Keynes was between capitalists (who Keynes refers to as orthodoxy in the quote above) and communists (the folks Keynes saw calling for revolution). Capitalists wanted the bank to be unchallenged and unchanged, left a tool for the elites to profit from with little or no regard for the worker or the broader economy. The capitalists were to the bank what royalists were to the nation-state or Catholics were to the church. They thought capitalism sacred. (They even referred to the market as the invisible hand, a nod, of course, to the hand of God that had earlier been thought to drive change and, of course, as with God's will, the market's decisions were not to be questioned or overturned.) Communists, by contrast, wanted the bank eradicated. Treat the institution as sacred or disposable? Side with the capitalists or communists? 

Well, the Keynesian response was to create policies that allowed capitalists to profit (profit motive remains a pretty clear signal about where to best allocate capital) while regulating banks through laws and central bank policy. The Federal Reserve's mission is to keep unemployment and inflation low.  Keynesian policy is fairly simple in concept: banks can do their thing as long as that doesn't mess up the larger economy that includes workers who have to stay employed and are also paid wages that can be made weaker by inflation. Capitalists were left free to profit as long as capital markets helped everyone prosper. Like freedom of religion and democracy before it, this "American Dream" treated a major institution both irreverently and as vital. 

After 1933, the world had three competing models running. One model was communism, another orthodox capitalism and the third Keynesian. (The orthodox capitalism models included a mutated form known as fascism that shared the orthodox belief in the natural inevitability of elites and the need to subordinate workers to business owners (and, of course, the state).) There was no competition. The Keynesian model was a triumph. As mentioned, from 1900 to 1933, the American economy was in recession 48% of the time. Since then it has been in recession only 14% of the time. In the 20th century, throughout the West, incomes and life expectancy rose dramatically. Keynesian economies trounced communists and unregulated market economies. People steadily got more access to credit and investment markets and as they did, wealth increased more than in any previous century.

The inventions of church, state and bank were so very, very cool. Turning them into tools for the masses rather than just elites was even more cool.

The punchline of the third economy's transformation of the bank? A banking system needs a central bank and regulations that save it from sub-optimization. Keynesian policies subordinate the banking system to the broader economy. Without that the economy booms and busts in ways that costs everyone - even banks.

So now let's turn to cryptocurrencies, the currency that relies on an algorithm rather than a central bank.

***

Cryptocurrencies are designed to avoid central bank policy. As long as they remain a minor part of the economy, this isn't such a big deal. Their value will vary wildly against other currencies but that won't adversely affect the economy, just the investors lucky enough to catch it on a swing up or unlucky enough to catch it before a big fall. 

But the more widely cryptocurrency is adopted, the more it will drive variation in GDP growth. Cryptocurrency promoters are not communists or Keynesians but instead are orthodox capitalists who have come back with algorithms. They are true believers in financial markets as forces that act best unsubordinated to anything else. They are designed to avoid central bank influence. If they are right than Keynes was wrong.

The good and the bad thing about algorithms is that they are rules that don't change in different environments. A new species can change an environment, though. The mortgage instruments that seemed like just a new product for bundling mortgage debt into securities that could be sold ended up changing the financial market in 2008. They were a key trigger to the Great Recession. It is not just that cryptocurrency would change the financial environment as it becomes more popular. The simple algorithms it follows will behave very differently in an environment in which they are dominant than one in which they are marginal.

Simple rules can still lead to weird chaos. This is one reason that the Federal Reserve has goals rather than rules. Things change and a constant growth in money supply can be a problem in an economy subject to shocks and surprises. Central banks change the variables they can to effect stability in employment and inflation. They are not perfect - that's impossible - but they are willing to subordinate capital markets to broader goals and they are willing to change things in novel or unexpected ways to effect such change. A cryptocurrency disconnected from any central bank or government regulation won't subordinate to broader economic goals and any attempt to suddenly change a predictable algorithm to do that could lead to chaos within the cryptocurrency market.

We see already that the simple algorithms that drive cryptocurrencies don't translate into stable prices of cryptocurrencies. As (and if) they become more popular they will not translate into stable economies. 

***

Speaking of social inventions, currencies are just made up. As it turns out, though, the point of currencies is not currencies. Currency just facilitates economic activity. To do this currencies have to be a store of value as well but that is incidental to its property, not its purpose. Currency induces people to work, to part with resources, to sacrifice or work now for future gain, and so on. A body is not made more healthy by the production of more RNA (that can, in turn, synthesize protein) any more than an economy is made more healthy by the production of more money. Hyperinflation is a reminder that the goal is not to maximize currency (or even to minimize it or keep it constant). 

***

One of my beliefs with the fourth economy is that what limits in one economy becomes abundant in the next. In an industrial economy, capital is so scarce that more of it will almost always provoke more economic growth, the creation of more jobs and wealth. In an information economy, though, capital has become more abundant and introducing more of it has a diminishing effect.

What limits economic progress now is not the capital to finance education for knowledge workers or factories for capitalists or the startup capital for entrepreneurs. We have trillions wandering the globe in search of returns (and arguably driving prices of stocks higher than is justified by expected profits).

A key question to ask about cryptocurrency is whether it has emerged because we have so much capital in search of novel returns or if it exists because we do not have sufficient currency to facilitate the economic activity that creates new jobs and wealth. For me, the answer seems obvious. Cryptocurrencies emerged during a time of such capital abundance that the interest on Dutch bonds - and they have records that go back to the time of Martin Luther - was negative for the first time. It is hard to argue that the problem with the modern world is a lack of capital or currency. 

Cryptocurrencies seem a symptom of a glut of capital rather than shortage.

***

Nor do we have a shortage of currencies. It seems plausible that the euro that emerged out of the EU will be  a prelude to the consolidation of currencies within regions. There are about 180 currencies around the world (most nation-states have one). It's not clear that we need more.  

Cryptocurrency advocates argue that bitcoin is poised to become the replacement currency for many of these national currencies. If currency needed no Keynesian policies to direct its behavior, this would actually be plausible. It is unclear, though, what would act as a central bank mechanism for any cyrptocurrency. I actually think it more plausible that the World Bank could issue a currency at some point.

***

Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. (But as was evident in his 1933 letter to FDR, he'd been thinking about this theory for years.) Kurt Godel published his incompleteness theorem in 1931. Godel essentially argue that a system cannot contain its own proof. Ultimately, a system needs an outside reference. Keynes notion of capitalism was similar to Godel's notion of math: it needed an outside reference point to keep it from collapsing in on itself. 

A currency or financial system ultimately needs an outside regulatory engine or mechanism to keep it running smoothly. (Or relatively smoothly. Booms and busts are inevitable even if it is not inevitable that the busts are underway half the time.)

Currencies are only part of the system. The economy is the whole system and in order to optimize the economy you have sub-optimize the parts of it, including its capital or currency.  The lesson of Keynes is that banks, capital and currencies have to be regulated by something outside. (Lightly. But regulated nonetheless.)

***

Cryptocurrency seems like modern technology based on an old, pre-Keynesian worldview that trusts in self-regulating financial markets that don't disrupt employment and GDP. I'm not sure that using a computer rather than a printing press makes that worldview any more effective. In fact, it could even make it more dangerous.

Trump's Birthday and the Baby Boomer Model of Leadership Expiration Date

Today is Donald Trump's birthday. He's 72.

Trump, George W. and Bill Clinton were all born within 66 days of each other in the summer of 1946, 9 to 11 months after the end of WWII. They are the very definition of baby boomer. Bill was elected at 46, George at 54, and and Donald at 70.

I suspect there is a "lead by end of 20th century" expiration date hidden somewhere on the back of their neck but the GOP are the guys who find something in the back of the fridge and say, "This says 'Sell by 2000' but it doesn't smell weird. I won't get sick if I eat it, will I?"

The Illusion and Importance of the Individual

I think Christians, Buddhists, evolutionary biologists, statisticians, and developmental economists are right. There is no way to make sense of a life in isolation. The notion of individuals breaks down under scrutiny.

One of the lessons of systems thinking is that systems emerge out of the interactions of parts.

Systems thinking advocate Russell Ackoff was fond of the analogy of a car to illustrate this point. A car can get you across town. The tires alone can't do that. The steering wheel cannot. The engine, alone, will just sit in your driveway and roar. What makes a car a car is the interaction of its parts, not the actions of its parts in isolation. The quality of a car emerges out of the interaction of its parts.

Your life is a system. What does it mean to be human? No species is born more helpless. A horse can run within minutes of being born. It takes us a year to be able to stagger and another year before we can talk about it. Humans are helpless for the first 10 to 25 years of life. Put aside the necessity of biological parents who "create" you. You don't even get to be human without the assistance of others for the first decade or two of life. We're little different from other primates without our speech and tools and to learn those adds another layer of dependence on others. Language does not emerge from an individual experience; it comes out of interaction with others.

To understand the culture we're born into, the options for work, and the skills needed to contribute to a working society adds yet another layer of dependence.

An individual life is an emergent property. It comes out of interaction with others, it has a particular place in history, economic development, and culture. It does not exist in isolation and to even speak of it as if it does is to strip it of all that defines it. We get defined through relationships and who we can be is hugely dependent on everyone else. Who a peasant woman in 1318 could be is vastly different than who an urban woman in 2018 can be. Each emerges out of her time and place. The notion that either is an individual who chooses her own life is a popular myth but a myth nonetheless.

Paradoxically, this is why it is so important to be an individual as defined in popular myth. The way progress works is that it sends tentacles out into the future in the form of individuals. Some paths work out and some hit dead ends. Your effort to become someone new and different becomes a starting path for those who come along later, even though that effort is absurd to even contemplate in a vacuum. Our life is the variation in the distribution of the system and through our life the distribution has the potential to change over time.

Because the system is twice emergent. Your life emerges out of a system that is a complex mix of culture and technology and that system emerges out of the complex mix of who people were and aspire to be. You define the system that defines you.

It's not paradox but rather perspective that makes two contradictory things true at once: lives emerge out of systems and systems emerge out of lives. The two options that are illusory are the options to believe that you define your own life or that you don't define the world you live in. This means that we have to work through others to even have the hope of changing ourselves. And others have to work through us for any hope to change themselves. We are inescapably created by the world around us and create that very world, sometimes in ways that have less to do with who we ever get to be than who other people get to be - now and in the future.

Deficit Swing - How Deficits Have (and are projected to) Change Under Each President

Trump signed a budget that will increase the deficit to a trillion dollars.

The deficit will grow simply because the economy is growing. If the deficit were stable as a percentage of GDP, it would grow about $100 billion during Trump’s four-year term.

Using the average spending and tax levels since 1979, the deficit under Trump would grow from about $600 to $700 billion. But given his tax cut this year and spending increases in the next few, it will instead hit $1,017 billion (a trillion) in 2020, or about $300 billion higher than what it would be if the Republican budget just met average standards for fiscal responsibility. (Since 1979, spending has averaged 20.6% of GDP and taxes 17.4%.) And this during a projected boom time; if you aren’t going to lower the deficit when unemployment is under 4% and the stock market is at an all-time high, you aren’t going to lower the deficit.

Here’s a table showing how much the deficit swung during a president’s time in office. Reagan’s first year in office, he had a deficit equal to 2.5% of GDP. In George H. Bush’s first he had a deficit of 2.7% of GDP. So, during Reagan’s time the deficit swung negative by 0.2 percentage points of GDP, which you can see in the "Swing" column.

	Deficit (-) or Surplus (+) Swing
	Inherited	Passed on		Swing
Ronald Reagan	-2.5	-2.7		-0.2
George H. Bush	-2.7	-3.8		-1.1
Bill Clinton	-3.8	+1.2		+5.0
George W. Bush	+1.2	-9.8		-11.0
Barack Obama	-9.8	-3.5		+5.3
Donald Trump	-3.5	-4.9		-1.4

Trump's first year in office he inherited a deficit equal to 3.5% of GDP.

According to CBO projections, whoever is president in 2021 will inherit a deficit of 4.9% of GDP. And that assumes no recession, which could raise the deficit by hundreds of billions.

Since 1981, the deficit has worsened every time a Republican president was signing and vetoing bills and has improved every time a Democrat was. You know what they say: you campaign like a fiscal conservative and govern like you're trying to make friends with everyone at the bar. "Tax cuts on me! For everyone!"

Video Games, Systems, Consequences and the Afterlife

I'm a fan of video games. I think that the world will get better as we build more effective simulators to teach systems dynamics that include the behavior of nations at war, ecosystems, financial and labor markets, popularity, and the change in social norms. Different dynamics are tough to understand as prose or equations; sometimes the patterns become easier to see when they play out in video simulations that let us see causality that simulates centuries within an hour. I don't think that we've really understood how powerful this potential technology is for teaching systems dynamics that so define our world.

There is one lesson that these video games gloss over, though. And it may be the most important lesson of all.

What we enjoy or suffer today rarely has anything to do with today.

Mark Zuckerberg made $1.5 billion today. I'm not even sure he went into the office today. He may have stayed home with a cold or may have had a really important strategic meeting. I don't know what he did today but I guarantee you that it does not explain his gain in wealth today. That is the consequence of things he did years ago.

Probably 99.9% of what we enjoy or suffer from today is the consequence of something done in the past. Little of it even done by us. Today my portfolio is up. It is the result of investments and sacrifices I made in the past, but that's the least of it. It's also the result of the Dutch who came over to New Amsterdam and recreated the stock market they'd first established in Amsterdam. It's the result of countless employees and entrepreneurs who have created equity out of thin air. It's the result of laws that protect private property. And so on.

That lesson that evolutionary biologists and religious teachers would both teach you is that causality does not stop at death. There is an afterlife. The lives of people in the future will be diminished or enhanced based on what you do in your lifetime. I suppose it is a kind of evil to believe that your life has no consequence and a sort of good to believe that it does.

If you are looking for cause and effect that can be experienced within a day or even a year, it is easy to get discouraged. Little of consequence plays out that rapidly and if you are measuring the impact of yesterday or last month's efforts on today, you'll conclude that there's not much that can be done. But the stories that inspire are those of the immigrant mom who worked two jobs to get her kids through college. There is generational causality and it doesn't end with her grandkids. One of the reasons I love history is that it explains so much of what defines today. We are the product of decisions made centuries earlier.

The community you live in is the product of the despair or hope of past generations, their action or inaction, their creativity or conformity. One definition of foolishness might be to believe that nothing we do has any consequence; one definition of wisdom might be to believe that what we do has consequences for generations. (Even if that consequence is to have made no difference because even not making a difference makes a difference.)

Finally, I leave you these words of advice from one of my favorite people.

The Buddhists have a good piece of advice: “Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” It is this serious playfulness, a combination of concern and humility, that makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time. One does not need to win to feel content; helping to maintain order in the universe becomes its own reward, regardless of the consequences. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Trump as Trickster

Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World  is a brilliant look at how trickster gods from cultures on every continent seem to be a constant, the gods whose mischief and disdain for the systems that order daily life disrupt those systems. Sometimes the chaos they unleash is destructive, sometimes creative, and sometimes merely affirms the need to restore the status quo.

Loki

The tricksters Hyde cites include Krishna and Coyote, from two different Indian cultures; Monkey,  and Eshu from two different African cultures; Hermes from the Greeks and Loki from the Scandinavians. Hyde calls them boundary crossers whose disdain for norms both help to change norms and to define them.

Hyde writes that prophecy is not about prediction in the sense that it predicts that the stock market will fall in October. Rather, prophecy reveals truths that will still be true in the future.  This section of his book from 1998 is prophetic about Trump.

These threats on both sides, to the shameless person and to the world around him are, I think, what sometimes lead people to ask if the trickster isn't really a psychopath. Certainly there are parallels. Psychopaths lie, cheat, and steal. They are given to obscenity and, as one psychologist puts it, exhibit "a confusion of amorous and excretory functions." [Think pee tape.] They're not just antisocial, they're foolishly so (they "will commit thefts, forgery, adultery, fraud, and other deeds for astonishingly small stakes and under much greater risks of being discovered than will the ordinary scoundrel"). While they are often smart, they have a sort of "rudderless intelligence," responding to situations as they arise but unable to formulate any coherent, sustainable, long-term plan. They are masters of the empty gesture, and have a glib facility with language, stripping words of the glue that normally connects them to feeling and morality. Finally, they lack both remorse and shame for the harm and hurt that trail behind them. One way or another, almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters. [p. 158 of Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, 1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY.]

Why, if this definition of trickster so aptly describe him then, is Trump so popular?  That's like asking why are the trickster gods so compelling that they have shown up in so many cultures? Perhaps it is because tricksters like Trump mock what people reverence. You can't really hope that a trickster will abide by norms. He defies them. Hyde quotes another author, Rickets, who shows how trickster stories can be read as parodies of shamanism.

In shamanic initiation, for example, the spirits kill and resurrect the initiate, often placing something inside the resurrected body - a quartz crystal, for example - which the shaman can later call forth from his body during healing rituals. If someone in your group claims such powers, you might find wry humor in stories which have Coyote, when he needs advice, calling forth (with much grunting) his own excrement. ... Trickster's failure implies that shamanic pretensions are daydreams at best, fakery at worst. [p. 294 of Hyde's Trickster Makes This World.]

If experts are our modern shamans, then Trump is continuing with this tradition of mocking shamans in a hundred ways that are variants on his appointing Rick Perry as Energy Secretary; Rick Perry who - in a debate - could not even remember the name of the Energy Department he wanted to eliminate. Only a trickster would make a person who thought so little of an agency that they both wanted to eradicate it and couldn't remember its name as the leader of that agency. Trump thumbs his nose at the experts who pretend to understand and predict the systems - from weather systems that define our climate to the financial systems that create booms and busts or even the government agencies he is supposed to manage - that define our world. He thumbs his - well, whatever - by bragging about the size of his penis in a presidential debate. He's shameless and his supporters love him for this for at least a couple of reasons. If the experts deserve mocking rather than reverence then even the non-experts can feel superior - or at least equal - to those experts. And once the standards have been mocked by the trickster Trump - whether when he has sex with porn stars while his wife is home with a new baby or when he shares conspiracy theories with Alex Jones - there is no longer a credible basis for calling them deplorable.

That said, past generations paid a great price for the transition to something new. Trump may be the price we pay and if so, he may be a bargain by contrast.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the 6 year-old Republican Party's first president. The new Republicans laid in place a set of policies that helped the country catch the wave of the industrial economy.  After the Great Depression, the modern Democratic Party - from FDR to Kennedy and Clinton - created a set of policies that helped the country to catch the wave of the information economy. Waves don't come out of calm seas and the chaos of the Civil War and the Great Depression and the second world war seemed - in retrospect - to mark a transition from an old to a new economy. During Lincoln's time we had a literal battle between Union soldiers and Confederates, two groups with very different ideas about whether we lived in a world contained by states or nations.  The transition ushered in with FDR's engagement in the second world war and Clinton's signing of NAFTA and WTO trade agreements was from national to international economic and political realities. Republicans made us bigger than states; modern Democrats made us bigger than a nation. Chaos in the form of bloody wars and assassinations marked these messy transitions into something new.

I think that we're now moving from an information to entrepreneurial economy and such a transition seems inevitably messy. It is unsurprising that a trickster has shown up at this time of transition. Tricksters are boundary crossers, creating and thriving on the chaos that marks transitions. Trump might just be the trickster who is disrupting the status quo enough to make it easier to create the next, new thing. We always pay a price for moving into the new; we still don't know the final tab for the Trump presidency but it could be one of the lowest we have ever paid, which seems to me just one more sign that we're making progress even if Trump - who as trickster belongs to earlier, more archaic worlds - is not.

Monarchs (Butterflies, that is) and Millennials

I went on a business trip with my wife Friday. She calls them field trips. She teaches 2nd grade and Wednesday her 7 and 8 year olds reached the end of their unit on butterflies by releasing some they had watched transform from caterpillars into butterflies. Friday they went to the IMAX to watch a movie about monarchs.

It's cliche to express wonder at the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly but the wonder is deserved. If you saw the two creatures without any knowledge that they were related, you likely wouldn't even put them in the same category, much less realize they were two stages of the same life. There's more, though.

Every fourth generation is a super butterfly. For three generations the butterfly's life expectancy is about two to six weeks. This fourth generation, though, lives for six to eight moths. It's also bigger and able to fly from Canada into the heart of Mexico, thousands of miles. The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is genetic code triggered each generation; the transformation from regular to super butterfly is genetic code only triggered every fourth generation.

Which made me wonder whether something similar is going on in our community.

If we define a generation as 25 years, four generations back takes us to those born about 1900. These people fought in World War 1 and then were the leaders during World War 2. Their inventions, speculations, investments and desires fueled the roaring 20s, tipped into the Great Depression, and then a hot war with fascists and then a cold war with communists. When they were born in 1900, the two most common jobs were farmer and household servants (families with fewer than 3 servants were considered lower-middle class); by the time they died in the 1960s through 1990s, men had walked on the moon, the internet was linking people across the world, and the discovery of DNA had evolved into genetic engineering.

The kids at Parkland so impressed me. Millennials and younger are aware, conscientious, and the best educated generation in history. They are informed by thousands of stories and have access to millions of lives through a media that includes TV, radio, podcasts, video, social media and every other permutation of the internet.

It is, of course, a whimsical idea, but what if those kids born about 2000 - who are 4 generations removed from the generation born about 1900 - are a super generation who will carry us farther than the generations before?

Product Idea: the Fiercely Reciprocal Robot

Mirrors were a phenomenal invention for promoting self-awareness. Mirrors don't make us look great but because they inform us of how we do look, they do make us look better. We can use the image they send back to correct what we can.

Our social image is tougher to discern than our physical one. We can easily see our face in a mirror; it's tougher to see how we come across to different people in different situations. For that I think it'd be interesting to get kids a fiercely reciprocal robot.

One problem with understanding how we come across is that there are different lag times and different probabilities for feedback from people. One person might patiently take our stupid jokes or tendency to volunteer "honest" feedback about how fat they look in that outfit while another will immediately take offense and avoid us later. One will put up with something from us for a couple of months before deciding that it is too much and another will put up with it for life. We don't really know how we come across as social beings and particularly for the young this process of understanding who we are to others can be slow and difficult.

A potential solution to this is the fiercely reciprocal robot. Imagine a robot that a child aged 2 to 14 could interact with. This robot would reciprocate everything from being ignored to telling amusing jokes to giving compliments to insults, handshakes to punches. If the child looked away when the robot was telling a story, the robot would look away; if the child made appropriate noises - the Ooohs and the "oh no's!" to express amazement or alarm, the robot, too, would make such noises. If the child expressed encouragement rather than complaints, the robot would be encouraging rather than complaining.  If the child were happy being with the robot then one might safely assume that the average, typical peer would also be happy to be with the child; if the child were miserable with the robot, then one might safely assume that the average, typical peer would be miserable with the child. Whatever the robot made one feel would be a reflection of what the child made others feel.

Of course you would need a "model good form" mode that might inspire the child to new behaviors. It could not be all reciprocity. Sometimes instruction is needed.

The default mode would be reciprocity, though, and this would be a great teacher and predictor. As it turns out, the average person is fiercely reciprocal. If you are kind to strangers they're generally kind to you; if you are rude to them, they're generally rude to you. For the most part, who we are dictates who people are to us. The fiercely reciprocal robot would be unique mostly in the immediacy and the relentlessness of its feedback.

A Proposal for the Reasonable Republicans Who Still Walk Among Us

Under Trump, Republicans are not just pursuing bad policy but bad strategy. As they frantically pursue policies that veer further and further right, these neo-Republicans may be driving Democrats further left.

Hitler would have never risen to power without communists. Communists had real power in Europe (they'd seized control of Russia shortly before Hitler emerged as a political figure) and Hitler was able to use legitimate fear of communists to win support. The way he credibly framed himself to many Germans was that he wasn't an extremist; he was only taking extreme measures to protect Germany.

A similar thing could happen in the wake of Trump. McConnell and Ryan are frantically running around, dismantling every reasonable compromise they can find. They've created a tax cut that will drive annual deficits north of a trillion a year. (That alone would have - just a few years ago much less a few decades ago - dominated media coverage.) They've rolled back regulations requiring banks demonstrate the ability to suffer a downturn without igniting a recession. (Before banking regulations of consequence, from 1900 to 1933, the US was in a recession 48% of the time. Since then it has been in recession only 14% of the time.) They are slashing funding for healthcare, even for children. They're so frightened of immigrants that they are breaking up families and losing the children of people who cross the border. They've gone after free trade, protection of national parks, gutted healthcare for the poor and are making abortion, birth control and healthcare for new mothers difficult to get, following the lead of Texas where maternal mortality is 10X higher than it is in countries like Italy or Japan. Yes. You read that right. New mothers in Texas die at double the rate they did just a few years ago, and at 10X the rate of mothers in other countries. This after policies similar to those advocated by Trump Republicans were put in place.

Now let's imagine that none of that offends or disturbs you. That is, let's imagine that you are a Republican who still supports Trump. So why should my friends and relatives who are so proud of their party find this disturbing? Because everyone else does and one of the many consequences of this is that you've just given extremists on the left what is equivalent to what the communists gave Hitler: an obviously evil and dangerous foe who justifies extremist countermeasures.

You want to roll back reasonable banking regulations? This is not just stupid in its own right; it is stupid because it could give more power to the folks on the left who have never liked banks or stock markets. You don't just raise the risk of a bad recession; you raise the risk that you could lose what has created so much wealth in this country.

You can believe that your system doesn't owe anything to the poor but even if you aren't moved by compassion, you should be moved by greed. If a growing percentage of people see no benefit in the system you defend, they will vote for it to go away. In your greed to get the next 5% of after tax income you could easily lose 50%.

I think that it is true in politics that for every action there is a reaction. The day that Obama was sworn in the country rejoiced at the end of racism .... and the enrollment level at neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites was 10X its normal rate. This reactions to actions dynamic suggests that anyone thinking a move ahead will take care not to take radical actions that will provoke a radical reaction. As Republicans continue to defend a man as reprehensible as Donald Trump, their support among people who can't get the senior discount at Denny's has steadily dropped. The GOP is the party of old white guys and those guys (us guys) are steadily dying.  If the next election were held only among those 35 and younger, Republicans would fare about as well as the Whig Party and in a few decades the "next" election will be among those 35 and younger.

I'm an old guy. I should be yelling at the Bernie Sanders kids to get off my lawn. I should be the conservative voice in American politics. Given the excesses of the Republican Party, I'm instead a flaming liberal. I believe that our financial system is wonderful and getting rich is great; and that markets should be regulated and that crooks (think Bernie Madoff) are as likely to show up on Wall Street as the back streets of poor neighbors and the rest of us need to be protected from them by smart policing and good regulations that looks as skeptically at bankers in suits as teenagers in hoodies. I think that a city of two million, half of whom are immigrants and a city of two million, all of whom are native born, will have the same number of jobs and consumers and the idea that immigrants steal jobs is absurd. I think that the corporation is one of the great inventions of modern times, and that CEOs have too much unchecked power and that there should be more opportunities for employees to make as much or more than their CEOs, that the pay of CEOs ought not to be 350X that of their typical employee. I believe that for-profit pharmaceuticals and healthcare provider companies have made us healthier and that the profit-motives has driven innovation that steadily make us healthier in ways that just saving money by emphasizing low costs would not; and yet I also believe that healthcare should be a right. I believe that we do need troops ready to intervene around the world and yet I believe that this should be done sparingly and we need far, far more humility about imposing ourselves onto other people. I believe that a person who wants to treat a sperm and egg at the moment of conception no differently than a baby has that right but cannot impose such a belief onto other reasonable and decent people who think that this zygote that cannot be seen won't be anything equivalent to a person for months. I think that societies should do all they can to encourage two-parent households but that single-mothers and their children should be generously supported so that both feel appreciated and loved by the community and that kids of single parents have more opportunity. I believe only most people - not everyone - should own a gun and that no one - not even special people - should own weapons like nuclear bombs or automatic weapons specifically designed to kill dozens or millions of people.

None of this is controversial. Unless you're a Trump supporting Republican. And given that these Republicans have decided that reasonable compromise represents an abandonment of principles, they are running full tilt into a set of policies that future generation will find baffling and offensive. This alone is enough to criticize them for but there is more; their excesses could easily provoke excesses in the other direction.

So, friends and family who have historically voted Republican but consider yourself reasonable, I have a proposal. Stop voting for candidates who support Trump. Instead, vote for Democrats who are reasonable rather than ideological. Make sure that the blue wave - which may come in months or years - brings in candidates who are moderates like me rather than the flaming liberals you like to pretend we all are.

One last thing. If you feel like you have to vote Republican regardless of how extremist the policies have become, you are are not reasonable. You are an ideologue. Your first filter should be to vote only for reasonable, intelligent, competent and decent human beings; once you have your choice of two or more such candidates, then it's great to choose based on ideological preference. If instead you filter only by ideology and then between good and reasonable people when they're available, you are reasonable only as a last resort. That's not reasonable.

Maybe There is No Lesson

Someone had shared this recently:

Rule 3
"There are no mistakes, only lessons."

As is my tendency, I nodded silently. It made sense. Then, because of my tendency to over-think things (or as I like to call it, "thinking"), I thought we may too readily believe in the power of lessons.

Lessons make it sound like there is something we can carry forward from one experience to the next. Maybe the most profound experiences of life are too unique to be understood by anything that happened before or of anything to follow. They are not lessons for life. They are life. And all we have to guide us through them is our heart. And maybe that's enough.

"We will loan you our trillion dollar tax cut," investors tell government

Here is an interesting pair of numbers.

In the first quarter of 2018, US companies announced $242 billion in stock buybacks. At that pace it will hit nearly one trillion dollars for the year. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-results-buybacks/apple-plows-u-s-tax-cuts-into-record-share-buybacks-idUSKBN1I300U

In the first half of the year, the federal government will run a deficit of $600 billion. At that pace it will borrow roughly 1.2 trillion dollars for the year.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/382033-deficit-nears-600-billion-in-first-half-of-2018

Put differently, corporations have a trillion more than they can spend this year and the federal government needs a trillion more than it has. 

It sounds like an onion headline: "We will loan you our tax cut," investors tell government.