Six Word Meme

Holly (HRH) hit me with a meme. It sounds simple. It is not.

Those hit with this meme need to describe their life in six words. Not less. Not more. Here I go.

As if I had a clue.

Why Abundance is So Scarce

“If survival of the fittest were truly the basic theme of evolution, then today we should all be microbes.”
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy

There seem to be three big obstacles to abundance: “only” thinking, inability to see the larger whole, and inability to design one’s way out of current scarcity.

Zero sum games are games like the NCAA tournament – one team’s victory comes at the expense of another team’s playoff hopes: for me to win, you must lose. By contrast, in nonzero sum games (more often called variable sum games), the outcome is not fixed. For instance, in a relationship, it is quite possible for a couple to play games that make them both worse, or both better.

This applies to communities as well. Imagine three farmers living in low-lying water. They build paths connecting the three houses. The paths linked together actually block out the water. They now have an enclosed area, a triangle of land, that is shared between them. In such a reality, the sense of ownership is different. Each farmer depends on the other to continue to maintain the path so that all have farm land. [Thanks to my buddy Rick for this example of a sensibility he wishes he could have brought back from his time in Germany to the US.]

In his brilliant book Nonzero, Robert Wright points to nonzero games as the mechanism for progress. If one Northwestern tribe has an abundance of salmon and another has an abundance of furs, cooperation by trade makes both tribes better off, allowing them to be warm and well fed. Trade may well be the simplest example of a nonzero sum game.

As economies become more advanced, they become more characterized as nonzero sum games. People working in an economy more dependent on land, for instance, are more inclined to think zero sum. Such societies are more violent and more given to absolutes. By contrast, people working in an economy more dependent on information and knowledge are more inclined to think nonzero sum. These societies are prone to negotiation and willingness to see things from multiple perspectives.

Inability to see beyond zero sum rules is probably the biggest obstacle to peace and progress. Such a world view is probably best characterized by the phrase, “There is only so much.” As soon as people believe that, the only reasonable thing to do is get yours – at any cost. What is more rarely seen is the possibility of dropping the “only” in this phrase, transforming it from “There is only so much,” to “There is so much.” The first defines a scarcity mentality. The second, an abundance mentality.

There are two things that could destroy a community. A scarcity mentality that leads to in-fighting (this can happen even within companies). An abundance mentality in a community that has not designed its way out a dependence on scarce resources.

“Only” thinking, as in, there is only one way to do things or only one truth that defines things or only one perspective that matters, breeds scarcity. As long as people and communities cling to “only” thinking they will have an abundance of evidence of scarcity.

There does seem to be an impulse towards the progress that depends on greater cooperation – the movement from tribes to city-state and city-states to nation-states for instance. And all this progress seems dependent on seeing a greater whole than exists now, seeing beyond the limits of current boundaries. Abundance, then, seems to rely on a few things: getting beyond “only” thinking, seeing larger wholes, and, as seen with the farmers able to create land out of a swamp or tribes negotiating trade deals, a design competence.

Happy Birthday Sandi & Jordan!

It is an odd and inexplicable Davison family tradition. My great grandfather married a Canadian. She had a child on her birthday. My own grandfather married a Norwegian (skipping out on the Canadian tradition for one generation), but my uncle married a Canadian who had a child on her birthday. I, too, married a Canadian and 21 years ago, she had a child on her birthday.



There is no one who knows Sandi better than I do and there is no one more impressed with her. She's not perfect, though, and I exploited her poor judgment, convincing her to marry me.

Jordan is the girl that any father would brag about. I exercise an excessive amount of restraint by doing so only rarely. In the quarter just ended, she delivered her first university lecture (right brain vs. left brain) in the cognitive science class she worked in as a TA - a nice milestone for a junior. She very convincingly announces that she's going to be a professor of cognitive science. I believe her. It has been an extraordinary privilege to watch her become an adult from this front row seat.



We celebrated for Sandi and Jordan with nearly 40 friends and family, food enough to feed probably 100, live music, a speech, games and conversations. Given it was Spring Break, we even had some Canadians join us - friends from when my wife was in diapers.

Here they are - in various stages - my two favorite women.

Consumption Junkies

Ron Araujo and I car pooled to work at one time and were in the same graduate program in economics. I think that Ron and I laughed together as much as I have with any co-workers (and if you ask my series of exasperated supervisors, that would be a remarkable amount of laughter).

NPR broadcast an inteview with Ron yesterday. As CFO of Mission Federal Credit Union, he was explaining how the Fed's rate move would translate into personal loans. He is still quick and I can swear that I heard an edge of laughter in his voice, even as he talked about something serious. Ron does a fabulous job of making it all sound simple and obvious - something I wish our profs had done. It's easy for me to imagine that in a few years, Ron could be one of those talking head guys on CNBC. Once again, I was made inordinately proud of my friendship with someone who has done well. (Pretending, once again, that this somehow has something to do with me.)

His interview made me think, though. The price of money has dropped. Loans are cheaper. But the flip side of this is that the reward for saving is lower. And I had a blinding flash of the obvious.

It is true that lowering interest rates can help to stimulate the economy by stimulating spending. But we're in a fairly precarious spot because our savings rate runs close to zero. Stimulating borrowing and discouraging savings is unlikely to help that. Might it be that we're taking short term measures that just make our underlying problems bigger?

[A British ATM is in the news for dispensing twice as much money as it should. Next time I talk to Ron, I need to ask him: why couldn't we "stimulate" the economy that way? Random ATM withdrawals enhancement program (RAWEP) sounds like it would be a hit with a polity that has made gambling a multi-billion dollar industry.]

A Life of No Regret and Less Reflection

In the news:

Washington - US President George W Bush says he has no regrets about the invasion of Iraq five years ago. In a speech at the Pentagon, Mr Bush said that "removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision - and this is a fight America can and must win". The president dismissed what he called "exaggerated estimates" of the war costs.

So, we know that George has no regrets. This is unsurprising, as regrets actually require enough imagination and curiosity to consider alternatives. But I am surprised that he didn't mention what is, to me, the obvious lesson of the Iraq War.


When an aging, short, overweight, bureaucrat in a suit tells you that something is "a slam dunk," what he really means is that it cannot be done.

The Rockets Run is Over

The best winning streak in the NBA since I've hit puberty is now over.

The Boston Celtics stopped the Rockets - making them feel the absence of Yao. The Rockets simply had no answer to the Celtic's big men.

I know that my buddy Daryl is disappointed. I also know that there is no other team he'd rather lose to. You see, before coming over to Houston to become their GM, Daryl's first job in the NBA was with the Celtics. As their COO, he was responsible for getting revenue, but he was already working with MIT profs on models for predicting which players were most likely to perform better than expected. He is not only fond of the Celtics organization but he had a hand in shaping the team. When he sees the Celtics, it’s not hard to imagine that he can see the Rocket's future a couple of years out.

Congratulations, Daryl. Just wait until next streak.

80 Year Old Man Awakes From Consensus Trance: Bernard on Society

My work goes through waves of intensity. For now, I’m in a wave of 80+ hour weeks and days away from home in a time zone 3 hours away. I let this spill into my lunch date with Bernard, arriving late. He looked like he was on the verge of crying.

“Bernard,” I inquired. “You’re okay?”
He just looked at me and shook his head. “I just feel a little overcome,” he said.
“You seem to be getting more sentimental of late Bernard.”
“Senti-mental," he played with the word. "What good is mental activity without some sentiment?” He waved his hand, offended just enough by my insensitivity to feel his own a little less acutely.
“Point taken,” I replied.
“My life is nearly over, Ron. In all my thinking, there is only one conclusion I can safely make: I didn’t love enough. I didn’t love well.” At this he paused and, like a small kid who’d been sobbing, shamelessly wiped the back of his hand across his nose.
“The defining thing about life is that it ends. You have to keep that in mind. Most everything bad you do – from sloth to cruelty – seems to stem from forgetting this simple fact.
“Pay attention to the fact that life eventually ends and see if that doesn’t make you more sentimental.”
I had no response to this. I had been hoping for something more emotionally neutral, like philosophy. I felt a little awkward, wondering if conversations with Bernard were destined to be more emotional as he got older.

After we’d ordered, Bernard started in.
“We tend to forget that even reasoning gets moved along by emotion. What I’m about to say makes no sense to someone who thinks that sentiment has no place in logic.”
“Well, you are obviously in the right emotional place,” I say.
“You can be such a twit,” he chides. “Here’s a fact that those neuroscientist, cognitive science people like your daughter have yet to fully learn: emotional states are like the elevator that takes you to different floors of your mind, from which you can access certain thoughts or thought processes, reasons you can’t reach from any other floor. Existential angst gives your reasoning a different edge than contentment; anger makes a different route for reason than curiosity. It’s why so often drama changes minds more than arguments.”
“Bernard, I’m really fatigued. The wrong week to visit the east coast is the week of time change. You’re making me feel melancholy.”
“Good. Maybe then you’ll get what I have to say.”
“You didn’t already say it?”
“No, listen. This is what occurred to me at 3 AM this morning."
"Oh," I said. "So you're on east coast time as well?"
Bernard looked intently at me. "No, you dweeb. I'm an old man. Just listen.
"Society is a consensual trance, like a person hypnotizing himself in the mirror and then walking away from the mirror forgetting that he’s under hypnosis, thinking that everything he perceives is real.”
"What?" I was confused.
"We have programmed programmers, - parents and teachers - who tell children how to be. Where does their idea about how to be come from? Society. The society that they made up by adults telling children how to be. We're hypnotized, but it is us who have done the hypnotizing. Society isn't just made up. It's a spell."
“But societies are real,” I protested.
“Sure. But what is that reality based on? Think about the power of a hypnotist. He spends about 10 minutes with you and suddenly, you believe things that aren’t true. You’re a great singer, he might tell you, or carrying a heavy load, or walking a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. If you’re hypnotized, you believe this. It all seems incredibly real. And this is something you believe after just a few minutes of his spell.” Bernard’s eyes welled up again. I still could not make the connection with what he was saying.
“Now compare that with society,” he continued. “Compare that with the time society gets to color your conscious, the time it gets to tell you that you’re awful or wonderful, that you’re a saint or slut, a brute or a gentleman.”
“This is making you sad, Bernard?” I literally scratched my head. “It’s interesting. It’s provocative. But sad?”
Bernard laughed. “You don’t get it?”
“No. I don’t.”
“You know, emotional insensitivity is overlooked as a means to resist new ideas,” he shook his head. “I’m 80 and now I get this? I finally get that this,” he waved his arms expansively, “this is a consensus trance.”
“Your insight changed your emotional state. I thought you said it worked the other way around.”
“Don’t feel like you always have to be contentious,” Bernard advised me disgustedly. “Sometimes you change floors and sometimes the floors collapse on you. Sometimes you move to the floors and sometimes they move to you. I’m trying to save you some grief.”
“So what am I supposed to do with your latest insight?”
“Well, first of all, how are you doing on the love thing we talked about?”
“I …” I was at a loss. Of late I obviously haven’t been able to properly translate what my heart was saying. It was apparently getting lost in the mail, or lost in this male, in a manner of speaking.
“Here are two things you have to convey to those beautiful children of yours. One, this is all made up. Society is a game we’ve agreed to pretend is real. Make sure that they know this is all pretence.”
“And then what? I mean, that sounds like a state of mind that might lead them to drop acid and sit on the beach watching waves crash.”
“It might. Once you kick out the props out, lives stand precariously. If someone doesn’t feel safe with you and you tell them that their life is a game, you’ll just terrify them. Or sound like an idiot. You take away the social constructs and what you are left with is ingenuity and love. If you don’t have the love, you don't even have the ingenuity. Without safety or love, a person can’t even get into the region of the brain that can create its way out of a situation. Knock out the props for society without love and you reboot civilization into a time of chaos and force.”
“Sounds scary.”
“Well, it’s a form of enlightenment. If that doesn't scare you a little bit ..." He trailed off. "Enlightenment doesn’t mean that you are dismissive of what makes society tick. It just means that you are not consumed by it. You might even play the game some. It’s just that you remember it is just a game.”
"You don’t live your life tone deaf to the consensual trance, blind to it. You have to see it. You’ll feel profoundly alienated if you don’t. But you have to be distanced enough from it that, like any good hypnotist’s show, you can laugh, shake your head, and even question whether the folks under hypnosis are just faking it. Every society is a form of madness."
"Madness?"
"Well," Bernard paused. "Yeah, from the right angle. But it's not like it's a bad thing. Necessarily."
“So, I teach them it’s a game but one that matters?”
“Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.” He looked at me intently. “You know, if you can pull that off, you might just turn into a father yet.”
“It’s kind of sad, though, thinking that this is just a game.” When I’m fatigued like this, my emotions feel less robust, my natural optimism is muted.
“At first,” said Bernard. “But once you’ve told someone else, there is a certain joy in it.” He smiled like a kid. “Just a game! Think about the liberty in knowing that.” He laughed aloud. “You know, you cheered me up today.”
“I’m happy I could do that,” I lied. And before I could stop myself, I wiped the back of my hand across my nose like a kid who’d just finished a good cry.

Homeward Bound

I saw a small, whining child in the airport who was probably 3 years old. His t-shirt read, “MY PARENTS ARE EXHAUSTED.” They were.

--------------

In Charlotte, N.C., I chose to eat at the BBQ. I like to eat food that reflects a regional personality, and I’ve just flown an hour and a half from Indianapolis to San Diego and am now, oh, an hour and a half further from San Diego. It seems small consolation to try odd and unhealthy foods. I order the fried okra and squash casserole with my sandwich. The okra is greasy and not that great, but the squash casserole is actually quite good – it could be served, in some fashion, in restaurants either crude or elegant.

But after I’ve chosen these sides, the man at the counter says, “Would you like a fried pickle,” with a southern accent that I can hardly refuse.
“Fried pickle,” I stupidly repeat. “Is that popular?”
“It is in more enlightened parts of the country,” he says. “But if you are from an undeveloped region of the country, you might not know about them.”
“That would be me,” I say. “Today I’ll choose enlightenment.”
He smiles happily and puts a breaded, fried pickle on my plate. About 30 minutes later, I swing by his station. “Here’s a sentence I never thought I would form when I woke up this morning,” I tell him. “That fried pickle was wonderful. Thank you.”
“Now you are enlightened,” he beams.
“Now I am enlightened,” I say. “And to think that all this time I was only one fried pickle away.”
“There you go,” he twangs.
As I walk away, I feel inexpicably pleased. This must be what enlightenment feels like, I think. I look back over my shoulder. My new friend at the counter has already turned his attention to the next person in line, but he catches my backwards glance. He smiles broadly at me and gives me a farewell nod. This must be the reason I’ve flown backwards to get home. A fried pickle. Suddenly blessed with enlightenment, I have a second realization: the pickle was not that great – I would have much rather gotten home a couple of hours earlier.

My enlightenment was enhanced when the next flight was delayed. Apparently, the folks at US Air sold us the tickets and boarded us on the plane before figuring out that we could not make it to San Diego on a single tank of gas. Stopping for gas in Phoenix turned our 5.5 hour trip into 7 hours. It seemed in-terminal (as in, I didn’t think that we’d ever make it off the plane and into a terminal).

Riding in coach, I once again conclude that I ought to have either been born rich or been short. A young teenage girl sitting in front of me with her mom and sister, headed to San Diego to vacation, put her seat back all the way even before we took off. About an hour and a half into our 7 hour trip, tired of contorting my legs into odd angles to conform to her seat back, I leaned over the seat and kindly asked her if she couldn’t sit up straight for at least two or three hours of our long flight. Looking startled, she quickly moved her seat up and did not once incline backwards again – for the next 5+ hours. When we landed in San Diego, I was so appreciative that I leaned forward one more time and thanked her for her kindness to my legs. She smiled and said, “No problem.” I then handed her a $20 bill and told her to take her mom and sister for fish tacos. Her expression of surprise and delight was worth some multiple of the $20.

Jorge Amado's Plan to End Racism

Yesterday, I stopped at Subway for a sandwich. The young guy who started my sub then said, "Sir, I ask this only because I care about the quality of your sandwich: are you willing to have this black guy put on your vegetables?" I stared at him. "Please realize sir, he is black." This was obviously his idea of humor and the young man to whom he was referring looked somewhat bemused and mostly resigned. I said to him, "It's an odd country. You can be white and black and black is what you are labeled." "Yeah," he said. "I'm half nigger and half cracker." Oh good, I thought, my sandwich is going to be made by a young man filled with self loathing. Unsurprisingly, it was tasteless. I should have said something witty or acerbic or critical, like "Oh yeah!" but instead, all I said was, "I'll have the cucumbers, alfalfa sprouts, and olives."

In the wake of Geraldine Ferraro's racist remark about Obama, I do wonder about this. How is this that a man who has one white parent and one black is automatically considered a black man? ("I don't know why people are so shocked that she would say this," quips Bernard. "Those Italians are notoriously racist.")

In a great scene from one of Jorge Amado's novels, a group of Brazilians are gathered around discussing race. Brazil has a little of everything and in spite of a reputation for being generally tolerant of one another, race problems emerge. The characters are getting quite philosophical about all this when (I believe it was) the blacksmith breaks his silence. "The answer is to have everyone interbreed until even God can't tell them apart," he announces. At 20, this seemed like a brilliant solution to me but I got very little cooperation in my attempts to put it into action.

Maybe, just maybe, when we finally read that Obama is a white guy whose father was black, we'll be en route to this world of racial confusion. I may have scuttled my personal plans to execute Amado's plan, but I still think that racial confusion might be the final solution to racist confusion.

Rockets! Run! Continues!

Tonight, the Rockets won their 20th game in a row. How cool is that? Well, only one team has ever done better.

From (Source: The Associated Press):

NBA's longest winning streaks

Games Team Date
33 Lakers Nov. 5, 1971-Jan. 7, 1972
20 Rockets Jan. 29-current
20 Bucks Feb. 6-Mar. 8, 1971
19 Lakers Feb. 4-Mar. 13, 2000

So, the best streak ended 36 years ago. My buddy Daryl, the Rockets GM, is 35. This is the best streak in the NBA since he was born. This is me applauding.

Dick Cheney, Sensitive Soul

News:

The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq.

Along with the contention that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials have often asserted that there were extensive ties between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network; earlier this year, Cheney said evidence of a link was "overwhelming."

I've been too hard on Dick Cheney. Once, I even went so far as to call him one of the three stooges of the apocalypse. But it turns out that I've been wrong. Dick Cheney is just a man easily overwhelmed, a sensitive soul prone to hide in undisclosed locations when he becomes emotional.

Look at his picture. It is easy to label the man as angry or hostile. One is tempted to discount his mis-read on Iraq as an inevitable outcome for a man who listens to his gut, an organ that must be perpetually in turmoil, feeding him a string of curses that would make even a drunken sailor blush. ("No, I don't have data. But my gut tells me that Iran has a secret weapon that will make our boys in uniform begin to feel oddly attracted to each other.")

But look again at that expression. Think about a man who finds even a paucity – no, an imagined dollop - of data to be "overwhelming." It is hard not to see this face as one about to collapse into tears, or perhaps cries of fright. It is rare that such sensitive souls make it to such lofty positions of power. It is time that we see Dick Cheney for who he really is. Dick Cheney is a beacon of hope for every child who has found himself crouched beneath his desk in reaction to moving poetry or reports of starvation. Easily overwhelmed, yet unafraid of power.

I feel like such a cad. I am overwhelmed with regret.

Spitzer Scandal

About a year ago, I predicted that Spitzer would be elected president in 2012. Damon broke the sad news to me in what struck me as an overly gleeful font. This morning at breakfast, the Fox News commentators put a fork in it: Spitzer's political career may be over. It seems that the reformer met up with a high-priced prostitute when in DC. (No word yet about how aspiring politicians are supposed to tell the difference between high-priced prostitutes and cheap politicians.)

Sadly, the news is about his libido. (You know what they say: big libido means a big fall.) Little is said about why the man rose to prominence and why it is important for someone to take his role.

In the last couple of decades, there has been a surge in the percentage of households that own stock (whether directly or through mutual and pension funds). To leave this money sloshing around without some regulatory oversight is to invite a series of ENRON-like fiascos in which senior executives and financial representatives easily manipulate the average investor. Imagine how ugly any sport would get after decades without a referee and you get an idea of what Wall Street could become – has at times become.

Spitzer was one of the few politicians who seemed able and wiling to go after the Wall Street’s coarser elements, protecting the average investor. The stupid politicians will see this imbroglio as an opening to steal Spitzer's votes. (The man recently won as governor of New York by an overwhelming majority.) The smart politicians will see this as an opening to steal his unique market position as the guy who protects the average investor.

The wrong lesson to draw from this is that this niche does not need to be served. Any politician who is savvy enough to create a career like Spitzer’s is going to have a real edge in any political contest. The sad thing is, these kinds of careers take decades to establish and just minutes to self sabotage.

Vatican Adds to List of Sins

News:
"(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,"

Worded like this, it makes it seem as though bioengineers are trying to compete with religion, which through medieval times had a near monopoly on attempts to re-program human nature in ways that have been difficult to predict or control.

Mingus Among Us (Even After His Eviction)

My cousin Scott sent me an email with these two videos juxtaposed. As he puts it, "they're a bittersweet pair."

In the first, jazz legend Charles Mingus is evicted from a property he was trying to turn into a music school for children, and then arrested. In the second, we get to see children - an awesome Japanese high school band - performing a Mingus composition. Is it justice if the person wronged isn't righted until after his death?

News Commentary

Marathon hopeful, 101-year-old , training hard
Already Britain's oldest employee, 101-year-old Buster Martin now aims to become the world's oldest marathon runner by completing the London Marathon and celebrating with a pint of beer and a cigarette.

Training for a marathon is hard for a 101 year old? This is news? What is news is that this father of 17 returned to work at 99, bored with retirement after two years.

For those of you wondering how he has stayed so fit and managed to father 17 children, it could be that Buster has done housework as a means of to both ends: studies indicate that men who do housework get more sex. It is not that men are unaware of this; they just keep hoping for shortcuts, like chocolates and empty promises.

Barak Obama raised $55 million in February.

To put this in perspective, it represents less than 2/1,000th of 1% of the federal budget and less than 3/10,000th of 1% of annual GDP. We still spend less on elections than we do on Halloween candy each year.

Home prices are dropping. The media reports this as bad news. Oddly, this same media had earlier reported rising home prices as bad news, a sign that homes were becoming unaffordable. I guess this is how the media keeps their reporting balanced; any direction the pendulum swings can be construed as bad news.

Forbes latest list of billionaires has some interesting data, among other things seeming to support the notion of globalization. "Two years ago, half of the world's 20 richest were from the U.S. Now only four are. India wins bragging rights for having four among the top 10, more than any other country." In second place, bumping Bill Gates and nudging up against Warren Buffet, is Mexican investor Carlos Slim, whose net worth has doubled in the last two years to $60 billion. The 1,125 billionaires on Forbes' list are worth a combined $4.4 trillion. Assuming a 10% interest rate, their combined net worth would generate Obama's $55 million in donations in about an hour. Facebook's 23 year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the world's youngest self-made billionaire. (At 23, I'm pretty sure my net worth (a shaky balance sheet that included a number of albums and a Bang & Olufsen turntable on one side and student loans and a '65 mustang prone to monthly break downs on the other) was probably closer to a negative $5,500.) With all that money, it is probably no wonder that Zuckerberg would need to create a social network site like Facebook. Many friends can be had for considerably less than a billion and someone with this much money would need some way to keep track of them all.

Personally, I'm hoping to get on Forbes' list within the next year as I begin hostile take overs of other blogs, leveraging my small number of comments to take over first Scott Adams blog and then begin picking off the blogs of people like Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington. How will I finance the purchase of these blogs? By highly leveraging my comments and obscure rating into stock I expect hedge fund managers to snap up. Why would they snap this up? Because next month, some other hedge fund manager will bid the price even higher. Now is the time for savvy investors to get in on the ground floor. I'm pretty excited about this, but I digress.

Mike Huckabee bowed out of the Republican primary contest. This has nonetheless been a boon to his career. He'll be starring in a new Broadway Musical: Gomer Pyle, New Mayor of Mayberry. The drama revolves around the mayor's move to outlaw evolution in the town; that Gomer Pyle is mayor seems evidence that he has succeeded.

Rockets Win Again with Rookie GM

The Houston Rockets just set a new team record tonight, winning their 16th game in a row. They've won 4 in a row without Yao, a remarkable feat even if it was not tacked onto such a streak. (No one in the NBA has had a longer winning streak this year.)

The New York Times wrote this about the Rockets' General Manager,

Morey, the rookie general manager of the Houston Rockets, is a wizard in the field of quantitative analysis, a friend of Billy Beane’s and a “Moneyball” true believer. He is the N.B.A.’s highest-ranking stat savant, the first mathematical magician to run a team.

Although all this is probably true, it misses what I think is the more important point about Daryl's success.

I met Daryl about 12 years ago. At the time, he was a recent college grad fascinated by oddly obscure ideas like self adaptive complexity. We clicked (there are not too many people who share interests in systems dynamics or find the ideas behind them stimulating) and since then I've followed his career with an odd mix of pride and amazement. The reporters frequently comment on his great mind, but Daryl is simply a likeable and delightful person.

Before sitting in Fenway Park watching the Red Sox with Daryl, I fancied myself a baseball fan. Listening to Daryl casually debunk various "myths" of baseball and support his claims with data, I realized that I was not really a baseball fan: I had odd bits of knowledge and interest in the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants. I realized that Daryl's most off-handed comment carried more weight than anything I had thought about for years.

Daryl is not just adept at analyzing data and determining what it means. He lets the data take him where it will - whether that is to the most obvious or most counter-intuitive conclusion. He does not just do this with sports data. He has done this with his life. I don't think that I've ever met a person who seems less concerned with tradition - that of others or even his own. Daryl accepts what the data says and is willing to test plausible theories - in any domain. Years ago, he put me on his "board of advisors," a move that amused and flattered me and has come to mean even more as his career continues to thrive. (That he would name me to such a position is proof that he's not just comfortable with data but is comfortable with odd ideas.)

Daryl did not play basketball in college, much less the NBA. His father does not own a team nor work as a famous sports analyst. Daryl’s career has not just risen with amazing celerity - he has done it on his own merit. I rather doubt that his high school friends would have pegged him as "most likely to be an NBA GM by 35."

There is a great deal I admire about Daryl. Perhaps what makes him most unique is not his ability with numbers and statistics but his willingness to accept the reality those numbers represent. Analysis can be taught. I’m not sure that Daryl’s willingness to change in response to the analysis can be taught and it is that – more than the actual analysis – that seems to me the truly extraordinary thing about his life, his career and his performance.

And Daryl – congratulations on the winning streak. You may just want to tell reporters that you’ve tried winning and tried losing and you just can’t see any advantage to losing or even one good reason to lose again.

The Diminishing Value of Capital - Entering an Age of Puny Portfolio Returns

Tom Stevenson of The Telegraph, summarizes Warren Buffet's take on reasonable returns:

Take the assumptions about future investment returns in corporate pension schemes. The average in America is 8pc, despite the fact that a quarter of pension funds are in bonds and cash (for which a 5pc return would be a reasonable expectation) and the rest in equities, which rose by just 5.3pc a year on average over the 20th century as a whole (a remarkable period of growth for the US economy).

Buffet suggests that expectations for returns are unreasonable based on history. Worse, I suspect that returns to capital will drop considerably over the next few decades for two reasons that are rarely mentioned.

1. There are trillions of dollars seeking returns. This money has driven up the price of stocks twice in the last decade, driven up the price of real estate for the last two decades, and is now driving up the price of gold and other commodities. This money is bidding up the price of various investment options because of a simple fact: the demand for investment returns is greater than the supply.

2. Related to this, many of the more exciting investment options are in ventures that don't require an enormous amount of capital. Or, more accurately, they require capital still not easily tracked or accounted for by accounting methods centuries old. Investments in Google have little to do with their banks of servers or buildings and almost everything to do with the ingenuity and knowledge of their employees. This is problematic for capital because it suggests that the best investment opportunities can be coy about their need for capital. Contrast this with the investments of a century ago; General Electric and General Motors represented investments that consumed huge amounts of capital.

As returns drop, it'll be easier for entrepreneurs to get money. Companies that expect to compete on the basis of returns to capital can expect to lag an already poor performing market. By contrast, companies able to foster a culture more like that of an incubator will prosper. For them, the cheap capital will be a boon, enabling them to seed even more ventures. These companies - and the investors who hold stocks in them - will be the big winners in this coming period of cheaper capital.

The Irrational Voter

This evening at the gym, I see Josh Groban and Rosario Dawson and a couple of other celebs urging people to vote. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but it is not hard to imagine.

Of course, the whole idea of voting is based on some fallacious notion about probability. You have better odds of buying a winning lottery ticket than you do of casting the deciding vote and I can pretty much guarantee that you are not going to win the lottery. Given that it is simply not rational to think that your vote will make a difference, only irrational people actually vote.

Wait. That seems to explain so much, doesn't it?

Newsweak

Pundits report the news before it happens and then authoritatively explain why it didn't happen as predicted. Hillary Clinton's campaign is over. So they say. They call themselves conventional wisdom and when they are wrong, they can all say, "We don't know how conventional wisdom could have been so wrong." When I get big, I'm not only going to talk about myself in the third person, but I'm going to refer to myself as some large and impersonal entity. ("Yes, dear, but conventional wisdom had been dead certain that you would love the real green dress.")

If you are willing to move to Kathmandu, there is an opening for a living goddess. It sounds like an interesting position, but I imagine that being the incarnation of Kali would leave one little room for personal self-expression.

Like an angry diner on a bad date cursing the waiter ("I did not order this heart break!"), the political machinery in Washington continues to try sending back the recession it did not order. But reality has its sense of humor, insisting that a prolonged recession is the perfect "cherry on top" for Bush's 8 years as leader of the free (for all) world. Proposing that his tax cuts be made permanent, Bush insisted that the problem was not government spending but was, rather, insisting that the government must pay as it goes.

It turns out that John McCain is "soft" on immigration because he is himself, an immigrant. John was born in Panama on a military base. Ralph Nader decried this as yet one more attempt by Republicans to eventually outsource every job in America.

The press has decided that they've lulled Barack Obama sufficiently that his expression of hurt surprise once they turn on him will make for priceless pictures and videos. Expect all favorable coverage to come to a sudden halt on Wednesday.

Crude oil prices continued their rise past $100 a barrel; sophisticated oil prices, by contrast, had already slipped past $150 a barrel months ago.

Los Lobos

Combine the psychedelic music and imagery of Northern California with the folk music and imagery of of Baja California and you just might get this fabulous song and video from Los Lobos, a band from here in Southern California. It's the weekend - I'll save the talk of social evolution and politics until later. Enjoy.