Steve Reads

The South during the Civil War: rebels, or a separate nation? — October 17, 2016

The South during the Civil War: rebels, or a separate nation?

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I’m in the middle of reading James McPherson’s magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom. It’s an exceptional book, and it’s reminding me of the legal grey area in which the South resided: was it a separate nation, or was it essentially a criminal enterprise violating the laws of the United States? The Northern blockade of Southern ports made this problem particularly clear: if the South were just rebels, then whom were we blockading? Were we blockading ourselves?

Likewise with the confiscation of Southern rebels’ slaves. Under one theory, seizing rebels’ slaves and then freeing them was legitimate during wartime, though this would then validate the South’s claim that this was a war against a separate nation. Under another theory, seizing slaves was merely punishment for the crime of treason, though McPherson doesn’t elaborate on whether the North ever attempted to try Southerners for the literal crime of reason. And when I glance at the Constitution, here’s the entirety of what it says about treason (in Article 3, Section 3):

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

On this quick glance, it doesn’t sound like fighting in the rebellion could be treason, if ‘Enemies’ refers only to external enemies; if it can refer to internal enemies, I’d like to know how those are defined.

Two responses to all of this:

  1. I’ve always found it kind of fascinating that governments insist on maintaining legal formalism even when they’re doing things that are pretty clearly extra-legal. That’s something of a testament to the staying power of the rule of law. Even though the North strained the bounds of credulity, I wonder if we can point to legal violations that the North was blocked from carrying out. And the North still felt it necessary to go through this legal exercise, which shows that the government’s power was not wholly unchecked.

    I see something of analogy here between legal formalism and Karl Popper’s doctrine of falsifiability. The basic premise of falsifiability is that a theory is considered scientific only if it’s possible, somehow, to think of an experiment that could prove it false. Plenty of people have raised objections to falsifiability over the years, but to my mind it remains useful as a necessary but not sufficient epistemological tool: plenty of falsifiable theories are unscientific, but it’s hard to imagine a scientific theory being unfalsifiable. Similarly, maybe legal formalism rules out government exercises of power that couldn’t be read into the bounds of the law no matter how generously we read.

    And I wonder if anyone was fooled by all the elaborate contortions that the North went through to have its rebellion cake and eat its war too.

  2. I’m not a lawyer, so don’t really listen to me on any of the above. McPherson cites Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, which seems like it may be a canonical work on this topic. It goes on the list.
I am actively looking forward to voting for Hillary Clinton — October 12, 2016
The white working class is large — October 11, 2016

The white working class is large

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I had been incorrectly thinking of the white working class as some small interest group, but — depending upon how you define it — it’s actually quite large. Check out the Census Bureau’s data on population sizes by educational attainment, which I’ve turned into a shared read-only spreadsheet.

(Note, by the way, that when I tried to import that Census XLSX file into Google Docs, Google mangled it and dropped the age breakdown in the leftmost column. Apple’s spreadsheet ingested it properly.)

If we define the white working class as white adults with less than a bachelor’s degree, there are 132.8 million such people. In a nation of 321 million people, that’s around 40% of the population. Given that 77.1% of the population is 18 years old or older, that means there are around 247 million adults. So of those 247 million adults, the majority are non-college-educated whites.

(Few of my friends lack a college degree. Another example of the bubble I’m in.)

It’s worth noting that around 3/4 of all voters in 2012 were non-Hispanic whites. And around 63% of all voters in 2012 did not have a bachelor’s or advanced degree (source: Census Bureau). I’ve not found cross-tabs that count voters by race and educational attainment, but then I haven’t looked very hard.

I have a hunch that elite discourse — being framed by journalists who’ve mostly been educated at elite universities — has convinced many of us that the white working class are a minority whose magnitude approximates that of many other minorities. My rough sense of the magnitudes here convinces me that, in fact, they’re a majority in whatever way you care to slice it.

I’m making no political point here. For one thing, whites are doing really well, relative to other races. And to be crystal-clear about it: nothing Donald Trump has said suggests that he would help the demographic that is purportedly his base. But it’s striking how large that base is.

The economy as a machine — October 6, 2016

The economy as a machine

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The latest episode of 99% Invisible (a podcast that you definitely ought to be subscribed to) describes a project carried out by the Chilean government under Allende to manage the state’s economy using the tools of control theory. The episode is a little light on the details of what they did in their control room; it is, after all, a podcast about design, and less about control theory.

It did, however, light up a bunch of neurons in my head related to longstanding interests of mine. The big, vague picture I have is that at one point people believed economies were machines which could be controlled by appropriately skilled engineers. This connects to a few threads, all of which I know in vague outline:

  • The early Technocracy movement.
  • Cybernetics, as pioneered by Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch (he of McCulloch-Pitts neuron fame).
  • Control theory, specifically as applied to economies — and as I understand it, specifically pursued at the RAND Corporation.
  • Macroeconomic work from around the World War II era, including input-output matrices of the sort that won Leontief his Nobel Prize; and even Kuznets’ Nobel for measurement of GDP.
  • The socialist calculation problem: how to replace a decentralized economy with disinterested bureaucrats who put data into their input-output matrices and output the appropriate level of every price in the economy. Specifically the debate between Hayek and Lange, which conventional wisdom has decided in favor of Hayek (specifically after he wrote The Use Of Knowledge In Society). I’ve not read the full debate, except as filtered through Stiglitz; I’d like to read the whole thing.
  • Pursuing formal analogies of economies as distributed computers, with all the formal consequences that would entail (e.g., deadlocks and race conditions).
  • Keynesian demand-side stimulation of the economy during recessions.
  • The later disillusion with the idea of controlling economies — including Milton Friedman’s famous observation that the economy responds to monetary interventions with “long and variable lags”

The big arc I have (again vaguely) drawn out in my head runs from a time when people seemed optimistic that an economy was something which humans created and humans could control, to a time when people seem to believe that economies are natural systems that we couldn’t possibly control even if we wanted to.

Does anyone know of a book that ties these strands together? Or do I need to write it myself?

Reading Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving is worth it if only for one turn of phrase — October 2, 2016

Reading Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving is worth it if only for one turn of phrase

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I’m in the middle of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, and I just happened upon his phrase “the invisible handwave”. This is the argument — which doesn’t withstand a moment of scrutiny — that the discipline of the market will purge irrationality from irrational actors. It is a lovely turn of phrase.

(You can make a plausible case that the market’s aggregate outcome — e.g., price levels — must be rational in some sense. What makes that more plausible is that people who act irrationally systematically leave the market, for instance because their businesses go bankrupt. But it’s not correct to believe that individual actors must themselves become rational.)

Here’s where I’m honor-bound to recommend that you read Thaler’s The Winner’s Curse. If memory serves, it’s largely a collection of his “Anomalies” columns from JEP. If you can’t commit to reading a whole book, try reading his delightful paper on the law of one price.

If I were Jane D. Hartley — October 1, 2016
What we have here is a failure to construct an argument — September 29, 2016

What we have here is a failure to construct an argument

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The video in this tweet is enjoyable, in its own way:

It’s sad that it should be enjoyable, because we’re watching a very decent fellow arguing against someone whose problems go well beyond believing the wrong things. The white fellow in this exchange either doesn’t know how to put together an argument, or is willfully avoiding a real argument for rhetorical purposes. Invoking the men and women who died for our country has nothing to do with anything, and specifically has nothing to do with refusing to sing the national anthem. The white fellow may as well be Walter Sobchak:


The obvious answer is that they didn’t die for a song; they died so that we’d have the right not to sing a song. But engaging with that particular line of argument is pointless, precisely because the argument is nonsense. Either its speaker can only string together nonsense arguments; or he’s capable of doing otherwise and chooses not to, in order to score rhetorical points with his audience. Either way, there’s no reason to engage with it.

Next up is his rhetorical question about why his sparring partner doesn’t leave the U.S., if things are so bad here. Again there’s an obvious answer: we live in a country that, in principle, allows us to improve things. Even asking that question is stupid; it’s meant to bait his sparring partner into a defensive response.

I wish it weren’t like this. I wish that both sides were arguing in good faith, but they’re not. And what do you do when the other side is not arguing in good faith? You either engage with them and lose, or disengage and talk past them — which is exactly what we see in that ‘debate’.

You simply must meet Thomas. Thomas! — September 22, 2016

You simply must meet Thomas. Thomas!

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The continuing Hamilton obsession reminds me: I’ve meant to read Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography of Jefferson for a long time; it’s supposed to be the definitive work on the man. I tried reading the first volume, but it was spending what seemed to me an excessive amount of time on Jefferson’s rural upbringing. That’s important to someone, surely; important when setting the stage for the famed philosopher’s veneration of rural life, surely; but not something I really need to read. So maybe I don’t need to read all six volumes. Maybe skip ahead to the time when he’s “off getting high [I always assumed it was ‘hot’] with the French”? Volumes 2 through 5 look like they cover the parts that most people would be concerned with, running from the Declaration through his time as president. Anyone interested in reading those four volumes with me?

As every schoolchild knows, Jefferson and Adams both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which would be July 4th of 1826. So from the end of Jefferson’s time as president until his death, there was a span of about 18 years. I’m sure he did fascinating things during that time, and I’m sure in particular that the letters he wrote would make for amazing reading…come to think of it, that time would span the War of 1812, and Jefferson was on one side of Virginia while Washington, D.C. burned, so surely he had interesting things to say. Regardless, volumes 2 through 5 are likely gripping reading, so let’s start by focusing on those.

James Madison also gets short shrift in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s play: offhand, I recall that Madison is mainly involved in uttering the hilarious single word “France”, convincing Jefferson to agree to the Compromise of 1790, and fielding Hamilton’s complaint that Madison is “useless as two shits.” But Madison is terribly important; my understanding is that he’s responsible for our government’s three-branch structure, in contrast to the monarchy that Hamilton wanted. That seems reasonably important. If nothing else, I’d like to read about the writing of the Federalist Papers, and the debate over the Constitution.

As always, I welcome people joining me in this reading.

Two math things — September 21, 2016

Two math things

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  1. It’s a long-term goal of mine to understand the proof of the Prime Number Theorem. The PNT, for those who are unfamiliar, is that the number of primes less than or equal to N is approximately N/ln(N), with the approximation improving as N grows to infinity; the percent error of the approximation approaches zero as N grows. I found a really interesting paper that walks through a proof. (The paper won an award for math exposition.) I’ve only done a quick first read-through, but it seems interesting. On that first pass, I think I now get why we even bother with the von Mangoldt symbol. Baby steps. If anyone would like to read along with me, y’all are welcome to.

    One question I have is whether it’s mathematically impossible to find a function that exactly equals the number of primes less than or equal to a number. The N/ln(N) approximation is good, but it’s just an approximation with a known rate of error — and while the percent error drops to zero, the absolute error grows without bound. Is there a proof that a function which counts the exact number of primes less than N is impossible?

    (I could be more precise about this. Obviously the function which sums the number 1 over all primes p less than or equal to x is an exact function. But it’s obviously not what I’m looking for. There’s probably a formal way to describe exactly what I’m looking for it. It’s probably either “a function containing only a certain set of symbols” or “a function of at most O(log n)” or something.)

  2. If someone gives you the equation “ax = b”, you can solve that really easily with elementary algebra; the solution is x = b/a. Likewise if someone gives you an equation involving x-squared; the solution is the quadratic formula. The solutions get more and more complicated for x-cubed and the fourth power of x. There’s a theorem (Abel-Ruffini) which says that no solution using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and root extraction (square roots, cube roots, etc.) is possible for the fifth power of x and higher in the general case. When I limit it to “the general case”, I mean that certain specific equations at higher powers may have solutions: x100-1=0 has the solution x=1. But the general equation ax5+bx4+cx3+dx2+ex+f=0 has no solution, nor do equations with higher powers.

    The question I’ve had for a while (apart from knowing enough Galois theory to know how to prove Abel-Ruffini) is what happens if you allow mathematical operations other than addition, subtraction, and the rest. What if you allow sines and cosines? Fourier series and their inverses? Bessel functions? Elliptic functions? The Wiki says that a certain kind of transformation turns the general quintic into a simpler quintic polynomial, which can then be solved using a Bring radical. Is the Bring radical the simplest function which can solve the general quintic?

    So then my first question is: what’s the simplest set of functions you can add to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, such that the general quintic has a solution in this augmented set?

I don’t want to give Amtrak ideas on how to make things even worse, but… — September 13, 2016

I don’t want to give Amtrak ideas on how to make things even worse, but…

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When I travel on Amtrak, I always use the Matt Yglesias hack: wait downstairs at Penn Station, rather than upstairs, because the Amtrak boarding process is insane.

I wonder whether Yglesias posted that observation about Penn with some fear that Amtrak would lock down the process and thereby kill the golden goose. It’s been several years now, and the enjoyable hack is still there, so perhaps there’s nothing to worry about.

I say the following with similar trepidation: if you want to avoid the incredibly stupid and pointless lines at South Station, just get on one stop farther along toward New York, at Back Bay; problem solved. There are no waiting lines, and people board trains the way they should — the same way they board subways.

Also, it looks like Amtrak is considering making the train system worse. Read this whole thread by a fellow whose Twitter description says that he is “Prone to live-tweeting transit plans.”