A Non-Exhaustive List of Pandemic Opportunities to be Missed

I must disclose, my forecasting abilities have been thoroughly trounced by the Covid-19 outbreak. My utterances and speculating have been of little predictive value. I've been 'keeping it real', the paranoid have vastly outperformed me thus far. But this very bad track record of mine, actually gives me some optimism. Because I'm so pessimistic about public discourse. Maybe others (sure, not most) will be hit with a similar revelation that their two-cents, is often not worth two-cents.

But what I'm forecasting is that we won't learn a thing/enough from this. Data will be lost, people will be eager to get through and forget, return to 2019 and rush back to the normal state of affairs we were all dissatisfied with as we took to social media and expressed our angst.

What clearly takes precedent now, and is to minimize the unnecessary death and subsequent bereavement of those who survive them. For the most part, the community has mobilized behind this cause, and I won't really address it here. Just rest assured I'm not a psycho that overlooks the value of human lives.

I'm also reassured by how often I've thought of something that really should be investigated and then hearing some expert or other considering exactly that. However, I guess I'm concerned that all of this will wind up in the tiny minority of people interested in believing true things and investigating objective reality, vs the majority who are interested in confirming their subjective experience.

You may read a lot of time markers like 'this morning' and 'yesterday' because I've been writing this ever expanding post for like a fortnight now, and it's broken my brain. I suspect it becomes less and less coherent as it continues but I now feel I can no longer continue expanding it because I've reached my cognitive limits.

There is in summary however a recurring theme, which is that the pandemic has instigated a bunch of moratoriums. A 'moratorium' is where you stop doing something to observe the impact of what it actually does. Think of that season of Lost where they have to keep punching numbers into a computer to reset a timer, but nobody quite knows why. The only way to find out is to stop doing this. A bunch of stuff has been forced to stop that we are understandably reluctant to stop, giving us this golden opportunity to actually observe the effects, confront our fears.

So with that in mind, back to the virus and everything not about the virus.

Covid-19 vs Mental Health

The data: Subjective experience and affect changes.
Why I'd like to know it: Better crisis planning, long term benefits.

I'd like to open with the positives. Forecasting my own mental health from the physical distancing, unfortunately branded 'social distancing' was again off. I've been effected more than I anticipated, it is all to date still manageable.

But I am finding tremendous value in appreciation-through-deprivation. This is a shared experience. Because I went to an international college, in my mid 20's a lot of my then social network went and dispersed all over the world. So once a year or so, something would happen somewhere like a flood or a fire or earthquake or terrorist attack in some region, and I would check-in with a friend to make sure they and their families would be okay. This one is much closer to a global shared experience. There's some variation depending who got hit with what numbers when, and governmental responses and health resources.

So there's that sense of connectivity that I am experiencing, even while being isolated and having a clear social calendar more remote is the potential for people to both build empathy and be humbled by the economic shutdown. What would be good to know is the mass of people that are suddenly identifying with people they previously criticized for simply being lazy, not getting a good job or spending too much on brunch.

It would be also good to know if any anxious minds are palpably appreciating being freed of the anxiety that comes with chasing esteem through social appearances. For most Australians I suspect the function of the economy has been to facilitate the pursuit of esteem by our peers.

But sidling to the negative side of things, there's an obvious notable exception to the lock-down on our social lives and it's possibly that intersection of the two largest chunks of the esteem game pre-pandemic. The ability to consume too much news and comment on that news on social media. For some people for whom social media is an anxiety pump, I wonder if it is being exacerbated. Many in the demographic that can't pursue esteem through the purchasing of yachts or photo-ops with world leaders, resorted to pursuing esteem through online posturing. Younger generations for whom social media has been an established norm have grown up in the era of cyber-bullying with the positive side effects of a drop off in youth drinking culture and underage sex because staying home posting to instagram took its place. Anyway, image crafting is one of those behaviors where everyone will know someone that is an egregious offender and nobody will own up to doing themselves. What I'd like to have data on is how many people are finding relief from reduced social contact vs how many people are spiraling into anxiety by thinking all Covid all the time.

I'd encourage anyone/everyone to start maintaining a journal through these surreal times. A wealth of data has already been lost to hindsight revisions. Change is happening rapidly, I for example sat at a dinner at a vegan restaurant in Coburg lamenting the lack of collective memory of SARS and more recently H1N1. That was 22nd of February.

It would be convenient for me to forget that opining of mine because in hindsight it was incorrect, and I can feel my ego already wanting to shift the blame for my poor conception of the crisis onto the media for overhyping SARS and H1N1. I forget when it was declared a pandemic, but shortly after that on the 13th of March, I went to a Networking event. At this point I was already tired of the Toilet Paper coverage, but again my forecasts would have been wrong, anticipating supply would be restored within a fortnight, and overlooking that the panic buying would be contagious and cascade.
I was shaking peoples hands still in a room full of strangers. I went home and listened to Sam Harris' podcast on the Covid-19 pandemic where he sounded paranoid to me, bordering on hysterical, however his arguments were persuasive.

That Friday I went to the cinema with a group of friends, by this stage I can still recall this experience of daily making decisions that I thought were acceptably risky, and the next day reflecting on the decisions I made the day before as taking stupid risks that I probably shouldn't have in hindsight.
I recall my parents incredulity when they returned from Tasmania, the day before the panic buying turned into it's own pandemic. They were incredulous about the toilet paper situation. Then started stockpiling shit themselves.

I'll get back to the panic buying, but I just want to emphasize, start journalling, you don't have to publish it, but anyone who keeps track of their thoughts and impressions and subjective experience of this will be sitting on a document of tremendous value to researchers. Particularly for generating data on how social isolation effects people. It can help policy makers weigh up the risks of what measures to take when, how authoritarian they can be and how authoritarian they should be and when.

One tricky aspect of memory, is that say when it first dawns on us that we could be in isolation for 6 months, we might panic. Five months later, isolation has become a new normal and we forget the visceral experience of panic. This is how you can get in the elderly people that describe the great war, the great depression, world war 2 as 'the good old days' because their memory dismisses all the unfounded panic and anxiety.

One last major positive I'd like to touch on though and subsequently find the data for, is what effects on the general population are being felt just by being forced to slow down. Like all the people getting more sleep and exercise. Granted, there's a the invisible enemy outside making most people appropriately on edge, and if you are watching the news right before going to bed you might have fitful anxious sleep... but I notice people out taking walks in greater and greater numbers. Just walking around taking in their neighbourhood and the public gardens. I also suspect that after 10 straight hours of netflix a bunch of people are running out of reasons to stay awake.

It may seem counterintuitive, but, in the regions that are managing the outbreak with some degree of success, there will be numerous people who's mental and physical health will actually improve as a result. If well contained the number of people whose life has been extended by this may prove to outnumber the lives lost. (not to mention the impact of improved air quality in areas like Los Angeles etc.)

Now into the more net-nuetral aspects of mental health, and where journal data would be really useful is that some subset of the population is in a position to notice how anxious they are about catching Covid-19 vs what a relief it was to finally be diagnosed with Covid-19. What I mean is that there will be substantial psychological data that I bet will be inline with what has been observed about other bad medical conditions and bad twists of fate. That the anticipation in a state of uncertainty is subjectively worse than the experience of knowing you are in the worst case scenario.

My family don't know currently if we are yet to be exposed, asymptomatic carriers or recovered asymptomatic carriers or if we already have contracted it and are in the latency period. Until any symptoms manifest we remain in this state of uncertainty, and that's what I personally am having to cope with daily.

Having emphasized the import and value of keeping a journal through interesting times. I guess for me in the last few days I started to feel the impending mental health crisis start nibbling at me. In so far as I can draw on experience to speculate. I would say my ability to sustain denial as to the personal impact on me has been stressed, forcing me to accept the circumstances.

I've felt better today for having accepted a much more bearish outlook on what this whole thing is going to cost me, emotionally and time wise. But people have had a disruption of one kind or another hit them, almost universally so a grieving process is to be expected where people will fluctuate roughly through shock, anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance. (bargaining really being a desperate form of denial).

It is really valuable in my experience, to just be able to recognize that one is grieving. If you are anything like I was, you probably associate grieving almost exclusively with a death. But really we grieve whenever we lose our anticipated future. Whether through breakups, job losses, or our sports team dropping out of contention.

The next level is to both investigate and appreciate the work the stages of grief do to help us process reality in doses we can manage and still remain functional. Shock for example, is really only experienced at the beginning, few of us relapse into shock, unless some new horrifying detail emerges. This I suspect is to make sure we shut down our ability to process the news and continue operating the heavy equipment we were operating when we heard. For our ancestors it was probably a response that helped members of a family survive when a predator ate one of our offspring in our midst. Get to safety, then acknowledge what happened.

Next  let's talk anxiety. I feel this is something spoken about constantly that enjoys the rare status of being little understood for all the airtime it gets. Prior to all this, I knew a lot of people that told me they 'have anxiety.' After a few years I was hit with the shocking revelation that in many of these cases people were just self-diagnosing based on their ability to identify with someone else's stories/preferences. One thing that should have given that away, is that anxiety is a normal part of the spectrum of human emotions. There are diagnoses related to anxiety, but these are in the realm of personality disorders, like Generalized Anxiety, OCD, possibly Borderline. Also attachment styles, like Anxious-avoidant and Anxious-preoccupied (Withdrawn and needy respectively).

Again in hindsight, the public discourse on anxiety was putting an onus on society in general to mitigate the debilitating aspects of anxiety. My lived experience was that in general, I was asked to accommodate people's anxiety.

So we don't yet have the data on the demographics or psychology of the people who kicked off the panic buying by stocking up on toilet paper. I suspect though that anxiety will play a role, and that their anxious behavioral responses have been indulged in recent history (the past decade).

In my layman understanding, anxiety is what we feel in states of uncertainty, particularly when there are good and bad outcomes at stake. The most common intuitive response to feelings of anxiety is to try and take control - panic buying/hoarding is an attempt to control an uncertain future. In a case of social anxiety; not going to a party, not asking out your crush etc. are also ways to gain control, by avoiding all risk of both good and bad outcomes through not taking the chance, we are at least certain of the bad outcome - we didn't enjoy the party, we don't have an intimate partner - but at least we inflicted it on ourselves, that we can control.

What's dangerous about anxiety is that it is contagious, so if you have a society that relaxes the expectation that you turn up to things you say you will, out of consideration for how awful anxiety feels, now people who host parties and gatherings have more reason to be anxious that people won't turn up. I like to think of a scene in a spaghetti western, where some outlaw walks into the saloon and injects tension into the room - that tension is anxiety - who's he gonna shoot? will they shoot first? people start reaching for their guns the tension will start feeding off itself as more people take in more variables (the other people weighing up the situation) and uncertainty escalates. Soon someone will snap and try to take control, at which point the situation is no longer under any control. (Unless you rig it like Blondie in the finale of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, however in that three way shootout the eyes tell the whole story of the contagion of anxiety).

What I didn't anticipate, is that on the unsubstantiated belief that toilet paper would run out, people stockpiled it, sending a signal that hoarders were out there. So suddenly the equation changed, no longer were you leaving items on the shelf out of consideration of pensioners and people in need, but if you left it there some greedy hoarder would just nab it. And so the people who thought 'better me than a hoarder' became hoarders. As items ran out, people were then forced to buy substitutes - all the pasta is gone, buy rice, all the rice is gone, buy all the lentils and so on...

People entered a losing economic game where they tried to anticipate the next shortage and stockpile it, creating shortage after shortage. This is something those keeping journals out of regular practice will no doubt have documented. Something that echoes through my head though is Chomsky's 'If you want to stop terrorism, stop participating in it.' which may have spared me from participating in it. But this allowed me to glean an insight into what others must feel.

Empty supermarket shelves send a message to vulnerable people, that nobody else cares about them. People have thought of themselves, not you. It is really dangerous because it appears to confirm what a lot of depressed people tell themselves. Proof positive nobody gives a shit whether they live or die. What I would add is wrong with this thinking is that people not caring is by definition, highly impersonal, and that is very different from people actually wanting you to die. People aren't against you, (particularly in this case), they were for themselves. And hopefully, given time to reflect, will start looking to the needs of others again, and wishing to make themselves useful.

But it would be nice to have data in the form of journals about what people are thinking about - we can measure whether people are thinking of themselves or others, and the degree of relatedness in terms of people whose welfare they consider. This would be great data to have, because I suspect it could inform public policy and discourse as to more constructive approaches to mental health issues like anxiety.

Personally, (as in non-expertly) I follow a rule-of-thumb which is mental health requires freedom of choice. Conditions like Schizophrenia, more severe types of Bipolar etc. one cannot choose to have auditory hallucinations or psychosis should they wish to. Similarly acquired brain injuries and autism deprive those who have them of the choice to deal with their debilitating symptoms. (Hence I am moved and approve of this public awareness campaign for Autism, one of the things that has brightened recent dark days). Anxiety though, I remain unconvinced deprives people of choices. It just makes things difficult. Also virtually every authority on the topic I have come across seems to join a consensus that accommodating anxiety just makes it worse. (I am frankly still amazed at the difference between the practitioner discourse and the public discourse on these issues)

So let's then move onto shame, which Brene Brown is probably the biggest champion of the discourse on shame. I am getting a bit cabin feverish, even though I would not describe myself as a particularly social or outgoing person. But I have taken time to consider people I can barely relate to, that this social isolating will hit hard - people who depend on others to esteem them. In my life I have met people that I suspect need to go out drinking on a Friday night. People who need to spend time with their core group of friends regularly to mentally survive.

There are also people whose sense of self is wrapped up in their jobs, their careers, what they do. Both people who are defined by external parties whether it's who their friends think they are, or who their work place says they are, or what bouncers approving their entry to the club says they are; these people are all due to be hit fucking hard by being cut off from external validation.

This is something little discussed, and yet the behavioral data is usually quite transparent because behavior can be seen. When I trained to tutor refugees, this was well known as a common issue in refugee households. Men who were suddenly unemployed and socially isolated would become tyrants to their families, their loss of job and role in society threatened their standing in the household. Suddenly they were micromanaging domestic chores they refused to do themselves.

The big problem of shame, as far as I understand it, is that people will do almost anything not to feel it. And we are badly prepared for this, because we basically ignore (or worse, try to profit from) all the self-medicating going on when society is functioning as per normal. We can measure the consequences of this, but there's something positive as well.

I've been going through an outplacement service for the last three months, and at things like workshops and seminars where I saw people recently redundant, I constantly just wanted to give my fellow participants hugs. Their esteems had taken a huge blow, and I inferred they were being brave. But I would say, most people who have this shock to the system because of both shame and anxiety - basically go on the rebound and try to find a job more or less just like their last one.

This pandemic is different, it's going to force a lot of people to actually sit with their collapsed identity and rather than hastily restoring it, having to proactively build a new identity. People cut off from their means of coping with their shame, may actually have to chew threw it, and be better for it. Gabor Mate who I'm a big fan of, either says or quotes in his book 'Hungry Ghosts' that most of us will do anything to avoid the company of our own thoughts.

I'm on the whole quite bullish about this though. The most productive and developmentally valuable times in my life have been my periods of grief. Break ups lead to break throughs, break downs lead to growth. This was my personal antifragility, and much of the opportunities I am most grateful for, are the result of some of the worst times of my life. Australians in particular have never known hard times in living memory, excluding the few people old enough to recall World War 2 or the Great Depression.

One addendum is also the subjective experience of all those people who had their dating activities shut down. People I would loosely categorize as afraid of being alone. This is particularly interesting to me, because I've long speculated that the fear of being alone is a misnomer - there's nobody there to actually hurt you. What is to be feared in my opinion, is actually how safe it is to be alone. It must be a fear of the self, being forced to confront our own minds as company. These journals would be particularly valuable.

Covid-19 vs Crime

The data: Aggregate changes in lifestyle and the impact on crime.
Why it would be good to know: How we structure work, life, the economy.

When the stay home orders first started to be implemented, I had my first thought about this basically forcing burglary to stop. In hindsight I'd amend that too; I hear some people will do anything for drugs. But the chances of a house being empty to rob without the police being called, violent altercations etc. must have crashed through the floor in recent weeks. There was never a worse time to break into houses.

The inverse is as businesses close, are burglaries of commercial properties going to experience an uptick? Or will the police suddenly find themselves having to monitor less and less businesses, given tills and safes being empty such that their response time for a grocery store also makes it never a worse time to abuse a supermarket employee.

Of course, the flip side of this, is that many crimes happen within the home. As painful as the wall that has been thrown up between my girlfriend and my's reunion, given the closing of borders, there is a much worse situation many will find themselves in. The relief felt by those in toxic relationships that work and school gave them and their kids breathing space. Also the presence of a community, and the fact that things like bruises and other physical injuries would be scrutinized outside of the home. How many of the stragglers to comply with advice are dreading this exact predicament?

Given no factor predicts a child's abuse (including neglect) better than having a step-parent in the home (according to Gad Saad my source on this 70 times more predictive than the next factor). This is really the time to leave. Particularly given the aforementioned mental health pressure it will apply. 'Room' is no doubt becoming a reality in these times, for many women and children.

Increased isolation might mean less scrutiny meaning some people may just disappear in the coming months.

A lot of the crime data is of course going to be captured by our ordinary police work. Call outs to noise complaints and suspected domestic violence. Then there's all the opportunities for racketeering, what's going to happen to meth labs? drug manufacture? drug dealers? At a time when nobody is having guests over, how is the local dealer delivering to customers?

It's not just a shake up of the regular markets, but I suspect a shake up of the black market too. I guess we should also anticipate cyber crimes escalating as more and more of life goes online. After the medical data, this is the most likely data to be collected. But it's just going to be so multifaceted. It virtually ensures that whichever way a government responds to the crisis there will be unconsidered costs, we will no doubt insist they answer for. In the future they could have answers, if the data can be collected and analyzed.

COVID-19 vs Education

The data: Longitudinal consequences of missed curriculum vs missed socialization.
Why I'd like to know it: Mental health outcomes for young people, and consequent lifelong mental habits.

Schools are shutting down, students to remain at home. Some course work will move online, but I do not expect any students finding themselves in a quasi swot-vac state will ask the question: why go to a campus at all? There are teens that will bemoan not seeing their crushes for weeks just as they felt they were making some progress. Others that think the whole thing is stupid. Others that will spend the entire time on chat/facetime/calls because they can't cope with their own thoughts. Others that notice cyber-bullying ramping up/or ramping down as the parents easily isolate the cause of their children's distress.

I'm not sure how social isolation works with boarding students, whether they are shipped off back to the country or simply sequestered on campus with the day student population removed. But I'm fairly confident most students will at some point miss the most valuable education schools provide - socialization, the stuff that happens in recess. Between classes.

My own school days drift ever backward in my rear view window, and as such are constantly re-contextualized. I remember having some math problem, the likely culprit being simultaneous equations, and my dad an engineer asking my cousin-in-law also an engineer if he knew how to do it, and his remarking something to the effect of 'been a long time since I knew how to do those.' Revealing to me, who was not pursuing a career as math heavy as engineering, that I was learning something ostensibly for the sole purpose of being tested on it.

Though I don't retain any understanding of how to do simultaneous equations, and if asked to re-sit my VCE exams today, would likely not receive scores sufficient to obtain the degrees I hold, I do enjoy learning for learnings sake, so I don't begrudge that I was taught a bunch of shit at school. What I do begrudge was the stress I was put under to learn that shit. This is considering that as near as I can ascertain, I was one of the more mellow students in my year level. The stress and anxiety students feel is scarcity driven, much like the Covid-19 panic buying.

The stress isn't need driven. As students are sent home, the reality from adult land isn't 'oh my god, the pipeline of Marine Biologists is going to be disrupted! Industry is going to collapse!!' No law firms are bracing themselves for a 'lost generation' of lawyers, sitting down to have crisis talks about what next years' gap in summer interns is going to mean for recruiting senior partners in 40 years time. Worse than that, I would wager there are no professionals, anywhere, tearing at their hair bemoaning that 'weeks 4-6 of final year further maths is allocated to drawing and interpreting box-plot graphs! If the students miss box-plots, we cannot in good conscious hire them as aerospace engineers!'

What Covid-19 pandemic can potentially wash out, is that our education system generates vast wasteful surpluses in knowledge dissemination. Good quality knowledge, reproduced with high fidelity. But who are the end consumers?

In my own life, I remember being handed a VTAC course guide. Back in 2001 it was still basically a small print phonebook, where you could look up something like the job you want (although I think we might have got a separate directory for jobs), the opening wage, the required qualification, then last years required enter score (now Atar) and the prerequisites. Overwhelmingly (as in 99% overwhelming) whether you want to design naval aircraft carriers or try constitutional law or compose modern contemporary dance... with very few exceptions the only prerequisite for any course was a passing grade in English or equivalent.

School closure is not quite the same thing, but I would have appreciated back in the day if the university head of the school of economics (or take your pick) came down to an assembly and said 'we are literally indifferent as to whether you as a student demonstrate an interest and aptitude for mathematics, or physical education.' With exceptions like Medicine... and I can't recall any other, the whole operation of secondary schooling (in Australia) is to produce a bell curve of scores so scarce tertiary places can be allocated. It is primarily testing for industriousness, in order to produce employees, and it has a flaw because it can accidentally test for intelligence, and thus provide false positives of highly industrious students who are in fact, quite lazy, but intelligent.

In summation of this point, we live in a society that has quite stressed and anxious members in an age bracket generally of 16-19 stressing over their ability to acquire and demonstrate knowledge that will create no economic or social shortfalls if done. We produce maybe 1,000 or more teenagers that know how to anti-differentiate for every 1 that will ever use this skill in their working lives. Those who survive this gauntlet to land in a tertiary course of their choosing, often will experience the implicit concession 'well done on that exam we insisted you sit. Now if you like you can just dump all that knowledge in the trash, you won't be needing it here.' and/or 'well done on that exam we insisted you sit. Now we're going to go over all of that again, because we don't actually require everyone to sit *that* particular exam.'

From the perspective of our tertiary enrollment system, we may as well test kids on subjects like Simpsons Seasons 1-12, and Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. Because all we generally require is the meta evaluation of some students doing well, and some students doing poorly and students on average performing averagely. With *this objective* in mind any subject sufficiently complex could be taught with no impact on the quality of tertiary graduates. What's more debatable but worth finding out, is 'how much student industry could we relax, with no impact on the bell-curve?' which is to say, there will be a bunch of scheduled topics that we could at any time, if the powers so fit, cut out at no loss.

I, but few, get suspicious that every subject of study fits neatly into the same school calendar. It takes 12 weeks to learn some level of French language, and woah 12 weeks to learn services marketing, and (oh my god) 12 weeks to learn Macroeconomics, which amazingly is exactly as long as it takes to learn Microeconomics. Wow! Who would have thought virtually every field of study is exactly as complex as each other and takes exactly the same resources in time and contact hours. (yes to be fair, there is Macro 1 and Macro 2 [or 101 and 102] because some subjects that can't be taught in 12 weeks have to be taught in 24)

Of course, the lived experience I expect is common, that the average student discovers there are some courses that are easy, and some courses that are hard. (A few exceptional students will discover all courses are easy, and likewise some exceptions find that all courses are really difficult). But they are charged the same, required to complete equivalently onerous assignments, and worse; group assignments and so forth.

If we missed a year of school, it would impact the economy, but the biggest impact would probably be that education wasn't being consumed, rather than the loss of much arbitrary knowledge being produced. Debt wasn't being accrued. Some industries with skill shortages might feel it. But I speculate that in most industries, we actually have a glut, skill surpluses, a bunch of people waiting around doing nothing and often these queues are growing, rather than moving. Hence we have people with student debts driving Ubers, working call centers and of course Middle managers...

COVID-19 vs Bullshit Jobs

The data: How large our 'private welfare' system is.
Why I'd like to know it: People wasting their precious precious lives.

In an ordinary economic contraction, there will be a bunch of redundancies and layoffs. The typical narrative is that a contraction in demand leads to an oversupply of goods and services, which drives a contraction in production. The reduced production means some proportion of staff becomes redundant and their jobs cease to exist. This narrative is pretty true. If you have a restaurant that normally has four waiters serving 16 tables, and suddenly you drop from having 16 tables to wait to 2, the owner reasonably drops from 4 waiters to one. If the car dealers are cancelling their forward orders and cars are piling up in warehouses, you stop producing cars and lay off all the factory workers until the backlog is cleared.

This narrative is not inaccurate, and it describes the more common economic downturn which is where there's a demand-shock such as experienced in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Covid-19 is driving a supply shock - disruption to supply chains shutting down businesses while demand is spiking, and most of the early coverage of the pandemic was economic focused in my experience, rather than medical. I saw stories about retail stores being unable to order more stock weeks before I saw my first discussion of symptoms of the disease. Of course now with social distancing policies and mandated shutdowns in place, the response generates a demand side shock as well. But there is little point to cutting interest rates.

But sticking with this narrative of layoffs, it conceals often the people in our economy, that actually could have been laid off at any point in the business cycle. A hypothetical person called Bob, that loses his job because of the drop in demand and production along with 8 other people that work the line with him. The thing is, Bob is the guy on the team that has been around forever, other employees try to do Bob's work for him, because Bob does a terrible job when he does things himself. He's been passed over for promotion such that Bob's manager started as Bob's junior and doesn't know anyone in the department that can recall the day Bob started. Bob turns up to work, collects a wage and provides useless and misleading criticism and advice that new staff quickly learn to ignore. People don't mind Bob, he's not mean or nasty, or bitter or unpleasant. He's simply there.

How many Bob's collect wages in our economy is data that economic shocks likely wash out, but nobody collects. I would personally be surprised if anyone's lived experience excluded characters like Bob. People who retain their position even though it's a kind of open secret that they are either not productive or even counter productive.

If you aren't familiar with the discussion on Bullshit jobs, here's a primer. But yeah, as social isolation kicks in, there will be employees whose absence isn't felt. Their risk as a carrier of Covid-19 finally elevating them to pure liability in the office. Their will be employees now telecommuting to work, that are also on an individual level gathering immensely valuable data as to how much of their jobs are bullshit.

I would bet good money that there will be people discovering that they can sit down at 9 and knock over all the work that actually needs doing by 11 or 12. People that will be questioning for the first time in years why they endure a 2 hour commute each day to the office. People that will notice that much of their behavior in the office, is purely a performance. There will even be skeleton staffers noticing how quick their commute is when 90% of their colleagues stay home and how productive they are when there's nobody else around to slow them down. The act of looking busy, generating and responding to emails, scheduling and attending meetings where nothing of consequence is exchanged or decided, is there to simply fill up the working day.

Suddenly, with the newfound ability to have nobody know you are watching Netflix all afternoon, potentially millions of workers are discovering that they actually work part time. Furthermore, if and when restaurants close down, and advice goes out to not use Uber eats and delivery services, people will be discovering the costs of their time poverty, as they prepare meals for themselves, get some exercise in for the morning, and consume stimulating entertainment/educational content. Some will even find time to indulge passions and hobbies. Yes, some people will discover how much work they can get done, if only they didn't have to go to work.

I've worked in offices where the culture of presenteeism was strong. Where a lot of people had adopted the strategy of showing up before the boss arrived and not leaving until the boss left. I knew these people actually avoided doing their work between 9-5 so that they had something to do during their voluntary overtime.

I attribute this (without evidence, just speculating) to a combination of factors:

Demographic shifts: much of our education system is a hangover of the industrial revolution, where you needed a constant stream of new clerks to keep the books because employees died from flu over the winter, were run over by horse-and-carriage, fell into the machinery or retired at 40 to enjoy the last 5 years of their life in an opium den. Where now the cohort of people labelled boomers ascended to management positions in the late 70s thru 80s and are still the managers today, with Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z now piling up in middle management. (this isn't of course always the case, talent generally goes straight from an entry position to senior/actual management regardless of age cohort, it's the mediocre; which let's be honest, is most of us, that get stuck in the middle management traffic jam.)

Psychological profiles: Most people are risk averse. Most people's average creative achievement score is 0 across all fields of creativity. As such differentiation is a rarely adopted strategy ('being different' in plain English). Most people opt for penetration, which while sounding phallic and patriarchal is basically trying to be better, cheaper, faster, stronger etc. than the competition. Students do this when they try to do more practice exams, or submit more drafts of their assignment until the teacher guarantees an A. A salesperson would do this by making more calls. Most workers do this by putting in more hours. This could work if you're a carpenter or animator. But when there's a fixed advertising budget, and only one ad campaign to run, it doesn't make much sense for a marketing department - they can only rack up more consultation fees from the ad agencies.

Power is transactional: This is my least formed, least confident, most bare faced assertion. I simply suspect at some intuitive level, the wealthy in our society understand that they can't stockpile their wealth in a vault and swim through it Scrooge McDuck style. Their wealth is actually predicated in the real economy by distributing it out, in order for it to come back. Just as a Landlord in effect levies a private income tax on their tenants ostensibly to finance the 'valuable service' of a landlord, employers I suspect, if the data could actually be captured, operate a kind of private welfare state, or stimulus package making payments to people just to finance their consumption.

Of course, our market is all calibrated as if employment was efficient. We pay someone a full time salary because they work for us full time. The economic incentives run against anyone saying 'boss, while in social isolation I realized, I only need 4 hours a week to do my job, not 40 plus commuting time.' because they probably have a mortgage, and other debts that were priced at them being paid for 40 hours a week and not 4. So the wealth of data generated on just how bullshit many jobs are going to be isolated in the individuals' revelations; it's a shame that we can't collect them, given that a collapse in the economy also presents an opportunity to rebuild it.

As a final thought, reflecting on the stock shortages at supermarkets caused by panic buying, (now a global phenomena but Australians can, and should be, ashamed of their contribution to this epidemic) this arose despite no actual disruption to the supply chain. I speculate that perhaps part of what drove this panic buying was an unconscious assumption that everyone who works, does something useful for generating our necessities. What is washing out is that very few participants in the economy keep us clothed, sheltered, fed and watered. The massive economic gains that have been made since the industrial revolution has been channeled into building an economy of non-necessity (or luxury) - in short a tiny portion of the population is putting meat and potatoes on our plates, the rest of us are just salting the caramel and convincing others we need it.

COVID-19 vs Journalism

The data: How misinformed people are vs. how many times their info was 'handled'
Why it would be good to know: Reform journalistic standards, recreate understood standards of information, regulate social media.

What we all have ample opportunity to observe is the strange compression of time. Time zones have gone from 30 minute increments, to distortions of days and weeks. I'm reminded of one half of what cured me of an addiction to news I can attribute to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of his utterances on this subject is: 'To cure oneself of newspapers, spend a year reading yesterday's newspaper.' From Australia we can look at the US and see them in an almost literal sense acting on "yesterday's" news.

The other half of what cured me of notions that the news is a necessary and useful way to stay informed I owe to my education. In high school I was required to read Elie Weisel's memoir 'Night' about his childhood spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps. In the opening chapter he recounts (to the best of my memory) a person called Schlomo reaching his community and telling them that Jews are being rounded up and put on trucks and that he escaped to warn them all to flee. This I thought was a candidate for most useful piece of news in history, and obviously the resulting reaction to this news was dismissal, allowing young Elie to witness Jewish babies being dumped out of the back of a truck bed into a mass grave.

Covid-19 may not be as fatal as a stay in a Nazi death-camp, but it is also far less discriminating.

This illustrated for me that the public doesn't actually possess the ability to discriminate and discern useful news in a timely fashion. The lesson there wasn't that I had to up my media savvy, but that one has to put in place risk-taking protocols. Warren Buffet's cardinal rule of risk taking is that you don't risk something important, to gain something unimportant. Speaking of...

Yesterday I watched an interview with investor and some-time world's richest person Warren Buffett whose biography doesn't matter except that one could infer he has a track record of making good decisions.. At one point (1:23) the journalist asks him 'do you know why?' and Buffet responds 'I don't know, and you shouldn't be asking...I shouldn't be offering my opinions...I pass along things I hear from people I think are smart...' (my emphasis) a notification ding from your phone and you could miss a key insight from a shrewd and exceptional mind.

Journalists shouldn't be soliciting opinions from everyone they point a recording device at. Covid-19 has elevated the stakes on an issue of our times that had previously been exposed; the social media driven era of misinformation. One body of data we can collect, is how misinformed individuals are. This data could be analyzed as it correlates with data on how many times information gets relayed. We'll even have good historical data of who knew what, when, thanks to the admirable collaboration of health authorities and big data.

Most people, or perhaps simply, enough to be dangerous, don't share Buffett's self awareness and discipline. Yesterday I woke up to posts on my facebook feed reading 'In an interview an Italian Doctor...' notably without naming the doctor, linking to the interview, naming the hospital he worked at, linking to an article or meeting any basic fact checking standard. Hopefully, the advice or information the post attempts to convey at worst, is harmless. But this is just a piece of text someone, we don't know who, has written up and asked people to share. (About a week later, my mum told me the exact same information that was now sourced from a Brisbane Hospital internal memo for staff - indicating that at best someone thought it would be helpful to change the made up source in order to spread the information).

Imagine a journalist penning an article and taking it to their editor for approval. 'Who's your source?' 'I don't know' 'Have you fact checked these claims?' 'Nope' 'Have you sought a second expert opinion?' 'Nope' 'Did you even write this?' 'Nope' 'Why are you bringing this to me?' 'It says "PLEASE SHARE" in all-caps.' 'Okay. Good enough for me.'

Well intentioned individuals amount in practice to shitty journalists with no editorial oversight. This is exacerbated by the shitty standard of actual journalism. The aspects of this pandemic that develop are the case number statistics, and the measures taken by government to try and contain it. Most of the measures are static - they simply need repeating because the adoption of them is staggered. The case statistics are changing rapidly, but reported daily. I imagine because it requires coordination. All the various testing points that can confirm cases need to submit their figures, this needs to be tallied, possibly cross checked to eliminate double counting any cases, then; roughly once a day the official figures are updated and released. Leaving us 23 hours and 59 minutes of opportunity to endlessly speculate.

Another juicy piece of data out there for collecting and consideration is how rare it is for individuals to see news covering a story almost exclusively, then log onto social media and see all their friends and family talking almost exclusively about that news story and say to themselves 'Looks like we have this covered.'

The common or default position, appears to be herd mentality. Granted, a lot of the content is a push-pull between parties feeling other parties are spreading misinformation and it needs to be challenged with the real information, that in turn is viewed as misinformation by the people they are trying to correct... but I feel it is mostly attributed to a historical hangover.

Prior to the printing press, the way important information like 'the King is Dead' was conveyed was through hearsay, the grapevine. There may have even been isolated communities no messengers were dispatched to, that might take years or decades to learn their Monarch had died or that Tibet was now an independent nation. But technology not only allowed the Royal Palace to send messengers to every corner of the Kingdom, but to send the same messenger with the same message to every individual, in real time.

But as forgivable as it was for one villager to say 'the King is dead, dehydration' and another to say 'what did she say?' and yet another to say 'King's dead, demonic possession they say...' and another 'King's dead, from diarrhea, poor bastard.' there's no necessity for this quirk of our past. We are not called upon to spread the word through recollecting, paraphrasing, interpreting, adding our two-cents. We just need to direct people back, ever backwards to the writing on the wall.

I would emphasize that on this and every other topic, every time we relay information indirectly human psychology is going to distort it. In our attempts to articulate what we've heard is going to creep-in our biases of what we hope is true, what we hope isn't true, as well as more base errors of simply mis-remembering or not understanding.

I have long been frustrated by the media coverage of the US President Donald Trump and his tweets, an analysis of the value of this journalistic coverage should indicate that he is not a source of information, even on his own behavior. His output has no predictive value, even when he announces policy and executive orders. Simply put, he is not a source of news but of entertainment. But this has just been an egregious example of a widespread journalistic practice:

Journalism in my view, needs to be a process of comparing what people say to what they do. Journalists should be reporting what proposed legislation allows or prohibits, but instead they give airtime to the politicians selling the legislation and just ask them 'so tell us about this legislation we could read and interpret ourselves?' It baffles me that this is most often how policy is covered. It's not necessary to interview a person, when all policy has to be committed to writing.

In the inevitable post-mortems carried out, I hope the treasure trove of data is analysed and journalism is held to account for it's business model of news as entertainment.

Covid-19 vs the Luxury of Beliefs

The data: Number of falsified beliefs.
Why it would be good to know: To enter a second enlightenment.

Matt Dillahunty puts it well 'Knowledge is a subset of beliefs, some might define it as "justified true belief"' but maybe for most people that isn't putting it well, for most people they can't parse the explanation...

...making me incredibly self conscious of all the words I'm tempted to use like 'epistemology' 'parse' etc. because watching the Atheist Experience, a call in show that Matt Dillahunty has been hosting for the last 15 or so years, really rams home that people don't know when they don't know something.

I can feel people tuning out when I bring up atheism, so let me put it in terms of Mixed Martial Arts, or Ultimate Cage Fighting. Imagine a fan of MMA and/or UFC that voraciously consumes all the coverage of fights put out. They learn all about grappling, boxing, throwing, kicks. They might even take some brazillian jiu-jitsu classes. After a time, they begin to believe themselves somewhat of an expert in martial arts. This is a belief they can sustain for as long as they can avoid getting into a fight with a stranger.

When they do, it's in a pub - and motivated by their self belief; they don't back down when a group of bros refuse to let them have the next game at the pool table. They put one of the guys in a choke hold, before one of his mates brains him with the cue ball from behind.

This disastrous fight over a truly trivial matter is where reality insults a belief. It's a process called 'investigation' or 'testing' a belief, (also in this specific case because the belief that the fan was a badass martial arts expert was proven to be an illusion), this process is what is known in the biz as a 'falsified' belief. It has been proven false, by investigating the claim.

The luxury of belief is the extent that you can avoid the day when your claim is investigated. A child can claim 'I can fly' and their friends may say 'wow! do it!' and they reply 'I don't want to.' right up until they and their friend are stranded on a pacific island with no fresh water after their yacht sank and the friend says 'well, you can fly, get help!' and they say 'actually, I gotta confess. I can't fly.'

It seems childish, but virtually all adults, myself included maintain beliefs under the luxury that they won't be tested. I opened this post with a confession at how bad I've been at forecasting the effects of the Covid-19 outbreak. A lot of beliefs are maintained because they are unfalsifiable, (which means we can never test whether they are true or not.)

In good times though, there's a lot of beliefs we can treat as if they are unfalsifiable by simply refusing to investigate them. This can be conscious or not, but in my opinion, this behavior being demonstrated is one of the core values of a call in show like The Atheist Experience.

Matt's great gift as host of this show is methodically getting people to agree arguments until they are painted into a corner where they face a yes/no question from Matt that they cannot answer without conceding that their argument is debunked. Predictable behavior ensues - they attack Matt's character or throw out something irrelevant (Theoretical quantum physics is popular) here's one that goes well and is quite pleasant because the caller's ego doesn't get in his way.

Covid-19 is going to falsify an immense amount of beliefs. Particularly in the field of alternative medicines. But really, this I suspect is the big one in terms of outcomes of the corona virus, that if data can be collated, analysed and respected can be broadly transformative as a societal good. Beliefs about our economy, education, work, the environment are all going to undergo a forced investigation in the coming months by having forced confrontations with reality.

I forget who... maybe Michael Shermer, maybe not... remarked that when Viagra hit the market and we finally had an effective treatment for male erectile dysfunction, that it would potentially save a lot of animals endangered by their use in traditional Chinese medicine. I've already had a few exchanges about medical beliefs with friends - having to point out that it isn't a big-pharma conspiracy (it isn't necessary, market incentives are enough)

However I would break down alternative medicine beliefs (for clarity) as:

stuff that works because it works: so bone setting in traditional chinese medicine (tcm) we can investigate and know how it works, via x-rays etc. I should qualify my ignorance on this with I assume tcm sets bones more or less the same way empirical based medicine does. We know some herbal folk remedies work because we can analyse them chemically, identify the active ingredients and see the interaction it has with human physiology. But as Tim Minchin points out in his poem 'Storm' alternative medicine that works, we just call 'medicine'

stuff that works because anything works: So facebook recommended I join a group called PUSH an acronym for 'Pray Until Something Happens' where I like the equally effective WUSH group 'Wait Until Something Happens.' In this category a lot of 'cures for the cold' come in, eating garlic, drinking honeyed tea, taking vitamin C supplements. Under these regimes, after a few days, patients experience themselves recovering, feeling better and lo and behold, they are cured. The thing is, that people don't bother to investigate that upping your donut consumption also results in recovery... taking cold showers cures a cold, taking hot showers cures a cold, taking no showers cures a cold, cutting out dairy cures a cold, cutting out whiskey cures a cold... What is happening when investigated is that our immune system is fighting off the virus and it takes about a week to do so. Beyond this, is the placebo effect which is a well documented but not quite understood effect that so long as we believe we are doing something to cure illness, we actually recover better than people who do nothing.
A lot of the skepticism around Big Pharma is the result of the pains they have to go to, to test for the placebo effect before a drug comes to market. They need to make sure their drugs work not because anything would also work, but because they actually do the active work. Resulting in double blind clinical trials, and having to get approval. Something that vitamin supplements, homeopathic treatments, crystals and all kinds of shit don't bother to do.

stuff that survives because nothing works: There are certain ailments that nothing will cure, and in some cases, can't even be treated. Here psychic surgery and crystal therapy can survive because they work as good as the existing medical interventions. As a result, we don't produce in sufficient numbers people who know people that survived stage IV pancreatic cancer because they underwent aggressive radiation therapy to counter the people who survived stage IV pancreatic cancer because they put some crystals on their chakras and meditated. Furthermore, there are some people with ailments that randomly among the population go into remission by themselves, and these people aren't qualified to attribute their spontaneous recovery to anything. None of the claims can be investigated or tested in isolation. We don't know if it was the praying for a miracle, the chemotherapy or the increased Spinach in the diet. However I can bet that in 50 years time crystal therapy will be exactly the same as it currently is, and have the exact same success rate, whereas I wouldn't make the same bet on empirical medicine.

stuff that we know doesn't work, but people insist: We know through investigation that crystals don't work we know eating different foods during pregnancy doesn't change the gender of the child, we know consuming animal body parts won't reverse male pattern balding nor help them obtain and sustain erections. People have to choose to believe these things by willfully avoiding investigating them, or only investigated data that confirms their beliefs - eg the one person in a million who testifies that their ailment went into spontaneous remission, and ignoring the 999,999 thousand that didn't. The insistence as near as I can guesstimate must come from an emotional investment in a belief that we can control our destinies, but people don't necessarily need to be aware that they actually just need to believe that anything is possible or sink into terror.

stuff we can believe because the large scale public tests stopped: Which is the anti-vaccine camp. I'm sure in the golden age of polio, small pox and measles there were people skeptical of vaccines also, it was just much much harder to do so, because the population were confronted with the deformities, disfigurements and human costs of not vaccinating. But give it half a decade and suddenly people can luxuriously become oblivious to the work vaccines do, because all the consequences of a life without vaccine have escaped living memory. Nassim Nicholas Taleb by analogy posited a hypothetical Senator that anticipated Terrorists hijacking planes and using them as suicide bombers, so passes a bill that overhauls cockpit door security. It prevents the 9-11 attacks which nobody notices not happening and the airline industry hates the government for introducing expensive new regulations.

So I'm sure there will be people that get Covid-19 and then eat plenty of chic-peas (or anything) and recover from some mild symptoms and attribute it without good evidence to their change in diet. But equally there will be chic-pea eating vegan yogis that discover that the novel virus is indifferent to their lifestyle choices and beliefs and put them on a respirator. There will be hippies that lose loved ones, despite all their advice about herbal teas and pharmaceutical conspiracies.

Ghandi said 'my life is my message' and he relented and took quinine to treat his malaria.

But beyond the medical, crisis times also test beliefs about our elected leaders. That believing our leaders to be strong and competent and geniuses is a luxury afforded by good times. Any fool can preside over economic growth and peace-times, and that's what we tend to do. I suspect a historical analysis will show that when times are bad, the people we need in charge end up in charge and when times are good the people we want to be in charge get in charge. So the good times drive the bad, but optimistically, the bad times in turn drive the good.

A recent example is the post GFC Icelandic election record - crisis hits, corrupt out-reformers in, economy recovers, reformers out-corrupt back in. A famous example is Winston Churchill's political fortunes within the Conservative party (albeit this has to be qualified with Churchill being very good at fighting WW2, and a dismal track record on any other field of governance).

We listen to the smart kid when the stakes are high, but as soon as they aren't we tend to listen to the popular kid. There must be a name for this phenomena, but I am simply calling it the luxury of belief. A fantastic case study in this phenomena that you can and perhaps should binge-watch while socially isolating is Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares.

The wealth of data being produced on falsified beliefs are coming thick and fast because the situation is developing so fast. We have behavioral evidence as well in the panic buying. What blows my mind is that 'misinformed' is an objectively determinable fact; it blows my mind because I would intuit that most people operate as if one opinion is as good as another.

Covid-19 vs Libertarians

The data: Cost of libertarian responses.
Why it would be good to know: To bankrupt an ideology that has been trading insolvent.

It's a very specific belief that I do not trust myself to not straw man. But a pandemic is a situation were extending autonomy to individuals just doesn't work.

My best effort at fairness is Libertarians are angling for 'maximum' liberty of individuals. Not some state of complete anarchy. I suspect few libertarians want free markets for police and fire departments, they believe in civil infrastructure etc. and dangerous members of society can be incarcerated.

I just feel, in my experience of Libertarian talking heads, is that we simply know too much at this point about human psychology to say we need to maximize liberty and reduce regulation.

Prisoner's dilemmas exist, and panic buying has demonstrated this. Unfortunately in Australia the regulation has lagged behind people's liberty to fuck up the supply chain. In prisoner's dilemmas the optimal outcome for all party is to cooperate, but it's hard to achieve because of risk aversion.

An organization that has been somewhat effective at beating the prisoner's dilemma are sadly, organized crime because they change the incentives - if you snitch you dead, you don't even want people suspecting you're a snitch so you don't talk to the police.

Panic buying is certainly a prisoner's dilemma which given that there has literally been no disruptions to supermarket supply chains, the only reason people are panic buying is for fear of panic buyers. That's where you need to put in top down regulation to change the incentives. We already have this which prevents the supermarkets from price gouging in these times (part of why I suspect the supermarkets are still putting items on 'special')

We are probably also witnessing the common psychological bent toward tragedy of the commons.

I am not pro-authoritarian. It's also been pointed out by Paul Bloom, that emergency powers have a nasty habit of sticking around long after the emergency has passed - like the Patriot Act in America. But a wealth of data is being produced on the costs of unregulated behavior and markets.

I feel Libertarians generally have good intentions and unchecked enthusiasm, and tend to be very wealthy possibly responding to the frustrations of running businesses in regulated environments. I feel it's to supermarket chain's credits that they are not proving libertarian and imposing limits on purchases here, however this is probably from self-interest to restore their stocking forward orders to predictability. That's self interest converging with social interests is not something we should rely on.

Covid-19 vs the Economy

The data: GNP vs Wellbeing
Why it would be good to know: Opportunity to adopt new paradigms/scorecards

Economics technically, is the study of decision making. Which is manageable when you pull out a particular context to consider and weigh up the decisions. Fish or Chicken? etc. But an economy is an emergent phenomena of all the decisions interacting and as such, I find it very difficult to conceive of an economy. Here's how I'd as of the moment, try to envision a modern economy.

So start of with a tribe of primitive people. If they don't get calories they die, if they don't have drinking water they die, if they don't have fire at night they die. Everyone has to work, they can't afford freeloaders (apart from infants). If you can't provide food, shelter or clothing, you are out - and that's a death sentence.

This goes on for a while. And this tribe eventually migrates to a particularly fertile area (typically flood plains of a river basin) or discovers stone axes or something. Suddenly, getting calories, water, firewood gets easier.

Now imagine a mentally and physically capable person waking up one morning and going around the tribe to see what they can contribute. Water is from the river, so anyone can get that any time. The wood gatherers tell this capable person that they have enough wood. The food gatherers have enough to gather enough fruits, tubers and berries and the hunters have enough for the hunting party. 'So what can I do?' this person says, fearing for their place in the tribe. One of the wood gatherers says 'A cup of tea would be lovely.'

That goes on for a while, a surplus of labor creates a new role, that isn't necessary but is valuable - a tiny part of the tribal economy. This goes on for a while, and eventually a hand pump is introduced, and a chainsaw, and a ladder and baskets. The hunting and gathering become so efficient, the number of tribe members required to fulfill the needs of the tribe shrinks, even though the tribe grows. Massive productivity gain. The tea maker now serves frappachinos with macaroons, delivered by segway, complimentary with membership to a car insurance program... and so forth.

What happens over time, is that the part of the economy that is necessary - agriculture/food production, sanitation, medicine shrinks in proportion to the part of the economy that is unnecessary but valued. That's the economy we live in (plus a bunch of stuff that is neither necessary nor valuable, contemporary journalism and alternative medicine might be candidates for this). Very little of that economy is invested in the sector that drives the most valuable progress by the way - I think from memory the stat is something like venture capital accounts for 1% of investment and over half the profits.

With the pandemic, what's really going to get a lot of data is the welfare state, which is massively expanding in response to this. It's a good response when the people can't or won't spend, the government should step in and spend for them, running short term deficit budgets. This is why WW2 wasn't followed by WW3, and not why the Great War had a sequel.

One of the things that was stupid about the panic buying, was that it occurred despite their being no reports of shortages or disruptions to food supply. Particularly given that it began in Australia.

Australia is a food basket of the world, we export a lot of food. I don't know the statistics for Australia, but to my recollection Michael Pollan said that the US alone grows enough food to feed 13 billion people every year. That's almost double the population of the world.

Which again shores up that most economic activity is in the sector that is valued but not necessary. What is tragic about the structure of the economy, is that at some point the person cutting all the wood for the tribe got told by the macaroon maker 'you're unskilled labor, anybody can pick up that chainsaw and chop wood, but not anybody can make macaroons. That's why I get the big bucks and you get jack shit.'

If you think about it for a moment, and through an evolutionary framework - the things necessary for a species survival are always going to be the things just about anybody can do. (Being able to perform a coronary bypass is highly specialized, and it helps an individual survive, but lacking these skills won't wipe out a species, and another reason the need for health care increases with distance from our peak reproductive ages) but I cringe at the supermarket ads telling me to celebrate over prices of this or that being lowered to new lows. That's being asked to celebrate the tightening of the vice on the supplier, who has been edged ever closer to the point where it isn't worth their time to grow food for everybody.

Michael Pollan again points out that the great exception to living expenses getting higher and higher is that our (US) food has never been cheaper. The price of calories is inconceivably low and historically unprecedented. One proxy piece of data for Australia is that we have pre-pandemic successful businesses where people pay to burn off their excess calorie consumption, commonly known as gyms.

Our economies are geared toward growth, because we measure and score them on Gross National Product compared to the previous quarter. That's how recessions are defined, this is what politicians brag about. All the growth though is unqualified (any growth is good) and it generally has been occurring in the luxuries of life, disregarding what is happening to the chunk of the economy that is necessary for our survival.

Again, reminding you reader that I am not forgetting the people most directly effected by Covid-19 by dying from it, one of my greater anxieties about this pandemic is that the economy that was might survive it. The prime minister here though announced this week his cabinets 'hibernation plan' to try and preserve the economy that was through this crisis so it can spring back to life. While it might seem sinister to seize upon a crisis to clear out dead wood, like murdering an inmate during a riot or something. Much of what is broken about our economy is a tiger-by-the-tail, the immediate cost of letting go of that tiger is to perish by it. I don't want people to go through the suffering of a market correction, a bubble bursting, but I'm more in the 'do not resuscitate camp.'

I want the government to do everything it can to prevent us from turning on our neighbors for fear of missing out, but I don't want them to sweep shit under the rug. More on this later.

Covid-19 vs Free Lunches

The data: Who pays and what are we paying for.
Why it would be good to know: An unprecedented opportunity to arrest the inertia of our economies.

Ironically, the area where I'm arguably most qualified to comment, is where I find my mind most melting in any attempt to forecast.

Governments are spending big money to try and stave off the economic impact of the pandemic, and nobody is really sure what and if it will work, given that there are both supply side and demand side shocks, and nobody can really call the end to this.

I have long been leaning towards concluding with confidence that one of the most broken things in our society is how important economics is and how economically illiterate the general population is permitted to be.

An economy is a complex interwoven story, so my mind tends to want to jump in anywhere and work outwards until it collapses. Apologies in advance then, to anyone who finds this too fragmented.

Take a business like a cinema, the government doesn't want large crowds gathering in enclosed spaces so it orders cinemas to close as a public health concern. The cinema complex then has a bunch of staff and overheads and insurance and rent and whatever to cover, so if they don't operate they go bust and have to fire all their staff.

The government's only move is to basically say 'okay, well we'll purchase 1,000 tickets and 500 large popcorns, and 1000 large sodas.' which is to say, the government steps in and takes the ordinary customers place. That way the cinema doesn't have to close or lay off employees.

Then they are going to have to consider, if the point of being a customer is to pay the wages of the staff, why not just pay the wages of the staff instead of buying movie tickets? And why not just pay the popcorn supplier to not supply popcorn rather than buy popcorn? And why not just pay the popcorn supply companies staff instead of the popcorn supplier? And what about the landlords? Why not just pay the rent instead of paying the business owner to pay the landlord...

The thing is, the government has to step in and do this for every business that closes and at every point in a chain where money would change hands, and that money they are spending largely comes from taxing the economy. There's no real way the government can spend tax revenues in such a way as they generate tax revenues to finance the government expenditure. What they will be doing, is borrowing, and borrowing from the future.

At some point though, that borrowing has to be secured against something, money is an abstraction of all the stuff we use it to buy with. Money is basically fundamentally debt - universally recognized IOU's that because we know someone's ultimately good for it (the treasury), almost anybody will exchange goods and services for those IOU's.

If you can't follow that, this is part of the problem, and why what goes on economically is likely to escape detection and discussion. Remember the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis? Where Greece tried to default on its debt and Europe wouldn't let them, so lent them more money and shoved austerity down their throats?

At the time that was unfolding, public discourse in my sphere was basically saying that Greece payed very generous pensions to civil servants that retired at 50 and they had financed it all by borrowing. The world is now following this Greek model.

Which means after all the dust settles and people can get back to work, someone is going to have to make future sacrifices to finance this massive temporary expansion of a welfare state. Is it going to be through a massive slashing of the public sector ie. austerity? These measures are provably ineffective, yet still immensely popular. Will it be a massive increase in income taxes? meaning the cost of the Covid-19 epidemic will be born by the young?

The future has to pay, because the past can't. The past paying is making the necessary provisions to weather a pandemic. The trend across modern democracies has been to cut the public health sector and privatize where possible.

If you have an income, then a shock hits the market and you lose it, there's only two ways to continue life as normal. The first, requires past sacrifice through the form of savings. I am a saver generally, apart from my substantive student debts that I will probably be buried with I have seldom been in debt in my life. The second of course requires future sacrifice through the form of debt, or borrowing.

The thing is, Australia and other economies around the world have been belted with a series of shocks that resulted in massive losses of income. The early 90's recession, that happened for reasons I am too young to remember. The tech bubble burst of the 2000's, the GFC of 2008 and each time what has happened was that people were encouraged to go into debt. This was generally done by lowering interest rates which for simplicity's sake, consider as a measure of confidence.

So when markets were crashing and economies started to shrink, the big central banks sent a signal to the market 'we've never been more confident that you can make money' when really their confidence should be bottoming out and interest rates should be going up, because there's so few wise investments to make. And so people borrow and buy cars and houses and plasma screens and the market picks up again, just as sick as it was before.

So this time, people have been hit with a loss of income, but now they are massively in debt, interest rates can't go much lower and even if people had money, they've never had fewer ways to spend it. And just like the government spending tax revenue to generate tax revenue, there's not much point to people taking on more debt to pay down all their debt.

But it's actually really important to understand the quid-pro-quo that comes with these stimulus packages. I understand the harm minimization aspect of 'just pay the doctor and figure out how later'
but there's deeper questions of what's being saved and whose future is being mortgaged.

It was relatively recent that my common-sense intuition that my savings were someone else's loan were corrected, by Yanis Varafoukis. It isn't the case that the bank is paying me 0.25% interest on my savings while loaning that money to someone at 7% to finance their homeloan, or credit card or whatever. What actually happens when we borrow money is that the bank reaches into the future and takes money from our future selves... which sounds trippy, but that's to my understanding is basically how Australia has kept its housing market rolling for 2 going on 3 decades now.

What's interesting is that at least since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and almost certainly prior to it, we've been financing the global economy on debt. I mean there's people losing their jobs, but there's a subset of people losing their jobs living paycheck to paycheck. There are also all around us, people who appear to be successful and well off, but don't actually own anything, they run their business on credit that they are paying off and everything they have is actually secured by future earnings.

Future earnings that didn't price in a total global economic melt-down. None of the debt markets appear to have priced in a global pandemic, and I'm confident there will be a 'Big Short' story to come out of this. It turns out the globe is more like the patient that ignored the doctor's advice to quit smoking, decided healthcare was too expensive and now finds themselves coughing up blood.

Money itself will have to be repriced. This is a massive forced reevaluation, two months ago, the money in your pocket factored in the value of a private jet, and pizzas in New York with sturgeon caviar and gold leaf. That private jet now, regardless of who owns it, is pretty useless because you can't really fly it anywhere, and certainly not anywhere you want. Our money needs to reprice to all the things worth buying, and probably hasn't. So at the moment it is hard to know what money is worth. I honestly don't know what this is going to look like.

Even the central banks just printing money and doubling welfare payments in best case scenario halves prices provided they hold steady. But it doesn't create double the goods and services we consume. It does appear in Australia at least that either a) the stores that remain open have a social conscious. b) we have good regulation in place from the ACCC to prevent price gouging and profiteering.

One thing I would throw in though, on an optimistic note, is that I hate Los Angeles. I don't like being there, and after two weeks there upon arriving in Mexico City, the literal first thing I did once I dumped my bags at the hotel, was walk and walk and walk for six hours. But I wouldn't destroy Los Angeles, I don't want to live there, but it's an interesting piece of human heritage. Because it is a 'city of tomorrow' it was built for the future. A shiny future where every American would have their own automobile.

I wonder at what point, did we stop building things for the future. My investigations as to what our economy is actually for, what grand vision people are busting their arses working towards make it hard... very hard, not to conclude that the great project of economic growth we have all been undertaking in some form or another is in fact a giant wealth transfer mechanism from the young to the old. Which is to say, there's no future beyond the death of the baby-boomer cohort.

I wish it weren't so, because it's so ugly, but the data is an open secret - boomers take out far more than they put in. I'll link two videos that address this: one thoroughly and comprehensively, and one partially. But as a non-boomer (that first video is by a boomer) I have to remind myself that boomers actually tried their best to do something worthwhile, their lives were a tireless effort to try not to be a burden via pensions, alas. My own generation in turn stands to face an accounting for the social and mental health costs of our over-exuberant adoption of progressive values and parenting techniques.

Similar to the bit about bullshit-jobs, I hope that for a larger rather than small contingent of people whose concerns are more economic than health related right now, they actually stop to think on what they actually worked for.

I mean literally, do you know what Australia has been doing for 30 years now? Digging up minerals and bidding up houses. We haven't been building a bright and shining future. Very very few of us are working on cities of tomorrow. We've largely just been spending down the national savings (mineral wealth) and burrowing to buy houses in the hope that one of our tenants will build the city of the future, but they have to work to facilitate our lifestyle aspirations just to pay rent.

I feel people are sitting idle conceiving of new ways to work and be, towards goals and projects they actually care about.

Covid-19 vs Finger Pointing

The Data: Who is responsible for what and when
Why it would be good to know: To delineate who should pay what and when.

When talking about economics I often throw out the term 'market correction' and you might hear it when the news runs a story about the share market falling etc. The reason I refer to it as a 'market correction' is well illustrated by the pandemic: what is very clear by what has happened to wall street and no doubt other exchanges around the world is that the market hadn't priced this pandemic in. So now the prices are correcting to what all these companies are worth in a pandemic. Some corrections will be upwards, for companies that the market didn't price in how valuable certain companies are in the face of a pandemic.

In contrast to the the market data, that tells us an enormous amount about how inefficient it is at calculating risk, another data set we have and that has already been mined is how entirely predictable this pandemic was, down to where and how it would originate.

Now this is crucial data to be poured over. I like to think about responsibility in the following way: I always want to take as much responsibility as I possibly can, and no more. So in the face of any loss, I will generally do an autopsy where I make clear to myself what was in my control and what wasn't.

For example, if a woman cheats on her boyfriend and he finds out and in a jealous rage he murders both her and his rival. She is responsible for cheating and possibly keeping secrets and the subsequent emotional pain this causes. He is responsible for his reaction. This is demonstrated by data that shows that mens reactions to infidelity vary. (This is the same reason that battered wife syndrome is no longer a legal defense to murder charges - numerous women leave their abusive partners without murdering them. Self defense remains a defense.)

So beginning in China, where Covid-19 begins, it's entirely possible that one staff member, of one vendor who shirked some cleaning duties or handling protocol or stacked the wrong cage on the wrong cage sparked everything that follows. Making most Chinese wholly irresponsible for the pandemic itself. This though then has to be expanded to how many wet market vendors have been taking similar risks where the consequences are the total costs globally of this pandemic. In which case carrier 1 is merely unfortunate given standard practice because there may be tens of thousands of others taking the same risks.

Then I'm ignorant, but believe it possible that China was slow to contain this because wet markets are already illegal, which indicates questions of responsibility around corruption and law enforcement - dereliction of duty. Then those questions flow up the chain, based on who knew what by when and then their responsibility for the actions taken or not taken.

That data for China will no doubt be hard to obtain, and we may never learn what grisly fates were met by people earlier in the chain of responsibility that lost China face in the world. Then obviously, Covid-19 got out of China, moving from outbreak to epidemic to pandemic. Somewhere here, China's responsibility stops.

Also though, the data gets better because we don't have to simply rely on what the Chinese Government tells us. The reactions around the world are varied and dynamic. For example, the UK announced a wage guarantee, Australia announced a doubling of jobseeker payments, the US announced a one-off payment of $1,000, NZ and Canada announce wage guarantees and Australia announces wage guaruntees.

That's on the financial side, in terms of the pandemic side we'll have immense data sets on what measures were taken when by what level of government and what proved effective given what circumstances. We will also have data on who prepared for this and who didn't. As of writing, it appears the Trump administration in an almost comical tragedy, took active steps to not be prepared for this.

This is data that should settle a lot of arguments, including healthcare, privatization etc.

Then there's a moment that Covid-19 comes into an individuals proximity and we have to look at individual responsibility. A lot of my friends are expressing the valuable concerns of governments rapidly putting in place draconian controls accepted by a frightened public that will not be relaxed once this is over.

I'm not sure any new measures need to be put in place, so much as existing legal principles be interpreted to apply. For example, a man who is HIV+ that knowingly has unprotected sex with partners unaware of his status can be charged with crimes ranging from reckless endangerment to attempted manslaughter or even murder (don't quote me on this I'm not qualified, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the ballpark). In the absence of good data and reliable and readily available testing, members of the public are in a position where they cannot know that they are a carrier or not. All the government then needs to do is stipulate the duty of care we owe to each other, like social distancing, sanitation requirements for supermarket staff etc. Breaching that duty of care then becomes reckless endangerment.

This runs counter to many, if not most of the general public's intuition but ignorance of the law is not a legal defense. Prior to any reliable way for us to know we have the virus, or had the virus, or have never had the virus we all have to assume we are asymptomatic carriers on a day to day basis.

I believe where I live, spitting on someone is already chargeable as an assualt.

This is more a weighing in with my-two-cents, but there's a fascinating question of what kind of damages China should/could pay for dropping the ball on this one. There's a plausible narrative that the damages bill handed to Germany for the Great War lead directly to World War 2, and the Marshal Plan to restore post war Germany lead directly to not having World War 3. I feel at the very least, the incentives are fucked if China is permitted to profit from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Also interesting on this front, is what damages should Australia pay for the panic buying pandemic. Clearing out supermarket shelves to my knowledge didn't begin in China, Italy, South Korea or Iran. It was Australia, and I don't know where it began but it certainly took place against all extant advice from the Australian government, but must have been facilitated and spread by journalists. This intrigues me because it's probably possible in a country like Australia to actually identify down to an individual the anti-social behavior.

A data set to follow is calculating how the shortfalls may have contributed to the spread of the virus as the public was then prompted to travel further for supplies and to more numerous venues, and visit supermarkets more frequently trying to find basic items as they came back to stock. What I'm trying to articulate is that if a household needed a 6 pack of toilet paper in those crucial early weeks, then what could have been one isolated visit to a supermarket might then become 3 supermarkets daily for 2 weeks or 3 x 14 = 42 opportunities to contract and/or transmit Covid-19.

On the subject of blame and pointing fingers, there's one data set I'm entirely confident will emerge, and that is how predictably intellectuals will interpret Covid-19 into their pre-existing world views. Which is to say, critical race theory academics will be interpreting the pandemic as a fundamentally racist event - despite the undiscriminating nature of a biological virus - John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry have anticipated Ta Nahesi Coats taking the predictable difference in African American mortality rates to argue that the medical profession is racist, and predicting they will neglect the contributing pre-existing disparities in income, health insurance, incidence of diabetes etc.

I also feel 100% confident that there will be socialist interpretations of the pandemic, capitalist interpretations, command economy interpretations, feminist interpretations, libertarian interpretations... not that these interpretations won't discover true things, they probably all will but that's because of the pandemics near universal relevance. What I anticipate is the very human response of struggling to stay relevant when the general public's attention has shifted so dramatically.

The harm of this solipsistic struggle for relevance is that there's an overarching data set that could help us all establish better priorities. I might posit that class turns out to be far more important than identity and so forth, that getting economic incentives right is far more important than determining who should have a right to speak etc.

Covid-19 vs Entertainment

The data: Changes in entertainer income streams
Why I'd like to know it: Burst the bubble of 'anyone can be anything pipe dreams.'

A co-worker once told me that some vague abstract collective of 'they' anticipated that sex workers would be a high growth industry in the advent of ai driven mass unemployment. I couldn't buy into this, because the sex industry transparently to me relies on someone upstream doing something that gets them paid so they can afford sexual services.

When the sports started suspending their seasons, or playing in front of empty stands just for television broadcast I had about 20 seconds where I thought 'e-sports' can clean up... before I remembered that what e-sports I'd seen (mostly Street Fighter V tournaments, because that game is useless for single player arcade) have built up a business model that is only distinguishable from traditional sports by the low bar of physical fitness for it's star athletes. People congregate in event spaces and pay money for tickets and all the athletes fly in from regions around the world and tour. E-sports may even be harder hit than regular sports because it seems to have kicked off as like a Grand Prix or Tennis style international circuit.

This in turn leads to the domino effect. Social media influencers might seem fine with shelter at home since these were people we paid to vicariously live the lives we'd aspire to if we didn't have to work. But at some point the people who have lost their jobs at restaurants and cafes, in the travel industry and finance industry. Their discretionary income has disappeared. Each of them may only contribute a few cents to each influencer and entertainer, but these people are sustained by the little discretionary income of the casual workforce.

I highlight this because the distribution of wealth can work in such a way that someone who lives in a mansion and has a room dedicated to Louis Vuitton handbags because fans send them to her in exchange for the regular stream of butt pics on instagram can suddenly find themselves bankrupted by 300,000 retail workers losing their minimum wage jobs.

What's interesting is that this will be a second wave that I predict might shatter naive intuitions that the economy isn't massively integrated. It will be when pro-gamers discovering their millions of followers no longer have dollars to spare to sponsor their live streams, and influencers discover that while they excelled at plugging protein shakes and cosmetics, they are very uninfluential when it comes to selling treasury bonds, spam or whatever the advertising revenue goes to.

They will be the canary in the cage that really indicates that the government can't just bail out part of the economy, but all of the economy. Which again, I would stress we don't won't to bail out all of the economy - there are certain parts of the economy we should seize the opportunity to be rid of.

Covid-19 vs Optimization

The data: Cost benefit analysis of optimization strategy.
Why I'd like to know it: To avoid having to pick up the bill for optimization.

In part I suspect, what we are witnessing right now is the true cost of cramming half a century of incremental progress into one generation. This is often described as China's record breaking achievement of elevating people out of poverty.

But imagine now a 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' scenario where a westerner traveled back into the middle ages and gifted their ancestors with a wealth of scientific discovery and technological innovations. Even with good intentions like getting Europe onto renewable energy sources and skipping the entire whale oil/fossil fuel era. Then got back to greet the new better present and discovered their ancestors had used that technology to better hunt witches.

That's a very junk hypothesis, but I would hope anthropologists are actually working somewhere to determine whether cultures are served by acclimatizing to progress in the same increment as technology is developed or not, or whether it's a common story that playing catch up to the rest of the world often results in highly cost effective wet markets, and really efficient superstition based markets.

I had an argument with my Dad about whether it is optimization or maximization, and I haven't personally settled the question, so I better describe what I'm talking about.

To me optimization implies removing redundancy. Running lean, getting rid of waste. For example, a call center having two sales reps they both pay an hourly wage. One rep outperforms the other, so they fire the weaker rep and double the stronger reps hours to optimize the sales-per-paid-hour ratio. I will concede optimization is a matter of scope. I would generally say, that the bigger the picture you are considering, or more long term the goal - the more redundancy and optimization I suspect are likely to converge.

Specifically though, prior to the actual pandemic being declared when Covid-19 was just an epidemic I remember a news story about how it was impacting retailers - specifically a bike shop and a music shop that weren't able to reorder stock because it was all sourced exclusively from China. Individuals have experienced the downfall of having two dominant supermarket chains. My partner in Mexico also lives in a country with dominant supermarket chains but they in turn compete with smaller scale convenience stores and numerous independent bodegas, which I suspect goes to explain why it hasn't really seen the same panic buying social contagion break out.

When meat got cleared off the shelves here, one thing I observed was that the supermarket Deli's still had stock, including lots of poultry. This lead me to suspect that a key difference and possible policy consideration for the future - was that people could shamelessly clear out a shelf anonymously but were too embarrassed when they had to ask the person behind the counter for 3 months supply of meat, so they didn't. It would be interesting to know the impact of another optimizing innovation - the self serve checkout played in people's willingness to buy out the stores toilet paper supply.

This is a recurring theme and what has employed most people in the global economy. Trying to remove waste and friction. But like a TV show when in a crisis the protagonist needs to jump out of a window into a dumpster/skip, or when someone is falling off a cliff we discover we may owe our lives to waste, friction and inefficiences.

More literally though, just with the outbreak in China many businesses were learning how fragile the system is when everyone moves their manufacturing operations into the same jurisdiction.

I've never really committed to words the story before as to why I'm not a free-market economist or globalist; but I never have been, and never really entertained it. The first time it was ever presented to me I can recall distinctly thinking - no. Some problems need to be partitioned to be solved. Specifically, to get workers rights right, it has to be entirely legitimate for say, Australians to figure out fair terms of employment without having to also depend that India, China, Brazil, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Indonesia etc. also get their employment regulations right and can enforce them.

The problem known before the pandemic broke out, was that in a country like Australia successful industrial action can put you out of a job. I worked once in a call center whose Union successfully lobbied for a wage increase that resulted in the company closing the call center and shipping operations to New Zealand. Equally, I believe China had started to lose manufacturing jobs to Viet Nam.

Part of this is a legacy of a myopic understanding of Labor and Capital, assuming that Labor was mobile and Capital was immobile. This was back when Capital took the form of big solid factories that took a decade to build and operated for a hundred years, and Labor could move from the English industrial hubs to Australia in pursuit of a new life for a nominal sum. Now the relationship has reversed, capital is an abstract balance of money that can go anywhere in the world instantly. Labor can't move at all. So the moment the world's manufacturing hub demands improved wages for its workers, the manufacturing hub moves - overnight.

Bringing us back to adding friction to the markets. How regulation has been working, is that say you have a chemical plant that has been saving a lot of money on its cleaning bill by just dumping their toxins into the local waterway. The local government decrees 'No chemical plant can operate without proper disposal of toxins as set out... blah blah' What I fear has been the result of such regulation ie. environmental regulation is that the companies say 'okay we can't dump toxins in these rivers. So we have to move operations to a river we can dump toxins in.'

That is, the regulation means our products are just made somewhere where the regulations aren't applied, and that's a lot of what regulating has produced. When we say you have to pay your employees a minumum of $1 a day, it doesn't result in a pay rise but a relocation to somewhere where they can continue to pay 50c. Etc.

I haven't checked but it must be the case that there's another more effective kind of regulation that stipulates 'in order to sell in this market, these products have to contain this, not contain these and be manufactured in compliance with this.' I'm thinking this must be how pharmaceuticals and medicine are regulated. Certainly the emissions standards set by the state of California wind up regulating the entire US if not global emissions standards for car manufacturing - a principle Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to as minority rule.

What needs to happen for things like the environment and labor movement are similar regulations - where we regulate the products, not the factories. So you can stipulate that no garment can be sold into our market that was made with slave labor. That no product can be sold into our market that dumps toxins into waterways.

I just rode past a tram stop poster for H&M's new 'conscious collection' which I always find amusing when a brand extends a line like this because it implies the rest of their collection is unconscionable. I'm going to bet this is a marketing reaction to the story getting out about how horrible fast fashion is, a reaction I believe (but don't know) can be called 'moral suasian' but in the case of this pandemic I hope the market abstract as it is, are learning lessons about the hidden costs of putting all of their supply chain heavily concentrated into the cheapest least regulated markets.

The data set that should win this argument for protectionism is being generated right now, as we reel from the effects of firms doing what they are designed to do and maximise profits by putting all their eggs into one most profitable basket.

Covid-19 saves the World

The data: Environmental impact of contraction in consumption.
Why it would be good to know: To avoid a permanent shutdown of human activity.

Within days of Italy ordering a lock down, news that has long since been buried in the tsunami of coverage of the rest of the world greeting the pandemic made its way to me. There were dolphins in the canals of Venice. Without the tourists, the waterways were running crystal clear. Fish had returned.

I have not heard many news stories covering phenomena like this since. But last year while in Mexico, I agonized over my footprint from air-travel. I had my own mental accounting of course. For an Australian I have a pretty low carbon footprint, and I sort of mentally budgeted that I could do one long-haul flight a year and still look at myself, given how much I did to otherwise offset this massive dumping of carbon right into the atmosphere.

A greater anxiety though was noticing how insatiable virtually everyone I know was for completely arbitrary and discretionary air travel. It was too cheap, both economically and in terms of social stigma. In fact, the incentives were all wrong - one could gain validation for taking a discretionary trip rather than condemnation. Jobs that involved much air-travel flying out to international sights etc. I feel weren't doing enough to ensure that that travel was really necessary.

Australians I suspect would have to justify their decision to not take international holidays rather than the reverse. Akin to our culture where one has to justify not drinking, or not eating animal products rather than the reverse.

Suddenly I was hearing stories of Qantas dropping 90% of it's international flights and 50% of domestic. I later heard a report that the quantity of flights had only dropped by 25% and I presume this is all the one-way flights going on of people being evacuated and returning home to avoid being cutoff.

But the thing is, I can't help but speculate that the reduction in emissions for the airline industry might amount to beyond what those concerned about climate change could have dreamed of accomplishing over a decade. It's a pity that clean jet propulsion tech hadn't been scaled up in time that the airlines and governments could use this period to retrofit all the fleets.

I'm sure pandemics are a disaster for single use plastics, but I'm naively optimistic that extracting plastic - particularly recent plastic that hasn't broken down fully yet - from the ocean is more available and less costly than extracting carbon from the air and sequestering it.

The data though will be generated, and the longitudinal studies may show the size of the reprieve mother earth gets from all this lost economic activity. Furthermore, I hope all the data is being collected that demonstrate how profoundly quickly ecosystems can recover when and where human activity contracts.

What recurs to me constantly was the example of the Icelandic volcano eruption, that was a stark lesson in the fragility of optimizing the Airline industry, such that Western Europe shutting down effectively shut down the entire global network of Airlines. But then a few years later BBC program Qi reported these estimates of how hugely beneficial what now seems like a brief hiatus in air travel was, as well as the slaughtering of Genghis Khan's Golden Horde. (Ghenghis' golden horde I also read long ago was credited as potentially one of the first employers of biological warfare, using catapults to send plague infested corpses into the cities they put under siege.)

The importance of this data set, is that thus far the deniers of the need for eco footprint reductions have been able to say 'these are just models, maybe that won't happen' and the pandemic will produce hard facts about anthropomorphic contributions to the death of our own civilization (by fucking up the environment we depend upon).

On this point, I would say that the past several years has seen a massive acceleration in the denigration of experts, and Covid-19 may yet prove to restore in our society the due respect for expert opinions. Because one has to basically claim outright exceptionalism to say 'look these pandemic experts we ignored and denigrated actually could have saved us trillions of dollars had we listened to them, but these meteoroligists - that's just a hoax.'

We aren't there yet, but the US appears to be shaping up to be a global example in the costs of embracing and protecting a post-modern administration. I'll be interested to see what happens in the other major postmodern regime - Putin's Russia given its resemblance to the US in terms of denigration of truth and China in terms of authoritarian rule. (I should clarify, I don't regard the Chinese government as trustworthy, more that I assume the Chinese present an 'official truth' in terms of state propaganda - Putin as I understand from Masha Gessen and other sources attacks the very concept of truth. This is parody but apparently quite close to reality)

People also being outdoors, and restricted in their movements may prove as yet to discover an appreciation of their local habitat. I wonder at a clear divide in mental health outcomes and physical health outcomes driven by the unequal access to things like back yards, public parks etc. High density living may take a blow, but when you only have 4 acceptable reasons to be outside the home and a quarter of them are exercise I'm hoping large swathes of the worlds population find their inner conservationist. Certainly there will be people who owe their lives to a public park. (As well as an unfortunate few that contract the virus that kills them at a public park).

One perspective I really want to hear is that of Indigenous Australia, people of a cultural identity that have frequently been excluded from greater participation in the Australian economy. I can imagine a person who has spent their entire lives watching the relentless destruction of this land by the expansion of the Australian economy, and had to watch them endlessly celebrate this as an achievement.

Because of huge gaps in health outcomes between indigenous Australia and European Australia, I imagine they are a high risk group for contracting Covid-19, but I still wonder if any Aboriginals or Torres Straight Islanders are breathing easier as they watch the tide of white retreat from their places of work.

I can't claim to be a champion of the environment, a conservationist or even a decent person. I know people who take it far more seriously than I, do far more work and make far more sacrifices. But for what I do, and what I have looked into, with issues like Climate Change that stand to be much much much worse than this pandemic - the chief obstacle to overcoming it is inertia. The inability to stop.

Covid-19 has changed that equation, it has forced people to stop. It isn't done stopping people yet. If this has multiple waves and goes on for 3-4-6 months a year, who knows how much human activity will be excised. What will wash out is how much human activity isn't necessary, and we are just doing it to look busy all the way to our collective grave.

The Market and Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is one of those concepts that floats out there in the weird space where it is a) relatively simple. b) relatively well known and c) little understood. At least for that last one, in practice.

People understand evidence, what constitutes evidence. In my experience though, the instance of people that understand the scientific method, or null hypothesis, or open mindedness, or skepticism. etc. is pretty low.

Confirmation bias though is a seeking, a pulling, phenomena.

I don't want to beat the dead horse of confirmation bias. You may understand it, you may not. You can look it up. It's a quirk of human psychology that is fiendishly difficult to correct.

I want to focus on the satisfying, pushing phenomena we know as the market.

These ideas I've largely imported from Akerloff & Schiller's book 'Animal Spirits' which I can see from where I'm sitting but can't muster the motivation to get up, find the relevant passage, and quote it. So instead I'll just paraphrase as best I can recall:

The market is incredibly efficient at producing goods and services to satisfy demand. The caveat of this awesome phenomena though, is that if we demand snake-oil, the market will efficiently produce snake oil.

The question then becomes, should we allow the market to produce snake-oil?

For the most part, historically we eventually always say no. Consumer protection regulation comes in and we generally shift in terms of liability from caveat emptor to caveat vendor. (Buyer beware to seller beware).

Where I find it interesting to marry two concepts together, consider the market in conjunction with confirmation bias.

Go on.

Consider it.

I put to you, or anyone, that there will always be demand for one particular product that the market will always find ways to satisfy: permission to believe what I want to believe.

A way to put this technically, is that the market will always produce alternative-epistemology. And these alt-epistemology products will find motivated buyers.

The thing is, the only way to regulate human psychology, is probably through education. And education isn't very efficient. It's a big if to assume the highest performing students have actually absorbed and retained everything they were taught. The examination process is not exhaustive, they test for a representative sample of knowledge presented on the syllabus. A passing score is usually 50. Which when you think about it, is demonstrating you know half of the knowledge you are tested on (which is less than half of the knowledge of the subject).

If someone knows and understands roughly half of the fallacies out there, that person is going to be very prone to making fallacious arguments.

What we can do, is regulate markets. In some countries, people suffering either directly or indirectly from erectile dysfunction can get a Viagra pill after consulting a doctor, then a pharmacist. Pharmaceuticals is a heavily regulated market. In other, or possibly the same countries, people suffering either directly or indirectly from erectile dysfunction can go to different kind of shop and buy endangered animal penis, powdered narwhal horn, emu egg dust or yes... snake oil  This happens in highly unregulated markets.

The internet is a highly unregulated market for ideas. I am persuaded by Timothy Snyder, historian, that what we are currently living through is not unprecedented and not unsolvable. Apparently when the Gutenberg printing press came along, before populating the worlds libraries with credible books written by credible authors it first created a torrent of misinformation based on nothing, written by nobody.

Eventually the printed word got it's shit sorted out and sufficiently regulated. The internet isn't there yet. Turns out, in the intervening centuries between scribes getting put out of work and the advent of the misinformation super highway, the demand for alt-knowledge, alt-facts and alt-reason didn't go away.

What is hard about regulating, is that people hate referees. Michael Lewis' podcast 'Against the Rules' is excellent on this very point. Most often what people object to, is not actually unfairness. But fairness.

In a court of law, counsel can object throughout a trial. There are agreements in place as to what constitutes fair conduct. You can't lead a witness, you can't speculate, questions have to be relevant, expert witnesses have to have expertise.

Imagine a psychic medium being bound by regulations that stipulated s/he was not permitted to be in the same room as the relative of the spirit contacted, was not permitted to ask questions of the relative and could only relay messages verbatim from the spirit... basically they were regulated out of cold reading techniques.

Or if theists and atheists sat down to a debate where participants could 'object' court style to any assertions made without sufficient evidence. This would be fair, but I would put cold hard money that the theists would complain the debate was 'rigged'.

In conclusion, the market for ideas needs regulating. In its current unregulated form it actually poses an existential threat. Most people will agree I feel, with this position, in some domain. What will be required though is that we will all have to probably sacrifice some comforting beliefs. We will all be detoured from the shortcuts in our mind and have to take the long way round to environmental sustainability, justice, equal opportunity, the pursuit of happiness, and longer lasting erections.

Social Construction & Sentence Construction

I don't know what I'm talking about. I thought I did, but I realized I don't. I found myself immersed in sudden confusion. A new arrival in Aporia. 'Social' means of society, concerning society, communal, many. 'Construction' means 'construction' but does construction implicate design? an architect?

In the absence of an actual understanding, I tend to use other concepts as substitutions for 'social construct' to set up affirmative-negative positions on any particular point. I tend largely to think in terms of a centrally planned economy (as seen in the USSR, Mao's China, and to a lesser extent Japan) vs decentralized markets. Which in turn I tend to analogize into 'intelligent design' versus 'natural selection' arguments.

That is to say, I get the impression that when 'social construct' is invoked, the general idea is that it's something we consciously constructed. This I am no longer sure about.

For example is a termite mound a social construct?

Does a bee nest qualify as a social construct?

Could social construction actually be referring to 'evolution by natural selection' the fruits of extended phenotypes? Are people describing a process whereby norms arise from multiple iterations of behavioral experiments and learning in changing environments?

Have I been talking past people because I don't know what social construction means?

Well, why don't I just look up what it means?

A social construct or construction concerns the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by the inhabitants of that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.[6] In that respect, a social construct as an idea would be widely accepted as natural by the society.

A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are developed, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans.

Here's the thing. I don't know what that means. The first paragraph I would interpret as basically saying 'society has norms it adheres to' and the second paragraph I interpret as 'the investigation as to where norms come from is ongoing.'

Being a fan of Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' I long ago endeavored to read it's inspiration 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. It's heavy heady stuff, but I found while reading it that my eyes often moved mechanically over the page, which in turn were turned and after three or four pages I would glance up and ask myself 'wait. what's happening?'

It's not a long book, but it is one of the hardest I've ever read as it's very much a moody piece written in an almost stream of consciousness way:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

After reading this paragraph a few times, my personal 'solution' to this paragraph is 'The value of sailors' stories is derived from the embellishment they make not the description of true events.' Or something.

So I have a bias towards plain speech despite what my own writing might indicate. I'm aware in literary appreciation circles there's people who would nominate James Joyce as greatest of all time and highly recommend reading Proust. I probably linger with the unseemly crowd who think nothing beats George Orwell for his amazing ability to speak plainly. An ability I don't have and feel like a moron for.

However, is a metaphorical descent into hell and madness aboard a riverboat as one travels away from civilization in search of a mysterious defector is probably a more interesting and compelling narrative than a farm where the animals take over and try to run it for themselves.

On the flip side though, in my experience Orwell is often cited to criticize totalitarian ideas and practices, so much so the short hand 'Orwellian' is well understood. I would posit that plain speech creates works that have broader influence than the domain of literature. If anything the richness of Conrad's prose obfuscates the horrors of the Belgian Congo by making it an abstract nightmare that is backdrop to the internal journey of the narrator, much as Coppola's movie uses the Vietnam War as backdrop for the journey of Martin Sheen.

If communication is the shared understanding of meaning; a process of encoding, transmitting and decoding the meaning... I'm not really qualified to lecture in communication and linguistics. But you know 'quiero comer un manzana' 'ore wa ringo o tabetai' and 'I want to eat an apple.' are three seperate encodings that depending on languages spoken can convey the exact same meaning to a listener.

However in the same language, encoding can move along a spectrum from obvious to obscure. There are many motivations to move along that spectrum. Necessity might demand you be more obvious 'Help! Police!' or more obscure 'Hello officer, yes [wink] I'm alone [wink] in the house. Nobody [wink] is holding me hostage. [wink wink wink]'

But I guess when people say 'x is a social construct [wink]' I am now a confused police officer standing on the doorstep 'so are you being held hostage or not sir?' 'don't [wink] assume my gender [wink, wink]' 'Are you hitting on me?'

This is a rhetorical trick I use. I admit it, which is to say when I admit that I don't know what something means, it means I don't know what you mean, nor do I possess the competence to know that you know what you mean. I use it to try and get people to commit to a position that can then be argued. It's sometimes effective.

I also use a rule-of-thumb to manage my attention. In my head I call it 'heavy lifting' and I recognize it as people going to a lot of cognitive effort to make a case, while rejecting a much simpler case. It's a real red flag when obscure technical language creep into heavy lifting, particularly if the content is directed to a an audience consisting of the general public.

With that in mind, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's page on Social Construction of Gender. I really like Wikipedia, regard it as one of the best things on the internet. I use it to assess lecturers that I feel should do at least as good a job of explaining concepts and technical jargon as the relevant Wikipedia page. Anyway here we go:

"gender proves to be performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed".[29]

I find this quite obscure language, it is however a quote devoid of context. I interpret it (or decode it) to be saying 'We are what we do' something in the field of clinical psychology has been described to me as 'we are what we do' (as opposed to who we think we are, or who we say we are). I'm all about that. I make idiotic arguments, I am an idiot, even if I claim to be a genius. Let's continue.

In demystifying this concept, Butler sets out to clarify that there is indeed a difference in the terms gender performance and gender performativity. In doing so, Butler states in an interview: "When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role; we're acting in some way…To say that gender is performative is a little different…For something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman…we act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or simply something that is true about us. Actually, it is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time."[30] Thus, Butler perceives gender as being constructed through a set of acts that are said to be in compliance with dominant societal norms. Butler is, however, not stating that gender is a sort of performance in which an individual can terminate the act; instead, what Butler is stating is that this performance is ongoing and out of an individual's control. In fact, rather than an individual producing the performance, the opposite is true. The performance is what produces the individual. Specifically, Butler approvingly quotes Nietzsche's claim that "there is no 'being' behind doing… 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything."[31] Thus, the emphasis is placed not on the individual producing the deed but on the deed itself. Although a seemingly difficult concept to grasp, gender performativity is realized throughout many aspects of our lives, specifically in our infancy and young childhood, our teen years, and finally our adult lives.

Again, given how inarticulate and incoherent I am, I find this hard to decode what is actually being said or asserted. It appears to be a restatement of 'we are what we do' and adding 'we can't separate an individual from their environment.' Perhaps even 'we are the sum total of our actions that are shaped by feedback from the environment.'

Without interpretation, the text is but white-noise, and I am not confident of my interpretation. This is an explanation of a concept on Wikipedia that is quoting its originator accompanied by commentary, that I find hard to understand.

I pick on Butler, because she features in this Onion video I find amusing:


I think it is an example of applying obscure language artfully, such that the joke can be interpreted multiple ways. My initial visceral interpretation was that it was painting a picture that ideas, like Butler's being disseminated widely through society, is pure fantasy. It ridicules the theories presented but I can see how another perspective could interpret it as ridiculing Trump voters, because they really don't 'get it'.

I don't get it, but I don't mean that in a hostile way. There appears to be no market sufficient to my need to have 'social construct' explained in plain language, as to a 6-year old. Instead I have to look to the examples offered and try to infer what is meant.

Like 'Money' appears to be a non-contentious social construct. It is an invention or contrivance of society, that allows me to walk into a building, fill a basket of food, tap a piece of plastic against a plastic box, and strangers let me walk away with all that food without a word.

The thing is though, 'social construct' seems to imply that money could be anything we all agree on. Bananas, Tree leaves or poems. But money or currency is subject to selective pressures. It's a social construct but it will butt heads with reality from time to time, and often lose in the form of asset bubbles bursting, hyperinflation, and sovereign debt defaults. In Economics you learn a list of criteria, or the selective pressures money is subject to: Generally accepted, relatively scarce, a store of wealth, a unit of account and perhaps portable.

Bananas won't survive as a currency because they are perishable and hence can't be a store of wealth. Tree leaves won't survive as a currency because they are also perishable, too irregular to be a unit of account and not scarce enough. Poems wouldn't work because it's not even a medium of exchange, someone can pay you for a poem, but can't really pay with poems because you would retain the poem that you have just supposedly traded. I just realized how ridiculous it is that I am arguing against poems-as-currency.

My argument is that the social construct of money can be explained by a process of evolution. People have come along and tampered with the social construct, and generally the tampering works or doesn't work. We see money evolve - milled edges, non-intrinsic worth, promissory notes, bank notes, credit cards, eftpos, pin and chip, tap and go, block chain. Economies collapse, liquidity in the market dries up etc. We know people constructed bitcoin, but it thus far has failed to become a real currency because it can't meet the money criteria while there's rampant volatile speculation as to it's price which is crazy given that it's only intrinsic utility is as a currency.

However, some people have agreed to let a dog use leaves to purchase biscuits. But if the societal norm is that only higher primates engage in trade, and identity is performative with no doer pre-existing the deed, is that dog in fact a primate? What I'm sure we can all agree on, is that it is very cute, and it would be hard not to give the dog a biscuit. Apparently he has had his visit to the shops limited to 3 a day though, lest the dog get diabetes and the ready availability of leaves bankrupts the school store.

I tend to view the 'big three' social constructs as Religion, Nations and Gender. However I appreciate that Religion is only a non-contentious social construct regarding every other religion but one's own, although often some reciprocal altruism is extended by believers to the rights of all religion. Gender is somewhat contentious, but in the circles I move it tends to be whether there's a distinction between sex and gender, where sex is biological and gender a construct...

Alas, these examples provide no clarity either. A case can certainly be made to explain religions with evolution through natural selection, right down to specific religious practices. Since that was really the debate of the 00's though, I won't dig into that.

Nation states as a social construct are also bound by selective pressures though. Borders tend to follow geographic features like rivers, mountain ranges, seas, island chains. The borders have to be defended from neighbors or other invaders to survive. They also depend on internal political stability lest they subdivide, not to mention the climate which has wiped out more nations and civilizations than people have.

Cuisine is a social construct, techniques and recipes can be altered, but these too tend to be shaped by selective pressures. We can add as much salt to a recipe as we care to, but our pallets will react in order to preserve our kidneys. If we make poison, those recipes tend to die out as go to meals. We can observe the correlation between use of spices and climate, and also how foods high in salt, fats and sugar lead to addiction almost as if our ancestors had no access to such an abundance of cheap calories.

I'm beginning to convince myself that 'social construction' must be a euphemism for 'natural selection' however my impression of what I'm supposed to decode is: 'it's arbitrary; accidental or malicious'

This then in conclusion is the gist. I cannot read minds, but my suspicions are aroused when terminology becomes popular that is incredibly hard to explain and pin down a meaning for. Sure concepts that are hard to conceive of like infinity, intelligence etc. we can 'know when we see' but I specifically suspect that in the market of ideas, there's always a demand for permission to believe what we want. We will find people willing to do torturous, strenuous heavy lifting to turn 'we are what we do' into a sentence so convoluted we can interpret it as 'we are who we think we are.' or something. I can only hope there is always demand and supply for pop-science writers to interpret for me.

The Last Climate Denier

So pretty much everybody has by now heard that my country of birth and residence Australia, is on fire. It will likely continue to burn for four more months or so. My family (including myself) was evacuated on the second day of our holiday. On our way to Eastern Victoria we saw a cavalcade of CFA fire trucks heading to the front - our holiday destination.

Just as some countries of the world have their 'Wet' and 'Dry' seasons, Australia has its 'Fire' season. Bush fires are not unusual, and we've had very bad ones in the past, what is unusual is to have bad ones start so early in summer, keep burning for months and occur all at once. They also traditionally have affected city folk less than say Tropical Cyclones that can make landfall in our northern cities, but also take out banana crops, causing prices to spike in urban supermarkets. But this time clouds of ash are blowing in with the breeze and giving the residents of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra a taste of what it is like to live in Beijing, and other mega cities powered by Australia's brown coal.

So that's the situation.

I got taught the four broad ways in which people avoid responsibility. Buckets if you will, that any time you have a problem or complaint and it wasn't resolved, you'll find it dropped into one of these four buckets.

1. Denial 'There is no problem'
2. Excuses 'We can't address it because...'
3. Blaming 'Joe did that not me.'
4. Diversion 'Your story reminds me of the time...'

I worked in a call center for the better half of the last decade conducting surveys, which gave me probably 10,000 hours to practice recognizing which buckets people use. Let's say I called up to ask people to do a survey about exercise:

1. 'I don't exercise.'
2. 'I'm having dinner.' 'I'm at work.' 'The kids are in the bath.'
3. 'The government is supposed to stop these calls'
4. (Very rare) 'I'll ask you a question what do you think about these Muslims?'

What might be missed is what people aren't taking responsibility for. Because there's two equally valid ways to resolve a market research cold call: A. Do the survey. B. Decline to do the survey.

The four tactics listed above, are not ways to avoid surveys, but ways to avoid taking responsibility.

So.

Climate deniers. The first question to ask is: 'what constitutes denial?' By analogy consider the following statement:

I'm not an alcoholic, I can quit whenever I want, but I don't want to.

Our social situation is such, that on a subject like alcoholism there's really only a binary. Once you admit you are an alcoholic, it tends to come with it a social expectation that you not be consuming alcohol.

Climate deniers though may style themselves as 'Climate Skeptics' and if one feels inclined to examine the magnitude of this fancy SBS ran an episode of their flagship show 'Insight' where one Climate Scientist took on an entire studio of Climate Skeptics.

Climate deniers are those people who opt for the simplest and most elegant way to abrogate responsibility for human-caused climate change. Those who deny it is taking place, and really we are now in it so it might carry the additional burden of denying it has taken place.

We don't however tend to think of 'denial' as an attenuated process. Consider:

A) Climate change is a hoax.
B) Climate change is real.
C) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now.
D) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now, and it's the most pressing issue of our time.
E) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now; and it's the most pressing issue of our time and I need to start making sacrifices.
F) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now; and it's the most pressing issue of our time and I need to start making meaningful sacrifices.

Now in Australia it is still more or less true that we are a classic two-party democracy. Voting is compulsory, voting is on a preferential system, yadda yadda... we follow a global trend of two-party democracies where our country is divided roughly in half and the right-wing party tends to have a narrow edge. Furthermore, our right-wing party tends to follow the American model of being the party of climate denial.

This would suggest that somewhere between 40~51% of Australians believe climate change to be a hoax. My suspicion is though that if one was to attempt to produce this via survey polling with any statistically significant and representative sample, it would be hard to find anything near 40% agreeing with the statement 'Climate change is a hoax.' option A.

Which would suggest something else is going on, and running from option A-F from above I would posit only option F is actually a state of complete non-climate denial. I'm not sure I'm in that category, (which is to say I'm possibly still in denial), because 'meaningful' sacrifices is a tricky concept.

For some people, the meaningful sacrifice may be not voting for the party they have voted for all their lives. To accept a bundle of policy issues they mostly object to in order to have climate change meaningfully addressed at a policy level. It may mean for them, that while they agree climate change is real and the most pressing issue of their times, they will have to sacrifice Negative Gearing, Water Allocations, Subsidies, Tax Benefits on Retirement Funds etc.

What I'm suggesting in other words, is that there are a bunch of Australians who want something done about climate change, but the chips have fallen such that they wind up voting in lockstep with the full blown climate deniers (A) because of what they perceive as more pressing or more immediate issues. (C)

Here then, I suspect the full-on Climate-Change-is-a-hoax people may provide a valuable service to the less visible majority of people in denial about climate change. Because remember that denial is but the simplest way to avoid responsibility. The larger group in denial don't resort to denial of the problem in the first place, but perhaps first and foremost; to blaming. Which is to say, we blame the inaction on climate change, on the climate deniers, not our own feet dragging.

There will, like any good dodge, be some truth to it. Electoral seats with high unemployment that have pinned their hopes on Coal to provide high salaries for unskilled and semi-skilled labor market etc. Lobbyists from offending industries basically paying to continue to externalize their true costs. The question, to explain the title of this post though, is: is it really the case that we need every last person to migrate from (A) to (B), or is it more the case that we need to move people from (B) to (F) or perhaps there's enough people in (E) that if we moved only them to (F) that would be the tipping point?

I don't know. Because I suspect by and large we don't have this data. The denial that shows up in political leadership though, tends to strike me as more motivated than sincere. The difference between the two is kind of moot to me, because it's just clear that there are incentives for politicians to take a position of climate change denial or skepticism. (And of the skeptics I tend to get a far greater impression that the skeptical political leaders aren't free to consult the data, read the reports and question the methodology. eg. behave like a skeptic, rather than willfully ignorant).

In which case, it may come the time that we need to look at their supporter base and interrogate that package deal. Are there a bunch of voters for example, that want something done about climate change, but are hoping to cash in on their property portfolio and take the retirement vacation of a lifetime before climate change is addressed? Are there voters, that want something done about climate change but balk at the idea of parents consenting to pre-pubescent children medically transitioning gender?

That would describe shifting people from (C) to (D) on climate change, not from (A) to (B).

But wait, it gets more....

"Après Vous" I'm told is what the French say... although we say it too because it's fairly straightforward translation which is 'after you'. Which I'm sure you'll agree we English speakers say facetiously all the time.

While there's evidently roughly half the population that could make an emotional sacrifice and vote for a party that will tax Greenhouse Gases or... basically address climate change in any way whatsoever, there's another half of the country including me, that I can't quite let off the hook with a simple 'you've done your part.'

What I suggest is this. Imagine someone knocking on your door and saying 'You've seen Italy for the last time. I hope you made the most of your last visit, because you'll never see it again.' And if Italy has no particular meaning to you, insert France, England, the United States, Brazil, Japan whatever floats your boat (or lifts your airplane). Imagine being done basically, with air travel. Imagine some official knocking on your door and saying 'You've eaten your last steak.' or knocking on your door and saying 'The window has closed for building your dream home.'

Add another detail to this though. You take it on the chin, the sacrifice the nation, the world is asking of you, and out of curiosity you ask the official. 'So you have many more doors to knock on this street?' by way of polite conversation and they say 'No. Just you.'

Maybe.

Maybe you are the kind of noble soul that could take it all for the team; would take it all for the team if you could. In my experience of posing hypotheticals to humans though, it is very common to see people try and weasel out of the scenario. Avoid responsibility. Robert Schiller in his book 'Animal Spirits' for example asserted that wage negotiations rarely have anything to do with supply of and demand for labor, but far more often to do with a sense of fairness. You'd really care if at 28 years of age you were told your travelling days were over, then watched your parents plan a holiday to Morocco because they were tired of Spain and wanted to do something different.

If we entertain (because I can't prove) that full blown climate deniers tend to be older rather than younger, have lower levels of educational achievement, and work and live in areas where the local industries are big greenhouse gas emitters. Industries like mining, agriculture, tourism and construction... that's the vast majority of the Australian Economy. Furthermore another big export: Education, results in much air-travel bringing students in and out of the country and they often are driving inner city apartment construction booms. The potential economic contraction that may follow from properly costing Climate Change may not have us scratching our head as to why climate skepticism is so prevelent, but instead why it's so rare.

I could only suggest it's probably because most people do have a naive intuition as to economies being segregated, discrete, isolated rather than appreciating how completely integrated they are. Everything you purchased this week, probably had fossil fuel burning for the next century factored into its price. I suspect the number of people that truly intuitively understand that the price of survival is fair up to and including everything you have is low, and here's why:

I recall reading some ten to fifteen years ago a Vox Pop segment in a paper that interviewed a Latrobe Valley Coal worker about climate change/carbon tax etc. and it made an impression because his response contained the words [paraphrasing from recollection] "At the end of the day we all need to turn on the air conditioner." Now there's loads of problems with that assertion, including the necessity, the source of electricity etc. but I also see an invitation to empathise, that is too often declined.

People who believe in climate change, as a man-made existential threat to organized human lives, lead their own lives all too often in fear of getting fired. Of being passed over for promotion or career opportunities. Of not paying their debts. And of trying to consume their way into happiness or at least esteem by their peers.

One might feel outrage at the suggestion that Air-conditioning is a sacred human right for which the planet may be destroyed. But as Freud so beautifully said "He does not believe, who does not live in accordance with their beliefs." People all over are living as if not just air-conditioning is a human right, but air-travel, international holidays, 80-20 grinds of chuck, pouring concrete and having no interruption to their supply of electricity is a human right.

If it were the case that somehow through some strange physics what we really needed to address climate change, was to close our Educational sector, rather than Agriculture, Mining, Construction etc. you could bet the demographics of climate skepticism would shift roughly in line with who was being asked to sacrifice the most.

Yeah, personally I believe in top-down rather than bottom up. There's a reality that many people who have gone vegan and will only visit Italy by sailing around the Horn of Africa, are extremely disadvantaged by our economy, which is to say our society is set up to drive these people to extinction and promote people with the largest ecological footprints. But if that's the case and the real change has to happen at a policy/economic incentives level, then the move from E to F (make sacrifices vs make meaningful sacrifices) places an onus on us to change our own politics. Which is to say, to stop demanding the policy platforms from our representatives that have kept our potential allies voting right-wing that want something done on climate change.

As we speak, the Democratic party in America is going through the arduous task of determining who will run against Trump. One of the flaws of this primary process I've noticed, is that the Primaries may be determined by the outcomes of 'Blue' States, large electorates like New York and California, whereas the Presidential race will be determined by Battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida etc. this would pose no problem, if the interests of the safe Blue states and the Battleground states converged. But I'm guessing Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt, don't quite have the same priorities.

Because the Coal miner, or Coal-fired power station worker has a much better vantage point to see the hypocrisy of the Tertiary educated millennial demanding - they give up the only career they've ever known, write down the value of their home, in the town that's lost it's biggest employer and completely reinvent the story of their lives - jumping on the latest Jetstar sale of $70 flights to Tokyo.

Just so, the politicians that stand in the way of climate action can freely observe how hollow a student 'climate strike' is in February so far from the VCE exams they will not be skipping, because there's no way they are giving up on their dream career.

I don't have hard and fast answers. But because I can never unsee those tactics people use to dodge personal responsibility, I see in the discourse of people that accept man-made climate change a lot of denial, a lot of blaming, a lot of excuses and yes, even diversionary tactics. (Lest we forget that a few weeks before bush fires broke out in Eastern Victoria the latest Disney Star Wars installment was for many people a more pressing catastrophe for debate than the fires burning in the state to the north of us.)

Credit where credit's due, a lot of people have donated money, raised awareness of the best fundraisers, volunteered their time and efforts. But these laudable efforts I suspect would be the same dealing with a non-climate change disaster fall out, like a Tsunami for example, and it's entirely possible that in relief efforts climate activists and climate deniers alike mobilize for a common cause.

What gives me hope is that living so close to the front, living in the ash cloud of these catastrophic bushfires while unlikely to budge the dyed-in-the-wool deniers (A), may be moving, myself included Australians from (E) to (F). Or any migration along that spectrum of denial from (B) to (F). People starting to process that the house they are trying to pay off may be devalued by the climate sooner than the tax policy. Or that 2020 is the year to give up red meat, not 2021. That gives me hope.

Just as I feel nobody is more likely to be the undoing of Trump than Trump himself, I am fairly confident no agent will be so persuasive that the climate is changing than the climate itself. Sol the mighty Sun God has returned to voice his wrath, and there's something to be noticed about this God in particular in that he won't spare the true believers either.

It would be helpful if the outright denial would stop and responsibility would be taken, but many people might be surprised at how reluctant they find themselves to take responsibility when the last Climate Denier concedes.

Among those that profess our belief that human activity has altered the climate, the onus is on us to come up with a better conception of our opposition than cartoonish stereotypes that merit no falsification, and keep uttering political messages that only ring true on our ears. We do not want Generals that cannot conceive of defeat, nor soldiers that cannot conceive of anyone rallying to any other banner. We do not want to limit ourselves to simply putting more resources into strategies that continue to prove ineffective. We have an obligation to change our own conversations, to check the map against the ground, and inventory the degree to which we are complicit in our own defeat.

Not-Thinking Out Loud

My sister said to me once, that we were living in the era of the Op-ed. My time in Mexico, impressed my sisters description on me further. Just as meal delivery apps have sprung up in the past half decade as a convenient solution to the time poor individual, the abundance of Op-ed (opinion editorial) content provides a convenient solution for the time poor individual to participate in a discourse while ensuring their toilet break does not exceed a mandated 4 minutes.

And of course I would surmise, that it isn't just stressed out 6-8 workers utilizing the convenience of outsourced opinions, convenience is beguiling to all. I would be surprised if uber eats wasn't popular with the long term unemployed slipping into a malaise where the stress and stigma from their situation makes it harder and harder to pull themselves away from soothing video games, not to mention the calming salts, fats and sugars of takeout that we seldom include when we cook at home. Just so, I imagine there may be people with plenty of time on their hands that will still prefer the sheer convenience of reading and sharing someone else's thoughts as a substitute for their own.

The person who has food delivered for years is unlikely to lose their ability to cook bolognese, pancakes or cubes of ice. And I don't know the neuroscience as to whether our neural pathways for cooking gradually go extinct with neglect or whether it's like riding a bike. But one is not likely to develop culinary skills in the interim. I do not imagine it is a frequent experience however that one is called upon to cook in their life; at least I can't conceive of a situation where one cannot instantly excuse themselves with 'I can't cook'.

Yes there's no Saw-like scenarios to my knowledge where someone has regained consciousness in a deathtrap that requires them to make a croquembuche or be baked themselves. I'm not arguing that eating out is good for you, nor harmless, just relatively inconsequential.

Because it strikes me as more likely that if one doesn't practice thinking, reasoning, argumentation, rhetoric, negotiation, writing, communication, presentation etc. these skill sets atrophy. However encountering a situation where, being able to do the cognitive equivalent of assembling a croquembouche, will be both more likely and incredibly consequential. Whether it is saving yours or another's life, avoiding financial ruin, casting a vote, or being able to sleep at night. Thinking is much more consequential than cooking, evidently so, because thinking can be used as to produce or substitute for a recipe.

What's interesting to me is that we live in a social environment that discourages thinking. The measure of nations remains Economical, with perhaps the solitary exception of Bhutan with its gross national happiness. This hasn't caught fire, nor do people of nations appear particularly impressed or perturbed by OECD human development indexes. My nation has never had a political leader come forth proposing we should run our nation more like Italy, given their greater longevity.

The proxy-measure for progress has been for quite some time 'Gross National Product' or GNP. It measures the total number of finished goods produced over a time period for the primary market, or at least that's my understanding of it. If you purchase a brand new fridge, the economy gets some credit for it. If you purchase a second hand fridge, the powers that be don't care.

This is significant because play conforms to the rules of a game. My former principle used an analogy of handing out darts to students and predicting they would throw them anywhere in any direction, into trees, walls and probably... fellow students. The moment though he paints a target on a wall, the darts will be thrown at it. This by the way is distinct from the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. What it means is that if your boss's boss's boss's boss cares exclusively about GNP then eventually you will learn to care exclusively about GNP.

This seepage down of incentives inevitably shapes society, until you have office buildings built on top of food courts and social media filled with shared op-eds. Simply because if you consume less that's bad for GNP. Buying ingredients from the grocery shows up in GNP, however preparing that food for yourself doesn't. Paying someone else to prepare your food does. The economy just by rewarding consumption, creates a blind migration to a society where nobody does anything for themselves if they can consume a good or service instead.

Not in some diabolical puppet master string pulling way, but just from the simple fact that if one is not paid to sit down, order their thoughts and articulate a position it doesn't show up in GNP. However, if someone pays a website for attracting eyeballs that see their ads, or attracting eyeballs to convert to subscriptions or donations, that website will likely start paying people to do thinking for others, or even articulation for others so they don't have to.

In an apolitical, and even amoral way, it is the exact same blind process that has us pay a premium to 7-Eleven for freezing and grinding up beverages for us, but extending into our mental lives.

Of course you've probably already thought of numerous exceptions where having someone opine for us is immensely valuable, just as having caterers feed 40 people for us, or having someone clean our office for us etc. is a good thing. We could call this, deferring to expert opinions, which is distinct from the appeal to authority. I do not for example advocate home surgery or just giving flying a passenger jet a go, or defending yourself in a criminal trial.

Enter an expert problem though, which is identifying experts. We have domains where expertise either does not exist, or possibly even cannot exist. I'm not sure if this is what is known as the expert problem, but I can conceive of few other candidates. It's namely the expertise required to identify an expert. Say you want to invest your savings to provide for your retirement and request an ethical fund. Lacking a degree of expertise in finance and investment you will be at the mercy of your expert. Are they an advocate of modern portfolio theory or value investing? Do they have a fiduciary obligation to advise in your interests? How are they determining your risk profile? What is their criteria for 'ethical' and does it map with yours?

If the Dunning-Kruger effect means we are blind to our own incompetence, surely this extends to our ability to detect competence in others. One particularly active and outspoken individual I see in my feeds urges me not to be 'brainwashed' but how does one know if they are brainwashed or not? Surely being successfully brainwashed requires one to believe they are not brainwashed? I can conceive of brainwashed individuals urging others not to be brainwashed.

As a poignant example of this expert problem consider this article that sticks in my memory for the very reason that cursory scrutiny of the article reveals it has no content. The additional effort of clicking a link reveals the assertions made are written by a non-expert. It is an Op-ed in the most literal sense, the thesis inferred is simply 'I encountered someone who voices opinions counter to my own, these opinions must be obstructed in order for my opinions to be unobstructed in the path to unanimity.'

One could be forgiven for thinking it contains content, if a list of unjustified assertions is confused for argumentation, where premises are established and conclusions follow. There is, with a little cognitive effort an interesting idea within the editorial and that is: "Toxic masculinity describes ...most importantly: the right and masculine way of engaging with the world." which though still an assertion, alludes to a weak inference that the very concept of argumentation, rhetoric, philosophy if attributed to toxic masculinity excuses the need for anything beyond an assertion, such that one cannot even use an argument to establish that philosophical argument and reason produce value and therefore cannot be defined as toxic.

That's really sophisticated though, and most probably unintentional given it isn't explicitly stated. But hopefully it highlights an expert problem, or appeal to authority. Is the average person competent to notice when subjective opinion is being presented as objective fact?

This is one of my chief misgivings about the recent surge of Video Essay content. With an economically driven reduction in the barriers to production, many non-experts have learned through trial and error and imitation and competition to present mere opinion in a convincingly authoritative way. 

About a year ago, I got interested in why nobody I know condemns Antifa, who just seem shit, let alone shit at opposing fascism. They seem to pass in civil society under a veil of ignorance. 'They're Anti-fascist? Well then they must be good!' I have to admit I was largely ignorant regarding Antifa, kind of just assuming they were like Melbourne's shitty activist group 'the Socialist Alternative'. Seeking to get myself more informed, I eventually found an hour long video explaining the 'Philosophy' of Antifa. Which was very informative, but upon reflection I felt was again, ultimately contentless.

I couldn't share this video as an appeal to authority, to defer to, as a better articulation as to why and how fascism must be opposed, because I thought about it.

For the purposes of illustration, its most interesting idea and articulate argument was to substantiate a double standard, (justify a belief that fascism needs to be opposed by any means necessary) - is that fascists can choose to stop being fascists and go about their lives, whereas Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies etc. whoever fascists target; are required to cease to exist in order for fascists to be happy.

This though was undermined earlier in the piece where the auteur addressed dogwhistles, such that one need not identify as fascist or white supremacist to be justifiably targeted by Antifa. The video also attempts to justify a slippery-slope argument, that there is no form of white supremacy that does not result in violence.

I am no fan of Fascism, and I am a fan of Democracy, Self-determinism, Secular Humanism, Philosophy and the Enlightenment etc. As such I would apply Tony Benn's five essential questions for power to any group tasked with defending Democracy from Fascism:

1. What power have you got?
Tentative answer: Unlimited powers to oppose fascism, in addition the unilateral ability to determine who is fascist.
2. Where did you get it from?
Autonomously self appointed.
3. In Whose interest do you exercise it?
Ostensibly everyone.
4. To Whom are you accountable?
Nobody.
5. How can we get rid of you?
Unknown.

These examples of content that can serve to outsource one's own thinking to, are but examples I've personally chosen of product that has evolved under the selective pressures of the market. Alas, there always has been, and always will be a market not only for reason, but rationalization. Rationalization is also I'm fairly confident a largely automatic process.

A problem with markets, (as outlined by economist Robert Schiller whose expertise was established by being on the very short list of economists recognized for predicting the Global Financial Crisis,) is that they will efficiently produce snake oil when the market demands snake oil. It doesn't mean it should be provided.

The libertarian defense to this phenomena is that if left to it's own devices the snake oil salesmen will eventually go out of business when their customers die. However, we could also just regulate the market by altering incentives to prevent the sale of snake oil. Furthermore, snake oil is a fucking metaphor, and if it takes the shape of something like cost cutting measures in construction, insurance fraud, or climate denial, the demand may not represent the ultimate consumers of the snake oil.

To the limits of my imagination, I can guarantee if you search the market you will always be able to find someone willing to tell you what you want to hear. They may even be able to value add by formulating arguments and articulating them where you could not yourself. They may add value by committing fallacies you yourself cannot detect.

The market for outsourced thinking, certainly adds value in the form of risk management. If you were to write out your manifesto as to why the West needs to abandon it's taboos regarding the consumption of monkey and dog meat, and your friends refuted it, I suspect that would feel quite personal. If you share someone else's opinion that you happen to be sympathetic to, and your friend refutes it, much less personal. Very similar to IBM's 80's campaign 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.' If you go with some bloggers opinion and it doesn't pan out, it's the bloggers fault. If you express your own opinion and it doesn't go well, it's your fault.

Sadly though, sooner or later someone will ask you to justify some belief you hold, and it's very rare for a belief to be self evident. I suspect you never want to confess 'I believe it because I want it to be true.'

I listen to others, I try to find experts, I defer. I watch debates, often in masochistic state of frustration, I have even been known to read up on a subject. None of that is bad. However, by analogy consider how schools teach students to solve math problems.

The teacher might demonstrate the problem on the board for the class. Then have them open a textbook, the textbook might have worked examples that walk the students through the problem. So far, learning resembles outsourced thinking, with designated authorities the students largely take on trust. You may then be given examples, and there's almost certainly answers at the back of the textbook you can check against or copy from.

At some point though, you will be handed a piece of paper that asks you to solve for something, and that you show your workings. In my highschool you got a mark for the write answer and marks for your workings. One might get four out of five marks just for the workings where a stupid error was made like rounding or getting a sign wrong.

I've been out of school for a while, but would be shocked and disturbed if schools in an effort to catch up to the internet age no longer instructed students to show their workings, but instead asked questions like 'use your smartphone to share a quadratic equation on social media.'

Arguably one of the objectives of Education in teaching basic mathematics is to empower students to not have to spend money paying someone to do quite basic mathematics for them. To not produce adults that need to pay people to read for them.

Sadly, we do live in a world where at best people are often sharing content they may have read, but not really scrutinized. I have a great appreciation now of the old proverb 'A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth even has its boots on.' It is not uncommon for me to see people sharing warnings about a misinformation campaign that has not nor ever will reach me, before then obliviously sharing misinformation themselves.

Perhaps most concerning though, is that often in the marketplace of ideas, when we outsource our thinking we often aren't even serving the interests of the people we think we are (ie. the author of an op-ed) nor even the employer of the author, nor the direct financial beneficiary like their advertises or sponsors, or the company that takes a cut of all the donations it facilitates. I mean, coincidentally yes, we may be unwittingly serving all these interests in the chain.

But ultimately, we are serving those few economists that pretended to know that GNP was the most suitable proxy measure of human utility. 

"Ok, Boomer"

The great irony of the meme 'Ok, Boomer' is that by the very nature of memes, if you employ a meme to criticize a generation, you are that meme. In other words:

Had you been born between 1946 and 1964, you would be a 'Boomer'.

Which is such a banal truism, I'm confident the point would be missed. I'm not sure how to articulate it better. Perhaps a few more examples would help:

If you were in your 20's in the early 90's you would be making 'not jokes'.

If you were in your 20's in the late 90's you would be listening to 'Nu Metal'.

If you were in your 20's in the 80's you would have paid money to see Police Academy movies.

If you were in your 20's in the 80's you wouldn't do yoga, you would do aerobics. 

Of course, we can't argue the counterfactual, so these assertions of mine are opinion. However the idea bears entertaining I feel. The specific idea that if we were somehow able to displace you in time or perhaps even geographically, you would struggle to maintain your beliefs.

'Oh but that would be great tohm! if you could send me back to the start of the industrial revolution, I could warn everybody about climate change!' Yeah you could, but I'm talking about displacing you not as a cyborg sent back from the future with memories of how things pan out, but more if you were abducted at birth and raised in different circumstances.

I was watching the German Netflix sci-fi series 'Dark' that is about displacement in time. Without giving too much away, a kid goes missing in the present day and turns up in the 1980's. There's a scene though where the missing kid from 2018 is discovered in the 80's by his father who has managed to follow him through time, and the kid is wearing short jean-shorts, long socks and sandals.

This small detail had me question my very identity. Would I wear the socks and sandals? I mean I still for the most part dress like it's 1996. Fashion has by and large never worked for me since. But if I was 10? If I had no means by which to purchase my own clothing? Would I protest or go with it?

'Ok, Boomer' would be useful as a device to make salient that our beliefs are by and large products of our environment. In which case, it should work in both directions, but the very espousing of 'Ok, Boomer' indicates to me more a comforting exercise in blaming, the boomers are bumbling buffoons that have fucked up the planet, but we have it all figured out. 

In Melbourne, in the inner city, you can find on pretty close to every block a bubble tea shop. They sell sugary drinks in plastic cups, sealed with plastic lids that are punctured with a plastic straw. You can also find in abundance, cafes that serve people coffee in their reusable 'keep cups'.

Would a white office worker with their keep cup turn around to a Chinese international student sipping on their bubble tea and say 'Ok, China.'? While privately I'm sure they feel superior, I doubt they'd feel comfortable laying into the Chinese. If the two individuals were the same age though, I sincerely doubt the keep-cup toting white person would imagine they wouldn't give a shit about single use plastic consumption had they been born in China.

But chances are, they wouldn't.

It is a conceit of hindsight we often make that we would have realized Bruce Willis was dead in the 6th Sense, that the memories in the Arrival were in fact taking place in the future, and that we would have been among the very few Boomers that took Climate Change seriously, argued for greater representation in Studio Movies and accepted our child's demigender non-binary status. 

More to the point, many of us assume that were we to move from the inner city, progressive suburbs, to rural racist heartland that our political views wouldn't change.

And I doubt, they would change dramatically but perhaps more erode over time as one begins to sympathize with a community of different values. 'Ok, Boomer' is a bold declaration of an inability to sympathize, by people who precisely are in the best position to sympathize. Because you are jumping on the bandwagons of culture as and where they occur. There's no Homo Boomus and Homo Millenius.

My ancestors, better known as my Grandparents opposed the imperial expansions of Germany and Japan. Evidently they didn't sacrifice their lives, just youth and mental health, because they came back and had a boom of babies. But many of their peers and siblings did sacrifice their lives. There's a naive assumption we can make in the present day that the Allied forces opposed Hitler because Hitler had to be opposed because of the atrocities of the holocaust. We know Nazism to be bad because it represents the moral nadir of antisemitism. 

Watch the recent Churchill biopic 'Darkest Hour' though, and whatever intelligence the brits had on hand about the deportation of Jews and the death camps, it didn't really feature in the public psyche. The expansion of the Third Reich was opposed for it's imperialism, resistance to being ruled by a foreign power. 

Sovereignty was the reason for the resistance, and with little regard to the Jewish diaspora. In other words: the same kind of sentiments that vote for Brexit. It's quite probable that a bunch of Anti-Semites sacrificed their lives to liberate the Jewish people of Europe, where if but for the accident of their being born a British citizen rather than a German citizen, could have just as easily been posted to a death camp and gassed a bunch of innocent civilians.

And my Grandparents and their peers didn't go fight fascism in order that we be free to marry people of the same sex and open immigration up to Asians and Africans and Arabs, and vote to become a republic, and socialism... their good work, was not undertaken for contemporaneous good intentions, the product of the very freedom and sovereignty they preserved for us. It was for Queen and Country. 

Had my grandparents been born when I was, if someone asked them to lay down their life for queen and country, I imagine they would have said 'fuck off.' as I would.

I was watching the Franky Boyle's New World Order wrap up of 2019, and Sara Pascoe made an interesting point, that is under discussed when they were discussing Greta's UN Speech. She pointed out that she was taught about climate change (she's two years older than me) when she was a kid, then grew up and got busy. And yeah, Pascoe is a vegan, but she also has guested on Travel Man, a show that promotes 'mini-breaks' where one flies to a holiday destination for 48 hours, and we don't hit this up with 'Ok, millenial'

Mark Blyth has been one of the few to point out, that there's an emotional obstacle to climate action. And I invite you to sympathize. 

If you lived in the 1970's you would have been encouraged to go to University for free (In Australia). Going to University would have assured you employment in just about any field, at wages your parents could only have dreamed of and kept you out of Vietnam. It was all driven by the post-war expansions of international trade, manufacturing and fossil fuel driven technology improvements. Real wages had been rising, the middle class was growing. Women were becoming lawyers, engineers, professors. I've met them. There's no laptops, no mobile phones, no internet, no smart phones. If you were an architect or a graphic designer you worked with a set square, not photoshop and illustrator. If you wanted to fact check someone you had to go to the library and look up books via a card catalog, or have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica handy. 

You invested your life in dodging the draft and getting an education in one of the industries that were driving into a better and brighter future. Then in your late 20's you first hear on a Sunday news program about a scientific theory called 'the Greenhouse effect' this is the point where myself and Greta might be tempted to ask 'what did you do?' but we are very unsympathetic as to how obvious the answer would have been to people in their late 20s with two young children and a mortgage who had embarked on careers in the fossil fuel and manufacturing industry - hope it wasn't true.

And I fucking see the same behavior among my peers and contemporaries. There is a popular mass undertaking of social justice, that sure has nobler aims and intentions than industrial expansion. But like the scientists of the 1960's and 70's that first clued in to the hidden cost of greenhouse gases, there is a small, unpopular contingent of serious scientists that have done serious science, that have gone and actually looked at the facts on the ground, and through the microscope and run experiments and they are by and large dismissed by my generation, on so many subjects. And mirroring the climate denying fossil fueled skepticism, there are motivated bodies producing bogus theory and promoting it to preserve their self interest.

I do not know if I would have been a Nazi, had I grown up in Nazi Germany. I listened to Brett Weinstein interview Katie Hurzog where Katie made the interesting claim that she 'knows now I wouldn't be a Nazi in Nazi Germany' (paraphrasing) which was not the reflexive 'well I know I would never be a Nazi.' But more the considered conclusion of a process of much soul-searching, where I assume she concluded with confidence that she was the kind of person who is willing to die out of principle sooner than fit in or be accepted. Brett shares her conclusion, but points out 'we would have opposed it, and we would have died.' (paraphrasing).

And I guess I need to get to some kind of fucking conclusion eventually, so out of respect for Godwin, it may as well conclude with Nazism. This is the thing about the 'Ok, Boomer' meme that I find deliciously oblivious. It's missing the general for the specific. Focusing on the content of beliefs, rather than how those beliefs are obtained.

I was talking to one friend and reported that I knew people who self censored their opinions online. I forget how we got on the topic because our conversation had been so fragmented, but I remember the response was in the vicinity (paraphrasing) of 'well, it's not really a problem because often those kinds of opinions aren't worth sharing.' which I'll be honest, stunned me that anyone wouldn't self censor that opinion, and I was so stunned that I couldn't articulate a push back there and then, it was really blindsiding. I cannot infer a true intention of the statement but what I hear is 'well it's okay if people are unable to express dissenting views because I feel the dissent is illegitimate.' that's not a system. It's tribalism. Simple substitution makes it clear to me 'Well, we shouldn't be concerned if the people are too afraid to criticize the Chairman. The Chairman is a great leader.'

At another party, I was talking about my project to redesign my wardrobe as I transition into middle age and the interesting challenges it poses, and my friend said to me (paraphrasing) 'Well as what I assume is a straight cis man... I think you're going to be fine.' and though I understand the value of labels like cis, to build empathy and challenge the idea of designating 'normal' it was the first time I had a bemused reaction that at first was (this is my inner monologue) 'how cute, you earnestly believe we help each other out...' before graduating to 'that felt remarkably similar to "you Jews are good at making money, and you take care of your own now don't deny it!" sweet pre-holocaust form of Antisemitism.

That's just how I felt, and I feel confident both friends would be horrified to be compared to supporters of the worst endeavors of the 20th century. Nor to my knowledge have either typed the phrase 'Ok, Boomer' anywhere. And in case it needs pointing out, cisgendered heterosexual anglo-saxon men are not as vulnerable as the Jewish diaspora, or even communist dissidents. The people most vocal in attacking us, still have a tendency to marry us, have babies with us etc. 

Baby Boomers are not homogenous, just like every generation, and every other which way you try to slice your demographics. I'm sure climate change, attitudes toward sex and gender, views on immigration, superannuation and how to serve avocado on toast are not the only avenues by which one might feel tempted to post a dismissive 'Ok, Boomer' but it will always remain a self defeating dismissal, because you are demonstrating how ordinary you are and how much in your thinking or lack thereof, you resemble the very people you think you're dismissing.

Short Stories About Housing

Probably two or three years ago I posed the following questions on a post about Housing:

1. How do houses make money?
2. What value does a landlord provide?
3. How can house prices rise faster than rents sustainably?
4. How can rents rise faster than wages sustainably?
5. If housing is such a safe investment, why do banks lend money to people to buy houses rather than simply purchasing the housing themselves and renting them to tennants?

It still feels recent largely because of how relatively infrequently I publish a post in these recent years. In that post I tried to actually steel-man a pro-housing investment position that made sense of these questions. I really tried and I largely failed. I'm time rich, by the way. A big part of my privilege is that I get to sit around and write blog posts, and I realize not everybody does. The point of that post was that if people are going to make large bets on the housing market, it strikes me that they should be able to answer these questions, because these are precisely the bets they are making. I am ever grateful to the few people who read this blog, and even more grateful for the few who had a stab at answering in part one of the five questions I feel anyone buying a property should be able to answer.

For this post, I thought it handy to just bring up a refresher of those five questions, to prime the mind when reading my ridiculous short stories about housing. Stories intended to get whosoever might read them to see the world they live in differently.

Now story time.

Seachange

Your husband had an affair affair with your sister and was arrested for fraud, leaving you and your children in disarray. Needing to make a seachange in your life you accept a job as a local Magistrate for a seaside community. You get in touch with a real estate agent and discover there's a house on the market that suits your needs perfectly and the owner is asking for $50,000. Your employment contract is going to pay you (after tax) $200,000 a year, working full-time as a magistrate. You arrange to meet the owner at the estate agents office and sign the paperwork.
When it's all scheduled to go down, Barry walks in to the meeting, unannounced. He informs you he is a local businessman that's made a fortune from selling abalone to the Japanese. He can secure a loan from the banks for a much larger amount than you and at a lower interest rate. He offers to do you a favor, he'll buy the house not for $50,000 but for $200,000 then you can pay him $5,000 dollars a month in rent. And you're welcome.
Being a magistrate and trained and experienced in calm, sober consideration, you point out to Barry some facts of the case: A) he doesn't need the house, whereas you do. B) You can afford the house, at the asking price. C) the rent you would pay him, is more than you would buy the house for if he wasn't taking out a loan to overpay for it.
Your verdict: he isn't doing you any favors. Barry holds up his open palms and interrupts, stating 'I'm happy to invest in good old bricks and mortar.'
You ask the agent if there are any other houses on the market, Barry interjects 'I'll grab that one too. Of course, that's going to mean two loans I have to repay and one house just sitting empty. I'm afraid $5k a month might not cut the mustard...'

The Great Property Apartheid Retirement Plan

You are sitting with your accountant explaining that you plan to retire in a few years. Your problem: You've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle your working income affords you, and you don't want your autumn years to be less enjoyable than those years you've worked your butt off during being compensated for making the world a better place.
The accountant starts talking about the potential future demand for renewable energy and the need for investment in that sector as your eyes start glazing over...
That shit's all to complicated for me! you say. Gimme something simple, you demand. The accountant stands up abruptly, moves to the window and shuts the blinds. He walks over to the office door and locks it. Yes, no cubicle for your accountant that's why you pay him the big bucks.
The accountant says 'okay, I may have the ideal retirement financing strategy for you.' He pulls down a large chart and explains.
'See you are here, currently working, earning an income. This income pays for things like cheese, foxtel, petrol and airconditioning. In a few years though you'll be here... with no income. But what if you could take someone else's income?'
Go on you say, you're listening.
'You have a son, who lives in a room in your house, he is in his early twenties and will be earning an income for many years.'
Yeah, you say, he has an honors degree in fine arts and now works as a guy who delivers food to people with real jobs, but you don't see how that is relevant.
'Well, what if you were to charge him rent? He earns $400 a week, you could say young man if you are going to live under my roof you have to contribute. And charge him "rent"'
Rent? You mean that thing I paid way back when I was at uni?
'Exactly, you could charge him up to 60% of the money he earns for living in your asset.'
Well, okay that's something you admit, but that's not enough to buy cheese and foxtel and petrol...
'Ah ha, excellent point sir. But what if you had more sons?'
Well I'd need more rooms...
'Yes, so what if you owned lots of rooms? then you could take 60% of the wages of 10 or 20 young people with shitty jobs, that will be working until the day you die.'
I see, but where would I get those rooms?
'You would buy an investment property.'
An investment property... interesting. But what if my son decides to buy his own house?
'Well, fortunately houses are very expensive. Your son won't buy a house because his job is insecure and he doesn't have much money. So nobody will lend the money to him to buy a house. He may refuse to pay you rent, and decide to rent elsewhere.'
So your whole scheme is broken then? What a waste of my time.
'No, that's the beauty of it. I have many clients like you, and if your son refuses to pay you rent and he instead goes to pay rent somewhere else, who do you think he's paying that rent to?'
...someone...like me.
'Exactly, housing is expensive not everyone can afford to buy, fortunately though renting is much cheaper than buying, so those who can't afford to buy pay the rent to those who can.'
So it's like a big charging your own kids rent swap?
'Yes. Exactly.'
But isn't buying a house expensive? I mean sure I can get a loan based on the assets I already have, but isn't it like paying $10 a week in order to charge my kid $5?
'Well, yes, but fortunately nobody really buys property for the rent. See here's the thing, if you were paying for something like a restaurant meal, what would you expect?'
Well... an excellent meal, cooked properly and served hot. Good service, on time... a good atmosphere... those sorts of things.
'And if you were paying rent to live in your current home what would you expect?'
To rent my own home? Well a bloody lot if I'm paying some other basterd for the roof over my head.
'This is the beautiful thing. If your toilet broke, you'd call a plumber, if your dishwasher broke you'd call an electrician.'
Yeah, that's just common sense.
'When someone is renting, if the toilet breaks they have to call an agent and request emergency repairs, if the dishwasher breaks, they have to fill out a maintenance request form, lodge it with the agent who passes it onto you and you arrange an electrician to go repair it whenever you feel like it.'
So I basically could charge them rent, and provide no service?
'Almost no service, toilet breakdowns are rare, so it's pretty close to none whatsoever. I mean what are your tennents going to do? Build their own home?'
Well yeah, that's what I'd do, you're whole system falls apart.
'But you forget, I have many clients, so where would they build their home? On whose land?'
...they'd have to buy it first.
'Yeah, and are you going to sell it cheaply? No, you've lost a lot of money charging $5 rent when it costs you $10 to own.'
Yeah!
'You need someone to bail you out, by overpaying by even more than you overpaid to provide no real service in the first place!'
That's right. But I have some questions, if this is all about getting our kids incomes... I heard there's less of them than us. And they have less job security than we do, and their incomes aren't very good.
'Well, it doesn't matter, property prices always go up, so really it wouldn't matter if you didn't rent your house out at all. I mean we can say that immigration will bring the working population back up, but that's kind of a red herring. The fact is, like you most people don't understand productive industries that make and do things of value. Heck! Most of my clients don't really understand the industries they work in, and aren't particularly good at their jobs. Even you sir, are asking questions most people never even think to ask. People hate landlords, and they hate paying rent, and they hate living with their parents, so much so that they will pay pretty much any price to not do so. I mean think of it this way, if your son was kidnapped how much would you pay to have him returned alive?'
Well, everything I have?
'Is that all? What if they were asking more? Much more? Would you still retire? Would you go into debt?'
Yes! Yes! Anything for my son.
'Well, isn't it fair then, that your son would do the same for you? I mean this is basically that, in reverse.'
So it's like a... kidnapping or extortion racket?

The Best Years of Our Lives

Now we turn to a happy couple in the early 80s at an auction, and here after much preamble, our story takes off. Imagine though that we didn't bid in the local currency of dollaridoos, but instead simply pledged years of our working lives. Now there's a reason we bid in dollars, and that is because people earn very different salaries and other incomes. So if 90's Bill Gates was at an auction with a 90's supermarket cashier, one might be pledging 0.001% of a years wages and the other 10,000 years. This would make it hard for the auctioneer to keep track of whether the bids were higher or not.
But here at our 1980's auction, everyone earns about the same and so the bidding opens.
'One year!' an enthusiastic couple call out. 'One year and one month' chimes in another bidder. Things tighten up at one and a half years, before the most persistent bidding couple decide to go for a knockout blow 'One year, 8 months.' it goes once, it goes twice, it goes three times. The owner is delighted the property sold for so much over the reserve of one year and two months. The bank approves a ten year loan to repay one year and eight months worth of wages. Everyone is happy.
Time passes.

Interlude

What happens when labor can no longer capture the returns of economic growth through higher wages? Where real wages are by and large stagnating. Not just for a little bit, but for decade after decade. Surely this would make workers angry, demanding economic protections against overseas competition, the threat of capital moving operations offshore for cheaper wages, lower taxation and more relaxed regulation?

Well, let's see what is happening at the auction. Our happy couple who bought their first home back in the 1980's are now selling it in the present day, on auction of course. A crowd gathers. Many just to watch the events of the auction unfold. Bidding opens. 'Twenty years' calls out the auctioneer, someone takes it. 'Do I hear twenty two?' 'Twenty five!' someone interjects, 'I got twenty five, can I hear 26?' ... again after an initial flurry the bids climb up into the late 30s, there are only two bidders left, an anxious young couple with pram in tow, looking for a home to live in to raise their child, and some guy in a leather jacket with designer sunnies looking for an 'investment property' to help secure his retirement and lifestyle aspirations. 'Thirty nine' says the young woman choking back the pleading desperation in her voice. 'forty' says the man in the leather jacket, reflexively while checking his phone for notifications. The couple anxiously request a moment to confer, doing some back of the envelope calculations... as a hail mary, they bid 'forty years, one month.' the man counters with 'forty one years.' It goes once, twice, three times. The young couple demoralized walk away.

Sharktank

'...and by taking the principle of the mobius strip and rendering not in three dimensions, but π dimensions I devised a new form of wind turbine that makes no noise, can be constructed from household materials and can provide free clean energy to power a four occupant dwelling from the slightest breeze.' she straightened her tie, trying to tamp down the excited movements of her hands.
'And you want our funding... to manufacture these mobius-turbines?' says the middle shark with the silver beard and hair.
'Oh no, I need a small amount of funds to set up the electronic distribution infrastructure to distribute schematics to the world via a pdf. I mean, this could stop carbon emissions... tomorrow.'
'How much would you charge for the pdf?'
'I'm thinking, pay what you feel. I mean this would be going out to markets everywhere.'
'I mean free energy might mean a saving of thousands to some, you don't plan to capture that? Over a lifetime it could be hundreds of thousands for an individual.'
'Oh yeah, well, in undeveloped markets though, the local currency and average wages of the population would amount to a micro transaction, I want them to have this too. To put an end to selling cheap dirty coal to poorer nations.'
'Well here's my problem Keith. I could put the money you are asking for down as a deposit on a house, and within a year make a double digit return on that. Because house prices historically always go up, and you, your answer to piracy of your intellectual property is to just give it away to people who don't feel like paying. It's a pass for me.'

 Short Story

'So would you like to pay 8% interest on a 1.5 million dollar loan, or 20% interest on a 75 thousand dollar loan?' 'How long do I get to pay it off?' 'Well you can pay off the interest first, then the principle.' '8% please!'

The Eve of Battle

The mood in camp was grim. Many of the men had fought  alongside the enemy putting down the rebellion of the Northerners. They'd fought side by side, and now this. Tomorrow they would meet upon the field and shed blood. Had only the King the lucidity to cede to the demands...
What were the demands again? The general sent forth an envoy to fetch terms of surrender. Perhaps no battle would be necessary after all.
Sure enough, the price to not do slaughter was cheap, agreeable. A granting of lands along the north shore of the riverbank and payment of the Lord's captured brothers ransom, as well as back payment for defending the north border. All-in-all peanuts when compared to a long campaign. The King might feel the stain upon his honor simply buying out his rivals rather than noble conquest, but at least he could finally turn his attention to a disastrous crusade to the Holy Land...

Property is Booming!

On a mysterious world there lives a couple, in a house and also on this world there is a bank. Where the bankers sleep is a mystery, but it is a mystery nobody seems concerned with for the purposes of this narrative, because one day one of the couple arrives home with some bad news. 'I've been made redundant, I'm laid off.'

'We'll have to sell the house.' says the partner, 'it's the only way to finance our lifestyle. We just can't afford this anymore.' so they make the painful decision to sell their home, and place it on the market. 'We'll need a place to live.' said one to the other. 'I saw a house has just gone on the market!'

So the couple head to the bank, and arrange a meeting with the manager. 'We'd like a home loan.' 'How much?' 'Well the owners are asking for $100,000' 'We'll we should be able to arrange something let's look at your budget.' so the couple pull out there budget, their balance on the savings account, documents relating to their remaining salary.

'We also plan to sell our house, we're hoping to get $100,000 for it.' 'Well...' said the bank manager. 'If that goes ahead, combined with your salary and savings deposit, we'd be willing to lend you $200,000' 'Well!' said the couple 'That would certainly do it.'

The couple are thrilled to receive an offer on the house for $200,000. 'That's almost double what we were asking!' and papers were signed and so the couple were able to sell their house to themselves ready to move into their new abode. After fees and taxes and interest was paid down, they found themselves with very little outstanding on their mortgage.

'You know...' said one to the other, 'We made more on the sale of our house than we have earned for the last ten years.' 'Property is booming.' agreed the other. 'We should really sell while it's still a seller's market.' So the couple excited by the recent trends puts their house on the market again, asking $250,000.

The bank manager based on the strength of last quarters real estate figures, is happy to lend them $300,000 to invest in their next property.

Time passes. The couple had never in their wildest dreams imagined that they would one day be sitting on a multi-million dollar property portfolio, but sure enough every time they nearly blinked on taking out such a mortgage, they always found themselves willing to buy their house from themselves at ever increasing prices.

The inflation in price had been so rapid and dramatic, that both had been able to quit their jobs to go full time into property investment. The more they sold their house to themselves, the more confident they felt. A confidence that was shared by the bank, who agreed to lend them more and more money each time they sold their house in order to purchase it at their ever increasing asking prices.

And of course, they lived happily ever after.

Not in Conclusion

When I was younger, in my late teens to early twenties I was a big fan of Warren Buffet who had come to my attention thanks to a profile on his eccentricities in the Age weekend supplement 'The Good Weekend' something I had taken to reading out on the spit of Lake Wendoree on a Saturday morning while I threw pine cones into the lake that my dog Lil, would fetch. If one wanted her to be occupied for a good twenty minutes at a time, you had only to throw two pine cones in at a time. Like Marty McFly's reaction to being called a chicken, she couldn't back down from the challenge of trying to bite down on a pine cone, while she already had a pine cone in her mouth.

At any rate, Warren Buffet made a profound impression on me, and through my fascination with him stumbled across one of his investment heuristics 'Don't invest in anything you don't understand.' Which had notably spared Buffet from the Tech Stock crash of the early 2000s and the collapse of Enron.

Being an artist has kept me from investing in general, also I suspect the acute awareness that having something to read while throwing pine cones to a dog is a good life; and so long as I have sufficient leisure time, life for the most part is sufficient, resulting in a chronic lack of material ambition.

But it has meant that for most of my adult life, I have been running around a mental labyrinth that folds back around on itself like a pretzel, trying to understand what most adults are doing with their lives. The housing labyrinth is more elaborate than my mental capacity to construct metaphors, I simply cannot picture how the housing market works. I do not understand it.

However I feel like I may be Zeno pointing out the impossibility of motion to Diogenes, who simply gets up and leaves the room. Which is to say, I attempt to construct arguments to show that property investment can't possibly be sustained, then I walk past the newspapers that seem to demonstrate the opposite.

My position then, is basically that property investment is a dead end in a labyrinth. We just have no intuition for dealing with labyrinths so large that it might take several lifetimes to hit that dead end. It may even be a positive, speaking as an elitist rather than an egalitarian.

We know, all of us generally, that wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated. Taking this as an a priori it simply must be the case that most people are actually losing at property investment. Further buttressing this argument is the observation that there's generations now who are not expected to ever own property in their economies of birth. That means that the assets are not even able to be passed down through the generations, they have to be sold off to the wealthy elites.

That could be a good wealth redistribution mechanism, if it meant that people are basically just pledging most of their income to a bank or in some cases landlord, for their entire working lives and that income then finances the highest value (emphasis on value, rather than wealth) individuals in the world. I just suspect that it tends to prop up societal deadweights like Donald Trump, literal 'rent seekers' and not the people working on clean renewable energies etc.