Category Archives: Politics

General Politics

You always have a choice

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The phrase “You always have a choice” is extremely prevalent in super hero movies. Ranging from Batman Begins to Spiderman 3 to Wolverine. In whatever situation you’re in, you can do the right thing do the wrong thing or through brute force come up with an alternative that you can force to occur. This really epitomizes the rugged individual and the ideal American to some extent. No matter how down on your luck you always have the choice to be or do something better. The GOP really pushes for this, where many of the candidates argue that they were self made men. I think this is also the root cause for a typical response to the 99% protesters (or someone asking for an increase in minimum wage) – “Get a job.” If the choices are get a job, or not work, the C -brute force response now is – “start your own company” or “make your own job.”

Before, you assume I’m just bashing the GOP, this also comes from the left. The environmental movement also assumes this is possible in regard to personal behavior and reducing your carbon footprint. In many cases they assume that it’s easy for people to change their behavior, because they want to protect the environment. If we wanted to we could drive less, we could buy the less impactful light bulb, we could turn off our computers at night, etc, but people are lazy or don’t care.

So, are the GOP and environmentalists right? We’re all lazy and don’t want to make the right choices? That we don’t want to work or that we don’t want to do what’s right for the environment? I think that for the most part neither is true. You will find freeloaders or people that protest saving electricity by turning on as many lights as possible. However, most people don’t behave that way. So what’s the problem? Why do we have uneven unemployment in some areas, why don’t we all work to save the environment?

It goes back the the choices we can make. One of the big assumptions in economics is that the work force is mobile, that when there’s unemployment in one part of the country people move to where the work is. However, we saw that in the US that isn’t true with this recession. The only people moving were migrant workers which may have been illegal. Why? Why wouldn’t someone with no job in California move to another state to find a job? Well some of it comes down to their ability to move. If they own a house and the choice is to lose everything end up in deeper debt because selling your house (if you could sell it) would leave you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole with nothing to show for it, do you really have a choice?

In this way our choices are bounded by our situations. A woman may want to drive less because she wants to do what’s best for the environment, but she has a difficult choice. Move closer to work so she could walk and take her children out of a great school and move them into a lower quality school. I think it’s a no brainer which one she would choose. However, let’s say that the schools are the same, her children may not want to move because they’d have to make all new friends. The gains would be very minimal. There are a lot of costs to moving closer to work even if everything else would stay the same. This case also assumes that there’s only one driver. In many cases this choice would involve two people and the trade offs for one driving farther could complete negate the benefits of moving.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that we are able to make whatever choices we want. Our choices are constrained by the circumstances we live in. There are ways to work around these constraints to improve our ability to make choices, but that is not easy and certainly not free. When we make policies that impact choices and make assumptions about people’s ability to make choices we need to be aware of these constraints and work to remove them.

Business Cash Reserves and Innovation

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I found an article on MarketWatch that discussed the fact that the private sector is, in fact, doing just fine. As the author mentioned, this didn’t go over very well whenever Obama mentioned it a few weeks ago. However, he’s right. Companies as a whole are doing extraordinarily well (see graph below), but normal people aren’t seeing it. I’ve discussed this before in a Future of Employment post.

As you can see from the graph Corporate profits are at an all time high. We also know that investments are still occurring in new equipment. We know from the numbers that companies aren’t hiring. I think that the GOP would argue that this is because of regulation uncertainty, which they are contributing to. From what I’ve seen the Democrats don’t really have any sort of good explanation for the lack of hiring. The author of the MarketWatch article claims that companies aren’t spending money on new employees because they are returning most of it to stock holders through dividends or stock buybacks. The data supports this perspective to some extent. Part of it could be the fact that many companies are automating, outsourcing and offshoring all contribute to some level or another.

I think that it’s a combination of these factors plus one other factor. This was added as something as a throw away at the end of the article, but it really stuck with me. “Corporations may be intensely profitable, but they have no profitable ideas about what to do with the vast sums they earn.” This comment is extremely important, especially when you couple that with the article that the Washington Post just published about the difficulty of PhDs finding jobs. 


These researchers are the core of the future for innovation at companies. If companies aren’t hiring these scientists, despite the fact that many claim there are skill gaps, then they are unlikely to innovate moving forward. My old roommate in the Netherlands, Brian, told me that the Holst Centre where he worked created 3 jobs for every employee at their research center. I’ve seen similar numbers in one of my courses as well. 


In this case the trickle down effect actually works. You hire researchers and they need to have technicians building equipment, which needs to order parts and raw materials to build those components. Which requires additional labor elsewhere. While 3 for 1 may not seem like the greatest ratio, those other workers typically make good money and will end up spending money elsewhere.

Innovation drives the economy. Companies need to look at how they manage risk, especially if they are sitting on huge reserves of cash. Putting more money into research for their field can lead to huge disruptions in technology and could lead to an increase in market share.

I will talk more about these risks in my next blog.

Europe in the Driver’s Seat

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Today I woke up to wonderful news. CERN has discovered the Higgs Boson particle, the so called “God” particle and the EU parliament has voted against ACTA. This is a great day for science and for freedom of expression.

What do these mean? Well, the Higgs particle is supposed to be the particle that gives everything else mass. It is the actual building block that everything in our universe is supposedly built upon. Why do I say supposedly? Well, the discovery is with a 5 sigma confidence. This is a really good, but in many cases they like to have 9 sigma. What does that mean in layman’s terms? So most testing is looking for a probability of less than 5% that this could happen by pure happenstance, or random error. This means that 95% of your data bear out the test your trying to answer. This happens around 2 sigma where sigma represents a standard deviation. Most products are made with safety specifications around 2 sigma, maybe three sigma (99.73%). The values that we’re talking about are so high, that you’re starting to get into the range of lottery winning (or plane accidents for that matter) likelihood for 5 or 9 sigma. With such high confidence you actually start to run into a greater likelihood of missing the actual signal than for it to not actually be there. You are being so strict on your data requirements that something that actually is the real signal is ignored by your data set.

Does this change my daily life? No not at all. We won’t be able to do anything functional at this level for more than a century if ever. We’re still working on the results of Einstein’s theories and how to apply them. We haven’t really gotten quantum computing working or any of the other cool things we’re working on (teleporting light and particles for example). However, it does give us a greater understanding of how the universe works and we’ve had to develop a lot of new technologies to detect these particles. The technologies could be very useful in the future for completely unrelated applications.

ACTA is a very different story. I’ve talked about it in the past and mentioned how much of a risk it was to the openness of the internet and to our society as a whole. The largest political body in Europe has decided to reject ACTA. The vote wasn’t even remotely close. Our hard work has paid off and the treaty is effectively dead. In the US it hasn’t been ratified by the Legislative branch and is really only going to be between the US and Morocco, which really isn’t going to be very effective. This is fantastic news and I’m extremely excited about this.

Unfortunately, we can’t just take a break, we have to keep working on the main reason why these laws are even brought up for vote in the first place. The USTR is currently negotiating the TPP which is starting to be viewed in a similar fashion as ACTA. I believe that we’re on the right path for stopping these types of legislation and treaties.

Way to go Europe in two major things.

Texas Repulicans

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Yesterday the Texas Republican Party released their platform. It’s terrifying. It starts out innocently enough saying that they plan to uphold the constitution and that everyone is created equally. However, that’s the end of the good stuff. As I tweeted out yesterday there’s a portion that says that they do not support teaching children critical thinking or anything that could lead them to question their current belief system or parental authority.

I can’t think of a better definition of science than critical thinking, questioning current beliefs and authority. When a scientist makes a discovery that doesn’t conform to the current scientific paradigm(program) accepting the results for the experiment REQUIRE these abilities. Looking at the faster than light neutrino fiasco of the past year is a perfect example of this. Scientists saw a result that was highly suspect (faster than light speeds), but they were willing to accept it, if it passed enough tests. They were critical of the results, didn’t accept it on face value, they were willing to question the current paradigm (relativistic physics) and the authority of nearly 100 years of work based on that paradigm.

This is also a case of biting the hand that feeds. Texas’s growth has been fueled through science, technology and research at businesses. With Houston as the center of the oil world, which is driven by better science of getting oil out of the ground, new technologies to do so and the research for increasing the conversion rates from crude oil to gasoline and other goods, you’d think that Texas would understand why it’s important to have scientists. While Texas doesn’t have as many Tier 1 research universities as California (3 vs 9) these three are extremely powerful and wealthy. UT is the 3rd richest in the country and Texas A&M is the 10th. They are both research powerhouses in the academic world. Creating policies that negatively impact the education system that feeds these schools is only going to hurt their abilities to compete in the future.

The Texas Republicans also want to “Teach the Controversy” with equal air time for every side of the argument. In this case when they get to evolution I hope the controversy they discuss is the recent disagreement between Evolutionary Biologists Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, because that’s the biggest one going on in Evolution right now. However, I know this is not what they mean. They plan to teach the “controversy” of creationism in science class. This is as dangerous as not teaching critical thinking.

If you couple the lack of critical thinking with teach the controversy approach, you have a recipe for disaster. You create students that are unable to really understand the differences and take what the teacher believes at face value. If the “biology” teacher is a creationist (which has happened in some states) then they will not adequately teach evolution and the students will not understand why creationism is wrong and evolution is scientifically accurate. They will be unable to critically reason the differences. This is a terrifying prospect.

These are not the only areas that Texas Republicans are showing that they are out of touch with the youth of America. The DailyKOS has further analysis  a lot of the bad policy stances that are coming down the road in Texas from Republicans.

Upholding of Citizen’s United

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Today, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), upheld the controversial Citizen’s United ruling of two years ago. I’ve written about some of this in the past and I’ve talked to many people about the implications of this. However, there are two major tenets in this ruling that matter. One: that you cannot limit the amount of money spent during a campaign because that restrict free speech. Two: that two separate groups can raise funds and use their right to speech without corrupting the political candidate. Additionally, there were some ground rules that were established as to when you are considered breaking this ruling and in violation of the law. One of these is that the two groups cannot coordinate their strategies and that the two groups must remain independent of each other. 

In this most recent ruling, the SCOTUS essentially has stated that there hasn’t been any reason to revisit their previous ruling and that it now also applies to states. This is important as Montana had laws on the books that limited the amount of money that could be donated. This law was put into place to fight corruption in 1912.

This ruling is difficult because on one hand, at what point can you limit the amount of money someone wants to spend of their own money on political speech without restricting freedom of speech? If someone is willing to let you put ads up and pay money for it, isn’t it your right to do so? That part of the ruling is really difficult to argue with. However, The part that isn’t hard to argue with is the lack of independence. This has been pretty well displayed during the Republican primary. Without some of the mega funders campaigns effectively folded. Santorum is a prime example of this where his primary doner pulled out and that ended his campaign. Was this person willing to fund him because their views aligned extremely well or was Santorum changing his views to align more closely with the doner? We’ll never know to be sure, but it’s likely that there was conversations between parts of the campaigns and the doner.

In the US we will likely continue to have huge doners and this will likely continue unabated until we are able to pass a law or constitutional amendment to make this sort of donation illegal. Many liberals argue that the 1st amendment for free speech wasn’t designed to allow the wealthy to say whatever they want. That it was to give an equal voice to everyone. Sadly, media is run by people that wish to make a lot of money. Until we figure out a better way to disseminate political information that is unfiltered, we will likely continue to have the same unbalanced views portrayed.