It was Colonial Williamsburg, and my daughter Emily and I were breaking our cross-country drive with a hot summer’s day walk into 18th-century Virginia.

As the day reddened into sunset, the cooper reshelved tools and stowed his bands and staves.

“The barrel,” he informed me through thin lips, “was and is a perfected invention. Nothing to be done to make it better than it is. Unchanged for a thousand years. This…” he spoke louder as tapped the oaken lid on a chest-high, unfinished barrel, “is my best work. And it, my friend, is nothing better than the barrels I made yesterday or a fortnight ago. And that’s because I signed on as an apprentice and worked 80 hours a week for ten years to learn my trade. I learned how to not think, to be second-nature with my craft, to do the same operation over and over. In the same way. With the same tools. Making the same barrel.”

He sucked on a tooth and leaned closer, seemingly offering a confidence. “Now if my shop were near a winery, I’d be making hogshead barrels, 63 gallons each. If I were near a ale brewery, they’d all be 36 gallons. A armorer, the gunpowder kegs would hold 25 pounds. But I’ve set my life beside this mill. I’ve been here 24 years, lived through three wives and seven children, four of them grown and wed, the others dead and buried. Beside this mill I set my life. This barrel, oak and iron to hold 200 pounds of flour, is what I learned to make.”

He tapped the barrel again. “This one, I say again, is nothing better than the ones I made yesterday or a fortnight ago. But nothing worse, neither. And that’s the knot I’ve untied to know my work. I do what I must do, and I do it well. Those who work on many things cannot truly know their craft, cannot be expert in anything…and those who work on one small part of a whole cannot know the entirety of what they do. They can be replaced. I cannot be.”

Standing his ground in a time before machined parts and assembly lines, the cooper stepped inside his shop and pulled the large wooden doors closed, leaving us outside in the late sun of our own century.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

As a result of advances in computer technology, these eternal questions will soon (long before this century is over, IMO) be explored in ways that go further and deeper than religion, philosophy, and literature have done before.

I am reading Hans Moravec‘s 1999 book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. In a field like computer science, where an 11-year-old book should be completely irrelevant, Moravec’s prescience and predictions are still remarkable. I was struck by two paragraphs that sum up my views on artificial intelligence. Moravec, an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, asks whether a robot driven by what he refers to as “fourth-generation” technology (think very powerful super-computers and highly advanced software) could have “an internal mental life anything like ours. Is it conscious of its existence? Does it have emotions?”

Moravec writes (p. 111):

The key insight is that the “animating principle is not a substance” or a spirit…or a soul. It is “a very particular, very complex organization.”

There should be no despair in this insight. To be animated by complex organization is no less miraculous.

Rejoice in that miracle…and watch for the next one.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

–New York Times, What Created This Monster? by Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, March 23, 2008

What began as a collapse in subprime mortgage-based securities (the result of higher interest rates…leading to programmed, but unplanned-for increases in adjustable-rate mortgage payments…leading to increased loan defaults…leading to plummeting investor confidence…leading to…) has now become a full-fledged credit contraction.

The negatives of this contraction affect both the meek and the mighty.

–Homes are lost. In my county, most mortgage defaulters are first-time buyers who were sold on affordable, zero-percent-down, adjustable, low teaser-rate mortgages. The little guy couldn’t resist.

Bear Stearns common stock

–A mega-wealthy investment bank is reduced to rubble. One month ago, Bear Stearns common stock was nearly $90 per share; it closed on March 20 at just under $6, after falling below $3 three days earlier. The big guys got mega-greedy.

It is clear that the unregulated proliferation of complex investment instruments, so-called derivatives, led to this debacle…and more bad economic news is coming.

Yet still financial conservatives decry any increased regulation of the free markets; they point to laissez faire economic policies that have enabled America to achieve worldwide economic superiority. (A warning: Great Britain—now trotting somewhere in the undistinguished middle of the herd—was, just 100 years ago, the world’s greatest economy, with the majority of important international dealings transacted in pounds sterling.)

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ)

Some see this current economic adjustment as an inevitable and welcome manifestation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” a force that redirects the many and unaccountable individual questings for profit into a more (some even say, the most) efficient market.

Wikipedia utilizes supermarket checkout as an example of this “invisible hand.” I paraphrase: Each customer selfishly chooses to maximize his own interest, that is to check out in the shortest time regardless of the other customers. Because the utility-maximizing choice is to choose the shortest line, eventually the lines will all be the same length. Therefore without oversight or regulation, and by following only selfish impulses, the most efficient check out process is created.

Such creation of efficiency assumes choice (many lines) and full access to information (clear view of line lengths). Some industries, however, achieved massive profits without embodying either of these characteristics. Big Tobacco, for example, offered no choice (“You’re addicted…”) and bad information (“…but we deny it.”)

Structural inequities demand oversight and regulation. Consider the social problem described by the late ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin uses the example of a pasture shared by local herders. Since each naturally wishes to maximize profit, each will increase herd size whenever possible. Additional animals create a positive effect (increased benefit to the one who adds) and a negative effect (greater degradation of the pasture…shared by all). Since an individual herder gains far more than he loses by adding another animal, all will rationally and continually strive for larger herds, eventually overgrazing the pasture…and the decreasing the combined total utility. As Hardin states, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

This is not a new concept.

Thucydides wrote: “[T]hey devote a very small fraction of time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays.” –History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, Sec. 141; translated by Richard Crawley.

Aristotle expressed a similar thought: “[T]hat which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it….everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.” –Politics, Book II, Chapter III, 1261b; translated by Benjamin Jowett.

Although conservatives and libertarians may profess otherwise, our financial markets are “commons” that reward most those who would limit choice and full access to information. In the current mess: a) super-large financial institutions control or manage large segments of the mortgage markets; b) mortgage-based and other derivatives are complex to the point of opacity; and c) documents that underly the mortgages (credit reports, income verification, etc.) are often missing or non-existent.

This is not just a Wall Street situation. Similar “commons” problems (climate change, pollution, population, water resource allocation, etc.) demand increased social and economic regulation. One can justifiably kvetch about the predictable inefficiencies of Big Government’s klutzy handling of almost anything it touches, but in our exponentially more complicated technical world, Big Business’s brutal “invisible hand” surely engenders something more dangerous: unpredictably abrupt and structurally unequal misery.

Accordingly, when the tilts of selfishness finally beg for the “invisible hand” to steady the market, the result may be a soft slap, a hard push, or, like the current “credit crunch,” a jaw-jarring knuckle sandwich.

*     *     *     *     *

A half-day after writing the above, I checked to see if my post had been picked up by the search engines and found another blogger who linked Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” to the subprime mess almost a month ago. He also included the Thucydides quote. His analysis of why the mortgage industry disintegrated vertically is spot on. I agree that the dominant strategy was selfish rather than cooperative, but that, in my opinion, is not the “lesson.” Selfishness is inherent in capitalism; it is a driver. I believe the “knuckle sandwich” we are experiencing is the lesson. But will we heed it?

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Aristotle

I have, in my dotage, become a Peripatetic (derived from Greek… literally “ones walking around”). The Peripatetic School was founded by Aristotle in 335 BC, so I am far from a charter member, but as with philosophy, striding about—especially to high places—affords one a wider view of the world.

Yesterday, as a pre-Valentines Day gift, my wife Ann asked me to accompany her and four other members of the local AAUW (American Association of University Women) chapter on a hike to the top of Mount St. Helena, at 4,343 feet, the highest point in Napa County.

Ann & friends atop Mount St. Helena

We began the ascent at 10 a.m. The air was clear and pleasant. Ever gallant, and remembering a Boy Scout always lets the slower hikers go first, I trailed the five women, all older than I, as we worked our way up the switchbacks. Soon, noticing that the oldest, a 4’11″, 75-year-old Ohio State Buckeye, was bounding upward from rock to rock with abandon that indicated knees far more forgiving than my own, I gave up gallantry, and adopted the pirate’s creed (“Every Man for Himself!”)…which, since I was the only man, granted me carte blanche. Spotting a steeply vertical shortcut, I scrambled, slipped, and scratched my way up the hillside from switchback #11 to switchback #12 and was relaxing on a rock (hiding my heavy breathing) as the hapless women came around the bend. They were unimpressed. One even muttered, “Cheater.”

Halfway up the mountain, we turned a corner and went from calm air to a strong, cold, noisy wind—a dramatic demonstration of leeward versus windward. The layers we had shed on the way up went back on.

Upward, dauntless peripatetics! Excelsior!

1912 remounting of the 1841 plaque

Hiking 5.1 miles while climbing just over 2,000 feet computes to a 7.4% incline. As we ate lunch, I wondered silently (the women were chatting amiably about birds, trees, and grandchildren) if Aristotle, in his many peregrinations up and down Grecian knolls ever calculated the inverse relationship between age and incline aptitude.

With both the air and our noses running clear, we saw far in the distance:

–to the west, range after range of low hills, with the Pacific shrouded somewhere beyond them,
–to the south, the skyline of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge, Marin County’s Mt. Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo near Walnut Creek,
–to the east, Lake Berryessa and by their snow tops, a hint of the Sierras, and
–to the north, what might have been a thin dream of Mt. Lassen.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition.

…more on Stevenson’s charming travelogue in my next post.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.