Scott Adams's Blog, page 353

Capitulation Stimulation

In normal times, one class of investment goes down in value while another goes up. But recently, even gold started moving in the direction of the stock market, namely down. Evidently we're not in normal times.

Real estate is starting to look as if it will be a bad investment for a generation. Municipal bonds appear riskier than ever. It's scary to hold cash if your bank has been misbehaving and you have more money in your account than the government insures. How about investing overseas? No thank you. Meanwhile, serious people are predicting that the government will allow inflation to increase as a way of eroding the value of the national debt.

So what does a rational, employed person with some extra money do? I think consumer spending is on the verge of spiking as high-income people decide they'd rather buy some nice things than lose money in sketchy investments. In other words, the horribleness of the economy is the very thing that will make it self-correcting. I could summarize the idea as "Screw the stock market. I might as well buy something."

There's a "capitulation stimulation" coming soon. In this context, capitulation means investors give up on investing, or at least love it less, and decide to spend more money on new cars, furniture, phones, and that sort of thing. If you buy a new TV, you have something you can enjoy. If you invest, all you end up with is less money. When being an investor starts to look irrational, overspending becomes the new rational.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Savvy investors can make money in any sort of market. But those folks are the exception. Your average doctor and small business owner aren't that clever. Their money is piling up in bank accounts with no place to go. I think the dam is about to burst. Spending on high end items is about to explode.

With 9% unemployment and a general slowdown of the economy, half of the country has no extra money to save or invest. But the folks at the top have plenty. And they have no idea what to do with it.

The well-off won't totally stop investing. What I'm predicting is more of a general wallet loosening along the lines of buying new cars sooner and booking slightly more expensive vacations. With any luck, that will be enough of a stimulation to goose the economy and set us on the path to recovery.

I woke up feeling optimistic today.

Constitutional Convention

With Congress' approval rating at 12%, there's no longer any argument that the U.S. government is broken. Lefties and Tea Partiers alike are starting to support the idea of calling a Constitutional Convention. This will be a good test of the Founding Fathers' ultimate emergency safeguard. Voters understand that elections won't help in our current situation because the spirit of compromise has been driven out of the system. It's time for Plan B.

I support the idea of a Constitutional Convention. But I think it probably won't work because the lack of compromise that got us to this point will be carried to the convention. I don't see a Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson in the wings to help us sort things out. And a constitutional change would take years. Clearly it is time for me to step in and set things right.

As self-appointed Leader of the Transitional Government, I order my fellow revolutionaries to create a website that can give direction to our gridlocked elected officials. I have blogged about this before, but now it's time to either build this site or tell me who has already done it.

The main requirement for the website is that it can compare arguments from all sides of every political issue in a side-by-side format with links to supporting data. The user should clearly see the counterargument for every point on display.

Ideally, the system would be designed such that the "best" arguments float to the top, not only for the big picture but for each point and counterpoint within the argument. Over time, the arguments for both sides would evolve to their strongest forms.

The next layer would be some sort of rolling judicial opinion on the quality of each argument, updated periodically. It would be hard to find unbiased judges for political issues, but I think you could find people who are ethical enough to be objective about the arguments themselves. Remember that the judges would not be issuing a final or binding verdict. They would be evaluating the quality of each argument in light of the evidence. I think you could find judges willing to vote against arguments they want to agree with until the arguments themselves are improved and better supported by the evidence.

The quality of an argument can change over time as better data or even better thinking becomes available. The judges would update their opinions as needed. The judges' opinions wouldn't be binding on anyone. It would just be a way for one side to know where their argument needs improvement.

The website would also have a layer where users can see continuously updated poll results that show what the experts think, what voters think, and what elected officials think. Whenever those three groups get out of sync, it would become headline news. Over time, you'd hope the experts and the voters would get in sync, especially with the help of the judges. And once the experts and the voters are mostly on the same side, the politicians would find it embarrassing to disagree. Embarrassment is the main tool of my Transitional Government. When the elected government can learn to govern without embarrassing itself, I will dissolve the Transitional Government. We're a long way from that point.

I know my readers, and you'll send me lots of links to sites that are poor versions of what I just described. But if one of them is better than the rest, and capable of further improvement, I'll blog about it so you can keep an eye on it. However, I doubt there's any site out there with an ever changing "best" argument and an independent judiciary review. At most, there might be some fact-checking organizations.

The key to making such a site work is as much in the interface design as in the concept itself. If you don't nail the interface, no one will use it. It might take a few versions to get that right. I'm not a micro-managing Transitional Leader, so I leave it to my fellow revolutionaries to work out the details of the site. Now get to work.

Driving the Wealthy into the Sea

The Wall Street Journal asked me to expand on an idea I blogged about.

Uh-Oh

About eight years ago I wrote a book called The Religion War . The main premise of the book is that terrorists would someday use cheap, home-made drones, packed with explosives and navigated by GPS, to reach almost any target above ground. The FBI recently thwarted a plot of that sort.

As predictions go, that was an easy one. With so many terrorists in the world, the odds are good that at least one of them is a model plane enthusiast. The technology to make your own tiny drone is fairly accessible and the idea itself would be somewhat obvious to any nerd terrorist. And terrorists are copycats, so any scheme that works well once will become the go-to plot of choice.

The rest of the The Religion War deals with what happens in a world in which terrorists can blow up pretty much anything so long as it is above ground. We're about five years away from that.

The plot of the book went a different direction than I will now. My question today is what happens when our leaders have a good reason to never appear in public? And suppose that era coincides with a time in which CGI technology can create animated images that are indistinguishable from real people? Answer: That's when ugly people will once again be able run for public office. You'll only see their improved CGI faces on TV and the Internet. That means we will elect more Abe Lincolns (competent but ugly) and fewer photogenic nut jobs. Engineers will finally be able to run for office!

In China, many of their leaders are unattractive engineers, and that approach to governing seems to be working for them. I think we can get to that wonderful place, but not until the terrorists drive our naturally attractive politicians underground for good. Ironically, terrorists and their tiny drones are the only things that can save this country.

You might argue that our media watchdogs will expose any ugly candidates by showing their high school yearbook photos. But I think the underlying reality will matter less to voters than you think. You don't hold it against Michelle Bachmann that she uses makeup and styles her hair. I think voters will say to themselves, Yeah, I know the candidate is ugly in his secret underground bunker, but I like the CGI face better, so it's all good.

 

 



 

 

Job Creation

I heard a pundit say the unemployment rate in the United States for so-called educated people is about 4% while the rate for the entire country is above 9%. Education matters. That's my first data point for this post.

I've been in several conversations lately in which people talked about how hard it is to get a service person to show up, or even return phone calls. Some small businesses have more work than they can handle. That's my second data point.

I know two unemployed people who are in career-specific training programs that virtually guarantee they will get jobs when they graduate because their specific skills will be in demand. That's my third data point.

I knew several small business owners who can't expand because it's hard to find employees that are both trainable and dependable. That's my fourth data point.

The same pundit I mentioned in the first paragraph (I can't remember who it was) said we have an "education problem" not a "jobs problem." That sounds almost right. I would tweak that idea to say we have a "training cost problem," not a "jobs problem." It seems to me that almost anyone who doesn't have a job, and wants one, would be willing to take career training if it were free and local and likely to pay off.

But if all training were magically free and universally available, it wouldn't help the overall economy. If you double the number of hairdressers or plumber overnight, while the demand remains constant, the people who already have those jobs will see their incomes halved. So the trick is to match the training to the types of jobs that have growing demand.

My stimulus idea for you to eviscerate in the comment section is to offer full government scholarships to train the unemployed for any profession that has growing demand. And if it is necessary to relocate people to where the training is, the country conveniently has plenty of bank-foreclosed properties that can be rented as dorms.

I think we all share a common skepticism for large, wasteful government programs. So let's imagine that this program is designed to be self-funding. Suppose graduates of the program are taxed a bit extra for several years after they take jobs in the areas for which they trained. If you combine that extra tax revenue with the government savings and increased income from reducing unemployment, I'm betting the government could come out ahead.

I think we all prefer free market solutions over government programs. But realistically, small businesses aren't going to create training programs for the few employees that each one needs, and small businesses are the economic engine of most communities. And if you want to become self-employed, no one in the private sector has any incentive to train you. Nor can we expect private enterprise to build for-profit vocational training for people who have no money to pay for the service. Only the government has the ability to train the unemployed and recoup the cost after the fact.

As with most of my ideas, this one totally blows. The most obvious problem is that large government programs have a poor track record. But if you're looking for someone to help you find a lost nut, and the only volunteer is a blind squirrel, that's still your best option.

One of the more popular ideas for stimulating the economy and reducing unemployment involves funding large infrastructure projects. But I worry that there aren't enough people with the right training to step into those positions in the near term to call the idea a true stimulus. It won't help the economy if we create jobs for which the unemployed are not qualified.

You'd be correct to hate my idea of government scholarships for career training. But I'll defend my view that we can best solve unemployment by seeing it as a training cost issue and an information issue, i.e. knowing which skills are in demand.

The Ultimate Peer Pressure

When professional cyclists were told they were racing against their own best times, they tended to match those times, even when the times were faster than they had ever raced. I wonder how useful that sort of influence would be if we applied it to other areas.

In a few years it will be feasible to create a CGI version of yourself - an avatar - that lives a better lifestyle in the digital world than you do in the real world. The avatar would have a healthier diet, exercises more, be less shy in social settings, more assertive at work, and perhaps have a more perfect golf game. If you spent a few minutes every day observing your avatar doing what you wished you could do, would the peer pressure motivate you to higher achievement? I think it might. In a way, this would be the high tech version of writing down your goals every day and visualizing success. The avatar would simply make the visualization easier.

Perhaps calling this effect peer pressure is not doing it justice. It might be more of a case of unlocking your potential in the same way that the first runner to break the four-minute mile unlocked the potential of those who followed. For any given task, we all seem to have a mental switch that is stuck in the "yes you can" or "no you can't" position. Sometimes you need to use mental tricks to flip the switch from no to yes. I wonder if your avatar could help.

I've written before on the topic of how often successful people seem to have had meaningful interactions with other successful people prior to making it big themselves. That could be a case of coincidence or selective reporting, but I suspect causation. When you get to know a famous person, your mind says, "If that idiot can succeed, how hard can it be?" That flips the switch in your mind to "yes I can."

I also wonder if programming your avatar to smile or laugh would immediately put you in a good mood. I think it would. I think your avatar could also improve your table manners, help your posture, and move you in the right direction a hundred different ways.

At some point in the future of humanity our avatars will be so well-programmed with our preferences and memories that they will live on after our deaths and have no idea they are not the real us. And since that future will last forever for the avatar, perhaps in a continuous loop, while your mortal life is limited in years, the statistical reality suggests it already happened and you are an avatar of someone who went before. (Yes, you knew I was going there.)

Going Back to the Sea

The most important technology for the next hundred years will be high speed Internet for ocean vessels. Once that technology becomes widely available, you'll see people abandoning their failed land-based countries and forming independent nations on the sea. Here are some floating island concepts to fuel your imaginations.

The rich will be the first to move to the sea to escape confiscatory levels of taxation in their countries of origin. The tax savings alone could be enough to pay for floating island homes for the wealthy.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for taking to the sea is climate change. It might someday become necessary to live on moveable ocean structures just to avoid hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

I can imagine security being better at sea too. You'd have pirate problems, but that might seem manageable compared to the risk of nuclear war, traditional war, terror attacks, violent crime, and civil wars. Traditional armies and even terrorists rarely attack anyone without one of these reasons that wouldn't apply to floating islands:
Hey, you're on my land!Hey, you're defiling my holy land!I want your oil!You're harboring terrorists!In the first phase of human migration back to the sea, floating islands will be comprised of vacation condos and second homes. Over time, the island homes will be built larger until some are mansion estates. At that point, the islands will become primary residences for the wealthy, and they will abandon their bankrupt countries of origin, leaving the debt problems to the unfortunates who remain.

Each floating island could become its own nation with its own laws. Some floating islands might be corporate headquarters. Some might be formed around lifestyle preferences, such as Vegan Island, Gay Island, Gay Vegan Island, and that sort of thing. And you'll have all sorts of island alliances to promote health, security, and economics.

This reminds me a bit of the migration from mainframe computing to personal computing and now to cloud computing. Land-based nations will be abandoned (to a degree) for independent micro nations at first. But over time, the floating islands will form virtual "cloud" nations, independent of location.

Does anyone think the rich won't someday migrate to floating islands?

The Best Way to Kill Creativity

I wonder if the best way to kill creativity is to encourage it. This notion will take some explaining.

Creative people literally can't stop themselves from creating. It's a form of OCD. If you plug one hole, the creativity finds a way out of another. There's no way to stop creativity unless you kill the people who have it. Creators will change jobs, defy the government, move to other countries, and do whatever they need to let the creativity out. That's my first point: Creativity is like a hurricane. You can't stop it from forming and you probably can't change its path.

My second point is that there's no such thing as "stimulating creativity." The people who have the creative gene (figuratively speaking) can't stop themselves from creating, and those who don't have it can't get it.

What about R&D labs? They don't generate creativity per se, but they do allow ideas to be researched, tested, and developed. They allow happy accidents to happen, and they provide a way to fund all of that activity. But there's a reason they aren't called Creativity Labs: Scientists don't know how to make more creativity - at least not the good kind that makes the world a better place.

I've noticed that creativity so often springs from hardship or pain that I wonder if it's a precondition. That would make sense from an evolution perspective. Humans don't need to come up with new ideas when everything is running smoothly. We need creativity when we're threatened and all of the usual defenses are deemed inadequate. In other words, the best way to generate creativity is to induce hardship on humans, which would be unethical. Conversely, the best way to reduce creativity is to - wait for it - make things nice and comfortable for creative people. In other words, any ethical attempt to encourage creativity will have the unintended effect of killing it. Happy creators are not productive.

The media has often noted the correlation between genius and insanity. My hypothesis is that insanity, or insecurity of any sort, puts an individual in a continuous state of feeling threatened. For those folks, the creativity gene - if they are lucky enough to have it - is locked in the ON position as they reflexively search for an escape from discomfort.

I was thinking about this because of the latest MacArthur Foundation "genius grants" that have no strings attached. The foundation gives so-called geniuses in various fields $500,000 to do whatever they want, with the notion that some of them will go on to do great things they couldn't otherwise do. And perhaps it works. I haven't seen any statistics about the success rate of the grants, if such a thing can even be measured. But I wonder if the money has the unexpected effect of reducing creativity in this same bunch of geniuses because it makes their lives easier. That's not a criticism of the grants because they aren't designed to generate creativity.

Devil's Advocates will point out that I've previously said my best ideas come during a relaxing shower. Surely that disproves my idea that hardship is necessary to produce creativity. But I'll bet the relaxing shower only helps creative people who feel threatened or uncomfortable in their lives outside the shower stall. And I'm just neurotic enough to feel threatened most of the time. I started worrying about retirement when I was about six years old. I can't leave the house without worrying if there will be an adequate restroom wherever I'm heading. And I'm fairly certain the world will plunge into darkness any minute now. On the plus side, all of that makes it easier to create comics.  

Transitional Government

When rebels overthrow a dictator, they usually have a transitional government ready to take over. But what happens in the rare situation - such as the United States is experiencing now - in which there are no rebel forces but the government simply stops functioning on its own? Don't we need a transitional government as an emergency backup plan?

In normal times, elections are all you need to get things back on track when leaders become useless or corrupt. And perhaps that will work this time too. But it seems more likely that a new bunch of Republicans and Democrats would get us the same deadlock and death spiral we see now. Maybe we should start thinking about forming a transitional government just to be on the safe side. I hereby nominate myself as leader of the emergency transitional government.

What? You doubt my qualifications? Allow me to make my case.

The job of President of the United States requires a specific set of qualities: character, principles, charisma, leadership skills, and a brilliant mind. I don't have any of that. But being the leader of a transitional government is a very different job from president. In fact, I would argue that the best transitional leader is one that you can't imagine as your leader for the long term. That's the country's best defense against the transitional leader turning into a dictator. You want someone who has no following, no allegiance to any political party or religion, and no likelihood of becoming popular. You want the transitional leader to be lazy enough that he wouldn't want a permanent job with long hours, and cowardly enough that he worries about assassination. That is so me.

Here's how I would run things in my transitional government: I'd organize policy decisions around a Judge Judy model in which advocates for each position get to argue their points in front of me on national television. I'd ask probing questions and bang my gavel whenever someone got into "spin" mode. Then I'd do some polling after the show to see what the country thought of the debate. One week later I'd do a second show on the same topic in which I'd ask follow-up questions on behalf of the public and the media before rendering my verdict. No decisions would be made behind closed doors. It would be like a reality show but with actual reality.

Consider the topic of climate change. Democrats and other pro-science types haven't been entirely successful saying that 98% of scientists agree we should do something about climate change. We don't live in an age where the public accepts "Trust us. We're experts." People need to see arguments unfold in front of them. The pro-science crowd is dismissive of the climate change doubters, but I don't think dismissiveness is appropriate until the case has been argued in a public forum. Skepticism is a reasonable default position for the under-informed. And it's not reasonable to expect the public to read and understand science papers.

The same dynamic holds true for every topic that is paralyzing the government. Would higher taxes kill growth? Let's see the experts debate the question in a one-hour format. You've probably never seen a serious debate on the topic of taxes. All the public gets to see are pundits and politicians exchanging sound bites.

Just to be clear, the transitional government doesn't need to reside in the White House, and none of our elected officials need to leave their jobs while the transitional government does its thing. Elected politicians simply need to take their direction from the transitional government and implement its policies until the permanent government demonstrates the capacity to do its job, perhaps by using a Judge Judy model of its own. At that point, the transitional government can dissolve.

Okay, okay, I know: Americans aren't comfortable with the idea of having the guy who blogs about his ass-sniffing dog become their leader. But until someone else steps forward, it's just a choice between me and the slow motion death spiral that is the current U.S. government. Perhaps you are optimistic that the government will right itself without any special help. But there's a fine line between optimism and insanity.

Those Were the Days

Every time I see a news story about early humans mating with Neanderthals or other near-monkey species, I wonder if there were any species that our ancestors didn't try to have sex with. And how did the conversation go just prior to the first pre-human deciding to get some Neanderthal action?

Pre-human 1: "Hey, that creature by the watering hole has two legs. I'd totally do it."

Pre-human 2: "It's all yours. I've got my eye on a tiny horse with a limp."

I'm no Darwin, but I have a few observations of my own. My first observation is that the only species that have survived to modern times are the ones able to fend off unwanted advances from horny pre-humans. Take the giraffe, for example. Its long legs keep its naughty bits well above the pelvic thrusting level of our ancestors. Then you have your cheetahs that can outrun us, your fish that can hide underwater, your birds that can fly away, your zebras that can kick, and so on. But the poor Neanderthals and other slow-moving bipeds all got banged out of existence by our horny ancestors.

I have a hypothesis that several million years ago just about anything could mate and have offspring with anything else. For example, the modern beaver is probably the offspring of an early human and a bear that was slow to snap out of hibernation. That's just a guess. But the next time you see a beaver standing on his back legs eating a fish, try to imagine him as a buck-toothed tourist at a sushi place. It's easier than it should be.

Contrast the open-minded attitude of our ancestors to our picky modern selves. Now humans won't even date someone who cheers for the wrong sports team or goes to the wrong church. And we don't want our mates to be sporting any hair below the chin. Dating outside your species is totally frowned upon. I think maybe we've lost something. On the plus side, your dog appreciates your willingness to have a platonic relationship. But he still gets nervous when you give him a bath. There's a lot of bad history there.