The Origin of a Novel

I published my first novel—Harald, from Baen Books—a few months ago. It occurred to me that some of you might be interested in how it came to be written.

It started, oddly enough, as an insomnia cure. I found that when I had trouble falling asleep, daydreaming didn't work—because I am the hero of my own daydreams, and so too closely involved with them. It occurred to me that if instead I plotted out a novel, I would have sufficient distance from my characters to be able to drift off.

It worked. Over a period of many months I plotted out parts of several novels and, eventually, all of one. House rules at the time required me, when putting one of our children to bed, to make up and tell three stories. I mentioned to my daughter that I had written a novel in my head and she suggested I tell her that instead.

The problem with telling my daughter stories is that she remembers them better than I do. The result in the past, when I was doing a long series of linked fantasy stories, was that just when I thought I had the characters in an almost impossible situation she would point out that the magic item they obtained three months earlier was precisely the thing to get them out of it. So this time, every evening after putting her to bed, I wrote an outline of what I had told her. As I got near the end I started thinking seriously of turning it into a novel. I wrote the final scene, liked it, and went back and wrote the whole first draft in a month or two. It was so much fun that, during that time, I played almost no computer games.

Illegal vs Unconstitutional: NSA, FISA, and all that

As many of you know, a federal judge has found the NSA warrantless surveillance program to be both illegal—in violation of FISA and various other things—and unconstitutional.

The discussions I have seen so far ignore the important distinction between those two conclusions. The fact that the surveillance violates FISA means that what has so far been done is illegal—and, incidentally, that Bush is a felon, as are lots of people at NSA. But FISA is legislation; Congress can repeal or alter it, and presumably will do so if the appeals court supports the ruling and a majority in both houses believe the current surveillance program is desirable.

Congress cannot so easily repeal or alter the Constitution. So if the surveillance is unconstitutional, that means the surveillance will have to stop.

I should add that, in my view, the illegality of the surveillance has been obvious from the beginning, as I said some time back. FISA was written to control precisely the sort of activity NSA has been engaged in—intercepting communications between suspected terrorists abroad and people in the U.S. It set up procedures for doing so and made it a felony to intercept without following those procedures, or to knowingly use information obtained by such warrantless interceptions.

The only arguments I have seen on the other side are either that Congress repealed FISA without knowing it was doing so when it authorized the use of force or that the President is entitled to break the law in matters of national security. Neither strikes me as plausible. The constitutionality, on the other hand, is a more complicated question, and one that I don't think I have sufficient expertise to answer.

Oddly enough, if Bush believed that what he was doing was unconstitutional that may explain why he did it. FISA provides a two week window after the beginning of a war during which its provisions are suspended—presumably to permit Congress to amend its provisions if necessary. Under the circumstances of the 9/11 attack, it is hard to believe that Congress would have refused to go along with an administration request to make legal the sort of interceptions NSA has been engaged in. But one likely consequence of such an amendment would be a lawsuit claiming that the activity it was authorising was unconstitutional—and if the courts agreed, that would leave Bush unable to engage in surveillance that he, presumably, saw as an important tool for preventing another attack.

I'm back

As you can see, I'm posting again. In part that is because I am back home after a month of travelling, in part because I have solved the problem that was keeping me from posting--although I still don't entirely understand it.

Drug Delivery

Nicotine patches are currently marketed as a cure for smoking. What they actually are, so far as I can tell, is an alternative delivery system for the same drug. Insofar as what smokers really want is the effect of nicotine the patches may well succeed in getting smokers to quit, but they cure an addiction to cigarettes only in the sense that whiskey cures for an addiction to wine.

Considered as a substitute, they have two big advantages over cigarettes. Since they get nicotine to the blood stream without going through the lungs, they should have fewer adverse health effects; there is no obvious reason why the use of nicotine patches would cause lung cancer. And they eliminate both the (somewhat controversial) medical effect of second hand smoke and the unpleasantness that nonsmokers experience from the smell of tobacco. The user of a nicotine patch may perhaps harm his own health, but he should have very little effect on those around him.

This may be an early and interesting example of an alternative approach to the problems associated with both legal and illegal drugs. The conventional solution is to stop people from using drugs. The alternative is to find ways of providing the effects drug users want while minimizing undesirable side effects, on themselves and others.

What an Electric Vehicle Costs

In an earlier post I mentioned the controversy over GM's EV1 sparked by a new film, with some people arguing that the all electric vehicle was a viable design scrapped by GM for vague but sinister reasons. In my view, the best evidence against that comes not from GM's experience—the facts about the EV1's performance are disputed and it's hard for an outsider to distinguish between startup costs and production costs in order to figure out what a commercial version of the car would have cost—but from the behavior of other auto firms. If a commercially viable electric car could have been produced, it is hard to see why some auto firm wouldn't have produced it—and none did.

We now have a little more evidence. Tesla Motors, a Bay Area startup, has announced that they will be bringing a fully electric vehicle to market in about a year. The relevant facts:

1. Range: 250 miles per charge.
2. Recharge time: 3 1/2 hours with a 240 volt/70 ampere source, longer with ordinary house current.
3. Configuration: Sports car.
4. Price: $85,000-$100,000.
5. Operating cost: 2.6 cents/mile if electricity is 13 cents/kwh.

If gas costs $3/gallon, the per mile cost for a vehicle averaging 25 mpg is 12 cents, so the electric vehicle saves less than ten cents per mile. If we assume a 100,000 mile lifetime, that's less than ten thousand dollars, which doesn't make up for much of the cost difference between the electric car and a conventional vehicle.

The range is sufficient for many people's needs, although not all. But a sports car does not have to carry many passengers or much luggage, leaving more space for batteries. That suggests that a sedan would either be much heavier and more expensive or have a substantially shorter range.

So the evidence suggests that the electric car is not yet viable as a mass market vehicle, although it may be competitive in the expensive sports car niche.

Readers interested in the EV1 controversy may want to revisit the thread I linked to earlier, with particular attention to the posts by Phil Karn, who joined the discussion after my original post. Phil—known to some of us as a party in an important encryption lawsuit—actually owned an EV1, and so was able to provide some first hand evidence from his own experience. He also has an interesting web page on the subject.

What Matters and Why?

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, offers an interesting hypothetical; I don't have a copy of the book ready to hand so will give you my version:

Someone invents an experience machine; get into it and you will have a fully convincing illusion of experience. Somehow, the inventor figures out about what your life is going to be like and makes you the following offer:

Get into my experience machine, spend the rest of your life there, and I will give you the illusion of a life slightly better than the one you would otherwise live. Your average income in the illusion will be a few thousand dollars higher than it would have been in reality, your wife a little prettier, your children slightly better behaved, your promotions just a little prompter. Your illusory summers won't be quite as hot, or winters quite as cold.

Assume you believe his offer. Do you accept it? If not, why not?

The answer, it seems to me, depends on what things you value. It's tempting to think that what ultimately matters to you about the world is only how it impinges on you, what effect it has on your sensations—and if that were true, you would accept the offer.

But it is not true, at least for me and I suspect for many other people. I don't merely want the illusion of having written an interesting, enjoyable and original book, I want to have actually done it. I don't just want to think people read my books and are affected by the ideas in them, I want them to actually read and be affected. I don't want just the illusion of wonderful children, I want my wonderful children to actually exist. I wouldn't touch that machine with a ten foot pole.

Having said that, it is worth seeing how far the argument applies to things more realistic than Nozick's hypothetical. Consider recreational drugs. A lot of us have a gut level feeling that the pleasure from being high on a drug is somehow less valid, less real, than the pleasure from accomplishing something—even if it is only winning a game of tennis or climbing a mountain. Feeling that you are a wonderful person because you are drunk is somehow less valid than feeling you are a wonderful person because you have just saved someone's life at risk of your own or solved an important problem.

Or consider virtual reality, which gets us closer to Nozick's experience machine—and to one reason I have been thinking of these issues of late. Why do I feel better about making a bunch of germanic lyres in my basement than about making a bunch of Whitesoul Helms online in World of Warcraft? Why do I feel less comfortable about consuming many hours online fighting computer generated monsters than about consuming a similar amount of time, also online, arguing with people about subjects of interest to me?

The problem is older than World of Warcraft. I know some very smart people who put substantial amounts of time and effort into playing games--chess, bridge, poker. As long as one views it as recreation, there is no problem. But what about a really able person who treats the game as his real life and whatever he does to earn money for food and rent as merely an annoying distraction? Something about that feels wrong—feels as though he would in some sense be leading a better life if he put the same talent and passion into building better houses or writing better computer programs. Why?

The other reason I have been thinking about this is that it looks as though I will be revising my Future Imperfect manuscript for publication, assuming my agents' negotiations with a publisher finally produce a contract. The puzzle of what matters and why shows up repeatedly there. If improved understanding of how the mind works results in a really good recreational drug and most people spend most of their waking hours enjoying it, is that a problem? Would it be better if the drug was never invented? If we end up with full sense VR and people spend most of their lives in a delightful illusion while their bodies occupy tiny cubicles and consume yeast paste—tasting, of course, through the marvels of VR, like sushi and sirloin—is that a consummation devoutly to be feared, or hoped for?

I expect to continue this in another post, and in particular to distinguish between what things in VR ought to count as real and what not and in what ways World of Warcraft might be seen as a useful part of real life, but this post is, I think, long enough.

Why Do We Tip?

A while back, I got into an interesting online discussion of tipping, in particular restaurant tipping, a practice that some people approve of and others don't. I offered what I think of as the standard economic explanation--that it was a way of rewarding waiters for good service (with high tips) and penalizing bad service (with low tips). It depends on social norms or repeat custom to work, but takes advantage of the fact that the customer has information about the quality of the service that the employer does not have.

The problem with that explanation, as a number of people argued, is that it depends on customers substantially varying the amount of their tip—and many, perhaps most, don't. If you almost always tip 15% and occasionally raise it to 20% for good service or lower to 10% for poor, that isn't much of an incentive to the waiter.

It occurred to me that there was another possible explanation, having to do with the customer rather than the waiter. People like to feel generous. Giving a tip when you know you don't have to makes you feel better than paying the same amount on the bill. People like to feel honest and honorable. Abiding by the implied contract to tip if you get reasonable service, when you know you could have stiffed the waiter and saved the money (provided you don't plan to come back to that restaurant), gives you a chance to prove to yourself and your table companions that you are an honest and honorable sort.

Talk Radio Ads

I often listen to political talk shows on my car's satellite radio. When I get fed up with a right wing show I switch to a left wing show, when I get fed up with that I look for another right show, or give up. One thing I notice is the sort of ads that go with the shows. While some are probably for worthwhile products, a lot are get rich quick schemes, instructions on how to get credit by incorporating in Nevada, and the like.

What is interesting is that, so far as I can tell, the same ads run on left wing and right wing shows. That suggests that many of the people who listen to such shows, left and right, have something in common.

Perhaps credulity.

Some Things Never Change

"Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. "

(George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language")

"Lieberman has galvanized the left at a time when it's eager to flex its political muscle by attacking Democrats who don't tow the party line."

(Story in Time.com)

The Orwell essay, incidentally, is a classic, well worth reading if you are not already familiar with it.

Lying with Statistics: A Second Case

"Poll: Clinton gets high 'no' vote for 2008"

That is the headline of a story on today's CNN web page. Someone who actually reads the story, however, will discover that 47% of those polled said they would definitely vote against Hilary Clinton, 47% against Kerry 48% against Gore, and 63% against Jeb Bush. It is true that McCain scored 34% and Giuliani 30%, but that puts Hilary in the middle of the unpopularity ratings and not, as the headline implies, at the top.

She did, however, have one distinction—the highest positive rating. 22% of those polled said they would definitely vote for her. The other candidates had ratings ranging from 19% (Giuliani) down to 9% (Jeb Bush).

I have to confess that my title for this post is also misleading. My previous example offered statistics that appeared, if you did not pay attention, to support its misleading headline. This one does not. Strictly speaking it is not lying with statistics but about statistics.

I should add, for the benefit of anyone to whom it is not obvious, that I am not a supporter of Hilary Clinton.

Merely of the truth.

Lying with Statistics: Today's Example

CNN: "Report: Fatalities soar after helmet law lifted"

Clicking on the link, one discovers that:

"Motorcycle fatalities involving riders without helmets have soared in the nearly six years since Gov. Jeb Bush repealed the state's mandatory helmet law, a newspaper reported Sunday.

A Florida Today analysis of federal motorcycle crash statistics found "unhelmeted" deaths in Florida rose from 22 in 1998 and 1999, the years before the helmet law repeal, to 250 in 2004, the most recent year of available data.

Total motorcycle deaths in the state have increased 67 percent, from 259 in 2000 to 432 in 2004, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics.

Records, though, also show motorcycle registrations have increased 87 percent in Florida since Bush signed the helmet law repeal July 1, 2000.

Deaths went up 67%, registrations went up 87%, so deaths per motorcycle have been going down. "Unhelmeted deaths" went up steeply, which sounds convincing—until you realize that one result of not wearing a helmet is that an accident that would have killed you even with a helmet now counts as an "unhelmeted" instead of a "helmeted" death. I do not know what else changed over the period; it would be interesting so see comparable statistics from states that did not change their laws. But the evidence actually presented in the article, taken by itself, implies precisely the opposite of what the top level headline suggests.

Successful Lies

The term "subliminal" came up in a recent Usenet thread. I had a vague memory that the conventional account, according to which people could be persuaded to buy things by flashing messages at them too fast for conscious perception, was at least debatable.

It turns out, if you believe the account on Snopes, which I gather is a usually reliable source, that the conventional account is not merely debatable, it is false—the result of deliberate fraud by one James Vicary. From Snopes:

" You see, Vicary lied about the results of his experiment. When he was challenged to repeat the test by the president of the Psychological Corporation, Dr. Henry Link, Vicary's duplication of his original experiment produced no significant increase in popcorn or Coca-Cola sales. Eventually Vicary confessed that he had falsified the data from his first experiments, and some critics have since expressed doubts that he actually conducted his infamous Ft. Lee experiment at all."

...

"As numerous studies over the last few decades have demonstrated, subliminal advertising doesn't work; in fact, it never worked, and the whole premise was based on a lie from the very beginning. James Vicary's legacy was to ensure that a great many people will never be convinced otherwise, however."

What struck me as interesting about the account is that Vicary's fraud worked. I don't know what its long term effects were on his career, but the long term effect on our culture was to strengthen the idea that human beings are not all that rational, that what appears to be voluntary choice is often really due to fraud or coercion. Vicary's flashing messages provide a memorable and convincing argument against freedom of choice on the marketplace, and one that I see echoed in many arguments. And the fraud continues to work long after it was exposed.

For another, and perhaps more debatable, example of the same pattern, consider Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. It was a very popular book, widely used in college courses. Part of its implicit message was that the traditional pattern of sexual behavior in our society was a mistake—an unnecessary and damaging repression of natural impulses, as demonstrated by the happy and sexually liberated youth of Samoa. While the changes in sexual behavior during the course of the 20th century surely had multiple causes, it's reasonable to view Mead's book as one of them.

Many years later, Derek Freeman, in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, convincingly argued that Mead's entire account was bogus. Mead did not know the language when she arrived in Samoa, was not particularly skilled in languages, and it is at least debatable whether she ever became fluent. She did not live with the people she was studying but with an American family in the village. By Freeman's account, she was heavily dependent on what she was told by a couple of teenaged informants through a translator; he thinks they were deliberately misleading her in the direction of what she wanted to believe, for their own entertainment. And she made no attempt to check the available crime statistics, which would have shown that her peaceful paradise had high rates of murder and rape.

Freeman's book set off an extensive controversy, with some anthropologists accepting his view, others defending Mead. The most interesting response I saw was by a friend and ex-colleague of Mead, who accepted Freeman's factual claim and argued that what Mead was really doing was not research but the creation of a myth, and that the spreading of that myth in our culture had good, not bad, effects.

After reading some of the controversy I think Freeman is probably correct; I remain uncertain as to whether, if so, Mead was a victim of her informants, as Freeman suggests, or deliberately dishonest. But either way, however false her account of Samoa, the effect on Europe and America, good or bad, remains. Lies can succeed.

Old News: Friedman Contra Rothbard

Many years ago, I got into an exchange on Usenet in which I argued that the part of Murray Rothbard's book on the history of economic thought that dealt with Adam Smith was a hatchet job, using selection and deliberate omission to attack Smith. David Gordon recently posted a long rebuttal and I have just posted a comment responding to the rebuttal. I don't know of any way of linking to my comment on someone else's blog, so am including it below. Interested readers may want to read my summary post from eight years ago, then Gordon's piece, then what follows. The controversy may be of interest to those interested in the history of modern libertarianism, in controversies, or both.

---

(My comment at http://blog.mises.org/mt/comments?entry_id=5182)

I'm not inclined to engage in a detailed rebuttal; interested readers can check the original thread against the account here. I did want to make a few points, however.

1. I wasn't arguing the question of how important Smith was or wasn't in the history of economic thought, however interesting that might have been, or of how pure a libertarian he was. Indeed, I explicitly conceded that Rothbard was correct in pointing out that many of Smith’s ideas appear in earlier works.

I was focusing on a simple question: was Rothbard's account of Smith and his French contemporaries an honest and accurate one or, as I argued, a hatchet job, deliberately distorting by omission and selection.

2. I suggest that readers consider one simple case, where David Gordon and I do not disagree on the facts, merely the interpretation: Smith's views on the wool trade. Rothbard said that Smith advocated taxing wool exports and offered that as evidence of his non-libertarian views. Rothbard did not mention that Smith was proposing the tax as a replacement for the existing situation—an absolute ban, enforced by extensive regulations and ferocious penalties, described in detail by Smith. 

Gordon argues that Smith's position was not all that libertarian, since the proposal can be read as imposing a tax high enough to collect most of the gains from the repeal of the ban. Whether that is true or not, he does not deny that Rothbard accused Smith of wanting to impose taxes on the export of wool without mentioning that he was proposing the tax as an alternative to a much less free existing system--a fact that the average reader would not have known.

Perhaps David Gordon believes that an honest writer could have done that. I do not.

3. Gordon thinks I am mistaken in reading Smith as undecided between public and private support for schooling, despite Smith's plain statement that "The expense of the institutions for education and religious instruction ... might perhaps with equal propriety, and even with some advantage, be defrayed altogether by those who receive the immediate benefit of such education and instruction, or by the voluntary contribution of those who think they have occasion for either the one or the other."

Gordon wants us to read that as making a distinction between the cost of setting up schools and of maintaining them. He may not have noticed that the previous paragraph, on roads, specifically refers to "maintainance." This one does not. There is no basis in the text I have just quoted for separating out the capital cost of establishing a school from the operating cost; both are expenses.

Gordon's response is to quote an earlier passage, where Smith suggests, as one possibility, having the state establish schools, with much of the fee paid by parents. But of course, Smith in his discussion of education considers lots of alternatives. Indeed, Gordon quotes a bit from my lecture notes—where I describe the proposal in question as "Possible public role in the education of the common people." There is nothing in that passage implying that the cost of setting up a school is not part of "the expense of the institutions of ... ." 

4. Vincent Cook writes:

"Moreover, Friedman and Rothbard had clashed in other contexts (especially in arguing the foundations of anarcho-capitalism)."

I'm not sure we ever did clash on that, although it's probably the most important and interesting substantive disagreement between us—assuming that what Vincent means is the disagreement on how the legal code of an anarcho-capitalist society gets produced.

But I think the real conflict was something quite different. Rothbard has a piece, webbed somewhere, in which he criticizes me for not hating the state. In his terms, he was correct. In my view, the fundamental conflict is not between bad men and good men but between mistaken beliefs and correct beliefs.

The flip side of that is that, in my view, Rothbard was consistently more interested in whether an argument was on the right side than whether it was correct. I think I have demonstrated that in the context of his attack on Smith—that he was willing to deliberately mislead his readers about the facts in order to get them to what Rothbard considered the correct conclusion. I can think of other examples.