Rational Action

I read a pretty awful column in the Columbia Spectator the other day, so I decided to write a response. Lo’ and behold, they printed it without any cuts!

To the Editor:

While I am open to arguments against Jeffrey Sachs’ plans to save the world, I would not trust Chris Kulawik to make them. In his latest column (“The Cult of Sachs,� Oct. 19), Mr. Kulawik claims that the Great Society failed to help the poor, and so anything resembling it would fail in foreign countries, too. If he had reached these conclusions through responsible analysis, then perhaps he would have a point.

The statistics that Mr. Kulawik cites against the Great Society have little to do with the program he criticizes. He claims that “the poverty level, 10.1 percent in 1970, would fall a meager .1 percent to 10 percent in 1998.� Why does he choose this time period? The Great Society was a program proposed and implemented by President Lyndon Johnson. We ought to at least begin our analysis in 1964 and end it in 1969, lest we confuse the effects of the Great Society with those of dismantling it.

The official U.S. census poverty statistics—Mr. Kulawik cites the numbers for American families, not for all Americans—show that the poverty rate fell more than seven percentage points between 1963 and 1969. By that time, about 12 percent of Americans were living at or below the poverty level. More than thirty years later, roughly the same fraction of our citizens subsists at this level of real income.

Mr. Kulawik owes his readers an explanation as to how the Great Society prevented the poor from sharing in America’s economic growth in the 1960s, and he ought to explain to his editors why he backed up his claims with the wrong statistics. Perhaps once he has acknowledged these failures of logic we will listen to his suggestions on alleviating world poverty.

Adam Sacarny CC ’07

From here.

The following is a short and unexpected rant about copyrights. Enjoy.

During a work’s copyright term, the author may control the publishing of his work. Once the term expires, the work falls into the public domain, and the author loses the right to control distribution. Copyright gives the author a monopoly on the production of the work, which allows him to earn rents on it.

If there were no copyright, others would simply copy the work and distribute it at a much lower cost, eliminating the author’s profits and thus making it impossible for him to earn a living by writing/composing/etc. During the copyright term, society pays a higher price for the work, so distribution of it is limited. But if there were no copyright, the work would never have come into existence, because the author wouldn’t have had the financial incentive to make it in the first place.

At some point the copyright term ends. Multiple publishers may now produce the work, and they compete for the market by lowering prices. Society now wins by being able to obtain the work at a lower price (average cost, even). But we’ve got a dilemma — on the one hand, a longer copyright term will create more rents for authors, and induce them to create more works. On the other hand, a shorter copyright term will put a greater share of recent works into the public domain, giving more people access to them. The tradeoff is between amount of works and the availability of them.

A caveat with this simple tradeoff: works of art tend to inspire other works of art. Having an overly long copyright term won’t necessarily cause authors to make more works — by limiting the availability of art, it could stifle creativity and result in fewer works being created.

As a society, then, where do we draw the line? What kind of copyright term length is just right? We want to maximize the amount of art created while ensuring that eventually this art gets widely distributed. Would the right term length be 20 years after the work is created? 40 years? The life of the author?

Surely it wouldn’t be longer than the life of the author. After all, would you really be a more prolific writer if I told you that you could earn profits from your works in the years beyond your death? Yes, these profits would go to whomever you assigned them — probably your family. But would that really alter your artistic calculus?

No, I say, it wouldn’t. If we extended the copyright term beyond your death, you would create the same amount of art, and yes, your family might end up richer. However, during these additional years of copyright protection, society would lose out. Fewer people would have access to your work, which would make society poorer in and of itself. Furthermore, fewer people would be inspired by your work to create new pieces of art. Society would be made poorer again.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the current copyright term in the United States is the life of the author, plus 70 years. This situation is absurd. Copyright term lengths which extend beyond the lifespan of the author provide society with few benefits (by not increasing the amount of art) and heavy costs (stifled availability of art, fewer new works.)

The creation of the Internet makes these costs even more acute. Copying works of the public domain costs almost nil when it is done electronically, making distribution incredibly easy. Public domain works are for more available than ever before.

Yet the copyright term in the United States keeps getting longer. For decades now, Congress has voted to ensure that no new copywritten works fall into the public domain. In 1976, they voted to make copyright last the life of the author plus 50 years, and in 1998 they extended it to the life of the author plus 70 years.

I could accept that we might feel bad for the spouse of a deceased artist, and say that we will extend copyright for a short period beyond death. Life plus 50 years seems a bit much for me, but in order to comply with the Berne Convention, we must make it that long (although we did not sign the Berne Convention for more than a decade after the 1976 extension.) However, there is absolutely no reason to make it life plus 70. No reason, except that media companies contribute heavily to our Congressmen and Congresswomen, and it is media companies which earn profits from ancient creative works.

Blame Mickey Mouse, copyright 1928.

Astute readers will remember a certain angry post I made a few months back. Basically, I had written an Op-Ed piece and gotten it published in the Columbia Spectator. The piece crticized the controversial film Columbia Unbecoming. The next day the newspaper had run a correction, claiming that because I had posted a similar version of the piece on my blog, the material had been “previously published” — an act that strictly violated Spectator guidelines.

Since I had first shown the article to the Spectator editors by giving them a link to the blog, I figured that they had simply forgotten to tell me of the policy. After they ran the piece, I received an e-mail explaining the Spectator reprinting policy — but not a notification that a correction would run the following day. I supposed that the editor who originally saw the draft had simply told some pedantic higher-up who didn’t want this mistake to happen again. I then shrugged my shoulders and moved on to the next message in my Inbox.

The next day Spectator ran the correction, and when I saw it, I was pissed. I immediately wrote a pretty scathing e-mail. However, after weighing the costs and benefits of fighting with the very people I needed to get my opinions in print, I closed the e-mail without sending it. So began the healing process. That was that… until now.

It seems that there is a student a Columbia who has a clear agenda with respect to MEALAC, but, having been kicked off the Spectator, lacks a public means of articulating his opinions. He runs a blog where he complains about bias in MEALAC and the Spectator, but unlike most campus media critics, he has valiantly decided to correct that bias by any means possible. To refute my piece, he turned to academia’s greatest embarassment: plagiarism.

This fellow, who goes by the name of Ariel Beery, sent a letter to the Spectator with these choice words:

What I do think you should be worried about, however, is plagiarism. The article you ran by Adam Sacarny was, in large parts, previously printed, which can also be found here (and added in the extended entry below in case he erases it). It doesn’t matter that the author of the two was the same person — just like you have to cite your previous work when you write a paper, a newspaper has to fully disclose when an article was previously printed, in whole or in part. What you published, then, can be considered by Columbia’s code of ethics “plagiarism.”

I had considered many kinds of challenges to my article and had considered logical responses for all of them, but I never thought that someone would try to discredit my argument without responding to its points at all! Thankfully, Spectator kept my article on their website, and they didn’t bother to sully it with the correction. I’m glad they don’t seem to have fully accepted Beery’s attack, because there’s an important question that I wish Beery and the Spectator editors had considered: does making a blog post equal publication?

You might be surprised to know that I think Beery’s on to something. If people beyond my inner circle of friends actively read the blog, if I had posted the article as a final copy and not as a first draft, and if I had attempted to conceal its presence on the blog from the Spectator’s editors, then yes, it would be reasonable to call my actions plagiarism. However, I posted the article on the blog so that my friends could review it: placing it on an easily accessible and reloadable site allowed me to show them my changes without sending e-mails back and forth. I stopped updating the online copy once the editors explained that they wanted to see the changes in word format — further evidence that it was only posted for review. Finally, when I first showed the article to the editor, I did so by giving him the address of my blog. He entered the address into the web browser and read the draft to an editor-in-training, criticizing it without warning me that what I was doing amounted to plagiarism.

Blogs are a new medium, and they can certainly be publications. At the same time, making a blog post is usually not tantamount to getting your piece in a newspaper, magazine, or nearly any other print media. For me, the article was on my blog not for publication, but for peer review. Beery should have contacted me and clarified the issue before sending his letter. Since he blogs too, the communication could have resulted in an interesting online debate about MEALAC — one which would have informed many people about the controversy. So why did Beery pass up this opportunity? I can only speculate, but it seems that he would prefer to silence unsavory views, rather than contribute to an open dialogue about them. Strangely enough, balanced discussions were just what Columbia Unbecoming supposedly sought to encourage. Since Beery doesn’t seem to have learned from the film, maybe we should consider his actions as more proof of its failure to convince.

Update #23213, wherein an animated gif is presented, and blinking text used:

AGHGHARHGHGGHHGHGG!

I just watched Laguna Beach, one of those shows that’s supposed to be a guilty pleasure. By all means I should have enjoyed the program — facilitating the experience were Sapporo Ichiban Beef Flavored Ramen and C++: The Core Language. (For the unaware, television, ramen, and computer programming are a geek’s holy trinity)

Yet if it weren’t for the ramen and the C++, dare I say that watching 15 minutes of Laguna Beach would have brought me negative utility! Even after removing the embarassment factor of revealing to all passersby that I felt the urge to watch this teenage-girl-targeted faux-reality TV show, I still would have enjoyed another blubbering MAD TV rerun over this programming. Damn! What went wrong?

The trouble with Laguna Beach is that, as far as I can tell, nothing actually happens during the show. I may not have been paying close enough attention, but I don’t recall whether any characters made any appearances. From time to time, I could hear the sound of concurrent female whines emanating from the television speaker — shall we refer to these sounds as dialogue? Okay, I’ll cede that point. Occasionally I heard some dialogue.

Analysis of this “dialogue” led me to several conclusions:

• The directors told the actresses to ad lib their conversation
• The actresses are not very smart

Laguna Beach is no guilty pleasure. It doesn’t give you that good pain feeling. It doesn’t even give you that bad pain feeling, since at least bad pain captures your attention. This show is just boring.

I suspect that every Jew who lived through the Holocaust acutely fears that a new movement will arise to finish off what Hitler started. And with just cause: these people lived through a nearly successful attempt to exterminate their entire religion. As far as I’m concerned, their experience makes that fear, however extreme it might get, completely understandable.

It’s simply a fact that many of the aforementioned people have a lot of money, and so they wield plenty of influence at universities, which often depend on their donations. They’re also rightfully afraid of anti-semitism. Add together their wealth and their fear, and you’ve got a dangerous combination. Just hearing about a few scary minutes of film could dramatically change how they spend their money.

That’s where Columbia Unbecoming, a new “documentary” by The David Project, comes in. The film introduces itself as a plea for academic integrity within the Columbia MEALAC (Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures) Department. After 25 minutes of interviews touting Columbia’s vibrant anti-Semitic professors, students, and clubs, the film concludes with a message that the problem of academic integrity goes beyond the classroom: academic imbalances go hand in hand with racism, sexism, and homophobia. If it had a coherent structure, believable interviews, and cold, hard evidence, then maybe Columbia Unbecoming would achieve its ostensible grand objective of solving the world’s problems of hate. Unfortunately, the producers get lost in their broad strokes and never convince the audience of their details.

At times, the film incriminates itself. One interviewee repeats that a professor tried to silence her by looking into her eyes, mentioning her eye color, and so determining that she wasn’t a Semite. Silence, silence, silence me, she repeats over and over again. Yes, the story she tells is a bit scary, but it only holds up if we ignore the rest of the interview. Initially, she explains that in class she discussed her objection to one of the professor’s points. When class ended, the professor motioned her aside, and the two continued to discuss the issue privately. This professor who was trying to silence and intimidate her — yes, that’s right, silence and intimidate her — apparently was so determined to do so that he spoke with her for 45 minutes out of class.

One wonders if the statements about the student’s Semitic heritage were taken out of context, since taking the events at face value indicates instead the teacher’s great degree of respect for the student. Few professors, in particular few popular professors, are willing to devote so much time to their students. If the professor wanted to intimidate her, why didn’t he yell at her during the class? Furthermore, why did he wait until 45 minutes into their private conversation to deliver the knockout intimidation punch? Were they actually just joking? Had she insulted him?

Beyond this “intimidation” incident, the film has little or no hard evidence of academic integrity failures. Much like the electoral campaigns, it uses talking points in place of pesky verifiable facts. While the editors clearly had a few words which they sought to emphasize, one begins to wonder whether the interviewees knew about them too. Words like “intimidation”, “silence”, and “anti-semitism” pop up all too often in the same contexts. One interviewee in particular sounds like she has rehearsed her lines. Rather than living up to its hype as a hard-hitting and moving documentary, Columbia Unbecoming feels… staged. It’s understandable though, because with only 4 academic incidents to report, all of them of questionable severity, the producers likely needed to manipulate their interviewees a bit.

As the film drags on, it switches themes and gives up on trying to prove any hard corruption in MEALAC. With talking points at full throttle and topicality completely ignored, the painful discussion of Columbia’s rampant anti-Semitism begins. The examples are inevitably ludicrous or exaggerated. One student posts a sign for an Israeli film festival and a Socialist tears it in two. The same student attends a talk entitled “Why Divest in Israel?” and complains that the talk failed to viably present Israeli investment opportunities. Another student claims that when he put up posters mentioning Israel, people drew swasticas on them. However, the film offers no corroborating evidence for his claims, indicating that the producers think lowly of their audience’s reasoning skills, don’t know how to make a convincing argument, or don’t actually have any more evidence. These reasons are listed in order of increasing likelihood, although they should not be considered mutually exclusive.

The film’s case is so shoddy that I fail to see how any critical viewer could leave the theater convinced that MEALAC has violated Columbia’s academic integrity standards. Likewise, the claims of anti-Semitism lack any substance. So why make a “documentary” about a “problem” when piecing such a movie together requires interview manipulation and perpetual running from the facts? Because there’s a whole class of powerful people who get very scared whenever they hear about anti-Semitism. It’s the message that matters, whether it’s true or not. Very few people will actually watch Columbia Unbecoming, but plenty will hear about it. For those who never see the film, all they know is that anti-Semitism has become so rampant on campus that a group of students got together to make a film about it.

Those complicit in the making of this documentary should feel ashamed of themselves. Columbia Unbecoming uses anti-Semitism as a manipulative tool, taking advantage of a painful ideology rather than trying to fight it. I hope that anyone who even suspects of its validity finds a way to watch it, because its success relies on popular ignorance.

After getting sick of poor polling coverage online and on the news, I decided to cut through the spin and make my own electoral vote map. Unlike the establishment media, I’m going to show the real American vote.

<rant>

I’ve watched the debates, I’ve read the commentary, and I’ve seen the spin doctors at work. We’re all talking about the election right now, and this election has come down to two fronts: foreign policy and economics.

Just so you know, I’m pretty focused on the latter. So let me give a rough paraphrasing of an interview I saw on CNBC recently. Some financial megapundit was questioning an Economic advisor to John Kerry:

INTERVIEWER: So what exactly is John Kerry’s plan for the economy?

ADVISOR: John Kerry is going to grow the economy. He’s going to support jobs here in America. He’s going to give tax cuts for the middle class while rolling back George Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans. He’s going to make sure every American has health care. John Kerry is going to promote energy independence. John Kerry. John Kerry.

INTERVIEWER: How exactly is John Kerry going to promote job growth?

ADVISOR: Let me say first that John Kerry will create jobs by promoting job creation.* We’re going to close tax loopholes. And we’re going to give companies incentives to make jobs here.

INTERVIEWER: Alright! Moving on to a completely unimportant topic…

* This line more or less ad verbatim

I walked back into my dorm about to cry. The interview made no sense. But oh, so what? Why are you being so emotional, Adam? It’s just job creation!

Forget that the livelihoods of so many Americans rest on good economic policy. I was upset because I wanted more from the candidate that I was — and still am — proud to be voting for. This stupid afternoon interview was symptomatic of the discussion of economics throughout the entire election run.

Dishonest, misleading, opportunistic, nonsensical. That’s the economics of Campaign 2004. We’re not watching real economics. We’re watching talking points covered in economics-colored saran wrap. The statements of the candidates don’t reflect reality; instead they reflect what tests well and what sounds good, irrespective of a positive or negative influence on the country.

You can lie all you want when the swing voters won’t call you on it. The candidates have an incentive to tell economic untruths because these lies damage the opposition in a particularly vicious way: for the opponent, they are for all intents and purposes impossible to rebut. Refuting false statements about economics necessitates an appeal to the more complex concepts of the science. Honestly, who has time to consider the short-term versus long-term stimulative effect of tax cuts of varying degrees of progressivity? The lie sticks.

And so we find ourselves in a situation where each candidate has an incentive to tell as many untruths as the swing voters will believe. If he doesn’t, his opponent will, and by that time it’s too late for any defense — no one’s listening to the response. It’s a prisoners dilemma in which the American people perpetually lose.

Is there anything we can do to heighten the level of Economic debate? I’m not sure. Individually, we start by educating ourselves, but not everyone wants or has time to learn the intricacies of economics. Blogs are certainly helpful in providing both a source of information and a forum for debate, but that won’t help if people continue to have other, more important things on their minds. For the casually interested, then, media coverage is critical. It would help if accountability-inducing media outlets became more prominent; FactCheck.org (not FactCheck.com, Mr. Cheney) is all over this one. It also wouldn’t hurt to have economists more involved in the production of media content, although I’m not sure Paul Krugman should be the one doing the reporting.

I’m don’t know where I fit in here. I’d like to do a series of posts about the economic issues of Campaign 2004, but even I don’t trust myself to report about Economics. On the other hand, this post deserves a follow-up. Let’s see if I can’t put together a list of common Bush and Kerry economic untruths. Feel free to respond to this post with a few, and maybe I will discuss them.

If you find errors, poor logic, or lapses of judgement in anything I say, please point them out. In writing all of this, I wouldn’t mind correcting any faults in my own understanding.

</rant>

Bury Me With It
Well, I am listening to Modest Mouse, as the most intelligent of you might be able to tell by the title of this post. I’m in one of those moods where little thoughts set me off into odd sad states. A mood that this song, Bury Me With It, captures pretty well in its tone.

I like how Modest Mouse has such a passionate sound to their music. Another band I want to listen to, and as usual I’ve waited until they have become popular. But there are more important topics at hand; god forbid this post turns into standard blogshit!

Bukowski
I watched the Clinton interview tonight with my parents. The man knows how to lie passionately. I want to trust him so much when I hear him speak; he believes strongly about so many topics and what he says must contain a great deal of truth. Yet he posseses the capability to lie at whim to his wife, his family, and the American people.

Why am I rambling about this? Because I want to talk about myself:

The View
In the interview, they showed Clinton a tape in which his mother spoke about how great of a son her child had become. Clinton got choked up and looked sincerely at the interviewer, saying, “I had never seen that tape before. Thank you for showing me that.” I said to my father, “He’s such a good liar. I wonder if he’s seen that that tape before.” My father responded that I was being even more skeptical than he was.

Satin in a Coffin (what a song!)
For my father to think of me as skeptical means a lot to me. He’s a skeptical person and I tend to think that I inherited my skepticism from him. I suppose I pulled it in with amplification, though.

Blame it on the Tetons
I’m not sure what that trait signifies for me as a person. If I end up doing political science or economics, it could come in handy.

Which brings me to my next point: I desperately want to write up a few paragraphs taking a position on some issue and showing some logic behind arriving at that position (normative). I would also like to write up a few paragraphs analyzing some issue without taking any position on it (positive). Would anyone be interested in having some kind of online debate? Or just listening to me talk?

Oh fuck it. I’ll just write about Bush’s foreign policy or something. But given my and my (presumed) readers’ position on that issue I doubt anyone would object my claims. I could argue in favor of Bush’s economic policy, but that’d be a stretch for me. Maybe I will just make a big post full of conjecture that manages to piss off everyone.

Black Cadillacs
Watching the Clinton interview, I got wistful for his policies — as if I were really conscious of them while he was in office. But one thing in particular really got me:

He was talking about the handshake between Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. You could tell that he interacted on a personal level with them. As he related some funny conversation he had with the men before their handshake, the program showed a picture of the two leaders in the embrace. I got a little upset, almost teary even, when I saw the picture. Just the idea expressed in that picture seems like such a far away dream right now. It makes me so sad.

Assume for a moment that computers can think. Anyone who knows anything about computers can certainly attest to the veracity of that statement. In fact, the sentience of computers has become so commonly accepted that Hollywood has made a movie about it. But if that doesn’t convince you, just withold your disbelief. It’s time for a quick lesson in the thought pattern of the common laptop.

You may or may not know that there is a component in every computer (laptop included) called the CPU. The CPU does all of the thinking, and as a result, it generates a lot of heat. Here is the thought pattern for the “Pentium 4-Mobile” CPU (your laptop probably has one) as it begins to heat up:

1. It’s getting warm in here. I’m going to turn on my fan!
2. Oh man it’s getting even hotter. I’m going to turn up that fan so it makes lots of noise, and I’m going to lower my speed so that I make less heat! Oh yeah, and by doing that, I’m going to make the computer really really loud and really really slow!
3. The temperature is still rising! I’m going to SHUT THE COMPUTER DOWN WITHOUT WARNING YOU AT ALL.

How stupid. Your computer has a 30 watt lightbulb under its keyboard and the only way it knows how to cool itself is by flicking the light switch off. No matter if you’re doing something important. Yeah, I know. I too thought “Pentium 4″ meant fast in and outside the icebox.

(Luckily this is not my computer)