Paul M. Jones

Gold standard as a restraint on inflation, anyone? Guest Post: Inflation Since The American Revolution | Zero Hedge.

Taylor confused the logical proposition that planning and doing are distinct functions with the empirical claim that these two functions are always best performed by two distinct classes of people endowed with distinct educational pedigrees, clothing styles, and patterns of speech. The one is nonfalsifiable; the other is simply false. Cutting up your food and eating it are distinct functions too, but it is not the case that they are always best performed by two different people. In manufacturing businesses, separateing planner from doers sometimes makes sense; but, as Japanese carmakers proved to the dismay of their American rivals, getting the doers involved in the planning can result in higher-quality products and lower costs.

— Matthew Stewart, “The Management Myth”, p 55-56

I see a lesson here for software product managers: if you get the developers involved in the product planning process, you may end up with higher-quality products. The developers are not mere tools that serve the ends of your planning process; they can be very useful in helping you devise and define that product, espeically since they are the ones that have to actually build the thing.

Implicit in Taylor’s approach is the idea that management always aims at the single goal of effciency (understood as labor productivity). But efficiency is just one of several possible competing goals that management might pursue. Profitability, customer satisfaction, or maintaining good community relations can always conceivably outweigh the goal of efficiency. Later management theorists have argued that Taylor’s obsession with efficiency came at the expense of the goal of quality.

— Matthew Stewart, “The Management Myth,” p 54

I cannot help but read that paragraph and think of software development practices. We want efficiency of algorithms, but the quality of the code (understood as its comprehensibility and maintainability by other programmers) is an equally important goal.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer in Havana, in a live demonstration of Cuba's vaunted socialized medical care. He went there instead of Brazil because he wanted to make a political statement. What irony.

As party cronies hover at his bedside, Cuban officials bark orders to the government in Caracas, and red-shirted Chavistas hold vigils, all signs are pointing to an imminent exit for the Venezuelan leader who controls a huge part of the world's oil.

He's going out exactly as he wouldn't have liked -- helpless and at the mercy of doctors, a far cry from the blaze of heroic socialist glory he might have preferred.

Most galling for him: It didn't have to happen this way.

His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.

via Venezuela's Hugo Chavez Sinks On Credulity In Cuban Health Care - Investors.com.

One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminshes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired featuers by still more intelligent reflection, and still more apporpriate design and "rational coordination" of our understaking. This leads one to be favourably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism.

Of course intellectuals will demand explanations for everything they are expected to do, and will be reluctant to accept practices just because they happen to govern the communities into which they they happen to have been born; and this will lead them infor conflict with, or at least to a low opinion of, those who quietly accept the prevailing rules of conduct.

Moreover, they also understandably will want to align themselves with science and reason, and with the extraordinary progress made by the physical science during th past several centuries, and since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that tere can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validitiy of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason.

...

These reactions are all understandable, but they have consequences. The consequences are particularly dangerous -- to reason as well as to morality -- when preference not so much for the real products of reason as for this conventional tradition of reason leads intellectuials to ignore the theoretical limits of reason, to disregard a world of historical and scientific information ...

-- F. A. Hayek, "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism", p 53-54.

I am reminded, again, that liberal/left/progressive/socialist persons accept the idea of biological evolution without a central planner or designer, and yet seem predisposed to believe that there must be a planner or designer for a complex economy of 310 million (or 6 billion, or more).

[Civilisation] is not likely to advance much further, under a government that takes over the direction of daily affairs from its citizens. It would seem that no advanced civilisation has yet developed without a government which saw its chief aim in the protection of private property, but that again and again the further evolution and growth to which this gave rise was halted by a "strong" government. Governments strong enough to protect individuals against the violence of their fellows make possible the evolution of an increasingly complex order of spontaneous and voluntary cooperation. Sooner or later, however, they tend to abuse that power and to suppress the freedom they had earlier secured in order to enforce their own perpetually greater wisdom ...

F. A. Hayek, “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors Of Socialism”

File under "it's not enough to be smart; you have to actually know things."

Reason is an excellent tool for generating hypotheses. But it is in the world of hard, gritty practicality that honest folks test their favorite ideas, modify them under the helpful heat of criticism, carve away errors, and join others in developing systems that work.

David Brin, The Transparent Society

No matter what your hypothesis says, no matter how elegant your theory, no matter how reasonable, common-sense, and obviously true it may seem, real-world observations and measurements trump everything else. If the observations do not match the theory, if the measurable predictions of the hypothesis are not borne out, then it is not the observations and measurements that are wrong.

Consider, if you will, the two following quotes:

• "Everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help mom with the dishes." P. J. O'Rourke

• "Familiarity breeds contempt." Wiktionary

It occurs to me that the two sayings are related.

You want to do big things, to be part of something worldwide, to make sure your efforts are employed in something that will have the greatest possible impact. But those are the things that you are least likely to have a real effect on, and even if you do, the extent of your effectiveness is almost impossible to measure.

How much better would it be to concentrate your efforts on smaller goals, closer to home, where your aid is instantly recognized and immediately useful? Certainly the rewards for such things are more measurable. But you don't want to do those things, like helping mom with the dishes. You are familiar with those problems; they are contemptible for their familiarity and smallness.

It is the problems you're not familiar with that are so sexy. You may think you know a lot about your particular world-saving issue, but compared to the problems closest to you, your knowledge is infinitesmal. It is the fact that you know so little about the big problems that makes them attractive; it is so easy to conflate your desire to help with your actual ability to do so. You congratulate yourself on having the right sentiments about the most popular "big" problems, even if your actions don't have any measurable effect.

(P.S.: This is an old post I've had on file for a long time, and since it appears I will never "finish" it, I'm publishing it as-is.)

Back in 2009, President Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers” program was supposed to be a boon for the environment and the economy. During a limited time, consumers could trade in an old gas-guzzling used car for up to $4,500 cash back towards the purchase of a fuel-efficient new car. It seemed like a win for everyone: the environment, the gasping auto industry and cash-strapped consumers.

Though almost a million people poured into car dealerships eager to exchange their old jalopies for something shiny and new, recent reports indicate the entire program may have actually hurt the environment far more than it helped.

According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

via Whoops--'Cash for Clunkers' Actually Hurt the Environment - Yahoo! News.

If you fear genetically modified food, you may have Mark Lynas to thank. By his own reckoning, British environmentalist helped spur the anti-GMO movement in the mid-‘90s, arguing as recently at 2008 that big corporations’ selfish greed would threaten the health of both people and the Earth. Thanks to the efforts of Lynas and people like him, governments around the world--especially in Western Europe, Asia, and Africa--have hobbled GM research, and NGOs like Greenpeace have spurned donations of genetically modified foods.

But Lynas has changed his mind--and he’s not being quiet about it. On Thursday at the Oxford Farming Conference, Lynas delivered a blunt address: He got GMOs wrong.

via Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong..