[Optimism] inhibits lucid thought, it shuts down core reasoning centers and seems to inflict terrible damage on memory. It is optimism that continually causes us to lose our respect for limits and to have unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, which leads us to set ourselves up for failure and disaster by encouraging us to overreach and believe that we can find a solution to every problem.

Larison above is talking about optimism with respect to foreign policy, but I think much of the critique can be extended to optimism in general. On a personal level, I suggest that the appropriate response is to replace unqualified optimism with optimistic skepticism.

While optimism thinks that the best will happen, optimistic skepticism thinks the best probably won’t happen, and that therefore one can prepare for the various non-optimal scenarios that most likely will result. That is, because one is appropriately skeptical, one can create plans that will actually work.

With governmental policy, the optimist will think that this governmental program will work (even though most or all of the ones in the past aimed at fixing this problem have not or have made the problem worse). The optimistic skeptic will think that this governmental program will probably not work, and therefore one can plan and calculate based on that premise - which in itself can be quite useful.

On a personal level, it’s similar. This plan (for example, an exercise plan) probably will not work - unless there is an extreme level of effort, skill, time, external pressure, and so on, brought to it - much like project plans in business where you double (or triple or quadruple) the time to completion and half the features. At that point, your chances of having a realistic plan increase significantly, and therefore any plans you have that depend on this plan have a greater likelihood of also going to completion.

Here is a practical example. Tomorrow, the optimist in me thinks, I will get up at 6am, go to the gym, and then get in 4 hours of high-productivity work. “Right,” thinks the skeptic. The optimistic skeptic’s role is then to figure out a plan that will actually make that happen. “I will pay my neighbour $5 every day for a week to bang on my door at 6am until I answer it. I will then arrange to meet someone at 6:30am at the gym (with some sort of social cost if I don’t show up on time). Finally, I will meet a friend at Starbuck’s at 8 for a quick chat, and then work there until 12:30pm.” Now the chances of the plan completing are starting to go up. Repeat until you think you have just a silly amount of effort being brought to bear.

Now you probably have a plan that will work.

One problem with many “conservative” critiques of media messages is that they grapple too much with the content of what is being sent. It is clear that most media messages utilizing sexual imagery, for example, exist simply to sell products, and once understood in this light the idea of trying to figure out whether this or that message is true or good for you becomes an exercise in silliness. It becomes clear that it is a waste of time to be receiving those messages in the first place. That is, it is typically much more useful to interpret a message in a “class ontogenic” sense - that is, to understand how it came about or why it is in your space in terms of its membership in a broader group of messages, and as a policy measure what simple action(s) to take to prevent or replace them in the future if an analysis of their origination makes it clear that they probably are not going to add to your long-term well-being.

In a commercial sense, most people have little of true value to offer.

When I read article titles like this (”45 percent of world’s wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO”), I wonder what these people mean by “wealth”. For example, people in a neighbourhood (say 50 people) get together and decide to pass a house back and forth between them, ratcheting up the value of the house by $50,000 each time. “Pretty soon,” reason the neighbours, “all our houses will be worth millions more!” Multiply $1,000,000 by 50 houses, and you have “created” $50M in wealth. I think the destruction of this sort of wealth is what the person quoted above is referring to.

I think a more useful definition of wealth would refer to something tangible. I have an orchard, and it reliably produces a large bounty of fruit - so I might have peach wealth. Or I have a nice home in a good part of the world, so I have habitation wealth. And so on.

For the most part, what hasn’t happened is the destruction of this sort of real wealth (yet, anyway). What has happened is the destruction of fake wealth - wealth that never really existed in the first place, but that some people thought existed.

Probably the most important things in the world are the boring ones. Slow, plodding, everyday factors that in the end make the real difference. Demographics is foremost of these. It is clear from trends - with a little bit of common-sense extrapolation - that the world population is about to enter a free-fall.*

* ‘about’ here means within the next 50 years

While people are still going on about the dangers of the Earth having more people, population decrease is already happening in “first-world” countries - buoyed only by large amounts of immigration. Canada is a good example. It imports nearly 1% of its population every year, causing a dramatic change in the cultural and ethnic make up of the country. The reasons for this government policy are probably fairly complex, but one argument for it is that a rapidly decreasing population will cause economic hardship. If indeed the whole world starts to experience population loss, this strategy will probably become less and less tenable, regardless of the merits of arguments for it.

We’ve been learning how to deal with population growth for some time, but the Western world hasn’t seen sustained population decrease for a long, long time. Significant population growth in the world started around 1750, and for the previous 3,000 years it seems that human population growth was occurring more slowly. Before that, it seems population levels were relatively stationary.

So what is more dangerous - continued population increase or population decrease? This question doesn’t seem to be debated that often, so the implicit answer would be “population increase”. How do we know that, however?

The recent drop in home prices in the U.S. (see here) has been easy come, easy go for most people. Yet, while news writers are banging on the drums of doom about the drop, they didn’t seem so concerned about the real problem - which was that people bought foolishly on the up-swing. In fact, many news writers were happy to encourage the over-leveraging (very little down mortgages from people without the likely economic resources to afford a drop) or reckless consumption (people borrowing on their increased home prices in order to buy vacations, fancy cars, and so on) that caused a large amount of the problems, peddling stories of seemingly infinite sunniness in a situation where it was reasonable to attribute a significant chance that it was a bubble market in many places in the U.S.

There is a saying about how great dangers can lurk in your seeming success - the problems with the U.S. economy came because people were not tempered enough in their evaluations of their previous seeming economic ’successes’.

Here is an interesting comment on market ‘unregulation’ (via Fumbled Mumblings).

Recently, a link sent by a correspondent raised my ire. It was to a link to this article on the rankings of American Presidents by a group of historians (full rankings available here, with specific attributes on the right-hand side of that page).

These two sentences in the article in particular spurred me:

“[Bush] was ranked 25th in crisis leadership and vision and agenda setting. In contrast, Lincoln was ranked in the top three in each of the 10 categories evaluated by participants.”

This survey of Presidents was timed to coincide with (surprise) Lincoln’s birthday.

I am not particularly warm towards Bush’s Presidency, but anything rarefying Lincoln’s bloody achievements galls me (as my interlocutor knows).

This elicited three e-mails from me before he could respond, quoted partially as follows:

First:

That was Bush’s error - not precipitating a large enough military crisis that led to hundreds of thousands of Americans dead so as to be considered among the top 3 at crisis leadership!

Next e-mail:

The best Presidents in terms of crisis leadership were probably those at the bottom of the list, because nothing seemed to happen while they were President - they defused crises before the situations were perceived as such. I’ll take a Coolidge (32nd in crisis leadership) over a Lincoln (1st in crisis leadership) or F. Roosevelt (2nd in crisis leadership) any day, thanks.

Finally:

N.B.: Now that you’ve got me writing, talk about the “greatest Presidents” or who is the best in a serious journalistic context is the sort of talk that I find a little … creepy. It smacks of some sort of quasi-deification, hero-worship, or whatever (especially when done in conjunction with the 200th birthday of one of them). In a democracy, leaders should be tolerated - not canonized and venerated. (I’ve found this especially concerning with the recent front-page magazine treatment of the most recent President - yuck).

This will be my last e-mail on this subject.

For now. :)

Hopefully this post will achieve its cathartic effect.

In what way is 100 a relevant number? If we had a base 8 number system, would the announcer intone “What will happen in the first 64 days of this administration?” It’s as if a poetic device (for example, 10,000 days = evocative of a long time) - actually, a rhetorical device - became the misguided basis of public policy decisions.

For an introvert, Harper’s list of defeated opponents is striking.

1993 James Hawkes (incumbent MP, Calgary West)

2002 Stockwell Day (leader, Canadian Alliance)

2004 Peter MacKay (leader, Progressive Conservatives) (After Harper and MacKay successfully merged the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties to end the fratricidal vote splitting of the 2 main Canadian right parties, MacKay was dissuaded from even contesting the leadership of the new Conservative Party, leading to an easy victory for Harper over his opponents.)

2006 The Right Honourable Paul Martin (incumbent Prime Minister, leader, Liberal Party) (After Martin started the campaign polling ahead, Harper’s campaign team won a Minority Government for the Conservative party.)

2008 Stéphane Dion (Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, leader, Liberal Party) (Harper defeated Dion first in the 2008 election and then - in a last minute scare scene from the supposedly moribund Dion (who had promised to resign as Liberal party leader) worthy of a cheap horror movie - defeated Dion again after winning a proroguing of the Parliament from the Governor General days away from Dion becoming Prime Minister himself in a coalition of opposition parties, where the ensuing public relations fracas was a debacle for Dion and led to his resignation as leader of the Liberal party.)

Whether Ignatieff is to be added to this list or not, it is clear that Harper’s achievements to date make him the most significant figure on the right in Canadian politics for the last decade, and probably the most successful given the political terrain in at least the last half-century. The trajectory so far is:

Won his own party’s leadership -> United the right wing under one major party -> Became leader of the new right wing party -> Led the party through an election, almost defeating the incumbent Liberals and delivering to them a Minority government -> Defeating the Liberals, taking a Minority government -> Winning again, increasing his party’s Minority government’s number of seats -> despatching Dion -> avoiding a possible Ignatieff Coalition government … for the time being.

Wanted: Mature Single Male For Shared Housing

From the housing classifieds. The blurb:

“We all need housing, but we all need a life as well. Why live alone, pay outrageous rents and have no life when you can share with someone pleasant, have reasonable rent and have a life. I’m a mature single female and my preference would be for a stable mature male. If this interests you at all, please drop me a line…”

I am not sure exactly what arrangement this single female is thinking of (presumably a 2 bedroom?), but it brings up the opportunity costs of being single. For many people, if you get married (or cohabitate, if that’s your preferred version), you can almost halve your rent, share a car (if one person doesn’t need one all the time), drive together to places (half the fuel), cook dinner together (decrease time per person, and probably decrease costs as well), halve your internet bill (Sacha, nota bene!), and so on. These could reasonably amount to combined savings of $1,000 a month = $12,000 a year. Suddenly, the cost of a wedding ring doesn’t seem so high.