Shtetl-Optimized

A few months ago I read Atlas Shrugged, the 1,069-page Ayn Rand opus that was recently praised by Stephen Colbert (for its newfound popularity with beleaguered CEOs).  As I mentioned in the comments of a previous post, like many other nerds I went through a brief Aynfatuation around the age of 14.  Rand’s portrayal of an anti-mind, anti-reason cabal of collectivist rulers, who spout oleaginous platitudes about love and self-sacrifice even as they mercilessly repress any spark of individuality, happens to be extremely relevant to at least two cases I’m aware of:

1. Soviet Russia.
2. The average American high school.

But it didn’t last long.  Even in the midst of it, I could see problems: I wrote a term paper analyzing the rape scene in The Fountainhead as immoral and irreconcilable with the rest of an otherwise supremely-rational novel.  And ironically, once I went to college and started doing more-or-less what Rand extols as life’s highest purposes—pursuing my ambitions, tackling math and science problems, trying to create something original—her philosophy itself seemed more and more quaint and irrelevant.  I snapped out of it before I reached Atlas.  (Or did I subconsciously fear that, if I did read Atlas, I’d be brainwashed forever?  Or did I just figure that, having read the 752-page Fountainhead and dozens of essays, I already got the basic idea?)

So, having now returned to Atlas out of curiosity, what can I say?  Numerous readers have already listed the reasons why, judged as a conventional novel, it’s pretty bad: wooden dialogue, over-the-top melodrama, characters barely recognizable as human.  But of course, Atlas doesn’t ask to be judged as a conventional novel.  Rand and her followers clearly saw it as a secular Bible: a Book of Books that lays out for all eternity, through parables and explicit exhortation, what you should value and how you should live your life.  This presents an obvious problem for me: how does one review a book that seeks, among other things, to define the standards by which all books should be reviewed?

Mulling over this question, I hit on an answer: I should look not at what’s in the book—whose every word is perfect by definition, to true believers who define ‘perfect’ as ‘that exemplified by Atlas Shrugged‘—but at what’s not in it.  In other words, I should review the complement of the book.  By approaching the donut through the hole, I will try to explain how, even considering it on its own terms, Atlas Shrugged fails to provide an account of human life that I found comprehensive or satisfying.

(Though on the positive side, it still makes much more sense than my 11^th-grade English teacher.)

Without further ado, here are the ten most striking things I noticed in the complement of Atlas Shrugged.

1. Recent technologies.  For a novel set in the future, whose whole point is to defend capitalism, technology, innovation, and industry, Atlas is startlingly uninterested in any technologies being developed at the time it was written (the fifties).  For Rand, the ultimate symbol of technological progress is the railroad—though she’s also impressed by steel mills, copper mines, skyscrapers, factories, and bridges.  Transistors, computers, space travel, and even plastic and interstate highways seem entirely absent from her universe, while nuclear energy (which no one could ignore at the time) enters only metaphorically, through the sinister “Project X.”  Airplanes, which were starting to overtake trains as a form of passenger travel even as Atlas was written, do play a tiny role, though it’s never explained where the busy protagonists learned to pilot.  Overall, I got the impression that Rand didn’t really care for technology as such—only for what certain specific, 19^th-century technologies symbolized to her about Man’s dominance over Nature.
2. Curiosity about the physical universe.  This, of course, is related to point 1.  For Rand, the physical world seems to be of interest only as a medium to be bent to human will.  When I read The Fountainhead as a teenager, I found myself wondering what Rand would’ve made of academic scientists: people who generally share her respect for reason, reality, and creative achievement, but not her metaphysical certainty or her hatred of all government planning.  (Also, while most male scientists resemble a cross between Howard Roark and John Galt, it must be admitted that a tiny minority of them are awkward nerds.)
   In Atlas, Rand finally supplies an answer to this question, in the form of Dr. Robert Stadler.  It turns out that in Rand’s eschatology, academic scientists are the worst evil imaginable: people smart enough to see the truth of her philosophy, but who nevertheless choose to reject it.  Science, as a whole, does not come off well in Atlas: the country starves while Stadler’s State Science Institute builds a new cyclotron; and Dr. Floyd Ferris, the author of obscurantist popular physics books, later turns into a cold-blooded torturer.  (That last bit, actually, has a ring of truth to it.)
   More important, in a book with hundreds of pages of philosophizing about human nature, there’s no mention of evolution; in a book obsessed with “physics,” there’s no evidence of any acquaintance with relativity, quantum mechanics, or pretty much anything else about physics.  (When Stadler starts talking about particles approaching the speed of light, Dagny impatiently changes the subject.)  It’s an interesting question whether Rand outright rejected the content of modern science; maybe we’ll pick up that debate in the comments section.  But another possibility—that Rand was simply indifferent to the sorts of things an Einstein, Darwin, or Robert Stadler might discover, that she didn’t care whether they were true or not—is, to my mind, hardly more defensible for a “philosopher of reason.”
3. Family.  Whittaker Chambers (of pumpkin patch fame) pointed out this startling omission in his review of 1957.  The characters in Atlas mate often enough, but they never reproduce, or even discuss the possibility of reproduction (if only to take precautions against it).  Also, the only family relationships portrayed at length are entirely negative in character: Rearden’s mother, brother, and wife are all contemptible collectivists who mooch off the great man even as they despise him, while Dagny’s brother Jim is the wretched prince of looters.  Any Republicans seeking solace in Atlas should be warned: Ayn Rand is not your go-to philosopher for family values (much less “Judeo-Christian” ones).
4. “Angular,” attractive people who also happen to be collectivists, or “shapeless” people who happen to be rational individualists.  In the universe of Atlas, physical appearance is destiny—always, without exception, from John Galt down to the last minor villain.  Whenever Rand introduces a new character, you learn immediately, after a one-paragraph physical description, everything she wants you to know about that character’s moral essence: “angular” equals good, “limp,” “petulant,” and so on equal bad.  Admittedly, most movies also save the audience from unwanted thought by making similar identifications.  But Rand’s harping on this theme is so insistent, so vitriolic, that it leaves little doubt she really did accept the eugenic notion that a person’s character is visible on his or her face.
5. Personalities.  In Atlas, as in The Fountainhead, each character has (to put it mildly) a philosophy, but no personality independent of that philosophy, no Objectively-neutral character traits.  What, for example, do we know about Howard Roark?  Well, he has orange hair, likes to smoke cigarettes, and is a brilliant architect and defender of individualism.  What do we know about John Galt?  He has gold hair, likes to smoke cigarettes, and is a brilliant inventor and defender of individualism.  Besides occupation and hair color, they’re pretty much identical.  Neither is suffered to have any family, culture, backstory, weaknesses, quirks, or even hobbies or favorite foods (not counting cigarettes, of course).  Yes, I know this is by explicit authorial design.  But it also seems to undermine Rand’s basic thesis: that Galt and Roark are not gods or robots, but ordinary mortals.
6. Positive portrayal of uncertainty.  In Atlas, “rationality” is equated over and over with being certain one is right.  The only topic the good guys, like Hank and Dagny, ever change their minds about is whether the collectivists are (a) evil or (b) really, really evil.  (Spoiler alert: after 800 pages, they opt for (b).)  The idea that rationality might have anything to do with being uncertain—with admitting you’re wrong, changing your mind, withholding judgment—simply does not exist in Rand’s universe.  For me, this is the single most troubling aspect of her thought.
7. Honest disagreements.  Atlas might be the closest thing ever written to a novelization of Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.  In RandLand, whenever two rational people meet, they discover to their delight that they agree about everything—not merely the basics like capitalism and individualism, but also the usefulness of Rearden Metal, the beauty of Halley’s Fifth Concerto, and so on.  (Again, the one exception is the disagreement between those who’ve already accepted the full evil of the collectivists, and those still willing to give them a chance.)  In “Galt’s Gulch” (the book’s utopia), there’s one judge to resolve disputes, but he’s never had to do anything since no disputes have ever arisen.
8. History.  When I read The Fountainhead as a teenager, there was one detail that kept bothering me: the fact that it was published in 1943.  At such a time, how could Rand possibly imagine the ultimate human evil to be a left-wing newspaper critic?  Atlas continues the willful obliviousness to real events, like (say) World War II or the Cold War.  And yet—just like when she removes family, personality, culture, evolution, and so on from the picture—Rand clearly wants us to apply the lessons from her pared-down, stylized world to this world.  Which raises an obvious question: if her philosophy is rich enough to deal with all these elephants in the room, then why does she have to avoid mentioning the elephants while writing thousands of pages about the room’s contents?
9. Efficient evil people.  In Atlas, there’s not a single competent industrialist who isn’t also an exemplar of virtue.  The heroine, Dagny, is a railroad executive who makes trains run on time—who knows in her heart that reliable train service is its own justification, and that what the trains are transporting and why is morally irrelevant.  Granted, after 900 pages, Dagny finally admits to herself that she’s been serving an evil cause, and should probably stop.  But even then, her earlier “don’t ask why” policy is understood to have been entirely forgivable: a consequence of too much virtue rather than too little.  I found it odd that Rand, who (for all her faults) was normally a razor-sharp debater, could write this way so soon after the Holocaust without thinking through the obvious implications.
10. Ethnicity.  Seriously: to write two sprawling novels set in the US, with hundreds of characters between them, and not a single non-Aryan?  Even in the 40s and 50s?  For me, the issue here is not political correctness, but something much more basic: for all Rand’s praise of “reality,” how much interest did she have in its contents?  On a related note, somehow Rand seems to have gotten the idea that “the East,” and India in particular, were entirely populated by mystical savages sitting cross-legged on mats, eating soybeans as they condemned reason and reality.  To which I can only reply: what did she have against soybeans?  Edamame is pretty tasty.

Murray Rothbard and Eliezer Yudkowsky take different routes to some of the same conclusions.

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I know I’ve been gone from the shtetl too long—I even stood by as a P=NP goon performed a drive-by shooting through my comments section.  Part of the explanation, I’m ashamed to admit, is that I’ve been procrastinating by proving theorems and writing papers, rather than building up the massive corpus of blog entries on which my tenure case will undoubtedly rest.

But most of my absence has an unhappier source.  At an unknown time about three weeks ago, I crossed the Email Event Horizon—defined in General Unproductivity as the point beyond which you could literally spend your entire day answering emails, yet still have more emails at the end of the day demanding immediate attention than you had at the beginning.  Not spam or crank mail, but worthy missives from students, prospective students, high-school students, secretaries, TAs, fellow committee members, conference organizers, visit hosts, speakers, editors, co-editors, grant officers, referees, colleagues … everything, always, requiring you to do something, commit to some decision, send a title and abstract, pick dates for the trip, exercise Genuine Conscious Thought.  No one ever writes:

Please respond to the situation described above by cracking a joke, the less tasteful the better.  You will never need to deal with this matter again.

I don’t know the precise moment when I crossed the EEH—there was nothing to herald it, it felt like any other moment—but it’s obvious now that I’m in a new, unfamiliar causal region (and that, while I might have thought I’d crossed years ago, I hadn’t).  Communication from inside the EEH to the external universe is theoretically possible, but like Hawking radiation, it tends to be excruciatingly slow—and when it finally arrives, might simply regurgitate the incoming information in garbled form.

When I was a student, I used to wonder constantly about the professors who’d ignore my long, meticulously-crafted emails or fire off one-word replies, yet who might suddenly have an hour for me if I walked into their offices.  Were they senile?  Rude?  Did they secretly despise me?  Now I get it, now I understand—yet I doubt I could explain the warped spacetime Gmailometry I now inhabit to my own past self.  On the other hand, the recognition of what’s happened is itself a sort of liberation.  I’m starting to grasp what’s long been obvious to many of you, those who crossed the EEH before I got my first AOL account in seventh grade: that it’s useless to struggle.  By definition, the speed required to escape the EEH exceeds that of typing, while the mental energy required to accelerate a massive, resting theorist to such a speed is infinite.  So there’s nothing to do but blog, goof off, prove theorems, let the starred-but-unanswered inquiries pile higher and higher, and await the Email Singularity in my causal future.

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Just to get back into blogging mode, here it is.  They do a good job of hamming it up, too.  Courtesy of Mikkel Vester, Anders Nissen, Martin Have, and Sean Geggie at the University of Aarhus (which is hereby forgiven for coming before me alphabetically).

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Within the last week and a half, I saw two movies that rank among the best I’ve ever seen: Slumdog Millionaire and Defiance.  Slumdog, as you probably know by now, is about an orphan from Mumbai who, in the process of fleeing starvation, murder, and the gouging out of his eyes, picks up enough trivia to go on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and answer almost every question correctly.  (It’s about 100 times better than the premise makes it sound.)  Defiance tells the true story of the Bielski brothers in Belorussia (where most of my family is from), who fled to the forest when the Jews were rounded up in December 1941, and eventually organized the largest Jewish resistance operation of the war.

On thinking it over, I was surprised to realize I liked these two seemingly-unrelated movies for the same reasons.  Let me try to break down what made them good:

• Both draw their emotional punch from reality.  Almost everything in Defiance happened.  Slumdog, while fictional, is (amazingly) the first Western blockbuster I can think of about modern India—a place where 21^st-century communication, entertainment, and industry coexist with 16^th-century squalor, and everyone acts as if that’s normal.  (If you haven’t been there, the anarchic street scenes might strike you as obviously exaggerated for effect.  They aren’t.)

• Both tell wildly-improbable tales of bare physical survival.  Survival stories aren’t just the best for keeping you in your seat: they also provide a useful reminder that your beliefs about politics and human nature might be badly distorted by the contingent facts that you have enough to eat and that armed thugs aren’t trying to kill you.  (I tried to think of a phrase to summarize my political philosophy, and came up with “liberal pessimist pragmatist rationalist of an unsentimental kind.”  Slumdog and Defiance both explain this concept better than I could.)

• Even as they starve, sleep in the rain, and flee their would-be killers, the protagonists in both movies pursue goals beyond just staying alive—which is what lets us identify with them so strongly.  Jamal Malik appears on a game show to win the beautiful Latika.  Tuvia Bielski risks his life to exact revenge on the police officer who killed his parents.  Days after losing their families to the Nazis, the young women who arrive at the Bielski settlement are weighing which of the men to offer themselves to as “forest wives.”

• Both movies use visuals in the service of a story rather than vice versa.  When Spielberg filmed Schindler’s List in black and white (save for the famous girl in red), reviewers were full of praise: what a profound artistic statement he must’ve been making!  The result, though, was that people saw the Holocaust the same way they’d seen it everywhere else: as something from some remote, incomprehensible black-and-white past.  But Defiance, like The Pianist, denies you the luxury of a visual remove—as if to say, “this is how it was.  It’s part of the same universe you live in right now.  It’s not even particularly incomprehensible, if you choose to comprehend it.”

• Both movies indulge the audience in what it already knows about the respective cultures.  Slumdog features hilarious scenes at the Taj Mahal and a call center, and ends with a tongue-in-cheek Bollywood dance number.  Defiance portrays the “malbushim” (the Bielskis’ derisive term for intellectuals) arguing and quoting Talmud as they starve in the woods.  It’s as if, instead of telling you that the stereotypes you came in with are false, these movies say “and so what if they’re true?”

• Both movies have been criticized as “simplistic”—a word that seems to mean “too clear or comprehensible for polite company,” and that I’ve found to be an almost-perfect marker for things that I’m going to like or agree with.  Even as the plots add on layers of complexity—sibling rivalries, uneasy alliances, unconsummated love—the dialogue is always straightforward enough that even a borderline Aspberger’s case like myself could follow what was going on without difficulty.

• Despite a backdrop of blood and tears on a continent-wide scale—which the audience knows full well is real, not fictional—both movies end up joyous and uplifting.  Lots of bad guys get blown to pieces, while the good guys you most care about live.  Is such uplift “glib,” “problematic,” or even “simplistic”?  Well, what’s the point of going to a movie in the first place?  I want to walk away feeling that the inherent injustice of the universe can be successfully defied, that I need not apologize for taking comparatively benign steps to solve the comparatively trivial problems in my own life.  I want my $10’s worth.

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1. There’s now a popular article by Lisa Zyga at physorg.com, about my paper with John Watrous on quantum computing with closed timelike curves. On the whole, I think Zyga did an excellent job at getting the facts (such as they are) correct.

2. Challenged ballots in the Coleman vs. Franken race: you be the judge!

3. One of the unfortunate things about not updating your blog often, I find, is that people assume you’re still obsessed with the last thing you blogged about, weeks after you’ve all but forgotten about it.  As it happens, I’ve now fully recovered from the joy of the election, and am back to my normal angst-ridden equilibrium.  On the other hand, I’ve not yet recovered from the STOC deadline.

4. My quest to become more obamalike in temperament is now officially a failure.   I should try it again sometime.

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Update (10/27): Peter Norvig at Google points me to his Election FAQ, for those who feel they haven’t yet spent enough time reading about the election.  I’ve just been perusing it, and it’s an unbelievably good source of information—reaching the same conclusions as I did on just about every particular, yet also calm, reasoned, and professional.

1. That’s my mom at an Obama office in Sarasota, FL.  For once, I find myself kvelling to strangers about her.

2. I’m at FOCS’2008 in Philadelphia right now.  Yesterday morning I gave a tutorial on The Polynomial Method in Quantum and Classical Computing, and was delighted by how many people showed up — I wouldn’t have woken up for my talk.  (And before you ask: yes, the PowerPoint slides for this talk include photographs of both Bill Ayers and Joe the Plumber.)

3. Here’s the FOCS conference program — tons of good stuff, as you can see for yourself.  If there’s a talk you want to know more about, say so in the comments section and I’ll try to find someone who attended it.

Note: I was a program committee member, and therefore know much more than usual about the talks—but my objectivity and license as a “journalist” are also severely compromised.  If unvarnished opinion is what you seek, ask my friend and roommate Rahul Santhanam, who’s also reporting live from the conference over at Lance’s blog.  (As you can see, we CS theorists manage our conflicts of interest roughly as well as the Alaska governor’s office…)

4. I apologize that I haven’t had much to say recently.  Against my better judgment, I find myself transfixed by the same topic everyone else is transfixed by, and it’s hard to find anything to say about it that hasn’t been said better by others.  If you want to enter my world, don’t read Shtetl-Optimized; read Andrew Sullivan or FiveThirtyEight.com.  Following the election is, of course, not all that different from following a football game, except for the added dash of excitement that the future of civilization might hinge on the outcome.

(Years congruent to 0 mod 4 are pretty much the only times when I understand what it’s like to be a sports fan.  Speaking of which, I heard there was some sort of “World’s Series” in Philadelphia last night—probably in basketball—and something called the “Phillies” won?  I might be wrong, though.  Maybe it was the “Flyers” … or is that a volleyball team?  Keep in mind, I only lived in this area for the first 15 years of my life.)

5. For a congenital pessimist like me, I confess it’s been difficult to deal with the fact that my team (I mean the Democrats, not the Eagles or whatever they’re called) is winning.  I simply don’t know how to react; it’s so far outside my emotional range.  Since when has the universe worked this way?  When did reason and levelheadedness start reaping earthly rewards, or incompetence start carrying a cost?  I’m sure Nov. 4 will bring something to console me, though: maybe Al Franken will lose the Senate race in Minnesota, or the homophobe proposition will pass in California…

6. Writing blog posts in numbered lists is easier; I should do it more often.  I don’t have to pretend all the little things I want to say are part of an overarching narrative, rather than standing in the relation “and that reminds me of … which in turn reminds me of…”

7. There’s another psychological question inspired by the election that’s fascinated me lately: how does one become more obamalike in temperament?

I’ve written before about Obama’s penchant for introspection and respect for expertise, which of course are qualities with which I strongly identify.  But Obama also has a crucial quality I lack: as the whole world has marveled, nothing rattles him.  Placed for two years under the brightest glare on earth, besieged by unexpected events, he simply sticks to a script, Buddha-like in his emotional control (although not in his quest for power in the temporal world).  His nerves are of carbon nanotube fiber.

When he briefly slipped behind after the Republican convention, I panicked: I felt sure he’d lose if he didn’t completely change his approach.  Sean Carroll recommended chilling out.  I now face the indignity of admitting that I was wrong while a physicist was right.

What struck me most, during the debates, was how again and again Obama would pass up the chance to score points—choosing instead to let his opponent impale himself with his own words, and use his time to hammer home his message for the benefit of any voters just emerging from their caves.  (As an example, consider his pointed refusal in the third debate to say anything bad about Palin—the subtext being, “isn’t it obvious?”)  It’s almost as if he thought his goal was winning the election, not proving the other guy wrong.

I have (to put it mildly) not always exhibited the same prudent restraint, least of all on this blog.  So for example, whenever there’s been bait dangling in front of me in the comments section, I’ve tended to bite, often ending up with a hook through my cheek.

But no more.  As the first exercise in my newfound quest for the Zen-like equanimity and balance of our soon-to-be-president, I now present to you two excerpts from the comments on my previous post, with no reaction whatsoever from me.

Have you considered the possibility that, in the same way a logical deduction is being equated with truth, understanding a thing is just an illusion? If a thing is logical, that only means that it appeals to the reasoning facility of the brain, not that it’s the truth.

Mathematics is just a place where it becomes clear how a human may think. Computers only go for the calculable. And the mathematical truths a computer can produce are at most countable infinite. But there are uncountable infinite truths.

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Here’s what I saw the last time I went to Intrade (yes, I’ve been checking about 200,000 times per day):

I understand that in this situation, the Constitution dictates that the selection of a President goes to the IEEE 754R Technical Committee.

Joke-Killing Explanation for Non-Nerds: NaN is “Not a Number,” an error code in floating-point arithmetic for expressions like 0/0.  Evidently there’s a bug in Intrade’s script to add the expected electoral college votes.

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Alright, no more politics for a while.  I’m sick of it.

Given the relative success of Open thread #1, I thought I’d give you the readers a second opportunity to ask about whatever’s on your minds, except politics.  Quantum complexity classes and painting elephants are definitely fair game.

(Update: One question at a time, please!)

(Update: Thanks for the questions, everyone!  The open thread is now closed.  We’ll do this again!)

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Inspired by the discussion of my fable, and specifically a comment of Ronald de Wolf, today I decided to do some amateur political science. Specifically, I created a scatterplot that ranks 156 of the world’s countries (those for which data was available) along two axes:

1. Their “political freedom”, as rated by Freedom House‘s 2008 Freedom in the World survey. This is a 0-to-100 scale, which includes 60 points for various civil liberties (such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion) and 40 points for various political rights (such as transparent elections). (Note that I used the raw scores, rather than the less informative 1-to-7 rankings.)
2. Their “economic freedom”, as rated by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal‘s 2008 Index of Economic Freedom. This is also a 0-to-100 scale, which ranks the sorts of things libertarians and laissez-faire economists love: free trade, deregulation, privatization, low taxes and tariffs, low or nonexistent minimum wage, etc.

The motivation was simple. Among educated people, political freedom is universally acknowledged as both good and important, whereas economic freedom (as defined by Heritage and the Wall Street Journal) is not. Indeed, a huge fraction of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives—at least over economics—seems to boil down to a single question: Is economic freedom (again, as defined by Heritage/WSJ) the friend or enemy of political freedom?

On one side of this question, we have Milton Friedman:

Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market.  I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity. (From Capitalism and Freedom, quoted by Wu and Davis)

On the other side we have anti-globalization activists like Naomi Klein (author of The Shock Doctrine), who say that “economic freedom” simply means the freedom of multinational corporations to exploit the public, and as such is incompatible with political freedom.  Klein argues that free-market economic policies almost never win democratically, and hence the ruling elites have had to force these policies on unwilling populations using strong-arm tactics of the World Bank and IMF, cynical exploitation of wars, hurricanes, and other disasters, and (when all else fails) state-sponsored torture and murder.

My modest goal was to use the available cross-country data to test these two hypotheses. But before we get to that, a few caveats.

Caveat #1: I know full well that the questions I’m talking about have already been studied in great detail by professional political scientists. Google Scholar turned up Lundström 2005 doing a correlational study between the Freedom House index and various components of the Economic Freedom of the World index (which is similar to the Heritage index), as well as Wu and Davis 1999, Wu and Davis 2005, Berggren 2003, Carbone 2007, and lots more. (Though see also Doucouliagos 2005 for evidence of publication bias in this area.) So why bother to reinvent the wheel?  A few answers:

• This project was really just a way to procrastinate.
• I like making charts.
• My methods were somewhat different from those in the published literature. Rather than using the accepted methodology of the social sciences—which consists of reducing all questions to chi-squared significance tests—I felt free to use my own Doofus Methodology, which consists of staring at graphs and seeing if something pops out at me. After careful deliberation, I decided on the latter methodology for three reasons. First, ultimately I only care about correlations that are strong enough to be obvious to the naked eye.  Second, I might actually know something about some of the countries in question—they’re not just interchangeable data points—and given how informal this study was anyway, I saw no reason to jettison that knowledge.  Third, as we’ll see, when we’re asking about the best forms of government, doing regression analysis on all the countries that happen to exist today can be seriously misleading.  To put it bluntly, the majority of countries are so abysmal in terms of both economic freedom and political freedom, that trying to gain insight from them into a hypothesized tradeoff between the two freedoms is like studying a remedial class of second-graders to find out whether algebraic or geometric insight is more important for winning the Fields Medal.  It’s the outlier countries, the Singapores and Icelands, that should interest us at least as much as the pack.

Caveat #2: The problems with the Freedom House and Heritage surveys—and for that matter, any surveys that try to rank countries on some linear scale of “freedom”—are evident. Indeed, reading the survey methodologies, I found plenty of things to complain about, as I’m sure you would as well. Nevertheless, both surveys struck me as (1) having reasonably consistent methodologies, (2) being reasonably well-accepted by social scientists, and (3) giving results that agree pretty well with intuition, for most of the countries I know something about.  So lacking a better alternative, I decided to go along with these indices.  Just to double-check, I also looked at the Freedom House index versus the Economic Freedom of the World index, and the plot was extremely similar to the one versus the Heritage index.

Caveat #3: A major limitation of my scatterplot is that it only looks at the world of 2008, and disregards a vast wealth of historical examples (Chile under Pinochet, the US under Reagan…).  Future research by amateur procrastinating bloggers should clearly take the available historical data into account as well.

Granting all of this, what can we potentially learn?

1. Political and economic freedom are correlated. Any doofus could have predicted this, and lo and behold, it’s apparent from even a glance at the data. Looking at the countries in question, it seems clear that part of this correlation is due to both freedoms being correlated with economic development, i.e. “having your national shit together.”  In a country like Denmark, you can criticize the government and start a business. In a country like North Korea, you can neither criticize the government nor start a business, at least without being shot.  The studies I linked to above claim some evidence that this obvious correlation has a causal component, as follows: by and large, economic freedom helps make countries richer, and being richer helps make them more politically free.  Assuming that claim is correct, score one for Milton Friedman.

2. A wide range of economic freedom levels is compatible with a “near-maximal” level of political freedom. Let’s look only at the countries on the far right of the scatterplot—those with “US-or-above” levels of political freedom (Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US, and Uruguay). Here the correlation between economic and political freedom seems to disappear entirely, or even become slightly negative. The economic freedom scores of these countries range from 64.3 to 82.4, which is almost half of the total spread across all countries on earth (excepting a few dictatorships like North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe). More to the point, this list includes countries commonly regarded as “socialist” in contemporary political debate (like the Scandinavian countries), and countries regarded as “capitalist” (like Australia, Chile, and the US).  Thus, the idea that countries that already have a high level of political freedom, would increase their political freedom even more by lowering taxes, privatizing industries, etc., does not seem to be borne out by this dataset.

3. There might be a “Pareto curve of freedom”: that is, a basic tension between economic and political freedom that prevents them from being maximized simultaneously. I’ll admit that the evidence on this point is inconclusive.  Firstly, there aren’t enough data points; secondly, the lack of any example of a country maximizing both freedoms is obviously not an impossibility proof.  A true believer in Ayn Rand’s utopia, like a true believer in Marxism, could always disregard any empirical finding by saying that the right experiment has never been tried yet, and would self-evidently succeed if it were.

However, if we do construct the “Pareto curve of freedom” for the Freedom House/Heritage data, what we find is this:

• Iceland, with economic freedom score of 76.5 and political freedom score of 100
• Canada, with economic freedom score of 80.2 and political freedom score of 99
• Ireland, with economic freedom score of 82.4 and political freedom score of 97
• Singapore, with economic freedom score of 87.4 and political freedom score of 49

(The US is conspicuously not on the Pareto curve, though wounded patriots can console themselves that it’s the only country of anywhere near its population size that comes close.)

Note that Hong Kong is not in this dataset, since as part of China, it isn’t ranked separately by Freedom House. However, Heritage gives Hong Kong an economic freedom score of 90.3, which is the highest in the world (Singapore is #2). The political freedom score for China itself is a dismal 18. So, if we assigned Hong Kong the point (18,90.3), that would be a fifth point on the Pareto curve.

To check the robustness of the Pareto curve, I recalculated it using the Economic Freedom in the World index in place of the Heritage index.   The result was basically similar: clustered on the right we find Finland, Iceland, and Luxembourg maximizing political freedom, then Canada, then Switzerland, then New Zealand, and then, as before, Singapore way off on its own maximizing economic freedom.

To confirm the hypothesis of a tradeoff between economic freedom and political freedom, what we’d need in the dataset are “more Singapores”—or better yet, some countries that interpolated between the Western democracies and Singapore.  Conversely, to disprove the tradeoff hypothesis, all it would take is a single country that dominated the rest of the world on both axes, with the political freedom of Scandinavia and the economic freedom of Singapore.  I find it interesting that no such country seems to exist, not even a small city-state or island.

Incidentally, the tradeoff idea is not necessarily rejected by libertarians.  Friedman himself stressed that “political freedom, once established, has a tendency to destroy economic freedom.”  To put it bluntly, if poor people can vote, one of the main things they vote for is to redistribute money to themselves.  There are then three possibilities: either redistribution takes place (and economic freedom as defined by Heritage and the Wall Street Journal goes down), or the poor majority is violently suppressed (and political freedom goes down), or the government is overthrown.  Amusingly, Friedman and Klein seem to be in complete agreement on this central point: it’s just that one of them laments it while the other relishes it.

In summary, I conjecture that the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom is similar to that between jogging and health.  In general, we expect people to be healthier the more they jog, with at least part of the relationship being causal. But it doesn’t follow that jogging 20 hours per day is healthier than jogging one hour; indeed the former might even be detrimental.

Of course, people could accept all this (even find it plunkingly obvious), and still vehemently disagree about the quantitative aspect: exactly how far out is the Pareto curve?  How much jogging is too much?  As usual, it’s the complexity-theoretic questions that are the interesting ones.  The tragedy is that you never even get to those questions if you’re too hung up on computability.

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Inspired by: reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine this week alongside Ludwig von Mises’s The Anti-Captialistic Mentality.

Addendum (7/28): Here’s my review of The Shock Doctrine.  If you want to know what I thought of the book, you should probably just read the review and ignore the dumb fable that follows.

I tried unplugging the router and plugging it back in, messing around with my DHCP settings — everything I could think of.  Still no Internet.  Hours passed, then a day.  In desperation, I finally called the tech support number for my Internet service provider, Laissez-Faire Solutions.  After putting me hold for an hour with Brahms and Beethoven, “Ayn” finally picked up the phone.”I don’t know what to tell you,” she said curtly, after I’d explained the situation. “Your connection ought to be working perfectly.”

“But it isn’t.”

“It ought to be.”

“But it isn’t!  Look, isn’t it possible that there’s some failure on your end?”

“You don’t understand, sir. There can be no such thing as a failure on our end. If a failure exists, then it must by definition be on your end and your end alone. What is provided to your home qua home is Internet access qua Internet access. It follows, then, as surely as A is A, that either your router is not configured properly, or your cable is disconnected, or in some other way your own stupidity or incompetence have prevented you from getting online, a failure you now seek absurdly to blame on the Internet itself.”

“I’m not blaming anything on the Internet.  I’m blaming it on you, my ISP.”

“Let me ask you something,” said Ayn.  “Did anyone hold you at gunpoint, or otherwise coerce you to sign up for Internet service with us?”

“Well, I guess not…”

“Then what exactly is your complaint?”

“That the service you agreed to provide isn’t working.”

“As I explained previously, it is working, by definition.  If for some fanciful reason you think otherwise, obviously you have the freedom of switching providers.”

“But all the others suck as much as you do.”

“That is not possible.  Were it the case that every Internet provider sucked, a provider that didn’t suck would have arisen and driven all the others out of business.  The market abhors a vacuum.”

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting more than a decade for this particular vacuum to be filled.  Until it happens, what else would you suggest I do?”

“Did you try going to Google again?”

“I’m still getting a ‘Page Not Found’ error.”

Frustrated, I decided to call the Tech-support Cooperative of the People’s International Proletariat (TCPIP).  Karl picked up the phone.  As I related my conversation with Ayn, Karl doubled over with laughter. “You mean you actually believe they want it to work?”

“Who exactly is the ‘they’ we’re talking about?”

“All of them — the service providers, the government, even the academics who designed the Internet in the first place.  We’ve amassed mountains of evidence that they’re all conspiring to keep the Internet broken, in order to force people like you to sign up for expensive, exploitative ‘solutions’ — solutions no one would ever agree to under normal circumstances!  Won’t you join us this weekend? We’re going to carouse around some rich neighborhoods and slice their fiber-optic cables.  Maybe the fatcats will finally get it, once their precious Internet connections work exactly as well as ours do…”

“To be honest, I really just wanted to check my email and blog comments.”

“This is not about the individual; it’s about the community!  There can be no truly reliable connections until the Internet as a whole has been demolished and rebuilt from scratch, until we’ve established a new social order on this planet where everyone is responsible for everyone else being able to get online…”

“Until the millennium comes, can you put me in touch with someone who specializes in fixing Internet connections now?”

“Traitors!  Don’t you see Internet access has to get much, much worse before it can get better?  That fixing your connection would just be a ruse to lull you into complacency and dim your justified anger?”

So what did I end up doing?  Well, until my connection starts working again, I found this unsecured wireless in my apartment building that I’m sometimes able to leech off of, as well as a nearby cafe that offers free wireless from 10 to 4 on weekdays.  And when all else fails I use my Blackberry, pecking out emails on the microscopic keyboard (though that connection, too, has become finicky lately).

I talked again this morning to Ayn and Karl, and they completely agreed with each other that I was beyond hope.  By focusing so obsessively on “fixing” a “problem,” they explained, I’d become distracted from the real goal: namely, comprehending a universal principle that explained why my Internet access wasn’t working, as well as every other question that I might ever want an answer to.  Maybe they’re right.  All I know is, at least for now I can usually get my email when I have to.

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