Author Archives: Larry Franz

Evolution Of A Sunset

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According to Wikipedia, “Barnegat Bay is a small brackish arm of the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 30 miles long, along the coast of Ocean County, New Jersey”. That doesn’t sound very inviting, but a talented photographer can make of it something like this.

(Note: the images look a bit sharper on Denise Bush’s blog, so please click on the link below, where you can also see some other views of the Garden State — which I don’t find uninviting at all! It was the “small brackish arm” that got me.)

denisebushphoto's avatarDenise Bush's Photo Blog

As the sun lowered itself past the horizon a peaceful calm came over the bay. I could hear the sea birds and waterfowl calling to one another while settling in for the night. The sun painted the sky with a beautiful pastel gradient of color that deepened with every second. I used my 6-stop neutral density filter to lengthen my exposures and capture the passing of time. At the end of the light show the sky glowed with a brilliant warm red that made the scene seem surreal before passing into the night.

Sunset On The Bay I ‘Sunset On The Bay I’ © Denise Bush

Sunset On The Bay II ‘Sunset On The Bay II’ © Denise Bush

Sunset On The Bay III ‘Sunset On The Bay III’ © Denise Bush

Sunset On The Bay IV ‘Sunset On The Bay IV’ © Denise Bush

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Being Paid What You’re Worth

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Robert Reich is an economist who was Secretary of Labor in the 90s and is now a Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He’s also a blogger who knows what he’s talking about (unlike some of us). I doubt he would mind this extended quote from RobertReich.org:

“Paid-what-you’re-worth” is a dangerous myth.

Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today’s dollars. Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart workers earns $8.80 an hour.

Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four times what today’s typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. Yes, that GM worker helped produce cars rather than retail sales. But he wasn’t much better educated or even that much more productive. He often hadn’t graduated from high school. And he worked on a slow-moving assembly line. Today’s Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets — mobile inventory controls, instant checkout devices, retail search engines — making him or her quite productive.

The real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they’d be unionized if they didn’t come close to matching the union contracts.

Today’s Walmart workers don’t have a union to negotiate a better deal. They’re on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, non-union employers across America don’t have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom.

By the same token, today’s CEOs don’t rake in 300 times the pay of average workers because they’re “worth” it. They get these humongous pay packages because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide executive pay. Or their boards don’t want to be seen by investors as having hired a “second-string” CEO who’s paid less than the CEOs of their major competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top.

Professor Reich doesn’t say anything about the effects of globalization in this post, but it’s obviously a factor. Our economic bottom isn’t in West Virginia or Mississippi anymore, it’s in Guatemala and Bangladesh. Even so, a strong labor movement would help slow down the race to the bottom and to the top.

There’s a question worth asking, however: Would it be better from an ethical point of view if workers in places like Guatemala were paid more at the cost of American workers being paid less? In other words, are we in rich countries automatically entitled to a better standard of living than people in poor countries? After all, for a worker in Guatemala, our race to the bottom is his or her race to the middle. If work can be performed just as well but more cheaply in Guatemala, why should it be performed in California?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Although it’s clear we should slow down the race to the very top (it’s gotten completely ridiculous), I’m not sure what should be done for the rest of us. Maybe the answer is to provide a reasonable minimum income for those of us in the rich countries, while doing more to improve the lives of those at the bottom. 

Update:

For example, as suggested here:  Considering a No-Strings-Attached Basic Income for All Americans

Libertarianism Again

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While writing about libertarianism a few weeks ago, I came across a 2011 article at Slate by Stephen Metcalf called “The Liberty Scam”. Its subtitle is “Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired”. Having finally gotten around to reading it, I highly recommend the article if you’ve ever considered yourself an economic libertarian or tried to argue with one. Or if you have an interest in politics or the recent history of ideas.

Metcalf points out that modern, generally right-wing economic libertarianism relies on a very selective view of capitalism. In particular, Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain argument equates all economic activity with the special case of an extremely talented basketball player who can negotiate a stratospheric salary. Nozick claimed that someone like Wilt Chamberlain should be able to negotiate whatever salary the market will bear, and that forcing Chamberlain to pay taxes in order to benefit other people is forced labor (“Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?”). The rest of us, presumably, are a lot like Wilt Chamberlain.

After demolishing the Chamberlain argument and briefly explaining why Nozick came to appreciate that society is more than a random collection of individuals, Metcalf tries to explain why someone as thoughtful as Robert Nozick would make the arguments he did. Metcalf’s theory is that in 1970, when Nozick published Anarchy, State and Utopia, America and places like Harvard had benefited from decades of enormous government investment:

The GI Bill was on its way to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had spent on research before the war.

As a result, members of the academic elite, including Harvard professors, were sharing in the general economic prosperity, even if their salaries hadn’t matched Wilt Chamberlain’s. Unfortunately for their bank accounts, however, tax rates were much higher than today. In 1969, when Nozick was writing his classic book, the highest federal tax rate was 77%, almost twice what it is now. It’s no wonder that Nozick saw virtue in a political ideology that considers taxation beyond the bare minimum a kind of theft:

By allowing for the enormous rise in (relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar professions, Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which professionals turned against Keynesianism…. Many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated protections from the marketplace but the result of their own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a free market for labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out [the liberal philosophy of John] Rawls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchy a surprise best-seller. It helped make Ronald Reagan president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the public good.

One day the tide will turn (maybe). In the meantime, I was going to sum up with that well-known quote to the effect that we in the modern world are ignorantly walking in the footsteps of some obscure academic of the past, but couldn’t find the damn quotation (clearly, search engines haven’t got artificial intelligence quite yet). So I decided to go with a remark attributed, probably incorrectly, to Abraham Lincoln:

The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

But while writing the previous paragraph, a key word popped into my head, namely, “scribbler”, which is the term John Maynard Keynes used when he wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 35 years before Robert Nozick wrote Anarchy, State and Utopia:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back….Sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

How the Universe Got Big

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A team of radio astronomers, working in Antarctica, where the air is clear and dry, have found the first direct evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation. That’s the theory about the origin of the universe first stated by the physicist Alan Guth in 1980.

Here’s some background from an article Guth wrote in 1997 for Beam Line, the magazine of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory):

Although it is called the “Big Bang theory,” it is not really the theory of a bang at all. It is only the theory of the aftermath of a bang. It elegantly describes how the early Universe expanded and cooled, and how matter clumped to form galaxies and stars. But the theory says nothing about the underlying physics of the primordial explosion. It gives not even a clue about what banged, what caused it to bang, or what happened before it banged. The inflationary universe theory, on the other hand, is a description of the bang itself, and provides plausible answers to these questions and more.

Guth explains that in order for the universe we observe to have begun with a Big Bang, the early universe must have been extremely uniform and have had a precise density. However:

The classical form of the Big Bang theory requires us to postulate, without explanation, that the primordial fireball filled space from the beginning. The temperature was the same everywhere by assumption, not as a consequence of any physical process….

[In addition] the initial values of the [universe’s] mass density and expansion rate are not predicted by the theory, but must be postulated. Unless we postulate that the mass density at one second just happened to have a value between 0.999999999999999 and 1.000000000000001 times the critical density [the boundary value between a universe that will expand forever and one that will eventually collapse], the Big Bang theory will not describe a universe that resembles the one in which we live…

Although the properties of the Big Bang are very special, we now know that the laws of physics provide a mechanism that produces exactly this sort of a bang. The mechanism is known as cosmic inflation.

The National Accelerator Laboratory issued a press release today:

Instead of the universe beginning as a rapidly expanding fireball, Guth theorized that the universe inflated extremely rapidly [faster than the speed of light] from a tiny piece of space and became exponentially larger in a fraction of a second.

For inflation to occur, the universe must have been in a state that allowed a sudden change to release enormous energy, creating an expanding universe almost from nothing. The process was apparently a kind of delayed phase transition, as when water is supercooled below its natural freezing point and then, because of some disturbance, suddenly freezes, generating heat.

However, as Guth immediately realized, certain predictions in his scenario contradicted observational data. In the early 1980s, Russian physicist Andrei Linde modified [the theory so that it] generated predictions that closely matched actual observations of the sky.

The new observations reported today are the first evidence of the existence of gravity waves. These are ripples in spacetime originally predicted by Albert Einstein. The radio astronomers working in Antarctica found traces of these ancient gravity waves by analyzing the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Andre Linde reacted to the news: “These results are a smoking gun for inflation, because alternative theories do not predict such a signal. This is something I have been hoping to see for 30 years.”

Future Nobel Prize-winner Alan Guth offered this summary in 1997:

While it may be too early to say that inflation is proved, I claim that the case for inflation is compelling. It is hard to even conceive of an alternative theory that could explain the basic features of the observed Universe. Not only does inflation produce just the kind of special bang that matches the observed Universe, but quantum fluctuations during inflation could have produced non-uniformities which served as the seeds of cosmic structure [in particular, the existence of galaxies].

Physicists doubted whether Guth’s theory would ever be proven. With today’s announcement, cosmic inflation is a big step closer to becoming settled science.