Liquidity

The Bank of Japan prints Yen, so the Yen falls against the Singapore dollar, so it's cheap to fill my fridge with Asahi and have a party! Germans take note: the role of central banks is to provide cold smooth delicious liquidity.

When my head of department came to the party, he remarked that this was less like taking advantage of a sale and more like commodities trading.

Chuck Schumer would be a nuclear disaster as Senate Democratic Leader

A few months ago, some lobbyists told me that Chuck Schumer was likely to become Senate Democratic Leader after Harry Reid steps down. This had me deeply disappointed. A lot of Schumer's rise to the leadership has involved getting money from Wall Street (his home state is New York) and using it to buy power within the Democratic Party. But it didn't look like there was any way to stop his rise. I'm generally a look-on-the-bright-side kind of guy, so I tried to content myself with the thought that we might make progress on other issues by using his ill-gotten money to maintain control of the Senate, even if he blocked financial regulation and higher taxes on the financial sector. It didn't really work -- those issues are important.

Now he's announced that he's going to vote against President Obama's astoundingly good Iran treaty. And he's spreading misinformation that originated on Fox News and other right-wing media sites against the treaty. His claim that "you have to wait 24 days before you can inspect" is highly inaccurate -- there are lots of ways for inspections to happen faster than 24 days even if Iran doesn't want them to, and if Iran tries to delay the inspections repeatedly, there are mechanisms for the international community to reimpose sanctions. As arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis writes,

Some of us might think it’s good that the agreement puts defined limits on how much Iran can stall and explicitly prohibits a long list of weaponization activities. Opponents, like Schumer — apparently for want of anything better — have seized on these details to spin them into objections. A weaker, less detailed agreement might have been easier to defend against this sort of attack, perhaps. 

... The claim that inspections occur with a 24-day delay is the equivalent of Obamacare "death panels." Remember those? A minor detail has been twisted into a bizarre caricature and repeated over and over until it becomes "true."

This treaty isn't just important for eliminating the threat that Iran will use nuclear weapons -- it's important for preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East where nations like Saudi Arabia build nuclear weapons to deter Iran. In such an unstable region, the fall of a nuclear-armed state could easily put nuclear arms in the hands of some people who could do a great deal of harm. Perhaps Schumer's solution to those problems will be along the lines of his 2002 vote of support for the Iraq War. (Hillary Clinton, who also voted for the Iraq War, supports the Iran nuclear treaty.)

Fortunately, the Democratic wing of the Democratic party is mobilizing against his ascension to the party leadership. I don't know whether they'll be able to stop him, as he looked certain to succeed Harry Reid until recently. But it matters a great deal, and I'm more confident in the need to keep Schumer out of the leadership than in my opinions on the Democratic primary. I'll explain why.

I think Bernie Sanders has a small but real chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary. If both sides play perfectly, she wins by coming out with enough interesting left-wing policy that she doesn't alienate the Democratic primary electorate on substantive issues, and electability issues and her enormous funding put her over the top. But campaigns don't always do a perfect job, and she fails to make reasonable-looking leftward moves, she could lose. Obviously we need to see a lot more general election polling to figure out whether Sanders could defeat Walker or Bush or (this probably won't happen, but...) Trump in a general election, but if the polling doesn't make a good case for Sanders, I can see a lot of Democrats being worried about whether he can win when the time comes. And it's so terrifying to imagine a national version of what Scott Walker did to Wisconsin that it could be a rational decision to play it safe with Hillary rather than going for the big risk/reward with Sanders.

But set all that aside. Suppose we're watching a Bernie Sanders inauguration in January 2017, and we have a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress! This would be an utterly spectacular outcome. You'd expect awesome legislation to follow. Except it turns out that Bernie can't get meaningful financial regulation through Congress, and also can't make progress on a variety of foreign policy issues, because Schumer is obstructing financial regulation and peace in the Middle East as Senate Majority Leader. As far as I can tell, this is what ends up happening in a Sanders administration, if the Schumer ascension goes through as planned and the Senate is in the hands of someone more conservative than Hillary Clinton with oceans of Wall Street money behind him. And that's why it's so important -- perhaps more important than the Clinton/Sanders primary -- that Schumer be stopped. 

The 10 most harmful jobs

My friends at 80,000 Hours try to calculate what the most socially beneficial jobs are, for career advising purposes. The site is called 80,000 Hours because that's the amount of time the average person spends on work over their lifetime. 

They recently put up a post about the 10 most harmful jobs. The list includes weapons research, tax minimization for super-rich people, and patent trolling. (These and the others strike me as sensible choices.) Also interesting is their discussion of jobs that they considered but didn't put on the list.

Singapore's government built transit infrastructure, and the infrastructure built Singapore

Today is the 50th anniversary of Singapore's founding, and a day of massive celebration. As part of the festivities, everyone gets free rides on public transit today. The government keeps buses and subways very cheap here by any other First World city's standards, so it doesn't make much of a difference. You can go from one end of the island to the other on the subway for under 2 US dollars, with shorter journeys under $1. But it's been fun to watch people board city buses and smile a little about getting something literally for free.

Western media sometimes describes Singapore as having a fundamentally capitalist economy. I wish they'd tell people that everyone rides elephants to work here instead. That would be equally false, but much more entertaining. From transit to health care to food to housing, the best things about this island have been built with a great deal of government involvement and planning -- often at levels unheard of in the US. Going into detail about health care, food, and housing (80% of Singaporeans live in government-owned public housing!) would prevent me from watching National Day festivities with my friends and drinking whiskey, so I'll just talk about transit for now.

Public transit systems everywhere are government projects, and Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit system (the subway) is no different. As far as I can tell, the hero of the MRT was a Minister named Ong Teng Cheong, who convinced the government to spend billions of dollars building it in the early 1980s. Here's Mr. Ong at the time, talking about what was to come:

"this is going to be the most expensive single project to be undertaken in Singapore. The last thing that we want to do is to squander away our hard-earned reserves and leave behind enormous debt for our children and our grandchildren. Now since we are sure that this is not going to be the case, we'll proceed with the MRT, and the MRT will usher in a new phase in Singapore's development and bring about a better life for all of us."

I also like his quote about positive externalities:

"the Government has now taken a firm decision to build the MRT. The MRT is much more than a transport investment, and must be viewed in its wider economic perspective. The boost it'll provide to long term investors' confidence, the multiplier effect and how MRT will lead to the enhancement of the intrinsic value of Singapore's real estate are spin-offs that cannot be ignored."

That's what happens when you build good transit. Lots of the stuff around major transit nodes becomes much more valuable, because people can easily access it and interact with it in positive-sum ways. They say that the three most important determiners of real estate values are location, location, and location. By building good transit, you can put huge immobile structures in a better location! Who knew that you could do that? Well, Mr. Ong did, and he made it a focus of Singaporean government policy.

If anyone wants to see a map of the MRT system, here it is in all its interconnected subway glory:

There's basically no way to get everyone where they're going in this place with cars. The island is basically 20 miles east-west and 15 miles north-south with 5-6 million people, so if everyone had a car you'd probably have to pave the entire island for them to get anywhere. That's why Singapore imposes car taxes of epic proportions. To buy a car, you have to pay a tax that's usually around 100% of the car's value. On top of that, you have to buy a "Certificate of Entitlement" to own the car for ten years, and those usually go over $50K apiece in USD. In the end, owning a Toyota Prius will cost you over a hundred thousand US dollars. The government rakes in the revenue from rich people who have lots of money to blow on cars, and then pours it back out into building transit for people who don't have cars.

I'd say that Singaporean transit is every US lefty urban planner's dream come true, but that isn't quite accurate. Their wildest dreams fall far short of the Singaporean reality. 

Lady Lamb, "Billions of Eyes" + Ibn Battuta

I've spent a lot of time on the road this year, and now I'm back in Singapore. At the end of my journey I was listening to a lot of Lady Lamb, and particularly Billions of Eyes, which has a lot of travel-related lyrics. And really there's a lot of lyrics -- I admire how Aly Spaltro just packs a lot of her songs full of as much nonrepetitive lyrical content as she can.

The kind of high I like is when I barely make the train
And the people with a seat smile big at me because they know the feeling
And for a millisecond we share a look like a family does
Like we have inside jokes
Like we could call each other by little nicknames

I think I've started smiling at strangers a little more often when something like this happens and I feel like smiling at them. Anyway, this video has the lyrics. "It's June where you sleep, July where I land" was one of the travel lines that really resonated with me.
Ibn Battuta was one of the great travelers of the medieval world, visiting places from West Africa to Sumatra in the 1300s. He describes how he left Morocco to visit Mecca in the beginning of his travels:

I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveller in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose part I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.

I like this line he wrote at the end about his life:

I have indeed—praise be to God—attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the Earth

The Killers, "Spaceman" + Nixon's Moon disaster speech

"Spaceman" sounds like a thoughtful reflection on having been abducted by aliens, set to a fun poppy beat. There's one or two Killers songs I really like per album, and this is my favorite on Day & Age.

Before the moon landing, speechwriter William Safire wrote a stirring speech for President Richard Nixon to give if something went wrong and the astronauts weren't able to return to Earth. Here it is:

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. 

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. 

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. 

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. 

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. 

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. 

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind. 

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT:
The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be. 

AFTER THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:
A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to "the deepest of the deep," concluding with the Lord's Prayer.

I like xkcd's suggestions for speeches Nixon could have given in other unfortunate scenarios, including "IN EVENT ASTRONAUTS ABSCOND WITH SPACECRAFT".

The Iran deal and Democratic foreign policy

The Obama administration's deal with Iran looks excellent. Iran gets relief from international economic sanctions in exchange for sharply limiting its ability to make a nuclear weapon. It has to give up most of its uranium-enriching centrifuges, including the newer and better ones. It's forbidden from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels, and has to give up 97% of the enriched uranium it has now.

After these concessions, the fastest Iran could make a nuclear warhead if it went all-out will grow from three months to a year. And that's if Iran did so and everything worked out, both of which are significant assumptions. Nuclear nonproliferation expert Aaron Stein says, "The intention of this agreement is to take the weapons option off the table for the next 25 years, and the agreement does that." Nancy Pelosi has pledged Democratic support for the deal in the House, and it looks certain to pass.

Republicans aren't happy. Scott Walker (whom I see as the most likely Republican nominee, just ahead of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio) pledges to "terminate the bad deal with Iran on the very first day in office, put in place crippling sanctions and convince our allies to do the same", and muses about ordering airstrikes on his first day in office. The National Review is putting up photos of Neville Chamberlain and decrying appeasement, as if Iran were the country in these negotiations that had carried out the most recent invasion in the region. Fortunately, restarting international sanctions against Iran is going to be really hard for a future president -- Walker isn't going to have an easy time getting China and Russia to sign on. But the noises he and the other Republicans are making, in line with John McCain singing "Bomb Bomb Iran" as a parody of "Barbara Ann" eight years ago, tell you a lot about how they can be expected to approach similar foreign policy issues in the future.

This is one of my favorite aspects of Democratic foreign policy, and foreign policy as practiced by sensible people everywhere: a recognition that international agreements can help us avoid negative-sum conflicts and promote positive-sum cooperation. Meanwhile, it's no surprise that a Republican party known for its negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities would approach foreigners of other races with suspicion and hostility that often leads to massive wars. Agreements like this are the path to a more peaceful world, and anyone who wants peace has reason to hope Democrats win elections.

Wolf Parade, "Yulia" + "Tell Detroit that I thank them"

This is Wolf Parade's "Yulia", sung by a Soviet cosmonaut to his beloved on Earth as he's lost in space on a failed mission. Dan Boeckner writes haunting love songs set around the former USSR, and here are the last lines of this one:

So when they turn the cameras on you
Baby please don't speak of me
Point up to the dark above you
As they edit me from history
I'm 20 million miles from a comfortable home
And space is very cold
Yulia
There's nothing out here nothing out here nothing out
nothing out here nothing out here there's nothing out here
nothing nothing out here nothing out here nothing nothing out

While I'm on a former USSR kick -- somebody wrote this in a discussion of World War II tank battles, and it's beautiful:

While swimming on a beach in the river flowing through Krasnodar, in southern Russia, another American student and I struck up a conversation with an old, scarred man. He was surprised to find that not only were we foreigners, but Americans. He asked where we were from and I replied, “Have you ever heard of Detroit?” His eyes welled up and he started to cry, then he grabbed me in a strong embrace and said, “In the Great Patriotic War, Detroit gave me a tank with which I killed many German fascists. Tell Detroit that I thank them.”

"Zarathustra's Metaethics" accepted by the Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Twenty years ago I found my Dad's old copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and it made me a philosopher. It introduced me to the philosophical question I care about most: does a naturalistic picture of the world include moral value? The book can make young readers less inhibited about wholeheartedly pursuing what they love, and it did that to me too. I stopped aiming to become a scientist and switched to philosophy, despite standard concerns about my future job prospects.

I'm delighted to announce that "Zarathustra's Metaethics" will soon appear in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. The first half of the paper argues that while Nietzsche is an error theorist about morality, he tells us to pursue a nonmoral and subjective kind of value that our passions confer on their objects. This subjectivism is most beautifully expressed by his title character Zarathustra when telling us how to speak of what we value:

"This is my good; this I love; it pleases me wholly; thus alone do I want the good. I do not want it as divine law; I do not want it as human statute and need: it shall not be a signpost for me to overearths and paradises. It is an earthly virtue that I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all the reason of all men. But this bird built its nest within me, therefore I love and caress it; now it dwells with me, sitting on its golden eggs."

The second half of the paper derives Nietzsche's conception of virtue from subjectivism. I start with Thomas Hurka's account of how value relates to virtue: desiring the good and being averse to the bad are virtuous, while desiring the bad and being averse to the good are vicious. If we see desire (D) and goodness (G) as positively valenced, and aversion (A) and badness (B) as negatively valenced, a multiplicative relationship emerges -- two negatives (aversion and badness) multiply into a positive (virtue), while one positive and one negative multiply into a negative (vice). Considering these attitudes for each object and summing over all objects gives us the following formula for someone's net virtue (their positive virtue minus their vice):

Σ (D x G + A x B) - (D x B + A x G)

Nietzsche's subjectivism entails that all things are good insofar as they're desired, and bad insofar as we're averse to them. So we can substitute the G's for D's, and the B's for A's. This gives us:

Σ D² + A² - 2DA

So virtue is having strong and focused passions, making the first two terms big; and not having both desire and aversion to the same thing as self-denying ascetics do, which would make the last term a big negative. Section 2.1 goes through this slowly, so please look there if you're interested. It's an unusual view of virtue, but the rest of part 2 shows how it fits the unusual things Zarathustra says, and gives us a picture of the Overman as the person with supremely strong and unified passions.

The paper was rejected 13 times. Some referee comments improved the paper, but I also learned the hard way that some Nietzsche scholars don't like math. After my harsh review of a famous scholar's Nietzsche book, I also got some rejections with weird ad hominems. But that's just how it goes. Zarathustra told me to overcome stuff.

I've tried to write the paper in language my teenage self could understand. I'm grateful to the book for what it did to me, and now I can make some of its most beautiful ideas more accessible.

Decemberists / Laura Viers, "Yankee Bayonet" + Peter Menzies Symposium

This week's song is "Yankee Bayonet" by the Decemberists and Laura Viers -- a duet about a much-beloved dead person. Unusually for these things, the dead person is singing.

Last week I was in Sydney at the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference. Helen Beebee and Rachael Briggs presented the best plenary address I'd ever heard at a conference, on Peter Menzies' approach to interventionist causal modeling and its connection to the free will debate. I came to the conference not knowing anything about interventionism (Phil Dowe gave a helpful talk that got me started, but it went in another direction). Helen and Rachel took me from nearly zero to getting a handle on the debate over whether interventionist approaches would help solve problems related to free will. I'd been wanting to learn more about Helen Steward's views to see if they opposed to my Humean project, and it was exciting to see a talk begin with views about causation and take me there.

Peter Menzies passed away this year. I never got to meet him, but now I've met some of his work. As I left their talk, I thought to myself -- if I should meet an untimely end, I hope people like Helen and Rachael will do something like that for me.