All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

Most of what I really need to know  about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.  Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School.  These are the things I learned:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Be aware of wonder.

– Robert Fulghum

Fallacy of Public Works for “Providing Employment”

Suppose the government decides to build a bridge.   There can be no objection to building the bridge if it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble, if, in short, it is even more necessary to the taxpayers collectively than the things for which they would have individually spent their money if it had not been taxed away from them.But a bridge built primarily to “provide employment” is a different kind of bridge.  When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. “Projects” have to be invented.  Instead of thinking only of where bridges must be built, the government spenders begin to ask themselves where bridges can be built.

Two arguments are put forward for the bridge, one of which is mainly heard before it is built, the other of which is mainly heard after it has been completed.  The first argument is that it will provide employment.  It will provide, say, 500 jobs for a year.  The implication is that these are jobs that would not otherwise have come into existence.

This is what is immediately seen.  A different picture presents itself if we have trained ourselves to look beyond the immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected.  It is true that a particular group of bridgeworkers may receive more employment than otherwise.  But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes.  For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers.  If the bridge costs $10 million the taxpayers will lose $10 million.  They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on things they need most.

For every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.

We can see the men employed on the bridge.  We can watch them at work.  The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing.  But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence.  They are jobs destroyed by the $10 million taken away from the taxpayers.  All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project.  More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers.

But then we come to the second argument.  The bridge exists.  It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not ugly bridge.  It has come into being through the magic of government spending.  The country is richer.

Here again the government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes.  They can see the bridge.  But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of the imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence.  They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and washing machines, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the ungrown and unsold foodstuffs.

What has happened is merely that one (unnecessary) thing has been created instead of other (necessary) thingss.

– Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Television versus the Printed Page

“Television is dramatic. It appeals to the emotions. It captures your attention. However, the printed page is a more effective instrument for both education and persuasion. The authors of a book can explore issues deeply - without being limited by the ticking clock. The reader can stop and think, turn the pages back without being diverted by the emotional appeal of the scenes moving relentlessly across his television screen.”

- Free to Choose by Milton Friedman

Scientific Integrity

At a commencement address in 1974 Richard Feynman spoke about scientific integrity [1]. His words ring as true today as they did then. I have extracted some particularly relevant passages:

“… scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”

“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.”

“In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. “

“The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will–including Wesson oil.”

“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right … although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work.”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”

“I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is … bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.”

[1] http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

Enhancing Productivity by a Division of Labor

Maximum productivity is achieved when a task is divided up into sub-tasks and individuals specialize in a sub-task.

Consider the task of making a pin.  This task can be broken up into these 10 sub-tasks:

1. One person draws out the wire.

2. Another straightens it.

3. A third cuts it.

4. A fourth points it.

5. A fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.

6., 7., 8. Making the head requires two or three operations.

9. Putting on the head is a peculiar business.

10. To whiten the pins is another.

A person performing all these sub-tasks could make perhaps 20 pins in a day.  Thus 10 persons produce 200 pins in a day.

When each person performs only one sub-task, the 10 persons working together can collectively produce 48,000 pins in a day.  By dividing up the labor there is a 250-fold increase in productivity.

– Extracted from Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Fallacy of Destruction as an Economic Advantage

A young hoodlum heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies.

After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier (window maker).

As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Two hundred and fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles.

The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.

Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. But the shopkeeper will be out $250 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent luxury or need). Instead of having a window and $250 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit.

If we think of the baker as part of a community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.

The glazier’s gain in business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten about the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.

Thus we see the fallacy of destruction as an economic advantage. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid this fallacy after a few moment’s thought. Yet this fallacy, under a hundred different disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is solemly reaffirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio and television commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities.

– Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Imagine a World without Periodicity

Definition: an event is periodic if there are successive events so analogous to each other that they may be termed recurrences of the same event.

Imagine a world in which there are no periodic events.

There would be no concept of a day or a month or a year.

The whole conception of experience as a guide to conduct would be absent.

There would be no heartbeat, no breathe.

There would be no seasons, no tides, no phases of the moon.

We may be able to identify sequences of events, e.g. A occurred before B which occurred before C, but we would not be able to measure the time between events because time is intimately dependent on periodicity.

Periodicity is fundamental to our conception of life.

We cannot imagine a course of nature in which, as events progresses, we should be unable to say: “This has happened before.”

– The above is extracted from a book by Alfred Whitehead North

P.S. There is a book called Flatlander, which describes a world in which there is no third dimension.  It would be fascinating, I think, to write a book which describes a world in which there is no periodicity.  What would be the title of such a book?

Knowledge for its Own Sake

“No more impressive warning can be given to those who would confine knowledge and research to what is apparently useful, than the reflection that conic sections were studied for eighteen hundred years merely as an abstract science, without a thought of any utility other than to satisfy the craving for knowledge on the part of mathematicians, and that then at the end of this long period of abstract study, they were found to be the necessary key with which to attain the knowledge of one of the most important laws of nature: the law of planetary motion.”

– Alfred North Whitehead

Every man reads one book in his life …

“Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this one is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair.”

– White in The New Yorker, May 23, 1953

It takes years of training to think simply

It takes years of training to think simply.

The ultimate ideas of mathematics are very simple, almost childishly so.
We are not used to thinking about such simple abstract things, and a long training is necessary to secure even a partial immunity from error as soon as we diverge from the beaten path of thought.

– Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics