The magical straight line of U.S. GDP growth...

This is really absolutely my new favorite graph. One of the primary columns of the conservative movement of the last forty or so years has been the supposedly deadening effect that high tax rates have on gdp growth. This graph really puts a stake in all of that. I'm no expert on the history of tax law, but I do know that things have changed massively in the period of time that this graph represents. Yet, this is essentially a straight line. Yes, there is one huge bump, but that is obviously not related to tax policy, and it looks as though there is a slight overall increase in the growth rate over time, but that's more attributable to America's stability and standing in the world improving.

I would pay a good statistician in beer to superimpose on this graph changes in tax rates over time, as well as the Gini coefficient (or some more relavent indicator economic equality). I suspect that we would find that tax rates have next to nothing to do with gdp growth, and everything to do with income equality.

Teddy Kennedy

I found myself weirdly affected yesterday by the death of Ted Kennedy. I am not really a sentimental person, and am too young to have a strong affinity for the Kennedy's in general (though I grew up a stone's throw from the birthplace of Pres. Kennedy). However, with the health care debate raging on in an abject clusterfuck of meaningless rhetoric, I was saddened at the loss of someone who not only cared, but would have spoke on the actual purpose of this health care bill. Providing health care for the poor. Simple as that folks. Ensuring that people who can not afford medical care get cared for anyway.

That, ultimately is what liberalism is supposed to be about, right? A society where no one is allowed to starve, freeze, or die of illness because they didn't have the good fortune to be, well, born a Kennedy? I understand conservatives who say that it's not that simple, that it's not easy, and that you can cause more problems then you solve through careless action, but can't we all agree that that should be the goal? I do worry that in our era of media and money politics the idea of a just society has been discarded in favor of bottom line utilitarianism, and so it saddens me that one of it's bearers has passed.

Infinite Jest...

I was listening this morning to a oldish Bloggingheads.tv episode between the Conors, Clarke and Friedersdorf. There's some interesting stuff in there, particularly Clarke's argument about eliminating summer vacation, which I'm not a 100% sure what I think of, though Friedersdorf's response was uncharacteristicly irrelevent.

Really though, the bit that I want to comment on came right at the beginning where Conor Clarke was talking about his issue with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. His complaint, essentially, was that he is not a fan of books that try to be overly difficult and disorienting at the expense of being readable and enjoyable, and I don't think that that's wrong. However, I do think that he kin da' misses the point.

The main character in the book (or at least the character which I think the gist of the book is organized around), Hal Incandenza, is introduced in the beginning of the book as, at least to my interpretation, as having lost his mind in a fairly peculiar way. Throughout the book we see him slowly slipping, for various reasons, in to increasingly obsessive, monomaniacal, recursive thinking. Simply put, I think that it is Hal's insanity that the narrative is really meant to mimic and convey to the reader not just in words, but by actually approximating that insanity in them. In that sense, the thing that Conor finds somewhat grating is a key element of the book. Now, that's not to say that you can't find it grating as well, but I think it's worthwhile to understand that there is a reason why the book is written as insanely as it is.

What's that? Link to myself on someone else's blog?

This has my inner geek fanboy all excited...

Yeah, not so much with the frequency...

Ok, so I'm going to take another crack at this... Starting with a response to a something I read this morning.

1. At PEA Soup this morning I found a rather bizarre argument, apparently found in a book by one Dan Benatar, which suggested that it would be better to never have existed at all. It is as follows:

(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
So far, pleasure and pain are symmetrical in their goodness and badness. But they are not symmetrical with respect to their absence. More specifically:
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, but
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody (an actual somebody) who is deprived by its absence.

The idea here being that there is an asymmetry between the two states, existence and non-existence, whereby non-existence contains some good (absence of pain) and no bad, whereas existence contains both good (pleasure) and bad (pain).

Now, it is entirely likely that the book being referenced here is substantially more nuanced than the argument being presented here. That said, this line of reasoning is so bad that I think it's worth dismantling whatever its significance. Let's start from the beginning: the presence of pleasure is good, the presence of pain is bad. How good? How bad? How much pleasure is there? How much pain? Is some pleasure qualitatively more intensely good than other pleasure? Likewise with pain? And I could easily go on in this basic line. In another direction, I'm tempted to ask why it is that we're so certain that pleasure is good and pain is bad in absolute terms. I know that from the apparently hedonistic viewpoint of this line of reasoning this is the same as to ask why we're so sure that good is good, and bad is bad, but nevertheless... At any rate, to blanket this by saying that there is a symmetry between good and bad in existence is maddeningly simple-minded.

Really though, I've buried that lead a bit here, because far and away the craziest bit is what goes completely unmentioned and unchallenged in the post I linked to above. Why the hell is the absence of pain good, even if no one experiences it, while the absence of pleasure is not bad? This is, basically, the crux of the entire argument and I can think of no sufficient explanation. It seems to substantially devalue pleasure.

I think it might be instructive to monetize this question. Let's say that the possession of money is, for the sake of this hypothetical, good. Further, the absence of money, and the obligation to pay someone money (debt) is bad. Certainly, it is the case that the absence of debt is good, we can agree on that. However, I think we can also agree that the absence of money, even paired with the absence of debt, is decidedly bad. The resulting neutral state (non-existence, for those not quite following the analogy) is therefore both good (absence of debt) and bad (absence of money) in equal measure. If you disagree, just try it some time, being broke, even in the absence of debt is decidedly bad.

Anyway, goofy argument, probably not worth that many words, but it's rare that I see something quite so retarded taken seriously, so there you go.