Facing down a fear

Recently I decided to tackle one of my demons head on.  I went to New York for a drawing course that lasted all day for five days.

Previously, my drawing ability had been close to, or maybe less than, zero.  In the 1960s, when my grade school teacher saw that I was unable to stay within the lines while coloring, she gently recommended that I focus on reading and writing rather than pursue art.  A couple decades later, a former girlfriend used to roll in the aisles when I tried to play Pictionary (a game that requires you to "draw" clues).

To make matters worse, my older brother and uncle are excellent artists who can conjure beautifully rendered objects seemingly from thin air.

Some friends encouraged me to take a weekly 2-hour class at a local art school or gallery.  But I knew that I would not stick with that.  So I signed up for a sort of voluntary incarceration with Brian Bomseiler.  It was very difficult mentally and emotionally for many of us in the class.  Brian said one day when we were struggling with drawing faces: "Now you understand why van Gogh cut off one of his ears!"

I am happy to report that, in the end, we all made huge progress.  Brian taught us some straightforward but effective techniques.  More powerfully, I think, was learning to see differently - especially shadows and light and texture.  That new way of seeing has broad implications in life, I expect.

I would never in a million years normally do the following.  But fully vanquishing my fear of drawing (and of my grade school teacher) requires me to put two ofmy drawings out there.  The first is my "before" self-portrait, done on the first day.  The second is my "after" drawing from Day 5.

Day 1

Day 5

I am in no danger of being asked to exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery any time soon.  But I am happy with my progress nonetheless.  (You can see other students' progress here.)


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He can have whatever he wants

I met this woman early one morning last summer at the Starbucks near our office.  She walked up with her huge, hobbling dog, handed me the leash, went inside, came back out a few minutes later, and fed him a maple scone.  She told me that he is seventeen years old and loves scones, so she gets him one every day.  "At his age, he can have whatever he wants," she told me.  I have not seen her recently and wonder whether her dog has died.

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Substance over Form

Only small NGOs it seems are able to actually get out in the field and get their hands dirty making things happen. Past a certain size (what is that size?) the demands for official looking papers, reports, audits and the like overshadow the demand to actually provide aid. Large donors are just too caught up in the appearance of good business and good government. Form without substance.

That is by Scott MacLennan over on Bill Easterly's Aid Watch blog.  Read his short post - it captures well the underlying rationale for GlobalGiving.


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As goes the NY Times, so goes the World Bank?

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. 

In this piece, Clay Shirky discusses Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and draws parallels with the revolution facing the newspaper industry.  But he could just as well have been talking about the revolution facing the international development industry.  Is he also talking about your industry?

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Farmers' Markets and Philanthropy

It goes without saying that the financial services sector also has a lot to learn from a community farmers’ market. Mortgage-backed securities were far from transparent; the credit default swaps market was dominated by speculation, not value creation; and, of course, the Bernard Madoff scandal offers a case of outright fraud.

That is from Jacob Harold of the Hewlett Foundation writing in Alliance Magazine.  He notes that the financial crisis arose because of a failure to have well functioning markets - not because of their excesses.  He argues that philanthropy needs more, not less market dynamics: " In fact, the financial crisis makes it all the more urgent to build a smarter, more open infrastructure that enables donors to make good philanthropic choices."

I agree, and I urge you to read this nice article. 

Two features about markets I emphasize these days are learning and innovation.  Each farmer watches and listens and tries over time to adapt to what the market wants.  Some farmers will continue their “labors of love” (the new or unusual heirloom vegetable) that no one wants at the beginning and that is a money loser, but then one shopper will say to another the next week “Hey, you should try this strange thing; it goes really well with tomatoes.”  Demand builds beyond the farmer’s capacity to meet it, and he thinks to himself “I’ve got to find a way to produce more of these at a cheaper price.”  Meanwhile, other farmers start producing the same vegetable.  This dynamic process enhances quality, introduces a stream of valuable variations, and keeps a focus on efficiency.

The economic and environmental crises we are facing cannot be addressed with marginal changes or more of the same.  They require fundamental innovations and leaps forward in efficiency and cost.  These come from a well-tuned, properly functioning market system like the one Jacob describes.

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A new economics is being born

In my next life, I hope I will write an article like "Time and symmetry in models of economic markets."

Alas, in this life, I am no Lee Smolin.

This paper is about the need for a new framework for economics that acknowledges its "complex and dynamical emergent phenomena." In other words, economic systems are in dynamic states rather than equilibria.

This is a fundamental re-framing that is critical to understanding the nature of economic growth and development.

From the introduction:

"Economics is a unique subject in that it is about nothing but human behavior, but it is also highly mathematical. The economic theory that appears to be most widely in use by experts, called neoclassical economics or general equilibrium, is remarkably like physics, in that it is based on a few simple principles, which lead to a rigorous mathematical formulation.

This mathematical formulation leads to some basic theorems, which are taken to be a rough or approximate description of a well functioning economy. A large body of results and models is built up around this theory, and there is a community of experts that express confidence in its basic correctness.

At the very least, the neoclassical theory of general equilibrium establishes that eco- nomics is one of the mathematical sciences...

But if the evolution of the other mathematical sciences is any guide, one cannot expect that the first successful theory in a domain is the last word. Precisely because of its suc- cess, we should expect that sooner or later any mathematical theory of real phenomena is replaced by a deeper and even more successful theory.

There are reasons to think that the present is a perspicuous moment for seeking to improve economic theory..."

Thanks to my brother Patrick for pointing me to this paper after I told him I was reading Wolfram. And to Stuart Kauffman for giving me a grounding in autocatalytic systems ten years ago.

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Bingeing at the Information Buffet

My friend Jeff Koeze (who also makes the world's best peanut butter) sent me a link to a talk by Barry Schwartz at the TED conference. In his talk , Barry notes the exceptional abundance of intelligence and knowledge among those present at the conference. But he argues that good judgment, not intelligence, is the binding constraint these days.

I agree with Barry that raw intelligence and wisdom are not necessarily correlated. In fact, my own experience is that the variance in wisdom around the mean grows as raw IQ rises. Really smart people can have insights that can be breathtakingly innovative - or completely disastrous.

So I wonder about the effect of the huge increase in knowledge coming from a particular dimension of the web. I am not talking about Facebook. I am talking about sites such as TED Talks, which makes available hundreds of riveting talks by leading (and often photogenic) scientists and intellectuals. Or Edge (my favorite) , a website that publishes short papers, interviews, and debates with some of the smartest (but often less camera-ready) people in the world. Or Marginal Revolution, a blog written mainly by the super-human Tyler Cowen, who each day spews forth an alarming volume of links and his own strong opinions on everything from the economic crisis to Mexican painting to the best cheap restaurants in Northern Virginia.

I partake of these sites like I used to partake of all-you-can-eat buffets when I was in college: I cram in a huge array of different appetizers, meat, fish, and pasta courses, followed by a brownie, a piece of apple pie, and a blackberry cobbler to finish it all off. Then I stagger home, completely bloated and feeling queasy, swearing off the buffet forever. But the next week I am back, bingeing again.

We have made big strides in computing capacity - both hardware and software. Gmail went down the other day for a few hours, and it made news, because these days it is rare that even large, highly networked websites crash. Such websites can process information that is growing at an exponential rate, with nary a hiccup.

But have we made similar strides in either the hardware or software of the human brain? Ray Kurzweil argues we will augment human cognition with machine intelligence at an accelerating pace. But few would argue that the human brain's capacity is growing as fast as in the increase in information available to it.

So the question is this: how will we process all this knowledge that is available to us? The good news is that much innovation comes from the recombination of existing technologies and approaches, so the increase in knowledge about these can in principle lead to accelerating innovation. And heaven knows we are in dire need of to address the economic crisis and challenges such as climate change. I also believe in the power of the Wisdom of Crowds in many contexts; that is one of the principles on which GlobalGiving is founded.

But what can we do to both increase the mean and reduce the variance of the wisdom emanating from all this knowledge? Sometimes I wonder whether the sheer quantity of new information we now "consume" will increase the variance in our judgement and wisdom, leading to unforeseen consequences.

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Pascal's tennis game

THE COMPUTATIONAL METHOD at the heart of Pascal’s work was actually discovered by a Chinese mathematician named Jia Xian around 1050, published by another Chinese mathematician, Zhu Shijie, in 1303, discussed in a work by Cardano in 1570, and plugged into the greater whole of probability theory by Pascal, who ended up getting most of the credit. But the prior work didn’t bother Pascal. “Let no one say I have said nothing new,” Pascal argued in his autobiography. “The arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.”

That is from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, an excellent book and an easy read. This passage should remind of us two things:

1) Sometimes astonishing insights can lie around for hundreds of years (in this case six centuries!) before they are widely recognized and applied.

2) Real innovation often comes about through the novel combination of existing ideas or approaches. We tend to dismiss the power of existing ideas as "old hat" or "already known." Instead, we believe that addressing our challenges or problems requires entirely new insights (preferably by lonely geniuses). That is a big mistake: combining, tweaking, and applying existing ideas or approaches is what causes most real breakthroughs.

(Thanks to Bill Easterly for recommending this book.)

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Settle down, boys

On the web you best build an audience by organising a claque and stroking its prejudices. Extend elaborate courtesy to people you agree with and boorish contempt to those who do not get it...

That is Clive Crook in the FT calling Paul Krugman and Robert Barro on the carpet for their recent columns in the NYT and WSJ.  He goes on to say:

Economics outside the academy has become the continuation of politics by other means...Mr Krugman gives liberals the economics they want. Mr Barro gives conservatives the same service. They narrow or deny the common ground.

Krugman and Barro both responded to Clive indignantly here, and the tone of their responses only proves Clive's point. 

ButI don't agree with Clive that people like Krugman and Barro act differently inside the academy.  My own experience is that the petulance on display at academic conferences often meets or exceeds that on display in the NYT and WSJ.  It makes me wonder why so many very smart people have such fragile egos.   Sadly, those egos serve to obscure rather than advance our understanding of the world.

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Power to the people.

Here are some slides from a presentation I gave at a conference a hosted by Bill Easterly at NYU last week. The topic was Accountability in Development Aid.  I spoke about how decentralized systems like GlobalGiving enable much more open access to the aid process - and how they offer the potential for greater accountability to the people that aid is supposed to help in the first place. We are still in the early stages, but the possibilities are great.

Accountability in Decentralized Systems

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