* Sorta spoilers ahead.

1. Neoliberalism prevails through the end. Africa is the only continent to survive the great deluge, and what do the rich and politically connected do? Head straight there to set up camp! “That’s why they call it the Cape of Good Hope” Really? Really?

2. Speaking neoliberalism, the s*** (this is still a family blog) hits the fan, and the G20 is now back to being the G8. Ugh. Assholes.

3. Speaking of Africa, how come our brilliant but loopy chief scientist tells us that the only way humanity is going to survive the Apolcalypse is to head to the Himalayan hills, when we could have just could have a built a few big tents in the Sahara? It seems to have come out of the whole thing reasonably intact.

4. “‘Those Chinese are amazing. I never thought it would have been possible in this little time.” This after hinting that essentially the future of humanity, such as it is, was saved on the back of Tibetan labor. I bet those monks never got a ticket on the life raft.

5. The U.S. just gets out of from under a thick layer of ice, and it has to suffer the same special effects all over again. Crap.

6. Actually, worse special effects, since the USS John F. Kennedy has apparently grown to three times the size of the Washington Mall.

7. And the Poseidon has to get flipped over again, too. Ugh. Seasick.

8. ‘Old Faithful,’ supervolcano. Take that, turistas!

9. Woody Harrelson has stopped acting and become the prophet we knew him to be.

10. Gordon, the plastic surgeon, deserved better.

Short review: Don’t get me wrong. I love disaster movies. But this was three hours of dreck. I thought it would be perfect relief after a busy week. It wasn’t. The end.

Nothing pleasing or pleasant (or really unexpected) to report from yesterday’s election news, but most unsettling was the decision by Maine voters to repeal gay marriage. James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario, however, posts on some reasons for cautious optimism, nevertheless.

For someone who takes the 1970s and the 1980s as the frame of reference, the shift in opinion vis-a-vis gay marriage over the past ten years has indeed been surprising and welcome. With progress, however, comes disappointment; but then again, I’ve come to think of disappointment as a part of the genetic code of our federal system of governance. In any event, I’d also be interested in knowing not only the source of shifts in public opinion, but within the gay community itself – if I’m not mistaken, commitment among gays and lesbians to such a ‘bourgeois’ ideal as marriage was hardly uncontroversial or widespread, even as recently as twenty years ago. I should read Tina Fetner’s book, which may have some answers.

and have a human sacrifice.

With apologies to all of the cat lovers, to whom I’ve done nothing but make fun of.

It’s surprising that a talk by a Nobel Laureate leaves me famished, but that’s exactly what happened last night, after I went to a lecture by Daniel Kahneman (sponsored by Columbia’s Heyman Center) entitled ‘of two (or more) minds.’ The lecture was a preview, I think, of an upcoming book, and Kahneman used the occasion to outline his perspective on ‘dual systems’ approaches to the study of mind. Interesting enough, but the examples which he and the discussants used…Marshmallow tests! Cookies! Chocolate cake on the dessert tray! After dinner drinks! I dragged a friend to a nearby restaurant after all was said and done, and we shared a nice salad and skirt steak.

The basic outline: dual systems approaches in psychology are common enough; Kahneman doesn’t claim originality in adopting the terminology, which he finds useful. The idea is that there are two systems of mind, each with their own ‘personalities.’ System 1 is ‘effortless,’ associatively coherent, hungry for meaning (stories), and is at the source of our ability to make quick intuitive leaps of judgment (which are, however, often wrong). System 2 is ‘effortful,’ logically coherent, and axiomatic in nature – it underlies reflective pause, the application of reason, and so on.

Walter Mischel, Jon Elster, and George Ainsle were the discusssants. None challenged the ‘dual systems’ approach per se, but introduced alternative distinctions that might be seen as expanding upon Kahneman’s version. Mischel introduced his distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ systems (accompanied by a funny video of children trying to force themselves not to grab the cookies placed in front of them); Elster, after questioning the utility of characterizing these systems as ‘personalities,’ distinguished between ‘meaning-making’ and ‘meaning-breaking’ system of mind; and Ainsle, talking about his ongoing research into mechanisms of self-control, identified two behavioral styles lying on a continuum, one able to see things in ‘big picture’ context and the other more focused on the individual choice at hand.

I couldn’t stay for the general discussion – it was already running past eight; this is what happens when a 6:15 talk starts at 6:35pm. A Giddensian might call this a discussion of ‘practical’ versus ‘discursive’ consciousness, or something along those lines – but there was no sociology; I think one takeaway of the evening was that we have a lot of brain science to look forward to over the next few years.

If you’d like to see a film that’s under two hours, won’t make you deaf, and will make you think for a moment or two, you could do worse than see ‘An Education.’ I know, this is hardly a ringing endorsement, but I’m finding it difficult at the moment to think of a movie that’s come out in the past two months or so that I’ve felt compelled to go to a theater to see (the lone exception has been ‘The Informant!‘ which features a deliriously batty and very funny Matt Damon). ‘An Education’ tells a story you’ve probably already seen, heard, or read in one version or another, but the performances are pitch-perfect, even if the characters’ motivations aren’t always explicable.

Darn. I keep on pressing ‘publish’ before I even finish writing the post. My apologies.

Here’s a time series of U.S. occupations as percentages of the labor force, by gender. It’s not my field of interest, but the graphics are too gorgeous to ignore. Data visualizations at Flare. H/t Chris Blattman.

One for all occupations:

And another for professors:

The visualizations are interactive, so you can create your graphics.

Would some one please watch this to the end and provide a sane commentary? I couldn’t make it past the first two minutes.

via Transitionland.

It’s time to re-read Hofstadter:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Over the holiday weekend I downloaded and read System Failure, a short book / pamphlet by Jake Chapman published by the British think tank Demos (the book can be downloaded from Chapman’s page at the Demos site). As the title of the book suggests, the central focus is on systemic failures in the public sector; the basic argument is that ‘linear’ approaches to service delivery often fail because of the inability of managers and reformers to think holistically. Goods can be delivered more or less efficiently, and it is against standards of efficiency that public sector delivery is now measured and assessed. But this begs the obvious question, which is to say: in what sense are education or health ‘goods’? It’s not simply that they refer to nebulous values of human flourishing or development. Rather, education and health refer to complexes of systemic relations between a variety of influences, behaviors, and factors, leading to a variety of outcomes and effects. This is fairly standard boilerplate in systems thinking, but it’s a useful reminder to view systems as interlacing chains of action that have different cognitive, normative, and temporal dimensions. According to Chapman, the inability to appreciate this is what gives rise to unintended consequences and perverse effects, or at least contributes to their high degree of probability. But this means that attributing the inability of public sector agencies to meet desired goals and outcomes to ‘inefficiencies’ and the lack of ‘proper incentives’ that can be remedied through the imposition of ever-tighter controls or market incentives is unlikely to resolve all of these difficulties, and may indeed exacerbate them. Tighter coupling means intensifying rather than remedying the deficiencies of linear thinking, when in fact what needs to be taken into account are a longer-range, more ecological perspective that allows for or reinterprets failure as natural resources for learning opportunities. Chapman thus ends up close to the organizational learning literature that de-emphasizes ‘command-and-control’ models of organizational planning and implementation in favor of increased room for learning strategies that allow for more open-ended searches for ‘what works’ in different contexts.

Chapman’s book is intended as a prospectus rather than a full-fledged defense of ‘non-linearity’ in organizational learning, which can of course become a dogma in own right (so much of the organizational learning – or rather, the ‘learning organization’ – literature comes down to mantras about being open-ended, listening to others, reflecting on experience, and so on: useful, and not incorrect, perhaps, but rather anodyne). For my own purposes, what was immediately useful about the book was the distinction that Chapman draws between ‘difficulties’ and ‘messes.’ The basic idea behind the distinction is cognitive rather than technical. Difficulties emerge in contexts where problem-definitions, goals, technologies, and solutions are relatively clear, but where there may nevertheless still be obstacles that prevent the easy marshaling of the necessary resources, personnel, skills, time, and so on to solve the problem for which those goals, etc., were formulated. Still, in such contexts, the obstacles are ‘definable’ however much effort it may take to overcome them, and reasonably stable assessments of the resources needed to overcome these obstacles can be realized.

In contrast, ‘messes,’ a concept that Chapman takes from R.L. Ackoff’s Redesigning the Future, arise when the problems become unbounded in the amount of time and resources they can consume, and there is no clear agreement about the very form which a solution might take, much less how to achieve them. Such situations are indeed chaotic, but while we think of chaotic situations as of fairly short duration – how, after all, could such situations last? – Chapman’s discussion led me to realize that they may be more prevalent and enduring than we like to think. It’s simply that we are led by our technical sophistication into mistaking them as difficulties that are thereby resolvable through more rationality, more technology, more efficiency – rather than distinctive problems calling for wholly new approaches.

My own reading and research of international development organizations, for instance, suggests that much of development work is in fact a ‘mess’ in the Ackoff / Chapman sense: one might read Richard Rottenburg’s fantastic ethnography of the organizational field of development, Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid, as a confirmation of this. The broad normative goal of using aid and assistance to promote the social and economic development of poorer countries dissolves into a mess of programs, policies, procedures, technologies, relationships that lack even rudimentary coherence ‘on the ground’ when viewed against standard templates of organizational rationality. So this prompts the question: what kinds of strategies aimed at social and economic development would be needed if we stopped thinking in terms of difficulties and in terms of messes instead?