Production vs. Redistribution

One of the major achievements of the Conservative Movement, and its fellow-traveling economists, has been to convince the Conventional Wisdom that Production is accomplished by the Private Sector (and that the Private Sector is identical with Corporations), whereas the Public Sector (assumed to be identical to Government, sometimes called "The Government" despite our multijurisdictional Federal system) is good for nothing but Redistribution, sometimes called "Transfer Payments," but almost always sneered at as "taxes," or "tax and spend."

Such are the power of magic words that this fantasy image dominates the political landscape. There's also the "dog whistle" aspect of it all, since "The Government" is also that Thing that does all the bad stuff like interfering with Free Enterprise, Forced Busing of School Kids, coddling criminals, and the like. Putting pot growers in jail, enforcing copyrights, or criminalizing abortion, those are done by "The Legal System," which somehow avoids being part of "The Government."

But I'm going to keep to economics here, so I'm going to use a simple model. I'm not even going to put the math onto it, but rest assured, there's some math lurking just below the surface.

Let's consider an island, a chunk of attractive real estate that sits off the coast of some mainland somewhere, maybe even in the middle of a large river, or, best of all, in the mouth of a large river or some other natural harbor.

As I say, it's attractive real estate, having a large coastline relative to its size, so there's natural portage, perhaps some nice beaches, and some natural exclusivity and scenery that can be put on the housing brochures. In the natural course of things, depending upon history, other situations, etc. there would first be some ferry service of some sort to the island, then someone would decide that there should be a bridge.

Long story short, the bridge gets built. Most probably, it is built and maintained by the authorities that run the rest of the transport system, i.e. "The Government," or at least an organization with governmental powers, like a Port Authority or a Transportation District. Conceivably, the job might be driven by a Private group of some kind, or at least contracted to one, but it doesn't matter that much really. If the bridge is big enough, it will probably be a toll bridge, both to recoup the cost of building it, and also to offset its costs. If a quasi-governmental organization is responsible for its operation, the tolls might be used to cross subsidize some other transportation methods, such as mass transit, or even parts of the old ferry line, if it had any sort of clout.

As an aside, I'll note that quite often bridges are built by governmental agencies with the secondary purpose of enriching private contractors. See The Great Bridge by David McCullough for a good description of this.

All well and good. The existence of the bridge, and the transportation that it provides, makes the land on the island, and on the nearby mainland, more valuable. Some of this value is recovered by the tolls, some in property taxes, but most of it winds up in private hands, which is to say those who own the land on the island and mainland. Some of the wealth also flows through the hands of the new businesses that are created to service the increased populations, any port services that obtain, and so forth.

Inevitably, the bridge begins to see some congestion at some point. It's done its job, creating wealth by providing transport, but now more transport is called for.

Or is it? After all, building a new bridge is a risk. Suppose there isn't enough demand to support the additional traffic? Will the new bridge undercut the cash flow from the old bridge? Besides, bridge building is expensive, carrying other risks.

So we might just raise the tolls on the old bridge, especially at rush hours, thereby moving to what is called "congestion pricing" of the resource, which is "efficient," in economics terms. What "efficiency" means here is that the resource is rationed by price, meaning that those with the greatest wherewithal get served, while those with shallower pockets do not.

Alternately, someone could build another toll booth. This seems silly, but it's perfectly acceptable if there are access points to the bridge that are in hands other than those who own the original bridge. This would be the case if the bridge were actually something like say, an oil production and delivery system, where tankers or refiners might raise their rates even if the oil fields are still underutilized. I'm just using the island/bridge as an analogy, after all.

And let's be clear about this, the higher tolls or new toll booths are by far less risky an "investment" than building a new bridge. So if your vision is just to accumulate more money via investment, higher tolls are the way to go.

What happens when the highest returns on investment go to investments that do not create wealth, but merely move money from one pocket to another? What happens when "economic growth" is calculated based on the rate at which this money is transferred around? What happens when people confuse redistribution with production, merely because the redistribution is done by organizations and people who are nominally "private?"

I'm not entirely sure, but I have a feeling that we've been finding out for the past 30 years or so. Or at least the last seven.

The Vocoder

In Between Planets by Heinlein, the intelligent dragons who lived on Venus used a “voder” to speak. “Voder” was clearly a contraction of “vocoder,” which itself is a contraction of “voice encoder-decoder.” In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Mike, the intelligent computer, used a vocoder.

The vocoder was a real device and a pretty cool gizmo. It took a sound sample and fed it through a series of notch filters, very narrow bandwidth filters, and measured the amplitude of each narrow frequency, making it essentially a device for producing a power spectrum. That’s the encoding part. The decoder essentially reversed the process. If you put enough bands into it, you can get more-or-less recognizable speech out of the decoder, at a small fraction of the bandwidth of full speech.

The trick is that you are tossing out phase information, the connection between each sound frequency, so you never get the sound of real speech out of a vocoder, no matter how many frequencies you segment the sound into. What you get is one of those “robot voices” that you’ve heard in movies and TV since the 50s. You can also twiddle with the playback by changing the nature of the original frequency set, or even imposing a voice envelope onto other sounds. That’s how Disney and Bell Labs TV specials got all those “talking instruments” ‘way back when. I’m not sure about Gerald McBoing-Boing

The unnaturalness of the vocoder output sent sound researchers back to an older vision: vocal tract modeling. I’m told that before the phonograph, there was a lot of interest in “talking machines,” literally, machines that talked like people do, by expelling air through a vocal tract. Vocal tract modeling attempted to do the same thing, only digitally, and it met with about the same success: not much. It sounded okay if restricted to some very amenable phrases (“We were away a year ago”), but more frequently, it was just unintelligible.

Eventually, cheaper hardware, especially memory, came to the rescue. Current speech generators simply look up words in a dictionary, and spit out the correct phonemes, linked together with some special rules. They can sound fairly realistic, provided your idea of realistic speaks with a Swedish accent. Stephen Hawking uses one of these types of speech synthesizers, by the sounds of it, but he has it set to sound more like the old vocoder style of robotic intonation, perhaps to emphasize that it is a robotic voice he’s using, or maybe because Hawking is a bit of a card.

The Way I Talk

When I first moved to California, I went to a lot of concerts, and one of them was Gil Scott-Heron. That would have been at the Berkeley Greek Theater, an outdoor amphitheater. During one of the breaks I went over to the porta-potties for the usual reason, and there was a line, as is generally the case during the breaks. While waiting in line, I got to talking with a couple of young ladies from Oakland. The young ladies were black.

It was a very pleasant conversation, and afterwards, I tried to analyze why I had felt so comfortable. Their young lady-hood obviously was part of it, but it occurred to me that part of it was their accents and manners.

What has come to be called “Ebonics” is actually a large sub-variant of the southern accent and grammatical quirks. My relationship to the southern way of talking is complicated, of course, given that I grew up in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, then left for what still seem to be very good reasons. Nevertheless, I have the same reflexive it’s-okay-for-me-to-criticize-but-not-for-you-to-do-so that everyone has about their family, town, state, and country. Added to that is something that I’ve mentioned previously: speaking with a southern accent means that people automatically make all sorts of assumptions about you, including that you are dumb and ignorant.

The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written that Ebonics (as well as a number of other features of “Black Culture”) is actually derived from “Cracker Culture,” which in turn was a English/Scots transplant that was pushed on African slaves by their white overseers. One of the features of my mild prejudice in favor of blacks is that I tend to cut black conservatives a little more slack than I do white conservatives, so I lean toward the belief that Sowell believes that American blacks are held back by their culture and would do better if they got rid of it—akin to my own ditching of my southern accent, for example. Nevertheless, Sowell tells only half the story.

The reason why people in the south, both black and white, talk the way they do is partly informed by slaves learning English from Scots overseers, but once that happened, some of the slaves then became the house servants of the southern plantation owners. In particular, they assisted the plantation owners’ wives in household duties, including child care and child rearing. In many cases, they served as wet nurses.

Guess who the children learned to speak from? There have been cases recently of largely absent parents being shocked when their children began to speak Spanish, or Tagalog, or whatever the native language of the main care-giver. In the case of the old south, they learned to speak from the negro slaves, who spoke a creole compounded from Scots grammar and African intonation. In other words, the slave owners began to speak like African-Americans. And when the wealthiest and socially prominent members of a community talk in a certain way, the rest of the community tends to begin talking that way.

The way you speak marks your social class. Every upwardly mobile young person learns this quickly, and the lucky ones are good at dialect. If you are reading a newspaper story, and the word “articulate” is used, chances are that it is being applied to a black person, even if race is not mentioned in the article. It’s one of the standard code phrases, and it means that—surprisingly—the black person doesn’t sound dumb.

Similarly, I would advise any black high school student to work on their accent. The best thing would be to somehow arrange to live in England for a little while and to develop a trace of a British accent. That adds about the same number of assumed I.Q. points that a southern accent subtracts. But any non-Ebonic, non-southern derived accent will do. It’s just part of the tool kit.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to some NOVA special (some PBS thing, at any rate), and one of the speakers sounded familiar. It took a little while for me to place it; he sounded a lot like me. In reaction to a former southern accent, the speaker slightly overemphasized the trailing consonants of words. So while the southern accent says walkin’, thereby dropping the trailing “g”, the reformed southern accent says walking, slightly overemphasizing the trailing “g.”

There are some other features, no doubt. One place to hear them is on Comedy Central, either Dave Chappelle or Stephen Colbert. Chappelle is black and Colbert is from South Carolina. In some ways, it’s the same thing.

Bad Wisdom

When I was twenty, under somewhat consciousness-altered circumstances, I became aware of what felt like pressure in my back teeth. A trip to the dentist confirmed that the sensation had been either real or a fortunate coincidence; I had impacted wisdom teeth, four of them.

I had them out over a Christmas break, while visiting my parents in Illinois. I think it was done in two operations, right side, then left side; I'm not positive of the memory of the whole thing because the first surgery is what sticks in my mind, for reasons that will soon become apparent.

I've never cared for the idea of general anesthesia, so all the dental work I've ever had has been under, at most, local novocain or nothing at all. This isn't as tough guy as it may sound, since I've been blessed with remarkably sturdy teeth. When I was twenty I had yet to have a single cavity, and the only traumatic dental work I'd ever had was the removal of my two bottom front baby teeth, when my adult ones came in behind them and failed to undercut the roots. Still, I have to admit that having two fully-rooted teeth yanked out when I was six feels a little painful, even at this distance.

As a complete aside from the main story, I'll recount that I also had an odd bit happen with the novocain when they were prepping me for the wisdom teeth extraction; they hit a vein with the needle. Novocain is a trade name for procaine, which is the anesthetic, but it's usually administered with adrenaline, which is the trade name for epinephrine. The epinephrine causes blood vessels to constrict and keeps the procaine in the local area longer, reducing the need for more injections. However, when, as it sometimes happens, the needle hits a vein, the epinephrine goes into the whole body. Epinephrine is the "fight or flight" hormone, and sometimes can cause panic reactions, especially if the patient is already anxious.

However, despite whatever trauma I had as a six-year-old, dentists are not a source of fear for me. Quite the opposite. No cavities. Great teeth. It's an ego thing. So, rather than having a panic reaction from the adrenaline, I had a different, although common reaction, which is a sense of "I feel like I ought to be afraid but I'm not." All the physical symptoms of fear are there, but none of the emotional involvement. It was an odd feeling of disconnect, which, it turns out, was about to get useful.

See, there's a downside to this "Look, Ma! No Cavities!" thing, and that is that it is a product of hard teeth, and hard teeth are brittle. Now let's see what I mean by "brittle."

"Impacted" in a tooth means that it is trying to grow towards another tooth. In my case the angle was fairly extreme; there simply wasn't enough room in my jaw for them to come up naturally. The standard procedure for impacted wisdom tooth extraction, at least when I had it done, was to file a couple of grooves in the teeth and hit the grooves with a hammered chisel, breaking the teeth into two or three easily extractable chunks. I've since been told that this is a pretty primitive procedure, and most such extractions are now done by sawing and such, but, 1970, central Illinois, who knew? I certainly didn't. Nor did anyone know what was about to happen when the hammer came down.

My oral surgeon hit the first blow onto the chisel and nothing happened. Then he hit it again, and said, "Oops."

Yes, dammit, I got my very own Bill Cosby "Oops." From my dentist. What had happened was that the tooth hadn't broken into two or three easily manageable chunks; it had shattered into more than a dozen pieces, shards, splinters.

So, the guy spent the next half hour trying to make small talk as he fished around in my open gums for little shards of tooth. He didn't get them all, either; bits of tooth were coming to the surface for months afterwards.

Then I got to go home and have my first experience with Demerol. Some people like the stuff; it makes me violently ill.

So, gums sewed up, still bleeding a bit (and one of the sutures had been sewn a little tight, so, what with the swelling, it cut into my gum and leaked blood for days), I got to vomit maybe two or three times before I figured out, don't take the Demerol!

And, of course, stomach acid is just the thing to sooth those raw and bleeding gums.

The second round of extraction went much easier, what with the no shattering teeth and no vomiting afterwards. I barely remember it, in fact.

Then, back at school, like I said before, months of having little tooth splinters come to the surface.

Ah, but it doesn't end there. It so happens that tooth extraction leaves a little halo of bone burrs around where the tooth used to be. Usually, these little spikes of bone get reabsorbed by the jawbone. Not mine. No, instead, sharp little bone spikes inside of gum plus chewing, moving the jaw, equals minor, ongoing gum lesions serving as infection sites.

After months of sore throats, persistent colds, coughs, etc., a dentist in Troy figured out the problem and took an X-ray, which confirmed it. The treatment was simple: open up the gum again and file down the spikes with a rasp.

Local anesthetic works well on pain, but it does nothing at all to keep you from hearing the sound of your jaw being filed down with a rasp, incidentally.

Finally, as a lasting little reminder of the whole thing, the months of infections caused a couple of drainage lymph nodes on the right side of my throat to permanently swell. My dentist told me to resist any attempts to biopsy or otherwise mess with them. This is now their "natural" state, and they'll probably be that way for the rest of my life.

Some Other Guy’s Anecdote

My high school friend Mark went off to Oberlin College in Ohio. One day his roommate came in and said, “Hey, want to go to a Simon and Garfunkel concert?”

“Sure,” said Mark.

The concert was in Denver.

So they got into the roommate’s car and drove, non-stop to Denver, saw the concert and headed back. College students do that sort of thing. It’s part of the educational experience.

In Kansas, one of them fell asleep at the wheel.

“So that,” explains Mark, “is how I wound up walking down Main Street in Russell, Kansas carrying a radiator. Did you know that Russell was home of the National Spelling Bee Champion? They had a big sign, just on the edge of town…”

Kid, don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Women and Snakes: Collier and Rubens

Lilith, by John Collier


One of my commenters suggested that the last bit of "Women and Snakes" artwork I posted did not meet his standards of artistry. That's okay; I can handle dissent. However, I pity anyone who cannot appreciate either of these two, for whatever reason.

Adam and Eve, by Rubens


Two different artists, and the only commonality is the snake, really, as Lilith only appears as a woman apocryphally, and not in the Christian Bible as such.

I'm tempted to let my own projections run a little while. Lilith, Adam's first wife (apocryphally), embraces the snake, and makes him her own. There is a small suggestion of this with Eve, but her downcast eyes are looking not at the snake, (who is above her in the tree), but rather in avoidance of Adam's scolding. Hmmph. No wonder Lilith left him, the jerk.

In the great folk engines, Lilith is related to Circe, Kali, and all the other female powers that were driven into darker aspects by...something. What this something might be I leave as an exercise for the reader, acknowledging that the entire thing is just a stroll around the litoral regions of Lake Id and Superego Cove.

Noted, with Previous Observations

Another example of neo-colonialism in America:

Like many immigrant families, he notes, his parents took education seriously. His brother, now a property developer in Britain, went to UCLA; he went to Oxford, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics and economics, going on to the London School of Economics for a master's degree and earning his doctorate from Cornell University's department of development sociology .

"At home, we had nutritious food, mostly Indian food," he says. But soon, long working hours and busy schedules made convenience foods appealing. "Sometimes we ate in the car," he admits.

"When I explain to people outside the U.S. that 20 percent of American fast-food meals are eaten in cars, they are absolutely gobsmacked," Patel says. "They ask me, 'Is it because Americans love their cars so much?'

"I explain that Americans are working so hard in order to access the things people in other industrialized nations take for granted - health care, education, a pension, a living wage," he says. "And increasingly, communities of working people can't afford to live where they work. They're holding down two jobs - we shouldn't be surprised that people are forced to eat fast food in their cars."
--Raj Patel, author of Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System