Theo's Theories

THE END OF THE WORLD (AS WE KNOW IT) IS HERE

2011-11-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

In a NY Times Sunday Review article on Nov. 13 Ezekiel Emanuel describes how to reduce health-care costs by relying more on computers (rather than people) for billing [1]. One question that he does not address is what will happen to the people who lose their jobs as clerks.

A feature of today's economy is that technological innovation has eliminated the need for routine clerical labor much in the way that 200 years ago the industrial revolution eliminated the need for low-skilled manual labor. Of course the industrial revolution created many new jobs but these required higher level of skills. Operating a bulldozer requires more mental skills that handling a pickax and repairing such a machine requires an even higher level of such skills. The industrialized countries responded to this challenge by vastly expanding their educational system. In the 18th century most people were illiterate while the opposite was true in the 20th century. The number of people employed as school teachers also increased enormously.

Today there are many jobs available but there are no people with the skills to fill them. The September 10 issue of the Economist included a special section titled "The Future of Jobs" with the lead article titled "The great mismatch" and subtitled "In the new world of work, unemployment is high yet skilled and talented people are in short supply."

An article by Adam Davidson in the NY Times Magazine issue of Nov. 6 raised similar issues [2]. The quote "...too many Americans don't know how to do anything that the world is willing to pay them a living wage for" captures the spirit of the author's position.

It seems to me that there is a need for a major expansion in education, similar to that that occurred between the 18th and 20th centuries. But this time we are not talking about literacy and basic numerical skills. We are talking about mathematics and science. Currently there are too few efforts in that direction. One shining example of what is badly needed is a program in the University of Maryland Baltimore campus that was highlighted in the CBS program 60 Minutes on Nov. 13 [3].

The United States is going to face a severe labor shortage in technological areas because it depends heavily on immigrant engineers and scientists from China and India. As these two countries advance we will see a major drop in such immigrants. The trend has already started. We have seen a parallel 50 years ago. Right after War World II the United States saw an influx of immigrant engineers and scientists from Western Europe and Japan. By the 1960's conditions in those regions had improved enough that such immigration was greatly reduced.

In short, there will be plenty of jobs in the United States in the years to come but these jobs will require skills that the current educational system does not provide. To put it bluntly, people with only liberal education are no longer employable. Maybe instead of "occupying" Wall Street they should try to retrain themselves. Extreme income inequality is a factor for instability in a society but it can be addressed through revisions in the tax code. But that is a minor step compared to what is really needed.

The change in our educational system must be drastic and it should start at least at the high school level. We need not only train people but also train teachers who can train them. It will be a monumental task. What I find most frightening is that our politicians seemed blissfully unaware of the crisis.

1.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/billions-wasted-on-billing/?partner=rss&emc=rss

2. www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/magazine/job-creation-campaign-promises.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

3. www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57319098/hrabowski-an-educator-focused-on-math-and-science/?tag=strip

Greek Privatization

2011-06-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk about Privatization in Greece and that brings to mind the reverse process that took place about 50 years ago.

In the 1920s a British company had received a contract for electrical power generation in Athens and its surrounding area. This ensured, for the first time, adequate power supply for the region. (Another foreign company was given the contract for the water supply.) The company was well managed and continued to perform well but in the late 1950s the Greek government decided to buy off the foreign investors and make the company part of a state owned enterprise. I worked for the British company during 1959-61 so I experience the change in management first hand. (The changes resulting from the Nationalization were a factor, although not the major, in my decision to leave the company and come to the U.S. for graduate studies.)

Things came to a grinding halt. For example, we had to buy supplies from the lowest bidder, regardless of the quality. One case that stuck in my memory was that of firebricks for boiler insulation. The low quality bricks we had to buy under state regulations did not last very long, so the boilers had to shut down far more frequently than before. Of course shutting down a boiler meant eliminating some power generating ability that often resulted in blackouts.

Another memorable statement was one that justified a reduction in the compensation of employees and engineers in particular. "You work now for the Greek people, not for British capitalists, so you have to be paid less."

LOST IN TRANSLATION

2010-07-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

This is a rather long piece, part of my memoirs. It describes how the Greek Army in the 1950s used to keep American advisers "in the dark." I wonder whether similar things may be happening 60 years later in other countries that rely on American help.

The View from the Field

In June 1958 I was posted in a Battalion of Engineers based just outside the city of Thessalonica. I had just finished the Army Technical Services Reserve Officers School in Patras. My specific assignment was with the mechanical repairs unit where I was second in command under captain B. B had joined the Army as a private in the 1920s and he had risen through the ranks. He was a nice person with a lot of folk wisdom and we got along very well.

The Greek Army had been the recipient of large amounts of American Army equipment (most of it World War II surplus). However, the donations were in an awful state of repair, mainly because the Greek soldiers had little familiarity with machinery. To make matters worse, postings in the repair unit were sought after and several of the “technicians” were from rural areas. They had been assigned to the technical services though favoritism. On the other hand there were men who had been mechanics in the Greek Merchant Marine but because they had delayed their enlistment, they were assigned to digging ditches. Fortunately, the battalion commander let me look for such people amongst the troops and transfer them to the repair unit. After all this meant that the equipment of the battalion will be in better working order.

It turns out that the High Command of the Technical Services had its own ideas on how to improve the maintenance of the equipment. The idea was to translate the American Technical Manuals into Greek and distribute them to the technician soldiers. Our unit had indeed copies of some but they were kept under lock and key. Why? The manuals were written in the official Greek language that was quite different from the common language spoken by the soldiers. Furthermore most of the soldiers were barely literate so books were not the way to train them. I tried to read some of the manuals and I found them so poorly written that it was hard to find in them any information that could be used.

Because the repair unit was responsible for the books, we did not want any to be lost, thus the safekeeping. When an inspector was expected, the books would be taken out and distributed to the soldiers. It was my job to match the books to the equipment a soldier was repairing. We did not want the inspector to see someone working on a Jeep to have a manual for a 2-ton truck. (We used to joke that I had also to make sure that the books were held right side up.) Another part of the preparation for the inspection was to pour some machine oil on the floor and throw the manuals down so they would be dirtied and appear used.

One day I received through official mail a copy of an American Technical Manual and I was asked to translate it. Apparently, some one had noticed in my records that I was proficient in English and they thought I could do the task. I had quite a busy schedule in the repair unit and I did not want to devote my few free hours to an Army task, but I managed to translate a chapter and sent it back. A few months later I received a notice that I was transferred to the Technical Services Translation Office in the Army Headquarters in Athens. The transfer to Athens was highly desirable and it seemed an appropriate reward for my translating efforts.

The View from the Top

In April 1959 I reported to my new post. However, I was not going to be a translator, but a technical editor supervising other translators. The head of the office was a major, an easygoing type who did not seem to take things too seriously. The translators were civilians, most of them young women who had some knowledge of English but no technical background whatsoever. I was supposed to take what they had written and make sure it was technically correct. It was an impossible task but now I understood why the manuals we had were so poorly written. There was a joke going around that the section that each manual had on destroying the equipment (so it would not fall intact into the hands of the enemy) did not have to be translated. Maintaining the equipment according to the earlier sections was certain to destroy it.

The head of the Translation Office reported to a colonel who, in contrast to the major, was all fire and thunder. It was my luck that the colonel would bypass the major and deal directly with me. He assigned to me an additional duty: to go to the Army Printing Plant to approved the galley proofs before the manuals were put into production. To travel to the Printing Plant from the Headquarters I would ride on the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by a messenger soldier. I often wondered what “important mission” people would think I was on as we made our way through the city traffic.

It turn out that the printing plant duty was a plum. Knowing that no one was going to read the manuals, I was quick to approve their printing and that made me popular with the staff (all civilians). They told me that after I had finished I could go home, and if the colonel called they would cover my absence.

I should have left things alone but one day an American officer came to the translation office and, in my minimal conversational English, I explained that the manuals were translated using the official Greek idiom rather the spoken language. He knew the difference between the top idioms and he was horrified. Apparently he spoke to the colonel who, the next day, thundered to me: “What right you have to tell the American that we use the official language. I told him you were crazy and did not know what you were talking about!”

From then on, he would call me the first thing in the morning and told me to go to the printing office. He would shout “Are you still here?” At first I thought he was anxious to push the production of the manuals but later I realized that he wanted me out of the Headquarters so I would not provide any more “leaks” to the Americans. Since the Printing Office duty was light, my “mischief” turned out to my advantage. I am sure the colonel wrote a poor evaluation for me but since I was anxious to leave the army, it did not matter. I finished my two-year enlistment period and I was discharged in late September 1959.

Anytime I read in the newspapers about American efforts to organize the army of some country my Greek Army experience comes to mind. I wonder if the Iraqi army manuals are in classical Arabic. After all both Iraq and Greece used to be part of the Ottoman Empire so the concept of an official language incomprehensible by the plebeians should be equally familiar to both.

The Real Trouble with Greece

2010-03-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

Today is Greek Independence Day, commemorating the 1821 revolution against the Ottomans. Today is also the day of the announcement of the bailout plan for Greece by the Eurozone countries. I find the coincidence fraught with meaning.

The Greeks may have gotten rid of the Ottoman sultan following the 1821 revolution but they kept a lot of the administrative and social structures of the Ottoman Empire. This was not particularly surprising because the Ottomans had adopted a large part of the Byzantine structures and those in turn go back to through the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic kingdoms to the Persian Empire. According to the historian Bernard Lewis "In the course of the millennia Middle East bureaucracies, through many changes of government, religion, culture, and even script and language, show a remarkable persistence and continuity." [The Middle East, A brief History of the last 2000 years, Touchtone, 1995, p. 182].

While modern Greeks like to tout their connection with ancient Greece that connection is at best tenuous and Greece is in essence the successor of the Byzantine state. The historian Warren Treadgold devotes much of the concluding chapter of his book on this topic [A History of the Byzantine State and Society, Stanford Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 851-853].

The biggest problem of Greece is not the budget deficit but the attitude of people who feel that they have no stake in the state and view it as an entity to be fought and defrauded like any tyrannical government. Such attitudes developed over millennia and they were probably the correct response to the Byzantine despots and the Ottoman sultans who succeeded them. In turn those in power (regardless of political party) treat the citizens with disdain and corruption and favoritism are rife.

A few years I got in touch with a former classmate from my high school that was also living in the United States. We had attended an elite high school with only 30 students per class. He had kept track of our class and we found out that more than a quarter of our classmates were in the United States or Western Europe. Students at that school had either to be very good to be admitted or have strong connections (or both). Of course that was not the official policy, only the policy in effect! If I count the people who deserved to be in the school the fraction that emigrated is closer to half. This is only a small sample of a large Greek phenomenon: significant emigration of highly educated people because of their frustration with the infamous "Greek reality". There is also a long list of people who tried to go back but were kicked out. One of them is a famous Greek computer scientist who is now a professor at one of the top U.S. universities who did go back to Greece at one time but then he was fired.

I have often tried to summarize the difference between Greece (and other countries of that region) and the West in the following way. In the West connections are used as the tiebreaker when two people have the same qualifications. In Greece qualifications are the tiebreaker when people have equally strong connections.

In conclusion, the Greek budget woes are only a symptom of a far more serious disease.

The Curse of Proof by Example

2008-05-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

What is a proof that a method in image analysis (machine vision) does what it claims to do? For example, how do we know that a given method of image retrieval will retrieve images similar to a given query? Unfortunately, the publications standards are such that most papers present only proofs by example.

This a big topic but I cannot help add one more "joke" to the list "How X proves that all odd numbers are prime?" (see http://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/OddPrime.html) A machine vision person's proof: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 hmm, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, oh well, we have an 83% success rate, let's publish."

The problem with machine vision publications is not only that the reported success rate may be too low for practical applications. It is also that the choice of examples is fairly sloppy with little thought given on how representative are of the of the population of interest.

Limitations of Content-based Image Retrieval

2008-05-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

This blog entry is a summary of a viewpoint paper (http://www.theopavlidis.com/technology/CBIR/PaperB/Apr08.htm) . It exists for the purpose of allowing readers to post comments on the paper.

In the paper I discuss my impressions from the current state of the art and then I express opinions on what might be fruitful approaches. I find the current results in CBIR very limited in spite of over 20 years of research efforts. Certainly, I am not the only one who thinks that way, the lead editorial of a recent special issue of the IEEE Proceedings on multimedia retrieval was titled "The Holy Grail of Multimedia Information Retrieval: So Close or Yet So Far Away?"

I offer certain reasons for this state of affairs, especially for the discrepancy between high quality results shown in papers and poorer results in practice. The main reason seems to be that the lessons about feature selection and the "curse of dimensionality" in pattern recognition have been ignored in CBIR. Because there is little connection between pixel statistics and the human interpretation of an image (the "semantic gap") the use of large number of generic features makes highly likely that results will not be scalable, i.e. they will not hold on collections of images other than the ones used during the development of the method. In other words, the transformation from images to features (or other descriptors) is many-to-one and when the data set is relatively small, there are no collisions. But as the size of the set increases unrelated images are likely to be mapped into the same features.

I propose that generic CBIR will have to wait both for algorithmic advances in image understanding and advances in computer hardware. In the meantime I suggest that efforts should be focused on retrieval of images in specific applications where it is feasible to derive semantically meaningful features.

The paper has two appendices with examples of image retrieval. One presents the results obtained from some on line systems and the other presents some experiments I conducted to demonstrate how a method that yields impressive results in the author(s) paper gives poor results in independent tests.

I have posted a page (http://www.theopavlidis.com/technology/CBIR/challenge.htm) with image that, I believe, would challenge the current CBIR methodologies.

Why Health Guidelines are Unreliable

2007-09-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Caution: This posting contains mathematical expressions that may cause stress.

Today's New York Times Magazine has an article by Gary Taubes pointing out the limitations of epidemiology in telling people what is good for them. I found the article far too long for its content and also taking rather a narrow view of the topic. Taubes has just written a book about diets, "Good Calories, Bad Calories", but it is not out yet (publication date is Sept. 25) and therefore I have no idea whether he deals with the issue of this blog.

My point here is that a major limitation of health guidelines is the lack of scientific foundations behind them.

Let us consider the example of weight. There is the infamous body mass index (BMI) that it supposed to have an optimal value around 25. To find your BMI you take your weight in kilograms and divide it by the square of your height in meters. (You can tell right away the European origin of the measure. For the conversion you need to multiply pounds by 2.2 to get kilograms and inches by 0.254 to get meters.) You can of course express your ideal weight in kilograms from the formula below, provided the height is expressed in meters.

Ideal Weight = 25 * height²

Let us now look at the results for people 1.60m (5 feet 3 inches), 1.70m (5 feet 7 inches), 1.80m (5 feet 11 inches), 1.90m (6 feet 2 inches) . The weights (in kilograms) we get from the formulas are respectively: 64, 72, 81, and 90. Do you notice that the weight comes to be close to the number expressed by the decimals in your height? When I was growing up in Greece doctors were saying that your ideal weight should be in kilograms to the number expressed by the decimals in your height. The mathematical formula for that is a linear equation

Old Ideal Weight = 100 * (height - 1)

That apparently was an old heuristic and the new "scientific" guidelines wanted to be close to it. The straight line of the linear equation is a tangent to the parabola of the quadratic equation and the two meet for height equal to 2 meters and weight equal to 100 kgs. However they are very close over a large area. For height 1.80m the difference of the equations is only 1kg and for height 1.70m is 2.25kg. I suspect the old formula was derived as a gross approximation to a set of observed weights and heights, most likely from recruits in a Western European army. (I have no evidence for that but data from army recruits have been used often in population studies because they were readily available.)

However a linear formula is itself too coarse an approximation for a large range of heights (if we want to include, for example women and children and not only young men) so the quadratic formula given first was adopted. Of course, the new formula had to agree with the old for the heights common to young men, hence the coefficient value of 25.

But there is another disturbing fact in that formula. Why is the weight expressed as the square of the height? Elementary solid geometry tells us that the volume of an object is equal to the third power of its linear dimensions, so the weight should be proportional of the cube of the height. However strength is proportional to the cross section of your arms and legs, so it is proportional to the square of the height. As a result, the ratio of strength over volume is declining function of height and that is why insects are far more mobile than dogs and dogs are more mobile than humans. Because for any given person height is determined by genetics and childhood nutrition, it must be taken as a given. Then the formula for proper weight must contain both a cubic term (to account for the volume) and a quadratic term (to account for the need for strength). The formula for the BMI is certainly flawed but nobody has figured out the right formula.

Not surprisingly, there have been articles pointing out that it gives too low weights for tall people but the public is not aware of them. Another flaw of the formula (also recognized in the literature) is that it does not distinguish between weight due to muscle and weight due to fat. Again that knowledge is not widely available.

Yes, you must be concerned about gaining excess weight, but what is excess weight is not what the formula tells you. Your best bet is to find a health practitioner who takes a realistic view of weight and discuss the problem with that person.

Medical Adventues (C)

2007-09-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

Some Practices to Watch Out For

There are many areas where Medical knowledge is limited and one should use published guidelines with caution. However, not all practitioners use such caution, so patients should be aware of the limitations. I list here a few of them only, mainly cases where I have had personal experience with the problem.

Normal Range: How is the normal range for a measurement (say cholesterol level in the blood) defined? You may think that there is some investigation of the body biochemistry behind it. No folks, it is based on statistics. Some medical board looks at values of the measure for several "healthy" people, the average (A) and standard deviation (SD) is computed and the range is usually set from A-SD to A+SD. The trouble with this approach is the definition of healthy. The sample may include people who may appear healthy but are going to develop the pathology in the near future (that results in too broad a "normal" range) and exclude people who have been misdiagnosed (that tends to narrow the range). The practical effect is that if your results are in the middle of the normal range you are probably OK, but if they are away from the middle the information is of limited value.

Risks Factors: Here I am going to give a personal example. My father died from a heart attack, my mother and both grandmothers died from strokes and my uncle (mother's brother) suffered a major heart attack and although he lived for another 20 years, he had been crippled because of the damage to his heart muscle. Yet, my family doctor insisted that I was not at risk from heart disease. Why? Because the medical guidelines define death of relatives as a risk factor only if it occurs before the age of 60 (or something like that) and my uncle was 68 when he had the heart attack and all the others over 70. I was 66 when I got into a big argument with my family doctor. He had given me a resting EKG that was normal and when I asked for a stress EKG his answer was "What do you need a stress EKG for?" Fortunately, I remembered a conversation I had with another doctor 25 years earlier. He had pointed out that the resting EKG was of limited predictive value and a stress EKG was far more likely to predict heart problems rather then just confirm that something bad had already happened. So I kept insisting and my doctor prescribed a stress test. Not surprisingly, I failed the stress test and that started the process that lead to open heart surgery in October 2000. I should add that my brother in Athens had stress tests every year because his doctor accepted a definition of risk factors more in line with common sense.

"It is all in your mind" is a common and erroneous diagnosis when a doctor cannot figure out your ailment. (See post of September 10.) I experienced such a diagnosis in November 2006 when a cursory examination of my urinary system revealed no problems and the doctor decided that my frequent night-time urination was the result of anxiety. I argued (too meekly in retrospect) that anxiety would have been causing more problems during the day but my argument was dismissed off hand. After I accepted the "in your mind" diagnosis I was prescribed and started taking psychotropic medications that while they seem to help in the short run (placebo effect?), eventually they seem to leave me worse off. That is when I called my daughter (a clinical psychologist) who, after listening to me, insisted that my problem was physical and not in my head. Of course that left me searching for the physical problem but I reduced the psychotropics and I felt better. (I stopped them completely after the diagnosis of sleep apnea that in many cases causes excessive nightime urination.) What was happening was that the psychotropics did not affect the source of my problem (sleep interruptions) but made me feel drowsy and more tired during the day. My suggestion is that if your doctor says "it is all in your mind" ask for a second opinion, and a third, a fourth. Under no circumstances start taking psychotropic drugs (antidepressants, anti-anxiety, etc) until you talk to a clinical psychologist and discuss your problems with him/her. Clinical psychologists specialize in dealing with problems in people's minds and are better qualified than MDs to say whether a problem is "only in your mind".

Read more on my website: http://www.theopavlidis.com/HealthIssues/health.htm

Medical Adventures (B)

2007-09-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

Looking for the Right Doctor

The key point to remember is that, like in any profession, the gap between the best and the worst practitioners is very wide. Not all of them keep up with advances in medicine. Here is another quote by Osler: "The average non-reading doctor might play a good game of golf or of bridge, but professionally he (is) a lost soul." This was said in 1909 and it is quite valid today. In addition, you have to consider compatibility of personalities between the doctor and the patient. Here are some suggestions:

(1) Be an educated consumer. Educate yourself as much as possible about human physiology and health issues so that can think better of your needs. But do not delude yourself that you can be your own healer. For one think, you are not objective.

(2) Look for doctors who are willing to listen and stay away from those who are in a hurry or seem to feel insulted when the patient proposes a diagnosis. Certainly, stay away from dogmatic and arrogant doctors.

(3) Be sure to ask for a second opinion for anything extreme. Either when a major treatment is proposed or when your doctors says "there is nothing wrong." Of course you have to be prepared to hear conflicting opinions, that is why (1) is important.

(4) If you have something very serious, such as cancer, go to a major medical center (in the case of cancer, Sloan-Kettering in New York and Anderson in Houston are examples of the kind of center I mean). At the very least try to select a doctor who is on the faculty of a major medical school. Physicians at such places are far more likely to be up to date with the literature and the newest developments in their field. They are also more likely to be genuinely interested in their profession and not consider it just as means of earning a living. I should add that in my own experience I have found the highly regarded specialists more humble and willing to listen than many ordinary physicians.

(5) Plan ahead. The best doctors tend to be heavily booked and it may take several months before you can get a new patient appointment (some of them may see patients only one day a week because they do surgery or research or teach the rest of the time). Decide what are your risk factors, find who is the best specialist in the area and make an appointment with him/her even if you do not have an immediate need.

(6) In addition to the specialists find a doctor who takes a broad view to medicine to be your primary care provider. You want a of doctor who takes a systems approach to medicine and places emphasis on nutrition and the treatment of the whole person. I was planning to use the term holistic medicine to describe such a practice but, unfortunately, the term is loosely used and it is often confused with alternative medicine and other unorthodox practices. The fact that mainstream medical practice maybe wrong on an issue does not make other views on the issue automatically right. When we deal with hard problems there may several wrong solutions.

There are various list of "Best Doctors" but not all of them are reliable. Probably, the most reliable indicator of the quality of a physician's training is the hospital where he/she was a resident. But you have to find that information first and then you have to find out the reputation of the hospital. A good indicator for surgeons is the number of operations they perform each year.

(To be continued)

Medical Adventures (A)

2007-09-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

How I am Alive Thanks to Some Doctors and in Spite of Others

Starting today I will write over several days a critique of some medical practices. It is by no means a critique of the medical profession as a whole. I am alive today because of the advice, efforts, dedication, and high skills of several physicians. But choosing the right doctors and ignoring unsound advice was essential. I also want to counteract the tendency of some people to reject modern medicine altogether because of a negative experience with a particular practitioner. I am a strong believer in modern medical science even if I have lost respect for some of its practitioners. If an inept mechanic messes up the tuning of my car engine I will not reject the laws of thermodynamics; I will simply look for a competent mechanic. Of course, choosing doctors is more critical than choosing mechanics because you may not get a second chance. Because the human organism is so complex, even the best doctors make mistakes sometimes. What patients should be looking for is doctors who will do as well as the current state of medical science allows.

These writings are motivated by my medical problems during the winter of 2006-7. I am detailing that story in http://www.theopavlidis.com/HealthIssues/health.htm where I also present more extensive comments than I do on the blog.

My most severe problem with doctors has been the unwillingness of many of them to listen to the patient and their extreme self-confidence, if not arrogance. Of course, such attitude goes against the advice of Sir William Osler (a Canadian MD, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) who said: "If you want to find what is wrong, ask the patient" and also "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."

This attitude is troubling enough by itself, but it is often coupled with a tendency to make a diagnosis based on the most common cases. If you have symptom A, then the cause must be B because that is the case with, say, 60% of the people who exhibit symptom A. Too bad if you happen to be in the remaining 40% and your symptoms are caused by something other than B.

The situation becomes even worse if your symptoms have multiple causes (which was the case with me last winter). Superposition effects seem to be beyond the grasp of many physicians. When I tried to explain the issue to some of them, they looked baffled and even impatient; it was clear they thought I was wasting their time. The tragic side of this is that in older people several systems may start functioning below the optimal level but, because each system is still within "normal limits", the MD cannot find what is wrong.

Another bad practice is that whenever physicians are puzzled they claim that the patient's problems are in his/hers mind. (This was the initial diagnosis for me.) This is the modern equivalent of been ill because of "foul airs" or the "evil eye". Because of the frequency of such a diagnosis in older people we have the myth of the "elderly depression".

You may say that I demand too much from doctors because the human body is a far more complex mechanism than any technological device. Well, doctors cannot have it both ways. If they want sympathy from their patients for their tough job, they must also have sympathy for the patients who suffer from a tough to diagnose ailment.

I am not dealing with practices that are clearly unethical, such as doctors who order unnecessary (and often painful and expensive) procedures to make money. Or doctors who prescribe medication because of their links with the pharmaceutical industry. What I am trying to convey is that some doctors may be harmful even if they commit no ethics violations or even if they use their best judgment in the interest of the patient. The problem is that their best judgment may not be that good.

There is an excellent book dealing with the problems of medical diagnosis: How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, MD that came out while I was struggling with my own doctors. Two of the most memorable (for me) observations in the book are: (1) 15% of all diagnoses are wrong; and (2) doctors often attribute to psychological causes ailments that are unable to diagnose ("it is all in your mind", "you are too anxious", etc). They seem to fit with what I was experiencing.

(To be continued)

Petition Against an Academic Boycott

2007-06-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

On May 30 delegates for a British academic union voted 158-99 in favor of a boycott of Israeli academics. The decision will not become effective until it is ratified by the membership, a long drawn out process that may never happen. There was swift reaction against the decision both from within British and outside. In particular a United States group that includes Alan Dershowitz has started a petition where those who sign say, in effect, that they will not participate in any activity from which Israeli scholars are excluded. The petition can be found in http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/display_petitions.cgi?ID=9 and it has already been signed by over 6000 scholars and academics. The whole issue has been discussed in a column by Thomas Friedman in the Sunday New York Times of June 17, as well as a two page article in the Economist issue of June 16-22 under the title: "Slamming Israel, giving Palestinians a free pass - A strangely one-sided boycott in Britain stirs global rage." (Pages 68-69, also online at http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9340508) The president of Columbia University and the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley have both issued strong statements condemning the boycott.

This post may seem superfluous given all the major publicity that the issue has generated but I want to emphasize that the proposed boycott is not only an attack on the academics of a given nation but also an attack on academic freedom and one does not have to be a supporter of the Israeli government or its policies to sign the petition. At the end of this post you will find several quotes attesting to this point.

The British proposal establishes a dangerous precedent and next time the target of an academic boycott may come from another direction against a different group.

Some people offer assorted excuses for not signing the petition. One excuse is that there is a very small chance, if any, of the boycott been implemented. This begs the question because one reason the implementation of the boycott is unlikely is the quick and strong reaction against it. Small radical groups can cause a lot of trouble if they are not confronted early enough. Do not forget that some Germans laughed at Hitler in the 1920's only to find themselves in concentration camps 10 year later.

Another excuse is that some people do not like Alan Dershowitz and the group that sponsored the petition. This is another poor excuse. The wording of the petition does not imply any endorsement of the group and if people feel strongly about this issue they should start another petition drive rather than do nothing.

Quotes from Signers of the Petition

"I cannot see how boycotting the Israeli academic colleagues who are statistically significantly more likely to be rational and open-minded than a lot of other groups of the general population helps any of the complex problems of the middle east."
Costas Constantinou, University of Birmingham, UK

"One may have strong differences with the policies of the Israeli government, which I do. One may have a strong moral commitment to the rights of Palestinians, which I do. However, it is morally wrong as well as truly muddleheaded, to boycott Israeli academics and hold them responsible for the actions of their government. First of all, this boycott is indiscriminate and unfair, because many of them oppose the policies of their government. Second, because as academics, we should encourage dialogue, not hold discussion hostage to politics. Banning Israeli colleagues from international meetings out of opposition to Israeli government policies will have exactly the wrong effects and send exactly the wrong message - if anything, our goals should be to engage Israeli and Palestinian colleagues in conversation, dialogue and collaboration and create an atmosphere of academic dialogue and discourse that can build trust and help lead to peace."
Jonathan Fritz, University of Maryland

"A boycott towards scientists and scientific meetings is certainly aiming at the wrong group of people. In my experience scientists in critical political situations are a powerful tool in keeping lines of communication open which tend to be closed already for politicians. Therefore a boycott towards scientists is counterproductive and totally unacceptable.I remember well the Cold War and especially the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army. In spite of strong calls for a boycott we attended a conference in Leningrad to secure the continuing personal contact with our scientific colleagues in the USSR. Here we learnt how much they criticized their government's action and told us how they appreciated our coming under politically most stressful circumstances."
Karl Fuchs, Karlsruhe/Germany

"The Soviet Union committed human rights abuses much worse that those attributed to Israel by even its worst critics. There was no call for a boycott of Soviet physicists like Lev Landau and Andrei Sakharov (father of the Russian H bomb).Such a call would have been considered absurd. Israeli academics have been in the forefront of the fight for a just solution to the problems of the Middle East. To punish them for the acts of their government is hypocritical and counterproductive."
Thomas Banks, U.C. Santa Cruz

Macedonia at 1907 and Iraq at 2007

2007-05-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

There is a historical analogue to the current awful situation in Iraq that happened about 100 years ago in what was then the Ottoman province of Macedonia. That province had a mixed population of Christian Greeks, Christian Slavs (mostly Bulgarian speaking), and Muslim Turks. In addition, there were several other minorities, such as the Sephardic Jews of Salonica.

By the end of the 19th century it was clear that the Ottoman empire was crumbling and a fight for the spoils started. Bands of Greek and Bulgarian "insurgents" started attacking the Ottomans and, mostly, each other. Six European powers (England, France, the then Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia, Germany, and Italy) decided to intervene and stop the mayhem and they did so by diving Macedonia into six zones with each country undertaking the modernization of the Ottoman police in its zone. Of course, their motives were not purely humanitarian. They were also looking to grab pieces of the disintegrating Ottoman empire.

You see now the similarities (as well as some differences) with the current situation in Iraq. A strong ruler has disappeared (Saddam suddenly in Iraq, the strong Ottoman rule has gradually weakened). There are two ethnic/religious groups fighting each other (Sunni and Shia in Iraq, Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia) and those who try to control the situation (The U.S. and its allies in Iraq, the Ottoman rulers in Macedonia). The West tries to calm things down by organizing a local security force (Iraqi police and army, the Ottoman police in Macedonia). In contrast to Iraq, there were no fighting Western forces. The Ottoman forces played the role of an occupying army (as far as the Greeks and Bulgarians were concerned) but they were also protecting the local Muslim population.

What happened next? In Macedonia there were the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. The countries of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro allied against the Ottomans and were able to defeat their armies and take over Macedonia and other European Ottoman parts. Then the Greece and Serbia united to fight the Bulgarians in the division of the spoils. The Bulgarians lost, so the Greeks and the Serbians divided Macedonia amongst themselves. But things did not stay quite for a long time. In both World Wars (1914-1919 and 1939-1945) Serbia (later Yugoslavia) and Greece were allies of the British and French while Bulgaria was an ally of Germany. After WW-II Yugoslavia and Bulgaria came under Soviet control while Greece stayed outside the iron curtain. However Greece was torn by a civil war between "nationalists" and communists. The former were supported by Britain and the United States. The latter by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Bulgarian speaking inhabitents of Greek Macedonia came readily under suspicion as being pro-communists. Many of the young Greece leftists were quite fanatic, "eager to give their life for the glory of the party." (Does this remind anyone of al-Qaeda?)

From roughly 1890 to around 1950 friction between Greece and Bulgaria persistent with regular bloody flare-ups. Even during the "peaceful" 20 years between WW-I and WW-II there were "border incidents".

What does the history of Macedonia imply about Iraq? If you accept the analogy, it may take over 50 years for peace. Are Americans willing to stay there that long? For 25 years? For 10 years? Splitting Iraq into three countries may be the least painful option, horrible as it might be initself. After all this is what happended in Macedonia.

A Disappointing Book

2007-04-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and I was quite disappointed because the author sets up several "straw men" that he easily knocks down and avoids deeper issues. Dawkins does not seem to distinguish between religion and the exploitation of religion, especially political disputes that are packaged as religious disputes. In fact, he claims the opposite, that ethnic strife is usually religious strife. He also lumps all religious attitudes together, people who believe in the literal truth of the Bible (or other religious texts) and those who think that such books have been written by people and should be read in their historical context and take from them only what is valid today.

The best part of the book is Chapter 5, "The Roots of Religion" where he addresses the question of why religion is so widespread amongst humans. But that is only one tenth of the book and the rest seems to ignore that part.

If we accept that a human society that is religious may have advantages over other societies we can see why political leaders may want to foster or manipulate religion. For similar reasons leaders may want a different religion than that of another state. Many theological disputes may seem absurd, but they are simply excuses. The original theological difference between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches was whether the Holy Ghost emanates from the Father and the Son or only from the Father. Of course the real reason was political antagonism between the Western and Eastern successor states of the Roman Empire. In modern times we have the supposedly religious dispute about the teaching of evolution. As Thomas Frank has pointed out (in "What's the Matter with Kansas") the subject has been used as a divisive issue to cause people to vote against their own financial interests. While it may not be easy to find the exact boundaries between genuine religious motivation and political manipulation, the issue exists and Dawkins ignores it completely.

Dawkins explains the persistence of religious beliefs as a result of religious instruction and, in effect, "brainwashing" of children. However, there are beliefs that are not supported by any organized religion and are still widespread. A good example is the superstition about "evil eye." It exists amongst Christians, Muslims, and Jews (in Europe and the Middle East) and it is not part of any of these religions. It also exists amongst Hindus in India. What maintains people's belief in the "evil eye"? Because this superstition has not been sponsored by any major religion or political ruler, the reason for its survival should provide hints about the human need for religion.

Dawkins quotes selectively from the Bible to show that it does not teach morality. In doing so he ignores parts where religion has pioneered concepts of social justice. My favorite is from Leviticus 19.9-10: "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger ..."

I share Dawkins' view that there is no personal God, a concept first stated by Spinoza. Einstein is one famous supporter of this view and Dawkins quotes from him. But then he goes on to argue that there is no God at all. I cannot see why this issue is important. For my part I find comfort and peace of mind when I pray, even if no one may be listening to me. And I find it even more helpful when I pray with others.

The Futility of Fighting Evil with Evil

2007-04-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a showing of "Paper Clips," a movie dealing with the creation of a monument for the victims of the Holocaust. There was a panel discussion afterwards and the panelists expressed sentiments such as "where were the churches when all this was happening?" and "for evil to triumph, it only necessary that good people do nothing." While people may still remember the Holocaust, they have forgotten why it happened.

The horrible truth is that churches and "good people" helped Hitler get to power. In the aftermath of WW-I and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the big fear in Europe was the spread of Communism. There had been already brief communist regimes in both Bavaria and Hungary. Hitler was seen by many people both within and outside Germany as the best defense against the Bolsheviks. I have written a summary of the related history in an earlier blog titled Appeasement (posted on August 30, 2006) where I have listed several sources. Hitler could have been stopped easily before 1936 but the Western powers thought of him as a lesser evil compared to Stalin. By 1939, when Hitler entered into an alliance with Stalin, he was far too powerful for anyone to do anything about him. The bloodbath of WW-II followed that included the horrors of the Holocaust. At the end of the war many countries ended up with communist regimes, exactly the opposite outcome of what Hitler's early supporters had expected.

Unfortunately, the lesson was lost and fifty years later the United States supported Islamic extremist to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The West also supported fundamentalists elsewhere to fight Arab socialists. The result was the creation of al Qaida, the emergence of bin-Ladden as a leader, and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The West slept while millions of ordinary Muslims suffered under religious extremists and many were killed. The attacks of 9/11 were a wake up call for the West but by then a lot of damage had been done. One of the worst consequences was that much of the western media lumped all Muslims together as potential "terrorists", including many who had fled to the West to escape the fundamentalist regimes in their countries.

Will we ever learn?

Income Disparity Keeps Increasing

2007-03-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

My first blog in May of 2006 was about income disparity. According to an article in the New York Times (Thursday, March 29, 2007) things are getting even worse. A study based on IRS returns showed in increase in the gap between the very rich and the rest of the population. The authors point out that the gap is likely to be even bigger because the IRS "estimates that is able to tax accurately 99% of wage income but it captures only about 70% of business and investment income."

On Sunday, April 1, the New York Times published an article about the problems of the auto workers. While payments for those forced to early retirement have eased their pain, the fact remains that thousands of well paying blue color jobs have disappeared. This does not bode well for the future and income disparity is likely to increase. Many middle class jobs have been outsourced.

I pointed out in last week's blog that, historically, states with large income disparity have not fared well. Of course, by the time the situation becomes critical it is too late to do anything about it. It may be difficult to keep some well paying industrial jobs in the United States or, for that matter anywhere (because of automation). But having a trully progressive tax that produces revenue that can be used for universal health care, subsidized college education, and the like should help to reduce the income disparity.

How an Empire was Destroyed by Outsourcing

2007-03-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to write more about Greek/Turkish relations and that led me to read about the history of the Greek Byzantine Empire that supposedly was destroyed by the Turks and I was struck by the similarity between developments in the Empire and the modern United States.

The Byzantine Empire was officially known as the Roman Empire because it was a successor state to the ancient Roman Empire. Until the 11th century it was a powerful state whose territory included present day Turkey, Greece, and large parts of the Balkan states. Then, in 1071 in Manzikert (in Armenia) ,the emperor Romanus was defeated by the Seljuk Turk sultan Alp Arslan and was captured as prisoner. As a result Asia Minor was lost to the Byzantines and that was the beginning of the end of the state. The final end came in 1453 when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople. Most historians agree that the crucial event was the 1071 defeat so we may look at what caused it. The story below is based on a book by Vryonis [1].

The Byzantine army used to consist of soldier/farmers who in exchange for having a piece of land they were obligated to provide military service. By the 11th century rich landowners (who were also the military leaders) had taken over the soldier farms and the farmers had no longer a military obligation. As a result the Byzantines had to rely extensively on mercenaries whose loyalties were at best doubtful. A second factor was extensive civil wars between the "civil bureaucracy in the capital and the military magnates in the provinces" [1, p. 71]. As a result parts of the Byzantine army were fighting each other, rather than external enemies. Finally around 1060-65 the Christian Syrians and Armenians were pressured to accept the doctrine of the church of Constantinople (Chalcedonian creed) antagonizing those ethnic groups. Vryonis [1] gives quite a grim account of the campaign that ended in Manzikert. Amongst other disasters, the Byzantines relied on Turkish mercenaries who switched sides during the battle.

I am afraid that we see a repetition of the first factor today in the United States. Today the power of a state lies less in its army and more in its industrial capacity. Many American companies have been moving their manifacturing as well as many administrative functions overseas. As a result their former employees are left poorer while the upper management (and owners) of the companies become richer. The increased income discrepancy and its importance as a predictor of decline has been note by several authors including Phillips [2]. But we may also notice the dependence on unreliable "mercenaries." What assurance does a company A have that country X may one day decide to take over the facilities of A located in X?

I suspect that there may never be an overt takeover, the action may be more subtle. But the effect will be the same. The end of the industrial hegemony of the United States.

Speros Vryonis, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Univ. of California Press, 1971. (The book is kept in print by ACLS and it can be purchased directly from ACLS or from Amazon. It contains numerous references and quotes from texts of that period.)

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy, Viking, 2006.

Greeks and Kemal Ataturk

2007-03-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

I have been away from my blog for over six months, in part because of health reasons and in part because the Middle East situation is so bad that I could not think of anything hopeful to say. One day, while surfing, the web I noticed that the Greek-Turkish disputes had spilled over cyberspace and I may have something to say in that area.

The truth is that there are more things that unite Greeks and Turks than things that divide them. I know many (though not all) Greeks and Turks share that view so good relations between Greeks and Turks is a more realistic goal than peace elsewhere in the Middle East. I hope this blog will compensate to some degree the blogs where some Greeks and Turks hurl insults to each other.

I should add that I was born in Greece but both of my parents were born in Turkey and left that country in the 1920's as a result of a brutal "population exchange." Two relatively recent books deal with that exchange in a way that fits with the oral history I have heard from my parents and other relatives. They are

Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006 and
Louis de Bernieres, Birds without Wings, 2004.

The first is history, the second a historical novel. The key issue is that "Greeks" (Ottoman Christians) and "Turks" (Ottoman Muslims) in Asia Minor lived together in peace and had generally good relations until WW-I. In 1919 the Greek Army was encouraged by the British to invade Ottoman lands and that started a chain of catastrophic events. It is customary for some Greeks to demonize Kemal Ataturk who led the resistance to the Greek Army thinking that if he did not exist they would have been able to re-establish the Byzantine Empire.

Let us imagine for a moment that Kemal not did exist and the Greek army was able to hold parts of Asia Minor while the Italians and the French held other parts. What next? Most of the people of Asia Minor were Turkish speaking Muslims. There would have enormous local resistance against what would have been in effect colonial regimes. (It is important to remember that most of the atrocities against Greeks and other Christians during the 1919-1922 war were not committed by the regular Turkish army but by irregulars, the "tsetes". So the absence of Kemal would have done little to diminish the carnage.) The example of nearby countries that used to be part of the Ottoman empire and fell under colonial rule tells what it might have happen. Turkey would have been another Iraq or Syria or Lebanon. A horrendous mess much closer to Europe than these other countries. Not the outcome some Greeks imagined.

Kemal Ataturk was a truly great man, a talented military leader, a gifted political leader, and a thinker. For a winning general he showed remarkable restrain when, in spite of advice from his generals, he refused to invade Western Thrace (he could have done easily so [1] ) or Syria . He had his eye in the long term. Like many a genius he had his flaws that unfortunately led to his rather early death (he was only 57) in 1938, a loss not only for Turkey, but also for the countries around it The history of his life can be found in several books, including the two I listed above [1, 2] but I want to include three of the more remarkable stories about him. (1) When he entered Smyrna in 1922 some people had laid down a Greek flag and asked him to step on it. He refused to do so, he did not want to insult the enemy; (2) In October 1930 he invited his former enemy Venizelos to Turkey where he treated him warmly (the streets of Ankara were decked with Greek flags). They even discussed the possibility of a partnership or federation between the two countries ([1], p. 201) (3) Years later when he introduced the Roman alphabet to replace the Arabic, he went himself to classrooms to teach it sending a powerful message to all government officials that lack of teachers was not going to be an excuse for not following the reform.

Greece is much better off today with the modern Turkey created by Kemal Ataturk as a neighbor than any other realistic alternative.

LONG TERM SOLUTIONS TO "TERRORISM"

2006-09-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

I think the fifth anniversary of 9/11 calls for some introspection. Who is our enemy? The usual answer is "the terrorists" but this describes the means of action of the enemy rather than the enemy itself. The word "terrorism" describes something like "crime." A problem that must be dealt directly with security measures but also indirectly by looking at the processes that produce the agents of such actions. The typical conservative reaction is to focus on the security measures and the typical liberal reaction is to focus on the long term causes. As a centrist I believe that we have to do both.

Our highly complex technological society is vulnerable to disruptive actions and we have to guard against such eventualities in spite of the inconvenience. It is not only common criminals or political activists that may want to cause damage but also mentally unbalanced individuals. One could theorize that a certain degree of mental illness is present in all those who commit extremely violent acts, even if the rational given may be political or in support of a criminal activity. I recall reading about a month before 9/11/01 that having unsecured doors at the airplane cockpits was inviting disaster. A small group of physically strong individuals could overpower the crew without using any weapons (by applying chock holds for example). I doubt that the 9/11 hijackers would have been as successful with secure cockpit doors. Thus we need security as well as intelligent intelligence gathering for possible disruptive actions.

A lot of the recent terrorist acts (and not just 9/11) have been committed by Moslem men in protest of various perceived injustices, American troops in Saudi Arabia, the Arab/Israeli conflict, the dispute over Kashmir, etc, etc. The extreme liberal view is that if these injustices were rectified we would not have to worry about terrorism. I find that extremely naive. (What would stop a group of religious fanatics from demanding, for example, that Americans stop eating pork?) What is true is that there is a widespread feeling of malaise amongst young Moslem men that may cause some of them to undertake desperate actions. If a person is alienated from society and frustrated about his prospects he may be likely to commit suicide and a political cause may make it appear more noble.

Ultimately, we must search for the cause in the societies these men came from. What do these societies have in common? It is not only religion but also the fact that most of them are rich in natural resources and, in particular oil. The availability of such wealth has let a small group of individuals in each country to benefit themselves while oppressing the rest of the population. An excellent description of such a society (in particular the Saudi society) and the way western countries aggravate the situation can be found in the book Trench by Abdel Raman Munif. As long as the industrialized world sees such countries only as sources of natural resources and pours money into the coffers of the local oligarchs who control the resources there is no motive for them to either share the wealth or establish democratic institutions. (Fareed Zakaria explains why in his book The Future of Freedom.) This explains not only the problems of the Middle East but also the overall misery of Africa (see the book Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith). People in these country direct their anger at the West not only because of the support it gives to their oppressive rulers but also because the rulers themselves try to divert the popular anger away from themselves by various ruses. (This is where the abuse of religion comes into play.)

It seems the long term remedy is a hard one. The West must stop (or at least reduce) their purchases of raw materials from countries that have oppressive regimes. How about not buying oil from any country that is not a parliamentary democracy and does not respect human rights? That seems like an impossible dream but unless we take such measures the process that produces terrorists will continue unabated.

"Regime changes" cannot be imposed from the outside and unless the economic structure is changed, even internal regime change is not going to work. (For example, in Iran the dictatorship of the Shah was replaced by a theocratic dictatorship.) There are no quick fixes!

Appeasement

2006-08-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

The word appeasement is making the news again in reference to European policies before World War II. It is accompanied by claims that retreating from Iraq today will be equivalent to such policies. It should be noted that the analogy with pre-WW-II "appeasement" was used against those advocating ending the Vietnam war 35 years or so ago.

It seems that few people are fully familiar with the pre-WW II history, so I composed a little primer based both on some books (listed at the end) as well as what I was hearing from my parents and other adults in that period and its aftermath. (Yes, I was born well before WW-II.)
The term "appeasement" is usually applied to the September 1938 Munich agreement between the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain and Hitler (http://www.onwar.com/articles/0004.htm). Chamberlain claimed that he had achieved "peace in our time" but in less than a year Hitler invaded Poland starting WW-II so the "appeasement" postponed WW-II by less than a year. Would it have been easier to defeat Hitler in 1938 than it was in 1939? Few historians think it would have made a big difference. The time to stop Hitler without a major bloodshed was much earlier, before he had the chance to build his armored divisions. A great opportunity had been offered in the March of 1936 with the remilitarization of the Rhineland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland). Hitler's army was not ready yet (he had come to power in January 1933 and he had not consolidated his power until the summer of 1934). So the term "appeasement" should be more properly used for the 1936 rather than the 1938 events. Shirer (1, p. 293) claims that the result from a strong French reaction "would have been the end of Hitler." Later Hitler himself referred to the 48 hours after the occupation as the "most nerve-racking" period in his life. (ibid)

Why then Hitler was appeased in 1936 when it would have been easily dealt with? Because many political entities in Europe were in his favor! Hitler was seen as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks and had the support, amongst others, of the Pope. The British also (foolishly) worried about the French getting too strong in the Continent and were counting on a stronger Germany to counterbalance them [2]. Some historians think that this factor was still in play in 1938 [2]. Hitler became a monster not because people were not willing to fight him but because many of them liked him! Even the French, had many other problems besides defeatism [3].

I recall reading a Greek right wing pamphlet that had been published before WW-II and my father had saved. Its author was full of praise for the "Christian (sic) leaders Hitler and Mussolini" who were not only going to "free the world from the Bolsheviks but also from the Jews and the Free-Masons as well." Hitler's anti-communism and anti-semitism had broad support outside Germany so the lack of opposition to him had less to do with the desire to avoid war than with a lack of understanding of his true intentions. For many Europeans (and Americans) Hitler was the good guy who would save them from Stalin (the really bad guy). Such views would even surface after WW-II. I recall reading such articles during the cold war.

1. William L. Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960, Simon Schuster reprint 1990) - An excellent overall source, although a bit dated. However Shirer's Afterword in the 1990 edition is remarkable.

2. James Pool Hitler and his Secret Partners (Pocket Books, 1997) - The book documents the widespread support of the Nazis both by the German establishment and outside powers, such as king of England Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor).

3. William L. Shirer The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969, Da Capo Press reprint 1994) - while Hitler was building his armored divisions the French were concerned with the horse breeding program for their cavalry.

It is the Oil, Stupid

2006-08-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of nonsense being written after the tragic events in the Middle East over the last several weeks. Both sides claim victory, etc, etc. Nobody seems to be looking at the big picture, at least not the major news media. (You can find an occasional column in the NY Times but not on their front page.)

What do we have there? A lot of poor and oppressed people who countries posses a major resource, oil. Who buys the oil? The major industrial powers of the West. Who gets the money from the sale of oil? Only the rulers of those countries. How do they deal with the dissatisfaction of their subject? By diverting their attention to, so called, external problems, namely the Arab-Israeli conflict. No wonder, it is in the interest of the rulers of the oil rich countries to fan the flames of the conflict.

Attempting "regime change" from the outside is futile, as any student of history knows (it has never happened before). Killing people to make them free ranks with the burning of "heretics" by the Inquisition in order to save their souls!

Is there a peaceful way to pressure the rulers of these lands? How about cutting our purchases of oil from them? How about not buying oil from countries that mistreat their subjects? Wouldn't that cause hardship in the industrialized world. It will, but eventually we must reduce oil consumption no matter what.

Oil is a non-renewable natural resource and eventually the world will run out of oil. This may not happen for another 50 or even 100 years but it is best not to face the crisis suddenly. Even before we run out of oil its price will start climbing - something that it may have already started. If we want to avoid economic shocks, it is best to start reducing our consumption now.

Then there is the effect on global warming. Global warming is happening, what is disputed is whether it is caused by CO2 emissions. Again, the prudent course is to reduce CO2 emissions.

There is talk about alternative source of energy, etc but these are not a given (see earlier postings on this blog). We waste so much now that a modest effort in reducing energy consumption will have significant effects. Tax policy (either taxing gasoline directly or taxing inefficient vehicles) can encourage people to save. Of course this is going to reduce the profits of oil companies as well as the profits of the auto industry, so we are stuck!

2006-08-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

THE MESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

WHY THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT IS A SYMPTOM RATHER THAN A CAUSE

While many people talk and write about the Middle East few seem to know (or, if they know, refer to) the background of the mess, so I am offering here a few observations.

For many centuries (from about 1300 to 1920) the Middle East was part of the Ottoman Empire, a state that in its peak included not only the Middle East but also all of North Africa (including Libyan and Algeria), the Balkan peninsula (what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Rumania, the parts of Yugoslavia, and, for about a century, Hungary), a good part of southern Ukraine and Russia (including Chechnya), and, of course, Turkey. For several centuries the Ottoman Empire was a formidable military power terrorizing Europe with Ottoman armies besieging Vienna twice. (The last time was in 1683.) The military fortunes of the Ottoman empire started declining in the 18th century and its disintegration started in the 19th century and was completed by the end of the first World War.

Why the big decline of the Ottoman Empire? It was an authoritarian state with a strong religious character. The Sultan was not only the emperor but also the Caliph, the leader of Moslems all over the world. Other religions were tolerated but their adherents "knew their place." (I speak on the basis not only of what I have read but also from personal experience. Both of my parents were born in the Ottoman Empire and lived there until they were expelled together with other Christian Greeks after WW-I.) In order for the Sultan and his clique to keep their power they used religion to keep the Moslem majority of their subjects backward. The existence of religious minorities (Orthodox Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Egyptian Copts, etc) allowed the rulers the opportunity to create an educated middle class to help administer the empire. For example, tax collectors were rarely if ever Moslems (one of my Greek great-grandfathers was a tax collector for the Sultan). In addition, every effort was made to cultivate suspicion and hostility amongst the various ethnic groups. The Sultan was safe from revolt because those in power bellow him were not only suspicious of each other but also faced the hostility of the mass of poor Moslems who saw them as oppressors rather than the remote and ostensibly benevolent Sultan.

Off course, all hell would break loose when the oppressor from the top was removed. Greeks and Bulgarians slaughtered each other in Macedonia in the early 1900s. Even 90 years later Serbs, Bosnians, and Croatians were at each other throats. The current Sunni/Shiite strife in Iraq has similar roots. (Keep in mind that Iraq was curved out of the Ottoman Empire around 1922.) In 1922-24 one and a half million Greeks were expelled from Turkey, from lands they had been living for over 3,000 years. Many ordinary Turks were jealous of them because they were the merchants and the craftsmen. My mother told me that Greek children would go to school to learn how to read and write while Moslem Turkish children would to school to chant from the Koran. (I have confirmed this story from other sources too.) The expulsion is described in Greece as The Catastrophe. I was surprised to hear later that in Turkey it is also described as the demographic catastrophe. After most of the skilled people were expelled the standard of living plunged even if the assets of those expelled were looted. One of my great uncles went back to Turkey around 1920 and he found the Turks in their old town living in abject poverty. He was told: "when you people left you took the blessing of God with you."

With the possible exception of Turkey itself most of the countries broken off the Ottoman empire fell under authoritarian regimes, first colonial, and then home grown dictators and kings. They had little incentive to educate the masses of their citizen and raise their standard of living because they found themselves in possession of the oil wealth. And lo and behold they also had a great scapegoat, the state of Israel. For me the Arab/Israeli conflict is no different than the numerous sectarian and ethnic conflicts in the remnants of the Ottoman empire, it just gets far more press coverage.

The Moslem world was kept down by the Ottoman Sultans for over 700 years. They missed not only the industrial revolution, they also missed the renaissance. (The first Turkish printing press was not established in the Ottoman Empire until 1729, while Jewish, Armenian, and Greek printing presses had been established in 1527, 1567, and 1627 respectively. Moslem religious authorities objected to printing as been sacrilegious.) Now their rulers wish to keep them down and blame variously the West and the Jews. It should be noted that anti Western attitudes predate the current conflicts. The Earl of Cromer, author of Modern Egypt (London, 1908) notes: "the westernized Egyptian becomes usually a promoter of anti-western ideas in his country." The modern observation that the Arab elite tend to be far more anti-American than the uneducated masses has been often repeated in our news media with the usual explanation that the elite are more aware of Israel's mistreatment of the Arabs than the masses. But this quote shows that the attitude was already there in 1908 when not only Israel nowhere in site but also before the Balfour declaration that promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Can the West do anything to help the Arab masses? Stop pouring billions of dollars in the coffers of dictators and absolute monarchs by buying their oil. Can we stand up and say that we will not buy oil from a country that oppresses its own citizens?

A lot is written in the Western press about terrorists. Please keep in mind that the same regimes that spawn terrorists are killing many more of their own citizens than foreigners. It is no coincidence that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. It is an old trick of oppressive governments to direct the wrath of their citizens to outside targets. Direct military action to help people from a bad regime rarely works. It has been said that "freedom is not given but taken." Thus quick solutions do not work and the best we can do is police action to defend ourselves from terrorist actions. For the long run, lets stopping funding them by purchasing Middle East oil.

Please have no illusions that a "resolution" of the Arab Israeli conflict will have any significant effect. After all they will be still plenty of places where some Muslims are unhappy and in the midst of either open or covert armed strife. Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, and, of course, several countries in Europe.

Why Use Electricity rather than Oil

2006-08-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

Recently the Economist had an article about the electric car that include some inaccuracies. Here is the text of the letter I sent to the editor:

"SIR - Your article on Electric Cars (July 29) repeats a common misconception that because the electricity used by such a car is produced by burning fossil fuels the "claims of greenery might sound a bit fishy." However, the thermodynamic efficiency of car engines is in the 20-30% range while the corresponding efficiency of the steam turbines of the electrical power plants is about double these numbers. Thus only half the fuel need to be burned for an electric car as compared to a gasoline power car. In addition, power plants can afford better emission filters, so the overall decrease in greenhouse gasses is even bigger."

While most of my US career has been in Computer Science, I was trained as a mechanical and electrical power engineer and I spent two years (1959-1961) working as an engineer in a power plant in Athens, Greece. So let me elaborate a bit.

When a heat engine (be it the gasoline of your car or your lawnmower, a truck diesel, or a stem turbine at a power plant) it cannot convert all heat to mechanical energy. The fraction converted to mechanical energy is the efficiency of the engine. Because of the laws of thermodynamics, the higher the temperature reached inside the engine the higher the efficiency. (If you to know why see, for example, http://ecen.com/content/eee7/motoref.htm but be prepared to deal with thermodynamic equations.) This is the basic reason why diesel engines are more efficient than ordinary gasoline engines and why large steam turbines are more efficient than internal combustion engines. It also happens that electricity is converted to mechanical energy with very high efficiency, usually well over 90%. Compare now a gasoline engine with 30% efficiency (on the high side) with an electric motor. The generating plant may have a thermal efficiency of 50% (on the low side) and the motor itself 90% (also on the low side). The total efficiency from fuel to mechanical energy is 45%, or 50% higher than that provide by the gasoline engine. Simple arithmetic shows that using an electric motor will burn only two thirds of fuel than using a gasoline engine.

The effects on pollution are even bigger. A lot of the pollution occurs when a gasoline engine starts or idles because combustion is imperfect. In a power plant starts and stops are far less frequent and, of course, they can have better emission filters. Power plants can also burn coal that decreases our dependence on oil. Coal produces more pollution but we need burn much less coal than oil.

Keep also in mind that electricity can be generated by hydroelectric power or wind power, so the effects on emissions or dependence on oil are even bigger than those suggested by the above analysis.

Because electric car batteries are going to be recharged mostly during the night when demand of electricity is low, it is unlikely we will need more power plants, we will only keep busier the ones we currently have. (I know from my days of working in such a place that demand between midnight and 6am was quite low.)

Why do we hear so often the argument that electric cars are not a solution because we must ultimately burn fuel to power them? Why is not important to reduce oil consumption by a significant fraction (30% or more)? Or do the oil and auto industries not like you to know the truth?

While we wait for the development of the electric car, try to help by using as much as possible electric powered tools rather than gasoline powered ones. I use an electric lawnmower, snow blower, and power saw. They are lighter, quieter, cleaner, and cheaper than the gasoline versions and the long power cord is less of a nuisance than people think. (The tools are also much easier to start.)

After I first posted this a friend pointed a particularly relevant site:
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/

Geography is Destiny

2006-06-27T10:34:00.000-07:00

TEAMS PER REGION IN EACH ROUND OF WORLD CUP

Region	Round_of
Region	32	16	8
Western Europe	9	9	5
Latin America	6	4	2
Eastern Europe	5	1	1
Africa	5	1	0
Rest of the World	7	1	0

David Brooks and World Cup

2006-06-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

On June 22 David Brooks had an op-ed column in the NY Times discussing the World Cup Soccer. He attributed the lack of success of the US team to their being more interested in education (several of them had attended Universities) while no player in any other team had college education. He also made certain points about the superiority of the American University systems as compared to Universities in the rest of the world. To me it seemed quite a bizarre article and I did not think of commenting on it until I saw the letters to the editor about it in today's (6-25-2006) NY Times. They were also off the mark.

The main (if not the only) reason that US teams do not do as well in soccer as teams from other parts of the world is that soccer is not very popular in the US. Athletically gifted young people are fare more likely to play baseball, football, or basketball rather than soccer. While numbers about young players may not be easy to come by attendance in major league sports is more readily available and there baseball, football, basketball (and ice hokey) are far ahead of soccer. In most of the rest of the work soccer (called everywhere else football) is the number one sport with basketball a distant second. (The few exceptions include Japan and some Latin American countries where baseball is popular and Canada where ice hokey dominates.) I grew up in Greece and I can attest to the phenomenon from first hand experience.

Why did Brooks (and the letter writers) missed the obvious?

I can add also a few words about the University systems of the US and other countries. The most striking difference in my view is the huge number of American institutions that call themselves Universities or colleges and the huge difference in quality amongst them. This huge range in quality does not exists in any other country that I am familiar with. There are over 2,000 institutions of higher education in the US and amongst those no more than a quarter (around 500) would be given that designation elsewhere and about 100 are certainly excellent with world standards. There is another unique feature amongst American Universities. In many of them there is a big range of quality amongst departments. And it is well known that athletes, even if they attend a respectable University, they go for the "easy stuff." (One of the subjects of Tom Wolfe's novel I am Charlotte Simons.) In short, the fact that some of the US soccer player attend college while soccer players of other countries do not is irrelevant.

I guess it is too much to ask columnists to look below the surface, especially after they have missed the obvious.

The Iraq War as a Failure in Education

2006-06-09T15:42:00.000-07:00

These days the Editorial and Op-Ed pages are full of the debate about Iraq, even though some columnists think there is not enough debate going on. Certainly, a lot of things have gone wrong and some of the early decisions were such that it was inevitable that things would wrong. Nobody knows what were the real motivations of the administration for invading Iraq, but one of their most frequently stated reasons was that they were to impose "regime change" and that the Iraqi people, eager for democracy, would be delighted for that. This seems to have led to the decision to use a smaller force than most military experts advised.

It seems to me that the assumption that Iraqis (or other people) would be eager for "democracy" is the most erroneous of the several assumptions made in the process of going to war. The limited appeal of democracy has been discussed by Fareed Zakaria in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom and, more recently, by Francis Fukuyama in his 2006 book America at the Crossroads. (If you have read these books, you do not need to read this posting.)

Why people may not care for democracy? There are several things more important in people's lives: having food and shelter, safety from violence, and, once the basic needs are met, predictability. People do not like to be surprised. More important than democracy is the rule of law that ensures the most predictable government. There have been authoritarian regimes that respected the rule of law and democratic regimes that did not.

There may be also predictable government in the absence of the rule of law but in the presence of "tribal" custom. A village governed by an unelected council of elders may offer a lot of predictability to its residents. If officials have to be bribed, then a stable "bride schedule" also offers predictability. This kind of regime seems to have been the normal condition in Iraq as well as in all the countries that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire (and in many other parts of the world as well). It was Ottoman policy to encourage self-governing communities. That was not only popular with the communities themselves, it was also good for the imperial government to keep different groups distinct from each other and encourage suspicion amongst them. This way it was unlikely that would join in revolt. The downside of this practice is that once the tyrant/emperor at the top was removed, the groups would fall on each others throats. It happened in the Balkans (most recently in Yugoslavia) and it is happening now in Iraq.

Going into a country that was formed by the arbitrary joining of three provinces of the Ottoman Empire less than 100 years ago and expecting people to be eager for democracy can be attributed only to extreme ignorance. Another failure of our educational system.

Education and Culture - Part 2

2006-06-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

My earlier page on the subject produced some adverse reaction, not only on comments posted but also on e-mail I received directly. To start with, I did not mean that immigrants are better students on the average. I did say that immigrants are over-represented amongst the best students but I have also encountered immigrants who were very weak students. So I was not making any general comparison between the two groups. I should have made that point clear.

My main point was that the American educational system is not as bad as is often claimed to be because some people from different cultures seems to learn a lot in American schools. It was pointed that my evidence was anecdotal and I admit it was, although it was not limited to a few examples but to observations over 30 years of teaching.

Clearly what a person learns in a school depends on several factors: on the individual's motivation and preparation, on the effect of classmates, on the individual teacher, on the school atmosphere, and probably others. Over the years of my teaching I observed three types of students: those who would learn no matter what, those who would learn depending on the school and the teacher (usually the larger group), and those who would not learn under any circumstances. When I taught I was trying to peg my teaching to the middle group and I would judge my own effectiveness on how well they did. I enjoyed interacting with the top group of students (and I would take them sometimes as research students) but I would not take credit for their achievements. These were the people who would have done well no matter what. Some of them acknowledged later my influence but I do not think it was critical.

I have noticed that the public debate often ignores the complex interactions of these factors and usually focuses on one of them. Now and then one hears variations of the statement "students do not fail; teachers fail." It often comes from the political left but sometimes comes from the political right if they want to bash the teachers union. Sorry folks, some people are not amenable to education and it is probably not a good idea to force it upon them. The Greek multimillionaire Onassis was a high school drop-out. I had a distant relative who emigrate to the U.S. in his early teens with his father (that was around 1900-1910), the father went back and he stayed on his own. He had no schooling but he ended up as a very successful businessman owning several restaurants. I met him about 50 years ago and he made a point that his lack of education was not a problem for him. "I can hire a secretary for $50 a week" he said " and she can write all the letters I want. I have to spend my time on far important things, dealing with my customers, my suppliers, my employees."

Part of the problem of our schools is the "one side fits all approach", often peddled under the guise of "equal opportunity." In several other countries high schools are specialized, that is a rarity in the United States. Consider five 14 year olds who are destined (if one can guess the future) to become each a great success in different fields of endeavor: retail business, law, theater, medical science, computer technology. Why should all five of them spend four years in the same curriculum?

More to come ...

A Crtique of "American Theocracy" by Kevin Phillips

2006-05-31T17:38:00.000-07:00

This is an extensively revised and expanded version of a review I wrote on Amazon.com.

Probably, the most interesting aspect of the book is that it was written by a lifelong Republican, the architect of Nixon's southern strategy. I found the book hard to read (I wonder how many of those who bought read it cover-to-cover). Phillips is over thorough in his arguments, marshalling extensive evidence that tends to overwhelm a reader. The book could have been half its size without being any less convincing, at least to those (like this reader) who are already worried about certain trends in our country. Those who have a rosy view of the our future are hard to convince anyway.

Still, I am glad that I bought and read the book - not only did I find new information, the book is also thought provoking. Phillips makes a case that the United States exhibits symptoms similar to those of other major powers as they went into their final decline. I do not quite agree with his analysis and I will get to it later in this posting. Still, his arguments made me think hard about this issue.

The book consists of three parts "Oil and American Supremacy" (3 chapters), "Too Many Preachers" (4 chapters), and "Borrowed Prosperity" (4 chapters). The title reflects mainly the second part, so in a sense it is misleading. (Even there is a lot of mention of religious zeal in other parts.)

The first part argues that the world will be running out of oil in this century. Phillips bases this view on predictions of certain scientists that other sources (e.g. The Economist) find too pessimistic. Still, the need for conservation is unquestionable, even if the sources quoted in the book are wrong. It makes little difference if we run completely out of oil or if its price increase by several multiples. I am worried that Phillips conclusion may be attacked by those who will argue that things are not as dire as he claims.

The second part focuses on the influence of fundamentalist Christians on U.S. politics. The issue also spills in the other two parts on the basis of the argument that fundamentalists Christians expect the end of the world to come soon so there is no need to worry about global warming, running out of oil, or the collapse of the U.S. economy because of excessive debt. I am not sure whether the influence of that group is a prime factor or a side show. At the end book Phillips points out that "the financial sector - and a large majority of the richest Americans ... find the alliance convenient ... (because fundamentalists) are too caught up in religion, theology, and personal salvation to pay much attention to economics ..." Of course this was the theme of Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas. I tend to the view that religion is being exploited rather than being a prime mover even though most of the book argues otherwise.

A weakness of the book is that it does not differentiates amongst different conservative positions. There are rational arguments against abortion and it is only people who are both against abortion AND contraception that seem to have lost their senses. There are also rational arguments against gay marriage. Even a secular person could be anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. Lumping people with such views with those who anticipate "rapture" any moment now is misleading. Let us also not forget a significant religious "left" whose focus is on social justice rather than strident positions on selected issues.

"American Theocracy" may be a catchy title but it does not reflect our reality. Some cynical politicians may be exploiting and manipulating parts of the population who have strong religious beliefs, but this in not a theocracy. I think that the book over-estimates the influence of religious fundamentalists in our country. Finding parallels between the United States and the Spanish Inquisition or Calvinist Holland is quite far fetched.

I found the third part the best because it documents how the expansion of the finance sector as the manufacturing sector is declining is leading to a ballooning debt with US obligations held by foreign banks, a far more serious threat (in my opinion) to our national security than any terrorist. While worries about the debt appear daily in our newspapers, the books presents an in depth analysis of why we have reached this sorry state of affairs.

Phillips points out that expansion of finance at the expense of productive sectors such as manufacturing or agriculture is characteristic of the last stage in the decline of a major power and he identifies parallels in Spain, Holland, and England. This ignores several other powers, starting from the Roman Empire (whose decline has been described so well by Gibbon), the Chinese Empires, the shogun regime in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and other European powers such as France. While extreme religiosity might have been present in Spain and Holland (I am not convinced by Phillips argument about England), it was not present in any of others. Contrary to what Phillips states, Rome was well on its decline by the time Christianity became the official religion (under emperor Theodosius, about a century after Constantine.) Even then, the Eastern part of the Roman Empire (what we call now the Byzantine Empire) survived for another 1000 years with alternating periods of growth and decline.

My reading of history suggests that the major common cause of decline is complacency. A new power emerges by following certain practices and sticks to them long after they have become counterproductive. (In 1938 French generals were concerned about the horse breeding program for their cavalry as Hitler was busy building his armored divisions.) In addition, the leaders and the subjects do not strive as hard, feeling smug and believing that nothing can dislodge them from their elevated position.

We see that happening (in a smaller scale) in the rise and decline of companies. I will end with one example from that sector. There used to be a company named DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) that did a thriving business in the 1970's and 1980's. In those days the "cool" thing amongst "geeks" was to have access to a VAX (one of the DEC products) running Berkeley Unix. The company is long gone because it failed to see the importance of personal computers. Its founder and CEO is credited with the quote "Why would anyone want a computer in their home?"

If the United States is declining is not only because we waste energy, or religious fundamentalists have undue influence, but because we may think that the American way is the best and there is no need to change anything.

Problem No. 5: Education (or is it Culture?)

2006-05-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

I continue my list of the serious problems facing our country, far more serious than any of the external threats. There is a lot of press coverage about the poor state of our schools, about the lack of funding for them, about the difficulty of recruiting good teachers, etc, etc. I do not want to go over that.

I am afraid that the lack of skills amongst our students is not because of limited offerings in our schools but because the students do not take advantage of what is offered.

What evidence do I have for that statement? I taught at college level for over 30 years. At some point during the last decade of my teaching I noticed that the best students in my undergraduate classes were either immigrants or children of recent immigrants. (My graduate classes were almost entirely "international" students.) I used to teach upper division classes in Computer Science that usually had 30-40 students so I would come to know most of them and find out about their background. I thought that this might have been a peculiarity of my school, so I asked colleagues at other Universities. Same thing!

It seems that, at least at the University level, students who were either not born in the U.S. or whose parents were not born in the U.S. were making better use of the available opportunities. I notice that this was also happening in high schools. A large fraction of high school students who would win distinctions that were mentioned in our local paper, were also children of immigrants or themselves immigrants.

I was told that immigrant parents would tutor their children, so their better skills were not due to the quality of the schools. But why don't parents whose families have been in the U.S. for several generations do not tutor their children? I think the argument is specious. Not all high performing immigrant students have highly educated professional parents. Also for upper class University courses parental tutoring seems almost impossible.

In short, there is something in American culture that discourages students from taking full advantage of the available educational opportunities.

Should I say more?

Problem No. 4: Breakdown of Human Relations and Polarization

2006-05-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

This should have been at the top of the list because it underlies all other problems but it is far more difficult to quantify than the three issues I listed first and I was reluctant to start within something that may seem too subjective.

We are witnessing a breakdown of communities, families, institutions, and in general an increased emphasis on "everyone for himself/herself." While it is customary to lament the breakdown of the nuclear family that is not the worst problem. Families with two parents working long hours to attain luxury goods while paying scant attention to their children are in worse trouble than many single parent families. The constant barrage of advertising encouraging people to stretch themselves to the limit to acquire material goods is worse than any totalitarian brainwashing.

Nearly fifty years ago J. K. Galbraith wrote the book The Affluent Society where he pointed out a major weakness of the consumer society. Individuals could be well off but the commons, education, public transportation, environment, etc. were neglected. The neglect of the commons encourages people to look after their own narrow interests, thus feeding a vicious cycle. For example, if public transportation is poor, some people will abandon it and start driving to work. This will reduce the number of riders and therefore the income of public transportation which in turn will reduce the quality of service even further leading more people to abandon the service.

In addition, there has been an increasing polarization in the views of the public (there have been several articles in the press on this issue, often in terms of "red" versus "blue" states). The polarization is usually expressed in a Manichaean view of the world: a struggle of good versus evil. Policies are either very good or very bad. Unfortunately the world is quite complex and a simplistic view of good versus evil is too naive. This world view should be contrasted with the Japanese view that places great importance on balance. (I have already referred to Japan in favorable terms in earlier postings. This does not mean that I consider it a model society, only that they deal with certain issues in a better way than we do.)

Clearly, different segments of society have different interests (for example labor versus employers) and it is necessary to balance such interests. There is no magic formula for finding the proper equilibrium and the best we can hope is to avoid large deviations in favor of one group or another. This seems to be happening in several countries where power alternates between right-of-center and left-of-center parties. This is certainly the case in Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. It was also the case in the United States until the mid sixties. Then the Goldwater candidacy came up with the slogan that he was "A Choice, not an Echo." It was true that until then (at least since Roosevelt) that there was little difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, one favoring slightly the unions, the other favoring slightly business. Alternating between two parties with platforms that did not differ drastically was good for stability and changing those in power limited corruption.

Goldwater's defeat seemed to encourage the left and the late sixties and early seventies witness the excesses of the left. This in turn produced a reaction by the right and we were well on our way to polarization. For example, the left start pushing for the removal of any mention of God in state sanctioned activities and the right started pushing for teaching biology in accordance with the Bible. We have the strange phenomenon that some courts are dealing with lawsuits requiring the removal of the word God from various public statements while other courts deal with lawsuits requesting (in effect) that biology be taught in accordance with the Bible. If I read a story describing a "mythical" country where both things were happening I would find it far fetched. Unfortunately, it happens in our country.

Electoral campaigns seem to be dominated by what are mainly personal issues rather than the serious problems (economy, energy, education) that our country is facing. Because the real problems are difficult and hard to explain in sound bytes politicians (of both parties) prefer to focus on marginal issues.

The topic is endless, but I will close the discussion here and return to specific issues. keep in mind though that many of the specific problems are manifestions of the breakdown of our human relations.

Why Iran is nowhere near the top of my list of "Our Problems"

2006-05-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Today a news item from BBC appears to further reinforce my view that there are a lot of other things we should worry before we start worrying about Iran. (Not that we should forget about it altogether.) But I will start chronologically on how I reached that view.

The May 2006 issue of COMMENTARY (a "neocon" magazine) had an article by Edward N. Luttwak "Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran—Yet". (The author is not opposed to bombing in principle.) The first reason the article offers is that by bombing we will alienate the majority of Iranians who are oppressed by the current regime. This is quite a strong reason but someone could argue that Iranians may still love us even after we kill a lot of them during the bombing. However there is no such "escape" from Luttwak's arguments on the other two reasons and I quote them below with my own comments following.

"There is a second good reason not to act precipitously. In essence, we should not bomb Iran because the worst of its leaders positively want to be bombed—and are doing their level best to bring that about."

Indeed it seems that Ahmadinejad is deliberately pushing for a confrontation, as means of diverting the attention of his people from their misery. Otherwise there is no rational explanation for advertising the existence of the "hidden" program. I remember any time the economy would sour in Greece or Turkey, there would be a "national" crisis, often a dispute of some forsaken rock in the Aegean. (And those you who have read 1984 will remember the comments about constant war.)

"There is a third reason, too. The effort to build nuclear weapons started more than three decades ago, yet the regime is still years away from producing a bomb. ... What undermines confidence in Ahmadinejad’s opinion is his rather expansive way with the facts, including his repeated assertion that the centrifuge technology was developed by Iranians in Iran and is “the proud achievement of the Iranian nation”—somehow overlooking the 99.99 percent of it that was purchased from A.Q. Khan."

That seems an excellent point and it "rings a bell". I recall from my service in the Greek Army (almost 50 years ago) how the modern technology given by the U.S. was abused and misused. I forget the numbers, but often only 10% or less of the equipment would be functional.

Today's BBC article seems to give further evidence in favor of Luttwak's third argument.

"Western diplomatic sources told the BBC the material used in Iran's recent uranium enrichment experiments probably came from materials supplied (by China) in 1991. That was before China joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and before it was bound by its export controls. "

In short, it may be many years (if ever) before the Iran nuclear threat is real. In the meantime other factors may damage our country far more seriously.

3. Energy Conservation

2006-05-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

I am listing Energy Conservation as the third major problem facing our country, after Income Disparity and the Failures of American Industry (I have explained why I think that the first two are connected). I started this list in response to comments about threats to our country from "foreign enemies". My position is that we face internal problems that are far more than threatening than any external threat (see my first post on 5/12/06).

There is a lot of talk about the energy crisis but no action. The predictions about the availability of oil run from the catastrophic (the world will run out of oil in 30-50 years, the position in American Theocracy) to the dismal (we will not run out of oil but it will become increasingly more expensive, the position of The Economist). Alternative sources of energy are overrated. Some cannot be produced without some consumption of energy (ethanol, hydrogen cells). Others pose safety issues (nuclear energy), environmental issues (wind mills), or have inherent limitations (energy from solar panels is not available on cloudy days). Yes, we should pursue all these alternatives but it looks unlikely that they could replace oil. The one source of clean and abundant energy, hydrogen fusion (the source of the energy of the sun), is still the subject of research and it is unclear whether it will ever become feasible. The only answer is conservation but nothing significant is done in that direction. It seems that the political will to implement simple measures (taxing "gas-guzzlers", subsidizing hybrids, subsidizing public transportation, etc) is lacking. By ignoring the problem we face a serious economical squeeze in the future. I have not discussed global warming because there are even more pressing reasons to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.

One of the worst wasters of energy are short airplane trips. From an energy conservation viewpoint a plane trip from New York to Washington or Boston is criminal. A plane burns enormous amounts of fuel during take off and for a short trip this is not amortized over the distance. Trains are far more energy efficient and modern trains traveling in excess of 100 mph (as they do in Japan and Europe) offer travel times close to those of air travel. Even though a plane may travel five times faster than a modern train, the higher waiting times and trips to distant airports add at least three hours to a plane trip as compared to a train trip (two hours on departure and one hour on arrival). A back of the envelop calculation shows that the break even point time-wise is about 400 miles. Therefore, taking a modern train rather than a plane for a trip under 400 miles does not add to the travel time. And of course it saves a lot of oil. Keep in mind that the power plans that supply power to the trains can burn low quality fuels or use alternative energy sources such as hydro-electric power.

Someone may say that that improving train lines costs money and energy. True but we seem to have no trouble finding resources for building more airports! These days there is talk about building a fourth airport in the New York area because air traffic is overwhelming the existing three airports. Here is an alternative solution: (1) Reduce the number of (or even eliminate) flights to Boston or Washington. This will ease air traffic considerably; (2) Use for the funds to upgrade the train lines to these two cities rather than build a fourth airport.

Here is a plan that could save a lot of oil in the long run and produce a lot of industrial and construction jobs in the short run. Build high speed (120 mph and up) lines between urban centers that are within 500 miles. New York-Washington (that will probably be the easier because the existing Metroliner track is pretty decent); New York-Boston; Chicago-Detroit; San Francisco-Los Angeles; etc. Then tax heavily flights between such cities. If the Japanese, French, Germans, and others can do it, why not us?

Of course, while such a plan makes good engineering and economic sense, it is going to face huge opposition from the oil, auto, and airline industries so politically is a pipe dream. This is why I list energy conservation as a serious socio-political problem. Technical solutions are not that hard.

2a. The Failures of American Industry - postscript

2006-05-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

We often read that American companies got into trouble because of high labor costs and the push of unions for more and benefits. The fact is that American industry was in good shape 40 years ago when union membership stood at about 60% of the labor force but it is in bad shape now when union membership has declined to about 10% of the labor force. (The percentages may not be entirely accurate, but the figure I give are at least close to the true ones.)

Like many other people I drive a Japanese car made in Ohio. The last American car I drove was quite a lemon. Clearly, American workers can build high quality cars under the right management. The auto industry not failed to come up with high quality cars, they also were quite late in producing small cars. Why is that Japanese companies were first with the fuel efficient hybrid cars?

There is one American company that I am quite familiar with (Symbol Technologies) and this company's stock trades now at less than a third of its high, has undergone several management changes in the last five years, there have been significant layoffs, and several of its executives are under indictment. The company had already moved its production facilities to Mexico before its troubles started. Its remaining labor force is not unionized. What actually happen is that the company refused to make serious investments in new products because they wanted to cut down costs, so the stock price would rise and the upper management would make more money from their options. (The actual situation was a bit more complex, see http://www.theopavlidis.com/technology/symbol_story.htm.) In short, by maximizing the current profits the management undermined the long term health of the company.

Managers of companies do not always try to create wealth. They often prefer to take it from others (both employees and stockholders). The excuse that the ills of the American Industry are due to its high labor costs seems lame to me.

2. The Failures of American Industry

2006-05-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

In the last several years we have seen several companies fail, some spectacularly (Enron, World Com) are less so. Some going through bankruptcy proceedings (several airlines and an auto parts manufacturer), others through painful restructuring (including two major Long Island companies, Symbol Technologies and Computer Associates). Bell Labs that used to be the pride of American technology and where many of inventions that led to the Computer era initiated, is not only a shadow of its former self but it is also about to be acquired by a French company. Xerox PARC, the other laboratory that led to the Computer era barely exists. Where are future innovations in technology are going to come from? Maybe from the Academia Sinica in Beijing. Many American icons, RCA, Pan Am, TWA, AT&T have disappeared. Are General Motors and Ford going to be next?

I believe there is a connection between the income discrepancy discussed in No. 1 and the company failures. Two factors: As I already pointed in No. 1, when income is accumulated by the super rich it is not likely to be spent in consumer goods but rather in exotic purchases. Money taken from the middle class is taken away from the consumer market.

A second factor is that business executives have been adopting a particular selfish attitude trying to maximize their own income at the expense of the well of the companies. It is not only the executives of Enron and World Com who abused the interests of their shareholders (many of them pension funds) and their employees. So did several others although to a lesser degree that kept them on the right side of the law (but on the wrong side of ethics). I have detailed elsewhere the story of Symbol Technologies. The greed and mismanagement there were not limited to those who broke the law.

What has happened in the last 50 years or so is the so-called people's capitalism. Individuals do not own major parts of companies any longer. Instead the managers supposedly work for the mass of the stockholders. Unfortunately, this is not far from the Soviet model where the "people" "owned" everything and the managers worked for the "people." As a result managers do not care about the long term well being of the company and look only for what is best for them. (The parallels between the Soviet and the modern capitalists systems were pointed out by J. K. Galbraith in his book The New Industrial State.)

By manipulating the stock price they increase their income to astronomical levels (through options, etc) and let the companies crumble. Such irresponsible greed has led to the demise of companies as well as the downgrading of industrial labs. How can we counteract this tendency? Make the managers have a stake in the long term health of the company. I have read several ideas about how this can be done, mainly by allowing managers to cash stock options only in the far future. But of course the current managerial crowd objects to such measures. It will make them work to earn their money.

It is interesting to compare the apparent prosperity of the American economy with the apparent stagnation of the Japanese economy. American companies slashed costs by large layoffs while moving operations out of the country without concern about the fate of their employees. In contrast, Japanese companies avoided large layoffs. Economic stagnation was a small price to pay for keeping social stability.

This brings up the issue of balance. People like to think in simple terms of good and bad and the news media encourage them to do so. We hear talk that free markets (used to be known as capitalism) are good or that fighting poverty (used to be known as communism/socialism) is good. In reality pure capitalism and pure socialism are both bad. I recall some maxims: "capitalism is based on greed and socialism on envy" (both deadly sins) or "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." (Attributed to J. K. Galbraith in Quotations Space.) Or “Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true” (Claimed to be a Polish proverb in Think Exist.) The modern experience suggests that regulated free markets are a better alternative to either extreme. Clearly, the government should regulate only some part of the economic activity but should not have control over the economy. The key question is what would be the extent of the regulation, neither 0 or 100% are acceptable answers.

What I believe is happening that the relaxing of government regulation that started in the Reagan era, not only contributed to the income inequality, it also contributed to the destruction of companies. Consider two ways of earning an income of $1 million a year. One by managing a company of 10,000 people, the other by earning it in stock market trading. (While some conservative economists argue that the latter also creates jobs, I prefer to look at the immediate impact.) In the former there is an increase in overall wealth of the society, in the latter there is only traffic in wealth, part of which "sticks in the hands of the carrier."

Kevin Phillips makes a big issue in American Theocracy of the shift of the economy from manufacturing to financial services. On page 274 it displays a diagram from Baron's that is shown below (produced by redrawing the original - it is not an exact reproduction.

The similarity between this diagram and that shown in part 1 is remarkable. The peaks do not occur in the same year. In the above figure they occur a few years later than in the figure of part 1.

This may have been a bit rambling, but what I am trying to say is that replacing industrial activity by financial manipulation is not only risky in its own, it also contributes to increasing the income inequality.

Problem No. 1: Income Disparity

2006-05-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

Since the Reagan administration there has been a growing gap between the income of the very rich and the rest of the population. For several years there have been articles on how the income of people in the top fifth (i.e. those making over $85,000 a year or so) keeps increasing with the implication that they are the rich. The truth is actually quite different. According to a New York Times article of June, 2005 income of those in the top 0.1% has been increasing dramatically, but not the icnome of those below. The diagram below (redrawn from that article) shows that the top 0.1% earn 10% of the total income which means that the average income of the top 0.1% is more than 100 times the average income of the 99.9% of the population (which includes not only the poor but also many wealthy people in the top 1% of the income range but not in the top 0.1%). Even more worrisome is the time trend that shows the reversal of the Roosevelt social policies by the Reagan administration.

According to the same NY Times article the top 400 taxpayers reported an income of over $87 million each! The New York Times has revisited the issue this year adding that people in the $100,000 to $200,000 range are going to be hit the worst by the Alternative Minimum Tax next year.

If we look at past history, countries with a few super-rich, a lot of poor, and a small or struggling middle class have not fared that well. Huge discrepancies in income lead to alienation and leave countries vulnerable to upheaval. Think of tsarist Russia and Shah's Iran. When things get very bad and there is a change, the change need not be for the better. Moderate reforms work out only before things reach a crisis. I do not claim that we are anywhere near the situation in Russia or Iran but if the current trend continues we may reach such a state within a generation.

Even though the risk of a major socio-political upheaval may be remote there is a more iminent danger. When income is accumulated by the super rich it is not likely to be spent in consumer goods but rather in exotic purchases. Money taken from the middle class is taken away from the consumer market. Look at the above diagram and see how the last accumulation of wealth preceded the Great Depression.

The following simple examples illustrates how big income inequalities affect people. Think of a company with 1000 employees and a boss whose pay is 10 times the average of the 1000 workers. If his pay was made equal to the average and the difference passed to the rest of the employees it will result to an average 1% raise for each one, not a big deal. However, if his pay was 1000 times the average such a redistribution would result in an average 100% raise for the rest!

I had made several trips to Japan in the early 1990's and I found out that the pay of the CEOs of large companies (over 10,000 employees) was 10-20 times that of the lowest paid worker. Similar figures had been reported in magazine articles. In American companies the same ratio was well over 100! Some people argued then that Japanese executives received more perks than American executives but that will not change the ratio much because most employees of Japanese companies also receive more perks than most American workers. The case of Japan shows that a capitalist economy can do quite well without extreme inequalities in pay. (I will get back to company matters in future postings.)

The disparity seems to be getting worse. According to the press the recent tax cuts approved by Congress benefit mostly the super-rich. According to Newsday of May 12, 2006 a person earning $50,000 a year gets a tax cut of $47 but a person making $1 million a year gets a tax cut of $42,000. That's more than 890 times larger even though the income ratio is only 20! Did anybody say something about progressive taxes?

Our problems - Introduction

2006-05-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

I read in the press and hear from people comments about the dangers of the nuclear program of Iran. While I agree that the situation in Iran is dangerous and should be watched carefully, I also believe that our country faces far more serious challenges in other areas. These latter challenges have been discussed in several books and magazines (such as the Economist or the New Yorker) they rarely make it to the daily press (with the possible exception of the NY Times) or the prime time TV news. Each topic of my list will be discussed in subsequent posts.

My list does not include any "foreign threats." History shows that no major power has ever been defeated by external enemies until after it suffered significant internal decay. This is true about the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and many others, the latest being the Soviet Empire. The list is endless. This theme is central in Kevin Phillips' book American Theocracy . While there is an overlap between my list and the subject of this book, my list of problems is not the same as the collection of problems discussed in American Theocracy.

I do not pretend to offer a scholarly analysis of our problems and I am not going to include detailed documentation. Neither do I claim that the ideas I present are original. My own thinking has been influenced significantly by J. K. Galbraith's books and it was his recent death and the comments of the press about his having been wrong was the trigger for this writing.