Way Past Strange

This is technically a post inspired by something in a recent bit of Doctor Who material, but it can be nice and non-spoilerific if you haven't been watching the show. (Although, if that's the case, go do something about that: it's really good.) All you need to know is that, in the prequel to a recent episode (obviously, don't watch that video if you haven't been watching the show), the Doctor speaks the following line, when asked whether he is strange:

"Oh dear, I'm way past strange. I think I'm probably incredible."

On hearing it initially, I thought this was a great line, in the hilarious/awesome fashion. As I've continued to think about it over the past several days, I think it's also very interesting, on an essentially linguistic level. Most recently, I think it's actually very deep.

The first part of that needs fairly little unpacking: it's self-evidently hilarious and awesome. The second part is about the way he's using the word "incredible," which I think includes two different meanings. First is the etymological meaning: in- meaning "not," credible meaning "believable," so overall, "unbelievable." In context, that's a plausible intensified version of strangeness: so strange as to be unbelievable. The second meaning, of course, is the modern colloquial one, with "incredible" meaning "amazing" or "awesome" or "fantastic." That's a fun little double meaning; he's using a word that, viewed etymologically, is a perfectly sensible conclusion to "I'm way past strange, I think I'm probably..." but that also packs in the notion of being, you know, incredible.

The third part comes out of that second (and more common) meaning of incredible. In this sentence, the Doctor is kind of suggesting that Incredible, with the standard connotation of awesome/amazing/fantastic, is located Way Past Strange. If you want to be incredible, in other words, you should start by being strange, and then keep going. Obviously the claim isn't that everything that's way past strange is incredible; much of what you find if you go to Strange and then keep on going is Terrible and Horrifying and Demented. But some of it is Incredible, and if you want to find Incredible, that's how you get there. You go way past Strange. After all, if you don't even get to Strange, you'll probably only find Ordinary, and you definitely can't find Incredible amidst all the Ordinary.

The implicit words of wisdom in this comment, then, are that the way to become Incredible is to go way past being Strange. Trust him on this, he's the Doctor.

Property is not Theft, but Poverty is Coercion

This is a sort of random post, not in response to anything much but rather just the expression of some stuff that's been floating around in my head, largely related to the Classics of Political Economy course I'm taking. It's also, in part, prompted by my having read this Jonathan Chait post detailing the apparent conservative belief that Matt Yglesias, another of my favorite bloggers, is a hypocrite for buying a house. (The relevant part is Yglesias' quoted tweet about the "myth of ownership," the in-his-opinion false idea that the existence of property is prior to the existence of the state.)

So, here's the basic idea. Various political theorists and political economists over time have been known to suggest that private property is theft. I tend to associate the concept with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though obviously it gets picked up in a much more virulent form by Karl Marx and his legions of nominal followers. Rousseau didn't think that property should be abolished, but he did think that the first person who said "this is mine, and that is yours" and got other people to believe him was doing something pretty radical, something that constituted taking the stuff he had just claimed as property away from everyone else. Property is theft, because what is mine is not yours. But there's an interesting assumption buried in this kind of argument, isn't there, namely that if no one owns anything, everyone owns everything? In order for me to steal something from you, you have to have it in the first place. If I hop in a TARDIS and take a trip to a planet no one's ever set foot on before, and say, hey guys, I own this planet now, have I taken anything from anyone? It wasn't anyone's before, ever. If it was a properly lifeless planet, I'm not even taking anything that's ever belonged to, like, any bacteria. Now, what I have done is taken the opportunity to take ownership of that planet from everyone else. Is that theft? It doesn't feel like theft to me.

Now, it's a slightly different case if one can say that a certain plot of land, say, or other physical good is owned in common by society. In some cases that may be literally, de jure, true. For instance, St. Andrews Links is owned and operated by the town of St. Andrews, so if someone came along with a private security force and set up camp in the middle of the Old Course and said, hey guys, this is my private property now, they'd clearly be stealing it from the town. But, well, a town is a corporate entity, so it can own things the way an ordinary person would. What if you just have properly common land, not legally owned by anything but considered to be held in common by all in society? Britain used to have a lot of such land, and still has some, and during the 16th through 18th centuries a lot of it got enclosed. Was this theft? I think it's a defensible claim, although in the English case it is pretty much true that society's agent, i.e. the government, gave its permission for the whole process. (Okay, it wasn't a democracy, but that's a subtly different issue.)

In any event, whether capturing explicitly common lands and turning them into your private property counts as theft, that doesn't establish that all private property is. That would require asserting that the entire earth is, by default, commonly owned by human society. And this strikes me as an incredibly arrogant claim. Human beings are, essentially, conquerors of this planet. Every other species in the world lives under our dominion right now, and we rule over them with virtually no regard for their interests. There is nothing "natural," in the normative sense, about this state of affairs, nor was it always thus. Humans are the rulers of earth because we're stronger, mostly along the various mental dimensions rather than the physical ones, than any other species. We're strong enough, in fact, that collectively we can fight off just about the entire rest of the planet's occupants at once. But at root, our rule is rooted in force, not justice, and to me this makes any claim that the natural order of things is that all the earth is owned in common by mankind pretty laughable. If that is so, it is only so because we stole it from the other animals (okay, and the plants and protozoa and what-have-you, but they're legitimately less important for the story). The idea that one individual human's claiming a part of that stolen bounty for him- or herself constitutes theft above and beyond the original conquest is just kind of silly.

However, while I don't think that for one person to own private property constitutes an act of theft against society, I do think that for a person to own sufficiently little property constitutes an act of coercion by society against that person. An indigent person is desperate. Someone who legitimately cannot be sure of sufficient material provisions for their own survival is living their entire life with a gun to their head. Sure, the gun is held by an Invisible Hand, but it's still there, and so is the demand being made at its point: conform. Do what we want you to do. Work hard. Be willing to work hard at unpleasant tasks. Or else you die. Given how much relatively necessary, extremely unpleasant work there still is in human civilization, we have chosen to maintain a large section of the world's population in pretty dire circumstances, more or less needlessly, so that there are always people desperate enough to do that work in exchange for not dying in the streets. To my mind, this is incredibly exploitative and incredibly violative of those people's basic rights to be treated with respect as people whose interests count. I'm not sure how we would organize society to deal with the problem of necessary unpleasant work if we didn't use this mechanism to coerce people, but I think it's a big big problem that we should be, you know, thinking about. And we should very much welcome any increase in the extent to which we can get non-sentient machines to do this work, as it should in principle reduce the "need" to maintain this underclass of the systemically-exploited. This isn't a violation that we can trace back to any one person, but the fact that it's systemic doesn't make it any less wrong. Private property itself isn't a crime, but the denial to a person of sufficient property for their own sustenance is a pretty massive abuse.

Arbitrary and Capricious, Eighteenth-Century Style

I'm doing some reading for my British History class about the criminal "justice" system in England in the 1700s. Apparently, during that century Parliament passed an awful lot of new laws authorizing capital punishment for various offenses against property. However, the number of actual executions for crimes against property didn't increase much at all, even as the number of convictions for capital crimes against property did. Why? Because an awful lot of death sentences got commuted by royal prerogative into exile to, say, Australia. This happened on the recommendation of judges, and apparently the very same MPs passing the death penalty statutes were often the ones intervening to secure clemency. This seems like a bit of a puzzle, at first, but given the discussion of capital punishment in the contemporary era, and particularly my grandfather's book on the subject, there's a pretty obvious answer that occurs to me. When you have a lot of people getting convicted of capital crimes, most of whom don't actually get executed, it gives the people deciding to whom the pardons will be doled out a tremendous amount of arbitrary and capricious power. It's sort of analogous to what happens if you create a legal code in which just about everyone will be guilty of some minor offense, jaywalking, say, or something perhaps slightly less minor but equally routine, but where as a rule no one is prosecuted. That gives the authorities the ability to selectively enforce those laws against people they don't like, for one reason or another: political enemies, say, or more serious criminals they can't get on the main charges of murder, theft, whatever. And if you just look at the convictions, or in the 18th-century Britain case if you just look at the executions, you won't see anything wrong with the procedure: the people in question were guilty under law of committing crimes, and were punished accordingly. You only notice a problem when you see all of the people equally guilty not being punished, and start to wonder why some got away with their crimes while some had the book thrown at them.

Diminishing Marginal Utility is Not Universal

A while ago there was an article in Slate arguing (or, well, claiming to be arguing, and then sort of backing away from arguing in its strongest form) that one shouldn't work less to spend more time with one's family, even if one (rather sensibly) prefers spending time with one's family to working. The argument basically depends on the concept of diminishing marginal utility, namely the concept that, as you do more of a thing, the gains from the last little extra bit of it you do go down steadily. It's a basic principle of economics that one should do various things until their marginal utilities are equalized; if the marginal utilities of different things aren't equal, you should take away the last unit of the thing with the lower marginal utility and replace it with a unit of a thing with a higher marginal utility, and you'll get higher overall utility. The argument of the Slate column is that one should adjust one's work and leisure until the marginal utilities of the last hour worked and the last hour spent with your family are the same. I guess it's kind of tough to argue with that claim itself, though as I suggested above it's a far cry from "don't spend more time with your family." People might currently be over-consuming work, i.e. working until the marginal utility (all things considered) of the last hour worked is substantially lower than that of the last hour of leisure spent with their families, in which case they should work less and play more. Or it might be the reverse: arguments from marginal utility don't help us distinguish.

My point in this post is more to argue about the idea that one can always count on a declining marginal utility of all things. This ties in with a thought I had a while ago about why the marginal utility of money income is so clearly declining. As best I can tell, the primary or perhaps exclusive reason why this is true (and it's very well established that it is true, and it's a very good argument for redistributive policies) is the fundamental economics concept that individuals are rationally self-interested. The way this works is that, when the universe hands you a dollar of income, of course you use that dollar in the way that has the highest marginal utility possible. You'd be irrational not to. (And yeah, it's rarely plausible to conceive of this process in single-dollar increments; whatever.) But then, when the universe hands you your second dollar of income, you'll still use it in the highest-marginal-utility fashion, but you won't be able to get the same utility on that dollar as you got on the first one. Why? Because you've already done the thing that gets you the highest return for one of your income dollars. You can't do it again. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and can't be plucked again. This argument can be extended ad infinitum for a formal economic proof that, if individuals are rational in the usual way we assume them to be in conventional microeconomics, the marginal utility of income must be declining. No rational person could ever get a higher marginal utility out of their Nth dollar of income than they got out of any one of dollars 1, 2, 3, ... N-1, because they would've been irrational not to spend one of their earlier dollars on the thing they eventually spent their Nth dollar on.*

But does this argument always work? I think that it rather plainly does not. The key point in the case of income is our ability to go after the low-hanging fruit, but that won't apply in all cases. Some activities might have marginal utilities that are drawn from independent identical probability distributions, i.e. each time we do them we'll have the same odds of having a very high marginal utility, a medium marginal utility, a very low one, etc. Is that utterly implausible? I don't think so. Consider, for instance, my serious hobby of playing golf. Each time I go out on the course, I might play very well or I might play very badly. Now, it's not quite fair to say that the probabilities of each are IID for each round. There are factors that affect how I play on a given day, but over the long run they mostly even out and we can treat them as part of the probability distribution itself. So there's no particular reason why I must get more out of my tenth round of golf this summer than out of my sixteenth, or why I must get more out of the difference between a two-round week and a three-round week than out of the difference between a five-round week and a six-round week. I think a lot of things have this property, that we cannot in any particularly effective way target the highest-marginal-utility parts of an activity, and, if I'm right about that, we should not necessarily expect the law of diminishing marginal utility to apply to anywhere near every activity. In fact, in some cases we may get an increasing marginal utility. In the golf example, the more I play the better I get (ceteris paribus), so the more I'll get out of each additional round. In other contexts there might be threshold effects, where I achieve some particular utility bonus only upon reaching a certain level of consumption of an activity; in that case, marginal utility has a spike around the threshold.

None of this negates the basic point that one should balance marginal utilities, or the inference drawn from it that life typically demands a balance of activities. In part, though, this comes from the existence of budget constraints, which force us to trade our leisure, i.e. time we spend doing whatever we think will produce the greatest amount of pleasure, for our sustenance, i.e. the material necessities of life, by working for pay. It might be the case, for instance, that the marginal utility of work qua work is always quite low, much lower than the marginal utility of spending time with your family even out to infinity, but that the bundling of work with income means that the combined marginal utility of (work + income) will be higher than the marginal utility of leisure until we reach the point at which the marginal utility of income starts to decline. In any event, we should not necessarily expect the marginal utility of leisure spent with one's family to decline much at all, since it is not immediately obvious to me that there is a great deal of ability in this area to target the low-hanging fruit. The details, of course, probably vary from personal circumstance to personal circumstance, but one cannot simply assume that marginal utility diminishes because it does so for common economic goods, like income or apples.


*Actually, there may be significant threshold effects with income, as there most definitely are in the world of production, where we call them economies of scale. This gets back to the point about how one neither receives nor spends one's income in continuous dollar-sized portions. In particular on the spending side, having 99% of the ability to buy Good X or Service Y has 0 utility, but if you get that extra 1% you're good to go.

Thoughts on the Mets Opening Day Roster

So, there's quite a bit of time left for things to shake out on this front, but I thought I'd look over the Mets' Spring Training so far and see how I would construct a 25-man roster if a) I were the GM, and b) camp were ending right now. In part this is inspired by the really, really good inning Pedro Feliciano just pitched. I'll say who I'd take north with the big-league club, and also what changes I'd be expecting to make or try to make over the course of the season. Note that I'm assuming that the injuries to Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Johan Santana, and Frank Francisco will keep them off the field on Opening Day, but that the injury to Daniel Murphy will not.

The Coming 2014 Bloodbath

No, not that one. The more prominent coming 2014 bloodbath is the Senate elections, which, being the repeat of the 2008 cycle, which was veeery good for Democrats, what with Barack Obama's lengthy coattails and all, has lot of vulnerable Democrats needing to be defended. I'm talking about the 2014 governor's races. See, those are, by and large, repeats of the 2010 cycle, which kinda sucked for Democrats. Lots o' opportunities for us to pick up territory. Let's review!

I'd rate the following as Republican incumbents with worse than toss-up chances at being re-elected:

Michigan: Gov. Rick Snyder
Pennsylvania: Gov. Tom CorbettMaine: Gov. Paul LePage
Ohio: Gov. John Kasich
Florida: Gov. Rick Scott

This placement might be a slight reach on Kasich, but I think he's been reasonably controversial like most of these guys. These five states have 77 combined Congressional districts, nearly 18% of the nation's total. That's a big deal if we can flip these states.

Genuine toss-up contests with Republican incumbents:

Wisconsin: Gov. Scott Walker


Other places, like Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, maybe the term-limited seat held by Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, are plausible second-tier pick-up opportunities. The Rick Perry fiasco in Texas might create some entertaining chaos there.

We'll probably lose Arkansas, a rather modest loss, and probably pick up Rhode Island from Independent Lincoln Chafee. So it's a bunch of probable pick-ups, a toss-up in the most polarized state in the nation, and a bunch of further possible pick-ups, and essentially no risk of meaningful losses. (I mean, one could always be surprised, but we're only really playing defense in blue states: CA, HI, OR, CO, MN, IL, MD, NY, CT, MA, VT, NH. I don't see a lot of looming losses there, aside from the aforementioned Arkansas.) Should be a fun side to the night, even if the Senate stuff is miserable.

Lineup Analysis Can Get Weird

Just for fun I thought I'd try punching the lineup for the All-Time All-Star National League Team, Integration Era Only, into the statistical lineup generator tool. That team is: Johnny Bench (C), Albert Pujols (1B), Jackie Robinson (2B), Ernie Banks (SS), Mike Schmidt (3B), Barry Bonds (LF), Willie Mays (CF), Hank Aaron (RF), and Stan Musial (DH). My impulse for that lineup is Jackie/Stan/Willie/Barry/Hank/Albert/Mike/Ernie/Johnny. They project 6.964 runs per game for that lineup, i.e. 1128 runs per 162 (holy shit!). Their favorite arrangement of those players, based on career stats, is Bonds/Pujols/Schmidt/Mays/Musial/Banks/Aaron/Bench/Robinson. That's, uh, a weird lineup. Yeah, you want OBP from your leadoff hitter, but Barry Bonds is Barry frickin' Bonds, he's gotta be your clean-up hitter. Anyway, they project that lineup for 7.079 runs per game, i.e. 1146 runs, a difference of just under 2 wins (out of, like, 140 or whatever).

Just for fun, using neutralized batting statistics instead, I get my preferred lineup at 7.085 runs per game, i.e. 1148 runs per year (I guess these guys mostly played in low-run environments?). Meanwhile, they prefer a batting order of Bonds/Pujols/Schmidt/Aaron/Musial/Banks/Mays/Bench/Robinson, for some reason, and project 7.2 runs per game, i.e. 1166 runs per 162. Again, just under two runs of difference from "optimization." Barry Bonds, leadoff hitter... yeesh.