What Apple?

What apple is best in oatmeal? My rankings:

• Honeycrisp
• Pinova
• Pink Lady
• Gala

The following are worse than nothing in oatmeal:

• Matsu

Shovel-ready, from 1921

Over at the RBC:

Finally, thirty-five years ago it was common parlance among economists that there should be a list of government projects fully designed and ready to go ("shovel ready" in today's terms) to aid in macroeconomic management. How fast you can spend money is not a physics constant, it's a result of policy. The Bush administration has prepared for the current recession about as effectively as it dealt with Katrina.

A few months ago while poking around on Google Books I came across an article from 1921 about a proposal for the government to keep a plans ready at all times for infrastructure projects, so when there's a downturn and high unemployment we're all set to go. The American Labor Legislation Review noted:

Plan to Combat Unemployment by Reserving Public Works

"To prepare for future cyclical periods of depression and unemployment by systems of public works," That is the stated purpose of Senate Bill No 2,749 introduced in the United States Senate November 16, 1921, by Mr. Kenyon. The bill affirms that -

"A sound economic policy requires that a larger percentage of the public works and projects of the United States be undertaken and prosecuted during a period of major industrial depression and unemployment, when labor and capital are not fully employed in private industry, that a smaller percentage of such works and projects should be undertaken and prosecuted during a period when private industry is active and competing for the same men and material with resulting business strain and over extension, and that the prosecution of such works and projects should be utilized as a stabilizing force during a period of over expansion as well as during a period of depression."

It seems to have died in committee. Now, 88 years later, a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank is in the works. Better late than never!

Some quotes

Every once in a while I'm reminded of one of these, and since the author is all over the place, they can be a pain to track down.

• People seem to be faintly drawn to the idea that there might be more political dimensions than just "left" and "right". Bullshit. Being in favour of allowing other people to take drugs, shag each other or read what they want isn't a political position; it's what we call "manners", "civilisation" or "humanity", depending on the calibre of yokel you're trying to educate. The political question of interest splits fair and square down a Left/Right axis: either you think that it is more important to provide a decent life for everyone in the world, or you think it is more important to preserve the rights of people who own property. You can hum and haw as much as you like about whether the two are necessarily incompatible, or whether the one is instrumental to the other, or what constitutes a "decent life" anyway, but when you've finished humming and hawing, I'm still gonna be asking you the question, and your answer to it will determine whether or not we're gonna have an argument.
  
  
• ... the single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith's aphorism that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been "the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness". Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is "what I have, I keep". Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that "what I have, I keep" is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem. But at base, the test of someone's politics is simple; if their political aim is to advance all of humanity, they're on our side, while if they have an overriding constraint that the current owners of property must always be satisfied first, they're playing for the opposition. Hypocrisy doesn't really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don't (or shouldn't) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish.
  
  
• the tragedy of this is that there is, within the bloated corpus of economics, a perfectly nice slimmed-down little science struggling to get out. It’s a branch of control engineering; specifically it’s the branch of control engineering that deals with the control of recursive systems that can change their outputs in response to their local state. The trouble is that at some stage in its development, this harmless and beneficial branch of engineering got caught up in 18th and 19th century politics and philosophy and developed all manner of strange idiosyncracies (including a lot of fundamental assumptions about human psychology which clearly don’t belong there), coupled with a wildly inflated idea of its station in life.
  
  It’s rather as if physicists believed in an actual, physical (or metaphysical) Maxwell’s Demon and furthermore thought that the Demon most likely voted Republican. If Fritjof Capra had the status of Albert Einstein, physics would be in about the shape that economics is in fact in.
  
  
• Public choice theory I think it’s difficult to blame economists for - a couple of economics Nobel prizes got awarded for it, but it’s not really part of economics. It’s basically just right-wing prejudice turned into a theory - the entire intellectual content is in the initial assumption “1. We assume that all public officials are venial and self-seeking”, and thence to derive the entire right-wing worldview.
  
  Game theory I think you have a lot more of a point with. Phil Mirowski’s book “Machine Dreams” is very good on the development of game theory. He raises the of-course-very-unserious-who-would-possibly-be-so-uncouth point that a) the key game theory concepts like Nash equilibrium describe the reasoning of a paranoid schizophrenic a lot better than that of a normal person and b) a surprisingly high proportion of the key figures in the development of game theory suffered from mental illnesses, and Nash himself was of course an actual paranoid schizophrenic.
  
  Game theory is actually very good in predicting the outcomes of things like telecom spectrum auctions, which of course really means that it is a good way of predicting the behaviour of game theorists employed to solve game theory problems.