When I turned to the young man, I braced myself for an offering of how Jesus can save my immortal soul. I’m rarely stopped by a perfect stranger on campus for anything other than proselytizing a cause, and more often than not the cause that stops me involves Jesus Christ. When I turned to him, he told me, “Dude, look at the sky.” At first, I gave it a cursory glance. It was partly cloudy. The sun was in its waning hour. I somewhat expected a surprise. Why would anyone stop me at random if not for some rare novelty, like a UFO or a rainbow? I looked back at him and he said to me, “Isn’t that beautiful man?”

When I looked back, I looked back with greater pause. It was, indeed, beautiful. The fog of yesterday that had cooled off the coast had transformed into mid-altitude clouds of intricate patterns. The twilight sun danced colorfully inside the forms of water vapor, set against the backdrop of the deep twilight blue. I realized the truth in the young man’s words. He said to me, “You know, sometimes you’ve just gotta stop and look around, right?” I agreed, smiled, and gave him a “Thanks, man,” accompanied with a peace sign before heading on my way. All he had stopped me for was a beautiful sky.

The man on the stump offered me nothing except what was already there in front of us. I was immensely pleased with his actions on the stump there. In many ways, this man on the stump embodies what I think is so deeply missing in higher education and the modern culture in general. This man took the time to sit, observe what was in front of him, and attempt to share what he saw with others. He didn’t force anything, and let his discovery speak for itself. That is the key to great academic work, in my not so humble opinion. I would take one of this man over a hundred of the other youth that are being churned out on the assembly line of competitive higher education today.

It is certainly a situation that gives one a bright ray of hope. Not only are you not the only person looking at the sky, but you were stopped by another to remind you of your own ethos. The thinkers are not dead, and maybe all it takes is one great sunset to bring them out of hiding again.

While passing by the Occupy Irvine encampment today, I noticed a sign that read “Don’t Just Honk” and felt compelled to consider that statement for a moment or two. The Occupy Irvine protesters were not just honking. The action they were taking was staging this low grade occupation of the lawn of the Irvine Civic Center. However, in terms of the actual effect that will be achieved by honking, as opposed to what the protesters themselves were doing, there will be essentially the same outcome. The Occupy Irvine protest, in similarity with the OWS protest, has done nothing more than complain about one evil or another that they can blame everything on while attempting to increase the size of their Facebook groups. Being Orange County, it is somewhat amusing to note that the Occupy Irvine protest tends to take on a much more Ron Paul style “End the Fed” message than their other national counterparts.

In some ways, this outlines the main problem I have with these kind of OWS or Tea Party movements. They are populism in a very dangerous form. When they do translate into slogan based policy, we end up with the kind of disastrous results that we’ve been achieving with the Tea Party in congress. Rather than trying to solve the problem of persistent unemployment, in many ways a cause of these OWS protests, congress has been hijacked by a bunch of slogans about the deficit. There has been no honest discussion about how to solve long term deficit problems. Instead, there has been a haphazard destruction of discretionary spending programs without much reduction in the long term budget outlook. We start looking less like a reasoned republican democracy, and more like a populist South American nation that throws bananas at the wall until one of them transforms into a functioning republic. Often, none of them transform anything and the real losers in the end are the same people who put the populists in office.

The reason people like myself get agitated by movements like OWS and the Tea Party is because it is almost impossible to take an honest policy position that occupies less than 200 words, let alone less than 140 characters. The only slogan I know how to give that is concise is “I don’t know yet. Let me explore that issue until I can make an informed opinion.” In person, when I’m talking about economic topics, it is usually a minimum of ten minutes, and I have to spend extra time attempting to infer what degree of prior knowledge they have that I am drawing on to make my point. None of this would be popular with the OWS movement, for the most part, since it would involve an attention span that was greater than a piece of cardboard with sharpie on it and a Like button on Facebook.

That being said, there have been interesting ideas that have come out of OWS that tend to get buried in the cacophony of self-importance. Among them, I heard of an ex-accountant attempting to advocate that the maximum compensation at publicly traded firms be set at fifty times the median wage of the firm’s employees. (She couldn’t fit that on a cardboard sign, so she was trying to hand out pamphlets.)  This is a significant policy proposal that deals with a real problem in the compensation of executives and it deserves its day in the light. Essentially, this rule would attempt to solve a principle-agent problem that exists within publicly traded firms in how executive salaries are set. I’ve often believed that the very high level of executive compensation has a great deal to do with the principle-agent problem whereby the executives are able to pay themselves the profits of a firm, instead of those profits being returned to shareholders. Of course, it is also the case the CEOs work harder than the average person and deserve a much higher level of compensation than most people. However, there are issues that go much further beyond the marginal productivity of CEOs that have not been honestly addressed.

Furthermore, sloganeers from both OWS and the Tea Party demand changes in the way taxes are levied. However, in order for actual change to take place we need to have honest discussion about the details of our tax system. It seems generally agreed that the tax system should be progressive, but by exactly how much? We also don’t think that the most desperate among us should have to pay taxes, but exactly where is that cut off and at what marginal rate should taxes be introduced? These are real questions that need real answers. They deserve in a reasonable world much more than a line on a cardboard sign or a man dressed up as Paul Revere. I tend to advocate for the following system. Let their be a VAT as the main collection mechanism of taxes. Then, issues a rebate such that the 10th income percentile pays no taxes, effectively creating a negative tax system for persons in the lowest income decile, but keeping the marginal effective tax rate low. Then, to fulfill the roll of progressivity, place a flat income tax starting at the 90th percentile (which is a little under $150,000 per year). The argument that the rich “do not pay their fair share” currently is an obscene argument.  The top decile currently pays almost 70% of the Federal income tax burden (I realize that the income tax is not the only form of tax and that there are other taxes that burden the middle class significantly, but this is not a valid argument for the rich don’t pay their fair share. Rather, it’s an argument in favor of simple and honest tax collection.).  If the OWS and Tea Party groups put down their megaphones and cardboard and actually demand a reasoned discussion across the political spectrum, we might be able to get a decent taxation system within our lifetimes. A simpler and more reasoned tax system would help greatly with both the problems of how to finance a long term deficit, and how much each person should have to pay given their place in our social structure. Instead of asking the 1% to pay more, ask everyone to sit down and determine the long term path of government revenues and services.

In conclusion, this idea of coming together and actually getting things done greatly highlights the difference between our current political era and the era of the mid and late 90s, and before. Some of the more memorable pictures I have in my mind of the Clinton administration were the pictures of the gigantic tables Clinton would set up at the White House. At these tables, he would bring together thinkers and players from across a massive spectrum and they would talk into the early hours of the morning. They would sit there, and they would get the very hard, nuanced, and detailed task of managing our nation done. Furthermore, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would engage in bitter, though necessary, political sparing, and yet still be able to share lunch or a drink as human beings and Americans together. When we elected the current administration, we elected it on the slogan of “Hope and Change.” Perhaps next time, it would be better to elect our politicians on their ability to drink coffee until the wee hours of the morning, and their ability to share a drink with co-workers. However, in order to get those kind of politicians, we as voters first need to commit to an ethos that goes above and beyond cardboard in Zuccotti Park.

However, I will gladly yield and say that the OWS protests did some good if this particular writing actually has an impact on anything outside my own ego. I did, after all, write this because I saw a sign that said “Don’t just honk.”

To start with, I would like to wholly dismiss my argument regarding the opportunity cost of time spent on Facebook. This argument was the only argument I made about something completely personal, as opposed to the other arguments being about social consequences. The simple idea behind this argument was that I could be doing better things with my time. The truth of the matter is, however, that I did not spend more time doing things that I deemed more “productive” than I would have done with Facebook. If instead of looking at Facebook as a social tool, I look at it simply as an entertainment, or content delivery, system then it is really no better or worse than a lot of the other entertainment options out there on the internet today. The conclusion to this idea seems to be that when it’s time to relax and do something mindless, I relax and do something mindless. The absence of Facebook just moved me into other mindless activities, rather than into more “productive” hobbies.

This leads into my new perspective of how Facebook is actually useful. Rather than being a tool for helping one develop social relationships and fulfill their social needs, its primary usefulness comes from being an entertainment platform and a personal marketing tool. Facebook is entertaining, and the characters and stories with which you can amuse yourself are people you actually know. It also does have some organizational ability for groups that cannot really be done by other (arguably better) technologies since they do not have the massive network size to back them up. Furthermore, I miss the use of Facebook’s ability to deliver content to me from organizations and “non-friends.” When I used Facebook, one of things that I used it most for was to get daily articles and blogs from The Economist. I haven’t really found a decent substitute for that.

From the marketing perspective, I find that I do need some kind of effective way to market myself. I had the idea that I would spend more time blogging here after I left Facebook, which as stated above was not the case. In the particular of writing new blog posts, I find that without the incentive of knowing that there will be an audience for something that I write, I end up being less inclined to write. Since I’m also considering some other creative projects, such as potentially developing a weekly podcast, I need a platform to get the word out. The bottom line is that when I had Facebook, I got click throughs to this blog. When I stopped using Facebook, those click throughs stopped. That in turn made me want to write less, which in turn meant the little audience I might have had evaporated.  If I changed the title of Facebook members from “friends” to “audience members” or “followers” or “listeners,”  then the impersonal nature of the Facebook environment seems much less troubling.

In my original post, the arguments about the impersonal and socially destructive nature of Facebook still hold a great deal of water, and was probably the main thrust of my leaving Facebook at the time. This is where I still believe that my original argument got a lot of things right. Facebook is still being used as a substitute for real human interaction. I see the effect of the network in my daily life here on campus, as people are engrossed in their phones. Furthermore, my idea that leaving Facebook would allow me to develop richer and more meaningful relationships with people also held water. However, the new richness of my relationships could partially be a side effect of recommitting to developing friendships at the same time as leaving Facebook and so the causality is suspect. These observations though justify why the use of Facebook as a kind of enjoyable diversion, as opposed to an actual social necessity, is critical. These two opposing uses, the entertainment purpose which I would consider reasonable, and the social fulfillment purpose which I would consider destructive, have yet to have been looked at in much seriousness as separable. Most of the people I encounter find Facebook absolutely necessary, and have commented to me that they would not have a social life in absence of Facebook, which from my new experience I believe to be wholly false.

I find that summarizes that conclusion of my little experiment. First, a social life will emerge regardless of Facebook usage, and one can find more clarity in relationships by not using it. The anxiety that people feel about not having that connection to Facebook is unwarranted, and in many ways I would encourage taking an extended absence from the service if one has found themselves trapped in Facebook as a social existence. Not being a part of Facebook will get rid of the “false” or virtual social life, and allow for an understanding of where someone actually fits in the social picture. It is enlightening, rather than isolating once one gets over the fear of being alone. Second, the size of the network and its use in disseminating information cannot be denied. While I would love for everyone to live in a Project Diaspora dream world and use better and better technologies that expand how we think about obtaining and spreading information, the network effects of Facebook will ensure that other technologies will remain marginal at best until a deal breaker technology emerges. It could be some time before something unique enough comes along to change the Facebook paradigm.

Finally, I am still a believer in the ill effects on socialization that Facebook and the always connected world causes. I recently watched a commercial for the iPad in which a family was sitting around a campfire, and the person had to stop and take out their iPad to tweet “Out camping with family!” In yet another dream world of mine, people should be openly revolting against this vision of the world. It is a world in which nothing is real and in which there is no experience of the place in which one is currently existing. The entire experience, even the one right in front of you, becomes a part of the virtual, make-believe world. However, I can’t help the revolution from outside the world. The world needs to begin a conversation about what they really want from their connected electronic devices, and what they don’t want. Figuring this out will mean starting to require people to experience some amount of depth of thought. Ironically, however, the only place large and connected enough to begin such a wide discussion would be inside the network itself. If I want to have that discussion, it has to be from the inside.

So what do you all say, will you be my audience members?

And if all of these arguments fail to convince, the truth of returning to Facebook is simply that I need a place to post more ponies.

If the miracle of human flight does not suffice to interest me, then out the same window I can watch cars drive in both directions on the toll highway 73. I count out ten seconds on my laptop’s clock and watch fourteen vehicles heading northbound towards downtown Irvine or highway 405. That’s, at minimum, fourteen different lives, each with a reason that they are all on that road right now. All this can been seen within ten short seconds. I can think for hours about how the tolls being charged on that road not only provides the road with its own source of financing, but change incentives such that traffic externalities are controlled. Not only does highway 73 manage its own traffic, but its existence helps manage traffic on other highways, such as the more famous, and vitally important, highways 405 and 5. If the economics is not enough to consider, then the engineering of the highway itself could be a source of wonder. The tons of concrete, the gigantic capital equipment of cranes and trucks, and so much more were not even in existence not that long ago. It would have likely taken the entire resources and lifetime of the Roman empire to build the road that I’m looking at right now. Today, we can build this road in a few short years, if even that, and its more of an afterthought than a grand project.

All of these things are amazing by themselves, but they are likewise amazing because I often seem to be the only person that ever sees them this way. In all my life thus far, I rarely have met anyone that even notices these things, and have never found a person that looks at them with the reverence and awe that I have come to have. I say all this because yesterday was a day that was monumental in two ways, and I feel like I was the only who noticed or even cared.

First, as of yesterday, February 3rd, 2011, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) assigned the very last block of IPv4 addresses. This is big news in the IT community, but for the most part the rest of the world shrugged.  (I might write later on what economic impacts should be expected, and how quickly the world might now have to move to IPv6 in response to the now very real shortage of addresses.) This is such a monumental event that I am in some way hoping that people will create a holiday to remember February 3rd as IPv4 exhaustion day. The internet is a part of everything that is done in the modern world today. The IPv4 address space contained addresses, or about 4.2 billion addresses. The world was expected to run out of addresses next year, and it has happened a year early. It’s a massive global achievement that will, as the depletion starts to trickle into the rest of the Internet,  within about six months start to affect almost every aspect of our modern world. However, this monumental human achievement, and the eventual consequences of it, went largely unnoticed.

Then, after I learned that it was in fact IPv4 Exhaustion Day, I hopped into a car to head out to Brea to perform with the lion group that I’ve been a part of here at UCI. Since this performance had only really been referred to as “The Brea Performance” I had no idea where it was that the group was going that day. As the car pulled into the parking lot, my jaw almost dropped. We were performing at the global headquarters of Beckman Coulter. When I turned in excitement to say, “Do you realize where we are? Do you know who these people are and what they do?” I came quickly to the sad realization that nobody in the group had even ever heard of the company. Here I was, standing in the beautiful compound of one of the greatest medical companies in the United States, and everyone was completely oblivious.

To put the miracle that is Beckman Coulter in context, consider the following. When I worked as a phlebotomist, I probably saw and helped to treat several hundred, to perhaps a low thousand, patients. When I worked in the laboratory, it was claimed that 80% of treatment decisions made by doctors were based on the data collected in the clinical laboratory, so the job of the laboratory was pretty serious stuff. During my tenure at St. Joseph Hospital, the hospital probably saw and treated patients somewhere in the tens of thousands. (I was always found these numbers hard to believe, until I was actually seeing them being run myself.) Now, consider that the vast majority of the tests that were done in our laboratory were run on Beckman Coulter’s machines. The determined the treatment of almost every patient in the hospital. Between Beckman Coulter and BD (Becton, Dickinson, and Company), their products were used in every aspect of my life for almost two years. Those lab results saved lives, hundreds of them, in our hospital, and Beckman Coulter’s machines are in almost every clinical laboratory in the United States, and in many more around the world. When you add it all up, the Beckman Coulter corporation is responsible for saving or improving hundreds of millions of lives. Here I was in the headquarters of this corporation playing for their Chinese New Year party, and all I could think about was the hundreds of millions of lives the people in front of me had saved because of the work they were doing in that building, and I was the only person that saw that.

I suppose it’s simply a factor of our modern world that all these things go unnoticed. If we didn’t live in an abstraction and tried to take in the scope of everything that is surrounding us today, we would never be able to function. I suppose being able to see all these things is why I’m so passionate about the study of economics. It allows me a method to digest the daily miracle of the modern world. I just wish that once in a while, I wasn’t the only person sitting at a window watching airplanes.

A short while back over this long winter break, I was crossing the street to Albertsons, and a young woman was standing at the crosswalk with me. This is usually the part of my day that I would have thought nothing about. However, as the two of us were crossing the street, the young woman started moving with a quicker pace, and then went around the rear of a car out of the cross walk. She was determined to go the long way. Now, at first, I would assume that she did this to maybe shortcut her way to the Starbucks on the far corner or some other valid, non-fear-for-her-life reason. However, the cynic in me quickly chimed in that I would see her again at the Albertsons when I arrived. And as I arrived at the entrance and looked to my right at the other entrance, there she was entering the Albertsons at the exact same time. She had chosen to go the long way around, through the parking lot, in the rain, in order to avoid me.

Kyle Bishop Abides, But Doesn't Rape

Truth be told, I wasn’t looking my best that day. It was in fact raining and dark out. And since I had just stepped out to grab something quick from the store, I wore my cheapest flip-flops. I was unshaven, and if I had pajamas on I would have probably looked a little something like a version of The Dude. I also came down my usual way, sliding down the side of a small hill from my building so I’m sure I appeared suddenly and unexpectedly on the sidewalk. However, flip-flops are hardly the optimal raping shoe in a rain storm. Aside from being not groomed and proper, I hardly thought as I walked out the door that I might raise the red flag of paranoid women everywhere.

And then, for added strangeness, I had to see this woman constantly while in the grocery store. It was a grocery store after all, and as I grabbed a sinful package of Twinkies while she was at the other end of the same isle I had to wonder if buying Twinkies raised or lowered my rapist score to her. Every part of my overactive imagination was trying to get inside this woman’s mind to see where the rationalization had come from to step far out of her way to avoid me. Perhaps, I should have shrugged of this incident as mere coincidence, or the act of a single frightened woman on a rainy night. I would have done that, however this instance was not singular. At times in the full sun when I have been (at least to my low standards) dressed to the nines, women have at this same crosswalk and other similar occasions, walked with their greatest strength to avoid me. The only way they could make their evasion more obvious would be to take one look at me, and run at full speed in the other direction while desperately attempting to dial 911 or at least post “Help! Rapist!” on Facebook.

I must assume that, at some point, all the women that I’ve met and befriended must have gone through some similar process. Each one in turn going through an inner monologue of  ”Well, he seems like a rapist… I could mace him just to be safe…” and then finally breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t waste perfectly good mace on someone who wasn’t a rapist. How any of them are able to overcome their own intuitive fear of rape and spend time with me must just be a tribute to the strength of my friendly nature. Though, to be fair, I’m sure they check their drinks for roofies when I’m not looking, just to be safe. Who would blame them?

I also wonder how I obtained the rape scent. Perhaps back in Humboldt county, where prevalent rape and assault of women is the little secret that nobody has ever talked about or dealt with, I picked up some of the scent. Here in Irvine, rape is relatively uncommon per capita (along with most other crimes), so maybe the noses of women’s intuition are not desensitized to the scent as they were back in Humboldt. If it’s not some kind of scent, then what could it be? Perhaps some way in which my face is structured, or the way I walk. It’s extraordinarily hard to tell what particular trait of mine women must find so instinctually appalling. Women do seem to have some kind of sixth sense for danger, and I do not fault them for using it. However, it seems such a sense has backfired when someone like myself gets avoided.

The truth of the matter is that most men are not rapists. Most men are not dangerous. I am, in fact, about as far from a rapist as one can possibly be. Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, “The legislators of the United States [...] still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion.  This may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more previous than a woman’s honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will.” I am certainly within the camp of men that believes we perhaps made a mistake when we demoted rape as a crime and claimed it to no longer be a capital offense. I have a long history of supporting and considering the plight of victims of sexual assault. If women are somehow flagging me as even a remote threat, then my concern shifts to an old one that I have complained about many times before. Women, in an attempt to defend themselves from crimes of this nature, often throw the baby out with the bathwater. As a people, we spend so much time afraid that we forget to separate our enemies and the people out there that intend to do us real harm from the regular Joes who are just out to buy a couple frozen pizzas and a beer and go back to bed. Perhaps, women’s intuition, which worked wonderfully when humans were animals on the lookout for predators, needs to be trusted a little less, so that fear of our neighbors does not get in the way of meaningful human interaction.

Or maybe, I just need a really good cologne to mask the scent.

There has always been in my mind a creeping dissatisfaction with Facebook that I have never been able to pinpoint exactly. Even now, in attempting to fully outline my reasons, I find myself both bothered and comforted by Facebook in a very ethereal way. In fact, I would not really be considering leaving if it were not for my putting leaving in the context of a larger social experiment in which I wish to engage. I desire to become more proactively engaged with my own social existence. In this context, I have concluded that the primary fault of Facebook is that it provides a passive and empty substitute for social interaction. The few (or often more than few) minutes spent on Facebook satiate human desire to be social, but do not fulfill such desire. Facebook is the Splenda of social interaction; it can be consumed ad infinitum, but it does not ultimately provide anything to its consumer. It is the equivalent of social pornography. If pornography acts as a substitute for sexual desire, then Facebook likewise acts in the same way for social desire. Therefore, continued usage of Facebook should be considered incompatible with a proactive social existence.

Since I tend to take an economic perspective on most things, I think one must first consider the opportunity cost of time spent on Facebook.  Every moment spent on Facebook, doing what are essentially trivial things, could be spent in the kitchen, at the Go board, working on this blog, or any variety of things. All of these things contribute in a way to my social goals, but in much more subtle ways, and with much more distant returns.  As an example, take the purpose of this blog compared to the similar purpose of Facebook. I want to be able to have a place to have long form thoughts on a variety of topics, and make them public in hopes that they promote further discussion among my peers, current or future. On this blog, I am unrestrained in the discussion and thinking aspect, though do not have the advantage of a somewhat large captive audience in the form of Facebook. Which is more important though? Do I value more the writing of these posts in terms of thinking in the long form or the pushing of my ideas out into the public forum? This blog emphasizes the first idea, Facebook emphasizes the second idea. However, if I think of myself as having a social existence that places the most value on direct interactions, then the blog should really be introduced in direct discussion with people as a place where interested people may go to get even more depth on some particular idea that I have been musing on. It’s a more difficult way to promote my ideas, but it is in many ways a much more active and healthy way to attract people to my work. Rather than have people come to something that I’ve done or thought because it flashed across some news feed on their wall, I would much rather cultivate direct relationships with people that actually have the potential of involving them.

This leads to another deficit of Facebook. A great number of the interactions on Facebook take place through the mechanism of wall posts. The topics of these wall posts range a great deal from person to person, but for myself the process tends to go as follows. I tend to have what I consider to be an interesting thought or observation, which is then followed by a desire to share this thought with another person. I satiate this desire by broadcasting on Facebook. I will then be satisfied by people “liking” said post, or posting a comment of their own. However, in truth these wall posts are transforming social interactions and the spread of ideas into no more than shadows on a Facebook wall. I feel satisfied, but still feel empty, when I engage in this type of behavior. Furthermore, in the context of living a proactive social life, every “like” of some post or photo is a missed opportunity to engage in a real social experience. I am forced to wonder how many conversations or more personal interactions are lost because one can simply “like” the wall post of another, and never have to actually engage that person. If I admit to having a goal of building relationships with other people, Facebook provides only an illusion of achieving this goal and diverts my attention from the fact that the goal might not actually be progressing as much as I would wish.

Likewise, in terms of building relationships with individuals, the use of the Facebook profile to learn about the interests of friends is also deceptive in its ability to undermine that goal. At first glance, the Facebook profile seems like a novel way to learn about new friends, or keep track of old friends. This is entirely true. One can learn a great deal about new friends using Facebook profiles, and can do so in an entirely neutral environment. In fact, Facebook takes this concept beyond a neutral environment. The person you are interested in will never in fact know that you were interested in them. They will never know that you were probing their interests. This is again where the Facebook idea breaks down. The trade made in exchange for all this new information is an almost complete loss of the discovery mechanism. Learning about a person’s interests doesn’t just serve the purpose of knowing how similar or dissimilar a person is from yourself, but it serves also to build trust and understanding. A person can go on to my profile and learn that I enjoy playing Go, but may never act on that information. However, imagine what a profound difference would be made if people were put in a position where they spent time personally exploring the interests of their friends and acquaintances. Not knowing something about a friend turns suddenly into an opportunity to attempt to learn more. This is an opportunity that I am certainly guilty of not exploiting to its fullest.

Furthermore, to the extent that the Facebook profile is a way of revealing information about one’s self, the Facebook profile provides a very censored view into the life of a person. In a New York Times article, Peggy Orenstein quotes M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle as saying, “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are. But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” In other words, your virtual self is manufactured to please the likewise manufactured virtual avatars of your friends. The presentation of self in Facebook is both passive and fake. If one is to be fully conscious of a social existence, that consciousness has to be free from things that will substitute for real social interactions.

In writing this post, I have certainly left out a great deal of the benefits of being a part of Facebook. I have also likely left out several more justifications for abandoning Facebook. However, I feel the need to emphasize that I in no way know if my particular approach is the correct one. As a social scientist, I feel some amount of obligation to put myself on the line to see if a particular theory about human interaction may be true or not. However, I am fairly certain that their exists a conflict between my own value system and Facebook. Hopefully, by engaging in this particular experiment the nature of this conflict will be revealed to me in its fullest form. I invite anyone that may stumble across this to comment on their own relationship to Facebook and how social networking defines social and interpersonal existence. I also hope to follow up later on this idea of living a more proactive social life. As I have said, I am hoping that leaving Facebook will be the first step in trying to consciously engage with my social self.

I guess it’s just a math heavy day today, mixed with a light sprinkling of rather standard insomnia. As I study for midterms and do my Econ-105A homework, I must have some internal desire to ground myself in things that I can attach more directly to myself. I had a conversation with a friend the other day that involved why I never ask anyone out. I claimed that the reason must be that I am highly risk adverse. Even though I meant this as a (albeit true) joke, as I sit here tonight doing way too much math, I distracted myself by thinking about how exactly I would model my own aversion to asking someone out on a date.

Since I’ve moved to Irvine, the old concept that there’s no such thing as a single woman has been pretty much entirely dissolved. This is a bizarre and foreign land where women seem to be, for no apparent reason that I can fathom, involuntarily unattached. Furthermore, the women here are of the highest quality in both beauty and intelligence, making the idea that any one of them would be involuntarily single all the more strange. I would say that perhaps it’s because the men don’t live up to their standards, but the men here are also of the same quality, so this seems unlikely at first glance.

All of this  is, of course, just a round about way for me to say that my usual excuse of “I can’t ask anyone out, because everyone is already taken” may not actually hold. I need an objective way to think about asking out women so that I can use it as a good rational for why I never do, and can thus maintain my well earned reputation as a cranky, lonely hermit.

So, for this model, we’ll assume that we’re presented with a choice between two options. The first option is to ask a girl out and the second option is to do nothing. For the do nothing option, we’ll assume that the expected utility of that option is zero. Some may say this is unfair, since you may suffer or may gain by choosing to do nothing. However, since we are only interested in the choice (or opportunity cost of doing one over the other), we only need to know if the expected utility of the ask-her-out choice is greater than or less than the expected utility of the do nothing choice. Said another way, we want to know if it’s better to have loved and possibly lost or to have never loved at all, and we’re measuring that based off of having never loved at all.

For the ask-her-out option, there are two potential outcomes. She can say yes, or she can say no. Let A represent the event that she accepts your offer, and A^c represent the event that she rejects your offer. Now, let U_A > 0 represent the utility gained by her accepting your offer and U_R > 0 represent the disutility caused by her rejecting your offer. The expected utility of asking her out is then given by the following equation:

EU = P(A)*U_A – P(A^c)U_R

Now, let k = U_R/ U_A. We’ll call k the heartbreak proportionality constant. The equation then becomes:

EU = P(A)*U_A – k*P(A^c)*U_A

EU = [P(A) - k*P(A^c)]*U_A

Now, we must examine the sign of the expected utility of asking her out. If negative, it’s better to do nothing rather than ask her out. If positive, it is better to ask her out. Since we know that the utility gained by asking her out, U_A, is always positive, the sign of this equation can be determined entirely by analyzing the sign of P(A) - k*P(A^c). Essentially, we can now say that the choice of whether or not to ask someone out can be determined entirely by two things. First, the probability that she will accept your offer. Second, by the heartbreak proportionality constant, k.

In this model, k represents how much one dislikes being turned down relative to how much one prefers being accepted to go on a date. First, consider a k = 1. This would represent a person that puts equal weight on being accepted and rejected. If it feels good to be accepted, then to this person it would feel just as bad if they got rejected. A person with a k = 1 would need to perceive that asking out his love interest would have at least a 50% chance of success in order for him to be at least indifferent between asking her out and not asking her out. If k > 1, then this person is strongly hurt by potential heartbreaks and would need greater than even odds in order to find the courage to ask someone out. A person with k < 1 is someone with a certain amount of courage. They value a potential relationship more than they value being hurt by rejection and will thus ask someone out even if they believe there is less than a coin toss chance of it being successful.

From this idea, it makes sense to determine the indifferent probability. Given a certain k, we must find the probability that a man would need to believe he would be successful in order for him to be indifferent to asking her out and not. This can be found using a little algebra:

P(A) - k*P(A^c) = 0

P(A) = k*P(A^c)

P(A) = k*[1 - P(A)]

P(A) = k – k*P(A)

(1+k)*P(A) = k

P(A) = k/(1+k)

If we know the person’s heartbreak constant, we can then determine by the above equation what probability of acceptance would be necessary in order to be indifferent to asking someone out.

And that’s where we can get back to me. I estimate that I dread getting embarrassed and rejected about twice as much as I like the idea of being accepted. Therefore, I must believe that the probability of someone accepting my offer would have to be greater than 2/3 in order for me to actually make an attempt. Since, however, I likewise believe that I am fundamentally undesirable to women since I am in fact a cranky, lonely, hermit economist secluded in my ivory tower, it is unlikely that I would ever believe, unless presented with extreme evidence to the contrary, that P(A) would ever be even close to 2/3.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a mathematically elegant explanation of why I will be single for the rest of my life. I guess my usual approach still doesn’t work here…

So, all this got me to start thinking about the so called pitcher’s duel. My question is: Why open a series with two ace pitchers? This is a pretty common practice that two top pitchers go head to head, but is there a reason that coaches would want to do this? Couldn’t a team put a lousy pitcher up against a great pitcher and throw the first game in order to give themselves a better shot at later games by wearing out the top pitcher early? Of course, if one team knew that the other team was going to do this, nothing would stop them from switching their pitching strategy, and on and on like that.

The choice of pitchers is a simultaneous game. For my thought process, we’ll assume that pitchers are chosen in secret by each coach. I start with a simple model. There are two teams and they will play one game against each other. Each team can either play their ace pitcher or their second-tier pitcher. If an ace plays and ace, there’s a 50% chance that either will win. If a second plays a second, the same thing will happen. If an ace plays a second, the ace will have a 75% chance of winning the game.

I could draw the payoff diagram, but I’m a bit lazy so I’ll just spoil the punchline. In this single game, both teams have a strongly dominant strategy to play their ace pitcher. The game, however, gets quickly complicated if you consider multiple plays. First off, to avoid the possibility of ties, you’d have to play three games. You’d give each team a first, second, and third ranked pitcher, and assign probabilities based on each pitcher facing each other. The complication then comes in even harder because each opening match up leads to its own sub-game for the next two games.

While working out what would happen in this three game situation would be difficult, there are a few things that can be thought about. First, the probability of winning the three game series, given that you already lost the first game, is lowered even if you do have a pitching advantage in later games. If you think about a seven game series, where ace pitchers may re-enter in later games, then a dominant strategy for all seven games might not exist.

Given that it is almost impossible then to find a dominant seven game strategy, it is probably a useful rule of thumb to simply try to win every game as if that game stands on its own. Winning game one does have a dominant strategy (choose the ace pitcher). So, it’s entirely reasonable then that we often see the opening of any given series start off with a pitcher’s duel between two ace pitchers. A pitching strategy that gives the highest probability of winning each individual game as if they are played one at a time is likely the optimal strategy for winning a series. Proving this is a bit beyond my scope of practice at the moment, but perhaps I might follow up on this idea when I have more skills and time.

On top of all that, it’s been raining today. It’s hard for me to really call this “rain” though. It’s more of an occasional drizzle that comes and goes. People are actually wearing coats in this weather, and I’m thinking it would have to drop about 5-10 more degrees before that was even a consideration. The drizzle is a simple cooling wind that falls with all the ferocity of the footsteps of a kitten, and I must say I somewhat enjoy a little of this weather from time to time.

So, what is the appropriate reaction to a horrible day such as this? Well, first, I think, is a matter of perspective. I can imagine a time not so long ago that a chain of events such as this may have devastated me. Now, it has become difficult to imagine how such things can bother me for more than a few minutes. I’ve seen my fair share of real troubles and hardships in life, and a day like this would gladly have been a par day only a few years ago. So, when I thought about how trouble tries to follow me where ever I go, I decided that it was a good time to turn on some good bluegrass music to carry my troubles away. (For those of you that want to play the home game, my favorite Internet bluegrass station: The Bluegrass Mix.)

Since nothing is ever simple for me, the music made me start thinking a lot about the common statement “I love all kinds of music, except country.” (I also think that most people that have that sentiment don’t differentiate between country and bluegrass, though some do.) I started thinking about this statement because I probably would have shared this idea myself when I was younger. Now, my perspective has changed to where I see excluding an entire genre of music as really a missed opportunity to experience a different range of human emotion. It’s often said that mathematics is the universal language. When we sent a message out into space to broadcast our existence, we sent it in binary code with a variety of mathematical constructs included since this would be the only way to send a message that says “Hey, we’re intelligent life. And if you are too, you’ll understand this.” So, if there is a universal language in math, I believe that music is the universal emotional language of humanity.

Why neglect a giant piece of emotional context that is carried in bluegrass and country music? I think about the classical Chinese performance music with which I am now involved and am reminded that most traditional Chinese music revolves around the very intricate use of the five notes of the pentatonic scale. I get the feeling that this type of music would be less rejected by the common man today than country music or bluegrass. And yet despite being a massive gap of time, space, and culture apart, they share a similar emotional context delivered in the complex and deep way that only music can. Chinese music is very environmental, often carrying with it themes of the land. It also deals with subjects of profound loss and sorrow. Suicide is not an uncommon theme in Chinese folklore. Through its music and dance, China paints a picture of its people and its land, along with its sorrows and its triumphs.

The music of Kentucky is no different, but it paints the picture of its own land, spoken in its own musical language. Bluegrass music is highly environmental as well and often sings about simple concepts. It contains large amounts of sorrow in its storytelling devices. It’s often about blue collar or farm workers struggling to make a living, or their relationship with their land or their god. The fast paced complexity of the banjo in many ways resembles the complicated play of the guqin. Why does this music get looked down upon while salsa music is considered to be sexy, or Chinese music is said to be highly cultural? It contains a unique emotional context tied to a unique land with a unique people. Neglecting this genre of music is in a way trying to claim that a piece of the human experience should be looked away from. I often sense two primary reasons that bluegrass and country music often get looked down upon.

The first reason, I think, is a kind of subtle reverse racism. Bluegrass music and country music are seen as the music of the ignorant, working-class, Christian white man. Today, that is everything that the modern multicultural perspective is suppose to despise. Most of mainstream music comes out of California today in one way or another through the major record companies, and most Californians, though I doubt they would admit it, look down on any state they consider to be Southern. Country music is against the liberal California way of life, and should be shunned in a way usually reserved for infectious diseases. Our stereotyping selves think, “Well, if they don’t want their son to grow up to be a gay Castro hairdresser, I don’t want my son to grow up to be a Mississippi preacher man!” Often, the very people that would make the argument that rap music will not turn your child into a gangster end up shying away from country music for what essentially amounts to the same rationalization. The Chinese music mentioned above soothes the pangs of white guilt by its claim of diversity, while bluegrass music pours salt on the wound.

The second reason, and the reason that brought out my own thoughts of bluegrass music on this rainy day, has to do with the topic of sorrow in love being prevalent in bluegrass music. The other common reason to look down upon country music is that it deals too often with the topics of heartbreak and whiskey, and not always in that order. Listening to sad songs makes people sad. However, once again I think that by completely avoiding presenting ourselves with the sorrow and pain of life, that we are missing a fundamental piece of our own humanity. There’s a claim these days that all anybody needs to do in life is try to be happy. What nobody ever tells you is that true happiness is not at all an easy task. Relationships will break down; people will die; the darkness will come for us all at some points in our lives. Right now, if I took five shots of whiskey, I think I could reasonably say that, at least for the evening, I would be a happy man. However, that is not really the happiness that we are suppose to be seeking. The human experience isn’t just about being happy, it’s also about dealing with the hard facts to life. It’s about working for a greater reward. Bluegrass music conveys the emotional context of a people that had to deal with hard facts of life, and worked for the rewards that their values saw fit to seek. They often did not succeed, and often feel on hard times, but they tell the story anyway.  We may not want our hearts to break, or to become restless souls, or to have people die before their time, but the human story calls into play all these things.  Saying you don’t listen to bluegrass because its sad in many ways indicates an incompleteness to the soul, or at least denial of a piece of the soul that we must all one day face.

However, maybe that’s the reason people tend to appreciate bluegrass music more as they grow older. After having myself experienced many dark and troubled times, I embraced different musical flavors that I would have never been able to relate with as much as I do now. So, when I listen to this bluegrass on this rainy day, it does carry my troubles away with it. I can sing a tune of folk melodies that relates my sorrow to the human experience, and my day of not having the alarm clock goes off can be met with a smile and a readiness for the next task at hand.

Around 3 pm, despite the fact that my every waking moment should be spent trying to get ahead in statistics, I felt that this epic heat wave was quickly calling me to do something with the warm temperatures. Around Newport Beach, weather stations were only registering around  88-ish degrees, and the general trend was already starting to drop as the evening winds started to tepidly pick up again. I decided that I should go to the beach, because during a record setting heat wave that just what you’re suppose to do. I grabbed a Zipcar for 20 bucks and change and headed to my favorite spot at Newport Beach. It was beautiful. The water was the perfect temperature, the waves were filled with surfers catching perfect curls, and the low evening sun was was distant enough that is didn’t turn me into a sunburned mess. I swam in the cool waters for 40 minutes, felt the waves wash over me, and then headed homeward.

With that, this is the second time that I’ve used the Zipcar, and it certainly provides an entirely different way of thinking about transportation. You have to be extraordinarily conscious of how you’re managing the time that you’ve allowed for having a car, and yet at the same time it’s completely liberating in that the only time you need to concern yourself with anything having to do with a car is during those blocks you’ve specifically allocated.

I have no doubt at this point that my monthly automobile expenses will be lower (much lower) using the Zipcar than actually owning a vehicle. However, that’s not entirely a fair assessment. Much of the decrease in costs comes from the fact that I use the Zipcar substantially less than I would if I owned my own car. Here is the part where my inner economist begins to chime in. I think it would be fascinating to develop or see some kind of normative model of Zipcar usage. There would essentially be two models here. The first model would involve the choice of modes of transportation. It would be about how the consumer choses to either own their own car and use that, or to use a Zipcar in combination with other alternate modes of transportation such as the bus/train. The second model would then be the decision of when to actually use a Zipcar and for how long (I’m sure Zipcar probably has their own version of this model worked out, as it would help determine pricing, profitability, scheduling, etc).

I find the choice model to be the most interesting for a few reasons. First, we hardly ever consider the opportunity costs involved with what is essentially having our car sit in a parking lot. A car is a somewhat expensive piece of capital equipment, and yet we never think to ourselves, “Well, while I’m at work for 8 hours, I could be renting out my car rather than having it sit unused in a parking lot.” One of the correct ways to think about this problem in economics is to consider the value of the car and determine how much could be made off of the next best investment as the opportunity cost of ownership. That, however, would involve not owning the car at all, rather than simply having the car be used while you’re not using it. So, thinking about Zipcars might provide a deeper understanding of what the opportunity cost of having a car sit in a garage or parking lot is. In the case of a Zipcar user, the opportunity cost is $8 an hour. If you choose to have your Zipcar sit in a parking lot, you’re having to pay $8 an hour to maintain rights over that car while it sits there.

Which brings me to my second interest, Zipcars make the marginal cost of driving very apparent to the driver. As I mentioned above, the cost of having a Zipcar for an hour is $8. Most of the time, I think, drivers that own their own car think about driving as if the marginal cost of driving were close to zero. We all make estimates of gas millage, registration costs,  insurance costs, repairs, etc. but how many people could reasonably say how much their morning commute costs? Or, put better, how much does that detour down the scenic route cost compared to the regular grinding commute? How much does it cost to go through the Starbuck’s drive thru on the way to work? And, once again, how much is being paid to have your car sit in the parking lot waiting for you until the exact moment when you’re ready to leave? Being a part of a shared car program puts a real marginal cost on driving that the consumer has to confront every time he or she gets behind the wheel. These kinds of things change behavior and it would be worth some careful study to see just how much. Since I’m considering doing my undergrad research in urban transportation, it certainly would be worth my time to think about it more. I’m hoping it will involve more trips to the beach.