Things That Don't Work

While I tend to be on the side of generosity, and prefer to think that the vast majority of right wing adherents are simply not able to comprehend complicated ideas like: your vote is meant to create good government for you. I also don't watch 'American Idol' or skip those thoughtful articles with big words. This seems to be a failing common to liberals, who keep trying to make life better for everyone.

The kind of visceral hate for those better off - hate that has come out in an electorate that wants to see dumb crooks elevated to powers of decision - inclines some of us to think Democracy has failed. That a dimwitted media accedes to lies, and elevates them to the same status as facts, would appear to seal its doom. I am afraid the discouragement will keep some of us away from the polls, and urge readers to hang in there. Growing economic chaos is likely to make even the least intelligent voter see something wrong in what they're being told. Maybe we need to simplify the message.

As Professor Wombat and I were discussing this morning in comments at Eschaton, there have been eight years of proof that 19th century trickle down theories don't work. Without a living wage, consumers disappear. Without consumers, the economy has no wheels to run on. The philosophy that directing government resources only to the wealthy will make a healthy economy has produced a mess. The rejection of the regulation of financial industry has created the present housing disaster, by eliminating simple numerical facts, that to afford a house a consumer needed a computed level of income.

Last time I bought a house, it was about 10% down, and an income that (spread over 20 years of mortgage) would allow a monthly payment of a set amount which I don't recall, but was a fixed figure on a scale accessed by all mortgage lenders. Without the amount necessary to support repayment, mortgages were not approved. When that standard was trashed, and mortgages based on fantasy became standard, financial overseers like the Fed should have stepped in and stopped a pending disaster. Under cynical assumption of wisdom above and beyond traditional standards, this worst administration ever called for more 'consumer confidence' - that would be the new standard for underpinnings of our economy. The bundled worthless mortgages were sold to unsuspecting investors, who knew that laws determined what the mortgages were based on. The fantasy grew. More investors bought houses and buildings they couldn't afford, and more investors relied on laws that were being ignored.

The spectacle that we see now is the government of crooks, who stole away the underpinnings of our economy, trying to keep their farce from falling about their ears, just long enough to pass it on to the next president and his executive branch.

We are being sold an increasingly twisted version of reality. What we have now is falling apart.

This morning, we were talking about the fact that economics as science that would allow such an obviously flawed theory as trickle down to continue, probably is based on flimsy principles itself. Professor Wombat is tracking down for me an article he saw recently that found a physics theorem that has been disproved, which was a big deal in early economics. Meanwhile, I like the following article, which really was used to dispute opposition to global warming.

Time again for Shtetl-Optimized’s Mistake of the Week series! This week my inspiration comes from a paper that’s been heating up the quantum blogosphere (the Blochosphere?): Is Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation Really Possible? by M. I. Dyakonov. I’ll start by quoting my favorite passages:

The enormous literature devoted to this subject (Google gives 29300 hits for “fault-tolerant quantum computation”) is purely mathematical. It is mostly produced by computer scientists with a limited understanding of physics and a somewhat restricted perception of quantum mechanics as nothing more than unitary transformations in Hilbert space plus “entanglement.”

Whenever there is a complicated issue, whether in many-particle physics, climatology, or economics, one can be almost certain that no theorem will be applicable and/or relevant, because the explicit or implicit assumptions, on which it is based, will never hold in reality.

I’ll leave the detailed critique of Dyakonov’s paper to John Preskill, the Pontiff, and other “computer scientists” who understand the fault-tolerance theorem much better than a mere physicist like me. Here I instead want to take issue with an idea that surfaces again and again in Dyakonov’s paper, is almost universally accepted, but is nevertheless false. The idea is this: that it’s possible for a theory to “work on paper but not in the real world.”

The proponents of this idea go wrong, not in thinking that a theory can fail in the real world, but in thinking that if it fails, then the theory can still “work on paper.” If a theory claims to describe a phenomenon but doesn’t, then the theory doesn’t work, period — neither in the real world nor on paper. In my view, the refrain that something “works on paper but not in the real world” serves mainly as an intellectual crutch: a way for the lazy to voice their opinion that something feels wrong to them, without having to explain how or where it’s wrong.

While claiming that throwing money at the 'entrepreneur', (a misnomer when applied to buyout firms that throttle cash cows), will create a cascade of money downhill into the pockets of the workers, conservative economists cannot show that it works. Au contraire, its enactment under the occupied White House has proved definitively it doesn't. This should mean it would be erased, and discounted. But the right wing is running on its theories, screaming frantically that it will work if we just keep it going - it works on paper. Bumper sticker paper.

Okay, pointy heads are just aghast at seeing that a majority of voters could use their own power to vote, to continue an economic disaster which makes them unable to afford today what they could easily buy about six months ago.

Maybe instead of writing beautiful arguments for factual bases for economics, we could spend the next two months making slogans, so that the media and other trolls would be able to understand. Can I hear a vote for "Fight Abortion, Pay a Living Wage" ... "Your Wallet Is At Stake in November" ... "Try Reason, The Opposite Hasn't Worked" ... "Faith Based Voting Preys On YOU" ... "Yes, It Can Get Worse" ... "$$ Sent Another Engineer in China Through College So Lost My Job, Got Three Service Jobs, Went Shopping, This Is Me Whining" Your suggestions welcome.