Halfway down the Danube

Mathematicus, Bernardus Silvestris

Now this was a strange find. It's an incomplete Latin dramatic poem from the middle of the twelth century, dug up from the Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge article by Deirdre Stone, 71 (1996), 209-283.

A summary: a childless wife consults an astrologer, who calculates that she will soon bear her husband's child, who will grow to be excellent in every way, and become the king of Rome!

And then kill his father. Oops.

No, you haven't heard this one before.

On hearing this, said husband sorrowfully tells his wife to kill the child when it arrives, but the baby has such a great personality, in nascente fuit tante deitatis imago vix poterat credi materialis homo, ' the new-born child was of such god-like appearance that he could scarcely be believed of human substance', that his mother sends him to wet-nurse exile instead, giving him only the name... Patricida. Foreshadowing is a sign of quality literature.

As a youth, Patricida studies philosophy, and then, scared of a life of idleness and leisure, he joins the military. Of course, Rome is at war with Carthage, and Hannibal manages to capture the king of Rome and the senate. But Patricida and his legion blindside the Carthaginian forces just as Hannibal is receiving the Romans' surrender. The Romans decide to give Patricida a triumph, and the king of Rome, reading the writing on the wall, gives him the crown.

Patricida's mother, keeping tabs on him from afar, is troubled by these events. All the astrologer's prophecies have come to pass, except for the one about her husband. So she and he have a sit-down, some self-hating misogyny here: si libeat superis genus evertatur iniquum femina vivat homo tum suus orbe suo, 'if it please the gods, let that evil species, woman, be destroyed, then let man live for himself in his own world'.

Husband says now, hon, you're heaven and earth to me, cara comes mihi sanctus amor mihi gratia concors, 'dear companion, blessed love of mine whose delight is my delight', with a boy like that I don't mind so much, and it's fated anyway.

The parents visit the king. Patricida recognizes his mother, but not his father, but is kind to both. Tearful introductions are made, and his father explains the situation honestly to Patricida. I made a mistake when you were younger, son, but fate fixed it for me. When the time comes, son, do what you have to do. It's all right.

Patricida, understandably, is left in a tizzy by all this. He devises a Cunning Plan, and calls together a special session of the Senate and People of Rome. He asks for one special gift from the city, just one and only one, no questions asked, no strings attached, but only if they think he really deserves it.

The people blush, honest, erubuit populus, and shout their approval.

Patricida doesn't beat around the bush. I'm not asking for stuff, people, but ut liceat mihi propriam conficere mortem, 'to be allowed to bring about my own death'. That's right, mors est Roma tuum munus mea, 'your gift, Rome, is my death'. The beauty part is, this way I don't get to kill my father and I become a star that watches over the city. (Yes, a star. Don't ask.) It's a win-win situation.

The Romans rather disagree. But Patricida even gets legal on them, quoting Justinian, Dux populi victor munus quod queret habeto, 'The leader of the people, the conqueror, let him take the reward he seeks'.

And then it stops.

The Mathematicus is 854 lines of elegaic couplets, using classical prosody and not rhyme. Stone provides a facing English translation, thank goodness. The plot is not taken from the Oedipus story, which was my first guess, but from a persuasive monologue, a suasoria, from the late antique author pseudo-Quintilian's declamations. No, I hadn't heard of him either.

Now my lone remaining reader is asking, Carlos, isn't this freaking obscure even for you? Well, it is and it isn't.

You see, a mathematicus was an astrologer, and at that time, and for long after, astrology was a 'hard science'. Johannes Kepler was a mathematicus. The conflict that drives plot of the poem is free will versus scientific prediction, not predestination.

In that, the Mathematicus prefigures much 20th century science fiction. The conflict that drives the Mathematicus is the same tension that drives Isaac Asimov's early Foundation stories, is the same question that Paul Atreides and his monstrous descendant brood over in Frank Herbert's Dune novels. As Walter M. Miller, Jr., put it in his Canticle for Leibowitz:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America -- burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

There are no references to Christianity in the Mathematicus. None. In fact, the poem so troubled one copyist that in one manuscript (provenance Beaupré, 12th century, now in Bern) all "reference to antiquity and especially any mention of pagan gods or astrology is deleted as well as anything that could be considered lascivious. The result hardly makes for a coherent narrative" (Stone, 216). Only 587 lines survived this treatment.

Yes, the Mathematicus ends on a cliffhanger. There are manuscripts which date from near the time of composition, so it's unlikely the ending was lost.

A possible hint to the end of the story might lie in the source material. Stone gives the synopsis of the declamation of pseudo-Quintilian's from which the plot was taken. It concludes with: "Now you can say 'you lie, astrologer'. My only fear is that my death will kill my father."

On the other hand, Bernardus may have deliberately kept it ambiguous. He was a smart guy, connected to 12th century Chartres and Tours:

Bernardin li Sauvages
qui connoissoit toz les langages
des esciences et des arts

and is perhaps best known today for one chance borrowing C.S. Lewis took from his Cosmographia. But I think that's for another post.

A world without squirrels

Only in Europe, an entire parking lot covered in acorns could be... empty of squirrels.

We do have squirrels in Europe, of course. But they are smaller, a lot fewer in number, red instead of gray, and very, very shy. I see them around my parents' house all the time, where they like to steal our harvest of hazelnuts. Why none of them would hang around this parking lot on the banks of Snagov lake, where acorns are literally strewn about, I can't say. It sure looked like squirrel heaven.

Dawn of the Logan

Saw my first Logan this week.

Romanian readers will instantly say, "Ah! A Logan." Everyone else will be saying "Do what?" So, skip the next few paragraphs, Romanian friends, while I explain.

Back in the bad old days of Communism, Romania had its own car brand: the Dacia. (Well, actually it had two car brands, but the Oltcit probably deserves a post of its own.) Dacias were boxy little sedans made at the Dacia factory in Pitesti, about 100 km west of Bucharest. They were originally made by Renault under a licensing agreement, and right up to the end they had a vaguely little-French-car-from-the-1960s look.

Originally, I am told, the Dacia was a decent car. Small, simple, and completely lacking in frills or luxury, but not bad. But like a lot of things in Ceausescu's Romania, it tended to get worse with time. Renault's license expired in 1978, and the state took over the factory. Lack of foreign currency meant that more and more of the parts were made in Romania. The quality of the car gradually dropped, until by the end of the regime it was iffy even by the low standards of Communist Eastern Europe.

(But Romanians seemed to keep a certain affection for it anyway. Or so I'm told. They were bad cars, but any car at all was a luxury in those days; you had to wait three to four years for delivery, and that was after you'd already paid for it. And since all Dacia models were essentially the same car, made in the same factory, they tended to be bad in the same ways. So you knew where you stood, and everyone was in the same boat.)

After 1989, of course, things changed. Romanians discovered second-hand European cars. The Dacia factory in Pitesti went through the same economic convulsions as all the other big state-owned enterprises. And eventually, in 1999, it was privatized -- ironically enough, to Renault.

Now, Renault had big plans for the Dacia factory. They didn't just want to make Dacias. They wanted to launch a massive assault on the Eastern European car market, building and marketing a cheap but reliable car that would be attractive, not just to Romanians, but to Bulgarians, Poles, Turks, Serbs, Ukrainians, you name it. They wanted to make "a western car at an eastern price", and sell it to a market of hundreds of millions of potential customers.

Still with me? Okay, so: the Logan is that car. It's built in that same old factory in Pitesti. But it's a whole new car, and much of it consists of Renault components manufactured elsewhere, shipped to Pitesti, and assembled. And the quality, it's already clear, is far beyond that of the little old Dacias.

If the preliminary reports are correct, then Renault may have done something. According to the first set of reviews, the Logan seems to be a decent car -- small-ish, somewhat underpowered, bland in appearance, but cheap, cheap, cheap. A new one runs about 5,700 Euros ($7,000); add all possible frills, and it only goes up to about 8,600 Euros ($10,500). That's a car that an average Romanian -- or Ukrainian or Bulgarian or Turkish -- family could imagine owning.

Of course, it'll be a while before we know for sure. The big questions -- is the Logan safe? Sturdy? Reliable? How will it handle Romanian driving conditions? -- won't be answered for months or years. The Logan looks good at first glance, but it might yet turn out to be a lemon. And in the meantime, Renault has invested five years and over 600 million dollars in retooling the Pitesti factory. So it's not yet clear whether this gamble will pay off.

But anyway, Logans are starting to appear on the streets of Bucharest.

More on this in a bit.

Pie Blogging Redivivus: The White Potato Pie

Let me be frank. This is not a happy pie. This pie speaks of isolation and deprivation in the midst of plenty. This is the pie a prison cook might make for Thanksgiving after the warden goes back on his promise of pumpkins. This is the pie Orwell might have made at Wigan Pier. This pie is two steps below soul food. It is a scary, scary pie.

Okay! This recipe makes two pies, so halve everything if you only want one. I started off with two large potatoes, which I peeled, boiled, mashed, and let cool. I stirred in a stick of butter (a quarter-pound, 100 grams), two cups of sugar (400 grams), two eggs and two cups of milk (500 milliliters).

This scared me. It's not particularly far from a recipe I use for potato soup. It was not very thick, so I decided to slowly heat it to allow the potato starch to thicken.

This took some time. I learned that this recipe is not initially forgiving of lumpy mashed potatoes. The small non-mashed bits of potato were floating loose in the liquid. Also, some of them scorched on the bottom of the pan, turning a light tan filling into a russet color as I hurriedly stirred the pot.

I added a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a teaspoon of what is called "pumpkin spice" to the mixture, mainly cinnamon and nutmeg, because the filling tasted exactly like you would expect: a sweet egg custard made from potato. Like you put flan and French fries in the blender.

It took nearly half an hour for the damn filling to thicken; or rather, the lumpy half was thick, but the remainder was less so. At one point I was seriously contemplating adding cornstarch. Yeah, starch to a potato pie. But it finally did thicken, the lumps dissolving into the general puree, and I whisked it smooth.

I poured the filling into two prefab uncooked pie crusts, and baked them for forty-ish minutes at about 350 F (175 C).

They came out bubbling, looking much like pumpkin pie to the untrained eye, but without the pumpkin pie's creamy custard sheen. On closer examination, these were grainy, raggedy pies that screamed ersatz from every steaming pore.

The taste? A sweet pie made from a bland root vegetable. The vanilla and the spices mask most (but not all) of the potato flavor. The potato nature of the pie really comes out in the texture, which is unsettlingly like mashed potatoes. Good with coffee, but what isn't? And if you're on an Atkins diet, forget it.

I can't help but think turnips would have given the pie more character. But that way lies madness.

Fix that!

Some days ago, I received an email from a dear friend, with a link and the subject line: "This needs to be fixed!"

I couldn't agree more. So may I direct your all attention towards this charity. I know the people who run this place and it is a good thing. They always need money, so if you have not yet thought of a charity to give to for the holidays (I know they are months away, so what?), consider them. The government is certainly not doing anything for the street kids and orphans, so it's left to private efforts.

(They are still so grateful for the generous donation of yours, Pouncer!)

In the meantime, I'm happy to report that my little friend is doing well. He's as charming and adorable as ever, and he had a good day today. Among his loot were a big loaf of bread, a meat pastry, a bottle of water, and a banana (the latter from me - I thought he should also get some vitamins. I don't always give him bananas, though!) I so wished I could just take him home.

And then, they get you...

Kids. You think you know your kids and you know what's going on in their little heads. Not much, really, since they are so little. Attention span is short, too. So, no big surprises in general, right?

Wrong.

Two conversations from this morning.

Conversation number one:

[Alan and I are sitting on the couch, watching Elmo visiting the firehouse. I know. But I'm a single parent at the moment and you can say what you want, Elmo is great for picking up the morale of a parent who is up since 6 am and already dizzy from caffeine overdose. So we sit, and cuddle, and watch TV.]

Alan: Mama, geht's dir gut? [Mommy, are you all right?]
Me: Ja, Spatz, mir geht's gut. [Yes, love, I'm all right.] -- Kiss for reinforcement.
Alan, patting my belly: Und Baby, geht's auch gut? [And baby, is all right?]
Me, taken aback: Oh, Spatzl. Nein, das Baby ist fortgegangen. [Oh, love. No, the baby went away.]
Short pause.
Alan: Mama, bist du traurig? [Mommy, are you sad?]
Me: Nein, Schatz. Ich bin immer froh, wenn ich dich sehe. [No, love. I'm always happy when I see you.] More kisses.
Alan, smiling: Geht's besser? [You better?]
Me: Ja, viel besser. [Yes, much better.]
Alan: Gut. [Good.]

Kids. Sometimes, they take your breath away. We haven't been talking much about the baby around the kids, before and after. Nine months is such a long time and all. Alan had to learn not to jump on Mommy's belly -- which he loves -- but we didn't think that the explanation "there's a baby inside" would stick so much. Apparently, he is still thinking about it.

Conversation number two:

At the breakfast table. David is pointing up the stairs, turns to me and says "Dada!". Me: "No, dear. Daddy is in Rome, he has to work. He's not at home and he won't join us for breakfast." David, more insistent and rather indignant, pointing to the stairs: "DADA!". This translates as: I know he's here, this is not right, Daddy always comes down these stairs, it's breakfast time so he better get up, and pronto!

So we called Doug in his hotel in Rome and got him up. Pronto.

Go to section 29

Combat Command in the World of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers: Shines the Name, Mark Acres, Ace Publishers, 1987.

What an odd little book. I picked it up for pocket change off Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. It's a choose-your-own-adventure book, set in the universe of Robert Heinlein's military science fiction novel, Starship Troopers, which perhaps should not be confused with the Paul Verhoeven movie of the same name.

It's more complicated than the choose-your-own-adventure books of my youth. Elements of randomness are involved, not merely exerting your own naked will onto the pages. Basically, on the occasion of battle you roll a pair of dice, kind of like you were shooting craps, and check the result on a set of "combat charts", repeating as necessary until the battle is over.

Since Gary Gygax wrote the introduction, I'm guessing that this system is based on the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, and not on any sort of actual military operations research.

Anyway. Here's the blurb, which is accurate enough:

ENTER THE WORLD OF THE STARSHIP TROOPERS

You are Corporal Julian Penn. A seasoned combat veteran, you lead your squad of Mobile Infantry against both Bug and Skinny forces. The success of your command is as vital and perilous as any Bug War missions faced in Robert A. Heinlein's legendary story.

From victory against monstrous aliens to overcoming your own troops' flagging morale, your decisions hold the key to victory -- or defeat.

Uh-huh.

The first fourteen sections of the book form a nearly self-contained unit. In the first section, you, Julian Penn, are given a telegraphed moral dilemma: do you leave Paolo Guiterez, a "crazy Latin" who has screwed up your mission and is probably dead, behind? Or do you rescue him single-handedly? Or do you go in with a team to pick him up?

Now, the weird thing is, the obviously correct decision in the context of the book can lead to worse results than being a complete and utter bastard. Let's examine the hedgerows of this garden of forking paths.

Decision 1: you abandon the crazy Latin to his fate. This causes the morale of your squad to drop by one point.

Path 1a: you beat up a guy named Brennan, who has a problem with your decision. And that's fine. No further change in morale.

Path 1b: you ignore the matter. Morale drops two more points.

Decision 2: you charge in single-handedly. You get dinged, or you don't. Doesn't matter. And hey, Paolo's still alive! That crazy Latin.

Path 2a: you court-martial him. He hangs by the neck until dead, and may God have mercy on his soul. Morale drops a point.

Path 2b: you ignore the git. Morale drops two points.

Path 2c: you beat him up. Morale stays constant.

Decision 3: you go in with backup.

Path 3a: you get dinged. See Decision 2.

Path 3b: Your comrade Jim Wade buys the farm. Morale drops by a point; now see Decision 2.

Path 3c: Both Wade and "the tall, strong black man from central Africa" Sutu buy the farm. Morale still only drops by a point. (One wonders if morale would drop if Sutu died and Wade survived.) See Decision 2.

Path 3d: You go in, you pick up the crazy Latin, you go out. No one (human) gets hurt. See Decision 2.

Path 3e: Y'all die. Go to section 29.

So. You can leave the crazy Latin behind, and as long as you lay some hurt on your critics, it's only as bad as if you saved his ass and got someone else killed in the process. In that case, while beating the crazy Latin silly afterwards is neutral to the general morale, it's worse if you hang the guy, and even more so if you only cold-shoulder him.

On the other hand, if you charge in yourself, and later happen to lay some hurt on the crazy Latin, hey, your morale doesn't drop at all. Incidentally, you're also beating on a guy who has signs of a concussion.

Finally, if you go in as a team, you might all die. This is not the case if you go in by yourself. Apparently in the future, there is no "team" in "I". (In Heinlein's original book, a great deal is made of the importance of teamwork.)

It strikes me that these are really strange values to inculcate via a children's choose-your-own-adventure book. The beatings will continue until the morale improves? Oh yeah. We are the happiest barracks in the Federation!

Anyway, for amusement value, here's section 29 -- i.e., the DEATH section -- in full:

History is full of examples of the difference one man, or one group of men, can make. Although their names never appeared in the history books, Julian and his men did live on in the textbooks. Future generations of M.I. officers studied his mistakes. Perhaps it was one such officer who remembered Julian Penn and led his men to victory over the Skinnies. It is documented in the history books that the Skinnies changed sides, gave support to the Terran Federation, and allowed Humans to triumph over Bugs... at least for a while.

You can return to section 1 and try again.

So, punk. Do you feel lucky?

Farm to Factory, the final years

And now we come to that period in history Allen calls "the Soviet climacteric". As you may have noticed, Allen consistently stakes out the contrarian point of view against the standard account of the Soviet Union's economic rise and fall, so it's no surprise that he does it again here. (As someone pointed out to me, it's an excellent career move.) But in the final chapter of Farm to Factory, he does it twice. Here's the play by play.

In the standard view, central planning by its very nature caused persistent inefficiencies in the Soviet economy, due to its lack of price signals and incentives, leading to poor economic productivity and stagnation. This line of thought goes back to Mises's economic calculation argument of the 1920s, and appears to show up in the data, as a drop in total factor productivity growth, starting in the 1960s.

But wait, said Weitzman, Easterly, and Fischer. It may be that the structural problems caused by central planning do not result in poor productivity per se at all, but simply make it harder to substitute capital for labor as well as a market-based society. Taking that structural difficulty into account, Soviet productivity growth is reasonable, though not stellar.

Ah, but what contrarian position can Allen take? "I argue," says Allen, "the value of .4 is an illusion. The low measured value of elasticity reflects massive errors in Soviet investment strategy rather than a real difference in technology. It was not purely happenstance that these errors occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, for the end of the surplus labor economy posed new management problems, and the party leadership bungled them."

In other words, even under central planning, had the party leadership planned better, the Soviet economy could have still managed to become more productive.

To anyone familiar with the history of late Soviet (or eastern European) Communism, this is rather difficult to argue with, contrary position or not. I mean, the sheer waste is legendary.

Anyhow, Allen discusses three types of "massive errors" in Soviet planning: in industrial reconstruction, in developing the Soviet Union's natural resources, and in Soviet research and development. These are rather standard takes on the subject, so I will go through them quickly.

The first massive error, in Soviet industrial reconstruction, is easy enough to describe. For political reasons, the Soviet state preferred to refurbish old industrial plants over constructing new ones, in order to prevent local unemployment, but also to prevent social dislocation, since Soviet factory towns were like the old 'company towns' of the US, but even more so. In addition, Soviet planners also believed that renovating pre-existing plant would be more cost-effective than building from scratch.

This turned out not to be the case. Allen refers to Gosplan figures which show that retrofitting old plant for greater capacity cost 50% more than constructing new ones. Meanwhile, production remained low. At the same time, the Soviet Union's newer plants could match higher, Western levels of output. These new plants appear to be responsible for productivity gains in selected industries, such as Soviet steel in the 1960s and 1970s.

Thus, Allen believes that had the Soviets committed to a program of building new plants and closing older ones, Soviet industrial productivity could have continued to increase.

The explanation behind the second massive error, the failure of the Soviet Union to develop its natural resources efficiently, goes back nearly two centuries to David Ricardo. The Soviet Union suffered major declines in productivity in their coal, oil, and ferrous metals sectors. Why?

Just as a farmer in a newly-settled country will pick the best land first, the second-best land next, and leave the worst choice for last, so too with the Soviets and their mines. The Soviets had already worked their most productive sites, many of which were playing out. And mines in ore-rich but remote regions took much more capital to develop than previous ones. As a result, output per capital -- productivity -- dropped markedly. In effect, the Soviet Union was having a "resource crisis", but one masked by its lack of price signals.

And now we come to the third massive error, in Soviet research and development. There is a story, common in certain circles, that US military buildup caused the Soviets to move investment, especially in research and development, from civilian to military use. Allen agrees. But the common version of the story has this happening in the 1980s, leading to the Soviet Union's abrupt collapse. Allen would date the beginning of the trend to the 1960s, when total factor productivity growth began to drop, causing the slow stagnation of the Soviet economy. After all, as Adam Smith commented, there is much ruin in a nation.

Allen notes that even near the end of its life, the Soviet Union was still able to plan and create an entire new and extremely productive industry from scratch (and pipe imports), the natural gas industry. This, for him, is evidence that the late Soviet system was still capable of feats of prodigious growth.

Finally, in regard to the low capital-labor substitution hypothesis, it appears to me that Allen is providing the micromotives that produced the Soviet Union's poor macrobehavior, to modify a phrase of Thomas Schelling's. Each of the failures of investment Allen describes can be considered as individual examples of feckless capital intensification. But taken as a whole, the failures appear to add up to the picture drawn by Weitzman, Easterly, and Fischer. Or so it looks to me.

But I should let Allen have the last word here, since after all, it's his book.

A new strategy was needed. The Soviet leaders responded to these changes by squandering vast sums on retooling old factories and by throwing additional fortunes into Siberian development. It was as if the United States had decided to maintain the steel and auto industries of the Midwest by retooling the old plants and supplying them with ore and fuel from northern Canada instead of shutting down the Rust Belt and importing cars and steel from brand-new, state-of-the-art plants in Japan supplied with cheap materials from the Third World. What the country needed was a policy to close down old factories and shift their employees to new, high-productivity jobs, reductions in the use of energy and industrial materials, and increased involvement in world trade.

The interpretation of the Soviet decline offered here is the reverse of the analyses that emphasize incentive problems and the resulting failure of managers to act in accord with the plans. On the contrary, the plans were implemented; the problem was they did not make sense. The strength of Soviet socialism was that great changes could be wrought by directives from the top. [...] By the 1970s, the ratio of good decisions to bad was falling. President Gorbachev was as bold and imaginative as any Soviet leader was likely to be, but his economic reforms did not aim in the right direction. Perhaps the greatest virtue of the market system is that no single individual is in charge of the economy so no one has to contrive solutions to the challenges that continually arise. The early strength of the Soviet system became its great weakness as the economy stopped growing because of the failure of imagination at the top.

Serbian Education Minister Fired

Well, headlines don't get much more attention-grabbing than that.

But actually, it is pretty interesting. See, the Minister in question was Ms. Ljiljana Colic -- the one who was going to ban the teaching of evolution in Serbian schools, at least until Biblical creation could be given equal time.

Apparently the evolution proposal was the last in a long string of blunders and questionable policy decisions, from halting foreign aid to eliminating English classes. I'm not privy to the inner decisions of the Kostunica government, but one has to suspect that the international wave of negative publicity made the difference this time.

Some of you may remember our Serbian friend, "Anna". I asked what she thought about the whole thing. "She (Colic) was a mean and stupid woman," said Anna, "a political appointment made with no thought for what children or young people need."

"My heart was full of joy seeing her leaving the ministerial stage. I even loved the tears in her eyes... Am I becoming an evil and cynical person? Maybe, but I can't help it right now!"

-- Actually, I agree with Anna. From everything I've been able to discover, Ms. Colic was mean and stupid, at least in her capacity as Minister. When mean and stupid people get into positions of power, they make a lot of misery for everyone else. Simple justice says that we'd rather see that misery go where it belongs.

Mind, it's not all smooth sailing for the Serbian education system; Anna tells me that the next Minister may be, in a different way, just as bad. More on this in a bit, if anyone is interested. (Is anyone interested?)

Scientists in the making

It was another day of "firsts" -- we had our first parent meeting at Alan's school yesterday. We joked before whether we were going to get an evaluation of Alan's progress, his abilities and his shortcomings. Little did we know...

First off: I think INS is a great school. (It better be, it's also really expensive.) They have a very good teacher-student ration (1:3 in Alan's class) and the teachers are wonderful. The building is in a safe place, they have great outdoors and pretty insides. I especially adore the little toilets but that is probably just me.

When we came to the classroom, it turned out we were the first ones. OK, so I'm German and if they say "between 5 and 7", I like to be there at 5. Sharp.

Anyway, we got the full attention of all three teachers. Would you know it, they have a curriculum! This week's goal is to familiarize the kid with school, teachers and classmates. A very reasonable goal, I think. Especially, since Alan loved school in the first week and decided to hate it the second week. Tears are flowing every single time when I drop him off. When I pick him up, though, he is that happy, bouncy little boy who just had a great day and hugs his teachers for good-byes. His mother, on the other hand, was guilt-wrecked all morning over distressing her little boy so much.

Some areas included in the curriculum are e.g. language development, social skills, gross and fine motor skills, and science. Science? Are they going to let my child play with hydrogen? "Well", said the teacher and laughed, "what we understand by science at this age - being curious, mainly." Ah.

As the teachers pointed out, they don't stick to the curriculum like glue. If a child displays interest or talent in one field, he's encouraged in this direction, even if it's something that is only in the curriculum for three-year-olds. "It's good for the children", the teacher said, "Learning should be fun. You know, most parents think their children are geniuses." Right, and what a stupid notion that is. Poor children, being subject to over-the-top expectations from their parents. We all know where these kids end up...

So we went back home, reassured and confident about having made the right decision for our boy (as a parent you're always second-guessing yourself). We had dinner, and for dessert Alan and David each got a cookie.

I have no idea where that electric tooth brush came from. We're not in the habit of having tooth brushes on the dinner table. Nor cardboard tubes. (The tube, however, was the core or the paper towels which we are indeed in the habit of having on the dinner table.)

Curiosity, eh? Science means experimenting, right? Like, drilling holes into cookies with an electric tooth brush (without the brush)? Like, sticking cookie bits into cardboard tubes to see that they fall through and out on the other side? I think my children are geniuses.

PS: In case you wondered, Alan's evaluation and a parent-teacher talk will be in January. I'm already nervous.

Farm to Factory, or, Production junction, what's your function?

So far we've seen two examples of modeling centrally-planned economies. In the first, by the American game designer Chris Crawford, production depends only on the allocation of labor. In the second, by the Soviet economist G. A. Fel'dman, production depends only on the allocation of capital.

I want to pause here a moment to savor the irony.

However, their omissions aren't thoughtless ones. A turn in Crawford's game is twenty years, so Crawford made the assumption that any capital investment made in one turn would have depreciated into nothingness by the next. Fel'dman went in the opposite direction: his implicit assumption was of a near-infinite mass of surplus labor in the background that could be allocated wherever production required it.

(I should note that the leading capitalist economic growth model of the 1950s and 1960s, developed by Arthur Lewis, also made a similar assumption.)

Still, most current economists prefer to model economic production using both labor and capital as input variables. They usually use a standard formula called the Cobb-Douglas function, which looks like this:

output = residual * [labor ^ (1 - alpha)] * [capital ^ (alpha)]

where the variable alpha is the fraction of the economy's output that accrues to capital, and 1 - alpha is the fraction that accrues to labor. In advanced economies, this tends to be around 30% capital to 70% labor.

This formula has some nicely realistic properties. For instance, if you double both your labor and your capital -- basically cloning your workers and your factories -- you double your output. In the jargon, it has constant returns to scale.

Another nice thing is that this formula shows diminishing returns. Adding more capital or labor to a larger base gives you less output bang for the buck, which is also realistic.

Finally, see that term I called the residual? That's better known as total factor productivity, or TFP for short. It's the fudge factor that wraps up technological advances, increases in efficiency and organization, and that secret Chemical X into a nice numeric bundle. Total factor productivity is where the cutting edge of economic growth happens.

Notoriously, Soviet total factor productivity is calculated to have been stagnant or negative from 1970 on. This is usually thought to have been a major contributing factor to the demise of the Soviet Union. Allen, of course, has a contrary explanation.

Unfortunately, it requires a few more technical details.

The Cobb-Douglas production function is mathematically rather easy to manipulate, which is one of the reasons why economists like it so much.

An example: say you have a Cobb-Douglas economy running at a steady level, and you increase the amount of labor relative to capital by 1%. Then wages (the price of labor) relative to the price of capital (rents) will have to decrease by 1%. If you raise the relative amount of labor by 2%, relative wages will drop by 2%, and so on. On the other hand, if you drop the relative amount of labor to capital by 1% -- or raise the relative amount of capital to labor by 1%; same thing -- relative wages will rise by 1%.

Makes sense, right?

This isn't something deliberately built into the function. Rather, it's a mathematical consequence of the form of the equation. Technically speaking, the Cobb-Douglas function shows an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor exactly equal to 1.

But do real world economies do this? It makes intuitive sense, but following one's intuition in economics can put you on the fast track to economics hell.

Fortunately, it's been studied, and for advanced capitalist economies like Japan, the elasticity of substitution really is pretty close to one. So the Cobb-Douglas function is good enough for most purposes.

However, in 1970, Martin Weitzman showed that Soviet data better fit an economy with an elasticity of substitution of approximately 0.40. And in 1995, William Easterly and Stanley Fischer analyzed more recent data, and agreed.

What does that 0.40 mean? One way of looking at it is that in the Soviet Union, an increase in the capital-to-labor ratio had two and a half times more effect on relative wages than in Japan. Another way of looking at it is that an increase in relative wages in the Soviet Union had only 40% the effect on the capital-to-labor ratio as it did in Japan.

Which view is correct? Both of them.

As a result, the high growth and slowdown periods of the modernizing Soviet economy stand in extremely sharp contrast to each other, even compared to similar phases in other countries that modernized rapidly, like Japan. The growth period, from roughly 1928 to 1950, was a time of relative labor surplus, when the capital-to-labor ratio was low, and growth from capital intensification almost one-to-one; the slow period, from roughly 1965 to 1989, was a time of relative labor scarcity, when the capital-to-labor ratio was high, and growth from capital intensification nearly stagnant.

Or, to relate it back to the earlier Cobb-Douglas formula, it was as if the Soviet Union's alpha, the percentage of an economy's output accrued by its capital, dropped sharply as Soviet capital grew.

What made the Soviet Union so different from capitalist economies? Here's Easterly and Fischer's hypothesis:

The natural question to ask is why Soviet capital-labor substitution was more difficult than in Western market economies, and whether this difficulty was related to the Soviets' planned economic system. [... O]ne possible explanation for the Soviets' substitution problems would be that, under an autocratically directed economic system, they accumulated a narrow rather than a broad range of capital goods. Some forms of physical or human capital that were missing would have been market-oriented entrepreneurial skills, marketing and distributional skills, and information-intensive physical and human capital (because of the restrictions on information flows). It is more difficult to substitute more and more drill presses for a laborer than it is to substitute a drill press plus a computerized inventory and distribution system for a laborer. There is nothing that explicitly supports this conjecture in our results, but it is an interesting direction for further research.

Which brings us back to Allen's upshot: since total factor productivity is back-calculated from a Cobb-Douglas production function, and since the Soviet Union's economy did not fit a Cobb-Douglas production function, the apparent decline in TFP might simply represent the Soviet Union's extreme difficulty in substituting capital for labor as well as a modern market economy, and Soviet productivity might not have stagnated at all.

Except, of course, that Allen is contrary twice.

His only instinct... to destroy everything he touches!

That's what Jumba says about Stitch. We think we can rightly say that about our sons, too. Or how would you describe this mess? It used to be a muffin, and a tasty one too. David did the initial destruction swiftly and I don't think the muffin felt a thing. Then, he continued to create ever smaller crumbs in a very methodical way, squashing with his little fingers one crumb after the other, and again, and again... I shudder to think what he could do with, say, a chain saw.

Read this...

... if you are the parent of a toddler or plan to become one. Finslippy is a very, very funny blog.

Farm to Factory, Guns or Butter, and Fel'dman

About a decade ago, there was a neat little computer game written by the brilliant but erratic Chris Crawford called The Global Dilemma: Guns or Butter. A solo game, your mission (once you chose to accept it) was to centrally plan production quotas for armaments and food production, move your resulting decimally represented troops around the randomly generated eye-candy map, and conquer your Central Asian-looking computer opponents and thus the world! Mwa-ha-ha!

What made the game fun for me was the production functions. Instead of a technology tree to pace the rate of military advance, like Sid Meier used in Civilization, you had a production spreadsheet. In theory you could produce any item on the list, provided you had enough people to make that item (and any other part that item relied on). If you had enough people, you could make enough tanks to conquer every single neighboring province on your next turn!

Unfortunately, you started the game with a very low population, usually only enough to make swords and farm tools. But as your agricultural surplus grew, your population grew, and you could put more people into making more complex and productive items, like muskets and iron plows, or rifles and combines, all the way up to tractors and tanks (and engines, and oil, and all the necessary intermediates). Production followed economies of scale, so it was possible to misallocate people in an industry too primitive or too advanced for its number of workers.

Yeah, this is basically the Gosplan game. And I got real good at it. My winning strategy was to keep my military just barely strong enough to keep my predatory neighbors at bay, and then, once my population base was large enough, crush their backwards swordsmen-and-musketeer armies with my tanks! At that point, I could expand as quickly as logistics permitted. Kabul, here I come! Only very rarely would I have to engineer a famine to keep up military production.

Unsurprisingly, Soviet theoreticians came up with a very similar model, but here's the thing: it was exactly backwards. By investing in the production goods sector (i.e. heavy industry; 'guns') at the expense of the consumer goods sector (food, clothing; 'butter'), they believed that eventually spillovers from the former would benefit the latter. Here's Allen on the background:

G. A. Fel'dman was an economist in Gosplan. In 1928, he published a two-part article in the Gosplan journal Planovoe Khoziaistvo ['Planned Economy' - CY] that developed a mathematical model of capital accumulation. Fel'dman's model focused on internal sources of investment -- exporting wheat to import machinery received scant consideration. Instead, Fel'dman analyzed the situation in which growth required a country to produce its own structures and equipment. The questions were: How could capital be accumulated? Was there a trade-off between rapid accumulation and standard of living? The surprising answer was that you could have your cake and eat it too: by expanding the investment goods industries, high investment and rising consumption could be achieved together. This insight became the basis of socialist economic development.

Fel'dman's model elaborated Marx's division of the economy into two sectors, consumer goods and producer goods. The former included food and clothing that sustained workers, while the latter included construction and machinery that could either be invested to expand the capital stock or be consumed as housing, hospitals, bicycles, or military equipment. The split of producer goods output between consumption and investment was the main issue explored by the model.

Fel'dman (or Feldman, depending on your transliteration preferences) came up with an algebraically simple yet still interesting mathematical model. Let me adapt Allen's sub- and superscripted presentation to a plainer ASCII approach.

First off, Fel'dman uses very simple production functions. A sector produces an output directly proportional to its capital stock:

producer output = a * producer capital stock

consumer output = b * consumer capital stock

where the variables a and b are simple rates of return. No economies of scale or anything fancy like that.

The resulting producer output gets allocated as investment to either the producer or the consumer sectors, according to the ratio e:

producer investment = e * producer output

consumer investment = (1 - e) * producer output

So if the variable e equals 0.70, 70 percent of producer output would be re-invested in the producer sector, while 30% would go to the consumer sector.

Finally, we introduce time by way of depreciation. If we let the variable d represent the depreciation rate per time period, then:

the current producer capital stock = (1 - d) * the producer capital stock of last period + the current producer investment

the current consumer capital stock = (1 - d) * the consumer capital stock of last period + the current consumer investment

where if the depreciation rate is 20%, d = 0.20, and the previous capital stock gets multiplied by 0.80, which reduces it to eight-tenths of its original value.

I'm afraid I'll have to switch to algebraic shorthand entirely at this point. In algebraic shorthand, the above two equations would be:

pcs_t = (1 - d) * pcs_t-1 + pi_t

and

ccs_t = (1 - d) * ccs_t-1 + ci_t .

Fair enough? Anyway, the upshot is that not only will your producer capital stock ('guns') grow exponentially, each year's production capital increasing by a constant ratio from the previous one, like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on:

pcs_t = [(1 - d) / (1 - e * a)] * pcs_t-1

but that eventually, your consumer capital stock will too ('butter'):

ccs_t = (1 - d) * ccs_t-1 + [(1 - d) * (1 - e) * a / (1 - e * a)] * pcs_t-1

with that horrific-looking second term I've emphasized in boldface providing the spillover effect that makes this possible.

But note the first term in the consumer capital stock equation. That's simply depreciation, and that's exponential decay, like 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and so on.

So for consumer goods (like food, clothing, et cetera) you have an increasing term and a decreasing term being added together. While in the long run, the exponentially growing term will dominate, in the short term, it's entirely possible that the declining term will predominate, leading to an extended dip in consumer output. Like food, clothing, et cetera.

I suppose I could put the equations into analytic functional form instead of these recurrence relations, but it was more of a conceptual model anyway. Even for the Soviets.

An urban legend, surely

Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.

George Bush, POPLAR BLUFF, Sept 6, 2004

I mean, really. Someone tell me it's not true. (Although Reuters thinks it is.)

Bomb threat, the Romanian version

So David and I arrived from Germany on Sunday, at 3:15 pm. Our flight landed, touched a little hard but no problem. We got off the plane and to my delight I found the stroller waiting outside the airplane door (not necessarily a given). I strapped David in and walked to the passport control. A long line but we were waived to the Diplomatic passport control and got through in no time. I expected to be out of the terminal and reunited with husband and oldest child in less than fifteen minutes.

The walk from the passport control to the baggage claim area is about 100 meters. Down a little ramp, around a ninety degree corner to your left, and then either walk or take the transport belt to the automatic doors that will open to the baggage claim area.

I got exactly as far as to the corner. There was a backlog. I mean, the entire corridor was packed with people. Packed. The transport belt had been closed off, and one could see that the doors to the baggage area were closed too. That was all we saw and all we knew. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like this, and I've been landing at Otopeni airport (oops, make that Henri Coanda Airport) many, many times.

I assumed that the doors were broken, that some high ranking politician had arrived, something like that. I even tried to wiggle my way through in a Romania fashion -- "my baby has a poopy diaper, I need to change him really badly, can you let me go through to the bathroom?". I knew there were no bathrooms on this side of the passport control, so it seemed a good scam. Oh, and David was very poopy, and very obviously so. When that didn't work, I started to worry a little bit. Babies usually get you everywhere, and poopy ones even more so. And then I called Doug to tell him about the delay, and he said, "the entire terminal is sealed off, I'm not allowed to park, I can't even get close".

Oh.

At the corner where we were standing, there was a little booth with an official. He was grilled, by all of us. He didn't know a thing. I said, "So, is there a bomb threat?" which for some reason seemed amusing to us. He shrugged and looked embarrassed. That, we found less amusing. I changed David right there on the floor. It did give us some breathing room, if you wanted to breathe that air...

During the next half hour, we only heard announcements of planes landing. London, Amsterdam, Brussels. (I think, it's hard to remember.) Rumors began to fly. Bomb threat, yes. An abandonned suitcase in the terminal. No, a security problem on a plane. Yes, it was the plane to Chisinau. Of course, Moldova. They were always causing problems, the Moldovans, everybody knows that. My argument that a plane to somewhere wasn't likely to be the problem, since we were in the arrival terminal (the departure terminal being a separate building), only increased the confusion.

I have to say that the general mood was pretty upbeat, considering that there might have been a bomb nearby. I think everybody had the same thought as I did -- who would care to bomb Bucharest airport? One man handed out "Merci" chocolates that were clearly intended for someone waiting outside the terminal. Another man gave me a bottle of water for David. Children started playing with each other. People smiled.

I have to say that I never took the bomb threat seriously. I mean, Romanians may not be the world's most efficient people but surely they wouldn't let a plane full of people walk smack into a bomb, right? There were no new passengers joining us, BTW, so the planes that landed after us weren't even deboarding. Hm.

After a while, the announcements changed. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Henri Coanda International Airport apologizes for the delay. Thank you for your understanding." I was glad the airport was apologetic but I would have been grateful for some more information.

After about an hour in that hot, stinking corridor (a mass of sweating people will do that and David's diaper wasn't making things better), suddenly it was all over. We poured into the arrival hall, the bags were already there, nobody at customs even glanced at any of the luggage hauled by people who were just frantic to get out. I could have made a fortune smuggling just about anything. Oh, well.

We never were told what had been going on. My nanny saw it on the news in the evening, though. Here's what AP has to say about it:

Plane Bound for Israel Forced to Land in Bucharest When Letter Warning of Bomb Found
The Associated Press
Published: Sep 15, 2002

JERUSALEM (AP) - An airplane flying from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv was forced to land in Bucharest on Sunday when a letter was found on the plane that said a bomb had been planted on the aircraft.

A Romanian bomb squad found nothing on the plane, said Israeli civil aviation spokesman, Pini Schiff. A search of passengers and luggage also revealed nothing, Schiff said.

It was not clear who wrote the letter, who found it, or what language it was in.

The plane belonged to a Dutch charter company, Transavia, Dutch border police said.

About three hours into the flight, the pilot announced there was a technical problem and said he was landing in Bucharest, said Israeli passenger Itai Yona. After an emergency landing on a special strip opened for the airplane, the pilot told the passengers before they disembarked about the letter and its warning.

"It was a little tense but we remained relatively calm and got off the plane very quickly," Yona said.

The passengers were slated to board a Bucharest-Tel Aviv flight of the Israeli airline, El Al, later Sunday, the radio said. Israeli authorities granted special permission for the flight since it was slated to land in Tel Aviv an hour after the airport would close for the Yom Kippur holiday, or Day of Atonement, Israel's Channel Two TV reported.

AP-ES-09-15-02 0447EDT

Pure poetry

Yeats has been my man for a long time.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Monday Night Football
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Jacksonville to be born?

Last night the Green Bay Packers met the best defensive line in the NFL, and tore through it like tissue paper in the rain. Packers 24, the Carolina Panthers 14. Oh yeah.

Goodbye to Romance, the Alex Skolnick Trio

I first heard the Alex Skolnick Trio playing in the background of a Brooklyn cafe. Jazz electric guitar was being played with talent and intelligence, the melody at the knife-edge of familiarity. And I listened to it with pleasure, because there is so much bad extruded jazz product out there, playing in the background of too many places, when I had a small mental jolt as I realized what song the arrangement was based on. It was "No One Like You", by the Scorpions, the 80s German metal band. I can't wait for the nights with you. You know the one.

The guitarist was Alex Skolnick, and yes, the album Goodbye to Romance: Standards for a New Generation is mainly jazz arrangements of hard rock and metal classics. I am going to guess that most readers of this blog have not heard of Testament, so I won't bring up Skolnick's past career in metal. But, as a rule, an ironic cross-genre cover is artistically rather easy. It's much harder to get deep into the soul of a song and rework it from the inside out. And it takes a special sort of sympathy to do that to Kiss's "Detroit Rock City".

The Alex Skolnick Trio has that sympathy. Goodbye to Romance is a very winning album. Certainly it won me over.

(Coincidentally enough, they have a new CD coming out this week, called Transformation, with more original compositions, and you know, Judas Priest. Can't wait.)

Brunswick stew!

So I was inspired by Bad Mama's recent post about her eating experiences in North Carolina to make Brunswick stew.

Brunswick stew doesn't have much to do with the original Brunswick, or Braunschweig, or even New Brunswick, Canada. Tradition says that it was named after Brunswick County (NB: a county is a small American administrative unit, which non-US readers might be familiar with from watching The Dukes of Hazzard), but which one? There are Brunswick Counties in Virginia and North Carolina, and to confuse matters further, there is a Brunswick, Georgia that has staked its claim to the stew.

Originally it was a squirrel stew, cooked with corn. A lot of recipes include beans (especially lima beans) as well, which speaks to me of a Native American origin for the dish. Was the primeval Brunswick stew basically succotash with added squirrel? Unfortunately, history is silent on the matter. Anyway, it's hard to find good squirrel these days. Most current recipes use chicken.

My version of Brunswick stew was a combination of yuppie and white beige trash cooking. I took two unused boneless skinless Perdue chicken breasts that I had in the fridge (this is the yuppie part), about 300-400 grams worth, and cut them into chunks. I finished up the rest of my bacon, about 150 grams, cutting it into thin slices. I put the uncooked meat into my big skillet, chopped up a large white onion and put that in too, and covered the shebang with water and let it simmer for an hour. I also added a few shakes of black pepper and a tablespoon of Worchestershire sauce somewhere in there, to kill time.

At the end of the hour I added an 15-ounce (400 g) can of generic baby lima beans, an 15-ounce can of ditto stewed tomatoes, and an 15-ounce can of ditto creamed corn. (This is the trash part.) I turned up the heat somewhat and let it cook down, stirring more often as the stew thickened, adding some salt along the way. By the end, it was a very thick, rather orange-colored stew, with very little recognizable bacon or tomato.

It turned out to be a rather sweet stew as well (though not candy sweet), probably from the corn and the bacon fat, with an interesting tang. Other versions make it considerably more sour and pepperier, but it was a deliberate choice on my part to keep it basic. And it was very good; my version served two meals for the hungry bachelor, which probably translates to four to six at table. Rice, corn bread, or potatoes.

Farm to Factory and a billion Russians?

First off, I should probably clarify something. As far as I can tell, Allen is a contrarian, not an apologist. For instance, he calculates that without the increased mortality and reduced fertility caused by Soviet collectivization -- he uses the word 'terrorist' to describe it -- the Soviet population would have been 27 million people larger in 1989. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for Stalin. But Allen has something of AJP Taylor's willingness to tweak the nose of conventional wisdom, I think.

Regarding the billion Russians: what Allen noticed was that Russian and Soviet raw birth rates matched Indian ones (barring the years of war, revolution, and collectivization, when drops were followed by rebounds) until the 1940s, when Soviet birth rates dropped and stayed down. Someone once quipped that the Soviet Union was just Upper Volta with rockets. Well, it did have Third World birth rates for a very long time.

Allen took heroic amounts of old Russian and Soviet demographic data and analyzed them to determine what factors might be responsible for this drop. His results ended up being numerically rather similar to a fertility model T. Paul Schultz came up with after analyzing Third World fertility in the 1970s and 1980s, which is pretty neat, so I'll discuss it here.

Schultz's model is a simple (mostly) linear equation that relates a country's fertility rate, the average number of children born per woman, to its demographics. For instance, for every additional year of education the average woman has, that country's fertility rate is computed to drop by half a point. For every ten percent of a country's population that lives in cities, the fertility rate is computed to drop by a tenth of a point. For every ten percent of a country's population that still works on a farm, the fertility rate is computed to rise by two-tenths of a point. And so on.

It's pretty good as these things go, and Allen found that it tracked Soviet fertility very well (again, barring the years of war, revolution, and collectivization).

So Allen used Schultz's equation to break down the factors of Soviet fertility decline. Between 1928, the break-even year for the Soviet Union compared to prewar Tsarist Russia, and 1960, Soviet fertility declined by 3.41 children per woman, from 6.47 to 3.07 (rounding). Allen found that 1.62 of this drop could be explained by education, 1.00 by better diet, and 0.67 by the Soviet Union's economic transformation into a more urban society, the remaining 0.12 due to a decline in religion.

Thus Allen concludes:

If the USSR had not followed this path -- if, for instance, industrialization and urbanization had proceeded less rapidly and if schooling had been expanded slowly and provided to men in preference to women -- then population growth would have been explosive. At the end of the twentieth century, the population would have approached one billion as in India, where urbanization has been limited and where most women remain illiterate.

Since I know at least one reader will be interested, let me give you Schultz's fertility model as Allen gives it.

Schultz's model predicts that the fertility rate will be close to:

5.79
+ -0.551 * (the average number of years of female education)
+ 0.179 * (the average number of years of male education)
+ 0.517 * log10(the GDP per adult)
+ -0.0084 * (percent urban)
+ 0.019 * (percent labor force in agriculture)
+ 0.0115 * (percent Catholic)
+ 0.0239 * (percent Protestant)
+ 0.0119 * (percent Muslim)
+ -0.0035 * (calories per day)
+ 0.00000053 * (calories per day) ^ 2

Damn, that's ugly.

Allen leaves out year-specific dummy variables and a statistically insignificant variable for family planning. Also, I have corrected what I believe to have been a numeric typo in the final coefficient; in the book it was 0.00053, which gives nonsensical results. Notice that increased wealth and male education increase the fertility rate. And yes, only those three religions are given; apparently both godless heathens and Orthodox Christians have little effect on fertility (though I suspect that Schultz's sample only had one Orthodox nation on its list, namely Ethiopia).

Farm to Factory, Robert Allen

Okay, my secret is out. I love nothing better than to find a new book on some incredibly boring arcane subject and worry at it until it makes sense. So when an online friend recently brought up Robert Allen's book on Soviet industrialization, Farm to Factory, I thought I would give it a look-see.

It's an interesting but extremely frustrating book. Interesting in that Allen tries to analyze Soviet industrial development from the point of view of its decision makers, but using modern econometric techniques, in the same way a psychologist or a novelist might analyze a bad relationship from the perspective of its hapless participants: how it made sense at the time to the people involved.

On the other hand, it's extremely frustrating when Allen makes comparisons that just don't make sense to me, the reader.

For instance, Allen repeatedly makes the claim that Russia without Communism would most likely look a lot more like India demographically than it would any western European state; it would have an extremely large and poor population of perhaps a billion people. At first I thought this was rhetorical hyperbole, the first few times I encountered it. Nope; it forms the basis for chapter six. The possibility of a non-Communist demographic transition is where?

But what really made me wince was his comparison of Soviet agricultural and climatic zones to American ones. Now, I'm from Wisconsin, where we know both climate and agriculture pretty well. (Wisconsin is climatically like Belarus, but with more lakefront, and has dairy like Denmark. The closest American analog to Romania would probably be Iowa or Missouri.) So when Allen compared Russian grain yields to North Dakota's -- compared to Wisconsin, a barren dessicated wasteland, though its inhabitants are very sweet -- and used this to claim that the Soviet Union had somehow caught up to American grain yields before Stalin, I knew something was a little weird.

Here's Allen on his methodology:

To reach a better assessment of Russian performance, the comparison should be made with a region of similar climate and soil. In this chapter, I compare Russian productivity in 1913 with productivity on the Great Plains of North America -- a region that includes the Canadian prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, as well as the American states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. Johnson and Brooks (1983) undertook a very careful assessment of Soviet agriculture in the post-World War II period and compared it with the same region studied here. As in Russia, the climate was cold and dry.

Yes, Johnson and Brooks did make a very careful and detailed comparison between Soviet and North American agricultural regions. Here it is, from Table 6.1 in Johnson and Brooks, Prospects for Soviet Agriculture in the 1980s:

Ukraine and Moldavia, Spring grains: South Dakota

Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter wheat, Area I: Nebraska, SE
Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter wheat, Area II: Nebraska, NW
Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter wheat, Area III: Nebraska, SW
Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter wheat, Area IV: Nebraska, Cen.
Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter wheat, Area V: Nebraska, NW
Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter wheat, Area VI: Montana, EC or NC, Colorado, NW

Ukraine and Moldavia, Winter rye : US, Canada

Central Black Earth: Manitoba
Middle Volga: North Dakota
Belorussia: Minnesota
Baltic Republics and Kaliningrad: Minnesota, EC, WC
European West: Minnesota, EC, WC
European Northwest: Minnesota, EC, WC
Central Industrial: Minnesota, NW
Upper Volga : North Dakota

Krasnodar: Nebraska, NE, East
Stavropol: South Dakota (spring), Nebraska (fall)
Kamensk: Wyoming, SE
Remainder, North Caucasus: Nebraska
Lower Volga: New Mexico

Molotov and Sverdlovsk: Alberta, EC
Bashkir and Udmurt: Montana
Chkalov and Cheliabinsk: South Dakota, West
Western Siberia: Manitoba, Saskatchewan
Eastern Siberia: Saskatchewan
Far East: North Dakota
Kazakh, except Alma Ata: Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Saskatchewan

(Apologies for the lack of a map.)

The Soviet wheat growing regions comparable to Allen's chosen North American analogs leave out most of Ukraine! Huh? Meanwhile, they include such great Russian breadbasket regions like the Amur river valley.

It gets worse. In fact, Allen compares these North American regions to European Russia in 1913. But that reduces the overlap even further, to a thin strip starting at the Black Sea, and widening upwards to include the upper and middle Volga before it hits the Urals.

Going by Johnson and Brooks's figures, had Allen used the five states and one province of Manitoba, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, and South Dakota as his comparisons, he would have incorporated 90% of European Russia's grain-growing areas. (In a footnote, Allen considers and rejects using Nebraska, since it produces so much maize. I don't know what that has to do with comparing yield.) This combination is warmer, wetter, and significantly more agriculturally productive than the four states and three provinces Allen did use.

Why is this important? Allen wanted to show that Russian, and thus later Soviet agriculture, was not as inefficient as sometimes is claimed. Unfortunately, noting that yields on rich Russian land were comparable to yields on more marginal North American land is probably not the way to do it.

So you see what I mean. Extremely frustrating.

Serbia vs. Darwin

No, that's not fair. It really should be "the current Serbian government vs. Darwin".

This news from Serbia today:

Serbian Education Minister Ljiljana Colic has ordered schools to stop teaching children the theory of evolution for this year, and to resume teaching it in future only if it shares equal billing with creationism. The move has shocked educators and textbook editors in the formerly communist state, where religion was kept out of education and politics and was only recently allowed to enter the classroom.

"(Darwinism) is a theory as dogmatic as the one which says God created the first man," Colic told the daily Glas Javnosti. Colic, an Orthodox Christian, ordered that evolution theory be dropped from this year’s biology course for 14- and 15-year-olds in the final grade of primary school. As of next year, both creationism and evolution will be taught, she said.

[...]

"Both theories exist in parallel and legitimately in the rest of the world," Colic asserted. "The evolutionist, which says man is descended from the ape, and the one which says God Almighty created man and the entire world."

Now, the present government of Serbia does not exactly represent the best in Serbian society; and Minister Colic is arguably not the best thing in the present Serbian government. One of her first moves was to cancel foreign-funded teacher training seminars, while telling the nonplssed foreign donors that all their work would be "reviewed". Since then, she's been most famous for proposing a 70% budget cut for Serbia's university system (The government later backtracked and said the budget had been drafted "in haste", and that they really only wanted a 25% cut) and for appointing an ex-crony of Slobodan Milosevic to run a university in Kosovo.

I never met Colic when I was in Serbia. Looking at her CV, though, I note that she was born in 1956, and has both her undergraduate degree and her Ph.D. in philology from the University of Belgrade.

That's suggestive in a couple of ways. One, it means that she didn't study abroad. Yugoslavs of her generation could, and the best of them generally did -- the country's best and brightest were taking degrees in Paris and Hamburg and Milan, thousands at a time. (I can remember being surprised to find a Slovene sitting next to me as an undergrad exchange student in London in the 1980s).

Two, it means that she was a Ph.D. student in the early or mid '80s -- exactly the years when Serbian academe began to embrace Serb nationalism en masse. It's a bit hard for an American to grasp, but it was in obscure disciplines like philology that this shift was felt the hardest.

The fact that she signed up as a founding member of the Democratic Party of Serbia is entirely consistent with this; DPS started as a pretty hardline nationalist group, with the main difference from Milosevic being (1) they were more traditional God-and-country nationalists, and (2) being in opposition for 12 years straight, under a government that rewarded opposition, not with jail, but with mockery, poverty and obscurity, they tended to be a bit crank-heavy. Sp anyone who's been with DPS since the very beginning is likely to be extremely devoted, rather strange, or both.

Mind, it's not likely that the coalition government gave Colic a Minister's chair simply as a reward for devotion. Those positions are powerful engines of patronage, and much in demand. So I'd guess that she was put there, in part, as a sop to hardline nationalists and as a bridge to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Keep in mind that the current government is a fragile coalition of ex-Communists, monarchists, modernizing technocrats, nationalists, and socialists. The Church is a powerful institution in Serbia these days, so appeasing it makes good political sense.

-- That said, I'm a little surprised that the appeasement is taking precisely this form. I didn't realize that the Serbian Orthodox Church -- or any Orthodox Church -- was down on Darwin in the way that conservative American Protestants are. (The Catholic Church, by way of comparison, made its peace with Darwin years ago; Catholic schools worldwide have no problem teaching evolution.) Can any of our Orthodox readers tell us more?

I should also note that using the Education Ministry to suck up to the Church didn't begin with Colic, either. In 2002, the Ministry promulgated a new alphabet textbook for young children -- you know, an "A is for apple, B is for bear" type of thing, for new readers, with a little slogan or poem for each letter. Except that this one had one page with a little picture of an (Orthodox) Church full of happy children, and a text saying "C is for church! You're crazy if you don't go." I remember thinking that it was basically the same stuff I'd seen in an old textbook from East Germany ("L is for Lenin, wisest of leaders..."), just with the direction of attack shifted a bit.

But anyhow. I'm not sure what else to say about this. Minister Colic seems like a pretty complete idiot, but she's probably going to keep her job for as long as this government lasts. And while this government is pretty screwed up, right now it looks like the least bad choice on the menu; the most likely alternative would be a government formed by the Serbian Radical Party, and that would just suck.

If any of our Serbian friends are still reading this, we'd love to hear what you think.

Admin notice

We are trying - between one thing and another - to keep this blog interesting and convenient for our readers.

The interesting part can be argued with, the convenient part has been improved somewhat: for those who don't want to bother with RSS feeds (I love them but not everybody does), but don't feel like checking in every day to see whether your erratic hosts have actually deemed to write something, you can now subscribe to our blog. Whenever there is a new entry, you'll be notified via email.

I'm off to Germany for Benjamin's funeral. Doug stays behind with our school boy but he's busy, so it might be quiet for some days. Here's something cheerful as an ersatz.

Growing Public, Peter Lindert

Hi all. A little change of pace from the coffee mug guy today. I've been reading Peter Lindert's Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century again. It's a troubling book that kicks economic received wisdom in the teeth, and I am puzzled at the lack of attention it's gotten in the blogosphere. (Two posts of Tyler Cowan's, here and here.)

Why is it such a troubling book? Well, here is Lindert's seventh of his nine conclusions:

The net national costs of social transfers, and of the taxes that finance them, are essentially zero. They do not bring the GDP costs that much of the Anglo-American literature has imagined. Accordingly, differences in those costs play almost no role in either the rise or the deceleration of social spending's share. No Darwinian mechanism has punished the bigger spenders.

Readers of The Economist know that one major theme in the Anglo-American literature is that welfare kills economic growth. It's widely used to explain Eurosclerosis (as opposed to, I dunno, core-periphery issues in EU policy), and it's become something of a conservative-libertarian shibboleth in the United States. "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", or TANSTAAFL, a phrase the influential Missouri-born science fiction author Robert Heinlein countrified from the writings of the economist Alvin Hansen.

Turns out there might actually be a free lunch. Lindert's regressions are pretty good, unlike a lott of ideologues I could name. I suspect much of the silence has to do with Lindert's interpretive framework, which follows Albert Hirschman's little book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and is rather different from the simplified models of public choice theory and class interest that many people, either consciously or unconsciously, use.

There's some food for thought for this US election year as well. As Lindert comments,

Nor is the puzzle strictly international. Within the United States since the 1960s, social transfers have taken a rising share of state product, and the variance in their generosity has also risen -- and has been positively, not negatively, correlated with the level and growth of state product per capita. How can the generous states, like Connecticut, New Jersey, and California get away with giving out more generous welfare and other transfers year after year? Why haven't they grown more slowly than other states? Why haven't businesses deserted them, leaving them with fewer firms and more welfare families?

Like I said, I'm surprised at the lack of commentary Lindert's book has received on the Internet. More on it later.

Here are Lindert's nine conclusions, from pages 20 and 21 of Growing Public:

1. There was so little social spending of any kind before the twentieth century primarily because political voice was so restricted.

2. The central role of political voice is shown by an exceptional case. Both Britain's relatively high poor relief in 1782-1834 and its cutbacks in 1834 and 1870 fit the changing self-interest of those with voice.

3. Similarly, just noting the interests of those with voice helps to explain Chapter 1's education puzzles: Why did Germany and laissez-faire North America lead the way in tax-based public schooling, and why did Britain lag behind in the nineteenth century? How did the United States remain a leader in educational attainment, yet end up ranked about fourteenth in students' test scores? Again, the concentration of voice was the enemy of education.

4. The great advance of social spending since 1880 is explained partly by the same political-voice motif, partly by population aging, and partly by income growth. Roman Catholicism was a negative influence on taxes and transfers before, but not after, World War II.

5. Postwar welfare states developed more fully in countries where the middle and bottom ranks traded places more and were ethnically homogenous.

6. The same forces that explain the growth of social spending until the 1990s carry implications for the future of social spending in all regions - in the affluent OECD countries, in the transition countries, and in Third World countries. In Western Europe, the political power of the elderly and the generosity of their public pensions have already matured and will fade. The social transfers that aging societies have supported will not decline as shares of GDP, but the generosity of pensions per elderly person will decline. Support for the elderly will also be under pressure in the formerly communist countries. Among prospering countries in the Third World, however, pensions will probably become more generous as income grows.

7. The net national costs of social transfers, and of the taxes that finance them, are essentially zero. They do not bring the GDP costs that much of the Anglo-American literature has imagined. Accordingly, differences in those costs play almost no role in either the rise or the deceleration of social spending's share. No Darwinian mechanism has punished the bigger spenders.

8. That large social programs have cost little in practice is consistent with the rise of European unemployment since 1970. Differences in social insurance did play a role in the OECD differences in unemployment over time and space, but only a partial role. Furthermore, the loss in output was less severe because those who remained out of work tended to be less productive workers anyway. Therefore any percentage loss of output tends to be much smaller than the percentage of jobs lost.

9. Two general principles seem to explain why the welfare state does no net damage to GDP per capita and why welfare states will not collapse. The first is that high budget democracies show more care in choosing the design of taxes and transfers so as to avoid compromising growth. The second is that broad universalism in taxes and entitlements fosters growth better than the low-budget countries' preference for strict means testing and complicated tax compromises.

Living with Calvin

I've long known that I'm living with a comic book fan. (I mean, we have about thirty boxes of comic books in storage in the States. That's not counting what we have here!) Little did I know that I am also living with a comic book figure.

Do you know Calvin and Hobbes? Very delightful comic about a very, hm, unusual little boy and his (imaginary) tiger. Written by the incredible Bill Watterson and, alas, long since discontinued.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, I came across one of the Calvin strips in which he creates a physical embodiment of his better half. "Good" Calvin looks a bit different from "normal" Calvin... Here's a picture from this strip, so you can see for yourself[1]:

And then yesterday, my little boy came home from the park. Unlike his usual dishevelled and dirty appearance, he was clean and neat. The nanny had decided to wash him before coming home. I was spooked. Here's how he looked, and how he normally looks:

See what I mean? It's uncanny, eh?

[Disclaimer: It's hard to find C&H strips on the net, due to copyright and all that. I had to take a photograph of the actual book in order to show you this. So I'm carefully noting that all copyrights lie with the author and the publishing company, of course. Just quoting, is what I'm doing.]

Benjamin

"There are souls who only brush the earth."

Benjamin Muir was born on August 17, 2004 after six hours of labor, in the same hospital in which his older brothers were born. He was supposed to be a winter baby.

He was awaited, with joy and trepidation -- three kids? How can we manage that? We arranged our lives around him. We bought a bigger car, so we could drive him and his brothers around in their children's seats. We delayed an impending move, discussed names, bought tiny little socks for him. Alan learned not to jump on Mommy's belly because of the baby inside.

Nothing prepared us for that one ultrasound in August. Where we looked for movements and somersaults, there were none. Where we looked for a fluttering, beating heart - silence.

We don't know what went wrong. A problem with the chromosomes? A virus that got past the placenta? Something subtle and biochemical? By the time we found out, it was too late to tell. We'll never know.

At 18 weeks, Benjamin was just under the official line that separates miscarriage from stillbirth. We have not found this a very useful distinction. We miss him terribly.

His funeral is on Friday, September 10, at 2 pm in Schweinfurt.

Spamstorm

Wow, are we getting spammed. Nearly 100 comment spams in the last 24 hours, and they're still coming.

Unfortunately, our copy of MT Blacklist seems to be busted. Not sure if the problem is at our end or theirs, but there it is. So we have to delete the damn things by hand. Complicating this is the fact that MT sometimes slows waaaay down -- probably because of this same spamstorm.

As we delete the spams, we're turning off the comments on all posts older than 30 days. I regret this. Once in a while, someone will stumble across one of those older posts and comment; it doesn't happen often, but it does happen. So the spammers are forcing us to cut those people off. They can still comment on recent posts, but it's not the same thing.

(Can anyone tell me: does comment spam actually work? Are there people who will see these things, click on them, and make a purchase? Or is it just pure stupidity -- thoughtless selfish greed on one side, willingness to fall for a marketing ploy on the other? Does anyone know?)

Anyhow. We've considered an upgrade -- we're using an older version of MT -- but frankly, the new version (3.1) doesn't seem like it's much better, at least where spam is concerned. MT Blacklist was developed by a third party as freeware, bless his heart. I suppose we could move to some other blogging software altogether, but I've heard some alarming stories -- lost archives, munged passwords, you name it.

We're still thinking about this. More in a bit, perhaps.

Also back

Hi all. It's Carlos, the Aquaman of the Superfriends of this blog. I haven't posted in a while, because I didn't want to turn this blog into Halfway Down the East River while Claudia and Doug were away. But hey, I was in the Philippines with virtually zero Internet access most of the time anyway. Some highlights:

Trying to sleep on the concrete floor of the humid, open-air plaza outside the domestic wing of Benigno Aquino, Jr. International Airport while waiting for its doors to open at 2:30 AM. Recommended if you want to precipitate a spiritual crisis.

The phrase, "she has a great personality", is a culturally universal signifier for "not very physically attractive at all". I do not have a great personality.

My grandmother's tomb. It's in a fairly new cemetery that has all the good taste and restraint I have come to expect from the Philippines. But my father designed it, and he is a man of parts. A simple, graceful, portrait-sized lotus above the sarcophagus -- my grandmother was a Buddhist -- and repeated in the ironwork of the windows.

Watching the working girls leave the lobby of a ritzy Makati hotel at four in the morning. I am hard to shock, but Jesus they looked young. But not.

I did get a great haircut at that hotel. Even in NYC, it's hard to find someone who will cut it properly, I think maybe because of cognitive dissonance in the old-time barbers. The dilemma of being an ethnic guy with white-boy's hair. Yes it has a wave. No it won't stay up if you cut it that short. Yes I part it. No I don't want my name shaved on the side of my head. Gel? Are you talking to me?

Anyway. Now that I'm back, I could discuss Lampe and Palairet on comparative Balkan economic history, or the recent American editions of Luljeta Lleshanaku and Edvard Kocbek, or that cheerful and really safe reactor complex across the Danube at Kozloduy, or some other such thing that is thematically appropriate for this blog.

On the other hand, pies! And football! Packers on Monday Night, oh yeah. Are you ready for some football? I certainly am.

PS read Bad Mama.

Oh, so bad

I'm so bad. I know that it will embarrass the bejeebers out of him when his college buddies will find this picture, and that the media will love it when he runs for president in 2048, and that he will hate me for this... but I just couldn't resist.

Reading material

Not yet added to our blogroll (because we're not using blogger or blogspot but MT and do much of our coding ourselves), but a few blogs that we are reading on a regular basis now and would like to recommend.

Apt. 11D has moved -- Laura now lives in the suburbs in a veritable house and therefore got rid of the "Apt." in her blog name. It stays a very good blog, though, so update your bookmarks and check it out regularly.

Bad Mama is a spanky new blog by Carrie from (and in) Wisconsin. She's a good writer, so read.

The blogs I read mostly these days are, of course, about miscarriage, stillbirth, and other cheerful topics. It helps to read about others going through the same and it scares the sh*t out of me to read how many are going through the same. However, some of those blogs are written by incredibly smart, courageous, kick-ass women. So if you can stomach the naked truth, I would like to recommend the following:

A little pregnant, with hilarious articles about what happens to your body when you actually do manage to get pregnant;

Indigo Girl, who is required reading in these circles;

Chez Miscarriage by "a DES daughter, one of the thousands of women exposed to diethylstilbestrol while in their mothers' wombs." I'm not a DES daugher, but this blog is still wonderful reading. An eye-opener;

Last, not least, Julia.

If you're not at all into these things (which I can understand, really), I'm also reading Matthew Yglesias whom I find amusing.

'kay. Enough suggestions for today.

Addendum

My dear husband thinks that my reaction to Bush's speech yesterday was a little intense. He might well be right. It's very easy for Bush to annoy me - basically, he always does.

However.

Maybe European feelings of decorum are a bit different from American ones. I know other Europeans who had the same disgusted reaction to Bush's speech, yet Doug didn't really get the point, and neither did reader Budd Tuggley. So let me explain.

What Bush said, at a campaign rally, of all places:

"This is yet another grim reminder of the length to which terrorists will go to threaten this civilized world."

In my eyes, it was unnecessary to say this, especially as the carnage was still going on. The implication -- vote for me, if you don't want this to happen in the US -- is clear. Tact is not one of Bush's strong suits, to put it mildly. The situation required him to react as a president, not a campaigner. That's what upset me so.

Leave the above sentence away, proceed with

"We mourn the innocent lives that have been lost, we stand with the people of Russia, we send them our prayers for this terrible situation",

and it would have been OK.

But putting it into a campaign, using the horror and the tragedy to scare his people (a very questionable strategy in any case) into voting for him, is despicable.

YMMV.

How dare he!

I know I'm not American and not informed enough and shouldn't really say anything... But can Bush dare to stand up and use the horrible tragedy in Russia to his own ends? Does this man have no decency? Couldn't he for one moment, just for one moment, bow his head and say "I'm so sorry to hear this"? Is this too much to ask?

How dare he!

Just another normal day

Actually, it was not another normal day. It was Alan's first day of school today. He's 2.5 years old and will attend the INS Nursery School in the mornings on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

It was so exciting. I almost think it was more exciting for us than for him. Our mornings definitely need to take on some form of routine now. We usually sort of leisurely glide into our days but now we have structure! We have to be at school at nine, that means Alan and I have to be washed, clothed and fed by 8:30! This takes a big chunk of my morning away! I did get to watch Kerry's speech on CNN, though, live, and I liked it. (I wonder whether this will up our search hits...) Then I harrassed Doug about getting registered for his absentee ballot. And then we were off to school, about half an hour early... I'm German, after all.

Alan, he liked the nursery school a lot (he just crawled onto my lap and proudly identified his name on the screen -- the only word he can read. Then he shut the computer down. Good thing I'd just saved this post or I would have lost everything!).

He didn't cry, he didn't fuss, he just thoroughly enjoyed himself. He is a very independent soul. He painted (which he can't do at home, since we don't even own paints), so we got his first real piece of art as well today. He played with sand, water, outside, inside... and he so wants to go back. We're lucky people.

The theory that kindergarten - nursery school - would tire him out was wrong, though. At dinner time, he opened the pepper grinder and added about fifty peppercorns to my until then very yummy dish. Then, he played with the vacuum cleaner, which I actually don't mind since he's also cleaning at the same time. He's quite good at it, normally. Today, though, he had the idea to try out on which body parts the suction would work well. No big disasters ensued, but his chin is all blue and purple now. It looks quite disgusting and he's the walking image of a battered child. It's a good thing that we don't have CPS here!

As a revenge, I took some pictures of him on the toilet -- future blackmail material. Parents have to defend themselves.

Ah! Internet!

After two days of very intermittent internet access and unsuccessful protestations I finally threatened Astral with refunds for those days. They really don't like refunds. I think it's because their accounting system isn't equipped for that or so.

Anyhow, they showed up five men strong around noon and lo and behold, it turned out that the outside cable, the one that is strung from the main line to our house, needed to be replaced. Quick and efficient, that's what I like. The new cable works like a charm (knock on wood!) and we've been online for almost ten consecutive minutes now. Yay!

Astral is a weird company. They only have two modes: super-competent and dreadful. I like the super-competent part very much.