Just because you don’t know how to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done

Photo from Brooks Elliot on Flickr

In this day and age, sometimes knowing how to do things doesn’t come from knowing everything. Just the other day I found myself thinking, someday all web browsers will convert currencies from to our home currency automatically. Won’t that be nice. I’ll be able to instantly gauge the value of foreign currencies instead of wondering how many dollars that is.

Then I thought, maybe someone else who actually knows how to make this happen has also thought of this. I don’t know how to code, but other people do. A quick Google search revealed Chrome Currency Converting extensions. Thanks to them, my web browser now shows all prices in US Dollars (with the original currency in parentheses).

The future is here. Sure we still have to install an extension to make it happen, but it’s completely possible. Someday, the extension won’t even be necessary. That is, if we’re not using a universal online currency for our shopping anyway.

It just goes to show, sometimes it’s worth checking out the things we’d like to be able to do. A little digging may show they’re already possible.

 

Get up-to-date exchange rates in Google Spreadsheets

Recently I needed to convert some figures from British pounds to dollars for use in a spreadsheet. My original idea was that I’d just plug the numbers into a converter on the internet and then copy and paste. That would have worked well enough, but it wasn’t the best way.

Google has all kinds of little tricks up their sleeve and built right into Google Spreadsheets. You can even build a formula that asks Google Finance for the latest info on currency exchange rates between the currency of interest. It looks like this:

=B3*GoogleFinance(“Currency:gbpusd”)

The gbp is for pounds, and usd for dollars, and you can easily swap them if you want to convert the other way, or find the symbols for other currencies. Of course, you replace the cell number with the one you’re using.

Awesome.

 

Economics with heart

I’m sure I’m not the first person to note that economics has a bit of a tendency to focus on efficiency and cold hard numbers. In many situations, especially on the free market side of things, economic analysts are willing to say things that come across as rather heartless, like admitting that temporary job loss might be an essential part of an economic adjustment.

This sounds pretty harsh from the perspective of the people who have to deal with the result: loved ones losing their jobs.

The idea of subjective value is related to this issue. While almost everyone easily recognizes that different individuals value things differently, sometimes it’s hard to define that value when it isn’t measured with a dollar sign.

I work with many economically minded people, but when it comes to this non-monetary value, my mindset is a little different. In college I studied English literature, not the trades and exchanges of the market. We placed value on a lot of things that you can’t really put a price on or purchase. I’m more prone to see this value.

It’s not that I’m a progressive, it’s that I’m willing to look for value outside of the market.

As someone I respect once said, “Love is not really efficient.” I think that’s accurate. Not that this idea creates a mandate for the government to show love to its citizens, but the inefficiency of love does come into play in the lives of many individuals. It may be love for our hobbies, sacrifice for family, all things that can seem to detract from efficiency.

Sometimes that’s a sacrifice that has to be made. Efficiency is good, but it can get in the way of some of the best parts of life.

 

Is a country a business?

John Stossel writes about Herman Cain’s presidential ambitions at Reason.

Now I don’t know much about Herman Cain, nor am I going to endorse him, but I certainly think there’s a lot to be said for someone with his type of background. The skills that leading a business requires are not exactly the same skills that a member of congress might have. But maybe they’re the right skills to be president.

A business executive knows how to find the people he can successfully delegate to. He doesn’t know everything himself, but he knows how to find the people who do have the knowledge. And isn’t that what the presidency is about anyway? The president doesn’t do everything himself, he just knows how to get people together and make decisions.

Maybe the experienced executive for chief executive of the nation wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

 

Scarcity and Social Security

Sooner or later, almost every discussion of our economic situation comes around to Social Security. Someone always brings it up, as well they should. It’s an enormous expense that weighs heavily on the government and on the taxpayers. While it has very positive effects for the people who depend on it, it’s far from being one big positive.

It is a major expense for the government, and it drags heavily especially on younger workers who are nowhere near collecting from the system themselves. Although everyone complains about the horror of the idea of stopping social security payments for seniors today, you don’t hear as much about the position of recent college grads who are not certain if they’re ever going to see any of the percentage that disappears from their paycheck every month. There’s no way of knowing if Social Security will exist by the time they’re eligible to get something from the system they’ve been paying into.

I’m not proposing that it’s a good idea to stop payments, but I think it’s interesting to think about why we even have this system in the first place. If I’m not mistaken, it came out of the economic hardships of the Great Depression. Many people were unable to care for themselves, and so the government offered to pick up the responsibility. This has great benefits for the government, since it makes people dependent on it instead of taking care of their own needs outside of the system. Government grows in strength when people depend on it.

What else does Social Security do? It makes people less likely to plan for their own future, thus making them even more dependent. In a way, it also makes people less generous. Americans no longer have to think about the future of their aging relatives. They have no cause to make personal sacrifices when they can just assuage their concerns with the knowledge that their government will take care of relatives for them. Does this make our culture stronger?

These are the types of questions that government doesn’t like to bring up or consider.

And with the system the way it is, politicians, our president included don’t hesitate to pull on the threat of ending Social Security checks to get people to vote for them. In this piece from the Examiner, we see the president do just that, threatening the possible necessity of stopping this source of income. And it works, because people don’t know where to turn. People can’t rely on other people that should care for them. I think this is a problem.

[This post is part 2 of a series found here]

 

Economics is scarcity

What is an economy? Well it’s a way to make scarce resources go around, or at least go further around. Perhaps “further” is the key word.

I was reading Thomas Sowell on the subject recently, in his Knowledge and Decisions he lays out this very clear picture of the fact that economics involves scarcity. It’s a fact that has to be acknowledged and underlies every economic interaction. What’s the other alternative to scarcity? Abundance.

The quest for total abundance is the quest for a utopia, and the admission that there are not enough resources to go around is an admission that we do not live in a utopia. We don’t live in a utopia. There is not enough of everything. There’s only enough when we pay for it.

In some areas this seems obvious, and no one argues that we have everything we would ever need. But when it comes to the areas where governments spend money, no one likes to talk about the scarcity that government itself faces. We can seemingly go on spending forever in whatever areas we desire, no matter what the cost. There’s no realization that we will run out eventually. No one is sounding the wake-up call that we’re not in utopia. What’s the deal? Does no one see it?

It’s not that people don’t see it, although some probably don’t. The reason we don’t have more politicians and bureaucrats sounding the alarm is that they have no incentive to. If they come right out and say that we don’t have enough for certain things, an uproar would result. No one wants to speak the truth. But it’s out there. We have issues.

What can we do to change the incentives facing politicians?

[This post is part 1 of a series]

 

“He thinks too much”

“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

Julius Caesar describes his future opponent Cassius early in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. The discussion of Cassius interests me particularly as I’ve been paying at least a little attention to what is no new debate: the question of what education and especially higher education ought to do.

Shakespeare’s Caesar realizes that to himself, as to any person, government or corporation that hopes to influence men, people that think are dangerous. People that think don’t easily go along with the suggestions of the experts. They want an explanation of the choices that are being suggested for them.

This is of course quite relevant in modern times as we see a great deal of respect ascribed to the experts in our American government. And in Egypt, recent attempts to control the internet reflect forceful attempts to suppress discussion and thinking.

But back to Cassius, Caesar further describes him:

“He reads much,
He is a great observer,  and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men.”

To relate this to the education debate, if we want a nation of thinking people like Cassius, we’re going to fail if we education doesn’t teach them how to read. Reading leads inevitably to thinking, and thinking people don’t let themselves get get passively drawn into things.

Like the noble Brutus, men who think don’t allow themselves to be captured and dragged into things unawares. Like Brutus they have “too great a mind.”

For those of you that know the story and are now wondering, so does education lead to assassination? That’s not the point. Cassius and Brutus were aware of what went on around them so that they could take action to keep their liberties from being taken unawares.

 

Risk

Recently one of my favorite blogs, Arts & Letters Daily featured a post on the financial crisis called The Imaginot Line. In it, the author makes the case that the American financial system seemed very safe pre-2008.

This is true enough. In the eyes of the general public and most investors, a major collapse was the last thing to be expected. If you had asked them if they could foresee one happening, the answer would have been no. Seabright says that everyone placed faith in the idea of “islands of stability in a sea of risk.” At least for the optimists among us, it’s a very human tendency to look for safety at the expense of our better judgment. There are always pessimists who can see dangerous potentials around the corner, but a lot of people are happier assuming everything is alright.

In our insurance and now bailout-saturated world, people have lost their sense of responsibility. Very few still hold themselves ultimately accountable for their decisions. The worst result they expect is a little pinch, not outright failure or catastrophe. The problem that they fail to realize is that some problems are too big even for a seemingly all-powerful government to solve.

Americans have a problem with risk. The problem is their desire to eliminate it entirely, which seems to me an unrealistic and impossible goal. Such a result will never truly happen, but it doesn’t stop us from trying. I have to wonder if these attempts to make failure a thing of the past add to our surprise when they happen.

Seabright says that investors and creditors need to bear more responsibility, which is true enough. At the same time, I think we need to remember that some blame rests on the attempts of the government agencies that tried to regulate the economy, and still do. To be sure, many of the investments undertaken prior to the crash were foolish, but so were many of the intervention attempts on the part of the government and central banks.

Many economists, at least on the free market side of the spectrum, hold the belief that an economy free from intervention will naturally grow and prosper. This may be true overall, but sometimes adjustments have to happen, and attempts to regulate the risk out of the economic world sometimes place us in greater danger.

In the end, I think one’s position on government regulation will depend on your view of risk. If you think risk can be eliminated by enough restrictions, you’re probably going to favor more intervention. If you think risk is inherent in this world, you’ll realize that the best option is not regulating risk out of existence, but playing it safe because risk will always be a part of the game.

 

The Internet is Changing Our Names

Over Christmas break I read some of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. He premises that internet usage is changing the way our brains work and use information. I’d have to agree with that, because I know myself and other members of my generation process things differently. We look for information in different places, and googling for an answer is almost second nature while we would never look at a physical encyclopedia and probably haven’t picked up a printed dictionary since 1999.

Carr says that one of the biggest impacts is the effect of linking, and the way it conditions us to process many different rabbit trail sources of information. We have become accustomed to constantly pursuing whatever looks most interesting and stimulating.

Just recently I was thinking about the tendency among some of my friends to call each other by first initials and last names. It happens most when the names and initials happen to work together and just have a nice ring, but occasionally we modify the last name into a shorter version that sounds better.

I started wondering why we do this, and it occurred to me that at my school, email aliases are first initial and last name. We’re getting so used to interacting online that we call each other by our online names even offline.

 

Interesting – musings on a word

As an English major, I have a slight tendency to think about words. What they mean, how they are spelled, and so on. As nice as it would be if we could graduate from high school and breathe a sigh of satisfaction that our years of homework has made our vocabulary complete, that just isn’t the case.

We tend to learn our vocabulary by exposure and familiarity. We learn words and remember them as much as we use them or hear them used around us. I have always spent a lot of time reading, and that’s how I picked up a lot of my vocab. The problem with this method of learning is that I associate some of the more unique words I know with specific occurrences. I remember them in the context of a specific work, which is fine, except for the times when my original exposure was rather idiosyncratic.

All this digression is meant to show that words can mean different things to different people or in different circumstances. In fact some words mean to many things, “stuff” for instance, gets thrown around and leant on like some sort of mental crutch when we’re too lazy to come up with another word that means “things”. This sort of verbal laziness bothers me from time to time, and today I want to think about another word that may get overused.

The word is “interesting”. (Pun intended).

Interesting, it’s what people say when something titillates them, or on the other side, when something spurs them on to deeper thought. Interesting is something that strikes at our “interests” and creates connections with things that are important to us.

Something “interesting” can take us down the path of pleasurable association. It can spark confused head-scratching or further inquiry. It can refer to a sketchy or questionable situation.

The word, it means something that catches our attention. Something has to be, well, interesting. It’s become such a staple word, which perhaps isn’t a bad thing. The world is a better place when we think things are interesting.