Marco has blogged about the recent Freakonomics blog series on the politics of happiness. He’s tied the discussion to biases within the political and social system against certain people (in particular women and black people; he’s viewing it in light of the current U.S. Presidential race).

He asked the blogosphere:

Given this amazing election year, if I look at the race as a “happy religious conservative”, seeing two people with the societal deck stacked against them, one of whom is very possibly the next POTUS, what am I to conclude about how they got there?

To which I responded:

If you’re willing to not put much thought into it, you can conclude absolutely anything you like.

If you are willing to put thought into it, you can only conclude that the situation is far to complex to assign it to any handful of factors that can be explained with one-word descriptions. We simply can’t measure these things accurately enough to really have any good idea.

Marco, in turn, responded with the question that prompted this post:

Do you, yourself, have a feeling about any of that? Does finding the situation too-complex-to-assess make you happier? Sadder? Or does it just lead to not really caring about inequity?

Firstly, I’d like to thank Marco for an excellent question.

I can say that my goal is to be indifferent to the complexity itself — it is what it is, and getting an emotional response to it one way or the other doesn’t help things much.

On the other hand, I do have an inherent desire to know *why* things like this occur, so the fact that we can’t here is a bit depressing.

On the third hand, complexity itself can indeed be interesting; the interconnectedness of things means that we’re always being surprised and intrigued. I enjoy it when we find out things that are non-obvious (which is why I like reading Freakonomics blog myself; their whole purpose is to point out socioeconomic novelties).

Now, Marco’s question (and blog post to a larger extent) also asked how inequality makes me feel. My answer to this is that it depends very much on the nature of the inequality.

Some inequalities are caused by forces that I’ll label as “natural”. Effectively, they are ones that we cannot (currently) change. For example, if you are born with a severe mental handicap, then your chances of wealthy (or even independently living comfortably) are slim to non-existent. That stems largely from the fact that you are incapable of creating the sort of economic value that humanity desires and rewards. You could definitely call this “unfair”, but there’s little point in doing so, because you’d be rebuking a universe that doesn’t listen, much less care. Assuming you cannot change these things, there’s no benefit to feeling bad about them; you lose a bit of your happiness without any corresponding increase in the happiness of anyone else.

Another class of inequality is that which is unnecessary and/or changeable: you can call it “unnatural” inequality if you like. For example, if you are a woman or black (or Catholic in the not-so-distant past), your chances of becoming President of the U.S. are reduced (and at one point they too were slim to non-existent). The bias against women and non-whites is largely based on faulty or non-existent reasoning — in particular, assuming the properties of a group also apply to an individual is not valid. This type of inequality means that humanity loses some of its potential, and is definitely something to be upset over. Ideally, we would be upset enough to change the situation so that the bias no longer occurs.

Lastly, there is inequality that is actually desireable. For example, if you have a useful skill (take your pick, there’s lots; medical is the most palatable example), then you can use your advantage to produce more value. You will typically benefit from the value you produce; since we share our value with the less fortunate (to varying degrees), others will benefit as well. Trying to bring equality to these situations is actually counterproductive. If you force the skillful to produce at the same rate as everyone else, then there’s a missed opportunity for more vale. You can try to make the less skilled produce value at the same rate as the most skilled, but most often this is impossible (the top producers are usually at the top due to some combination of factors that can’t be replicated). This kind of equality makes me happy, because I see the benefits that come with it.

So, I don’t not care about inequality. It’s not easy to see which type of inequality is in play at any given time (and it’s usually a combination of the three), and it’s even less easy to know what to do about it. I try my best to do what is appropriate depending on the circumstances. With that philosophy, it’s relatively easy to avoid unhappiness for the bad kinds to gain happiness from the good kinds.

Paul Graham writes about his heroes: people who have significantly influenced his life. One of those people is Robert Morris:

Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he’s never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it’s surprisingly easy. Don’t say anything unless you’re fairly sure of it.

Here’s the insightful bit though:

He’s not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.

You’d think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that everyone would do this. It doesn’t seem like that much extra work to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. And yet practically no one does.

This is a quality I’ve tried to develop recently: don’t just try to get the right answer, try to estimate how correct that answer is, and act accordingly.

In fact, I usually try to go one step further: improve confidence in the answer by testing, verifying, getting second opinions, etc. It ends up being a lot of work, but in many cases it’s well worth the effort — in fact, it’s the only way to achieve success for many complex problems.

“Sometimes you just need to believe in the power of words: cheap, cheap words.”

From Australia Apologizes To Aborigines on The Onion.

Indexed is a pretty self-explanatory blog, once you see it.

I like this one in particular, which Jessica Hagy did custom for Freakonomics Blog:

Today I was reading this Slashdot story about this article on tapping geothermal energy for human consumption. Good stuff.

Of course any time there’s discussion about new energy sources, someone always brings up the unforeseen consequences argument. In this case: “wouldn’t we cool the earth’s core if we started using it’s energy, causing catastrophe?” This post says “no”:

I’ve seen too many comments about the “effect this would have on magma under the earth if we cool it this way.” The answer to these questions is that for a long long time, we’d have virtually no effect. The scale of human activity is just to small compared to the mass of the earth -the heat source for this power generation method. Go back to school and look at the graphics that show just how thin of an area the crust occupies on the earth. http://iga.igg.cnr.it/geo/what-is-for%20IGAnew_file/image038.jpg Now imagine for yourself just how thin of an area human activity would impact.

The poster misused “area” instead of “volume”, and he’s talking about energy impact rather than physical space, but this post did get me thinking… how much area do we actually take up? I mean us, personally, not our ecological footprint.

So I did the math:

• Start with 1 square metre per person. That’s roughly 3 feet to a side: a little crowded but you’re not pressed up against anyone.
• There’s roughly 6.6 billion people on the planet.
• 6.6 Gm² is 6,600 km²
• 6,600 km² is a bit larger than P.E.I., just about the size of Delaware, and a fair bit smaller than Puerto Rico
• If you divided Earth evenly, each person would get about 77,283 km²m²: 22,567 km² of land and 54,716 km² of water.
• That works out to a plot of land about the same size as Israel or New Jersey, and (mostly saltwater) lake nearly twice the size of Lake Superior an area the size of 14 U.S. football fields, or nearly 1.5 times the base area of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• If you want to talk volume, each person could get a chunk of Earth 164 km³ big.
• If you limit that volume to 2 m high (the taller of you will have to duck), each piece would be 82,000 km² in area, which is a bit smaller than Austria.

I call dibs on the top-left corner.

Update:I made a big calculation mistake figuring the amount of area per person, which unfortunately lessens the entertainment value.

This one line sums up the entire article and similarly makes a societal statement:

But with gas close to $4 a gallon near his home in Paso Robles, Calif., Mr. Collinsworth has been driving the Yaris instead of his BMW X5 sport utility and GMC Sierra pickup.

This sort of thing is ridiculous both economically and environmentally. You’ll spend far more on depreciation and insurance on an extra car than you will save on burning less fuel. The amount of energy that went into making, transporting, selling, maintaining, and disposing of the car won’t be offset by your better mileage unless you’re driving a heck of a lot of miles (which, as a Yaris-driving commuter, you’re almost certainly not).

Laura and I own a Toyota Highlander non-hybrid SUV which gets a mediocre 19/25 mpg. This is our only car. I work from home, and Laura works part-time relatively close to home. I’d be willing to go toe-to-toe on transportation and environmental costs with any two- or three-car family, even if they own hybrids. On top of our savings, we get a nice, comfortable vehicle with great visibility that can handle less-than-perfect roads (handy in the mountains) and haul a bunch of cargo when necessary.

Smaller cars are often status symbols and political statements rather than conscious choices for better living. Be sure to recognize them as such.

Marco replied to my previous blog post:

There are a lot of questions as to *why* these numbers are the way they are.

The article has a few statements on this:

Further analysis showed that a nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels (correlation of .62), followed by wealth (.52), and then provision of education (.51).
…
There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.
…
We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.
…
The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the World.

So the answers are perhaps not so mysterious: people who are materially comfortable, healthy, and well-educated are happier, but individualism also plays an important role (or else Japan would be way up on the scale).

A psychologist at the University of Leicester has published the results of a study showing the happiest countries in the world.

Canada comes in at #10. Costa Rica (my wife’s home country) is #13 (which makes the two of us average at about Ireland). The US places a respectable #23 (out of 178). 6 of the top 9 are all Scandinavian/Germanic countries (which are the usual suspects in studies like this one). The other 3 in the top 9 are the Bahamas, and (perhaps surprisingly) Bhutan and Brunei. Also surprising is that the really big names in Europe and Asia all do quite poorly, from Germany at 35 to Russia at 167. Considering the amount of wealth and/or power these countries have, I think it’s telling that they’re not performing better.

I should make one thing clear: in my opinion at least, these are really the only results that matter. Everything else we talk about (economics, politics, health, etc) is a means to the end of personal happiness.

(Via Guy Kawasaki).

Just this past Friday, I had a conversation with my aunt on oppression and how very much of it is self-imposed / tolerated. Especially among the religious, restriction of personal freedom is often seen as a good thing by the restricted.

There’s a small town in Quebec called Herouxville that’s been making the news these days. They created a code of conduct for immigrants that prohibits a lot of stereotypically Muslim horrific behavior.

What I’d like to note here is that the Muslim women (whom the code of conduct is supposed to “protect”) claim that they’re not oppressed in the first place. While we’re not talking about enburqa’d Afghani women here (these Canadian residents are far more liberated than that), I’d still argue that they are to some degree. They’re effectively required to wear headscarves, for religious and not fashion reasons. The key is that they have a Stockholm-syndromesque belief with regards to their oppression. I think that it’s a very common thing throughout the entire world, and it explains how a lot of oppression can continue to exist.

One other thing to note: while most of the Herouxville rules are along the lines of personal-safety (ex: don’t stone women), there are some that cross the line into oppression themselves (ex: don’t wear headscarves). That’s a bit of irony that I’m sure the townspeople don’t realize.

Joel Spolsky is easily one of my favorite bloggers. He’s a software developer / manager of a software development company that he grew himself. On top of being a very insightful guy, he’s a great writer: he tells stories and comes up with all sorts of quips and analogies. Here’s an example from his latest post:

Near as I can tell, Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.” I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool”) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano”) you know you’re in trouble.

If you have anything to do with software development, you need to be reading Joel. If you have anything to do with business or customers or users, you should probably be reading him too. And if you like to know about how people and the world really works, reading him wouldn’t be a bad idea.