A Challenge to Anarcho-Capitalism

One of my Facebook friends, Matt Dubuque, recently posted on his wall a link to a BBC report on a "disaster zone robot competition announced by Pentagon."

According to Matt, this sort of development shows that government is or can be a good thing, a source of original and valuable ideas that, even if originally military in conception, will carry over into civilian applications. This is a rebuke (in his view) to those of us, emphatically including yours truly, who don't see government as the cause of any net benefit in human life at all.

I challenged him on this, saying that I think the $2 million involved in the disaster-zone-robot competition would "almost certainly be better spent if left in the hands of the Chinese who lent it."

It is intriguing that when people try to make this kind of point, they so often focus on the military. The manner in which Japan was defeated in 1945 gave rise to a desire (a penitential one, perhaps) to show that atoms could be split for peaceful ends.  An effort upon which Japan itself became overly dependent, a fact highlighted by last year's Japanese tsunami.

Matt doesn't want to argue that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki blasts have worked out for the best because they have given us nuclear power plants. Indeed, when I asked him about that point he called it a "very big and very public" mistake.

So the case for government goodness based on Pentagon sponsored inventions comes back to those robots working in disaster zones. The military need for such robots is clear enough. If you bomb a place into rubble you'll want to have robots explore the rubble first. The military benefits can hardly be considered net benefits for humanity bestowed by governments!  We don't sing hymns to the rivalry of governments which produces the wars and the chaos which also produces more efficient ways to conduct that rivalry. At best, clever robots in the context of war will mitigate some of the awfulness of war.

Ah, but there will be civilian benefits ... someday, maybe. If we don't look at such claims with some skepticism, after all, we might find ourselves encouraging warfare-based statism, in the expectation that it will create ever more wonderful stuff (for those who survive long enough to enjoy the stuff.)

A more promising candidate for Matt's point then is the internet. He asked me whether I was asserting that:

 "1. The government and the Defense Department played no central role in the development of FTP.

"2. That FTP was not central to the founding of the Internet and its subsequent offspring the world wide web.

"3. That, on balance, the Internet and World Wide Web are simply of marginal utility?"

I begged off, saying I would address such points in an upcoming blog entry.  Which is where we are. So ....

For the uninitiated, FTP is "file transfer protocol," a critical internet building block that dates back to the early 1970s, and allows the quick transfer of text from one computer to another. And yes, of course, I acknowledge the historical truth in Matt's points (1) and (2). In 1958, as a response to the Soviet advances embodied in their Sputnik satellite, the US established an advanced research projects agency (ARPA) -- later renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The name change made explicit what had been clear enough anyway -- the new interest in supporting "advanced" projects was an interest in those with military significance, in the face of the threat from Soviet communism. FTP, and in the early 1980s for that matter the development of graphical user interfaces (GUI) too, were offspring of ARPA/DARPA. 

Now ... isn't that good?  Hasn't the internet brought us a lot of useful stuff, such as my ability to explain these thoughts to whoever you are, reading this right now?

Well ... yes. But as to question (3) above, I still have to say, "maybe not."   Indeed, "probably not."  

The phrase "marginal utility" is an inapt one in this context. That's a technical phrase in economics, with a meaning different from what Matt seems to have in mind. What I think he has in mind is a full cost/benefit analysis. The problem with this is that it requires alternative-path scenarios. The question is not "is a world with long-distance speed-of-light non-hierarchical communication better than one without" but something more like "is a world with long-distance speed-of-light non-hierarchical communication of the sort the world now has because of ARPA/DARPA better than whatever would exist had it not come about in that way?"!

In considering that question, one would have to consider other ways in which long-distance, speed-of-light non-hirearchical communication could have come about. Do we know it could never have happened had there been no such post-Sputnik reaction?

The problem is the old one of weighing what we don't see against what we do see. What seems obvious is that if ARPA had never existed, the money that it spent would have been spent or invested in some other way. How do we decide among different possible pathways unless we have some sense of what else might have been done with it, whether in the telecomm field or elsewhere?
 
As an ambitious extreme for this sort of analysis, I'm reminded of a science fiction story I read once in which mercenary time travelers had somehow changed the outcome of the Punic Wars. The protagonist had to decide whether to time travel himself and undo the mischief the first set of time travelers had done, allowing Rome to win and the 'natural' course of history to proceed from there. In this novel, there is no 'better' or 'worse.' The 21st century AD that resulted from Hannibal’s victory was neither better nor worse than the one that resulted from Scipio's victory in the natural time line. Just very different.

Now think of something much simpler. Think of a bridge, built several years ago over the river Hypothetical with public funds. There was no big market-based demand for this bridge, because both the two towns separated by the mighty river Hypothetical were small. But … due in large part to that bridge, the towns have grown large, and merged into one. Instead of East Burg and West Burg there is now the unified town of Burg.

We Burgers no longer think of the bridge as a matter for continuing expenditures. After all, the maintenance costs of this bridge are a very small part of the overall highway budget of the state of which Burg is a part, and as to whatever bonds were sold to build the bridge, they’ve likewise melded into the broad background of public finance.

You can imagine an admirer of big government waxing poetically about the wonders of the bridge over Hypothetical. Where would the Burgers be without it?  They cross that bridge all the time, a huge commerce depends on it, they would be in a terrible fix were it to disappear!

Yet that admirer would be misguided. (At least he’d have to be judged so without much better reasoning than that!)   As Henry Hazlitt wrote long ago, thinking of precisely such cases, if you have taught yourself “to look for indirect as well as direct consequences [you can] once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence.” What of that capital that was diverted to create this bridge and indirectly to create the Burg that depends on it? That capital would otherwise have created homes, cars, washing machines, dresses and coats, etc.

No doubt we will continue to use the bridge whatever our imagination or philosophy allows. But why suspect a priori that the world created by the diversion of that capital is better than the world strangled at that moment?

That other world – one in which the whole highway system around this river on both banks had been left to market forces let us say – would likely have had new bridges at some point, too, since bridges are valuable things for which there is a market demand. There would not have been (on our stipulation) this particular bridge built with these materials, at this particular time. Why do we know the cost/benefit ratio along that path would have been worse?

I suspect the burden of proof lies quite the other way, for bridges and for file transfer methods too, and it is a burden that cannot be satisfied.

The capital was diverted by force in one way or another. Either the bridge was built by taxed revenue or it was built with money borrowed, due to the low interest rates that can go to a sovereign because of its power to tax, and because of the further power to declare interest on its bonds tax free. Either way, it was a diversion by force.

Force is quite generally a way of doing that which free transactions among free people would not have done. How does that make it a good thing? How does that make force-built bridges magically superior to whatever the freely transacting parties would have done.

I have to deem Matt’s point yet unmade.

The Back Story

Much is left to inference, but as I understand it the alternative-history backstory of the events in The Difference Engine is this:

In our world, the "primary world" as we'll call it, Lord Byron died in Missolonghi, during the Greek war for independence. In the world of this novel, though, Byron survived his illness there and returned to Britain, where he became the key figure in a revolution, leader of the winning side in Britain's "Time of Troubles." He was on the victorious side of that conflict and became Prime Minister in the 1830s, lived on into the 1850s, ruling until his death.

The losing side in the Time of Troubles consisted of old-order Tories, led by Wellington, allied with Luddites, who were both equally discomfitted by capitalist technologies. The Byronic revolution was a pro-steam engine, pro-technology revolution. It raised to prominence Byron's daughter, Ada, known in primary-world history books as Ada Lovelace, and often described as the author of history's first computer program. But presumably the revolution led her life in an alternative path, so she never wed William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace. She is Ada Byron throughout the novel. (She, too, lives longer in this novel than she did in the primary world.)

Another consequence of the rise of the Byrons and the defeat of the Luddites is the prominence of Charles Babbage, fom whom we get a snippet of interior monologue near the book's end. Babbage  became a crucial figure in the government. Here is the inspiration for the novel and its title. In the primary world, Babbage planned workable computers. He called his earlier plans  "difference engines" and his later plans "analytic engines," but the novel for convenience used the term "difference engine" generically. Ada Lovelace's "program" was designed to run on one of Babbage's engines. If they had had the resources of the whole Empire available to them, and had really been able to create such things -- databanks, credit cards, and a hacker subculture would have gotten a much earlier start.

Mathematicians might even have achieved an understanding of Godel's theorem, and thus the limits of algorithmic achievement, sooner than they did.

The authors have also implied changes from the primary-world timeline in events outside of the British isles. Notably, the US seems to have had its civil war a lot earlier -- apparently during the Andrew Jackson administration. The south won the war, so that by the 1850s there are five sovereigns claiming chunks of what in the primary world is The United States. There is the Northern Union, the Southern Confederacy, the Republic of Texas, French Mexico, and the Republic of California. There is also a large chunk of wild terrain in the northern plains and Rockies, where some key paleontological digs have taken place, once the paleontologists have made the necessary bargains with the Cheyenne.

One critical character in the book is a British paleontologist who discovered the bones of the brontosaurus there, and who has acquired the nickname "Leviathan Mallory" as a consequence.

There is also, blocking off the mouth of the Hudson from control of the Northern Union, the Commune of Manhattan, a conceit that the authors borrow from events in primary-world Paris in 1871. But these are the 1850s, remember, and presumably the forward push give to technology by the Time of Troubles in Britain has sped up a lot of related historical developments.

Iterations

Continuing my research in steam punk as a literary genre.

I've discovered that the chapters of The Difference Engine, apparently a critical work in establishing this genre, are called Iterations. As in "the first iteration," "the second iteration" and so forth. Why?

Iteration, which literally understood is just a fancy way of saying "repetition," is a term of art among computer programmers. It refers to the looping of a program. Typically, each trip around the loop, each iteration, is at least subtly different from the one before. For example, a "Monte Carlo" program -- one that incorporates an element of chance -- might call for an operation to be repeated 999 times, with some averaging at the end of that sequence. The 453d iteration is subtly different from the 452s -- not only will the calculation likely have a different result that time due to the stochastic element, but we are one step closer to the desired averaging.

Of much greater historical significance are the iterations of the Newton-Raphson method of solving general nonlinear equations. The gist of this is that you start your efforts at solution with a best guess. If the guess is right, the equation works, and you're done. If  your guess is wrong, as is a lot more likely, but certain conditions apply, all is still good: trying to work through the problem will tell you how far wrong you are, and what your next guess should be. Then you work through that second iteration, etc.

Iterations in this sense were crucial in Babbage's work, which in turn inspired the novel and much of steampunk.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Earlier this week, on Facebook, my sister posted a quotation from the long-running Brit sci-fi television series "Doctor Who."

The quote, specifically from the Third Doctor, was, "Courage isn't just a matter of not being frightened, you know.  It's being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway."

Beth called these "wise words."  They are indeed, but the observation is hardly original to The Doctor.  They reminded me immediately of something Atticus Finch said in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, though it took me awhile to find the precise quote.

Of course, Atticus, being a model of humility along with the other virtues, wouldn't define his own behavior as "courageous" or use that as the ground for defining such a word, so our author had to find another context in which he could say something like that.  This arises in Mrs Dubose's fight against her morphine addiction, which explains why she was so cantankerous an old lady.   She was mortally sick, yet offended at her own addiction, and determined to face both the pains of her illness and the pangs of withdrawal in one grand final struggle -- a struggle, that, of course, could only have one ending.

After her death, Atticus says that he had insisted that Jem read to Mrs Dubose because "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."

Sci Fi and Related Genres

Any of my readers who have any interest in science fiction, horror, fantasy, or related fictional genre will soon find himself in love with this graphic.

And for those with an interest in mathematics, it ends up looking a bit like a Mandelbrot set!

The key plot of the meta-story is revealed in the legends along the top:
adventure dominant; science dominant; sociology dominant; form dominant; Star Wars dominant.

As even that much information conveys, we have a wild intermingling here of high and low brow.

But I'll say no more.

A Little Gift for the Dr. Who Fans

A tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan. This is fun to watch. And I was never a huge fan. But ... enjoy!

Moon Water Results?

Positive!

The widely publicized experiment last month produced evidence of "significant quantities of ice on the lunar surface," NASA now says, making this convenient orbital body look good as a site for colonization, a stepping stone for the human race on the way to really distant destinations.

The director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research put things into perspective. "It is a big Wow," he said.

Gotta love that techno-scientific jargon.