I have found that a common error in the critiques that economists proffer (especially those of the Chicago school of thought) is to hone in on small portions of concepts (tiny in fact), analyze that single point, and then dismiss the whole of an argument. Call it particularism or maybe just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I feel that way about Paul Krugman’s review of John Gray’s False Dawn.

To summarize Krugman’s review, his take if twofold: one, John Gray has not done a good enough job substantiating his arguments with facts, and two, John Gray has pointed to a problem that does not actually exist while offering no solution to the problem within the bounds of the text. To Krugman’s first point, I will largely concede. Gray’s work is hardly an economic text technically and has a lot to do with law. But in so far as an examination of the history of regulation with regard to lazzez-faire style government non-intervention, Gray offers a substantial and eye-opening history that is considered such a standard and known history of western industrialization it hardly needs to be plagued with a rash of footnotes.

Gray’s work is a diatribe, a long introduction to an idea that not many people are talking (still). To that end, look at how this article in Time speaks of capitalism as some kind of homogeneous entity or concept. Gray’s overall point is that there are many different species of capitalism, and that not all of them resemble the Western concept. Moreover, to quote my previous explanation “Social market economies (socialist regimes) are driven “out of business” by world markets that allow for corporations to seek and find cheap labor, areas where regulations are lax. Here again, the problem of these social market economies is now exacerbated by the fact that have fewer Keynesian remedies with which to protect their laboring populations. Impose too much protection and the capital just goes somewhere else.” I think this same point has begun to appear in other texts, such as Robert Reich’s “Supercapitalism.” And some real world examples exist as well, such as when Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, was pretty much forced to change his stance on capitalizing banks, not by the Congress, but by the British. In short, so many of the large financial firms that took a hit here in the US were so widely spread globally that this crisis spread quickly to other shores. What all the governments did together mattered more than what any in particular did. And now, many of the governments of the European Union are looking to establish global regulation–a kind of Bretton Woods 2.0.

Despite his support for regulation—even global financial regulation—Krugman doesn’t address this point in Gray’s book, the major point of the book, once in his review. Should anyone look past the labor practices of companies like Nike in Vietnam to not see the intuitive persuasiveness of an argument like this?¹ Yes, it is more essay than academic paper, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a valid point in saying that handing over the legal reins to global corporations is a bad idea. Krugman does not once in his article address the key term “species of capitalism,” and this to me, implies that he missed the point.

With this reasonable comparison in mind, Barr turns toward the concept of the meme. Within the mind, the concept of competing ideas cannot be true. It is merely a mixed-metaphor brought over to psychology from Darwinian concepts of biological evolution. He says:

…The common sense notion that ideas are selected by some obscure competition between objective alternatives … finds an equal bridge to selectionist principles that are derived from biology. Thus, just as Newtonian physics and common sense physics seem to confirm each other, common sense psychology and Darwinian biology share similar metaphorical principles that explain respectively how behavioral and biological selections are made.

Barr mainly argues that ideas are selected by competition and thereby misses the definition of the meme. The key thing that Richard Dawkins was arguing when he introduced the concept of the meme was the more general concept of the replicator. At the time of his writing of The Selfish Gene [Amazon link] Dawkins was attempting to find natural, basic constructs in nature that could replicate themselves — and do little else. He pointed to genes but he also pointed to viruses, computer viruses, and prions. As an aside he argued that ideas may have some capacity to replicate themselves from individual to individual, but he was not arguing that human behavior could be described by an individual mind’s competition of ideas.

And here’s where it gets tricky. Yes, meme’s can be passed from individual to individual competitively through the use of media (language, music, speech, etc.) and although they can influence behavior, they are not the only thing that does. To understand the concept of the meme it is crucial not to confuse it with perception (such as the color blue or the feeling of cold) or even information. It is a kind of data and a kind of data based on a experiential context.

A meme exists as an extension of our ability to utilize media to communicate with one another and ourselves.[1] Without media (including “natural” media such as speech) there are no memes. Perception and information come from reality and in the desert of the real our connections are our own. It is only in the shared light of media that human consciousness begins to create, trade and disseminate memes.

I have often said that what is funny is that which is wrong. A man slipping on a banana peel. That’s not a duck it’s my brother. Did Paris Hilton just fall in to a vat of… whatever. You get the idea. The joke is the meme. The tune is the meme. The fashion is the meme. The graphic is the meme. The perceptions that come before it are not memes and no more unique to our consciouness than they are to dogs and monkeys. Flat, far, and cold are not memes. But how flat, far, and cold have to do with our ex-wives is definitely a meme.

The most important embodiment of a meme is its symbolic notation. It is not that the meme exists outside of the evironment of the individual mind but rather that the meme within the mind is formed when new connections between older memes or perceptions are created through the feedback loop that is the act of observing media. Although memes do not carry the weight of information or value, they can create value within the human mind.

To touch on Barr’s point once more, meme’s are not responible for your behavior, but they may influence it. Barr seems to place memes on a higher level than necessary. Fear is not a meme. It is an instinct, something received through a mechanism other than media (natural or nurtured). I would not posit that memes could possess information nor transmit it. I would however posit that there is a meme in the connection between sex, cold, blue and Sunday morning. And there is most certainly a meme in the ability of an author to choose the words “sultry sullen Sunday” and create within our mind (if the prerequisite experiences are available to us) a new connection between perceptions — a connection you may not have possessed or imagined.

I will finish with Barr’s statement of this:

Thus, we select not only memes, but also the abstract relationships between memes as they are moderated by our thoughts and overt behavior.

But memes are the reversal of this. They are in fact the abstract relationship itself. And sometimes it is that abstract relationship, such as love, that can very much be a driving factor in our behavior.

[1] Daniel Dennett most convincingly makes this argument in Consciousness Explained [Amazon link] when he explains that the act of writing is a kind of feedback loop in which one observes one’s own thoughts and thereby reflects on them in a manner not possible without media (in this case, the medium of language)

General Reference:
The Channel Mob

In all realms of thought, be it Science or Religion, we are endowed with the freedom of investigation.  And one of the most important tenants of investigation is that we do not necessarily believe what we are told. That we are told soemthing may be evidence of one kind, but we should know better than to take any of those statements at face value. To do less is to obey, and obey may be the most dangerous word in the human vocabulary, because it means that we reliquish ourselves of whatever free will we may have been granted. To obey a dogma or a doctrine is to alleviate ourselves of our inherent ability to assure ourselves of any truth by asking questions.

Ultimately, authority represents the relinquishment of the freedom of investigation.  It is the Jedi knight who waves his hand and says, “These are not the droids you are working for.”  And I would not deign to use a pop culture reference here if only for the fact that Obi-wan Knobi himself says that his Jedi mind-tricks work only on the weak-minded.  Do not be weak-minded.  And do not be opinionated.  It is not a strong mind that clings to the opinion, the assured, the lack of chance.  The strong-minded are not those who hold fast to ideas, but rather the open-minded and curious; those who are never sure of an answer, and so always have reason to question authority.

Authority wants something from you that you do not necessarily want for youself. Consider some religions that will happily tell you that “evil” people will go to hell, while you (who are never, apparently, evil) will go to heaven. The only evidence to be surmised here has nothing to do with souls or their arrival in a heaven or hell. It does, however, have everything to do with your inherent goodnes—something I am sure that you find suspect. This fact, that you might trust yourself less than the church does, could and should make you consider that your faith is not the church’s to give, if only because they do not know who you are. Why isn’t your faith, your faith a matter of your choice and investigation?

And this questioning of authority and the importance of trust in one’s own freedom to invesitgate brings me now to the topic de jour: did Senator Obama mean what he said about people “clinging” to religion and guns and anti-immigrant sentiment? I do not know and even if I were granted a personal audience with Senator Obama, I think I could not know. But I do know that religion can be arrived at by two different paths. One, we come to on our own out of a genuine need to wonder. The second we arrive at by keepers of the temples who tell us what to believe. It is right for those who believe to stand up and be counted among those who do not cling.  But is it truly fair to say that all Americans believe and do not cling?  It is not. There are many among us who, unwilling to investigate, refuse to question their chosen authority.  And in this act, they are no longer possessing of the inheritance of good Americans, our heroes and forefathers who questioned a God-ordained king and said that we could, ourselves, form a better government. There are, whether we like it or not, those of us who have chosen and those of us who cling—in all of Science, Religion, Politics or Philosophy. Only those who have chosen possess a modicum of free will and the rest are soldiers in a horribly dangerous army that fights for control—an objective that is the truth of evil and tyranny.

Chris Anderson makes the excellent point that the people complaining about intellectual property being treated as free are missing the fact that free does not equal valueless. I’ll agree with him there. But a simple economic fact that IP-based companies and industries are going to have to wake up to is that markets operate because of scarce resources. According to most neoinstitutional economic thought, people trade because what the other person has is of more value. In a nutshell, If I farm celery and you farm tomatoes, we’ll trade because each of our goods is more valuable to the other person. But there are two things under the sun that I can think of that are not (effectively) scarce resources on this planet. One is sunlight and the other is brains (and with them, ideas).

“No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.”

###Day 1 The Shit-storm Begins Almost Immediately.

It’s important to note that a large movement in the software industry today, generally referred to as the Open Source movement, is made up of a loose confederation of programmers who believe that the key to making software more reliable and more flexible is to make sure that the source code be available to any who wants to modify it and that once modified, that same source code be made publicly available. This movement has found friends in other arenas, namely among artists in the form of the Creative Commons group. The folks at Creative Commons are worried that too little art is escaping in to the public domain where it can be used freely and are attempting to create alternatives to the ubiquitous copyright notion that keeps anyone from using an artist’s work for what is becoming an increasingly long period of time.¹ So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that labeling these folks as communists ruffled a few feathers.

Some of the commentary on the CNET page itself was interesting, some of it vulgar. A lot of posts simply put in that Bill Gates was just ignorant of most of the movement’s real potential; some were far more insulting. One of the “lighter” comments to follow the article was this one from Robert Dean:

“If Bill really believes that the proponents of Intellectual Property Reform are communists, he’s stupid. I don’t believe he’s stupid. I think he wants to protect the revenue stream from Windows Media DRM, so he’s going to disparage anyone who would undermine the need for draconian DRM schemes.”

Day 2

The Meme Goes Graphic By the very next day, some of the larger pundits on the web had begun taking Mr. Gates to task for his statement, including Lawrence Lessig (of Electronic Frontier Foundation fame) who said in his blog entry “what a total (intellectual) disappointment this man is”. BoingBoing, one the first new blogs to gain a large audience, also jumped in and something began to brew when one of BoingBoing’s readers, Matt Bradley said, “Obviously, what we need is a large red flag with a gold copyleft in the upper left, replacing the hammer and sickle.”

So let’s look at the evolution of our meme so far. The copyleft term itself was derived from a series of events beginning with Richard Stallman’s creation of the GNU public license (the first software license to enforce the open source software philosophy) in 1984 and ending with the inclusion of line “Copyleft — all Wrongs reserved” in the code of TinyBasic. Generally it is believed that this is the first occurrence of the meme “copyleft” although there is some dispute. And the meme was applied to the copyright symbol in fairly short order. So while the copyleft meme had been around for a number of years, itself a mutation of the copyright meme, it had yet to be associated with communism in any fashion.

Here now we see a new permutation of the copyleft symbol, namely its incorporation into the flag of the Soviet Union — thus uniting the concept of copyleft with that of history’s most infamous communist organization. But even more permutations followed just the next day — an explosion of concepts not unlike the large and rapid evolutionary changes some times found in the fossil record.²

Other Related Blog Entries: http://www.sweetbirch.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=91#trackback

Day 3

What’s a Meme Without a T-shirt By Day 3, Ken Mickles of Giant Robot Printing had taken the newly formed meme and emblazoned it on a nice red t-shirt. Other individuals created shirts on Cafepress as well. Today, on Google, the search “‘creative communist’ or ‘creative commie’” returns 1800 results.³ The creative communist meme appears to be spreading quickly. Let’s hope it doesn’t go the way of the XFL.