A Partisan Nonpartisan Blog: Cutting Through Confusion Since 2012
This is a link to Rana Foroohar’s piece about Anat Admati in Time.
Anat is one of my heroes for her dogged advocacy in favor of the high equity requirements that will give us a stable financial system.
As you can see from the link above, for most people, it might not be that big a deal if paper currency were demoted, as I advocate in my column “How Subordinating Paper Money to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation." For those who actually use paper currency a lot, the system I advocate would help them financially because it would lead to lower inflation, and therefore a lower implicit tax on paper currency. And of course, other than those who use it for illegal purposes, those who use paper currency for a large share of their transactions are more likely to be borrowers than lenders, so they would benefit in the short run from the low interest rates possible when the safest interest rates are negative. And in the long run, they would benefit along with everyone else from a more stable economy.
Question: I can’t resolve a question I have about breaking the ZLB with electronic money, and it’s driving me nuts.
I re-read a couple of your posts that mention a kind of ‘first-mover’ advantage in breaking the zero lower bound: not only does a first-mover get the usual stimulus from lowering the interest rate, but the fact that it is the only country in the world that can offer such a low interest rate is likely to boost demand further.
I’m struggling with the effect on the supply of loanable funds within the first-moving country. Essentially, as the central bank lowers the interest rate, and economy-wide interest rates fall, won’t some investors begin to look abroad for better risk-reward alternatives? I know that it’s not costless or riskless to transfer to a different currency, but it seems that the central bank’s effectiveness in unilaterally changing interest rates would be hampered by the existence of outside options: either some interest rates will remain high or some agents will begin to 'cash out,’ if you’ll pardon the pun, and move their money abroad.
I hope it’s clear what I’m trying to ask. Would you help me figure out what I’m missing?
Answer: Great question. I am using logic from Mankiw’s textbook treatment of international finance, which I lay out in my post “International Finance: A Primer.”
Basically, when people start investing abroad because rates of return are higher abroad, that is a capital outflow, and that is why exports go up. Capital outflows put domestic currency in the hands of those abroad. They don’t really want it, so exchange rates adjust until that currency (whether physical or virtual) makes its way back to its home country to buy exports. “Moving money abroad” is a stimulus to exports, because goods follow money.
The only way an outside option would cause trouble is if firms starting setting prices and wages in a foreign currency. It is crucial that sticky prices and/or wages (or at least most of them) be set in terms of the electronic dollar (or whatever the domestic electronic currency unit is called).
In my electronic money seminar, I make the point that, when they occur, negative interest rates on paper currency are not meant to disadvantage paper currency. What those negative interest rates on paper currency do is make it so there is nowhere to hide from the negative interest rates except by spending the money. You can send your own funds abroad, but then the person who took your dollars in exchange for their own currency now can’t hide from the negative interest rates except by spending the dollars. In that situation, by sending dollars abroad, you haven’t eliminated the hot potato of dollars earning a negative interest rate from the world, you have only made it someone else’s problem. The only escape from those negative interest rates is to spend the money, so someone–you or someone further down the chain–will be driven to spend it.
Follow-up Question: Ok. In other words, this kind of behavior (bailing on the domestic currency) will just lead the exchange rate to adjust until some form of interest rate parity is achieved again. Is that the right?
Answer: No. There might continue to be an interest rate difference. But the international flow of funds to the higher interest rate stimulates exports through its effect on the exchange rate.
Here is the key passage, but the whole thing is eminently worth reading:
What actually happened in the 80s, however, was that central banks — most famously the Fed, but also the Thatcherite Bank of England and others — drastically tightened monetary policy to bring inflation down. And inflation did indeed come down — eventually. But along the way there were deep recessions and soaring unemployment, which went on much longer than you could justify with any plausible story about the monetary shock being unanticipated.
This was very much a vindication of more or less Keynesian views about the economy, and the 80s were in fact marked by the New Keynesian comeback.
Models in which human beings are always maximizing their utility perfectly are the simplest kinds of models. But it is hard to maintain that children are always maximizing their own utility perfectly. In a discrete-time model, it is easy to have an initial period in which someone is not nonrational, followed by later periods of full rationality. But In continuous time, there are likely to be an in-between period in which some types of decisions are close to full rationality, while other decisions are far from fully rational in advancing self-interest. (For example, this post on the Edutopia blog talks about the “hyperrational adolescent brain,” but is about anything but.)
In On Liberty, Chapter IV, “Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual” paragraph 4, John Stuart Mill has to face the lack of full-scale rationality on the part of children, using the phrase “self-regarding virtues” to talk about the kind of rationality that allows one to advance one’s own interest. He writes:
I am the last person to undervalue the self-regarding virtues; they are only second in importance, if even second, to the social. It is equally the business of education to cultivate both. But even education works by conviction and persuasion as well as by compulsion, and it is by the former only that, when the period of education is past, the self-regarding virtues should be inculcated. Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. They should be for ever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading, objects and contemplations. But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.
Notice that in American custom, we tend to add to the kind of deference John is recommending for another adult’s decisions in regard to that adult’s own life, a deference for a parent’s decisions in regard to that parent’s own children. But the logic is unavoidably weaker for deference to parent’s decisions about their own children than it is for an adult’s decisions regarding his or her own life.
One interesting area where our culture is shifting in regard to parent’s decisions about their own children is in our attitudes towards spanking. When I was a child, we children took the possibility of spanking (including many elaborated threats of spanking) and sometimes the reality of being spanked for granted. Not long into my experience as a father myself, I realized that social tolerance of spanking was waning. And nowadays, parents who spank their children often have a niggling, if perhaps exaggerated, fear that child-welfare arms of the government (“Social Services”) will punish them.
John Stuart Mill allows for the possibility that compulsion might be necessary in bringing up children. And I find it hard to rule out the possibility that there may be situations in which some form of corporal punishment for a child may be the best available option. But compulsion (of which corporal punishment is only one type) should only be used when absolutely necessary, since it tends to have unwanted side effects. For example, in “John Stuart Mill Argues Against Punishing or Stigmatizing, but For Advising and Preaching to People Who Engage in Self-Destructive Behaviors,” I wrote
…punishing and stigmatizing may often be ineffective because the elements of a riven psyche one wants to encourage may have trouble seeing a punisher or stigmatizer as friendly.
“Money is the most powerful secular force in the world. … Money is linked to everything–safety, health, relationships, creativity and spontaneity, social belonging. It’s the one thing that intersects everything, and as soon as I’m talking about money, all the family dynamics come out.”
– Brad Klontz, author of Mind Over Money, as quoted in Clutch by Paul Sullivan, p. 196
Maryam MIrzakhani, First Women to Win the Fields Medal
Going beyond the usual news articles such as these two,
Quanta magazine gives a more in-depth treatment of the the work of the first woman to win a Fields Medal, which is aptly described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics:
I know about this article thanks to Mary O'Keeffe’s Facebook post on my wall. Mary points out that Maryam describes herself as pursuing what I have called “slow-cooked math” (most recently in my Quartz column “How to turn every child into a ‘math person’”):
Mirzakhani likes to describe herself as slow. Unlike some mathematicians who solve problems with quicksilver brilliance, she gravitates toward deep problems that she can chew on for years. 'Months or years later, you see very different aspects’ of a problem, she said. There are problems she has been thinking about for more than a decade. 'And still there’s not much I can do about them,’ she said.
Mirzakhani doesn’t feel intimidated by mathematicians who knock down one problem after another. 'I don’t get easily disappointed,’ she said. 'I’m quite confident, in some sense.
Her slow and steady approach also applies to other areas of her life.
Reblogged from econlolcats:
Things are gonna get better.
I have a few thoughts about the J-curve in International Finance. The idea is that the medium-run supply and demand elasticities with respect to the exchange rate are higher than the short-run elasticities. So in an era of deprecations within a fixed-exchange-rate regime, that would mean that the quantities of exports and imports would at first respond less than the prices, but later on the quantities would move more, so the value of net exports would go down right after the depreciation, but later go up.
Here is my question. Think of a flexible-exchange-rate regime in which capital flows are determined by what people want to do with their portfolios, as I describe in my post “International Finance.” Then, if the domestic central bank cuts interest rates and people want to shift toward foreign assets, that intentional capital outflow plus any unintentional capital flow plus any other flows of funds across borders that are not associated with the purchase of goods and services internationally (such as remittances) has to equal net exports. There might be a short time when unintentional capital flows cancel out some of the intentional flows, but it seems to me that in a flexible-exchange-rate regime, pretty soon net exports have to match those intentional capital flows. So the prediction would be that the low short-run elasticities of imports and exports would show up in a bigger movement in the exchange rate in the short run than in the medium run. Of course there are some risky arbitrage possibilities with that kind of movement. But do we see such a quickly-reverting pattern for exchange rates anyway? It certainly seems like exchange rates move an awful lot in the short run.
An interesting case is when the short-run price elasticity of net exports is less than one. (Note how different that is from gross exports or gross imports having an price elasticity less than one.) If depreciation means less of the local currency gets spent on net exports, then net exports can’t equilibrate with a fixed level of capital outflow. What I think would have to happen in the short run is that the initial capital outflow causes a drastic enough decline in the value of the domestic currency that the financial market rethinks the initial intentional capital outflow. That is, someone needs to see the domestic currency as so cheap they want to move their portfolio into it. It may take a very large depreciation before that is the case. Does that story make sense?
Here is a link to my 52d column on Quartz, “How to turn every child into a ‘math person.’”
In the companion post below, I have collected a few memories, ideas and suggestions that had to be cut out of the Quartz column to make the column flow well. I added some headings to make it clear where each bit fits in:
I spent at least as much time on math when I wasn’t supposed to be doing math as when I was: The teacher might have been talking about social studies, but I was finding the prime factorizations of all the numbers from 1 to 400 by writing “2 ×” for every other number “3 ×” for every third number, “5 ×” for every fifth number, etc.–and then repeating that process for every other even number, every third multiple of 3, every fifth multiple of 5, and so on). The prime factorizations I learned from that satisfyingly tedious task I distracted myself with in elementary school came in handy when I took my SAT’s. And to this day, the way I get a hotel room number firmly into my memory is by doing its prime factorization.
Nothing seemed like a failure: At one point I knew just enough algebra to know that doing the same thing to both side of an equation left it a true equation. So for a long time, I transformed equations endlessly with no idea at all of where I was trying to go with those equations. Later on, when I actually had a purpose in mind for what I wanted to accomplish with a bit of algebra, I was able to draw on all of that experience just wandering around in algebra-land. And because I knew what it was like to do math without having any particular objective, I was able to appreciate how important it was keep the objective clearly in mind when there was an objective.
Proofs on other topics to get kids ready for proofs in Geometry class: Many kids who do well with arithmetic and algebra have trouble with geometry class in middle school or high school. It is often very hard to understand the idea of a proof when can’t see any reason to doubt the proposition to be proved in the first place. It is much better to get kids used to the idea of a proof earlier on in a context where the proof tells them something that doesn’t seem obvious. My favorite is the proof that there are an infinite number of primes. (There is a whole page of Youtube videos to choose from on this.) And a lot of kids wonder if imaginary numbers are numbers at all. The proof that complex numbers with an imaginary components obey all the rules of arithmetic and algebra and therefore can be treated as legitimate numbers not only answers a question kids really have, but uses concepts from “The New Math” that confused many kids in the 1960’s in a way that is obviously useful.
Math resources I found useful:
Resources to check out that might be good but that I don’t have any experience with:
Note: if you want to advertise your tool or method for math instruction here, I encourage you to advertise it in a comment that you post in the comment box below. When I moderate the comments, I will approve comments that advertise tools or methods for math instruction like that unless I have reason to believe there is something wrong with that tool or method.
This is the text for my August 10, 2014 Unitarian-Universalist sermon to the Community Unitarian-Universalists in Brighton, Michigan. This is the seventh Unitarian-Universalist sermon I have posted. The others are
This is the second sermon I have given that I have known in advance I would post. I wrote it with my online readers in mind as well as the Unitarian Universalists in Brighton.
For the Unitarian-Universalist “Celebration of Life” service, the text for the “reading” was “Moment” by Wisława Szymborska, while the text for the meditation was my "Daily Devotional for the Not-Yet.“
Here is the abstract I wrote a few weeks in advance for the sermon, followed by the sermon itself:
Abstract: The mystery of consciousness is central to religion. Many religions even claim that consciousness is supernatural.
A major job-to-be-done for religion is improving our conscious experience. In particular, much of what seems transcendent to us is in conscious experience, and encouraging certain types of subjective spiritual experiences is a central part of many religions.
Although we care deeply about our own conscious experience, it is not the only thing we care about. Most of us also care about the conscious experience of others, and some of us care about the state of external reality even apart from any difference in conscious experience.
I once read a book by the philosopher Colin McGinn called The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. True to the title’s claim that consciousness is a mystery, I felt no wiser about the nature of consciousness when I got to the end of the book than when I started. But I like the image of consciousness as a flame. The symbol of Unitarian Universalism is a flaming chalice; it is easy to see that flaming chalice as in part a symbol of the flame of consciousness.
Conciousness makes possible our perception of beauty, goodness and truth. Beauty, goodness and truth make up the trio of ideas Renaissance Humanists identified as central to the Plato’s philosophy. In his distillation “I think, therefore I am,” René Descartes emphasized the quest for truth as a demonstration of consciousness, but the appreciation of beauty and the judgment of goodness are equally hallmarks of consciousness.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins begins his book Unweaving the Rainbow with these beautiful words about death and life and the consciousness we are granted by life:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
But it is a broader theme of his book Unweaving the Rainbow that I want to talk about: beautiful and wonderful things are just as beautiful and wonderful even when we understand them. We do get a thrill from secrets and suspense, since it gives us the hope that something might be even more awe-inspiringly beautiful, wonderful or interesting than it really is, but apart from that illusion, there is no reason for understanding to destroy beauty. A rose is still a rose, even if you know that the softness of a rose petal comes from its papilla cells. And a rose with any degree of understanding of its biochemistry would smell as sweet. I want to see if I can’t demystify consciousness a bit, but then point to the preeminent value of improving both our own conscious experience and the conscious experience of others.
Some people are horrified by the idea that according to a standard nonsupernaturalist worldview, you and I are very sophisticated robots. But on the principle that a rose is still a rose, even if you understand the science of roses, if we are robots, then robots are not necessarily robotic. Our notion of "robotic” comes from our experience with relatively simple robots, not our experience with very sophisticated robots such as you and me.
Among the things that make human beings amazing is our consciousness. That consciousness is often pointed to as evidence of the supernatural. The argument is the challenge “How could such a wondrous thing arise from nonsupernatural, mechanical causes?” In the one computer programming class I took in college, back in 1981, one of the assignments was to write code for Conway’s Game of Life. Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton based on extremely simple, mechanical rules, but it can do many things lifelike enough to justify the name of the game.
Here is how simple the rules are: on a chessboard with many, many squares, “live” squares are in black and dead squares are in white. At each tick of the game’s clock (the Game of Life’s third dimension), the following transitions happen (see the Wikipedia article on Conway’s Game of Life):
Here are a few examples from the Wikipedia article on Conway’s Game of Life of what can come from these extremely simple rules:
Blinker:
Toad:
Beacon:
Pulsar:
Light-Weight Space Ship:
Glider:
Gliders can be Created by Gosper’s Glider Gun:
I first got an inkling of the philosophical importance of Conway’s Game of Life when I read Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which, more than any other book, tugged me toward being a nonsupernaturalist. In his earlier book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will WorthWanting, Daniel Dennett talks about something being inevitable or unavoidable as the opposite of free will. He argues that any creature that can avoid something therefore has at least the most rudimentary imaginable form of free will. Animals avoid many things, and so have a bit of capability for voluntary action. But there are also creatures in Conway’s Game of Life that can avoid some of the moving objects coming at them. So by that standard those patterns of black and white squares also have a bit–though a much smaller bit–of capability for voluntary action.
To my human eye, so eager to interpret things in terms of intentions, even a simple blinker seems full of intention. And if Game of Life blinkers, toads, beacons, pulsars, spaceships, gliders and glider guns enchant, intrigue and amaze me, how much more enchanting, intriguing and amazing are human beings.
Not everyone is a fan of Daniel Dennett’s argument that the existence of avoiders in Conway’s Game of Life means that determinism does not imply inevitability. Aaron Swartz says it all rests on a pun between unavoidable and inevitable, which really have two very different meanings. But that depends on what kind of inevitability you care about. The idea that things are in some sense inevitable at the fundamental particle level (which is consistent with at least some interpretations of quantum mechanics) is interesting, but otherwise makes no difference in my life. To me the key fact is that at the human scale bad things can be avoided and good things can be pursued. And if even an avoider in Conway’s Game of Life can avoid things, then maybe we as individuals and as a species can avoid possible catastrophes that might overtake us if we didn’t take care. Acting as if the hand of fate makes it impossible for us to steer our path toward better things is just a way of substituting a stupid deterministic process for a smart deterministic process of trying to predict the consequences of our actions and modifying them accordingly. We are fortunate that for the most part, deterministic processes have favored our being smart in seeing that we have what Daniel Dennett calls a “variety of free will worth wanting,” that we need to exercise carefully.
Let’s now turn to consciousness proper. Consciousness does seem magical. So I have felt some temptation to think that while a sophisticated robot can act as if it is conscious, it can’t really be conscious. “I feel, therefore I am really conscious.” So suppose there was a robot that was an exact copy of me in terms of its quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons, etc. that could only pretend to be conscious, while only I would actually be conscious, since only I would have a supernatural spirit attached to me. Either the supernatural spirit has an effect on the quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons etc. in my body or not. If it does have an effect on those quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons etc., then that effect of that supernatural spirit on fundamental particles should be detectable by the extremely sensitive instruments used by physicists. (Of course, if there is a supernatural realm that is intentionally trying to hide itself, then all bets are off.)
What about the possibility that the supernatural spirit attached to me has no effect on the quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons, etc. of my body, but is what really feels the experiences that my body is going through? The trouble is that, however hard it is for us, and however much we might claim that things are inexpressible, we actually talk about our conscious experiences, and seem to understand to at least some extent what we are saying to each other in that regard. What that means is that if there are supernatural spirits that feel, but have no effect on our bodies, that extra bit of consciousness is not the consciousness we are talking about. We speak and write and talk in sign language with our bodies. So a supernatural consciousness would have to be able to affect the quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons etc. of our bodies in order for us to be talking about it.
The implication that a supernatural spirit would have to have some effect on the quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons, etc. of our bodies is even stronger if the supernatural spirit was supposed to be the source of free will. The Mormonism I was raised in was and is quite anti-alcohol. For a supernatural free decision of my spirit to make the difference between me walking into a bar or resisting the temptation and walking past it, that supernatural spirit has to be able to either directly or indirectly affect some of the particles known to physicists enough to cause a neurochemical/neuroelectrical cascade to go one way as opposed to another. Even if that were by a subtle change in quantum-mechanical probabilities, the kind of diligent efforts that convinced the world of the existence of the Higgs boson could detect an effect big enough to do that.
Does that mean there is no such thing as spirit? Not at all. Daniel Dennett points out that there are two very different categories of things: matter/energy and information. Information can be embedded in matter/energy in many, many different ways. For example, the genetic code can be embedded in DNA, RNA, or in the bits and bytes of computer code that store the results of the Human Genome project and its sister projects to sequence the genomes of Neanderthals, Chimpanzees, Horses, Cows, Honeybees, and Grapes. So, body and spirit can be interpreted as matter/energy and information. And surely, the information embedded in human beings is what makes us precious. The unorganized elements alone of which we are composed is little more than a handful of dust. In that sense, by value, human beings are spirit, even with a totally non supernatural view of things.
It is clear that consciousness operates on the spiritual, information side of the ledger. It may be embedded and written in matter, but it is its own thing.The same can be said for free will. It may be embedded in matter and energy and operate according to the laws of physics, but 99.99% of what makes free will of special value is all on the spiritual, information side of things.
The fact that we humans are spiritual beings who care deeply about the informational side of things is one of the most important things about us.
Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. I am drawing my account from the Wikipedia article on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s idea was that there are some very basic needs that usually need to be satisfied before we start focusing on other needs, that Maslow represented as being at a higher level. At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs, such as breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis and excretion. At the next level up are safety needs, such as security of body, security of employment, security of resources, security of the family, security of health and security of property. At the third level up the pyramid are love and belonging needs, such as friendship, family, and sexual intimacy. Above that are esteem needs, such as self-esteem, confidence, achievement, and respect of and by others. Finally, at the top of the pyramid are self-actualization needs such as morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, and facing the truth, even when the truth is hard to bear or goes against one of our prejudices.
Notice that, in general, as you go up Maslow’s hierarchy, things move markedly toward the spiritual, informational side of things. Love and belonging needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs all seem equally spiritual to me in this sense, but those all seem more spiritual than safety needs, which in turn are obviously more spiritual than immediate physiological needs, since judgments of safety require trickier thinking about the future than immediate physiological needs do.
Touched by commerce, but in very much the same vein, there has been a trend toward more and more of an informational content to Gross Domestic Product–GDP–in the process of rich countries getting richer. We can define what is informational by whether something can be sent as an electronic file, or in the olden days, as the contents of a document. By that standard, I am not counting agriculture as an informational component of GDP–at least not in those days when agricultural products used to make up the bulk of GDP. After the period when agriculture dominated GDP, came the rise of manufacturing. Then came the rise of services. And now we see the rise of information goods proper: software, digital music, digitized videos, computer games, Kindle books, mobile apps and communications, the cloud, including the blogosphere and online social networks, and things we are barely beginning to get an inkling of. But so far, the way we compute GDP does a bad job at counting up the true value of information goods. For example, so far, the value to you of anything you can read or see free online when surfing the web isn’t counted in GDP at all, though the value to advertisers of influencing you with online ads is counted according to their willingness to pay for advertising. And the way economists now calculate GDP is even worse at measuring the transformations of human existence that I think are coming next.
Looking forward to the future of cultures fortunate enough to collectively provide more and more opportunities and choices for people–which in economics is the deeper meaning of “getting richer”–I see people wanting in turn food, clothing, shelter and physical security, and of course basic family relationships, then refrigerators, cars, washing machines, indoor plumbing and then the books, movies, radio shows, TV shows etc., that become progressively digitized. Now, I think the big thing people want next, if they have all of those things with some level of security, is an interesting, challenging, rewarding job, with good coworkers. But after that, I think people will turn in earnest toward improving the quality of their own consciousness and the consciousness of others they care about more directly.
It is easier to be happy if you understand how happiness works. And social scientists are beginning to understand better the things that go into happiness: things like good news, sleep, exercise, time with friends, meditation and antidepressants.
Antidepressants are an easy way to get happier, and many people quite appropriately take advantage of them. In the surprisingly distinct spiritual realm of pain and pain reduction, I have been very glad for ibuprofen in the 13 days since my dentist replaced a crown, with all of the disturbance of the roots of my tooth that entailed.
Meditation is a path to raising happiness and otherwise improving the quality of one’s consciousness that I think people will turn to more and more in the future as the other things on their wish list besides quality of consciousness get checked off as attained. In my own household, we do a little bit of Transcendental Meditation and a fair bit of Mindfulness Meditation, as well as meditations based on words.
But meditation is part of a larger class of spiritual exercises that have powerful effects on consciousness. With the Dalai Lama’s encouragement, Tibetan monks have been scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging machines while meditating. Just google “Tibetan monks MRI” to learn about the fascinating results. I would love to see the result from Mormons praying sincerely in MRI machines as well. And I think most religions have some spiritual practice that powerfully affects consciousness. My bet is that, by and large, each changes consciousness in a different way, that would show up differently on the brain scans. I don’t think all religious experience is one experience. It is many, many different experiences.
Internal spiritual experience is a more important strength to religions than many sociologists of religion give it credit for. People value religious community a lot. But it is not uncommon for people to demonstrate by their actions that they value internal spiritual experience–both for themselves and others–even more.
A key moment in my transition away from Supernaturalism was when a friend who was also a Mormon pointed out that subjective spiritual experiences–even subjective spiritual experiences that fulfilled in a striking way a prediction by Mormon scripture–didn’t necessarily mean that there was a supernatural God out there in the universe. What it did mean was that there were remarkable and powerful spiritual experiences here on earth. I am glad I had those spiritual experiences as a Mormon, even though I no longer believe they were supernatural. Not only for the sake of curiosity, but also because the feelings themselves seem valuable, I have an ongoing, though slow-going, project of trying to investigate how close I can get to those spiritual states without having to believe things that I now don’t believe.
My friend Andrew Oswald, who like me does a lot of research on the Economics of Happiness, believes that essentially everything we value can be thought of as some kind of internal mental state. I wouldn’t go quite that far. Most of us at least care quite a bit about the internal mental states of those we love, as well. Many of us care about the internal mental states of animals. And some of us care about things being a certain way in the external world even if no human being could ever know for sure that it was so–and don’t want to be deceived about whether it is so. Nevertheless, internal mental states are a very big part of what we value. And that is as it should be for spiritual beings like us.
People often say “Don’t be so materialistic.” But as I see it, that isn’t the big issue. It isn’t “You shouldn’t be so materialistic,” it’s “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are more materialistic than you really are.” One of the great values of a religious community is having someone to remind us that we are spiritual beings, whether we like it or not, and even if our spirits could not exist without being etched into patterns of quarks, electrons, Higgs bosons and the other particles and forces we are in the process of discovering, governed by equations that will someday be in every truly advanced physics textbook.
This piece is interesting in its own right, but I was also happy to see that Paul Krugman flagged my post “Contra John Taylor” again. The earlier occasion was Paul’s piece “Calvinist Monetary Economics.”
Paul also flagged me one other time, when I critiqued John Taylor and his coauthors on another related count. Here is that Krugman post: “Stimulus Derangement Syndrome."
The idea for this column emerged during my trip to Rome, when I talked to Luigi Guiso about the economic and political situation in Italy. I wanted to thank him for all of his insights. Don’t construe that as his endorsement of my proposal, though!
Since soon after I started blogging, I have used Twitter extensively, and have put tweets from Twitter discussions together into “stories” using Storify. I have been surprised at how many views some of these stories have gotten. (A couple of my stories are popular enough that they could have made it into my list of most popular posts.) So I decided to systematically see which ones have been most popular (starting by leaving aside anything with less than 200 views). Here is the result. I cover a lot of topics in Tweets that I don’t have time to write full-scale blog posts on, so I think you will find something of interest in this list of my top 37 Storify stories. And many of my favorite stories didn’t manage to get 200 views yet in order to make this list. You can find all of my stories here.
Here is the list of my most popular sets of storified tweets with links, and the number of views as of August 5, 2014 next to each link:
Reblogged from econlolcats:
Everyone’s a critic. By MichaelH.
“Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven’t half the strength you think they have.”
