Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

I grew up just outside of Boston. Boston is one of few places in the U.S. where people are from a very definite area, and you can hear it in their accent. New York may be like that too–certainly there are distinctive patterns of speech in Brooklyn and Queens–and not doubt a few places in the south, but in most parts of the U.S. people are from everywhere.

I recently saw Gone Baby Gone, and it does a great job of showing this. It was directed by Ben Affleck, who of course also grew up just outside of Boston. The movie was always set precisely where it was set, as opposed to some other movies which only used Boston as a stage (e.g., Blown Away, or Fever Pitch for all that it was centered on the Red Sox).

I thought Gone Baby Gone was a great movie for that alone. As a straight movie, I found it gripping and emotional but, in the end, overplotted. But the setting was really note perfect.

Also the supporting actors were excellent. The star, Casey Affleck, did a good job, but he always seemed to be what he was: a guy from Cambridge acting like a guy from Dorchester. Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman didn’t pretend to be from Boston, and the movie took the trouble to explain that. Michelle Monaghan’s background was never explained; I foune it unclear what she was doing there at all. But the supporting characters to be very well done.

Amy Ryan in particular was perfect. She really didn’t seem to be acting at all. She simply was a woman from Dorchester (though looking her up I see that she is actually from Queens). That was the most impressed I’ve been by an actor since Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener–although there he was obviously acting, albeit very well.

I still read a daily newspaper, but we all know that newspapers are in decline. Their circulations are dropping slowly but steadily. I haven’t seen any data on the average age of newspaper readers, but I’m sure it must be increasing. Over time newspapers will have fewer and fewer readers.

As technology advances, they will no doubt find different distribution mechanisms. Most newspapers are available on the web, of course, but reading articles on the web is not (yet) the same as reading them in the daily paper. And, of course, nobody has figured out how to get people to pay when reading on the web. I think the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are the last major newspapers to charge for web access; they do it by providing information of particular interest to people who need timely information. Most of us don’t need the information in the newspaper, at least not enough to overcome the mental hurdle of actually paying for it.

Newspapers have an important role in our social system: they provide in-depth timely information about what is happening. Television is an excellent source of breaking news, but terrible at in-depth information. Radio is no better when it comes to news. The Internet is significantly less reliable than newspapers, in that there is no editorial oversight and no punishment for being wrong. Magazines have a relatively slow publication schedule and are not timely (and the weekly news magazines are likely to be the next ones to go after newspapers, anyhow).

Is there any way to keep something like newspapers in existence? They will clearly have to switch to a different distribution mechanism; that will use fewer resources, and save them lots of money. That different mechanism has not yet been invented, but I’m confident that it will be. Some sort of smart paper would seem to be the best bet at present.

That still leaves them with the problem of supporting the large reporting staff which is required to do the job. People aren’t willing to pay to read newspapers on the web; would they be willing to pay to read them on smart paper? I don’t know; if smart paper exists, a lot of people will provide free information on it. Can newspapers still charge a fee in that case?

Perhaps a somewhat more radical approach could be found. I see two keys to a useful newspaper: a deep reporting staff with expertise in different subject areas and geographies, and a responsible editorial staff to maintain an independent perspective and to ensure that articles are high quality, relevant, and correct. There are plenty of people with the necessary skills and interest. The question is how to pay them for their work.

As I’ve written before, micropayments won’t work. Newspapers have a history of thriving on the patronage system, and we can’t rule that out in the future, but we also can’t count on it. Subscription fees I discussed above. Advertising is an obvious source of revenue; newspapers use it effectively today, but that too is decreasing. Newspapers once got much of their advertising money from classified ads; that entire market has been eliminated by the Internet. Is advertising enough to keep several newspapers thriving? (We want more than one, to avoid capture by the people and organizations they cover). I don’t know; I guess time will tell.

This is an instance of a general class of problems that are difficult in a capitalist system: if you have a good that has a small value to many people, but requires a large ongoing investment to create, it is difficult to aggregate payments from the many people to the single creator. Advertising works around the issue by finding a much smaller set of people who want to talk directly to all the users of the good. There ought to be another mechanism as well, but I don’t see it.

Larry Niven’s classic science fiction short story “All the Myriad Ways” points out a problem with the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: if there is no collapse of the quantum wave function, then all possibilities actually happen. That would seem to imply that we make all possible personal choices, including the really bad ones. This makes a mockery of our notions of free will, even worse than determinism: if we make all choices, then we really don’t exercise our will at all.

There is an obvious flaw in this argument: there is no particular reason to think that uncertainty at the quantum level leads to our making different choices. Most quantum events actually have no effect at the macroscopic level at which we live. If one entire molecule of oxygen tunnels across a room–an event which will occur at a vanishingly smal probability–nothing will change at the macroscopic level. And even if a bunch of molecules in my brain switch places, that doesn’t mean that I will change my mind about something.

Our actions are constrained by who we are. Quantum activity could conceivably make us into different people. It can’t make us be the same person who made a different decision.

Still, quantum mechanics in general, and the Many Worlds Interpretation in particular, pose some real philosophical problems. Unfortunately they don’t pose the problems addressed by science fiction novels about parallel worlds. The problems are more along the lines of what it is like to live in a world in which low probability events are not only possible but actually happen all the time.

Iain M. Banks, in his novel “The Algebraist,” argued that the only universal religion is one in which we assume that our universe is actually being simulated by an incomprehensibly large computer, and that our only meaningful goal is to try to reach the creator by proving that it really is a simulation. That seems as good a reason as any for why we never see low probability events in macroscopic universe: because the computer doesn’t bother to simulate them.

A few years ago, when my daughter was 2 years and 2 months old, my grandmother died. My daughter and I flew to Sweden for the funeral. As we were flying home, there was a blizzard in Boston, and our plane was diverted to Bangor, Maine. After we landed at Bangor, I told my daughter that we were probably going to have to leave the plane and take a bus to a hotel, and that we would not be home that day. However, as it turned out, the pilot announced that the weather in Boston had cleared sufficiently that we would be able to fly there. As she was listening to the announcement my daughter got very excited and started repeating “Papa was wrong!”

It’s hard to read the mind of a two-year-old. However, it seems to me that that was the first time that she had ever realized that I could be wrong. I think it helped her to learn to question authority, not merely in the sense of not doing what she was told, but in the sense of learning that nobody is always right.

Of course, questioning authority does not mean figuring everything out for yourself. After all, when most people believe that something is true, it usually is, in fact, true. While there are exceptions, our time on earth is too short to question everything. To me, questioning authority means to remember the sources for what you think you know. Believe in facts provisionally, with appropriate weights based on the source of the knowledge. If you know why you think something, then you have a much better idea of when it is appropriate to reconsider.

My daughter is probably still too young to fully grasp this. It requires a certain level of maturity and experience to understand how to weight beliefs appropriately. For young children in particular there are safety issues–children should not check for themselves whether crossing the street is dangerous. But I hope that her feelings on the plane already started her on the right path.

The New York Times ran an article today pointing out that in states with competitive electricity markets, rates are higher. Standard market ideology argues that when you have a competitive market, prices will always go down. However, this often fails to happen for utilities like electricity or water. Why doesn’t the market work?

First I should note that it always possible to do some special pleading to explain that the market really will work, but there are just some temporary problems. It’s possible that this special pleading is true. But I think there are some good reasons to think that some things simply aren’t amenable to market solutions.

People can’t survive in the modern world without water or electricity. They will pay any affordable price to receive it. The infrastructure is already built, in the form of water pipes and power lines. People can not meaningfully switch to an alternate provider.

Competition in the electricity market is normally done by making suppliers bid for the chance to sell their electricity. Electricity is purchased from the low bidders until enough is obtained. There aren’t very many suppliers. It takes a significant investment of money and time to become a new supplier.

Any market with inelastic demand and high barriers to entry is a recipe for big profits. Company managers are not rewarded for increasing market share. They are rewarded for increasing profits. In this kind of market there is little incentive to push prices as low as possible. It’s better for all concerned if prices are a little bit high. The high barriers to entry ensure that companies can follow this strategy for a long time without facing new competition. Enron showed an extreme case of this, as they manipulated the supply to keep California electricity prices high.

A longer term problem with utility deregulation is maintenance of the infrastructure. Companies have little incentive to spend heavily on infrastructure. Managers are rewarded for what they do this year, not for how the company performs fifteen years down the road. And since demand is inelastic, the companies can always charge more to fix the infrastructure later.

Markets really only work when it is easy for new suppliers to enter them, or when it is easy for customers to change suppliers, or when it is easy for customers to turn to a substitute. So why does anybody try to deregulate utilities? Is there a good argument other than market ideology?