Realizing Resonance : Realizing Resonance | Futurist Philosophy Blog

Thorstein Veblen's Economics of Wealth and Leisure

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 17:41:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

It has been more than a century since Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class shook the foundation of America’s elite culture and upended the assumptions behind the virtues of wealth. His economic and social commentary on the decadence and profligate excesses of the Gilded Age may be as relevant in 2014 as it was 1899, considering that America is just now climbing out of its worst economic catastrophe since President Hoover resided in the White House, a dire situation for most, but one in which the wealthy did just fine. Even more relevant is how Veblen’s critique on the values of extreme wealth pertains to the recent emergence of wealth and income inequality to the economic and political dialogue. The short-lived Occupy Wall Street movement did succeed in making economic inequality a continuing focus of debate, with talk about the 1% versus the 99% inspiring powerful people, such as President Obama and Pope Francis, to speak of a return to Nobles Oblige. Thorstein Veblen presents an earlier American incarnation of these concerns.

Before propelling into Veblen’s economic contributions, it is helpful to reveal his peculiar biography. So peculiar in fact, that some have considered Veblen’s unusual background an explanation for his odd economic ideas as the neurosis of an “interned immigrant”, and suggested that if he had been still living by the 1950s, “his friends would…urge him to contact a psychoanalyst” (Diggins 220). He was born in 1857 Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrants, the fourth son of six children. He grew up in a foreign enclave in rural Minnesota and, disconnected from the typical American upbringing, he learned English only as a second language and spent his time avoiding household responsibilities in order to read incessantly. His family lived a rustic lifestyle in which they wore handmade clothes to work in the field. It was from just such work that a seventeen year old Thorstein was sent off to the religious Carlton College by his father without any forewarning, and with the hope that he would enter the Lutheran ministry.

Veblen was not one destined for the ministry. His interests were directed toward anthropology, sociology and economics. It was in the last subject that he studied under the marginalist economist John Bates Clark, who put forward a theory that wealth distribution was based on the law of diminishing returns to one’s productivity (Brue 265). It was also here that Thorstein met his wife Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the school’s President (Heilbroner 223). Veblen’s penchant for riling feathers began early when he caused a stir by giving controversial addresses with titles like, “Plea for Cannibalism” and “Apology for a Toper” (Diggins 34). After Carlton he spent some time at John Hopkins before obtaining his doctorate in philosophy from Yale. It was not until 1892 that Veblen landed his first job at the University of Chicago, in the year that it opened. In the middle of his 14 years at the school he published his seminal work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which turned him into something of an academic celebrity.

Despite Professor Veblen’s notorious intellect, his teaching skills were horrendous. He lectured in a quiet and mumbling voice. All his students received a grade of C regardless of their performance, and he once explained to an exasperated student, “My grades are like lightning, they are liable to strike anywhere.” (Diggins 167) Throughout his teaching career his fame attracted prospective pupils, but his dreary methods drove most of them away before they could complete the semester. However, he did make an impression on some of his students like Wesley Clair Mitchell, who went on to further the ideas of the new school of institutional economics that Veblen initiated (Diggins 168). The most unfortunate aspect of Veblen’s behavior in academia was not his teaching habits, but his infidelity. His disreputable philandering would cause him to eventually divorce his wife, but not before he lost his job at the University of Chicago (Heilbroner 241). More schools and more controversies such as these would be the story of his life, so to speak. But other chapters, such as volunteering for government service during World War I, and his last days as a hermit in the hills of Palo Alto who allowed the rats and skunks free reign of his cabin, add color to this most intriguing man’s story.

Thorstein Veblen contributed several novel ideas to economic thought, often including elements of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. His colorful and elucidating term, “conspicuous consumption” is still in the popular lexicon today. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, he incriminates most of society by satirically accusing them of unproductive and wasteful behavior to one extent or another. In his The Theory of the Business Enterprise, he illustrates the modern capitalists’ pattern of interference with industry, relating this behavior back to primitive mannerisms of a predatory nature. In Engineers and the Price System, he addresses the problems caused by the owners of capital being disconnected from the managers who put it to use. Each of these works has some relevance to the global economic drama that has been unfolding during the Great Recession.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen sets the tone by first illustrating the pre-historical succession from savage to barbarian culture, and then determining that the latter stage’s characteristics were still reflected in the men of modern capitalist society. Barbarian civilizations, whether ancient or modern, set them apart from the earlier peaceful communes of savage society, by their propensities to warring and predation, resulting in the appearance of a dominant leisure class. The transition to this new social order is made possible, and perhaps inevitable, by the innovations that allow a community to produce beyond the minimum subsistence level. Once this happens, an exclusive clique of men develops. This elite cadre practices cunning and deceit in order to redistribute the fruits of other people’s productive labor into their own hands, while simultaneously creating such envy in the middle and lower classes that these lesser groups aspire to the same un-industrious lifestyle. The institution of ownership springs from the same forces that allow the leisure class to form.

The modern barbarian society is a property oriented culture, thus the accumulation of possessions is priority number one for the leisure class. Since this privileged group, by virtue of their envious position, sets the agenda, the working class tends to parrot them. “Pecuniary emulation” is Veblen’s term for this behavior. He indicates that a major source of this conduct is due to the pressures of “invidious comparison”, a “process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.” The instinctual pride of workmanship is therefore suppressed in the environment of private property because it can no longer garner the esteem of others the way that building wealth can. So as soon as societies emerge from a subsistence regime, the surplus produce generated has the effect of causing individuals to compete for the highest share of it due to the respect and admiration it brings from others. It is this reverence from peers that we ultimately desire.

In order for invidious comparisons to be made individuals must find ways to demonstrate their wealth. Veblen cited two major methods to this end, “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption”. The leisure class appears because it is a sign of richness to abstain from laborious work. Employment diverges into two broad categories in Veblen’s analysis; productive work is the ideal occupation of humans, but it is now reserved for those of lowly status, while the honorable employments of the upper echelon are those of a predatory nature. Politicians, soldiers, business men, and even clergy fit the latter category, according to Veblen. Conspicuous consumption expresses pecuniary emulation even more so than leisure, because the working classes engage in “wasteful” expenditures in an attempt to appear wealthy, even when their employments are not of the leisurely persuasion. Extravagant dress, gluttonous banquets, grand mansions, and hand-crafted silver utensils are all examples of conspicuous consumption. Any item that is without a productive function, or that has a price well above what is indicated by its practical utility alone, constitutes a good that is valued predominantly for the social capital that it brings.

Veblen contends that the institution of ownership began when predatory men began claiming women as possessions, then slaves of both sexes. The fruits of servant labor were reposed by these men, and this is the most primitive form of capital formation. The vestiges of chattel remained in the trophy wives and household servants of the wealthy men of the Gilded Age, and Veblen is an early advocate of women’s rights. He suggests that the barbarian institution of subjugation is alive and well when it came to women in his time, and this treatment was not limited to the rich. The historical reason for this behavior is simply that men were much more aggressive and better at fighting, and took advantage of this fact. Besides the obvious lack of suffrage, Veblen reduces various aspects of female culture to “vicarious consumption” and “vicarious leisure”. From fashion and jewelry to being excused from gainful employment, the women at the end of the 19th century made excellent props for displaying a man’s pecuniary success.

Thorstein Veblen’s criticism of America’s most sacred institutions does not stop with wealth and consumption. In 1904, he published The Theory of the Business Enterprise, which among other things addresses the accusation in his first book that business men are predatory rather than productive. The accumulation of money is the sole purpose of the capitalist. However, business in Adam Smith’s era was truly industrious and capital actually did consist of actual goods and equipment. Capital, by the early 20th century, has become the intangible goods of credit and goodwill, which are lost in a morass of absentee ownership. According to Veblen, there is a disconnection between the industrial “machine process”, which is productive and good for the community, and the actions of the business men who have found that the best way to make money is to game the system by exploiting the volatility in markets and industry that they themselves are in a position to create. He writes:

“The economic welfare of the community at large is best served by a facile and uninterrupted interplay of the various processes which make up the industrial system at large; but the pecuniary interests of the business men in whose hands lies the discretion in the matter are not necessarily best served by an unbroken maintenance of the industrial balance…To the business man who aims at a differential gain arising out of interstitial adjustments or disturbances of the industrial system, it is not a material question whether his operations have an immediate furthering or hindering effect upon the system at large. The end is pecuniary gain, the means is disturbance of the industrial system, - except so far as the gain is sought by the old-fashioned method of permanent investment in some one industrial or commercial plant[.]” (Veblen 1904)

The widespread use of credit to finance business, including loans, stocks and deferred payments, is what drives business cycles, Veblen argues. Credit necessarily becomes ubiquitous because it provides an advantage over competitors by financing expansion. In fact it is a potentially ruinous move to forgo the use of credit in business. The more financial capital that is made available for loans the quicker the increase in investment, followed by the inevitable speculation as a product of greedy anticipation. However, economic growth of this fashion is short lived because inevitably the extenders of credit, who only want a return on investment, will lend so much that the capital produced will outpace the earnings expectations on it. Once investors realize that they risk losses due to overextension in the market, they will liquidate their positions causing a chain reaction of deflation, inventory reductions, fire sales, credit freezes, defaults and consolidations. Veblen determines that the natural course of the economy is declining profits, but strangely enough he makes the case that wasteful consumption and monopolistic limitations on production could stave this off.

The ultimate solution to the vicious business man and the plague of capitalism would not be a Marxian working class revolution, although Veblen was eager for the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia. His theories suggest that Marx was wrong in his belief that the lower classes could maintain a proletariat government because a leisure class, or bourgeoisie equivalent, would remain in place regardless. Only the particular individuals on the top would change, because men could not resist pecuniary emulation as long as there were possessions to be had. His answer was a “soviet of technicians”, and he made this case in his 1921 work, The Engineers and the Price System. Engineers are the best hope for humanity, because they are devoted to workmanship and the smooth operation of the machine process, rather than self interest.

Veblen also trampled all over such Neoclassical School assumptions as the laws of demand and marginal utility. In his 1909 essay, “The Limitations of Marginal Utility”, he derides his former teacher John Bates Clark’s theory of distribution, based on diminishing marginal utility, as a static model that could not explain the growth and change that takes place in the real economy. The assumption that economic behavior is just rational hedonism frustrates Veblen and he argues that this misses the important role of intangible cultural institutions on consumers, which cause them to modify their behavior in relation to each other. Veblen’s legacy in this regard may not be considered very substantial considering the fact that the Neoclassical approach to economics is part of mainstream thinking today, while typical university classes on the subject are resoundingly silent on the implications of invidious comparison and pecuniary emulation. However, his theories inspired a few well known predecessors, like John Kenneth Galbraith, who served in the Kennedy administration and shared Veblen’s concerns about absentee ownership (Brue, Grant 388), and Wesley Clair Mitchell, an acolyte of Veblen who advocated empirical research for testing theories. (Brue, Grant 384) Veblen’s Institutional School still exists today, even if it has been relegated to a heterodox classification, like the Austrian School and Marxism.

The Theory of the Leisure Class, as well as his subsequent works, propelled Veblen to the status of superstar iconoclast, so it’s no surprise that not everyone was on board with his unconventional notions of wealth, consumption, and the status of women. Henry Louis Mencken was Thorstein Veblen’s most critical contemporary, when the latter’s ideas were still in vogue. Mencken complained in 1918 that, “everybody who was anybody began gabbling about him” and that he “dominated the American scene.” (Diggins 212) He contends that Veblen’s description of ownership is a “wraith of balderdash” (Diggins 161), and specifically targets what he considers to be the Achilles heel of the leisure class argument. The idea that men posses their women in modern society is preposterous, according to Mencken, because the examples of this provided by Veblen, like a husband forbidding his wife to drink alcohol, were due to a man’s sentimental desire to protect his wife from actions that would debase her. Looking back on this debate from a modern perspective we can see that Mencken’s argument from paternalism is no longer viable. Veblen’s characterization of the barbaric ownership of women may no longer be as popular either, due to the gains in equality that women have achieved in the last 100 years, but it would surely get more sympathy in comparison to Mencken’s defense of the historical status quo.

Even though mainstream economic thought may not pay considerable attention to Veblen’s contributions, I think that he offers some deep insights if one can get past his somewhat neurotic hyperbole. Attempts to incorporate his arguments into the Neoclassical School have been made, like Harvey Leibenstien’s (Brue, Grant 376) 1950 article that attempted to depict a marginal analysis of demand for “Veblen goods”, products that serve the single purpose of conspicuous consumption. Leibenstien illustrates the demand curve for these items as upward sloping, implying that as the price of a Veblen good increases the demand for it actually grows as well. This is contrary to the law of demand, which proposes the inverse, and is a primary assumption of economic theory today for good reason. There is little evidence that goods actually have upward sloping demand curves, though there are some cases where this occurs, yet the evidence for the traditional assumptions about the law of demand are abundant.

I think Veblen would have been aghast at the attempt to model his ideas with oversimplified static graphs. The essence of what he proposed is missing from this model, because he described a dynamic social environment that continually effects, and it is affected by, the participants. Dramatic examples of wasteful behaviors and the persistence of barbaric institutions aside, Veblen’s lasting insights are really about the powerful influence of social institutions on aggregate behavior. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, and has its own downward causality. His vision of America as a monetary culture in which individuals compare themselves to each other based on their degree of wealth has empirical evidence in modern society. Erzo Luttner conducted a statistical analysis in 2005 that establishes an inverse relationship between the well-being of a person and the monetary success of neighbors and peers. When a neighbors living standards rise relative to oneself, happiness is reduced even more than when one’s own income is reduced according to the findings.

Economic conditions, when I originally wrote this essay in the summer of 2009, were improving tentatively and the emphasis in the media was on the debates over fiscal stimulus and extending tax cuts. Now, looking back on our recent economic woes with Veblen’s theories in mind, one finds a reasonable explanation for the business cycle there. The Great Recession began after the supply of credit had increased until it became apparent that the expected future returns on this lending would not pan out, causing a less than orderly removal of credit from the markets. This is what happened to the innovative credit markets for mortgage backed securities, collaterized debt obligations (CDO), and credit default swaps (CDS) in the last four months in 2008. This panic spread to the whole credit system and led to a feedback cycle of production cuts and reductions in demand and a stall in business activity.

I disagree with Veblen’s characterization of the business man as essentially predatory, mainly because I know of many business men, both personally and by reputation, who don’t fit this mold. With that being said, his accusation that absentee owners would benefit by manipulating stock prices and then take advantage of these artificially induced changes has a modern analog. On May 6, 2010 there was a “flash crash”, in which prices suddenly plummeted and then jumped again across a wide range of asset classes due to large scale computerized trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a probe into whether or not traders encouraged volatility in the stock market by such innovative techniques as “spoofing”, in which a traders places fake bids without any intention of buying. Hyper-fast trades are executed on such a huge scale in the modern computer age that it took five months to investigate the transactions that took place over a span of a few minutes (Younglai, Spicer). Given the role that computer engineer’s play in this activity, Veblen’s last hope for humanities economic future in the form of technicians dedicated to the machine process seems misplaced.

Veblen’s ideas about conspicuous consumption and pecuniary emulation may be emerging as more relevant than ever, in our ages of hyper-consumerism and hyper-inequality. These two things together have the potential to be very ruinous to a robust middle class American society, as the encouragement and desire for the consumer to increase spending on goods and services is coupled with a declining means by which to do so. Thorstein Veblen’s Economic Philosophy was famous at the beginning of the 20th century, but is now largely forgotten in the beginning 21st century. I think it is the right time to bring these eccentric ideas of an American iconoclast back into the modern economic dialogue.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Works Cited

Brue, Samuel L., and Randy R. Grant. The Evolution of Economic Thought. Seventh Edition. Mason, OH: Thomsom South-Western, 2007. Pirnt.

Diggins, John Patrick. Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of The Leisure Class. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. Print.

Heilbroner, Robert L.. The Wordly Philosophers. New York: Touchstone, 1953. Print.

Luttmer, Erzo F. P. . “Neighbors and Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well Being.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Aug. 2005. Web. 7 Aug. 2009.

Younglai, Rachelle, and Jonathan Spicer. “U.S. Probes Trading Practices in Fragmented Markets.” Reuters. 8 Dec. 2010. Web. 11 Dec. 2010.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1899.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Business Enterprise. 1904. 5 August 2009. Print.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Engineers and Price System. 1921. 6 August 2009. Print.

Veblen, Thorstein. “The Limitations of Marginal Utility.” Journal of Political Economy, Volume 17. 1904. Web. 7 Aug. 2009.

What I Learned in Turkey About Forecasting Turkey Dinner

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 09:25:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

The Byzantine stronghold of Constantinople, the Rome of the East, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 after a millennium of rule from behind its massive walls. Sultan Mehmet II, the Conqueror, laid siege to the city using a brand new innovation of war, massive cannons called bombards. The Turks had already pushed the Byzantines out of Anatolia over the previous few hundred years, and had recently encroached into Thrace and the Balkans by defeating the Serbians at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Constantinople was mostly depopulated by this time, and surrounded by Turks on all sides. Besides the use of cannons, Mehmet used his Navy to attack Constantinople from the Bosphorus Strait, intending to hit the city’s weakest walls from the Golden Horn inlet. But the Byzantines placed a massive chain at the entrance to the Golden Horn to prevent entry by boat. To deal with this Mehmet had his men and oxen physically pull massive galleons over land on log rollers, from the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn. The horrified Byzantines were able to hear the spectacle and watch it from the city walls. When Constantinople fell it was renamed Istanbul and became the seat of the Ottoman Empire until Mustafa Kemal Atatürk created the modern Republic of Turkey from the wreckage of World War I.

In May of 2013 I traveled to the historical city of Istanbul, Turkey. I learned a great deal on my trip, including some clumsy Turkish in advance of my travels, and I found that even a short four day visit can cause one to fall in love with a place and its people. I learned about the Byzantine legacy. If you didn’t already know, the small outpost of Byzantium was chosen as the new capital of the Roman Empire by Constantine in 330 AD, becoming Constantinople, right about the time that the iconoclastic Emperor was institutionalizing that new religion Christianity across his domain. I learned about the Ottoman Empire and its great lineage of Sultans, like Mehmet the Conqueror of Constantinople, and the longest reining Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, also known as Kanuni, “the law giver,” who expanded the Ottoman Empire Northwest across Hungary to the walls of Vienna and Southeast to Bagdad, instituted significant law reforms, and commissioned many grand and beautiful works from master architect Mimar Sinan. One such work is the Süleymaniye Mosque, which I had a chance to visit (with my shoes respectfully off of course).

Süleymaniye Mosque, photo taken by Jared Endicott, May 2013.

My impetus for travelling to Istanbul was not primarily for pleasure, or even a historical lesson, but to attend a two day workshop on demand forecasting. Facilitated by Hans Levenbach of Delphus, Inc., these forecasting workshops are part of a program that trains Certified Professional Demand Forecasters (CPDF) . The certification has three levels, Basic, Master, and Professional, and having attended the Basic workshop in Chicago back in 2010 I was now on to learning the Master level. The two day workshop does not fulfill the certification requirement all the way, so for that I have also been completing self-paced forecasting projects at home. I thought it would be fun to use some of the new things I learned while in Istanbul in my attempt to get better at forecasting Thanksgiving Dinner and related variables. This will be the fourth installment in my annual Thanksgiving Prices Forecasting series, a follow up to 2010’s Inflation and the Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner, 2011’s Thanksgiving Dinner and Inflation Forecasts, and 2012’s Thanksgiving Dinner Inflation, Droughts, and the Dust Bowl. So this article is literally about what I learned in Turkey applied to forecasting turkey dinner.

Both the workshops and the follow-up projects have been great learning experiences, helping me to understand in a practical way what are often tricky forecasting concepts and techniques. The names of these concepts alone are extremely daunting for those not initiated in statistical jargon and notation. Holt-Winters exponential smoothing, autoregressive integrated moving averages (ARIMA), median absolute deviation (MdAD), and the merits of using the robust correlation coefficient of standardized sums and differences [r(SSD)] over the Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient (r) are prime examples of how intimidating these forecasting tools sound. I can comfortably say that the CPDF workshops and certification exercises, along with the mentoring from Hans, has helped me to grasp the above concepts by showing me how to put them to use in practice.

The core framework for the CPDF training is the PEER forecasting process. This is a structured systematic cyclical process to maintain forecasting excellence with four phases: preparation, execution, evaluation, and reconciliation. In the preparation phase the forecaster must gauge the needs and requirements, get a grasp on the business environment, seek our reliable data sources, locate predictive factors and use a feedback process to review and prioritize these factors. In the execution phase the forecaster applies forecasting methodologies by choosing quantitative and qualitative approaches, building and selecting models, and producing forecasts with these models. In the evaluation phase the forecaster measures the relative accuracy of the various models, backtests with hold-out sample simulations, and observes performance through ongoing examination of model accuracy in an iterative cyclical process of structured judgment. In the reconciliation phase the forecaster must bring together the findings into a final model and forecast selection with an articulate presentation to decision makers and stakeholders.

I began learning the PEER method back in November 2010 and it has been the number one most successful tool in my forecasting career since. My annual posts about forecasting Thanksgiving Dinner prices began the same month as that first workshop, so I have already been incorporating what I have learned about PEER and the forecasting methodologies in the first three articles of the series. On an annual cycle I have done research to gather information of the relevant factors and theory that pertains to Thanksgiving Dinner prices (evaluation), developed and utilized forecasting models (execution), monitored and analyzed the accuracy and errors of the previous year’s forecasts (evaluation), and provided presentations and explanations of my findings in an annual series of blog articles (reconciliation). This is basically the PEER process, although a little less structured than my day job.

For now we will skip ahead to the evaluation stage in order to consider last year’s forecast of the 2013 cost for Thanksgiving dinner. The price survey I have been attempting to forecast comes from the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), and it is the average cost of Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people. I predicted an increase of 3.6%, but average prices actually fell by 0.9%, so where I forecast $51.26 the cost went down to $49.04. My miss was favorable in terms of the consumer, but falling prices can also be a troubling sign of deflation and a weakening economy. The AFBF analysis does not indicate weakness in the economy though, with most factors simply unchanged, although the biggest factor–price of turkey–is down. Deputy chief economist for the AFBF John Anderson says, “Slightly higher turkey production for much of the year coupled with an increase in birds in cold storage may be responsible for the moderate price decrease our shoppers reported.” (Grondine, Sirekis)

Upon further evaluation I find that the actual number fell outside my 95% prediction interval. This seemed odd to me, since my forecast was only 4.5% off, which is a better performance than my last two attempts, and those higher errors were within my 68% prediction interval. It turns out I may have set the interval much too narrow, especially in terms of the possibility of price declines, which have occurred eight times of the last twenty-seven years. I will make sure to give the prediction intervals more focus in my next forecast for 2014.

Last year I calculated absolute percent errors (APEs) and mean absolute percent error (MAPE), but I learned this year in Istanbul that it is good to consider other evaluation measure as well, such as median absolute percent error (MdAPE). My APEs were 9.9%, 4.8%, and 4.5% for 2011, 2012, and 2013 respectively. This works out to a MAPE of 6.4% and a MdAPE of 4.8%. It is good to look at multiple measures of performance, with the MdAPE being particularly helpful because it is more robust and less sensitive to outliers (Levenbach, Cleary 78). I will cover what I learned about robust methods in more detail in a later section.

Learning ARIMA

Understanding how to use ARIMA models for forecasting has always stumped me. That was until I completed the Master level CPDF certification in Turkey. A recent tutorial on ARIMA in the Summer 2013 edition of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting was also helpful for me. While not an expert by any means, I feel much more comfortable with the theory, conception, and appropriate use of ARIMA models now. This is a time series method, so the history of the data being forecasted is used to build the model. The major benefit of ARIMA models over exponential smoothing or seasonal decomposition models is the way that this alternative approach takes into account autocorrelations. Autocorrelation is the momentum in the data that correlates the current observation to past observations. The standard strategy to ARIMA modeling is called Box-Jenkins (named after the developers of the method), and it involves a three part iterative process of identification, estimation, and diagnostic checking.

It is not the purpose of this article to teach these methods, for that I recommend taking the CPDF workshops, but rather to demonstrate some of what I have learned on my Thanksgiving Dinner forecasts. Given that Thanksgiving Dinner forecasts are annual, and I really want to use a seasonal ARIMA model for the demonstration, I thought it would be interesting and relevant to forecast the monthly price changes for poultry. First thing to do is visualize and analyze the historical data to determine if there is a season and trend pattern that can be modeled. For this I might just look at the data. Or, to have a more reliable indication of pattern, I can use a method I learned from Hans back in 2012 at the Basic CPDF workshop in Chicago, constructing an analysis of variance (ANOVA) that measures how much of the differences between the data points belong to season, trend, or irregular factors.

For ARIMA, the identification phase is typically carried out with autocorrelation functions (ACFs)and partial autocorrelation functions (PACFs). Next with estimation, the model parameters are inferred from the data, and once preliminary models are chosen the forecasts produced from them can be checked diagnostically with an analysis of the residuals between the model data and the actual data. The model building process of identification, estimation, and diagnostic checking is iterated until the residuals from the model are randomly distributed, like white noise. For the first iteration of my poultry price forecasts I used a common benchmark, ARIMA(0,1,1)(0,1,1)12, the “Airline Model” used by Box and Jenkins to demonstrate their seasonal method with airline passenger mile data. It turns out this is the best performer compared to three other seasonal ARIMA models I tried, in terms of testing against a hold-out sample of actual data, with monthly simulations evaluated using a waterfall table. An illustration of the poultry price data and forecasts are displayed in the chart below.

In the following chart there is a distinct seasonal pattern in the month over month change in poultry prices, with a dramatic drop in price every November. This seems a little counter to economic assumptions at first glance. The law of demand suggests that if there is an increase in demand of something, say turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, then the price will be driven up, all other things the same. During Thanksgiving turkeys sell at prices well below cost, with the mark down being a strategy by competitive retailers to get customers in the door in order to capture the sales on other items (Sullivan). The laws of supply and demand are still contingent, and the competitive custom of displaying the holiday bird as an enticing loss leader becomes an extenuating circumstance that defies normal price behavior. The turkey price reverses course in December, going back up, and over time the trend is generally a higher price for poultry each year, as illustrated by the chart below.

Learning Robust Methods

Another technique I became familiar with during Chicago’s workshop was using transformations to handle nonlinear data. In 2013, at the Master CPDF Workshop in Istanbul, I enhanced this knowledge by embracing nonconventional methods of analysis, techniques that are robust and more suited for data that does not conform to the conventional assumptions. In terms of statistical models, it is conventional to use measures of central tendency and dispersion that are derived from the mean and the standard deviation. In a linear and symmetric world, where all data distributions conform to the normal bell curve, these methods are optimal, but in the real world where we are often confronted with data that is nonlinear these methods can be ill suited. It is these nonlinear situations that call for nonconventional solutions.

The most conventional and familiar statistical methods, in terms of data analysis and forecasting, derive from the mean and the standard deviation. This is the method of calculating a simple average from a set of numbers and then using that average to calculate the spread of the data around the average. After the mean and the standard deviation are analyzed, one or more data sets can be related using ordinary correlation and linear regression. If the underlying data are linear and normally distributed, meaning that the data conform to a bell curve model, then the ordinary conventional methods are optimal. Unfortunately, much business and economic data are not linear and do not conform to standard assumptions. Conventional methods of analysis may provide misleading results when applied to nonlinear data, because these methods are sensitive to outliers and distortions. When these problematic situations arise it is typical to adjust or transform the data into a linear perspective, by handling outliers, calculating differences, or converting to logarithms. Massaged data can then be input into the conventional models to better effect.

Rather than locate and handle outliers another approach is to forego the ordinary methods and apply robust methods that are less sensitive to non-normal data. Instead of using the mean as the measure of central tendency, the median will not be affected as much by outliers. Rather than use standard deviation to estimate the scale, or spread, of the data, use median absolute deviation (MdAD). In lieu of the standard product-moment correlation coefficient, try relating two or more variables using a robust correlation method such as standardized sums and differences [r*(SSD)]. Below are two correlation matrices that display the correlation coefficients of the prices changes of Thanksgiving dinner against related variables, one produced by the ordinary calculation and the other with a robust method. After that scatter plots of these factors are illustrated, with linear regression lines to exhibit the ordinary correlation.

The changing price of Thanksgiving dinner is most closely associated with the price of food more generally, and is also the only variable that showed an improved view of the correlation with the robust method. The association with changes in consumer prices is much weaker with the robust correlation, and poultry prices in November show a different direction of the correlation altogether, going from positive in the ordinary method to negative in the robust method. The reversal of signs between the two measures of correlation between Thanksgiving Dinner and November poultry prices is curious and suggests a closer analysis may be in order.

Forecasting Thanksgiving Dinner Inflation for 2014

For my primary forecasting task of predicting the price of Thanksgiving Dinner next year I tested out a few different methods and models. Times series methods are one possible approach, like the ARIMA example discussed earlier, or exponential smoothing, which both use the historical values of the same data one wants to forecast, allowing for seasonal and trend effects to indicate a likely future course. On the other hand, regression gives the predictioneer a tool by which to leverage correlations and causes, using independent variables to estimate future values of a forecast variable, whether using linear regression or robust regression. There are pros and cons to each approach, contingent upon the forecasting situation, such as whether leading indicators are available or patterns can be found in the historical data. With this in mind I blended a few approaches. Combining forecasts from diverse models has merits, including robustness, which I discuss in more depth in the article Macroeconomic Forecasting with Diverse Predictions.

My forecast for the cost of Thanksgiving dinner in 2014, as measured by the American Farm Bureau Federation, is $50.63. This is a 3.2% lift from the 2013 cost of $49.04. I am 68% confident that prices will come in between $48.10 and $53.43. Alternatively, I am 95% confident that prices will land between $45.58 and $56.23. My prediction intervals are wider than I set them for the 2013 forecast, and this should allow for greater contingency in the price movements. I am expecting consumer prices to grow by 2.1% and food prices to grow by 3.0%, and I expect the change in price for turkey dinner to move in the same direction with a modest magnitude.

Conclusion

The largest lesson I learned while I was in Turkey though is not one that I can apply to forecasting Thanksgiving Dinner, but it is one that gives me great hope about this magnificent nation’s future. I fell in love with Istanbul in the short time I was there, which was a relatively serene week the month before the Taksim Square protests over Gezi Park broke out, a situation I covered in the article, Taksim: Tranquility Before The Tumult. I marveled in the history of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires with visits to Galata Tower, Blue Mosque, Aya Sofya, Topkapı Palace, Basilica Cistern, and a relaxing cruise down the Bosphorus Strait with my friend Sinan. I even visited the Grand Bazaar where I picked up a necklace for my wife, and spent some time negotiating over carpets. While enjoying cay, tasty kebabs, and Turkish coffee, I encountered a culture that has preserved and honored its rich heritage while also embracing modernity and a dynamic future. In an interesting coincidence for my forecasting trip, I also had a chance to see a relic from the Oracle of Delphi, a piece of the Pythia’s tripod located on the site of Constantinople’s old Hippodrome which is now in front of the Blue Mosque.

Relic of the Oracle of Delphi, photo taken by Jared Endicott, May 2013.

You may not always see what I saw in the way the American media portrays the region, but the Turks I met were youthful and intelligent professionals from the energy, electricity, airline, banking, and hospitality industries. They were all eager and excited to learn and achieve, with an ambition that any American should admire. Not only were they learning and communicating with me in English, we all spoke fluent Excel. It is no surprise to me that there are seven more CPDF workshops scheduled for Istanbul in 2014 while so far the US only has one to look forward to next year (at the time of this writing). After all, I traveled all the way from Seattle to Istanbul for the valuable insight into foresight that Hans Levenbach brings as a mentor. The forecasting skills I went to Turkey to learn have not just added to my set of tools for predicting turkey dinner, but have also added challenging and essential expertise to my professional repertoire. For me this is invaluable human capital and well worth the trip.

Blue Mosque, photo taken by Jared Endicott, May 2013.

Aya Sofya, photo taken by Jared Endicott, May 2013.

Topkapı Palace, photo taken by Jared Endicott, May 2013.

Basilica Cistern, photo taken by Jared Endicott, May 2013.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Works Cited

Levenbach, Hans, and James P. Cleary. Forecasting: Practice and Process for Demand Management. Belmont, CA: Duxbury, Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2006. Print.

SWIFT - Structured Workshop in Forecaster Training. CPDF - Certified Professional in Demand Forecasting, Delphus, Inc., 2010.

CPDF_Master - Demand Forecasting Methodology and Performance Measurement. CPDF - Certified Professional in Demand Forecasting, Delphus, Inc., 2010-2013.

“Cost of Classic Thanksgiving Dinner Down for 2013”. American Farm Bureau Federation . Contacts: Tracy Taylor Grondine and Cyndie Sirekis. 14 Nov. 2013. Web. 14 Nov. 2013.

Sullivan, Paul. “In the Labyrinth of Turkey Pricing, a Reason Under Every Giblet.” The New York Times. 8 Nov 2011. Web. 15 Sep 2013.

Stellwagen, Eric, and Len Tashman (2013). “ARIMA: The Models of Box and Jenkins.” Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, 30, 28-33.

Personal Identity, Pregnancy, and Process Philosophy

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:44:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

Who am I? Why am I me and not somebody else? Who was I and who will I become? These are the sorts of questions I have asked myself throughout my life, and I imagine that most people have thought about these enigmatic notions on one occasion or another. These questions have recently been in my mind again lately, but not primarily in regards to my own self and identity. My wife is pregnant with our first child, we will be welcoming a new baby girl into our family in less than a month. And we can’t wait!

Last March it was the best birthday present ever when my wife surprised me with a gift bag of onesies and the perennial pregnancy paperback, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I admit that I have not read the book cover to cover yet, but I am taking in the essential stuff and learning about the evolving process of a life growing inside. Of course this is a reality that my wife is experiencing much more directly than I ever could. In no time the pregnancy process will have culminated in a birth and my wife and I will be enjoying the process of raising an infant, toddler, child, adolescent, teenager, into the adult that our daughter will become. This journey is ahead of us, indeterminable, blooming with loving anticipation, hope and promise. Contemplating my wife’s pregnancy, a future raising our child together, and thinking about our unborn’s development into personhood has got me wondering anew about life, existence, and personal identity.

The other book I’m reading right now is Process Metaphysics by Nicholas Rescher, a treatise on why the essentialness of reality is processual rather than substantive in its fundamental mode. Reality to this view is in essence a complex manifold of nested processes that interact to create a complex of things and kinds of things, not the other way around. In mainstream philosophy this is a heterodox view, the dominant theme in metaphysics being the fundamental status of static things, with process being secondary to substance. Think about how reality is often explained in terms of quarks, atoms, molecules, objects, organisms, persons, and collectives of these things. Process philosophy seeks to understand things in terms of the processes that realize them into existence, finding these processes to be the salient feature that underlies all substantial entities. While contemplating the tricky and nuanced arguments one comes across in the debates over metaphysical ideas it dawned on me that my other reading material, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, provides its own kind of evidence in favor of process metaphysics. Because at root, pregnancy is not a thing or a substance, but a process. Furthermore, as pregnancy is the process that brings into being a new human life, it stands to reason that human beings are not just things, rather we are primordially processes.

The Puzzle of Personal Identity

After our baby is born she will be on her journey to personhood, a journey that is better described as a process not a thing. Who will she be? Philosophical psychology encounters a puzzling situation in the problem of personal identity. Who am I? Am I my physical body? Am I my mind and memories? What does it mean to be the same person over time, given that we all change and grow physically, mentally, and experientially? What does it mean to be a particular person, in a particular body, at a particular time in history? Generally speaking, the philosophical debate over personal identity has focused on three flavors of theory that focus in turn on body, memory, or psychological continuity. These questions about personal identity, and our modern notion of the self, stem from the Enlightenment era’s towering intellectuals like Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau. And the enigma of the self persists to this day.

René Descartes took a skeptical approach to reality and assumed that everything about his experience and sense perception was in doubt. After all, one cannot be sure that the physical world is not an illusion manifested by an evil demon, or a virtual reality. This leaves only one sure thing for Descartes, that he was a mind that could think, since even if his body and environment were illusion he could not be fooled at all if he was not a mind to be fooled. The lasting legacy of Descartes’ doubt is his Cogito Ergo Sum, the famous statement, “I think therefore I am.” (“Descartes’ Epistemology “) The implication is that a human is a Res Cogitans, a thinking thing. This answers the question of who one is in terms of rationality, dualism, and the mental.

Thomas Hobbes wondered how the physical self could hold the same identity over time, pondering anew Plutarch’s paradox of the Ship of Theseus, and of course adding a puzzling new twist of his own. Theseus was the hero of ancient Greek myth who killed the Minotaur, and after he returned from Crete his ship became a symbol for the Athenians. They preserved it from generation to generation until about 300 B.C.. Over such a long period of time the wooden planks had worn out and were replaced one by one until none of the original wood remained. The form and function were still there, but the materials were all together different. So was this the real Ship of Theseus or not? Hobbes added the additional complication that we should imagine all of the original wood was shipped back to a warehouse for safekeeping, and one day some workers completely reassemble the Ship of Theseus using the original materials (Grimm). In this case, which ship is the real ship, or are they both the real ship? Hobbes reminds us of the challenge of grasping the persistence of personal identity over time.

John Locke’s influential perspective was that humans were born tabula rasa, blank slates who absorb the impressions from sense experience and incorporate these into the self. Who one is then, is the aggregated bits of data that is imported into one’s memory. Locke imagines a situation in which the consciousness of a prince wakes up one day in the body of a cobbler. The reasoning by Locke is that the royal mind and memories would still constitute the prince even though he is inhabiting the body of a cobbler. To outside appearances that man would be a cobbler, but inside the real person is the prince. Although through empiricist rather than rationalist glasses, like Descartes, Locke explains personal identity in terms of persons being thinking things:

“[T]o find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for;–which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, it seems to me, essential to it…For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e., the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.” (Locke)

Thomas Reid disagreed with Locke’s view that the self was defined by memory and provided a famous critique in his story about the brave officer. Imagine that a brave officer becomes a hero by taking the enemy flag in battle, and in his height of glory he has the memory of being flogged as a boy for stealing from an orchard. Years later, as an old general, he remembers the glory of taking the enemy standard, but he no longer recalls being flogged as a boy. In terms of Locke’s memory theory of identity, the boy is the officer, and the officer is the general, but the boy is not the general (“Reid on…”). Clearly this does not work for us, and we think that the boy and the general are the same person regardless of the memory situation. Reid has demonstrated that Locke’s view is seriously flawed, although we may often feel that people who have memory impairments, such as Alzheimer’s, might be losing a fundamental part of the their self and identity.

David Hume looked inside in order to discover his self and did not find anything there beyond his perceptions at any given moment. Thoughts, for Hume, are always about something, an object, an idea, a sensation. He says:

“From what (experiential) impressions could this idea [of self] be derived? This question is impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity; and yet it is a question which must necessarily be answered, if we would have the idea of self pass for clear and intelligible … For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” (Rescher 106)

Jean-Jacque Rousseau was the Enlightenment’s iconoclast, caught up in the sentiment of the times yet critical of it and sowing the seeds for the romanticism that was to follow. His ideas about the self marked a departure in perspective compared to the views of Descartes and Locke, with Rousseau recognizing the role the social life played in the determination of personal identity. People come into the world as unique individuals, but are then conformed into the culture that surrounds them, and uniqueness become a disadvantage due to the fundamental inequalities that are bound up in it. Rousseau laments the passing of our more primitive and solitary existence, a time when our true authentic selves were dominant. Rousseau famously said, “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. Each one believes he is the master of the others and yet he is a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What could render it legitimate?” (“Jean Jacques Rousseau”)It is the social contract that conventionalizes one to the many and obscures the true individual underneath, making us all role players.

The philosophical debate over personal identity has evolved with the times, but the problem remains unsettled. Consider Derek Parfit’s updated twist on the Ship of Theseus Paradox. The hypothetical problem of reduplication creates an additional bias in favor of the body’s role as personal identifier. Suppose that tele-transportation technology, like that featured in Star Trek, existed in real life and worked by disintegrating a tele-traveler’s original body and, using the deconstructed information, reconstructs the tele-traveler, mind, body, and everything, in a new location far away. A horrifying malfunction occurs at one point and a tele-traveler is reconstructed several times, instantiating a multitude of exact replicas (Grimm). Who is the tele-traveler if they all have the same memories? The only way to distinguish between the recently diverged individual identities of these duplicates is the fact that they have distinct bodies, which although exact in appearance do not occupy the exact same space. With this puzzle case the theories that use memory or psychological continuity as the definitions of identity fail against the bodily definition.

For many, a disquieting implication of the bodily theory of personal identity is that it closes the door on the possibility of life after death. The reduplication thought experiment has not only been offered as proof of the bodily requirement of personal identity, but by implication it has been considered a proof against dualism and God, like the Paradox of the Stone and the Problem of Evil. Jeff Johnson, who I studied under, has illustrated problems with relying on the reduplication scenario as a deductive proof against theism. He argues that Robert Nozick’s Closest Continuer Theory offers a legitimate rival explanation for solving the question of personal identity that preserves psychological continuity as a possible definition. Using the hypothetical example of a faculty softball team called The Null Set, Johnson shows how the issue of identity might be broached. Suppose that Johnson and an all-star core of his Null Set teammates slowly relocate to Eastern Oregon University after spending several years competing together on the faculty for a different school in Colorado. At Eastern, Johnson and his companions decide to reform The Null Set, without realizing that the original team in Colorado still exists with a different staff (Johnson). With this reduplication of the team, who is the original Null Set, the squad with the majority of the original star players or the one that stayed in the original location? The closest continuer test can be used to determine the best candidate for the original Null Set team, even if disagreements can still exist about which criteria determines the closest continuer. For example, we could say that it’s the location not the players that make the team, as in the obvious case of professional baseball teams. This means that the real Null Set is the original team from Colorado, but there is no permanent resolution to identity lurking here.

Perhaps unraveling the puzzle of personal identity is so difficult because it has been left up to philosophers this whole time. What about the harder disciplines of psychology and neuroscience? Most of us are familiar with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical notions of self, with the subconscious and primal id, the conscious reality facing ego, and the superego, our conformed sense of social norms (Cherry). Freud is interesting, but not much help with solving the problem of personal identity per se, since the id, ego, and superego do little to clear up any metaphysical confusion. In terms of today’s psychology and psychiatry, the focus is on practical issues like counseling for depression, stress, and marital difficulties, or otherwise diagnosing and prescribing for abnormal behaviors and brain chemistries. Not resolving paradoxes.

The Johari window is another practical tool that deals with the self, a strategy of personal analysis and reflection that breaks the self into four parts. The known self is the side what we know and show to others, the hidden self is what we know and don’t show to others, the blind self is what other know but we do not, and the unknown self nobody knows (López De Victoria). Another practical tool of personal discovery and development, in terms of characteristic profiles, but who is the real you if things are learned which prompt personal growth, such that what is blind becomes known, and what is unknown becomes blind, and so forth? We are still not out of the metaphysical woods yet. Other theories in psychology may actually provide a more useful insight into philosophical problem of personal identity and so I will revisit another contribution from this discipline later on.

Modern neuroscience has answered many questions about the brain and human behavior. So it might be reasonable to think that the problem of personal identity is solved this way. Professor Jeanette Norden, during a lecture titled “Consciousness and the Self” for the Great Courses series on neuroscience called Understanding the Brain, makes explicit the lack of insight that neuroscience currently has into these mysteries, even if we can safely say that consciousness depends on the existence of a neocortex. She says that while philosophers have broken the puzzle of consciousness into the easy and hard questions, she thinks it’s better approached as the hard, harder, and hardest questions.

The hard problem for her is the mapping of the correlates between neuronal processing in the brain and subjective consciousness experience, which is referred to as the easy problem by philosophers because it is at least solvable in principle with current and future science. The harder problem is understanding why consciousness exists to begin with and how it is possible for something like this to emerge in living things from seemingly unconscious material. No matter what we learn about neuronal correlates we still have not answer this harder question, even a little. According to Norden, “[t]he ‘hardest’ question of consciousness is that consciousness appears to be a ‘something’ that is happening to a ‘me’.” The puzzle of personal identity has not come close be being solved by neuroscience, especially since there is no location in the brain where identity is found, but rather it seems to be a distributed process of interaction within the brain.

The Process of Personal Identity

Personhood begins in the womb. And pregnancy is a process. This is true for the mother as well as the unborn (and of course the father too), with gestation and growth being the fundamental aspects of the emergence of new life. Pregnancy is finite, with a beginning and an end, in the typical experience the conception and the birth encapsulate nine months of internal changes in the mother and her offspring. This process view of pregnancy probably feels rather obvious. After all, we commonly consider the pregnancy in terms of three successive stages, the familiar trimesters. This way of thinking about pregnancy as a phased progression from conception to birth is common sense, but it reveals an interesting philosophical perspective too. People are not just things, not just substances. Whether it is the mother who carries a new human being to term, or the unborn who is conceived and grows in the womb, these aspects of life demonstrate fundamentality, temporality, and transiency.

Pregnancy is often divided into trimesters, but the developmental process happening in the womb can be divided still further. In the beginning the process of a person is brought into being with the fusion of two entities, egg and sperm, creating a zygote. Cell division begins rapidly, growing the egg geometrically, becoming a blastocyst that embarks on a quest from the fallopian tube to the uterus. Once this journey is complete the evolving entity inside becomes an embryo, with rapid growth cell division eventually morphing into those tiny and adorable components of the typical human baby, head, arms, hands, legs and feet. By the end of the first trimester this embryo has become a fetus. Measured in just inches and ounces, this miniature person can begin to move her eyes and wiggle her fingers. Growth continues at a fast pace, with proportions settling into place, with neuronal connections forming between the brain and the body, a quickening of movement and the initiation of awareness and perception. By the end of the second trimester she is measured from head to toe, rather than crown to rump, and her eyes are beginning to open. In the last trimester the baby grows into full term, kicking, sucking, and turning, getting ready to be born. She changes from egg to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to fetus, to little baby, but through all of these phases and forms, these separately defined things, she is the same identity, the same continuity of process.

The sudden changes inside have a big effect on Mom, with the first trimester known for fatigue, morning sickness, aversions, and changes in mood. The second trimester brings a reprieve from the fatigue and new energy to be active and get things done, get things ready, nesting and all that. By the end of the third trimester Mom is ready to give birth, carrying a larger and more active child inside that is seemingly prepared for independence and autonomy already. As the partner I try to help out how I can. I remain humble and wondrous, empathetic to Mom’s needs and dutiful to her expectations. Painting the nursery, shoulder massage, nice words of encouragement, but in the end I can never know the process of pregnancy directly. Perhaps that is why the predominantly male endeavor of philosophy has neglected this processual aspect of personhood, the process of motherhood is felt and understood primordially, with the emergence of one entity from within another, while fatherhood is a role vicarious to the emergence of a new being.

My wife and I, as soon to be first-time parents, recently took a class on childbirth at the hospital. One of the many salient lessons was a discussion of the stages and phases of labor. If pregnancy is a process then labor most certainly is as well. Dilation is the first stage, with three phases, early labor, active labor, and transition, each progressing toward the second stage, pushing and birth the baby. Stage three is birth of the placenta and then finally the recovery stage. Calling pregnancy, labor, and birth a process may seem to understate the experience, so it is here where I must humbly declare my appreciation to my wife for bearing the process of child birth. Being a man I will never know the strength it takes. I love you Mary. Of course the process of child rearing has now just begun. And just as her parents experienced the pregnancy and labor that brought her into being, Mom directly and Dad vicariously, we will also share the experience of helping and watching her develop into the person she will become.

Next comes childhood. Rousseau, who was mentioned earlier, influenced a much more contemporary thinker who has a lot to say about children, the theorist on human development Jean Piaget. He believed that children progressed through stages of development, exploring, learning, and adapting to the world around them in four successive steps. The first of Piaget’s stages is the sensorimotor phase from birth to about age two. Not a tabula rasa, but born with the agency to look, listen, grasp, and suck, a baby knows the world through sense and motor experience only. The sensorimotor stage is even divided into 6 substages: reflexes, primary circular reactions, secondary circular reactions, coordination of reactions, tertiary circular reactions, and early representational thought. Piaget’s second stage is the preoperational, from about ages two to seven, with the development of language and symbol usage, role playing and pretending, but perhaps a little egocentrism as well. The third stage in Piaget’s scheme is the concrete operational, in which children ages seven to eleven develop the ability to apply logical consideration, although more the inductive type of logic which reasons from the specific to the general, and less of the deductive type which reasons from the general to the specific. The final stage begins at about age twelve and spans the adolescence and teenage years leading to adulthood. This is when kids begin to reason deductively and hypothetically and learn to plan the future in a systematic way (“Piaget”). Piaget’s stages, and other development theories, illustrate the evolving and processual nature of children growing to adults.

The journey of personhood does not end with childhood. We do not become fully formed static individuals at any arbitrary inflection point in the experience of existence. In his hugely influential book, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger took a phenomenological approach to the question of ontology, which to him meant applying the method of “letting what shows itself show itself in the way that it shows itself” (Cahoone) to the question of being. Being, existing, is an activity of entities, and Dasein (Heidegger’s word for the self) exhibits being in a dynamic sense. One of Heidegger’s great insights was to escape the philosophical legacy, left over from Descartes’, of thinking dualistically about the person as a mind separate from a body. We are not ghosts inhabiting machines, we are each Dasein, an existing entity who is finite and temporal, thrown into, interacting with, and shaped by the world and the time in which one lives.

Being in the world, according to Heidegger, means that the world and time that we inhabit is not separate from our existence but a fundamental aspect of selfhood. In addition, our mode of being is special in the sense that we reveal the world around us when we move about in it through our conscious experience. Dasein’s normal way of being is a tripartite structure, which is “ahead of itself, always being already in the world, and being alongside entities.” (Cahoone) The first part of the structure of being is called existentiality, and this is the experience of understanding the world and the objects in it in terms of possibilities of use. Understanding is oriented toward the future. The second part of Dasein’s structure of being is facticity, that one is always already in the world exposed to the facts of the current reality, inheriting the mood that is carried over from the previous moments. Facticity is oriented toward the past. The third branch in the tripartite structure of Dasein is falling, the identification with present experience in terms of other people and objects, as in normal daily interactions like idle talk. Falling is an inauthentic way of being in which we become absorbed into daily life and our social situation in order to avoid anxiety and existential angst. Falling is oriented toward the present.

Our existential angst is not a particular thing that can be resolved, but an ongoing apprehension about living one’s life, one’s care, one’s stand on one’s own existence. Authentic existence, for Heidegger, means being-unto-death, an aspect of his thought that I covered in more detail in the article, Authentic Iron Maiden and Global Domination. Being-unto-death is not meant to be macabre, rather it is the sense that we recognize our finite reality and allow it to drive our action and motivation to realize our own possibilities authentically, in anticipatory resoluteness. “‘Future’ does not here mean a Now, which not yet having become ‘actual,’ sometime will be, but rather the coming, in which Dasein comes toward itself in its ownmost ability-to-be.” (Blattner 105) From birth to death we have a continuous development of existence that does not cease until our end is actually realized, showing that personal identity is a process until the end of personal existence. Life is finite, at least in the material existence of this world that we have been thrown into, but also temporal, dynamic, creative, and personally directed during present moments into an open future.

The human sense of self has evolved in history as well. In an article I wrote, Happy Birthday to Me and the Telephone, I connected my own identity to that of the telephone through celebration of my March 10, 1976 birth date to the first telephone call, a monumental event that happened a century to the day earlier. Coincidental for my purposes here I wrote this illustrative passage:

“Wireless technologies are also evolving our culture and social habits. The contemporary Italian Philosopher of Technology Luciano Floridi suggests that we are in the midst of a revolution in human awareness representing a paradigm shift in the types of beings we see ourselves as. This is the fourth revolution of this nature, according to Floridi. From our ancient and classical perspective of special creatures of creation with mythical origins, we shifted to seeing our existence as much less special when we discovered that the Earth was not the center of the Solar System. This was the Copernican Revolution. The Darwinian Revolution caused us to reevaluate the human identity in a context firmly rooted in biological determinism and the animal kingdom. The Freudian Revolution cast into doubt our classical understanding of human consciousness and free will, with the recognition that cognitive processes below our awareness and control had large role in determining our behavior. Floridi argues that the current Information Revolution is altering our view once again and that we are coming to see ourselves as information exchanging entities. For example, our identities our represented online within social networking sites by archives of sense data and informational content. Our interests, activities, and living relations define who we are not only to the outside world, but more and more to ourselves. I think Floridi is really onto something here. That means the business I work for is more than just a new industry, it is an institutional framework supporting a revolution in human consciousness.” (Endicott)

Ontology is the study of being, so in this branch of philosophical inquiry the goal is to identify what exists, everything that there is and how it all relates. The Western philosophical tradition has mostly focused on ontologies of substance. It is this assumption that the universe is composed of substances with discrete objects that then have characteristics. The substance ontologies have had a hard time reckoning with change over time, because an object defined has a permanent identity that then must change through the incorporation of properties, characteristics, and relationships that can shift over time. Zeno’s Paradox, the mystery of how an arrow can ever reach its intended target when it should be stuck perpetually halving the distance, is an example of the problems that develop from thinking about change and motion from the static substance framework. The problem of the self, in trying to answer how personal identity remains when the body and mind are constantly changing, has continued to be an enigma for philosophers into the present day. Much of the paradox of identity can be resolved by shifting from a substance ontology to a process ontology.

The idea that process, and not substance, is the fundamental aspect of reality has been around since the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus in the sixth century B.C.. He was the first to argue that change in the only constant, and quipped that “one cannot step into the same river twice.” (Rescher 9) Although it has never dominated Western philosophical thought, process and change has been the focus of several prominent thinkers, from Gottfried Leibniz and G.W.F. Hegel during Germany’s Enlightenment and Romantic periods to the American Pragmatists William James and John Dewey. James talking about the mind as a “stream of consciousness,”(Rescher 108) with the focus on the continuous experience of self. Yet, process philosophy did not really become a school of its own until Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. Bergson thought that time, flux, change, and creative energy were the basis of an underlying dynamic reality that we did not adequately conceive in our taxonomies of static things and objects (Rescher 16-18). Whitehead, in his standard bearing Process and Reality, lays out an entire metaphysical system based around “occasions” as the elementary building blocks of actuality, with entities such as electrons and atoms being only instantiations of things resulting from the creative processes that bring them about, the transition process, or that utilize them to different purposes, the concretion process (Rescher 20-23). Despite these insightful contributions, process metaphysic is not the dominant mode of thinking in Western philosophy and culture.

The debate between substance and process is not about what exists and does not exist, but about what is more primordial and fundamental to the true nature of reality. Substance philosophers emphasize distinct individual things analytically separated from each other, where process philosophers focus on the totality of reality through interactive interconnectedness. Substance philosophers highlight the fixed entities, with their modification by feature, condition, or relation being subsequent and secondary, while process philosophers elevate the activity and creative energy which results in the innovation of being and novelty of experience (Rescher 35). To most people this probably just sounds like splitting hairs, or impossible to settle, a sentiment captured by a magnet my wife gifted to me that paraphrasingly reads, Nietzsche said “to do is to be,” Kant said “to be is to do,” and Sinatra said “do be do be do.” Still, for the kind of metaphysical understanding one needs to resolve paradoxes the differences shape the rules of the rationality game that we play. They are the first principles, the a priori assumptions, the paradigmatic prism by which we allow everything else to be comprehended.

In process philosophy the dominance of doing over being is the fundamental aspect of entire reality, including personal identity and the self. Not in terms of what it means to be an individual person but what also what it means to live and exist in the world at the time that we do. We are connected to our own place and time, events and happenings, the occurring world, its history and its other occupants, an identity of evolving ecology that defines us as we define it. Nicholas Rescher (116) explains, “[t]he ‘self,’ the human person, is…best seen not as a substance or being (a thing of some sort) but as an experience-integrating life process of the human mode, the concrete realization of a developmental sequence comprising childhood, youth, maturity, and, finally, old age…as processists see it a person not only has a developmental career but is individuated by it as the particular individual that he or she is.” The stages of pregnancy and fetal development, the phases of childhood, passage of adolescence and the teenage years, milestones of adulthood, and living at the momentous and temporary apex of history are all indicators that a life is an activity one does, not a thing one has. Personal identity is a process of existence, not simply the possession of a body, memories, or psychological continuity.

Welcoming Willow to the World

My daughter, you are not yet born, but you move and kick in your mother’s womb. Your identity is not yet that of an individual, you are a potential person who will soon emerge into the world, a novel being, unique soul, and eventually an autonomous person and sovereign citizen. Nonetheless, there is a facticity about you already, a proto-identity that you inherit as you are thrown into our world. Your DNA, your gender, your birth date and birth place, your ancestry, your parental units, and your name which we have chosen for you. In the future, when someone asks you that ambiguous question, “who are you?,” your first answer will surely be, “I am Willow.” The government will choose for you a social security number. There will be plenty more facticity to follow, the world will already be what it is when you encounter it, as it presents itself to you, but the rest of the answer to the identity question is up to you, up to what you choose to do, because you will become the path that you follow…or the trail that you blaze. You will be what you think about, who you befriend, who you love, what activities you pursue, how you spend your time.

We are what we do and what we become involved in. This means that we are not just our past and our present, but also our future. Our identity is never complete, not a solid thing, until our personal process of living life comes to its inevitable end. My identity changes with each new article, or song, that I write. My identity changes with each new day that I work, learn, relax, engage, and journey. My identity changes until the day I die. In less than a month my identity will change in the most fundamental way I can imagine. I will become a father. This process of life, of growth and change embodied, is just beginning for you, but for me it is blossoming. This is the ultimate example of realizing resonance, a most excellent way of existing.

Jared Roy Endicott

Dedicated to my wonderful and loving wife Mary and my precious daughter Willow. My muses, my motivation, for you my heart and soul.

Subscribe in a reader

Works Cited

Blattner, William D.. Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.

Cahoone, Lawrence. “Heidegger’s Being and Time.” The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2010. Audio.

Cherry, Kendra. ”The Id, Ego and Superego.” Psychology, About.com. 2013. Web. 20 Oct 13.

Grim, Patrick. “Self-Identity and Other Minds.” Philosophy of Mind: Brains, Consciousness, and Thinking Machines. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2008. DVD.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Albany, NY: Pomona Press, 2013 (orig. 1689). Kindle.

Johnson, Jeffrey L. ”Personal survival and the closest continuer theory.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. 1997. Eastern Oregon University.

López De Victoria, Samuel. ”The Johari Window.” Psych Central: World of Psychology, 2008. Web. 27 Oct 13.

Murkoff, Heidi, and Sharon Mazel. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. New York: Workman Publishing, 2008. Print.

Norden, Jeanette. “Consciousness and the Self.” Understanding the Brain. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2007. DVD.

Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. Print.

“Descartes’ Epistemology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010 .Web. 27 Oct 13.

“Jean Jacques Rousseau.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010 .Web. 27 Oct 13.

“Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development.” Psychology, About.com. Web. 25 Sep 13.

“Reid on Memory and Personal Identity.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009 .Web. 27 Oct 13.

Evolution and Emergence Explain Social Change

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 01:02:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

The two theories of social change that I find most compelling are Evolution and Emergence. Evolution is a well known idea in terms of biology and Darwin, but in terms of social change the theory assumes that variations among human traits and behaviors, as well as group social norms and trappings, combined with the ability to replicate these patterns and a selection process for environmental fitness and adaptation, leads to societal changes over time. For example, the evolution of mobile technology and all the ways how that in turn has caused people to adapt to an environment of almost constant communication. The theory of Emergence is a nice complement to Evolution, because it suggests that diverse dynamic interacting agents with individual intentions can produce societal patterns as a collective simply through the bottom-up process of self-organization. The emergent societal whole becomes more than the sum of the individual members. Consider the spontaneous emergence of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street which led to social reactions that then changed the character of society and these movements.

The shape theories of Progress, Development, Cycles, and Conflict are all good for explaining some moments of social change, but problematic on their own as complete theories because they incorrectly assume an overall macro-shape to society that is perpetually maintained. Change can be progressive, or only mean that things are getting more complex, or that nothing lasts forever, or that groups with opposing agendas create a dialectic. I don’t see any of the shape theories as taking precedent over each other though, so a better way to encapsulate all of these different shapes is to say that they are all possible emergent patterns that can arise from the interaction of individual agents acting autonomously and guided by an evolutionary process.

For example, increasing complexity over time per Development theory is possibly an emergent phenomenon of increasing diversity and interactions between agents. These same interactions may result in self-organized criticality and a collapse, perhaps through growing tensions due to the increasing interactions and diversity which results in Conflict between groups. After a period of greater tension between groups has transpired this could lead to a golden age of peace and cooperation between agents, a time of perceived Progress. In due time this golden age may just present more complexity devoid of any increase in value, and we get to Development and Conflict again, giving us a Cycle. This example of a cyclical pattern I am using is also not an explanation either, given that cycles in culture may never quite repeat the same way, begging for additional explanation.

The driver theories of change are also all insightful and get at something important, but I don’t think it works to say that any one of them is the primary driver of change. Technology, Culture/Ideas, Power, and Markets all drive, and are driven by, each other. A revolutionary technology can change the culture, the power structure, and the distribution of goods and services. At the same time, to bring a technology to market it takes investment and capital formation. Powerful people, like a Supreme Court Justice, can oppose the use of a technology, say for instance drones, and limit the amount of change that is ultimately driven by a technology. Ideas can inspire inventions, changes in the power structure, and the channeling of money. Also, drivers leave out the context of the environment, which is key, because none of these drivers operates in a vacuum. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and necessity is an environmental determination. Because of the chicken-and-egg problem of picking one dominant driver of change, I think a better way to understand change overall is to recognize drivers, but think of them as embedded and dependent on systems of interacting and interdependent ecology.

I think the weakest theory of social change is Progress. The biggest problem with believing that social change is primarily characterized and explained as a continuous progression is the assumption of universal value. What one sees as progressive another may see as a loss of tradition for the worse. Greater amounts of liberty to one group may seem like a dangerous drift toward anarchy to others. For many, modern progress means loss of culture, growing complexity, stress and being forced into the rat race. Finding a standard of value for which to measure progressive change is a chimerical endeavor I think. Although it is hard to deny that, generally speaking, life has improved over the last couple of centuries in most places around the world.

The encapsulating theories of social change from this perspective are thus Emergence and Evolution. The shape of change in a society emerges from the interaction of diverse autonomous agents, so there can be different shapes at different times, and perhaps many simultaneous shapes that change and mingle within societies, characterized by different lengths of time, generating outcomes that are greater than the sum of these shapes and drivers. It’s the dynamic dancing landscapes of entities, in the context of their environment, that determines the shape and direction of change. Evolution is a good explanatory complement to Emergence because it shows how conditions, and fitness for those conditions, determine which forms are maintained and which are not. As agents act within the situation of resource constraints, and where other agents are also acting, there is competition, cooperation, coopetition, and different strategies for obtaining individual goals. The right fit at the right time will decide which system of organization will persist within a society, and this mechanism causes societies to evolve rather than progress, develop, or simply cycle in a loop.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

The Band Practice Dialogues: Free Will and Determinism

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 19:15:00 -0000

The hard rock band Realizing Resonance performs enthusiastically in their otherwise empty rented practice space. The band is composed of four members, Taylor, the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, Daniel plays lead guitar, Rune is on bass, and Chris is the drummer.

Rune: I think I finally have the bass line in the bridge down, at least well enough not to train wreck it live. I hope.

Taylor: Nice. ‘Bout time.

Rune: Hey, gimme a break. You wrote some tricky transitions in there.

Taylor: Just messin’. Anyways, we can move on to something else. I’m kinda tired of runnin’ through our set, you guys wanna just jam a little? Like freestyle?

Chris: I heard those jam bands get a lot of groupies following them on tour and stuff, but they’re not my type of girls. I’m down, just don’t expect a drum solo.

Taylor: Who’re you foolin’? They’re all your type! No drum solo required.

Daniel: Whatever, as long as we stick to A minor, or C major, or E minor or…um…G major. Those are the only keys I know well enough to improv in.

Taylor: Well then Rune, you wanna lay down something deep in A minor?

Rune: I guess, but I’m not really into just jamming that much. I don’t know about everyone else, but I still need to practice the set before I feel totally comfortable getting up on a stage in front of people.

Chris: Look at it this way, at least if you train wreck it’ll probably be on YouTube.

Taylor: No one’s gonna train wreck. Jammin’ will be good for our practice. Improvisation is the ultimate expression of musical free will, and freestyling with friends, other talented musicians, is like a transcendent free will. Like…the music has its own consciousness and we are the limbs, and the organs, belonging to one big sonic mind. The feeling of getting into a good jam…it’s like nothing else. It’s the freedom to move the music in different directions spontaneously without a top down plan, to play the lead, then surrender control, playing off each other, but still inside the music. It’s hard to put into words. It’s good for practice. I think It’ll help you play everything better. It stretches your musical muscles.

Rune: I don’t think I would get as much out of it as you think. I learn best with structure and conditioning. Plus I don’t really believe in free will anyway. So expressing my conscious choice with jazzy improvisation or a hippy noise fest does not appeal to me in any way.

Taylor: What do you mean you don’t believe in free will?! I never heard of that.

Rune: I mean free will does not exist, and I think it is an error to believe in it. Everything that happens is a function of what happened just before that, and this means that what will happen was already going to happen. Our typical view that we have any real choice in the matter is a persistent illusion. We fool ourselves into feeling like our decisions are not already determined for us. The universe is governed by causal forces, starting with the big bang, unfolding through an inevitable set of interactions from there to eternity. We are part of the universe, so we are part of a process that destined us to our position long before we were born. If we spend our practice time freestyling we will not be expressing any more free will than if we work on perfecting the songs in our set list instead. So I vote for the latter since we have our first show coming up soon, and I would like to feel confident that a good outcome for the performance is the part of the determination.

Chris: Ay Dios mio! Spoken like a truly naive Atheist. It’s obvious that we humans have free will to make choices. It takes some mental somersaults to get to where you’re at. When you know, like I do, that free will’s a gift from God so that we may choose to follow His Word and do good works, it’s easy to understand. But you think all there is to the world is the stuff you can measure, without recognizing that your grand scientific theories still leave your knowledge hollow and empty of true meaning.

Suddenly Chris smashes his drumsticks down hard on his crash cymbals.

Chris: I chose to do that. But if you think it was destined to happen then don’t blame me if there’s a ringin’ in your ears.

Taylor: Ow! What the heck?!

Daniel: Good thing I still have my earplugs in.

Rune: Whatever, smashing your cymbal to annoy me does not prove anything. You’ve proven long ago that it’s in your nature to annoy me. And by the way, there are Christian sects that believe in determinism. John Calvin believed in predestination, the doctrine that God has already determined through His will the complete course of past, present, and future events, and specifically whether you will go to heaven or not. My family are Lutherans, since we have mostly Swedish ancestry, and they would disagree with your argument that good works make any difference for salvation. That’s something you Catholics believe. Protestants broke with Rome on the grounds that they felt faith and grace are the only ways to get into heaven, and believed that free choice couldn’t contribute to being saved. Just because I don’t believe in God does not mean I wasn’t saturated with these things growing up.

Taylor: I don’t know about God. What I can’t believe is that you don’t think free will is real. It’s obviously real! Chris smashing down on his cymbals whenever he wants does prove it. I can just decide to raise my hand in the air and that proves it. Proving that free will exists is so easy that anyone can prove it to themselves by just choosing a choice. Little kids even get that as soon as they can talk and all they wanna say is ‘no.’ Because it’s obvious to them that they can if they want.

Rune: An illusion can lead you to believe something that seems obvious, but is nevertheless completely incorrect. It’s no surprise that little kids would not see through an illusion. Plus, the fact that it’s common for many children to go through phases, such as saying ‘no,’ suggests deterministic tendencies in development. True reality needs to be logically consistent, and since little kids, and I guess plenty of adults, are not so good at critical thought, they need to rely on what seems obvious and are not able to see past the illusion.

Chris: Ok Spock.

Taylor: Dude, that makes no sense.

Rune: What kind of music do you like to perform?

Taylor: We both play in the same rock band together, so what do you think?

Rune: Did you choose to play rock music for a reason besides liking it?

Chris: For the hot groupies.

Taylor: Of course I chose it because I like it. I taught myself how to play guitar because I’ve loved listening to rock since I was little. You know I’d never sell out and play country or bubble gum pop and I know you’re the same way. That’s why you’re being so stubborn about not wanting to freestyle, because you don’t like listening to jam bands and that kind of stuff. But that just makes my point, because I choose to persevere and follow my dreams and not sell out, when so many others either give up or compromise–and it was through the force of my own will, my free will.

Rune: No, you are proving my point. Why do you like rock music over other genres? Did you choose that? Could you not just use your free will to choose to enjoy country music the most instead?

Taylor: Um…I hate the twang and I think the lyrics are dumb. I guess I don’t exactly choose the music I like, but that’s because music is different, it’s something that you feel with your soul, or something. Songs and artists just resonate with you, you know? Choosing to learn to sing and play guitar, so you can play the music you love in bands, is not the same thing as choosing to like a genre of music. I practiced–I practice all the time when I could be doing something else if I wanted to.

Daniel: We’re supposed to be practicing right now.

Rune: But Taylor, aren’t you the kind of person who follows their dreams?

Taylor: Well, yeah.

Rune: Did you choose to be the kind of person who follows their dreams?

Taylor: Um…I don’t know. Sort of…

Rune: There you go. What we choose depends on the kind of people we are, and this we can’t choose, so our choices really don’t originate from a free will. We know, with an incredibly high degree of certainty, as the result of centuries of scientific study, that the universe is composed of matter, energy, and force, which break down into protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, Higgs bosons and other particles. Particles are governed by physical laws of mechanics, and particles form atoms, which form molecules, which form more complex molecules. Chemistry relies on physics. But biology also relies on chemistry, since the body, including the brain, is composed entirely of molecules and energy, dependent and beholden to the laws of physics and chemistry. The mind is caused by the brain, the brain is part of biology, biology is reducible to chemistry, and chemistry is reducible to physics. Minds are not separate from the reality of the causal order, so they cannot be causal forces unto themselves.

Daniel: From what I understand, particle physics is centered around quantum mechanics, which is based around indeterminism. Like the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and the inherently probabilistic nature of the quantum world. We are way beyond Laplace and his demon. We can’t simply use the laws of physics to predict the entire future course of the universe, not even in principle. So it’s not correct that the universe is determined. And if determinism isn’t correct then how can it be a good argument against free will?

Taylor: You wanna talk about a lap dance demon? There was this one…

Rune: Laplace’s demon. Laplace was a French mathematician in the Enlightenment period who argued that you could imagine a supernatural being, a demon, who could perfectly predict infinitely far into the future, if the demon had complete knowledge of the laws of motion and the locations and momentums of all the particles in the universe.

Chris: Nice Taylor. You beat me to it. I know some lap dance demons too.

Rune:One track minds. I think Laplace was right in principle, because there is hard causal determinism, even though it’s impossible to get the perfect knowledge needed for making perfect predictions. Anyway to your point Daniel, indeterminism does not support free will either. Quantum mechanics is based on probability distributions, which while not explicitly determinable they are nonetheless extremely reliable and lawful in their propensities, and while there is uncertainty at the micro levels this does not manifest as indeterminism at the macro level. Playing my bass is reliable and determined. Assuming I am in tune, the strings I pluck and the frets I hold determine the notes I play, and the quantum particles that form my bass do not cause the notes to play in random unexpected ways.

Taylor: Great, now we’re gettin’ into geek speak.

Daniel: Yeah, but if the bass is determined that doesn’t say anything about the bass player. The bass player has to learn and remember…and get into the groove. The bass just gets played.

Chris: Rune could be more of a playa though. Is determinism your way of explaining why you have such as hard time with the ladies?

Rune: Ha ha. We get it. You’re Cristóbal the Playa. The “Latin Lover.” Enough already. Save it for your groupies at the show.

Chris: Sor-ry! You’re so sensitive…

Daniel: Rune, everyone gets it that there are laws of gravity, and thermodynamics, and crap. I never thought that having free will meant that I could walk through walls, or stop myself from aging, by wishing really hard. There are many ways that we aren’t free, but the fact that we can differentiate between freedom and slavery should show something. Having free will doesn’t have to mean that the mind doesn’t depend on a big causal chain culminating with the brain, it very likely does I’m sure. Having free will simply means the choices are yours and no one else is responsible for them. Unless you are being constrained or controlled in some way, like with slavery, or duress, or hypnotism, and stuff like that.

Rune: Yes, when we are not outwardly constrained we have the illusion of making free choices, but it’s just neurons firing in the brain, replacing the chains upon our wrists, one master for another. Free will is regrettably an epiphenomenon.

Taylor: Epi– what?

Rune: Epiphenomenon. It is a secondary effect of a process that has no part in the causal workings of the process. It means that we perceive and experience ourselves taking actions and making choices, but action and the feeling of acting are both caused by the same causal forces in our brain. We don’t cause an action but we feel like we do because of the consistent correlation in time of bodily actions and our experience. There have been some experiments that show how our brain starts to initiate an action before we are actually consciously aware that we are doing it. This is evidence that the feeling of free will is an epiphenomenon, and that means it’s an illusion.

Chris: At first when you said “epiphenomenon”, I thought you were talkin’ about me. But now I really don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.

Daniel: I think you’re out on a limb Rune. I can deliberate about a decision and change my mind. I do this all the time. In my day job I have to analyze data and offer recommendations about possible managerial actions, and when me and my co-workers get into a meeting room and discuss strategy we are obviously doing more than being passive observers that only watch as our mouths speak causally predicated words. When I get home I have to decide between spending my time with my wife, my friends, learning something for career development, taking a nap, or as Taylor would prefer, practicing guitar. In order to make this work I create a complex schedule each week that I try to maintain. There is too much deliberation and contemplation going on behind my decisions for it not to be me making them. They involve conflicted feelings of duty, love, and passion, with different objects of desire vying for my limited time and attention. Not only do I have to make decisions about what to do, I have to make decisions about what to think about.

Taylor: Hey, if you practiced guitar more often at home, we could spend more time learning more new songs when we are together. We should be doing that right now.

Daniel: We have plenty to practice already. With our ten songs in the set list, plus like five alternates. You write virtually a new song every week.

Chris: It’s not just ‘cause you’re the only one of us who’s married, and with a real career. I work two jobs. I date. I’m busy too. Taylor just does nothing else but spend his free time playing music and writing songs. He’s obsessive to an abnormal degree.

Rune: Exactly, Taylor is a song writing machine. Determined to create. The key point behind what you were saying, Daniel, is that you feel emotions that conflict, but you don’t decide which emotions to feel. Your emotions are your experience of your causal drives, and your intellect is your experience of satisfying these drives, whether this is hunger and getting a meal or reproduction and going on dates. Just because life is really really complex, does not mean it’s not all part of a causal order. Humans are agents that process environmental inputs through inherent cognitive machinery, through lower level bodily urges to their derivative higher level social strategies. Our subsequent actions and our experience of initiating them are ultimately predetermined. It’s easy to understand how we can get from changing environments and diverse interacting agents to evolutionary and emergent patterns if you have studied complexity theory and systems theory. Even chaos is determined. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, colonies of ants and termites, and even tornadoes are examples of where intricate phenomena emerge from the interactions of many diverse parts following simple causal rules. Yet these emerged entities seem to show a causal force that belongs to the whole entity rather than the parts. Human identities are emergent and really no different in principle, just different in the diversity of parts and degree of interaction, resulting in greater complexity.

Daniel: Dude, hello! I do data analysis and statistical forecasting for a corporation. I already have an economics degree. I know all about systems and complexity, and trust me, economic laws are not determined like the laws of physics. Good luck with that reduction! How does determinism explain all of the choices that went into the set list that we decided on at our last practice? We agreed that we wanted our strongest up tempo songs first, because we want to catch the attention of the crowd right away, so we picked “Future Tell”, “Metamorphosis”, and “You Incomplete Me” as our first three. Next we decided on slower songs, “Tragedy” and “Daydreaming”, but we agreed that “Daydreaming” should be played after “Tragedy” because we wanted to lighten the mood up from a heavy piece. And of course, we have “Realize the Resonance” as the finale, with “Entropic Ends” right before that one, given the poetics of ending with these two songs. When it came to the other three songs before that though, “Rise of the Oligarchs”, “Spoiled So Special”, and “Whispering to You”, none of us really had any preference for how to order them. We just sort of picked at random. This is the liberty of indifference. We are still making a choice even when we don’t care which way or the other. We can decide to utilize chance to choose even, by flipping coins, or rock-paper-scissors.

Rune: Thanks for the soft ball. You just summed up the causal reasons for us selecting most of the set list, which all supports my view, and the other three songs that we were indifferent to were determined all the same, only we never made explicit any personal reasons for those selections. If we left it up to a coin flip that would simply pass the determinism on to the complex web of movements and forces that go into that action and consequence, with randomness being only the higher level illusory perspective that is not able to track the complexity. Plus, turns out we didn’t flip a coin.

Taylor: Man, all I wanted to do was just jam a little without any structure. So what you’re saying is, my desire for us to improvise a little has instigated an annoying college symposium on free will versus determinism, what–like–because of the butterfly effect, or something?

Rune: Think of it this way. If you rolled back time to the beginning of our practice session today, could you see it going any other way? Would you have randomly decided not to want to jam? I know my reaction would have been the same.

Taylor: It could have been different. You could’ve played that last song a little worse, making me less comfortable with just free styling, and we could’ve just ran through the song a few more times instead.

Rune: But why would I have played any worse than I did? My performance today was a function of my current skill level, my previously practicing the songs, my focus, and these are functions of earlier things, so if I was going to play worse than I did something else before that would have needed to be different, but that will not work. Think about all the time travel movies that show how there is a paradox which results when you go back in time and change even a small detail, so that the present time you left is forever changed, including the conditions that resulted in you going back in time. The most dramatic of these is the grandfather paradox, in which you go back in time and kill your grandfather which creates the condition that you would have never been born and so you would never have been able to go back in time and kill your grandfather. The logical corollary to this thought experiment is that if you went back in time and only observed the past like a ghost, and did not interfere in any way with the order of events, you can rest assured that the present time will be exactly the same as it was when you get back and you don’t have to worry about any paradoxes. This also means that if you roll time backwards to a particular moment and then start time again without interfering directly in any way to change some detail, then events will play out like a movie with a script.

Daniel: No one has ever really rolled time backwards, that we know of, so you can’t know that our intuition from time travel movies is the reality or not. It could just as easily be the case that quantum indeterminism means that rolling back time allows for the possibility of tiny little changes in the positions of electrons, which eventually aggregate into large scale macro differences after a while, so you don’t get the same events if you were able to replay time. It’s totally possible that if we rolled back time to when we were selecting our set list last week that the selections we made out of indifference would have a different ordering.

Taylor: Yeah, what he said.

Daniel: Besides, you make it sound like humans are essentially zombies who just happen to have an illusion of their own consciousness. According to your view, we would all behave exactly the same way if we did not have any conscious awareness of ourselves, like if we were zombies without minds. If the complexity of our brains and neurons firing is all you need, and our conscious experience of personal identity directing our actions through choice and free will is just a by-product, not a part of the causal order, then it doesn’t matter if it was removed from the picture all together. I can use the example of many movies and television shows to demonstrate the intuition that zombies without consciousness do not behave like we do anymore. So I don’t think it makes sense that we don’t have our own personal causal powers related to consciousness and free will. We would be mindless zombies otherwise. At least if we get to use movie intuition as evidence.

Chris: I think that I can’t just be determined by my drives and urges all the way. I used to have problems with drug addiction when I was in high school, but I overcame it through force of will and through the support of family and my rediscovery of faith. When I had the drives to use, I couldn’t resist them all the time, but that was not because I didn’t want to resist them. I really did. I didn’t want to be the way I was, and I dreamed of stopping, but I was weak. Then I got back to my Catholic roots and opened myself up to faith in God, truly, and this gave me the power to persevere and change my sinful ways. This is also when I started playin’ the drums, and I would I say that my life was healed by prayer and percussion. Not that these caused me to change though, but that I was able to use them as ways to transform myself. Free will is something real if I can take control of my basic urges and become a better person, a person that I want to be more than the person I was. If I didn’t have free will, it’s like sayin’ that I wasn’t responsible for changing, that I wasn’t responsible for my action. If that’s true, then there’s no point tryin’ to accomplish anything, I may as well just sit around bein’ lazy, since nothin’ I do has any effect on what happens and I’m not responsible for what happens. The Atheist response that I sometimes hear to my story– about finding faith to help me get clean–is that I found the power within myself and just misattributed it to God. If what you’re sayin’ is true about determinism, Rune, then I couldn’t even have found the power within myself. Your position would make more sense if you were a Lutheran still, and believed my willpower really was all from God, because then at least determinism would make sense with my experience.

Taylor: Yeah, Rune, determinism would mean that I wasn’t truly responsible for writing any of the excellent songs we are practicing. It would mean that the melodies, harmonies, and lyrical poetries I write are triggered by factors in my environment, with no artistry on my part, no dedication, no choice of environment at all. How could I have such pride in my work then? How then could you all fault me for being such an awesome composer, and writing so many good songs?

Rune: I don’t think we’re truly responsible for our actions in the way that everyone usually thinks. That is one of the reasons why I am against the death penalty. I think we need to completely reform our understanding of responsibility, justice, and punishment to consider determinism.

Taylor: Wait a second. I let you and the other guys write your own parts around the core of my original compositions. That’s the reason why we all agreed that when we get signed some day that we would share writing credits. If what you’re saying about determinism is true, then either no one wrote the songs and no one gets credit, or I wrote the songs as an original source of their primary content, and your parts were therefore determined from there on out. So I should get all of the credit and the royalties if we get signed.

Chris: Really? You wanna play the drums too?

Rune: Not so fast. Credit is apportioned by contribution of the part, or your friends don’t want to play in a band with you anymore and you can get credit for playing all of your own instruments. That’s the causal order of that.

Taylor: Obviously joking. Still, how does determinism explain the way I write my songs? People ask me a lot, so I’ve thought about it, and it’s not just a simple method. Sometimes I hear a melody in my head, and I’ll keep trying out different patterns of words, like random strings of words, just to feel what sounds like it belongs. Not like it was meant to be exactly, but like I am an explorer who discovers my creation through inspiration and experiment. Sometimes I get something down super fast, I get a verse and a chorus, with melody, chords, and lyrics, but then I get hung up on the second verse. In fact, I got so hung up on the second verse of “Daydreaming” that I felt it was better just to repeat the first verse.

Daniel: I knew it!

Taylor: Sometimes I have an idea for a lyrical theme, which gives me a sense of the musical structure. You know, the tempo, and whether it’s a major or minor key, and the style. That’s when I want the song to be about something specific. It’s not just the process of writing a particular song though, you know, it’s the creativity of writing any song. They are each a novelty. A body of work is an artist’s fingerprints, a unique identity, except instead of being born with a repertoire, the catalog is shaped and formed by the artistic will, changing and evolving over time. The Beatles are “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “Strawberry Fields”, “Let it Be”, and all their songs, not just any one song. I intentionally try to push my boundaries, and the boundaries of the music, but not too much because then it wouldn’t be accessible to the audience I want. It can be even simpler than that though, like not wanting to use the same key too many times in a row, and the desire for changing up the tempo. Its kinda like what Daniel was saying before about the set list. I am almost writing a set list rather than individual songs, or an album, as one holistic entity, with each song fitting inside like flexible puzzle pieces. Unfortunately, most people don’t really listen to entire albums much anymore, but still.

Rune: That’s all really interesting, but it doesn’t explain anything about free will.

Taylor: Whatever it doesn’t! I might not be explaining my creative process that well, but the point is that creativity requires a free will. For the inspiration…it begins with dedication…no outside instigation…free will its own creation. See that! New lyrics off the top of my head. How else but free will?

Rune: Impressive, I guess…Obviously I’ve heard of songwriting and creativity before, so you didn’t stump me or something. I don’t think this has anything to do with free will. Remember I didn’t even think that playing your jazzy improv would be expressing a free will. I don’t disagree that music feels transformative and transcendent to us, and for some the allure is so powerful that they even become musicians and songwriters. Clearly, each of us here is that type of person. However, at root this is because music produces a limbic system response of dopamine and endorphins. Music triggers our internal reward system. The styles of music you are exposed to as an adolescent become the styles you are predisposed to as an adult. If you are a non-musician you process melody and harmony in your right brain hemisphere and rhythm in you left, but if you are a musician you process all three components in your left. This means left hemisphere damage could cause a musician to lose their ability to perform music. Trauma to the hippocampus could cause memory damage, such as the ability to remember long sequences of music. And so on. Your brain creates your creativity, and what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time is that you didn’t create your own brain.

Chris: Actually, I know a few ways that people can intentionally create different brain states for themselves. Not my recommendation though.

Daniel: You are over thinking this Rune. There is no contradiction between any of the deterministic examples you have argued and the existence of free will. They are pretty compatible I think. Look, I agree with most of what you’ve said, most of your evidence. The laws of physics, the principle of sufficient reason, evolutionary selection, biological imperatives, brain states, these are all well established rational facts and assumptions.

Rune: Don’t even get me started on evolution.

Daniel: I won’t. The thing about all of the deterministic evidence that we can think of is that it creates constraints that limit our options, but while the constraints define our options, it’s our options that give us choices. I didn’t choose that I was born in California in 1977, but I did choose to move to Seattle in 1995. I didn’t choose who my parents are, anymore than they had a choice in who I was gonna be. I didn’t choose that I am attracted to women, that I was attracted to my wife and fell head over heels in love with her, but I did choose to express my love by proposing to her at Chichen Itza in Mexico–

Chris: Oh man, you should’ve done it at Machu Picchu!

Daniel: Chichen Itza was a place we both had both always wanted to visit before we ever met. It’s one of the cool things we have in common, our interest in the Mayans. Dude, Incas are cool too, just a different connection to me and Elise. You know what I mean? Anyway, I chose to take Elise to Chichen Itza and propose marriage to her at that place in the world. I didn’t choose that Chichen Itza is a place that exists in the world and which we can actually travel to, or that we both were interested in it even, anymore than I chose to live in our time rather than the time of the Mayans. Determinism presents us with options, of which there are often many, but we still get to choose between these options. And that is free will.

Rune: The key is to see how each step of the way is predicated, even what seems to take place inside yourself. You just said that you had particular reasons for going to Chichen Itza instead of Machu Picchu, so this preference was a conspiring factor in the determination of where you went. I’m sure it also had something do with wanting to demonstrate romance, it was within your price range, and…

Daniel: You’re missing the point. Preferences themselves might be determined, but these still only form constraints on our options at the moment just before the choice. Preferences, and wealth, these limit the set of options at any given moment just like gravity and geology do. Even law, morality, and custom have the property of constraining what are acceptable alternatives, and our musical tastes are the same way. The thing is, we still think about all of these things, ponder and deliberate, consider scenarios, and we decide how to use our free time doing what we can do freely. For some people it’s in the spaces between work and duty, while others freely choose to shirk responsibility in order to obtain more free time.

Taylor: I don’t shirk! I need time to create–

Daniel: I wasn’t talking about you. How we spend our time, the choices we make, these determine our character more than our character determines exactly what we’re gonna do next. We can even change our character through the force of will, because we are free to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, as when Chris got clean. Nothing about the future is a foregone conclusion. In fact, a fundamental fact about our decisions is that they all pertain to the future. We don’t need to be explicitly thinking about our plans and goals, but each step we take is forward. There are pathways already there in front of us, there are pathways that we have started on or already travelled down, but we still get to pick which branch to follow at the next junction, at the next crossroads, or we can decide to just go off the path altogether. Isn’t that close to what we’re doing here and now, following a lesser travelled road?

Rune: Not really, garage bands have been around for decades–

Daniel: It was a rhetorical question. I already know your answer. What I’m getting at is that the future is an enduring aspect of our decision making process, and the future hasn’t happened yet. This is profound right? It means that there are purposes involved in our motivations beyond our human drives and instincts, beyond our character and preferences, beyond the conditions of the past. We are teleological creatures who dream up fantasy futures, and some of us even seek out the cutting edge skills and tools to achieve our autonomous creative ends. You gotta know this is profound.

Taylor: What is teololo–

Daniel: Ask your phone. The future hasn’t happened yet, yet we consider it constantly. The thing is, the future does not cause the present, so this aspect of our decisions, this is about our thoughts, our consciousness in consideration. Its holistic and integrated…and messy and fleeting. It involves the consideration of possibilities, scenarios, and hopes, along with taking risks, leaps of faith, perseverance, and reflection. We take a stand on our own existence. We take a stand on our own identity. We are pushed forward by time, and, recognizing this fact about our situation, we take a stand on our own futures. We are processes not things! We are evolving entities with each second, defined anew with each choice we make, each thought, each contemplation. Yes, we go on autopilot much of the time, following our typical routines without thinking about it, executing our subconscious checklists. We tactically react to the situations of the day, we converse about clichéd niceties, we generally conform to the socially accepted patterns of behavior.

Taylor: I’m not a conformist–

Daniel: Didn’t say you were. We at least conform relative to our social circles. I’m not as free at my corporate job as I am here at band practice, but I’m not exactly free at band practice either, since we’re supposed to be practicing when we’re here. I have a dress code at work, and while this is a constraining rule there might be an infinite amount of tie designs to choose from. Performing music lends itself to a kind of dress code as well, but now the idea might be to go with leather and tattoos, or maybe just crazy costumes like KISS or Lady Gaga. The point is, we can really feel ourselves in our decisions, and this feeling we have, this experience that we have of imagining our dreams, of formulating our plans, of executing our steps, of enjoying our accomplishments and regretting our mistakes, these might be ultimately dependent on our biology and circumstance. Nevertheless, the fact that we make decisions which are solely concerned with our person, and that these involve pie-in-the-sky concepts…um…fame, wealth, getting signed, performing to a sold out Tacoma Dome, the fact that we base our decisions on things like this should already be proof positive that whatever autopilots we’ve got going on, we still play a very active part in trying to make our own future happen how we want it to. Don’t discount this. Like I said, seriously fuckin’ profound.

Rune: A profound illusion.

Taylor: Shoot! Our practice time is up. Thanks for that Rune. I think maybe that was your plan all along.

Rune: Hey, I wasn’t the cause of anything!

Chris: That conversation was destined to go ‘round in circles anways.

Rune: Don’t even get me started on destiny. And circles!

Daniel: Seriously?

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Inspired by the Following Works:

Nichols, Shaun. Great Philosophical Debates: Free Will and Determinism. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2008. Video.

Rescher, Nicholas. Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Print.

Watson, Gary. Ed. Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Second Edition, 2003. Print.

The Band Practice Dialogues: Government and the Social Contract

I Play My Guitar Because I Want To

Emergent Consciousness and Freewill

Mardi Gras and the Liberty to Sin

Taksim: Tranquility Before The Tumult

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:30:00 -0000

Atatürk Monument in Taksim Square Gezi Park, May 15th, 2013.

I recently travelled to Istanbul for the first time, attending a training workshop for business forecasting, seizing a chance to marvel at the relics of Ottoman and Byzantine history backdrop the emerging vitality of modern Turkey. It was the ides of May, a time of relative calm considering the waves of turbulent protest that have swept across Turkey since then. The mellow atmosphere I experienced a month ago while walking through Istanbul’s Taksim Square has been shattered by angry mobs defiantly confronting unforgiving authority. The stillness was broken when police brutally raided a peaceful encampment of environmentalists in Gezi Park, who were vigilantly guarding a sycamore shrouded commons, a rare green space amidst Istanbul’s massive metropolis. Reports and images of police excessively employing batons, water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas to disperse these activists triggered an unintended consequence. The ranks of protestors increased dramatically and spread rapidly to other major Turkish cities, Ankara, Izmir, Konya and most of the country’s provinces.

I have mixed emotions about the protests, but alas I am not a Turk so I don’t feel my two cents would be all that helpful to my Turkish friends right now, except to say that I hope and pray a fair resolution will settle the unrest soon. Nevertheless, seeing the dramatic scenes of civilian crowds facing off against riot police and armored vehicles, at locations that I now find familiar, has felt terribly surreal and somewhat emotional, so I needed to express this. I offer my personal experiences and images as a small bit of history, the tranquility before the tumult, the calm before the storm, an ode to the Taksim District of Istanbul.

Regrettably, I only shot one photo while walking through Gezi Park, this dim picture of a fountain shaped into dolphins, a fountain from which no water poured forth.

Gezi Park, May 16th, 2013.

I wandered through the center of Taksim Square several times in my short stay in Istanbul. To get there from my hotel I used a pedestrian walkway that bridged an area under construction, a corridor of corrugated sheet metal papered with posters advertising an upcoming rally in commemoration of Atatürk. The corridor emptied onto a circular walkway inside four semi-circles of grass, flowers, and a few small trees, enclosed by little white fences, surrounding a large monument to Atatürk, scenes from his life frozen into statues decorating all four sides. Busy passersby entered and exited the circle around the monument, looping into whichever direction they were headed, most of them ignored the street vendors selling bagel-like pastries covered in sesame seeds and navigated around those tourists who obstructed the walkways with hopes of achieving the perfect angle for their photos. On Thursday night I made my way past the square and noticed large crowds loitering about and socializing, with a couple of young men even roosting on the monument below the petrified Atatürks.

Taksim Square, May 16th, 2013.

Taksim Square, late on May 16th, 2013.

I crossed the street to get a mocha from Starbucks, a little taste of home after a few Turkish coffees, before heading down İstiklal Avenue. It was Thursday night, but it felt like the weekend, a vibrant energy permeating all of the faces. Perhaps the large cadre of riot police milling aimlessly along a side street between Taksim Square and İstiklal Avenue should have been a portend, their transparent body shields leaning against the wall, these protectors of the peace were mostly young men talking and laughing, just hanging out. Then I saw something that surprised even my own liberal expectations, thinking to myself, no it can’t be, and promptly let it go. A few minutes later, as I was walking past The Gap and Sephora, I saw another instance of it and I knew that more than just Starbucks had followed me from Seattle to Istanbul. Amongst the occasional stylish hijabs and sporadic black burkas strutted gorgeously unexpected cross dressers! It was the first thing I told my wife about when I called her my next morning, which was incidentally still her night before.

İstiklal Avenue, May 16th, 2013.

Also the next morning, as I meandered through the square toward Starbucks (yes again), I was surprised to see the area around the Atatürk monument was empty except for one lonely Saz player softly tuning his instrument. Luckily I managed to capture this image. These are my memories of a tranquil Taksim, before turbulence and tumult took it over.

Taksim Square, May 16th, 2013.

Watching the protests on CNN is not only surreal, it is nerve racking, as if it were my own Seattle. However, as dramatic as things are right now in Turkey, I believe these troubles will pass without anything so destabilizing as Tahrir Square in Egypt, or any of the other Arab Spring revolutions. I will leave you with this consideration, a passage from Stephen Kinzer’s Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two World:

“My favorite word in Turkish is istiklal. The dictionary says it means ‘independence,’ and that alone is enough to win it a place of honor in any language…But the real reason I like to hear the word istiklal is because it is the name of Turkey’s most fascinating boulevard. Jammed with people all day and late into the night, lined with cafés, bookstores, cinemas and shops of every description, it is the pulsating heart not only of Istanbul but of the Turkish nation. I go there every time I feel myself being overwhelmed by doubts about Turkey. Losing myself in Istiklal’s parade of faces and outfits for a few minutes, overhearing snippets of conversation and absorbing the energy that crackles along its mile and a half, is always enough to renew my confidence in Turkey’s future. Because Istanbul has attracted millions of migrants from other parts of the country–several hundred new ones still arrive every day–this street is the ultimate melting pot. The country would certainly take a huge leap forward if people could be grabbed there at random and sent to Ankara to replace members of Parliament. Istiklal is perfectly named because its human panorama reflects Turkey’s drive to break away from claustrophobic provincialism and allow its people to express their magnificent diversity.”

Taksim Square, May 15th, 2013.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Works Cited

Kinzer, Stephen. Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two World . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Revised edition, 2001. Kindle.

Türkçe Olarak Yazmayı Öğrenme

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Sun, 12 May 2013 08:57:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

This blog article, which in English is titled “Learning to Write in Turkish,” is a bit atypical for me. I am travelling to Istanbul, Turkey this week and I have been trying to learn as much Turkish as I can before I leave. I am up to Level 2/Unit 2 using Rosetta Stone, a remarkably helpful program that makes learning a new language fun. Inspired by this I had planned to write a simple blog article in Turkish, using what I had learned so far. After taking an hour to write the first couple of sentences, I decided to cheat a little and get some translation help. I discovered an app for my Droid called Talking Translator/Dictionary , from GF Media Apps, an excellent supplement which has made learning to write in Turkish go much faster. Hopefully I did not butcher things too much.

Türkçe

Merhaba. Benim adım Jared ve ben Amerika’liyim. Ben İngilizce konuşmak, ama bu hafta İstanbul’a ziyaret edicek çünkü Türk öğreniyorum.

Bugün benim bavul ambalaj başladı. Ben altı gömlek, pantolon iki çift ve bir kemer getirerek, ama benim takım elbise ve kravat duyuyorum. Hala diş fırçası ve diş macunu paketi gerekiyor ve benim cep telefonu şarj cihazı unutmak istemiyorum.

Çarşamba günü Ben Atatürk Havalimanı’nda gelmesi ve arkadaşım Sinan karşılamak için umuyoruz. Ben otele kontol sonra İstanbul’un bazı bölgelerinde ziyaret ve bazı deliscious Osmanlı mutfağı için bir lonkanta gidecek.

Perşembe ve Cuma günü ben iş tahmin için bir eğitim atölyesi, mesleki gelişim ve ağ için büyük bir fırsat katılacak.

Ben ailesi Cuma akşamı ile Sinan evinde ile akşam yemeği için davet edildi. Sonra Cumartesi günü o Kapalı Çarşı ve Topkapı Sarayı ziyaret ile, İstanbul çevresindeki biraz daha bana gösterecektir.

Ben eşim Mary için Türkiyeden bir hediye ile birlikte, Pazar günü eve dönmek.

English

Hello. My name is Jared and I am American. I speak English, but I am learning Turkish because I will be visiting Istanbul this week.

I started packing today. I am bringing six shirts, two pairs of pants, two jackets, six pairs of socks, one belt, but no ties. I still need to pack a toothbrush and toothpaste, and I don’t want to forget my cell phone charger.

On Wednesday I arrive at Ataturk Airport and hope to meet my friend Sinan. After I check into my hotel we will visit some sites around Istanbul and go to a restaurant for some delicious Ottoman cuisine.

On Thursday and Friday I will be attending a training workshop for business forecasting, a great opportunity for professional development and networking.

I have been invited to have dinner at Sinan’s home with his family Friday evening. Then on Saturday he will show me around Istanbul some more, with visits to the Grand Bazaar and Topkapi Palace.

I return home on Sunday, along with a gift from Turkey for my wife Mary.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Macroeconomic Forecasting with Diverse Predictions

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:22:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

To say that economic forecasting is inherently difficult is an understatement. The economy is a complex adaptive system, with billions of independent agents and countless relations and interconnections between them acting in a dynamic dancing ecology. The discovery of economic forces, theories, and correlations is a fruitful social scientific endeavor that has given us great insight into the workings of markets and money, but the problem of seeing into the future and anticipating the change in an evolving macroeconomic system confounds plenty of experts. In the article, The Disputability of Macroeconomic Knowledge, I describe the challenge that we have even finding agreement about the way economic systems work. Predicting long term trends, cycle turning points, and sudden discontinuities, will likely never become a perfect science.

My own crystal ball remains as cloudy as anyone’s when it comes to predicting the future of the U.S. economy. However, I do know a way to improve the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasting through the combination of multiple and diverse projections. It is fairly well established that combining multiple diverse forecasts or methods can improve average accuracy over time. The phenomenon was captured in James Surowiecki’s popular book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Surowiecki provides compelling case studies, such as Sir Francis Dalton’s data from the 1906 West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, in which 787 participants tried to guess the weight of a steer. The mean of the crowd’s estimates was 1,197 lbs. while the actual weight was 1,198 lbs., an amazing outcome (Page “Wisdom of Crowds”). Combining multiple forecasts together to obtain one crowd prediction appears to have some promise. In fact, this leveraging of the crowd to make better forecasts is the impetus behind prediction markets.

Some Background on Predictive Diversity

In their detailed text, Forecasting: Practice and Process for Demand Management, Hans Levenbach and James P. Cleary highlight the benefits of combining and averaging forecasts. Professional forecasters have held competitions, such as the M1 and the M2, in which various methods and techniques were tested. In tests of the exponential smoothing method, using 1,001 times series during the M1 competition, it was discovered that taking a simple average improved accuracy compared to the best individual forecast. Although the M2 competition showed gains from simple averaging, the best individual forecasts still outperformed the crowd. The same logic that applies to portfolio diversity in investing applies to diversity in forecasting, it reduces the risk of putting all of your eggs in one basket (Levenbach, Cleary 545). It was from this text that I first learned the merits of forecast combination and began to apply this technique in my professional work to great utility.

In the Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, an indispensible resource for predictioneers compiled by J. Scott Armstrong, there is a chapter devoted to the principles of combining forecasts. These are sometimes referred to as composite or ensemble forecasts. Armstrong (419) writes, “Combining forecasts improves accuracy to the extent that component forecasts contain useful and independent information…There are two ways to generate independent forecasts. One is to analyze different data, and the other is to use different forecasting methods. The more that data and methods differ, the greater the expected improvement in accuracy compared to the average of the individual forecasts.”

Based on research and expertise the principles recommended by Armstrong are to use diverse data or methods, combine at least five forecasts, use formal procedures for combination to avoid judgmental biasing, apply equal weights unless there is good reasons to do otherwise, trim the highest and lowest forecasts before calculating the mean, and use past track records and domain knowledge to determine the weights if there is strong evidence that supports it. Armstrong (431) also calls attention to evidence that indicates that combining econometric forecasts improved upon the accuracy of the individual forecasts. This suggests there might be promise for my goal of forecasting macroeconomics.

In a series of Great Courses lectures from The Teaching Company called, The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently is Your Greatest Asset, Scott E. Page of the University of Michigan spends some time on the benefits of forecast combination. In one lecture, aptly titled “The Wisdom of Crowds,” he demonstrates the Diversity Prediction Theorem and a mathematically sound proof that the crowd squared error of an ensemble of forecasts will necessarily equal the average individual squared errors of the forecasts minus the diversity of the forecasts. The major implication of the Diversity Prediction Theorem is that having diverse forecast models or predictions is just as important as having individual precision. In a subsequent lecture titled “The Diversity Prediction Theorem Times Three,” Page illustrates another excellent case study, the Netflix Prize. I don’t have the time to discuss it here, so I recommend checking out this Great Courses series.

Leveraging Diversity to Make Better Macroeconomic Forecasts

In the fourth quarter of 2011, as I was planning for the next year’s budgets, I needed a good estimate of the economic numbers for 2012. Nothing too fancy, just the annual forecasts of national GDP growth, CPI inflation, and the unemployment rate. Rather than waste precious time and resources building my own complex econometric model for use simply as high level inputs into my core forecasting interests I decided it was best to find some credible forecasts already in the public domain. The problem for me was choosing between the many conflicting forecasts available in the media and the internet.

Forecaster Roy Pearson provides several great resources in his article, “A Baker’s Dozen Free Sources of Economic Forecasts”, publishing in the Winter 2010 edition of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. The volume of forward economic projections on the web is overwhelming, so Pearson’s article is a helpful way to narrow the list down to a manageable repertoire of credible forecasts. He chose the recommended baker’s dozen under five principled criteria, the forecasts are free on the web, they are reliably updated on a regular basis, they contain numerical predictions, they provide projections for months, quarters, and years, and finally they include an explanation of the assumptions behind the models. Pearson’s selected crowd of forecasters includes U.S. and Canadian financial institutions, the Federal Reserve, the National Association of Realtors, neural net models from the private Financial Forecast Center, and Yale University’s Fair Model. I excluded these latter two sources, plus one of the U.S. financial institutions, from my model for technical reasons, leaving me with ten diverse forecasts of the same macroeconomic data points.

I calculated a simple average of ten forecasts from Mesirow Financial, Northern Trust, PNC, Wells Fargo, MFC Global - Manulife, BMO Capital Markets, ScotiaBank, Royal Bank of Canada, National Association of Realtors, and The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Survey of Professional Forecasters. This process generated a forecast for GDP growth of 2.26, a CPI inflation of 2.31, and an 8.9% unemployment rate. This ensemble of macroeconomics forecasts was fairly close to the mark, with actual GDP growth clocking in at 2.20, CPI inflation climbing 2.07, and unemployment dipping to 8.1% in 2012. In all three predictions the Diversity Prediction Theorem holds, which has to be the case given that it is enforced by a mathematical proof. A more difficult and less certain test is whether or not the ensemble beat all of the individual forecasts.

With the GDP prediction the crowd outperformed all of the individual forecasts, with the closest of those estimates being 2.1 and coming from both Northern Trust and ScotiaBank. Evaluating the CPI projection shows that the ensemble was outperformed by seven of the individual forecasts, a poor showing for diversity. A closer inspection of the CPI forecasts reveals that one forecast in particular, a prediction that prices would rise 4.1, from the National Association of Realtors, surely brought the average up too high. The evaluation of the unemployment forecasts is a bit of a different story, in that there was a bias to the high side with four models expecting rates above 9% and only one model coming anywhere close to the actual 8.1%. Because of this, the ensemble forecast for unemployment was too high at 8.9%. All in all a mixed bag.

I would have benefitted from following J. Scott Armstrong’s advice and observed the principle of trimming the mean by eliminating the minimum and maximum individual forecasts from the ensemble. When I backtest with the trimmed means I get forecasts of 2.20 for GDP, which is right on the money, and 2.10 for CPI, which is tied with the two best individual predictions. In the case of unemployment using a trimmed mean would have made things worse, because it would have eliminated a prediction of 8.0%, the number closest to the actual, and the combined forecast would have been 9.0% instead. Still a mixed bag, but an improvement in two out of three so I’ll take it.

Macroeconomic Forecasts for 2013 and 2014

All of my analysis above has to be taken for granted by the average reader, as I never made the macroeconomic predictions in my evaluation public prior to the period being forecast. Although, I have provided my method and source inputs so theoretically someone else should be able to recreate the same backcasts and test my claims. Nevertheless, backward analysis receives significant utility imparted to it from the value of its forward looking applicability. In this spirit I am sharing my best estimates of the U.S. macroeconomic outlook for the next two years, an ensemble that roughly mirrors the method I used to forecast 2012, although this time I used trimmed means for the GDP and CPI, plus I dropped the two highest unemployment forecasts to slightly correct for last year’s bias in the models. Below are forecasts for GDP, CPI, and unemployment for 2013 and 2014.

In the future I might be able to make further improvements to my ensemble model by weighting the input forecasts with unequal weights based on past accuracy or by careful scrutiny of the underlying model assumptions against domain knowledge (Levenbach, Cleary 545) (Armstrong). This is challenging because we don’t just want to pick the predictor that has done the best in the past because this removes the diversity benefit altogether, so selecting which forecasts to include and how to weight them can be a complicated optimization problem in which weights are assigned based on proportional accuracy or other scheme (Page “The Weighting is the Hardest Part”). I could also average forecasts taken at different lead times, seek out even more diverse models or forecasts to incorporate into my ensemble, or even build my own macroeconomic model as a supplement. Before going to all of this additional effort though it is helpful to consider whether the benefits in accuracy will outweigh the increasing costs of tracking and analyzing multiple models and methods.

Conclusion

Combining forecasts is not a panacea for perfect prediction. The economic system is far too complex and dynamic to provide consistent patterns and smooth trends all the time. Discontinuous changes, wildcards, sudden inflection points, and black swan events with low probability yet large consequence, are all facts of the global economic system. Disruptions can be dramatic and missed entirely by a consensus of astute experts, so averaging their predictions does not help in these scenarios. If we liken the situation to that of risk management in investing, as Levenbach and Cleary indicate, the comparison can be made to the way a diversified portfolio can hedge against idiosyncratic risk but not systemic risk. The same is true of forecasting with diverse models, the technique improves upon uncorrelated idiosyncrasies in different models or data sets, but it is not a hedge against something big and unexpected happening which is absent from all of the models. There is no silver bullet that will give us perfect knowledge of the future of complex systems. Still, by synthesizing and leveraging diverse predictive methods and models we can certainly enhance our predictive power and obtain better results than otherwise.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Works Cited

Armstrong, J. Scott.. “Combining Forecasts”. Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners. Ed. J Scott Armstrong. Philadelphia: Springer, 2001. 417-439. Print.

Levenbach, Hans, and James P. Cleary. Forecasting: Practice and Process for Demand Management. Belmont, CA: Duxbury, Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2006. Print.

Page, Scott E.. “The Wisdom of Crowds”.The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently is Your Greatest Asset. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2012. Video.

Page, Scott E.. “The Diversity Prediction Theorem Times Three”.The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently is Your Greatest Asset. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2012. Video.

Page, Scott E.. “The Weighting is the Hardest Part”.The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently is Your Greatest Asset. Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, 2012. Video.

Pearson, Roy (2010). ”A Baker’s Dozen Free Sources of Economic Forecasts.” Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, 16, 12-15.

Five Essential Principles for Transformational Change

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:08:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

Successfully guiding your organization through a transformational change requires the stuff that true leaders are made of. Moving from the comfortable status quo into a new era is not a foregone conclusion, and trepidatious attitudes can be difficult to convince. If the right steps aren’t taken to bring about a process of change, resistance could imperil the plan and old habits could reassert themselves in no time. While not an exhaustive analysis or comprehensive list, I have listed five principles for transforming organizations that I consider essential.

Have a Good Reason: Most people do not want to change and feel incredibly anxious about it. Including me. So there needs to be a good reason. The change may be needed to respond to a sudden or approaching threat, or the change may be needed to take advantage of an opportunity. Either way, the change must feel necessary or it will surely be resisted. For example, a cost cutting strategy that has no other justification than that it will improve profit margins and increase manager incentive pay is a change for no good reason, because it is short-sighted and self-serving. However, a strategy of process improvement, through adoption of new information technologies that enhance productivity, is justified by the logic of opportunities for both the firm and the worker. This change may cut costs, add value, or both, but it is not self-serving. Creating a sense of urgency is important, and urgency needs a real reason.

The Vision Thing: The need for a motivating yet achievable vision is incredibly important. Not only does the vision need to be bold and audacious, it must be imaginable through clear articulation and communication. The members of an organization must also be empowered to act on the vision. The vision includes the purpose, values, and stretch goals that the organization maintains, and represents the aspirational glue that binds everyone’s efforts together. Members of an organization must believe in the vision, seeing it as a desirable future that has an air of attainability. This means that not only does the vision itself need to have these qualities, it must be disseminated well so that others resonate with its boldness and the achievability

The Flywheel Effect: I like Jim Collins’ use of the flywheel analogy to describe the need for building momentum slowly through concentrated effort. This makes me think of that old adage that Rome was not built in a day. When I started my blog in October 2010 I felt very self conscious about launching it with only one article, so I launched with two articles. This was not much help since two articles did not feel like very much content either. I thought that I would probably never get many readers besides friends and family, but I did not let this stop me from starting. I just kept writing, and now over two years later I have posted over 100 articles, some of them thousands of words. Plus, I am re-published online in Paperblog’s Philosophy Magazine and my articles now get about 6 thousand views a month on this site. It is my sustained effort over time that has made the difference in these numbers, and exhibiting the flywheel the blog required more effort in relation to reward in the beginning. Now that I have momentum I have been able to slow output to only 1 to 2 articles a month while I am busy with other work, yet still maintain the same level of views. Sustained effort is a must for realizing a transformation.

Direct and Honest Communication: In talking about the need to a motivating vision I emphasized that it must be communicated well to be effective. Communication is incredibly important for all aspects of change management, not just in presenting the vision. A big transformation brings many unknowns with it, and the last thing that people want is to find out that there were things that were known to management, but kept secret from them. People also want to know what they should be working on and why, so clear guidance is necessary. Lack of communication can result in gaps, duplication, stepping on toes, fire drills, wasted time and energy, and worst of all distrust. Poor communication can leave members of an organization feel like they are being lied to, taken advantage of, being strung along, or like second class citizens. It is utterly de-motivating to find out that the report you have been working on for the last few years has been not been looked at in the last six month, because someone else is producing a new report now and no one told you. You think to yourself, should I start working on my resume? Or did I just not get the memo?

Establish Trust: Direct and honest communication helps to build trust, but trust must also be established in other ways. A transformational leader must take people through the gap between old and new eras, like an explorer with a map to a mysterious land drawn from rumor alone. If I am going to follow someone through the dark dense uncharted jungle then I want it to be someone I can trust not to leave me sinking in quicksand, to cut me loose, otherwise I might start to think I would be better off on my own, or not entering the jungle of change at all. I am more likely to trust a leader who I feel has my back and personal welfare in mind, that they desire to see me succeed along with them, and that they have the capabilities to help me manage and prioritize my workload toward shared objectives. Recognition of accomplishments and development of new skills is helpful. Without trust a strategic transformation will have a diminished chance of success, and change tends to create distrust, so I think dealing with this principle is the most important. Unfortunately, trust can be difficult to gain back if it is lost for any reason, even seemingly small reasons.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Works Cited

Collins, Jim. ”Good to Great”. Fast Company. Oct. 2001. Web. 28 Mar. 2013.

The Changes Over My 37 Years

realizingresonance@gmail.com (Jared Endicott) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:30:00 -0000

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.

I was born a few months before America’s bicentennial, March 10th 1976, 100 years to the day after the first telephone call. A lot has changed in the last 37 years. I remember growing up in the 1980s, sometimes afraid of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but most of the time listening to tapes on my walkman. Now in 2013, less than 50 years later, the Soviet Union is long gone, and if I get an itch to listen to an 80s song that randomly gets stuck in my head I can download the digital copy for about a dollar and listen to it on my smartphone. Computers and phones have both come so far that now they are combined, and I work at a computer terminal for a firm that provides broadband speed wireless internet service to a touch screen terminal in my pocket. The world has changed so much in such a short period of time, and I can’t help but wonder at how my existence has been shaped fundamentally by these transformations.

The revolutions of the world at large convert the context by which we live our lives, while our immediate environments often directly alter the course of our personal journeys. My parents were divorced when I was young, and this certainly had profound significance for my path. When I moved with my family, from Oregon to Southern California, from Southern California to Northern California, and from Northern California to Washington, not only did I have to acclimate to the weather each time, I had to enroll in new schools and make new friends. The only semester in high school during which I achieved a 4.0, was the semester right after we moved from Salinas to Redmond in the middle of my tenth grade. I know it to be a fact that the main reason for my great performance was a complete lack of friends leaving me with nothing better to do.

More recently the dates of September 11th, 2001 and September 29th, 2008 mark events that changed my life, as well as those of many Americans I’m sure. Prior to the terrorist attacks in 2001 I was fairly apathetic to politics, but now I have a degree in politics and am keenly interested. So much that I write about it on a blog, including a few articles on the subject of terrorism. The second September date may be a little less familiar to others, but it’s the day that the House of Representatives failed to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on their first attempt causing the DOW plunged 777 points, the largest one day point loss in history. This was also the exact day when I began a Money and Banking class in which I was to track and analyze financial data, plus discuss financial news reports, all in the context of studying the history and theories of money, banking and financial crises. American economic history and the Federal Reserve are now common topics for my blog, and issues of political economy are now some of my strongest passions.

I was thirteen when I got my first guitar, and learning to play it was a choice made with will and persistence. It made profound differences in my life experience for sure, from the aspect of listening to, playing, and writing music, but also playing in bands and performing. Pursuing my college education was at least as impactful as playing music, clearly it has gotten me to what I am doing now, and I did it while working full time. A good choice, but with real opportunity costs (at least in the short run). Proposing to my wife and getting married is the biggest choice I have ever made, and the one I am most happy for. Choosing a new job will come this year, and this will be a big change with incredible implications obviously, but I think that choosing to have a child soon will be even bigger.

The image of the future that I held as I made my most formative life choices, and the image I will hold for future choices, is one of pragmatic optimism. I am hopeful for my future and the future of the world, but I recognize that many things are out of my control. Often we must make the right choices for ourselves, contingently. Every now and then though, we need to go with our heart no matter the circumstances. Learning to play guitar and going to college were sacrifices, but before that they were opportunities. I control the sacrifice not the opportunity. I don’t want to say that getting married was a sacrifice or an opportunity, so for this I will reframe my image of the future as a leap into love. To me love is both fate and choice, because falling into love is something that happens to one without the direction of will, it requires a surrender of will, yet the exercise of will is needed for love’s fulfillment. My image of the future is one in which I live a happy life, with philosophical reverence for what has been presented to me by the world, and I will make the most virtuous choices that I can. These are my thoughts as I reflect upon the change over my 37 years, so far in the world and so far in me.

Jared Roy Endicott

Subscribe in a reader

Realizing Resonance : Realizing Resonance | Futurist Philosophy Blog

Thorstein Veblen's Economics of Wealth and Leisure

Works Cited

What I Learned in Turkey About Forecasting Turkey Dinner

Learning ARIMA

Learning Robust Methods

Forecasting Thanksgiving Dinner Inflation for 2014

Conclusion

Works Cited

Personal Identity, Pregnancy, and Process Philosophy

The Puzzle of Personal Identity

The Process of Personal Identity

Welcoming Willow to the World

Works Cited

Evolution and Emergence Explain Social Change

The Band Practice Dialogues: Free Will and Determinism

Inspired by the Following Works:

Related Articles:

Taksim: Tranquility Before The Tumult

Works Cited

Türkçe Olarak Yazmayı Öğrenme

Türkçe

English

Macroeconomic Forecasting with Diverse Predictions

Some Background on Predictive Diversity

Leveraging Diversity to Make Better Macroeconomic Forecasts

Macroeconomic Forecasts for 2013 and 2014

Conclusion

Works Cited

Five Essential Principles for Transformational Change

Works Cited

The Changes Over My 37 Years