Too Goddamned Many Ideas (Part I)

No idea exists in isolation. Every idea is part of a network of ideas that refer to each other, and sometimes to themselves (as this one is doing, right now). Expressing one idea is hard to do without having expressed the others on which it depends. And those depend on still others, and so on. Given a narrow context, I can write something. But given the broad landscape that my ideas on economics and politics cover, I have trouble finding where to start.

I've tried mind mapping--writing down ideas and connecting them with lines--but my ideas about economics and politics are so interconnected that my mind map becomes a tangle. Everything is connected to nearly everything else. Mind mapping has not helped.

Expressing myself is harder because most words in economics and politics are overloaded. When I write about wealth I've got to make sure people understand what I mean by "wealth," because there are many overlapping definitions, and my arguments are based on a particular definition. And because "wealth" is connected to many other concepts I quickly get caught in the tangle.

But that way leads to madness and non-production and frustration. So in this post, I'll try to map out some of the territory that I hope to discover by listing the titles and key ideas for a bunch of posts and link to them as and if I write them.

It's Wealth, Not GDP That Matters: Continuing the argument that what's important is finding ways to increase wealth, not to create jobs or manage the debt, I'll argue that focusing on GDP and not wealth-creation is a mistake. GDP doesn't grow when wealth is produced if the labor that produces the wealth is unpaid; it grows when labor produces nothing of value (think needless bureaucracy), and it grows when the result is destruction (think the building of bombs.)

What Is Wealth*? If growing wealth is what's important in economics, we damned well have to have a good idea of what we mean by that word.

Annotating Key Terms: You won't understand my arguments about wealth*, for example, if you don't know what I mean by wealth*, for instance. To make it clear the word that I'm using is so overloaded that many people will define it differently than I am defining it, I'll annotate the word so that it's clear that there's something special about its use. And I'll summarize the definitions for the main terms in this post--or link to their own if that's important.

Don't Believe Anyone's Economic (Fore or After)cast: Economic and political arguments often appeal to a forecast: if we do X, then Y will result. Or an aftercast: P has happened because we did, or failed to do Q. Extensive accountability research, comparing forecasters' forecasts with the non-optional reality that results, shows that almost all of them are confident in the accuracy of their forecasts, despite the fact that they are usually wrong.  Most do no better than chance and some worse. Given that dismal record,  arguments based on their predictions don't count for much.

Science And Economics: Economic forecasts are imprecise in part because the full power of the scientific method can't be used to test some of the most important economic hypotheses. We can collect data and form hypotheses, but rigorous experiments are generally impossible. The result is that many economic theories are based on posthoc reasoning or imputing that correlation implies causation. Indeed, recent experiments in psychology have overturned many long-held economic principles.

Why Is America's Economy The World's Richest: Marketarians argue that the United States has the world's richest economy and with very few exceptions, the world's highest GDP per capita because it has the world's freest markets. That's untestable, and therefore wholly unscientific hypothesis. Experiments on a smaller scale than an entire national economy show that many of the supporting principles of the free market system are untrue.

Wealth Produces Wealth: Growing national wealth is important because, notwithstanding the fact that individuals can go from rags to riches or riches to rags in a generation,  the current level of existing national, regional, family, and personal wealth* (as defined in What Is Wealth*) predicts future wealth.

You Can Only Optimize One Thing: People don't realize that if they have more than one thing that they find of value--say family and country--that there must inevitably be areas where the two must be in conflict. There will always be situations where what's best for one is not what's best for the other.  We sent our kids to private schools, yet we don't complain about paying taxes for public schools or the fact that the government extracts taxes at the point of a gun. I think that even poor quality public education for every child is better for the country than no education for many. But if the government didn't collect taxes for education, I doubt that I would donate to educate other people's children. Nor would most people.
There's more in my head, but this is enough for this post.

American Nations

Bobbi gave me the book American Nations by Colin Woodard for Christmas. It's helped me fill in some of the huge gaps in my understanding of American history, and has given me some new insight into the current political landscape by telling an illuminating story of how things got to be the way they are.

Woodard's premise is that we are not and never have been one nation. We've instead been at least eleven different ones, each with its own values, cultures, and tendencies. Each of those nations, he argues, is based on the philosophy of the people who originally settled those parts.

Culture is powerful, we know. A management book, somewhere in my past, had this remembered aphorism, explaining why change is so difficult in an organization: "When you put cucumbers in brine, the cucumbers get pickled more than the brine gets cucumbered."

From folk wisdom to science: we know from experiments in psychology that not only are peoples' expressed options manifestly changed by the stated views of the people around them, their perceptions are changed as well.

A first, foundational study in the area was conducted in 1951 by Solomon Asch at Swarthmore college. Participants in a group were asked to compare the length of a set of lines. In a typical group of eight, one was a test subject, the others were confederates of the experimenter. In some cases, the confederates gave wrong answers to test what a test subject would do in a social conflict situation.

The perception test was sufficiently unambiguous that the unbiased error rate was less than 1%. By comparing that baseline with the accuracy of subjects in groups where as many as seven people gave manifestly wrong answers, Asch was able to quantify their degree of conformance. In high conflict situations, only 25% of the subjects never conformed. 75% of the subjects conformed at least once, and on the average, the conformity rate was 33%.

After this part of the experiment the subjects were interviewed, told the real purpose of the study, and questioned about their feelings in the experimental setting. Among those who conformed Asch described three tendencies: "distortion in perception" in which subjects actually saw the lines the way they reported; "distortion of action" in which subjects maintained accurate perceptions, but behaved in a way that was inconsistent with what they perceived. The balance experienced what the experimenters described as "distortion of judgment." After a few conflicted trials, they concluded that they must be wrong and the majority must be right and sided with the majority.

Similar experiments have shown that the tendency is robust. In political terms it implies, for example, that if someone with liberal views moves to a region where the majority hold conservative views, that the liberal will become less liberal; similarly a conservative who moves to a liberal region will become more liberal. The reverse is also true and backed by research: people have their original views (or biases) deepened and confirmed when surrounded by people who share them.

The result, Woodard points out, explains why despite the mobility of our population, many regions of the country continue to bear the strong cultural stamp of the people who first settled there.

Because I know my own biases, and I am sure that I share the experimentally confirmed tendency of nearly all subjects to try and have their biases confirmed, I'm wary of anything that supports beliefs I already have. Woodard's book is a mixed bag. It clarifies some of my already formed ideas and gives me some new perspectives. But it does very little to contradict anything I already believe. Because of that spent a little time surfing for criticism. I've not found a great deal.

This review, by Steve Kettmann in the Daily Beast, likewise praises the book and offers this succinct summary.

The Daily Show has evolved toward more open-minded consideration of the issues of the day and less outright comedy because Stewart still thinks honest people of good faith can cut through the nonsense and figure out problems in a way any reasonable person can admit makes sense. Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America  pulls off the unlikely feat of both offering the tools for just such a broader, deeper understanding—and demonstrates why, in a larger sense, that effort is doomed.

I think I was more hopeful about political reconciliation before I read the book than after. Woodard takes a strong position, which Barone contradicts, that the country is in decline. I'm not more optimistic than Woodard, but perhaps more hopeful.

In this post, the second of a two-part review titled Tossed Salad, not Melting Pot, in The Evangelical Outpost--not usual reading for me--the author, Nathaniel Bennett, interprets the book through a Christian lens, an interesting perspective. And he points out:

...the culture wars that we hear about in church involving abortion, gay marriage, gun control, religious liberty, and other social and political issues may well be part of a true culture war, but which culture? Consider the controversy surrounding Judge Roy Moore and the Ten Commandments monument that he put outside a courthouse in Alabama: according to the multiple nation idea put forth in American Nations, the controversy could be as much about the North (in the ACLU) saying, “You can’t just put up whatever you want outside of a courthouse!” and the South saying, “Stop messing with the South! Enough!” Some causes upheld in the name of Christianity might be nationalistic rather than Christian.

This review in the Wall Street Journal comes the closest to challenging it. It contradicts some of his scholarship and the reviewer, Michael Barone, states that these lapses make him wary of the analysis. Nonetheless, he does praise it.

If you're interested in understanding the fault-lines of this country's politics this book is a worthwhile read.

I'll probably post some more after I've had a chance to think some more. It's certainly thought-provoking material.

Related articles

• U.S. Regional Clashes Behind Obama Versus Romney - Bloomberg

Lowering the bar: a technique for following tough acts

I was pretty pleased with (logical) yesterday's post, "Reality Isn't Optional," apart from the time that it took to get it out. I started on the day after my blog says I posted it, but didn't post it until I was happy. That took a few days of editing and rewriting, making my thinking clearer and the prose better, and correcting my many spelling and grammar errors (some of which may still be there).

But it took more time than those few days to write it. I originally created the Reality Isn't Optional blog a couple of years ago, and it's taken until now to get my thoughts in good enough order and my moxie up enough to post something. And I did a lot of thinking and researching before I created the blog. But I finally got my first post done! (Technically, as I write this, I didn't. I only posted it here, but by the time you read this, I will have posted it there. Honest.)

The door is open. And now that I've opened that door I've got a few more posts in mind, each of which may end up taking similar amounts of time to meet my quality standard. On the other hand, I might surprise myself.

My problem is that post set my bar high, and because it was high, and because I like to mix metaphors, that made it a tough act to follow. So I did what comes naturally to me: I didn't follow it the tough act.

Silly me.

That's not what I want at all.

My "Lapse Management" policy designed to prevent non-posting didn't work, so I'm going to refine it, or replace it with another: if I don't have something to write I'll write about not having something to write. Going meta. That's a big thing with me.

I'll just lower the bar. That's how I'll follow my own tough acts.

The underlying theory is a) that it will be easier for me to improve the quality of my words when they are flowing than to get them flowing in the first place and b) as I've told myself many times, and as other, better writers have told me: the hard part isn't writing; it's sitting down.

 So I'm sitting.

And writing.

And now I'm posting.

Reality Isn't Optional

A while ago I created a blog called Reality Isn't Optional. The name comes from a friend of mine, who uses that phrase as a touchstone when he (a libertarian of the Republican variety) is criticizing the ideas of the Left. I think it's an apt phrase when criticizing the ideas of Left, Right, North, South, and so on.

And I shall do so. I've decided to get serious about posting to that blog, starting with this essay, cross posted to Reality Isn't Optional. Nothing like a little ambition.

[[Update: and nothing like redundancy. Editing this post I managed to delete all its content. Google Cache didn't have the original. archive.org didn't either. But because of my cross-post I was able to get the other version, hopefully the same as the original. Or close. And quickly, I backed up this blog, entire. That's not gonna happen again. Much.]]

The Seed
The seed that's grown into this post was planted long ago. It took time to germinate and started sprouting during the 2011 "Debt Ceiling Crisis," when it struck me that the debt arguments were framed incorrectly by both sides. As I'll explain below, debt isn't a problem; nor is per-capita debt; nor debt to GDP ratio.

That sprout continued to grow as I continued to research and to think about politics and economics. During the 2012 election when the rhetorical focus shifted to jobs, it again struck me the issue was being framed badly:  more jobs would solve nothing.

The Arguments
I'm not ideologically attached to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but it's a fine book that this project inspired me to study. I admire the way that Smith made his arguments and how he took care to accompany his every principle with empirical evidence supporting it. Reality isn't optional. I believe that in his title Smith focused on the right fundamental issue. Not jobs. Not debt. Wealth.

During the 2012 contest, the Left argued that the government should create jobs by spending money to "stimulate the economy." This would produce more jobs and thus more revenue, which would drive down the debt after it had been driven up by the stimulus. And the Left argued for keeping deficits lower by raising taxes on some people they called "The 1%."

The Right argued that government should create jobs by getting out of the way. It should reduce taxes so that the people they called the "Job Creators" (likely the same ones the Left called "The 1%") could use that money to--well, create jobs. They argued that these new jobs would create additional revenue that would drive down the debt after it had been driven up by the tax cuts; and the Right argued for keeping deficits lower by cutting something they called "entitlements."

My research and thinking led me to conclude that these are both bad arguments, By themselves, jobs solve nothing. And taken in isolation, debt is not a problem.

Jobs
First, think about jobs. We can reduce the jobless rate to zero by putting the unemployed to work doing unproductive things. Or we can lower it by outlawing devices and practices that make people productive. For example, we could have a full-employment economy simply by passing a law that outlawed bulldozers. People would be put to work with shovels, and there would be no increase in taxes or debt. China does something much like that: it deliberately withholds productive machinery from some of its infrastructure projects to keep unemployment down. The jobs get done, and the people have jobs and the debt does not rise. But is the country better off economically than if fewer people worked, more efficiently, and those otherwise employed were paid to--who cares?

Alternatively, consider a world in which productivity has become so great that it takes only 10% of the population to provide everything that the rest of the population gets today. In this world, everyone has just as much food, clothing, housing, heat, and iPads as today, but the number of people who are unemployment is massively increased. Would the world be worse off economically with so many fewer jobs and so much more unemployment if everyone got what they had today? Well those people who no longer had jobs--and thus income--would be worse off. But suppose the government gave them money. Just gave it to them. How would be worse off than we are today?

Of course that's not reality. It's a thought experiment. But reality's evidence supports the experiment. In 1776 90% of the US workforce was employed in agriculture; now it takes just a few percent and we eat better than we did back then. In nearly every economic domain more and more gets done with fewer and fewer people--with fewer jobs.

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained that wealth was created by the productivity of land and labor. But Smith pointed out that just working wasn't enough, because much labor was unproductive. He gave examples of productive and unproductive work. His might classify things differently today, when so much wealth is in the form of work on ideas rather than on material objects. But his distinctions are still valid: if the people who are engaged in today's unproductive labor found themselves unemployed (but still paid) our material well-being would be largely unchanged.

Debt
Now let's look at debt.

Debt is important for households, for companies, and for nations. The Right and the Left want to reduce the debt. They disagree about how to do it, and in what time frame, but they miss several important points when they analyze the debt. The first is that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with debt. In some cases debt is good. The second is that the effects of debt on households, companies, and small nations are different than the effect of debt on economies the size of the United States. I'll detail this second argument in another planned post (The False Debt Analogy--which I never quite wrote. But I did write this, and this, and this, on the same topic) Here I'll explain why there's nothing wrong with debt per-se.

Growing debt is not necessarily bad in a household with growing income or when the household is taking on debt to invest in the future; it's likewise not bad in a company or an economy if the debt is used to buy assets or the means for future production. It's not necessarily bad if debt per householder, or unit of revenue grows. A company might take on debt to acquire capital equipment that will lower the labor content of products (and thus raises debt per unit of revenue or per employee) but which will make its products more profitable. In a household debt for an education that increases earnings might be good.

When is debt a problem?

We can decide if debt is a problem for a household only by comparing it to the household's assets and to current and expected household income--effectively it's net present value. We can decide if it's a problem for a company only by comparing it to the company's assets and expected net income--likewise it's value. Indeed when a company does not have enough debt, financial analysts often consider it to be under leveraged.

Debt is a problem for an entity only when it's large compared with the value of that entity.

So a better question about our national debt is this: how does our national debt compare to our "national value."

Again back to Adam Smith: what's important is wealth.

National Value
We know the size of the national debt. What's our national value? What is this country worth? How do we even answer that question?

In a market economy, we gauge the value of an asset (in this case the asset called the United States of America) by considering these questions: "At what price would its owners want to sell it?" "At what price might a buyer want to purchase it?" To determine our "National Net Worth" let's consider selling parts of the United States. Let's consider selling the entire country.

There's a precedent for buying and selling parts of our country. In 1803 the United States bought the Louisiana territory for $15 million dollars, or about $233 million in 2012 dollars. That sale put everything in the territory, formerly governed by France, under the control of the United States Federal Government. Residents got to keep what they owned, and the United States got the right to extract taxes, to govern it so that it might grow, and to benefit from its growth. In 1809 we purchased Florida from Spain in return for settling claims amounting to up to $5 million, or about $70 million in 2012 dollars. We bought Alaska from the Russian Empire for $120 million 2012 dollars. We bought part of what is now Arizona and New Mexico as part of the Gadsen Purchase for $279 million 2012 dollars.

At what price might the United States Federal Government--which bought the Louisiana territory, Florida, Alaska and the Gadsen territory--sell its property off to pay the National Debt? At what price might the United States Federal Government sell other parts of the country that it acquired not for cash, but through armed conflict? I claim that the price, which imprecisely measures the "National Value," dwarfs the national debt.

But the Federal Government does not "own the country," you might argue. It's owned by the people. Really? The Federal Government bought parts of the country, and has never sold them. Nor has it relinquished any of its rights. So if you subscribe to the notion of property rights, it's hard to argue that the Federal Government does not continue to own what it bought. But let's not quibble about the word "ownership," if that's the problem. As far as I can determine, the Federal Government could outsource its power over the land that it bough, giving that entity rights that are equivalent to ownership. If enough citizens elected federal legislators who passed the necessary legislation and elected a President willing to sign the legislation, then it could be done.

So we transfer the rights of ownership of the entire country if enough of our citizens choose to. Would people want to do that?

The per-capita debt this country is about $50,000. For most people that's a lot of money. If some entity offered to forgive each citizen's debt obligation in return for their agreement to be governed by that entity some people might take the offer? But I think that most would not. 

If you believe everything has a price, at what price would a majority of the people in this country be willing to sell their share of the country? To keep things simple, let's assume that sellers could choose to leave the country or take their chances with the country's new owners? Does anyone believe that the premium, above debt-forgiveness would be small?

This thought experiment tells me that our "National Value" is much greater than our National Debt.  And if our value is so much larger than our debt, is the debt really such a big issue? It might be, if our debt was growing fast enough to swamp our value soon, but I don't see that it is even close to doing so.

Increasing Wealth, Assets, and Value
I claim that what's important is what we do to increase the wealth, the assets, and the value of the nation. The best way to do it may be through the market or it may be through the government, or through some combination. But what seems clear to me is that the goal should be national wealth expansion not debt reduction or job creation.

We don't need job creators, we need wealth creators.

When we shift our focus to national wealth creation and expansion a consequent issue arises: how do we distribute the increase? Not all ways of distributing wealth will lead to equivalent outcomes, so there must be ways to distribute wealth that will lead to greater or lesser future increases in wealth. The Right takes it as a matter of faith that the market machinery that they believe creates wealth also distributes that wealth optimally for further wealth creation. This might be true, but I don't believe that it's a necessary consequence. The Left argues for "fairness and justice."

It's Wealth That Matters
Adam Smith was focused on the right issues. His book was called Wealth of Nations and not Jobs of Nations or Debts to GDP Ratios of Nations. Smith correctly realized that in economics (and politics) it is wealth, and the things that contribute to, and proceed from wealth that make the greatest difference in the human condition.

Freedom matters, but below a certain wealth threshold people spend almost all their time and available energy trying to feed themselves. They may have certain freedoms in theory, but they might as not have them, for all the difference it makes in non-optional practical reality. Many freedoms can only be enjoyed by people with wealth to exercise those freedoms.

Productivity matters, but without access to the fruits of wealth, including tools, knowledge and social order, individuals can produce almost nothing. Truly impoverished people cannot produce enough to survive. With no wealth at all (no clothing, no tools, no knowledge) they are hunters and gatherers at best, and can only live by consuming what nature, or more fortunate others have produced. Within an organized society people who are insufficiently wealthy (insufficient knowledge to be productive) can only forage, or steal, or live on charity.

The wealth that has been accumulated by individuals, families, groups and nations over the course of millenia is the reason that we don't live like our cave dwelling ancestors. Wealth is created only by productive labor. Wealth can be owned through productive labor, or by theft.

Regardless of how it came to be owned, in the end the result is the same.

It's wealth that matters.

Lapses, and FUBAR

Three posts into Project70 and my first lapse. Notwithstanding this post's date, (google has forgivingly let me backdate it) today is January 5th and I've missed two days.

I give myself partial credit and partial blame for an ambitious post about Reality Isn't Optional, my attempt to conduct an oxymoronic rational inquiry into politics and economics. I started the post, but I got bogged down, as I have done many times before, thus the lapse.

Project70 is not about letting lapses persist. It's about living the rest of my according to my intentions, not my habits. So what caused the lapse? And what do I do about it?

What happened? I picked a topic too grand for a post. I wrote dutifully, then started researching, then got lost. That explains one day's lapse. The next day I had a bright idea about one of my technology projects and got so caught up in it that I didn't even think about writing until it was too late in the day to write. And although I was fairly committed to writing every day, I wasn't sufficiently committed to posting. And I wasn't willing to post something that was less than completely thought out.

Underlying all of this is the more general failure mode: Starting And Not Finishing Up. That's SANFU. I started my post on economics and didn't finish. Started my technology adventure and didn't finish it. And that's my point of attack: SANFU!

So I'm going to invent and apply a few anti-SANFU policies. First, I hereby threaten myself to publish utter crap and incomplete work unless I have something good and complete to publish. Really it ain't that hard to finish something. All I have to do is sit my ass in the chair and the words come. And it's not that hard to produce something decent. Decent stuff comes when I am not overly ambitious.

Second, I'm going to set smaller objectives for myself: little bits of work that I can start and complete and most important that I can write about.

Let's see if that works.

That's the gist of the post if you are looking for content. But my ass is in the chair, and this post has stirred some memories, so if you're looking for anecdote or memoir, read on.

SANFU reminds me of SNAFU, the old military acronym: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. And that remind me of its next-of-kin, FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. SNAFU was a pretty common term back in the day, probably due to returning World War II Warriors. I learned FUBAR from S/Sgt Jack Eldred, a brilliant guy who I met while I served a term at Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, doing site support as a civilian contractor, trying to keep my skinny white ass out of Viet Nam, and learning that Catch-22 was not entirely a work of imagination, but based on how things actually worked in the military. When Jack, who had a wicked sense of humor, designed an office form form he always gave it an "official" Air Force form identifier, something like
    Form: ANQ-FUBAR-32

Colonel Petkus was nominally in charge of the group, but everyone soon learned that Jack really ran things. Colonel Petkus just gave the orders which Jack carried out, and which were always based on Jack's recommendations.

Colonel Petkus consulted Jack on every significant decision. "Jack," he'd say, "you know that ..." he'd name some topic needing decision. "Yessir," Jack would say and give Petkus his recommendation. "That's what I was thinking of doing," Petkus would say. "Yes, sir," Jack would say. "I think that's a wise decision because..." and Jack would explain why Colonel Petkus must have been thinking what he thought he had been thinking. "Those are my reasons, too," Petkus would answer, and then order Jack to do what Jack had just told him to order him to do. "Yes, sir," Jack would say.

If you weren't a moron you learned to talk to S/Sgt Eldred before going to Colonel Petkus. If Jack agreed with your idea, it was as good as done. If Jack disagreed, you'd be wasting your time talking to Petkus. "What do you think about that idea?" Petkus would say when someone was stupid enough to pitch it to Petkus over Jack's disapproval. "Bad idea, sir," Jack would answer. "My thoughts, exactly," Petkus would inevitably reply.

I had some other fun experiences during the time at SAC, but I'll save them for other posts.

TODO: Write them other posts.

Cognitive decline

The signs were all around me. I just had to look. Which I didn't do until I read Normal Doidge's book The Brain That Changes Itself. 

Wake up call!

Chapter 7, Rejuvenation, changed my life. Doidge talks about the natural processes that cause and that can accelerate the inevitable cognitive decline that accompanies the inevitable process of aging.  To summarize what I've learned in this book and others I read later:

You're always learning something. You never stop learning. But you're either learning how to get better, or you're learning how to get worse.

Young people are driven to use up energy, take risks, and learn how to get better. When I walked to kindergarten with my grandson Luke, he didn't walk. He ran, skipped and hopped. He saw some large rocks along the side of the road, and instead of walking, like a "normal person" he jumped onto the first rock and jumped from rock to rock--like a normal kid. That kid-drive kept him learning how to move his changing body better, and improving his balance. Normal young people like Luke create unnecessary challenges, then use the challenges to drive them to improve.

Old people like me are driven to conserve energy, avoid risks, and so we learn how to get worse. When I walked with Luke to school I didn't think of jumping from rock to rock--until I saw him doing it, and realized what he was learning and what I was learning. I was learning that I didn't need to improve the complex machinery of my vestibular system to help me keep my balance; I learned that there were muscles  I didn't need to know how to operate, and I didn't need my proprioceptors tuned up. I was teaching myself to be old.

Our brains tell us do that. You could call brains efficient, but if you do you're just sucking up to your brain, and for no good reason. Our brains are not efficient. They are lazy. A brain figures out how to an acceptable result with the least effort. It doesn't do anything it doesn't have to do.

When you've got an immature brain in an immature body, surrounded by adults and older kids who can do more than you can, your brain tells you that in order to survive you have to LEARN! When society puts kids in situations in which they compete with other kids, then in order to survive they have to LEARN! But eventually you find a niche and survival is no longer a problem, and you don't have to keep learning to catch up. You can live well with what you already know.

When a brain figures that out, then you're on your way down hill. Once it finds out that it can get just about the same result with less work, it does less work. When it figures out that it doesn't need a certain neural network because the skill that the network confers is no longer needed, it decommits the neurons. The process goes on throughout our lives. During the growing phase, neural networks are trimmed to find more efficient networks and to leave space for new learning. During the growing old phase, the old networks are trimmed and replaced by not much.

The PBS show based on Doidge's book gives a compelling example of skill-deaquisition and cognitive decline in the aging. It shows us an old person walking the classic old person walk: legs spread apart for a more stable platform; head down, looking at the feet to make sure that there are no missteps; small stiff movements to avoid imbalance and using unnecessary muscles. Old people don't walk that way simply because they have to: they walk that way because they learn to. And the show explains how that comes about.

When babies stumble they don't slow down; they're driven to compete and to do that they need to walk and then run and keep up their speed. They're driven to learn how to go faster. When young kids stumble, they pick themselves up and learn to do it better. Tripping and falling aren't disasters: they're a sign that more practice is needed. Sometimes it's something to laugh about.

Later on, skills are maintained, and no longer improved. So what if you slow down a litle? As long as you're doing not much worse than your peers, you're doing fine. An occasional tumble is no laughing matter, but youthful bodies heal fast enough, so there's nothing to be concerned about. Skills decline, but slowly.

When people grow old enough and stumble they don't laugh. They've hurt themselves; they heal slowly, and they worry. So they teach themselves a different set of lessons; that they need to slow down; that they can avoid stumbles by spreading their feet by looking down rather than up, and by minimizing the time when one is in a state of dynamic imbalance by taking small stiff steps. Arthritis helps. If normal movement leads to pain--even a little pain--you stop moving normally, and start moving like an old person.

Old people teach themselves to be older than they need to be.

After reading Doidge's book at age sixty-something I realized that I was teaching myself to act old. I realized that I had learned to walk down stairs differently than young people. They moved at a brisk pace, kept their heads up, occasionally glancing down to check that where their brains said they were was actually where they were. And they often walked down the center of the staircase. Sometimes they took a couple of steps at a time. I was starting to walk down stairs more slowly, with my eyes down, occasionally looking up to avoid bumping into someone and holding the handrail to keep from falling. The more I did it, the more my brain learned I could get away with it. Unlike younger people, I was in no hurry.

I was teaching myself to act old.

I decided to force myself to reverse the process. It was hard. When I took a step or two without looking at my feet I could feel the adrenaline rushing. I felt anxiety bordering on fear. I had to fight to keep my eyes up. Then after a while, as I retrained my brain it got easier.

This is not just physical decline, I realized. Sure, part of it is physical, but it's cognitive decline as well. When I was in my thirties I used to run through the woods, head up, checking my feet rarely. My brain was good enough to process my visual input, build a model of the trail I was running, compute when the root that I had seen in front of me was about to be underneath my feet, and take a longer or shorter step, avoiding a stumble. Now that's too much computing for me, and the cost of a brittle-boned mistake is too high to risk. I don't run the way I used to because my arthritic
knees won't allow it. But I also don't do it because my brain won't support me.

Doidge's book made me realize the vital importance of attention. Attention is a limited resource; controlling attention is a learned skill. Kids have so much attention that they don't have to control it. They have enough so that new skills are learned effortlessly. Older people have less attention and have to focus the attention that remains to learn and to perform. It gets harder to control it when you don't practice, and the the lazy brains of aging people discover that they can get by without paying much attention. Every time they slide by they learn that they can pay even less attention. And that accelerates their spiral of decline.

I see my waning ability to pay attention in small ways and large. "What did I just say?" my wife might have asked, years ago, when she thought I wasn't paying attention. Well, I wasn't paying enough attention to have listened to and understood what she had said. But I had enough excess attention to have recorded the last thirty seconds of speech. I could access it, recite it back and pretend that I had been listening. Now I can't do that. When she asks "What did I just say?" I have no idea.

Back in the day when I was aware that someone was saying something of interest, I could access a recording of what I had missed, for context. No longer.

I see lots of other signs of cognitive decline, now that I know what's happening, and I'm doing the only thing that I can do: I fight back.

Writing this blog is one way of fighting back. It takes a lot of attention to write 1300 words in a sitting. Forcing my head up when I'm walking down stairs is a way of fighting back. Getting up on the rocks with Luke is a way of fighting back.

The bad thing is that it's a losing battle.

The good thing is that the battle's fun to fight.

Update: 4 years later. Sometimes it's fun to fight. Sometimes it sucks. Note to self: since it's bound to be a losing battle, work harder at making losing fun.

Related articles

• The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
• The Power of Books (And the woman who changed her bra

The Mirror Doesn't Lie

I hit puberty late. When I got my driver's license, six months past my sixteenth, I looked like I was ten. I was driving with my brother, two years younger than me, and we passed a town cop going the other way. I checked my rearview. He was turning around. The lights and the siren came on and he pulled me over.

The driver's buddy took station behind my car, just like the manual says, and he looked ready to shoot me down if I made a suspicious move. With his back covered, the driver sauntered up to my window, just like the book says. I'd already pulled out my license, told my brother to pull the registration out of the glovebox, and rolled down the window. As soon as the cop reached me I handed them to him. Apparently, the book didn't cover this contingency, so the cop followed the script that was in the book, and as he took the license and registration, he said: "Let me see your license and registration." I played along. "Here you are, sir," I said as he studied the documents.

He looked up. "How old are you, kid," he said.

"Sixteen and a half, sir," I said.

"Are you sure?" He looked at me suspiciously.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"You don't look sixteen," he said, accusingly.

I nodded my head. What could I say? I knew it.

His eyes narrowed and he studied the license. "When were you born?"

"December 30th, 1942, sir," I answered. I didn't add: "Just like it says on my license."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, officer," I said.

He went back to the license and studied it some more. He was sure that I'd memorized that birth date just like I'd memorized my age. Then he realized how he could trip me up. He'd ask me the question that I didn't expect.

He leaned down, to get a better look at me and to make sure I didn't cheat on this one. "What color are your eyes," he asked.

"Brown, officer," I said. Brown. Just like it says on the license.

He looked disappointed. "Are you sure?" He asked.

I resisted checking in the mirror. "Yes, sir," I said. "I'm sure."

"Well you don't look sixteen," he said and handed me back the license and registration.

I looked like someone much younger, but I felt like someone older. I was precocious and didn't have much respect for most adults. They were stupid, and I was smart. So there I was, a grown-up stuck in a kid's body.

And now, ironically I'm a much younger man stuck in an old man's body.  I don't think that I'm seventy. In my mind, I'm still thirty. Or forty. Or fifty. I didn't grow older, just more experienced.

But my mirror says different. I look in the mirror and see this face that I don't recognize. It's the face of an old man with deep lines around his mouth, lines around his eyes, wattles at the neck, and other indisputable signs of age.

Who the hell is that? I ask myself, looking in the mirror. That's not me.

But neither is the twenty-something-year-old guy with curly hair and sideburns in the picture sitting on my dresser. Or the three-year-old kid in the small picture next to it. I just finished scanning thirty years of family pictures with plenty of shots of younger people that I think I used to be. But I'm not them anymore. I'm not the kid in the small picture or the handsome dude with the hair.

I'm a seventy-year-old guy who doesn't believe he's seventy. But my mirror refuses to go along with me.

It says I'm seventy.

WTF!