The Street Strategist is a popular column in Businessworld that appears weekly on Thursdays. It has gained a following among business executives, economists, investors, journalists, politicians, activists, and riff raff like myself. People like Senator Serge Osmena and Labor Secretary Art Brion ask for copies of its latest issues. CEOs of Philippine corporations tell their secretaries to compile the articles. Former NEDA secretaries-general Felipe Medalla and Dante Canlas are forced to respond to its points. What's the Street Strategist all about?
Well, the Street Strategist is unlike any other column. It is not a preachy screed like what that leftist bore Conrado de Quiros is fond of writing. It is rib-ticklingly, can't-catch-my-breath, there-are-tears-in-my-eyes, I'm-wetting-my-pants funny. (Ok, I didn't quite wet-my-pants, but you get the drift). It is written by Thaddeus Bentulan. I know Thaddeus. He's a friend of mine from college. He was always a funny guy, and very very smart. His fund of knowledge is encyclopedic. I used to compete with him in quiz bowls and he was always a formidable opponent. He's the kind of guy who wins TV game shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He is a genius.
Fast forward X years later and here I am critiquing his Businessworld column.
The curious thing about Thaddeus' column is that its topics are not the typical material used for comedy. You won't read about the foibles of Kris Aquino here. It is not an entertainment column. Its subjects are in fact quite dull: accounting, bank runs, bonds, contracts, debit and credit, minimum wage, and - for the life of me - ice cubes. This kind of material typically elicits yawns from most normal people. You have to be so into bookkeeping or refrigeration for this stuff to appeal to you. Average newspaper readers like myself usually head for the sports, entertainment, comics, or classified ads section first. Only when there's nothing else to read there do we stray into the business section.
But the Street Strategist is different, and this is testament to Thaddeus' brilliance. He has managed to turn boring topics into eye candy. He has successfully sexed up such things as "debit and credit", "contracts", and "ice cubes" to the point of winning fawning accolades from female admirers from around the world. At least that's what the Street Strategist himself says, and I have no reason to doubt it since he has published these fan mail on Businessworld. Surely, the man gets hate mail too (NEDA economist Felipe Medalla wrote that he should get psychiatric treatment), but this kind of reaction only underscores the fact that the Street Strategist has gained enough of a following among influential circles to be viewed as a growing threat that needs to be swatted.
I'm writing about this since I was recently drawn into an online discussion concerning one of Thaddeus' columns. You see, I am a lurker in his online discussion group. He had invited me to join this group about a year ago but I never participated in it because I was then too busy reviewing for my recertification exam in medicine that we internists are required to take every 10 years. Anyway, I've since passed the exam and that freed up my schedule. So I went back to his group and checked the discussions they've had over the past year.
I learned that the Street Strategist wrote a stunning 33 week series of articles in Businessworld in 2005 on Hyperwage Theory where he laid out his proposal to cure poverty in the Philippines and the rest of the Third World in one stroke. It was a very ambitious piece. It claimed to supplant the entrenched theories of neo-classical economics and Keynesianism on which modern capitalism is anchored. It was a scathing condemnation of the economic policies promoted by the World Bank. But it was written in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that it made me wonder whether Thaddeus was merely pulling everbody's legs. Imagine this non-economist (Thaddeus has a degree in engineering, not economics) purporting to overturn the received wisdom of John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and the like - and demanding a Nobel Prize for it! Yet he had the econometric data and airtight logic to back him up.
Naturally, the series generated a lot of flak from professional economists whose thinking is mostly in line with World Bank prescriptions. This is the same piece which earned that snarky "go see a psychiatrist" remark from Felipe Medalla.
It turns out that the Street Strategist had sent me a PDF copy of Hyperwage Theory (which is now a book, by the way) last year which I never read because of my tight schedule. Last weekend, I sat down and plowed through the entire 300 or so page opus. It was very entertaining, to say the least. It was sexed-up economics - a far cry from what I remember my college Econ 1 used to be! Reading it was like reading an econ textbook where every other page contained photos of sexy nude women. A real page turner.
Thaddeus reviewed basic econ concepts like gross domestic product (GDP) and how it is calculated. He explained that the major driver of GDP is consumption. He demonstrated how the effect of consumption is magnified throughout the economy by way of the Keynesian multiplier, citing Gaussian geometric progression as the underlying principle of this. The idea is that P1 of consumption adds P5 to the GDP. His point is that if the Philippine economy is to grow, Filipinos must consume more goods and services. There are graphs and formulas to support his presentation.
Sounds good so far. The only problem is, Filipinos don't have the money to buy these goods and services. The Street Strategist's solution: give them the money. Hence hyperwage. Hyper as in "jet boosters". Thaddeus recommends boosting the minimum wage to P20,000 a month. That's the wage that he wants domestic helpers to get paid. He uses domestic helpers as his threshold occupation since he thinks they represent the poorest of the poor. Thus, by giving them P20,000 a month, he automatically boosts everyone else's wages. Why P20,000? He bases this on the "global market price of labor" which is equivalent to the US federal minimum wage of $7.50 per hour.
Filipino domestic helpers will now be earning close to American wages. They will be able to afford 5 cellphones instead of one. This will start a chain reaction that stimulates economic growth. The increased purchasing power will then reverse many societal problems. For instance, the brain drain will be stopped. Filipino plastic surgeons who've migrated to the US will now make a U turn back to the Philippines where many domestic helpers - now flush with cash - will be waiting to get their nose lifts and breast implants. Ok, the author didn't really say that, I made it up. But his general implication is clear.
Domestic helpers with brand new boobs. This will stimulate the limp Philippine economy. Who's going to object to that? It turns out, the professional economists do. They are worried that the excessive stimulation will lead to hyperinflation. Of the economy, that is.
In the next installment, I will discuss how the Street Strategist addresses the problem of hyperinflation.
If there's one trait that is consistently found across human cultures, it is our religiosity. Religiosity is such a universal trait of our species that we might as well call ourselves Homo religiousum. A naturalist like myself is compelled to search for a natural explanation of this.
What is it about human brains that facilitates belief in entities that are beyond our powers of observation? One is tempted to say, "maybe God really does exist, and he may have wired our brains in such a way as to make us receptive to religion." But this "explanation" is not very helpful. Invoking the existence of God to explain why millions of people believe in the existence of God is fallacious circular reasoning. It also begs the question of why we have so many mutually contradictory versions of God. Surely, they can't all be correct.
But this puzzle is not insoluble after all. Just as scientists have found natural causes for mental illnesses like schizophrenia (previously thought to be due to demon possession), they have also chipped away at the citadel of human religiosity and discovered that it too has purely natural origins at its core. Stewart Guthrie's "Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion", published by the Oxford University Press, is one such scholarly attempt to explain this phenomenon.
Guthrie is an anthropologist at Fordham University. His thesis is that religious belief is a form of "systematic anthropomorphism". What this means is that human beings are prone to attributing human or life-like characteristics to objects and events around them. For example, we've seen how children play with dolls, put them in hammocks, and sing lullabies to them to put them sleep. These children really do believe that the dolls are animate. In fact, Mickey Mouse and the whole Disneyland empire owe their commercial success to our kids' propensity to anthropomorphize. Adults are not immune to this either. We "baby" our cars, curse the bad weather, throw our cellphones in frustration - as if these objects give a damn about our little existential issues.
Well, this is anthropomorphism in action, and Guthrie contends that it is a smart Darwinian strategy which is pervasive in humans because it has enabled our ancestors to survive the hostile environments they were exposed to. Think about it: the objects that our ancestors found most consequential in their environments were their fellow humans and other living things. Our ancestors' ability to correctly judge whether these other beings were threats to be overcome meant the difference between life and death.
Imagine yourself alive 150,000 years ago. You are crouched in the middle of an African savanna, hunting for food. You, in turn, are being hunted down by predators (eg other humans, or animals larger than yourself, like tigers). You move quietly to avoid being noticed. Suddenly, you see a shadow behind a tree. What can it be? Your mind races for an answer. Your pulse quickens, your breathing gets harder. You have a decision to make: either dismiss the shadow as coming from a fallen log, relax your guard, and proceed to go about your business....or assume it's another human being laying in wait to ambush you. What should you do?
If the shadow is just from a fallen log, nothing will happen to you. But if it is coming from a hostile human being, then you run the risk of being killed if you relaxed your guard. The smart bet is to assume the worst: that there is in fact a threat lurking in your environment. It's a smart bet because the cost of being wrong when you presume no threat exists when there is a real one far outweighs the cost of being wrong when you presume a threat exists when there is none. You will surely die if you are careless, but you will live another day if you are cautious.
Our ancestors must have faced scenarios like this countless of times eons ago. Those who were careless and ignored the warning signs were killed, and their genes were eliminated from the gene pool. The more cautious (or paranoid) ones survived. They erred on the side of overestimating threats, and lived. By definition, we are the offspring of the latter group. We inherited their characteristics, including their propensity to anthropomorphize.
We create God in our image, projecting all our habits onto him. He gets mad, becomes jealous if we entertain his rival, bears a son. We believe that he controls the weather, so we pray to him to give us rains for a bountiful harvest. Now, we're not really sure if there's a God behind the clouds, but our brains tell us it is better to assume the worst because the penalty for disbelieving a God who exists (eternal damnation) far outweighs the penalty for believing a non-existent one (no penalty). It is better to err on the side of overestimating threats than to err on the side of underestimating them. This line of reasoning is basically Pascal's wager . It's anthropomorphism at work. It is (or was?) a valuable survival strategy. That's just the way our brains have been wired by evolution.
I have been fascinated by game theory for some time. Game theory is a branch of applied math that "studies strategic situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns". Game theory has been used in fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, military planning etc.
In biology (which is my field of interest), the principles of game theory were used to formulate the theory of Evolutionary Stable Strategies (enunciated by John Maynard Smith in 1982) to explain why certain population ratios (eg. hawks versus doves) persist in nature, and why these ratios are stable. ESS also explains why the human sex ratio is always 1:1 (male/female) and why any deviation from this will always be corrected back to "normal".
Another application of game theory relates to war. The Israeli mathematician Robert Aumann (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work in this arena) made the striking observation that: "countries are more likely to cooperate if their relations are characterized by frequent interactions and a long time horizon. Game theory also teaches that the chances of cooperation increase when backed by the threat of punishment."
The take home message I get from this is that if you are a peace negotiator trying to settle armed conflicts, you must negotiate from a position of strength. You must be able to carry out a threat of punishment against any violators to your peace treaty or else nobody will take you seriously. This probably explains why the UN is so ineffective in seeing that its resolutions are carried out: the UN has no real military force that is capable of enforcing these resolutions.
Combatants on the ground will see this and they will simply ignore UN resolutions they don't like. Hence, Hezbollah can afford to thumb its nose at UN resolution 1559, which then forced Israel to take punitive action last summer against Hezbollah, an action that should have been the duty of the UN to impose.
The other insight I got from game theory is that those suicide bombers who die for their cause willingly do so because they have already calculated that their deaths will be offset by the gains that their close genetic kin will obtain from their actions. The suicide bombers may lose their chances to propagate their own genes, but they gain by allowing the genes of their siblings and other close relatives to get propagated.
Suicide bombers would have to come from large families for the cost-benefit calculation to be favorable to them. They should have many brothers and sisters who can fill the vacuum and continue the task of gene propagation in their absence. This implies that if you are looking for the profile of a potential suicide bomber, you have to look among Arab families with many children. A family with only one child will not be a suitable source of such a "shahid"(martyr).
This is interesting. Perhaps I should check the profiles of the Sept. 11 suicide bombers to see whether they indeed fit this prediction. If a significant number of them came from large families (larger than the norm for Arab families), then this may validate the theory. It will also demonstrate the applicability of game theory in war.
tekton12 ¶ 8:04 AM 0 comments
I've since done some reading on the subject. I now have some working knowledge to form an opinion about it....though I admit I am still not an expert. For definitions, Wikipedia comes in handy: "postmodernism is a continual skepticism towards the ideas and ideals of Modernism, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty & personal identity, and grand narrative in general; the belief that all communication is shaped by cultural bias, myth, metaphor, and political content; the assertion that meaning and experience can only be created by the individual, and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator."
These definitions are intriguing. The basic issue here is postmodernism's (or pomo's) view of objective reality. Pomo challenges the assumption that objective reality exists. Postmodernists contend that the human brain can never truly know objective reality since its perception of the world is mediated by sensory organs which can be fallible. Our senses can play tricks on us. Postmodernism is therefore a direct challenge to science, an endeavor which is based on the assumption of the discoverability (through sensory exploration) of objective reality.
Postmodernism is said to be a reaction to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the period in history (17th to 18th century AD) when rationality and modernism took root in Europe. The Enlightenment's intellectual fathers were Baruch Spinoza, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, Galileo, Isaac Newton. The ideas that these great minds introduced to civilization triggered the development of science and technology. They ushered in the Industrial Revolution and subsequent upheavals that lead up to today's Information Age. We owe the technological advances we enjoy today to the seeds that were planted by these intellectual pioneers.
Meanwhile, postmodernists trace their intellectual lineage back to Immanuel Kant, who believed that it is futile to try to know the world as it is (the "thing in itself") independent of our sensory experience. Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are perceptual experiences; they don't exist independenly of the perceiver. Humans need sensory organs to be able to perceive space and time. Without these sensory organs, space and time are unknowable.
The implication of Kant's ideas (which he laid out in the aptly titled Critique of Pure Reason) is that rationalism and science are futile activities. Science entails a lot of observing and measuring in the course of data-gathering. If Kant is right, then all these activities scientists engage in can never really measure the thing-in-itself. We will never really know whether the "data" we measure actually exist. They may just be figments of our imagination. With this critique, Kant threatened to destroy the foundations on which science and modern civilization are built.
I'm no philosopher, so I will not dwell on proving that "objective reality" exists using philosophical arguments. The objectivists have already done a stellar job of refuting Immanuel Kant. Ayn Rand said "existence exists"; it is axiomatic. My own rebuttal to Kant is rather crude. Here it goes: if objective reality does not exist, or is at least unknowable, how then do we explain the presence of sensory organs whose purpose is precisely to detect external objects? Kant acknowledged that sensory organs exist; even he didn't deny that. We have eyes that see. Eyes are organs that evolved to detect light by means of photochemical reactions that occur in specialized cells in the retina. We have ears that hear. Ears are organs that contain specialized cells that are deformed by sound waves, thereby enabling the brain to perceive sound. And so on and so forth.
The existence of these sensory organs begs an explanation from Kant. To me, they presuppose the existence of "objective reality". Evolution has surely favored the survival of organisms that have a way of interacting with the environment. Even plants have mechanisms to detect changes in environmental conditions. Plants tend to grow where light is most abundant, or where soil is most fertile. Organisms that are unable to detect changes in the environment simply do not exist.
The postmodernists pooh pooh all of this. Michel Foucault, for instance, says that there is no objective reality beyond language. Language is all there is. Jacques Derrida goes the next step by "deconstructing" language, stripping it bare. Language - instead of being a medium used to transmit a message - has become the message itself. Words no longer have referents in the external world; they have become the "thing-in-itself".
Postmodernists tend to be Marxist, anti-Western, and especially anti-American in political orientation. They view science with deep suspicion; they believe that since it was invented by white European males, science is therefore a tool of cultural imperialism - invented to oppress colored peoples and to subjugate women. Some postmodern feminists have even gone to the extent of calling Isaac Newton's Principia a "rape manual". Many postmodernists are also leery about criticizing indigenous cultures, since they believe that all cultures are equivalent to each other. They believe that there are no objective standards by which to judge the merits of a society. This kind of thinking results in moral equivalency; that's why postmodernists equate terrorists with freedom fighters, or folk remedies with rigorously lab-tested drugs. When you attend an anti-globalization, anti-American demonstration, you'll see postmodernism and its follies in luxuriant display.
Why does Islamofascism attract the Left? This has puzzled me for some time. Leftists/Marxists are supposed to be secular-minded, yet they have become the most vociferous defenders of the most virulent, reactionary, superstitious ideology known to man which is Islamofascism. Notice how leftist websites routinely praise Palestinian suicide bombers as "freedom fighters". Notice how they consistently side with Islamists in any conflict the latter are embroiled in with Israel or the US. Leftist islamophilia is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Or it may just be sheer opportunism masquerading as concern for the underdog.
In the Philippines, leftist organizations and pseudo-intellectuals like Walden Bello and Randy David predictably ally themselves with the Bangsamoro movement at the expense of non-Muslim Filipinos. These Filipino leftists argue that Mindanao is Bangsamoro homeland that was snatched by Christian settlers from the north. (How similar a refrain this is to the Jewish settlers-grabbed-Palestinian lands tune!). They advocate the return of these lands to their "rightful owners". Funny thing is, many of these leftist pseudo-intellectuals live in Manila where they are shielded from the armed turmoil raging in far- away Mindanao. They don't own property in the south. They don't suffer from the kidnapping, pillaging and banditry; it is the non-Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao (and the Visayas) who have to deal with these threats on a daily basis.
Ironically, if we are to go by these leftist apologists' logic, the entire Philippines should be returned to the Muslims. After all, the whole archipelago - not just Mindanao - was under Muslim rule for several hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century. Manila was then ruled by Rajah Sulayman until 1570 when the armed contingent of the conquistador Martin de Goiti landed in Manila and grabbed the city for the King of Spain. So how come we never hear these Manila-based leftists call for the return of Manila to the Bangsamoro movement? Walden Bello and Randy David should really be the first to give back their properties to the descendants of Rajah Sulayman. But it's not gonna happen, folks. These people would rather sacrifice the homes and land of non-Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao than give up their own. Such is the depth of hypocrisy that plagues the left.
I have a feeling that the left's alliance with Islam is their way of getting back at the United States for winning the Cold War. The US consigned the left's former ideological patron, the Soviet Union, to the trash heap of history. Red China is now practically Green China (green stands for money), a capitalist country-in-the-making. Only Cuba and North Korea remain standing, and neither of their economies can be considered vindications of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Cubans would rather drown in the shark-infested waters of the Gulf of Mexico while fleeing Cuba in leaky boats than live under the oppressive Communist regime of Fidel Castro. For it's part, North Korea has now become the dream destination of vegetarians, since food - especially red meat - has become so scarce there that people have been reduced to eating tree barks and grass.
Many in the left can not accept the failure of their ideology and the defeat of their models, the USSR and China. Hence, they are doing what desperate people are wont to do under the circumstances: piggyback on an ally to fight the common enemy, the United States. Thus the left has found Islam - or specifically, Islamofascism, to piggyback on. Islamofascism is a potent political force that has an even chance of beating the US. Islam has about 2 billion adherents. While not all Muslims are radical, a sizeable percentage is fanatically determined to advance its dream of global domination as espoused in the Koran. Imagine if only 1% of Muslims belong to this camp....that still amounts to 20 million jihadists, a sizeable army which eclipses the Soviet military manpower of 13 million at its Cold War peak. The other advantage Islam has over the USSR is that its antipathy towards the US is fueled by religion, a fuel that never runs out because it is based on emotion rather than reason, whereas Communism was fueled by Marxism-Leninism which is arguably cerebral and sterile - a less potent means of inciting people to go to war.
How long the left's alliance with Islam will last is a good question. My bet is that if the Islamofascists defeat the United States, they (the Islamofascists) will devour the left with gusto, and any illusions leftist atheists may have over their flirtation with Islamofascism will quickly evaporate. My reading of the Koran is that Islam regards atheists with even worse contempt than it regards Christians and Jews. The fate of atheists under an Islamic theocracy is not exactly benign (unless you call the pouring of boiling water on your head benign). Lenin's phrase "useful idiots" which he used to describe starry-eyed liberals who shilled for the Soviet Union may aptly describe today's leftist apologists of Islamofascism.
tekton12 ¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments
