Remains of the Day

How to feed 9 billion people in 2050

That's the problem contemplated in this article in The Atlantic. That's one way to look at the problem, to back out from some predicted future population figure and then solve for that equation.

The author's conclusion is that biotech won't solve the issue, that the only way it's possible is if we (1) raise incomes the world over (because some people aren't fed today purely because of poverty, not because of a lack of food supply) and (2) convince people to eat less resource-intensive food, of which meat is a large culprit (the higher up on the food chain you are, the more resource-intense you are as a food source, which is why we couldn't feed many people at all if we just fed them lion meat).

Here's a long and related article in the NYTimes: Beyond the Eternal Food Fight.

One more chief economist

One more technology company hires a chief economist: Microsoft nabs Susan Athey [from Tim Harford's reflection on the second printing of The Undercover Economist]

Days of Yore

From this Jennifer Egan interview at Days of Yore:

A: It’s a very trusting environment, but also a very rigorous environment. Because you want to know that everyone is on your side, but if they just tell you it’s great, they’re not doing you any favors. That part about everyone being on your side is really critical too. There’s nothing worse than not knowing whether their criticism is motivated by some sort of internal or external wish to undermine or whether it is valid.

Q: But it can be hard in, say, a writing workshop, to shut out the choir of voices and hear your own voice.

A: Yes. But what I lose by not listening is much greater than what I lose by listening to bad advice. Because I think I can sort of sort through with my gut what is useful and what is not useful. Whereas if I hear nothing, I know vividly what results. I am never going to let that happen again.

I think people feel somehow that they can be hurt by hearing the wrong thing. I am not convinced that is true. We might get our feelings hurt, but I don’t think there is any actual damage done. What’s bad falls away.

One thing I often say to students is, “I am not interested in hearing solutions.” If people give me solutions that are cockamamie, which they often will, forget that! But take a step back and look at the problem they are identifying with that solution. That is useful to know.

Days of Yore is a site that "interviews artists about the years before they had money, fame, or road maps to success, and inspires you to find your own." Some good reading there. Here's another interview with George Saunders. From that:

Well, this is sort of old-fartish advice – that is, the type of advice someone who already has a tenure-track job would give—but I do mean it: I think the only defensible position is to sort of say to hell with making a living and put all your energy into making something new, that seems beautiful to you – that is, to try your best to push your work into a new/iconic place and let the chips fall where they may.  Otherwise you’re putting the cart before the horse, and it’s very possible that the emphasis on making a living (or being viable, or commercial, etc etc) might cause you to miss a vital path – to be, that is, both (a) lame and (b) unpublished.

This also strikes me as true of the entrepreneurs I admire the most. Great work doesn't start with this goal: "How do I make a lot of money?" Nor does happiness (though poverty is not fun and correlates to many unpleasant things, like health problems). If your sole goal in life is to make money, there are many simpler and less painful ways to do so than pursuing art or starting your own company.

The true cost of higher education

Malcolm Harris writes at n+1 about the next economic bubble in the U.S. after the housing bubble: the student debt bubble.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy,  then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?

Harris goes into all the reasons why the cost of education has exploded, and why it's not likely to end anytime soon, and this all leads to his less than sanguine conclusion:

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

To me, the real tragedy of so many higher education programs is that they saddle students with so much debt that they have no choice but to consider salary as a first-order criterion for their choice of profession. When the real problem that an institution of higher education should aspire to is to teach us how to live and engage with the world, and to teach us how to be both children and adults at once. The best of my college days blended lessons in adult responsibility (how to take care of yourself without your parents as a backstop) with encouragement that the best way to pursue intellectual adventure was to follow your curiosity wherever it led.

Free market solutions to obesity

Matt Ridley discusses free-market solutions to obesity. One section caught my attention:

In due course, the obesity problem will be solved, I suspect. The ultra-rich have already solved it. Most of them are very thin these days, quite unlike in ancient times. That's because they can afford the solutions that work for them, from low-carb diets to personal trainers.

If economic growth continues to spread, as it has over the past two centuries, most people will be ultra-rich by today's standards within two generations, and slim figures will also spread. Still, it would be nice to find a way for people to lose weight without having to wait for them to get rich first.

The signifiers of wealth evolve over time. In some countries a tan is a signal of wealth because it means you can afford to vacation where there's sun. But in Asia a dark complexion was often a signal that you were in a lower socioeconomic class and forced to work out in the sun all day, for example in farming or construction, so a pale complexion was socially desirable.

In places of food scarcity, obesity can be a sign of wealth. However, in the U.S. today, it's the reverse: the wealthy can afford to hack the diet and lifestyle issues that lead to obesity in poorer socioeconomic groups.

DFW's The Pale King

John Jeremiah Sullivan's review of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King is a fantastic read. And in GQ, no less. I loved this paragraph:

It's worth noting, in that regard, that The New Yorker, which published some of his best fiction, never did any of his nonfiction. No shame to Wallace or The New Yorker, it's simply a technically interesting fact: He couldn't have changed his voice to suit the magazine's famous house style. The "plain style" is about erasing yourself as a writer and laying claim to a kind of invisible narrative authority, the idea being that the writer's mind and personality are manifest in every line, without the vulgarity of having to tell the reader it's happening. But Wallace's relentlessly first-person strategies didn't proceed from narcissism, far from it—they were signs of philosophical stubbornness. (His father, a professional philosopher, studied with Wittgenstein's last assistant; Wallace himself as an undergraduate made an actual intervening contribution—recently published as Fate, Time, and Language—to the debate over free will.) He looked at the plain style and saw that the impetus of it, in the end, is to sell the reader something. Not in a crass sense, but in a rhetorical sense. The well-tempered magazine feature, for all its pleasures, is a kind of fascist wedge that seeks to make you forget its problems, half-truths, and arbitrary decisions, and swallow its nonexistent imprimatur. Wallace could never exempt himself or his reporting from the range of things that would be subject to scrutiny.

I am among the many for whom David Foster Wallace, or DFW as he's commonly referred to, is the most influential writer of this generation, and Sullivan's article articulates much of why that is. I'd add that beyond his prodigious talent, Wallace's writing evinced a curious but tolerant world view which seemed all too rare in this more cynical age, with its tendency towards snap and shallow judgment.

I enjoyed the reference to the New Yorker house style, which Tom Wolfe (according to a citation Wikipedia), once said (emphasis mine): "The New Yorker style was one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine’s pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier."

Famous Objects from Classic Movies

This is old news on the web by now, but I'm still getting a couple moments of fun each day from Famous Objects from Classic Movies.

ADDENDUM: Just as I posted this, I finished the game with a record of 112 and 10. So there are 122 of these for now, with more, I hope, to come.

The alpha and the loyal sidekick

Paul Allen's autobiography is about to hit, and so it's omnipresent on the web. A juicy excerpt appears in Vanity Fair. As with Keith Richards slagging Mick Jagger in his entertaining autobiography, Allen doesn't hold back about his relationship with Gates, both positive and negative.

Bill craved closure, and he would hammer away until he got there; on principle, I refused to yield if I didn’t agree. And so we’d go at it for hours at a stretch, until I became nearly as loud and wound up as Bill. I hated that feeling. While I wouldn’t give in unless convinced on the merits, I sometimes had to stop from sheer fatigue. I remember one heated debate that lasted forever, until I said, “Bill, this isn’t going anywhere. I’m going home.”

And Bill said, “You can’t stop now—we haven’t agreed on anything yet!”

“No, Bill, you don’t understand. I’m so upset that I can’t speak anymore. I need to calm down. I’m leaving.”

Bill trailed me out of his office, into the corridor, out to the elevator bank. He was still getting in the last word—“But we haven’t resolved anything!”—as the elevator door closed between us.

I was Mr. Slow Burn, like Walter Matthau to Bill’s Jack Lemmon. When I got mad, I stayed mad for weeks. I don’t know if Bill noticed the strain on me, but everyone else did. Some said Bill’s management style was a key ingredient in Microsoft’s early success, but that made no sense to me. Why wouldn’t it be more effective to have civil and rational discourse? Why did we need knock-down, drag-out fights?

Why not just solve the problem logically and move on?

This relationship pattern bubbles up so often it's nearly a trope: the somewhat belligerent, mercurial, and talented alpha dog and the loyal, lower key, but often exasperated lieutenant or right-hand. Like Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington in the documentary The September Issue. Or Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti in Valentino: The Last Emperor (shocking, I know, to find a surplus of divas in fashion).

At times such relationships work well, especially when the sidekick is willing to subsume himself or herself to the alpha in a symbiotic hierarchy.

For example, Jordan and Pippen. Unlike many players, Pippen didn't care about his scoring totals. He was content to let Jordan dominate the ball, the press, the accolades. Pippen focused on passing, individual and team defense, and a lot of the less glamorous duties. Without Pippen, fewer than 6 banners would be hanging in the United Center today, and fewer than six championship rings would line Jordan's jewelry case (or wherever men keep their jewelry).

Jordan knew what he had in Pippen, and Pippen knew how lucky he was to be playing alongside the GOAT (greatest of all time), and they were content with their roles. When Jordan retired to play baseball and Pippen became the new lead dog, the stability of the team's hierarchy weakened. The infamous incident when Pippen refused to play after Phil Jackson drew up a game-winning shot for Kukoc instead of Pippen is more understandable when seen in the context of his previous relationship. Pippen had played sidekick for years, and now that he had finally ascended to the top stop, Jackson was drawing up the final play of the game for a sixth man?

Even Wintour/Coddington and Valentino/Giammetti have, in many respects, worked out more often than not. Most people don't know Coddington and Giammetti, and to the extent they're fine with their relative anonymity, the partnerships are productive. In the two documentaries, each express frustration with their bosses over a variety of issues, but ultimately seem to come to some level of peace with their place in the world.

Another successful pair, at least from the outside, is Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive. From a recent Jonathan Ive profile:

Ive responded by delivering the iMac, a curvy, semi-transparent desktop computer that looked utterly different from anything else on the market. Although it was an immediate hit with users, Ive’s iMac did not quite meet Jobs’ standards of perfection. Its translucent mouse was clumsy and the choice of new USB connection technology caused problems.

‘Jonathan took his share of beatings early on,’ reveals Valarie Sobolewski, a software engineer who worked at Apple for over a decade.

‘To be in Steve’s world, you’ve got to be willing to take a buffeting.’

But by the time the first iPod music player launched in 2001, Ive and Jobs had finally clicked and the sleek, minimalist Apple vibe of today was born.

Ive has achieved some measure of fame, and Pippen certainly wasn't anonymous, so perhaps that level of recognition smoothed those relationships over. After he had retired, Jordan traded his Ferrari for Pippen's Porsche because he knew how much Pippen coveted it, an act of recognition much like a star quarterback buying Rolexes for his much less famous and lower paid offensive linemen.

One other fictional partnership echoes here: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. In The Age of the Infovore, Tyler Cowen theorizes that Sherlock Holmes was autistic or perhaps had Asperger's syndrome (Cowen cites both textual evidence and biographical hints that Holmes' creator Arthur Conan Doyle was himself autistic). It's often remarked that many hugely successful technology CEO's might be autistic or have mild Asperger's Syndrome. Perhaps it's not that they're intentionally callous towards others but simply that they're high-functioning autistics whose emotional antennas are wired differently. What makes them successful may be the same thing which renders them emotionally remote.

Obama, do you have your own computer?

A Univision anchor asks President Obama if he has his own computer. [via The Daily What]

Three Big Pigs

Smart.

The hardest climb in cycling?

A profile, complete with ominous photos, of The Koppenberg, a contender for the title of "toughest climb in cycling."

The Koppenberg's stats are, objectively speaking, nothing to go home crying about. I know, sacrilege, you howl. Hear me out. There are climbs that are steeper, longer, even harder. It's only 600 meters long, it averages just under 12%, and its steepest section is 22%. I'm not saying these are paltry figures, but climbs like the Zoncolan and Angliru manage figures like that for ten thousand meters. They're debilitatingly hard, but so is the Koppenberg. There are a few things that are very, very different about the Koppenberg that set it well apart from the horror climbs of the Zoncolan and the Angliru, namely: cobbles, cobbles, cobbles, and the Ronde van Vlaanderen.

I haven't done a lot of riding over cobblestones. It's not pleasant, though it gives one a sense of joining some gladiatorial fraternity. But watching professionals suffer over them is good fun.

Behind every autotuned 13 year old girl...

It makes sense, doesn't it, that Gawker would do the profile of the man behind Rebecca Black's Friday? Meet Ark Music Factory CEO Patrice Wilson.

Where did Wilson get the inspiration for such lyrics as "Yesterday was Thursday/Today is Friday?" "I wrote the lyrics on a Thursday night going into a Friday," he said. "I was writing different songs all night and was like, 'Wow, I've been up a long time and it's Friday.' And I was like, wow, it is Friday!"

The immense spike of interest in this otherwise unremarkable video begs for an explanation. Needless to say, I enjoy reading the attempts to explain the phenomenon more than the video itself. From one example:

Rob: I like the song too, but I don’t find that embarrassing. It feels like a confirmation of the suspicion that the best pop music must aspire to a formal purity that comes at the expense of content. The best pop songs are the emptiest. At that point, pop music has nothing to do with subjectivity or identity construction: You don’t become empty when you hear it; instead you have your own fullness confirmed.

And later:

To shift the terminology, I think we’ve been in post-Fordist relations of pop-culture production for some time now, with consumers driving the innovations in meaning that culture-industry firms then harvest and exploit. They increasingly supply the playground itself rather than the specific jungle gyms. No one owns the malleable, mutable meanings of pop culture, but the process and the medium for those transmutations is definitely owned. This is the essence of what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism.

Next: 1,000 words on the great existential crisis of our time: which seat can I take?

What happened to liberal ed?

Why are fewer and fewer students interested in liberal arts and more focused on professional degrees? Dan Edelstein's theory:

The only problem with this logic is that universities in fact bear a considerable responsibility for the brain drain away from the humanities. By raising the cost of education to stratospheric levels, we oblige students to seek a higher return on their investment. It is this sort of economic calculation, I suggest, and not some alleged generational change, that is driving students in droves towards preprofessional degrees.

He forecasts a dire future for the humanities.

Until the tuition imbalance stabilizes – and eventually Congress may well intervene to ensure that it does – humanities departments need to act more aggressively to ensure their survival. Increasing the turnout of majors may be beyond our reach, but we perhaps need to rethink the relationship between research and teaching. Do highly specialized courses offered by individual departments provide the best kind of background in the humanities for students headed for careers in law, engineering, finance, or science? Or do we need to offer more cross-disciplinary courses, ideally team-taught by faculty from different departments, on core questions and topics in the humanities? The bulk of our teaching is geared toward majors and graduate students. If we do not want to be the victims of the next recession (or, if it lasts long enough, the current one), we also need to target those students who feel they do no longer have the luxury of specializing in a humanistic subject.

If I were to choose one subject to start this movement to more practical instruction, it would be writing. Non-English majors are often forced to take some eclectic literature course when a more focused class on writing well would prove so much more practical over the course of their lives. I'm amazed how few people I encounter in the professional world who can write with clarity and command.

If we look at the Internet space, the world seems ready for a new and more focused educational paradigm for the modern age. Or at least an alternative to the traditional educational roadmap in the U.S.

RELATED: It's been clear for some time now that the tech sector is in the midst of a huge software engineer shortage. This weekend the NYTimes wrote about the wide variety of perks companies are dangling to not only hire new employees but keep the ones they have from bolting.

In a market like this, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a company like Google started its own alternative educational institution to train software engineers from an even earlier age in life (high school, perhaps), in exchange for a first look at candidates or just to expand the pool of candidates in general. Just as in sports, the cheapest candidates are those fresh out of school, before their salaries correct over time to match their contributions. Given how much of their work can be leveraged across a global audience now, the return on investment from a software engineer is massive.

Chief economists

Google’s strength, he continues, was to recognise back in 2001 that “we would be handling massive amounts of data, and would need to develop tools for that.” Another foresight was to hire an economist. Eric Schmidt hired Varian to ‘have a look at the auction’, the bidding system for ads that soon became Google’s lifeblood. Other companies were built up around auctions – eBay, Yahoo! – but they didn’t hire experts until much later. Now Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple and Intel all have chief economists.

From a profile of Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, in Think Quarterly, Google's new quarterly magazine for its business partners. I didn't realize chief economists had sprouted beyond Google. If you can find an economist with the right disposition to work in a corporate setting, having that dispassionate viewpoint on the team can be useful. I don't know any economists personally; the ones I'm familiar with are all ones I discovered online.

Varian, a man who quotes feminist playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay as easily as MIT founder William Barton Rogers, points to the proliferation of what he calls ‘micro-multinationals’ – small companies, mostly connected to universities, working around the globe and around the clock. “The smallest company now has access to computing and infrastructure only the biggest tech company had 15 years ago. So it’s a much more fertile environment for start-ups. We’re seeing all these little companies. And guess what, some of these little companies become big companies.”

Micro-multinationals: that's the first time I've heard this phenomenon named.

Varian wrote Information Rules, one of the more useful business books in the past decade for companies working in the internet space.