randform

foto by fotonotof

Short notice: as published in one of the current gazettes (2010-04-20) of the US Trade mark office the company Disney had filed an application for the name “snow white” (if I understood correctly ?) for:

Production, presentation, distribution, and rental of motion picture films; production, presentation, distribution, and rental of television and radio programs; production, presentation, and rental of sound and visual recordings; production of entertainment shows and interactive programs for distribution via audio and visual media, and electronic means; production and provision of entertainment in the nature of shows, current events news, and entertainment information via communication and computer networks; amusement park and theme park services; educational and entertainment services rendered in or relating to theme parks, namely, live stage shows, live amusement park shows, live performances by costumed characters, and presentation of live theatrical performances; presentation of live stage shows; presentation of live show performances; entertainment in the nature of theater productions; entertainer services, namely, live appearances by a professional entertainer

just in case someone didnt notice this comment.

There is currently a public debate in Germany about what to do with long-term unemployed or similarily precarious individua. In particular in Germany there exists a social care instrument called “Hartz IV” which combines unemployment benefits and welfare benefits. The debate saw meanwhile quite some contraversial statements, including a statement by the current minister for foreign affairs Mr. Westerwelle, who warned -according to Spiegel-Online in that context of “late-roman decadence” and – again according to spiegel-online demanded that recipients of Hartz IV who do not display enough flexibility should be further sanctioned (there are already sanctions). One of his main ideas which stood behind these statements was – if I understood correctly that “work should be worthwhile again” . In particular it was inferred in that context that some recipients of Hartz IV receive more benefits than some who work full-time in a badly paid job. Meanwhile people tried to collect information about which assertions are correct in that context. Like there was a nice (partially even tabularized comparision) about benefits and unemployment in Berliner Zeitung (unfortunately I currently cant find the link) which displayed that less benefits do not automatically increase job chances. Likewise Frederic Valin of the Berlin blog Spreeblick collected some arguments, which disagree with some common buzz-terms which were used by some politicians, others provided examples where working (in contrast to receiving benefits) would not pay out a.s.o. The debate had now been even more spurred by the SPD top-candidate for the federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen Hannelore Kraft who suggested –according to Spiegel Online – that recipients of Hartz IV may have at least some kind of job if they could work in places which are oriented to the public good like in care for the elderly etc. These recipients could then earn a little more money than the usual Hartz IV money, which is 359 Euros a month. The main idea behind that proposal being probably that this would relief recipients of Hartz IV from the feeling of being some kind of public “parasites”.

In all the discussion I somehow missed out something, so I felt I had to explain this here on the blog.

Guido Westerwelle’s idea that “work should be worthwhile again” will here actually also be the key issue in my arguments. The question how to find a measure for what is “worthwhile”, independent of market mechanisms will be at the center.

I do not agree with Mr. Westerwelle that people who do not display enough flexibility should be further sanctioned. I do not understand how he might have drawn his conclusions from the idea “work should be worthwhile again” and I will try to explain this. (Apart from what I am going to say it should be inferred that the quest to lower benefits seem to have its flaws already by “free-capitalistic” standards, because if you would reduce or cut the current benefits then the low-paid labour market would be flooded and thus low-paid work (in Germany there is usually no minimum wage) would be even less worthwhile.)

There had also been already quite some discussion here in Germany about a basic income for everybody. This discussion is of course not limited to Germany and there are other suggestions for innovating reimbursement like for example Jeremy Rifkin talks in this interview (mentioned in the comment section of Valins post) about the use of time-dollars a.s.o. I think time-dollars may make sense only in very special circumstances and the argument against them is again related to the question when “work is worthwhile again.”

Before coming back to the discussion about the value of work, one has to digress a bit.

The “world market” would in a simplified picture basically consist of three main ingrediences: ressources (I consider machines to be ressources for simplicity), the labour market and the financial/partially entrepreneurial sector. In the labour market one gets money for labour and in the financial/partially entrepreneurial sector the money is again very simply speaking mainly made by providing the “fluidity” (i.e. e.g. by distributing investments, transfer actions), by handling risks and responsibility (like for example for the workers).

Labour is usually paid according to availability of the needed work force (the market).

Now one observes the following: The labour market is in decline. It is first in decline with repect to the overall production, mainly due to rationalization but secondly it is in decline with repect to the financial sector. For the first assertion I have spend quite some time to gather actual data in the past days, whereas the second assertion will be left unproven.

side remark I:

Data for the assertion that the labour market is in decline: In the already mentioned interview Jeremy Rifkin gives some data for the decline in employment (and in fact he wrote a whole book about it) and there are others (some are e.g. listed in the german Wikipedia). In fact the issue of “machines killing labour” is old enough that as a kid I imagined that when I would be an adult I wouldn’t need to work anymore. This situation is not yet there (and its very debatable wether it will be like that) but there are meanwhile rather clear indications that the overall trend of rationalization is killing jobs is true. I didn’t read Rifkins book and there is probably enough data in that book, but there is also public accessible information in the internet. That is the International Labour organization ILO hosts at laborsta quite an amount of data, however this data has only very partially been analysed. I actually even corresponded with the ILO and it seems one of the best available statistical ressources which display the long-term decline of employment is given in this document. Here the socalled elasticity is listed over 4-year periods starting from 1992 and ending in 2008 (Box 19b). The elasticity is calculated by dividing the observed growth rate of employment during any past period by the observed growth rate of GDP during the same past period. That is for example if the amount of people having an employment would be growing by a factor of 0.02 and the world-wide GDP would be growing by a factor of 0.06 in four years then the elasticity would be about 0.3 as it is given in the table. In other words if the GDP wouldn’t grow one could assume that the employment would be in rather rapid decline. Similar things can be deduced by looking at the productivity (see productivity at KILM) which seems to have been growing in the same order of magnitude on a first glance (unfortunately here there seem to exist no worldwide analysis).

Hence as a consequence of the above the money which used to be in the labour market goes either into the financial sector or into ressources ( i.e. simplified into machines). There is also quite some labour going into “information production”, which could also be seen as going into ressources, however it should be noted that here the issue of its easy duplication has to be considered.
As a consequence Rifkin proposed e.g. in his interview to establish a tax on machines.

side remark II:

There is also a trend to delegate the original entrepreneurial risk to labour force. See for example outsourcing of the job market for software development (see e.g. this or this company) This happens even on the academic market and not only on the teaching side (see e.g. this randform post) but also on the research side -where it should be pointed out that especially special types of research are a high-risk undertaking (see e.g. this company, which is supported by one of the most prestigious scientific journals).

By looking at these trends (it would be of course helpful to have more data accessible and more data analysis at hand than the above one currently provided by ILO) one sees that unemployment is rather not due to “lazy parasites” which should be seen in connection with “late-roman decadence” but rather due to a world-wide rationalization.

Sofar there seems to be no easy recipe how to adress the above problems and maybe – at least for a certain time there can be only smaller steps applied (like maybe the above mentioned taxation on machines). However I think it is necessary to rethink the paradigm of work in general, which brings us back to the original question of when is “work worthwhile”. In particular it is also clear by the above that the old labour market mechanisms do not work anymore as they used to. There will be more and more people without labour and if there is no welfare these people will be without income.

As a consequence it will be important to understand what work means and why and when “work is worthwhile”. And as I tried to explain above it is worthwhile to understand this independently of current market mechanisms.

In particular the usual “parasite” reproach towards unemployed presupposes that work is something “unpleasant”. Paradoxically it is however NOT SO THAT THE MOST UNPLEASANT JOBS ARE THE BEST PAID JOBS! On the contrary, not so pleasant jobs like cleaning public toilets are rather lousy paid!

Thus if one would assume that employment would decline to such an extent that unemployment/welfare benefits would be needed to be paid to a great percentage of the poulation, i.e. if one would be in a situation, where one would have a quasi basic income, then it is indeed an interesting question, who would do the unpleasant jobs in that context.

Hence for simplicity assume all of the population receives a basic income. My claim is that in this context it is important to find out what is not pleasant/especially strenous at a job and to have a public debate about that. In particular in that context “work could be seen worthwhile again” if the unpleasant parts are adequately honoured. If these unpleasant parts would be honoured adequately then there would still be enough people doing “unpleasant” jobs, in particular those which can’t be done by machines (why not clean the toilets of Bahnhof Zoo for a month stay in a villa at an italian lake?). The time dollar is only very limited capable to capture the unpleasantness of certain jobs. It is by the way also not easy to assess creative work with a time-dollar. This reassessment of the value of work however would probably also imply that rather pleasant jobs may be paid rather poorly.

It is of course not easy to assess, what is unpleasant and what not, in particular skills, personal preferences and mentality play an important role in here. Everybody who knows the fights about who does what in a household will agree. But as already said it would be interesting to have a public debate about this. This could give interesting insights into wether the payment for example for some “one Euro jobs” (or similar proposals like the one of Mrs. Kraft) in the public sector are adequate. For me it would also be interesting to discuss wether grading math assignments (which is not pleasant) is really more than 12 times less unpleasant than being a bank director, assuming that the skills are comparable.

A reader called Silvia Hossfehler asked about a statement I made in a blog post, in which I described a design of a chair that I had subbmitted to a competition. My statement there was “I do not like competitions.” And Silvia Hossfehlers question was:

Are you sure that you do not like competitions? So why did you then send in your suggestion?

Since I think this is a more general issue, I decided to make a blog post out of this.

There are three major aspects of a competition. One is filtering, one is evaluation and one is motivation. A competition is filtering since it is making a choice between the objects/subjects under competition. A competition is evaluating since this choice is usually done with respect to some “value scale” that is for example in the olympic games the value could be e.g. “high velocity” and the filtering is thus to filter out the fastest. However in an art competition for example the “value scale” is not so obvious, people may talk about “quality”, as a possible value, but usually in an art competition, the filtering is mostly subject to a quite unspecifyable/predictable “value scale”. The third aspect is that a competition may serve as fostering motivation, it may make people increase their commitment to a certain task. That is for example the runner in the olympic games may be running faster and giving his/her best due to the “competition”.

Likewise in the working world a competition may filter out “the most efficient/capable”, moreover usually competition is regarded as a necessary condition for motivating people to work hard enough. Efficiency and a motivated workforce is usually essential to make profits and since competition solves all these demands all at once it therefore is a kind of “must-have” for “capitalists”. Often enough the principles of evolution (“survival of the fittest”) are taken as a justification of these paradigmas. However it should be noted that there there are enough examples, which display that in evolution things are more complicated, in particular the “survival of the fittest” may not hold for the individual but for a group of species.

Nevertheless as a result our western society is highly “competition-oriented”.

In my point of view – especially by looking at the odd sides of competition, like for example where it is leading to things as exploitation or monoculture – this can be very problematic and I think a more critical view on competition as such may be at place.

It is of course more or less unavoidable to take part in competitions and unfortunately one has to go through quite some competitions in order to have a saying. Grades in school already constitute a “competition”. And again in this example a competition serves as an agent for “evaluation”.

On the other hand this example already makes it also clear that the above mentioned major aspects of a competition can at least partially be transferred to other means. That is an evaluation can also be done by purely measuring capabilities/competences, i.e. the competitive aspect of being compared to others can be reduced. Likewise motivation can be driven by interest, social connectivity etc. In short competition may not even be a necessary condition for efficiency. On the contrary if the competition and “optimization of efficiency” is too strong competition can be counterproductive (see e.g. the last Toyota crisis). Last but not least the “filtering” aspect of competitions may lead to a blindness for other “filtering” criteria. Thus if for example “fast profit” dominates the “value scale” for a competition other possible criteria, like social conditions etc. are going to be neglected. Moreover the conditions for filtering may be unfair/too restricted etc. (read also this randform post about competition in the academic world).

So yes my comment in the blog post was referring to all that but it was also expressing a subjective discomfort with competition, in particular for me competition is usually not the most motivating force. For example in school sports I was especially slow if I had to run with others. I do not object to evaluation, on the contrary a regular feedback is important for me, however I do not always need the comparision to others. The comparision to others may impose quite an extra stress, rather than motivation. This can go as far as this: If I notice that someone wants to challenge me for a competition I sometimes prefer to completely step back. In particular there are people who want to make everything into a competition. I find that unpleasant, since in these cases one has not only to decide about the issue in question, but also about the aspect, wether one is up for a competition.

I took part in this design competition mentioned in the blog post, because I actually would have liked to discuss my chair with others and get critics about the design etc. and eventually connect to people who might be interested in building a prototype (if you put your design just into a forum or on your blog than the response is usually not very big). So unfortunately in this competition nothing like that happened. Thats in part what I do not like about these usual competitions. Moreover there are more and more competitions, where you have to pay an entrance fee (apart from postage etc.) in order to present your work. I think this is crazy. Who is taking part in these competitions?

There had been quite a discussion on mathematics blogs about a recent request of the very well-known mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck. Amongst others he is a recipient of the fields medal – a kind of Nobel prize (since there exist also the Abel prize should one now say NoAbel Prize?) for mathematics. Since quite some time he lives secluded and disconnected from the mathematical world.

Alexandre Grothendieck is the author of a lot of very influential mathematical works. Unfortunately these works are in an area of mathematics I do not know much about, so I can’t really say much about his work. However, there are a lot of mathematicians who think that some of the older prints should be typeset again (which rarely happens for mathematical papers) and there are projects for that – in particular a project where the socalled Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique du Bois Marie (short SGA) is typeset in LaTeX by many volunteers and which made parts of the SGA available on the electronic preprint arxiv (an archive, which makes it possible to provide math and physics preprints for free). Partly these SGA were published in a book, as well. As the Wikipedia page about the project says:

Legal permission to reprint the works was obtained from every author except Alexander Grothendieck himself, who cannot be contacted; it was decided to proceed without his explicit agreement.

Given the information provided by the mathematical blog “The secret blogging seminar” , what apparently happened now was that suddenly on a webpage for part 4 of the SGA the sentence:

Alexandre Grothendieck a malheureusement souhaité que cessent les travaux de réédition de SGA. Les pages qui étaient consacrées sont donc closes.
Dernière actualisation : 2 février 2010.

appeared. After that it became clear that this sentence was probably based on a letter which Alexandre Grothendieck wrote on Jan. 2 of this year. Here is the direct link to this (french) letter (typeset version of it) as made available on the secret blogging seminar (there is also an english translation in that blog post) .

In this letter he writes among others (modulo mistakes of readability):

Je n’ai pas l’intention de publier, ou de republier, aucune œuvre ou texte dont je suis l’auteur, sous quelque forme que ce soit, imprim´ee ou ´electronique, que ce soit sous forme int´egrale ou par extraits, textes de nature scientifique, personnelle ou autres, ou lettres adress´ees `a quiconque – ainsi que toute traduction de textes dont je suis l’auteur.

So this came as a shock to a lot of mathematicians (the partially quite emotional discussion on the blogs displays this rather vividly), as it seems to indicate that Alexandre Grothendieck doesn’t give the permission to republish his works!

Consequently the reaction of the SGA project was to terminate the project of reediting the SGA (see above sentence). Summarizing it seems the already done voluntary work of a lot of people is lost, moreover the availability of the SGA will be reduced.

When I read all this I missed the discussion about one point in his letter. May be this is due to my poor knowledge of the french language, though. Let me explain this – maybe someone french can comment on this.

In german the word publication is “Veroeffentlichung”. However a preprint doesn’t count as a “Veroeffentlichung” (at least not in mathematics) that is, it is considered as a prepublication. In his letter Alexandre Grothendieck explicitly underlined the terms retirer du commerce that is, he explicitly says that he does not wish that his works turn into a/another commercial product. So may it be possible that the word “republication” should be seen as ambiguous, i.e. that he would tolerate (or accept) a “pre”-republication of his works as open access documents?

Remark: Even if if one knows a lot about licence agreements, open access etc. so that one could have formulated this more precisley one could still wish to keep the “fuzzy” formulation of “publication”. Why? It just occurred to me that nobody really knows what would happen to all the preprints in the arxiv.org if the university system shouldn’t be able to sustain it anymore. What would happen to orphan preprints? Maybe Alexandre Grothendieck prefers to be able to say that he never agreed even with a “pre”publication.

Another side remark: You may think that the assumption that the arxiv may go down is far-fetched. This could well be, but on the other hand I find the arxiv looks a bit untended. That is for example the searches are still a bit uncomfortable and the upload procedures are very tedious, especially if you have a lot of pictures. I don’t want to think what happenes if one would like to upload an article which includes an interactive applet. Maybe I should say at this place that I tried in vain to upload my thesis to the arxiv with Tims help (who is quite a LaTeX wizard). The problem was that the upload program at the arxiv automatically deleted some necessary files. After many emails forth and back with the arxiv people we finally gave up. In addition I proposed to the people at arxiv to introduce a closed pre-preprint section for the arxive for timestamping works (something I am going to talk about later in more detail) and heard nothing about that proposal since then.

Concluding: If there is any slight chance that the term “republication” in Alexandre Grothendiecks letter could be interpreted as ambiguous, one should think about this. It is completely acceptable that he would wish that his works are not to be made into a commercial product (Similar things can be said about the works of Grigori Perelman). One can make this understandable even by “capitalistic” standards, i.e. imagine a soup kitchen where volunteers cook (unfortunately this voluntary work is seen by some politicians not as “work”…) hand out food to poor people and someone fetches some of the food and sells it around a corner. I know this comparision is a bit drastic, but still.

Our friend Sohaila Abdulali is a writer. Her first novel “The madwoman of Jogare” was shortlisted for the Crossword Award in 1998. Her second novel “Year of the Tiger” will be launched on:

Thursday 18 February 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at Crossword Bookstore, Ground Floor, Mohammed Bhai Mansion, Kemps Corner (below the flyover) N. S. P. Marg, Bombay, India
Kalki Koechlin and Anahita Uberoi will read and be in conversation with the author.

RSVP: Vivat Chandok (Crossword) or Harish Shenoy (Penguin India)

In an earlier randform post, the distribution of surplusses was discussed, among others it was proposed to simulate a different way of distributing surplusses in a game-like environment. There were some comments to this:
Sabrina Says:” why don’t you make a business model out of that game prototype?”
Victor Says:
“if you have these dangerous ideas to abolish banks or let them go bankrupt, this is communism!
And
“did you fit in all your parameters?!”

Here a reply to the comment by Victor “if you have these dangerous ideas to abolish banks or let them go bankrupt, this is communism !” :

(more…)

On a blog of Fabrice Rimlinger it was pointed out that a patent claim has been filed by Microsoft for a rather general class of sparklines. Sparklines is a term which was proposed by Edward Tufte in his book “beautiful evidence” as

“Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics”

(citation from Edward Tufte website)

So it seems I have to pay now to Microsoft for talking about

does anyone know – do they take regular checks ?

(more…)

Sometimes it happens that someone says to you something occasionally – like as a side remark, but that that phrase – despite its parenthetical nature – sticks in your head. Something similar to this happened to me when an intern at a german company where I was also as a student intern said to me: Nadja – one should buy shares only with gratuitous money, never with money that one needs. Maybe this phrase stuck in my head because this person was one of the very few persons in my surroundings which knew something about the stock market, who knows. However bank accountants and other financial consultants kept telling me to care for my retirement by investing in all sorts of bonds. In view of this discrepancy of recommendations and out of curiosity I thus took part in an online game which was organized by a german public TV station (If I remember correctly WISO, ZDF).

In this game one started with a fixed virtual start amount of money which could be virtually invested in real stocks at real prices. Despite that this “stock market” was only a game it nevertheless became quite captivating. I learned a lot in this game, like that it is rather difficult to have high returns on short term investments a.s.o At the end the game became quite time consuming though. But as a result I decided to follow the advice of the person from the internship which was sound. I never owned a bond.

But this little adventure in financial markets taught me more. It made me clear that the feature of “surplus” or “gratuitous money” is quite essential. Or in other words the often proclaimed view that financial markets are democratic and open to everybody seems to be more informed by concrete interests (like to sell financial packages to laypersons) than by actual facts.

Further deduction allows to say in a simplified manner that there are the following ways to become rich (we leave marriage and adoption out): that is either by being able to “sell” highly demanded goods (like done by hollywood actors, exceptional artists, rags to riches etc.) or via owning a surplus and letting the “money work” with high returns and/or a combination of the two. Lotto wins etc. are the exception to this rule. Lets consider criminal activities also as an exception.

It is interesting to observe that the first kind, i.e. the “self-made” riches are rather accepted while the latter the “undeserved”, “lazy” riches are seen more critically. This holds especially true for the recent protagonists of the financial crisis who still – despite their obvious failures demand more returns and/or boni than what is commonly regarded as appropriate.

However it is undenied that surplusses and the rather decentralized investment of surplusses is somewhat necessary in a technological society.

High risk investments carry a high risk of failure and thus they usually carry a high risk of personal loss, so it makes sense that high risk investments usually result in higher returns than low risk investments, in order to encourage them. However meanwhile a lot of returns in the banking businesses are exorbitantly high even without any personal risk at all. Without exagerating it can be said that the whole regulating mechanism of return vs. risk seems to be out of control – at least in the banking business.

In short –it seems that the question of how to deal with surplusses and the “return of investments” is a rather crucial point in any economic discussion.

In particular, apart from the disastrous performance of the banking business, it can be said that “capitalism” hasn’t given a satisfying answer to the question of how to encourage investments into ventures with from the outset low return or even with from the outset no return at all, despite the fact that these investments are often crucial for technological and societal developments. In my eyes this is a major flaw of “capitalism” or however you wanna call the current system.

Considering the above observations I thus started to think about: How could this flaw be mitigated ? and: How can one come up with something?

Inspired by the above described game and also by games like the Sims which usually mimick a real world in a virtual environment (and where the gameplay is supported by the fact that people like to “train” for the real world) I asked myself to what extent a “new investment system” could be implemented in a game in order to test such a system for the real world. One knows that such “experiments” have limited capabilities of providing real life evidences, however they may be not completely useless. At least it seems that the new possibilities in times of MMPORGS havent been fully explored in economic science.

My question turned thus into: “How can one set up an investment scheme (in a game like environment) which encourages investments into ventures with from the outset low return or even no return?”

Assume we have a kind of Sims game that is sort of a real life economic scenario. Could it be supplied with a different system of money distribution and storage than with the usual banking and economical scheme, in particular the system should be able to encourage investments into ventures with no return, but which are desired for technological and societal reasons? If yes – What could be possible? What can one think of?

Here – a very incomplete and rough (and probably not working) scheme as a start, which is mainly intended to encourage brainstorming about these issues rather than provide a solution.

Starting from the crucial point that surplusses are needed for investments, lets assume there exists a certain amount of surplus. In the game that surplus is just a fixed start amount of extra money. In reality and within a country one could find such a surplus in all assets which are not unconditionally needed for covering the running costs. Its a debatable point what these are, but in richer countries one can find a surplus. Or coltishly put: Schloss Neuschwanstein could a priori be liquidized. In some sense a countries surplus is an indicator of how a country florishes. If there is no surplus and if even running costs cant be covered a country is usually considered to be bankrupt.

Now a surplus could be in total centrally distributed by a government. However similar real life experiments like in a centrally planned economy showed that this was economically less successful. Nevertheless it is meanwhile also rather undisputed that governments or other societal institutions should be able to exert an influence on the distribution of surplusses.

Hence lets e.g. assume that the given surplus is evenly distributed among the participants (in order to give the most democratic chance of investment and in order to mitigate the problem of lazy riches).

Impose the rule that any personal surplus has to be spend within a short time span into various (short and long term) investments (so money has to be invested). The investments have to promise “benefits” that is either one can collect benificiary points (being e.g. issued by societal institutions prior to investment) for investments into ventures with low or no return or one can collect money returns. For the work which is related to the distribution of the surplus each participant gets a “wage” which can be used for one’s own consumption. The wage is dependend on the success of the investments. If an investment yields no return or no beneficiary points or worse if even the investment is lost then the participant is “punished”. E.g. in the worst case that is if the whole surplus is lost then the participant is punished with “getting no wage from surplus”. The actual size and dependency of the wage with respect to the earned returns and/or beneficiary points is thus an important parameter.

All made returns and beneficiary points enter the personal surplus and have to be reinvested. A venture may store collected investment and eventually issue interests until the needed lump sum is collected that would accomodate for the storage effect of banks.

It may be also be good to allow only for investments which are not ones own investments. This would e.g. encourage long-term investments, since the surplus could anyways not be spend on ones own projects and thus accomodate at least partially for the intermediation function of banks.

Note that the distribution of beneficiary points is also an important parameter. (please see also this randform post about assigning values) In particular beneficiary points may be distributed to such different things as newcomer bands, extraordinary social activities/aid or research in quantum gravity.