Thomas Sowell Pt. 1

This will be the first of many posts about economist, political columnist, and author of a ton of books dating back to the 70s – Thomas Sowell. Sowell grew up in Harlem, moved out at 17, and joined the army and served in the Korean war. When he came back home he got his undergrad, graduate, and PhD at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, respectively.

Not really surprisingly, his initial political views were Marxist, and it was only the experience of working a government job where he came to understand the inherent flaws and misaligned incentives that tend to come with any government run operation. So, like a lot of people who end up being conservative or libertarian-leaning later on in life – he was on the left in his younger days. I defy you to name me examples of people where the opposite scenario worked itself out.

He picks on the very core of our inherent biases as people, and filters them through an economic lens – and this allows the people who read him to see and understand the motivations and various manifestations of knowledge that inform political movements, social movements, government policies, and simply the mindsets of sets of people that make daily decisions.

Under what constraints and limitations as human beings do we operate under? What IS sufficient knowledge required to make a given decision? Why can (and do) so many unintended things happen when a decision is made, despite the highly plausible pretenses that were the impetus for the decision in the first place? Why does money forcibly changing hands in the form of taxes, subsidies, and other regulations tend to have a longterm and disastrous net effect on an economy, and ultimately serve to benefit no one – save for the people that were elected to execute the initial policy?

These are the kind of thoughts that are neither popular, nor easy to think about and work through. We have been grown up in such a luxury that we can directly benefit from an economic system we know nothing about – and that ultimately is very dangerous. If we don’t know how our current system works and how it gave us what we have, we can’t really know or comprehend movements, ideas, or people that may threaten this system in the name of ego-stroking and ambiguous and ill-defined language designed precisely to numb our docile little minds into subservience.

Needless to say, I love this shit. It runs directly counter to prevailing ideas and wisdom, but man, does it teach you how to think and organize information. You know when you defragment a computer and it reorganizes all the files and data so  that when you make a command, the thing runs more smoothly? Reading Sowell is like doing the same thing with your mind.

As I’ve said before, leave the details for someone else. Instead, learn to think about and understand the details you WILL come across in abundance, so you can more smoothly discard obviously bad ones and further explore the good ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

The Vision of the Anointed

Knowledge and Decisions

(^^ This one is very very difficult to get through (its taken me a few weeks to get through 60 pages), and I would suggest starting with something lighter like his “Controversial Essays” books, but this book really helps you understand his points from the ground up, and will GREATLY enhance your understanding of economics)

Do You Know The Number of Intervals Between Two Pulses?

Funny but important question I asked somebody during Christmas over beers and Jimi Hendrix: How many intervals are there between two pulses?

The context is musical. The pulses could be, say, quarter notes, but think of it primarily as pulses. How many intervals of time from one pulse to the next?

The answer is: a lot. Infinite, actually.

The answer seems kind of obvious, but there are larger implications to this. What do you do once you know this fact? If you’re a musician, how do you use this to your advantage?

When you listen to some of the best musicians in the world, what makes them good is their ability to hone in on those infinite intervals, and to skillfully play with them. They can tease and prod and stretch the time itself. This is a rhythmic phenomenon. Listen to the Meters or James Brown or any good funk band, they all have one thing in common – that fucking pulse is relentless. Its brutally honest and human, and this is what is lost with digital drums and some recording software. More importantly, the musicians themselves have practiced their ability to feel these pulses, and all the space between them, so that they are free to imagine the larger musical image they are trying to convey.

To think of it another way – close your eyes, take a tennis ball, toss it in the air, and try to clap your hands precisely when the ball hits the floor. Its surprisingly easy right? Which leads to another question – where is this intuition coming from that allows you to determine accurately when a ball hits the ground, despite having your eyes closed?

Answer: gravity.

No fucking shit, right? But that is, once again, what makes some excellent music excellent. We derive the concept of pulse based on our sense of gravity, and our sense of gravity is innate (or particular to this planet).

Watch somebody hit a home run – even before the ball clears the infield it feels pretty obvious when they’ve hit one. Even before that, you can tell by the way the bat is swung that it will connect beautifully with the ball. That’s gravity. That’s having a honed relationship with it.

Take a caveman – one day he sees a bird feather fall from a tree and float back and forth in the air until it hits the ground. The naturally fluttering movement of the feather strikes him as funny, so he runs to his cavewife and shows her, using his hand to demonstrate the motion he saw the feather make. The cavewife intuits the hilarity of the movement without him having to explain it.

Or take basketball – you just somehow fucking know when somebody is going to make a shot, the moment the ball leaves the athlete’s hand.

So this is a cool concept, and not foreign to music. Its all the same. Take a guy like Thelonious Monk, by all standards NOT a great pianist. And yet listen to his sense of rhythm – it more than makes up for his lack of pianistic command and expertise.

Our sense of gravity informs everything. Fucked up, right?