Knowing the Endgame — in Chess and the Economy
All good chess players know that a respectable game will not be decided in its early phases or even in medias res, and consequently prepare themselves for future resolutions when things become truly forbidding. They do not plod from move to move but project strategically to the later stages when tactics finally supervene. Grandmasters always prepare for the endgame. The same stricture applies to the economic game if the players are professionals and obviously do not want to find themselves saddled with the debts incurred by faulty, thoughtless, or over-exuberant planning, as happens with wood-pushers. For when they finally arrive at the inevitable conclusion flowing from their initial efforts, they cannot abruptly change the rules to compensate for their antecedent blunders.
A debt must either be paid or paid for. A missed opportunity comes back to haunt. A false calculation wreaks havoc. Defective logic and poor mathematics translate as ruin in the sequel. A player who lacks skill in planning carefully for the endgame or who cannot find his way once he gets there can rely only on some unanticipated fluke to emerge unscathed. But in any momentous competition where the stakes are high, be it chess, economics, politics, or business, nothing substitutes for proficiency. Amateurs pretending to be pros will in the course of time bring humiliation upon themselves — and unhappiness to those who have invested in their performance. Eventually, everyone is checkmated.
In the agon we are considering, Barack Obama is an unskilled player. Timothy Geithner is an unskilled player. Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee are unskilled players. (The jury is out on Ben Bernanke.) The moves they are now making will see to their embarrassment when they try to unkink the sinuosities of the endgame — assuming, as with my five-year-old, that they get that far. Indeed it appears that almost everyone in the administration is either an unskilled player, an old hack player (Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton), or a weirdo player (John Holdren, Van Jones).
This also appears to be the case with the Democratic Congress and its attendant RINOs. Duffers all or most. They cannot adhere, in Harry Frankfurt’s words, to “a disinterested and austere discipline” since they do not understand the game they are playing or are merely incapable of taking it seriously. They do not even read the bills that they pass. They are, in fact, prone to “some kind of laxity,” they are “trying to get away with something,” and they are blithely making up the rules as they go along. Frankfurt would not hesitate, despite his cachet as a Princeton philosopher, to call them bullsh*tters. But when one tackles a vital issue like the economy, there is no room for ignorance or frivolity — or bullsh*t.
As the game proceeds, metaphorically speaking, the players of record will push their wood, lose some pieces and capture others, arrange exchanges, and formulate ambitious plans even if these are half-baked and ultimately prove cumbersome. But when they find themselves approaching or even contemplating the endgame, facing a vast board of question-mark spaces and myriad computations, they will find themselves effectively at a loss. If they are exceptionally fortunate, the game will end in stalemate, but chances are overwhelming that they will lose decisively. They will not forge to the eighth rank like Alice gamboling through her chess game hijinks in Through the Looking-Glass, asking herself how the Queen’s crown on her head could “have got there without my knowing it.”
My son is now in his thirties, married, two kids, and a top engineer for a major industrial corporation, who travels widely across the chessboard of the world. He has recuperated impressively from his nonage tendencies. One of his greatest strengths, which has served him in excellent stead, is his mature ability to envision the endgame and to make exactly the right tactical moves at precisely the right times, ensuring the success of critical initiatives, projects, and contracts. He is also teaching his young sons how to play chess.
But who will teach the fantasists of the current administration to ponder the convolutions of the economic challenge they are presumably trying to meet and the daunting obliquities of the endgame? Who will prevent the bumbling White House Knight from continually falling off his horse, “right on his head as usual,” as Alice remarks? In the fiscal world, as on the chessboard, one cannot triumph by launching brazenly imprudent moves at the start without incurring insolvency at the end, especially if one does not know how to manage the endgame.
In his memoir King’s Gambit, Paul Hoffman, editor of Discover magazine, tells the story of Canadian chess prodigy Joel Lautier, who expressed a certain disdain of a new and arrogant generation of chess players. “With their computer databases, they may know the latest opening wrinkles. But after the opening, the gods have placed the middle game. And after the middle game, the endgame.” For that is when the laws of chess, like those of economics, remorselessly foreclose.
We can only hope that the United States Senate or the American electorate will end the game their leaders are playing before the endgame looms unforgivably before them.
Our fearless Leaders do not fear failure. They believe they would still be reelected and rich.
The bullshit begins by pretending there isn’t 53 trillion dollars of debt in US system, or that a debt that size can be managed, or that it won’t be the anchor that pulls GDP to the bottom of the ocean for decades. 30 years of bad decisions, pull forward debt, fraud, and an imperious welfare state, combined with an ignorant and perpetually distracted populace and leadership whose venality is only ecliped by their incompetence, has created an endgame that isn’t hard to conclude; the math is never wrong. But there is something stimulating in the endgame that is being played out. I think the economic suffering that is looming is real and will be terrible, but the shock of the cold, hard truth is invigorating, rather like finding out on Dec 7, 1941, that the world out there had become a very different place than were trying to imagine it to be. But, like then, in this game, once the players start making up their own rules to avoid their dead-end positions, it usually means war.
The tool of analogy is notorious for its limitations. The author is to be greatly commended for the imagery, which correctly illuminates the dangers of the “end game.” But there is a significant flaw in presenting global economics as a chess game. Real world economics makes Go look like Go Fish. Geithner, et al, will fail in their statist tasks not only because they are not Grand Masters of some hypothetical two-player game. They are utterly doomed to failure because world economics is a billions-of-players game. The statists believe in “experts,” singular individuals and enlightened small groups who can supposedly supplant the blinding market-mediated intelligence of billions of active players. And on the falsity of that supposition we will all hang. No small group of people, Grand Masters or otherwise, can possibly match the raw decision-making power of the global market. They are doomed to be overmatched and overwhelmed. Any puny plan the experts propose will be eaten alive by the profit that stands to be made by figuring ways around it… and the billions of people with at least some small stake in doing so. If you stand on the sidelines of this game, you will lose, so you must try to work it, you must compete. And so we shall be the plan’s undoing, and thus the undoing of ourselves, for ever having placed our fate in the hands of experts.
When you change the rules, you change the game.
The “Mel Blount Rule” in the NFL in the late 1970s only changed one little rule, but it changed the entire game of football. All it stipulated was that wide receivers could be jammed by defenders only within five yards of the line of scrimmage, instead of all over the field. The rule was instituted by the NFL to address the dominance of the Pittsburgh Steelers of that era, and their Hall of Fame cornerback in particular — Mel Blount was a dominant player who terrorizes wide receivers.
The rule effectively ushered in a new game of all-out passing attacks (e.g., Air Coryell, the West Coast offense), and ushered out coaches who could not adapt (e.g., Chuck Noll, Tom Landry) and no longer understood the game; they understood the old game, not what the game had become.
Economists trained under the economy’s old rules are in the same boat. You can argue, if you like, that Obama’s projections of the unemployments rates with/without the stimulus package were made in bad faith, but I don’t need to believe that; it’s enough for me simply to point out that the rules of the economy had changes to the point that the economists didn’t know unemployment would be 9.4% by June.
The old rules were, among other things: companies that make good economic decisions tend to prosper, and those that make bad decisions tend to suffer; secured debt means secured debt; the government referees the rules but does not dictate the outcome; you can expect to keep a large portion of the money you earn.
The new rules turn the old rules on their head. Companies that make bad decisions get federal money; companies that make good decisions get to pay for the subsidies. Secured debt means the government takes your money and gives it to the unions. The government picks the winners. You can expect to pay more in taxes to subsidize all this largess.
Nobody understands the game yet. The first to understand it will be the companies who figure out how to exploit the new rules, not by producing more effectively and efficiently, but by polishing their tin cups and taking Begging 101 courses at MBA school.
My God next you will be telling us that Obambi and his foolish followers are left wing moonbats and what they are doing will destroy America . LOL
“We can only hope that the United States Senate or the American electorate will end the game their leaders are playing before the endgame looms unforgivably before them.”
That has happened many times. Last time I heard, November 2008.
It is not mere happenstance that most of the deeply flawed(in all ways that matter) and under qualified leaders within the Obama administration are Ivy educated, or rather, uneducated.
This sorry list of non-critical thinkers cannot be attributed to a fluke, despite the media’s crowing how smart they are. Not exactly. On the whole some were educated in the soft sciences,(economics)others in the netherworld of the humanities.
The thing is that the current crop of players are mainly in their 40′s 50′s and 60′s. This means that ALL of them were ‘educated’, force fed a diet of radical politics, rather than educated in courses of real substance. Surely they took some tough courses here and there. But the MAIN lessons of radicalism were imbibed at their Ivy League boot camps, where propaganda passed for true scholarship.
Fast forward to 2009,as the world watches in horror the ensnaring of America in a noose-like grip.Radical overhauls/changes – change we can all believe in.
It is not for nothing that I advised my sons to steer clear of the Ivies like the plague.Their first choices were not Harvard, or Princeton or Yale. They were Caltech & MIT. This is because as a parent I performed my due diligence and investigated what the Ivies had to offer-NOTHING.
Not unlike the author’s son, my sons are the best trained engineers that an employer hopes to hire. This is because they were trained at their schools that logic trumped fantasy, that substance trumped style, and that bullsh-t was no substitute for flat out knowledge.
If our sons were put in a room with the lightweights now pushing America into ruin to demonstrate the above I have no doubt who would cry uncle first. You can bet it wouldn’t be the hard core engineers!
Lee Dise: A most excellent post. Thanks.
Nonsense. President Crisis and the O-admistration know what the end game is. Their game is to destroy the game.
Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Dodd, and many others are intellectual five-year-olds. They’re making up their own rules as they go along, but instead of learning the game, they throw a tantrum when someone points out the actual rules.
That has happened many times. Last time I heard, November 2008.
A clever yet non-substantive post from “vivo” means we must still be in the “middle game”. In the endgame, there is no “vivo”. He’ll either have to change his stripes or be on the losing side. Markets always win.
Excellent article and posts…the real danger is when people believe they are so smart 2+2=5, and then explain the new math to legislators. These same legislators do not question the new math, but assume it must be so because the expert with degree from MIT in Quantum Physics is needed to explain it.
There is some talk of auditing the Fed, which will never happen, if the average American truly understood the depravity going on in the NY FED, they would burn the buildings down.
I take the author’s point as a given but as Myno accurately points out that economics is infinitely more complicated then chess to the point where the analogy is not very useful.
The modern open economy is indeed complex and is beyond the ability of anybody to manage it. Not that the “simpler” economy of the past was any more amenable to fine tuning by governments. Although we focus on the financial dimension of the recession/depression, there is a real (as in nonfinancial) dimension that has been lost in the headlines and the scapegoating. For better or worse we live in an open economy and for the last 20 or more years the United States economy has grown at 3%+ annual rate while the rest of the developed world has experienced growth in the 1-1.5% range over the same the period. That works out to 81% versus 22-35% growth rates for the US and ROW respectively over the same period. Something had to give. Either the Europeans or Japan must adopt growth polices to match outs or the United States growth rate becomes unsustainable. This imbalance was a strong contributor to the bubble as foreign investment, be it in productive assets or paper, flowed into the United States. Now, we are coming back to the rest of the world just as the Obama administration seeks to makes us more like Europe. The result will be that the US economy will begin to become the anchor dragging down the world economy that Japan and Europe have been over the last two decades.
OUr older son was a very bright student and talented football player while in high school. He was contacted by all of the Ivies to play football but was recruited very vigorously by Yale. A friend of our family is the CEO of one of the Fortune Top fifty companies in America and an alum of Yale. When asked for his advice on the subject, he advised to steer clear of being an Eli..Too liberal, he had quit donating to them years ago. Hmmm.
Obama and crew devoted great time, study and energy to getting elected, their end game. The media helped by changing the rules. And they lived happily ever after… Or maybe not.
Dear Adina and Tennessee
You did right and are to commended for not going with inflated and now unwarranted reputations. My other son was wooed by two American universities to complete his graduate studies, Harvard and New Mexico–they even flew him down for the interviews. He didn’t need my advice–he chose New Mexico, which didn’t have the glitz but offered substance. And it was manifestly the right decision. After graduation he was hired by the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility in Tennessee and is now a prof at the University of Alberta, and publishing in the major scientific journals. Had he attended Harvard, he could have coasted; instead he went for solid basics and took his chances, and I couldn’t have approved more. BTW, he’s also an excellent chess player, second in the province of Quebec when he was a teenager. It’s great to have great kids.
David
Off the top of my head I can’t think of a worse metaphor for the global economy than a game of chess. There is no end game. There never will be an end game. It’s more like a never ending game of Monopoly on a board that expands and contracts and even that is a crappy metaphor.
@Myno #3
You make an excellent point, complicated rules are bound to be exploited by the profit motive. Regulations, when necessary, must be simple and unambiguous. Observe the US tax code for an example of what happens when you try to fix the problems of one set of regulations by adding additional layers of complexity.
The Left is not playing a game of Chess, it is playing Risk, the game of world domination. Markets do not decide the winner in Risk, control does. The Left wants control, that is its currency of choice. It will try to attain it by any means necessary.
I have to agree with davimcg – what is being played is not chess, it is Risk – or a blind crapshoot.
Basically, I always tell my friends to cash out of the market, buy a good troy scale, as many 1 ounce gold coins as they can, a good solid supply of canned goods, flour and other essentials, and a good rifle/shotgun with lots and lots of ammo and gun oil.
I would contend that this administration is more likely in the position of your son IF he actually had the power to change all the rules. IF he had the chess media backing all his proposed changes, control of and support from the US Chess Federation, and all chess academics propagandizing for him too, guess what?
THE RULES WOULD CHANGED.
Suddenly all the complexities and complications of the end game are under his control. No more need to encumber the pieces with old-fashioned restrictions of movement. He could even import pieces from checkers, parcheesi and use lots of Monopoly money to buy out the opponents of his “changes”. And if you didn’t like this, and protested that he must play by the old rules, well, he also happens to control the Armed Forces, and could soon set up a internal army as well funded and powerful as the old one, in case the military mutinied and agreed with the protesters.
We already see legislation proposed to repeal the Constitutional term limits for president (a la Huga and Mel). Other proposals to limit freedom of speech through hate crime laws, internet access and control, imposition of the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine” by stealth under other names and methods, and so much more a book could be written about it, and probably already has. A process is already in place and effectively being used to destroy opponents financially and politically with massive
smear campaigns masquerading as “news” from the leftwing media.
We soon will see the end of your chess analogy because there will be a whole new game with new rules that the left will ruthlessly control.
The only thing Orwell got wrong in his prescient “1984″ was the year.
David:
Let me add some further support for you argument. My son had an opportunity to go to Princeton but chose the University of Minnesota instead despite the fact that he could have played Division I Golf for Princeton. He didn’t like the sense of entitlement that just seeps from those ivy covered walls. He liked Minnesota precisely because he would be only a number and you have to prove yourself to be recognized.
There is quality in numbers. The top quarter at Minnesota fit the profile for Ivy League admissions. That computes to 2000 students per class that are Ivy League material. There are far more true scholars at large state universities then in the Ivy Leagues and similar institutions. The Ivies are only useful if you want to work in Washington, go into Law or work on Wall Street.
7. Same here. My first choices were the Naval Academy and MIT. Princeton and Columbia were down at 3 and 4, and only because they do have good physics and nuclear programs at their engineering colleges. I never even considered going to Harvard or Yale. Of course, I got rejected by all my top four, and I wound up at the University of Michigan, which ironically outranks MIT in Nuclear Engineering (albeit only slightly).
Never fear geokstr. The economic rules of the game never change–defeat is only a matter of time, though admittedly it could be a long time. It took 70 years for the USSR to be economically checkmated. Let’s hope for all our sakes Obama’s game collapses way way before that.
David
Whether or not the market is too complex for experts to manage, decisions about how the nation will address that issue of complexity is worth noting. Hayak’s ideas regarding market complexity are being ignored by lightweights, people whose decisions are made based on the last person they spoke with. And bad plans are often worse than no plan. I think Mr. Solway’s point is that when the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops, and the tailgate has dropped and there are only a bunch of little boys and girls pulling levers and pushing buttons. The United States is facing a potentially existential economic collapse, one that is going to require the best minds we can produce to try and sort through the complexity of possible moves, and we have Barney, Dodd, Geithner and Nancy playing at being adults.
TO: David Solway
RE: What If….
…their endgame is not the endgame you think they are fumbling at?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. The truly crafty make their moves look like stupidity. But the real question is what sort of game they are playing at.
Ever hear of a game played on a chess board called ‘Give Away’?
Failure can be redefined as a huge achievement in the face of adversity and enemies. Roles of the enemies, for that matter, can be easily assigned and, with a proper care by MSM, proclamed as responsible for all the ills and misgivings and made truly hated by a significant percentage of the populace. And if you remember January, you know that the Dear Leader has a proclivity for designating common enemies in spades.
Political Economics as Chess
Winning at Chess, and Life,
by psychological maturity
Two defining differences
between children and adults:
Insight and self control.
One characteristic of children:
When they see they are in trouble,
they cry for an adult to get them out.
Primary distinguishing characteristic
of adults: Responsibility.
Will the US end game result in
a Circulation of Elites: Lions for Foxes,
or a change from rule of Law to rule by Force ?
It is Pyramid Chess, with TPTB at the apex, and
Free Men at the Grass Roots; Your move, fellows.
I got my Masters in Ping Pong while in the US Navy. We were Navy Wide table tennis players and hardly every were defeated. I was also pretty good at Antisubmarine warfare and bomb delivery.
David, New Mexico was a far superior choice for your son when compared to Harvard-substance over style.Even their science courses can’t help but meander into a fluff here, a fluff there….
We all recall with amusement the brouhaha Larry Summers caused when he attempted to suggest that scientific data backed up differences between men and women, in so far as their capabilities in the hard core sciences and math. Heresy at the hallowed halls.
People often raise their eyebrows when I relate this nugget of truth.
My son graduated in 2007 from MIT, & when he needed to rest his brain he took advantage of MIT’s cross register policy with Harvard to meet some humanities requirements. He was so thrilled to take a course where his head wouldn’t hurt that he felt like he was on vacation when attending Harvard classes.
Therefore, the next time folks get all atwitter while referring to Harvard’s halo, think of what my son experienced, as he vacationed through his Harvard courses-all the while receiving A’s.
you should have taught “draughts” to your son when he was five, it’s easier to play, becuz you don’t have many carachters to remember, just tactics to trap your opponent’s pawns.
I used to be very good at them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draughts
#28 LMAO
I remarked that there are ping pong tables for the staff on cruise ships too
The rules of economics do change. The debt-based currency and economy we have today, for example, is historically recent. Rules change because politics and/or ethics always trumps economics, if push comes to shove. We are wise to prefer a maximally free and open market, but that is ultimately a political choice we have to make and defend. And in making it we have to realize that politics does have to do something to mediate the resentments that free markets inevitably generate because these resentments can destroy the system. (Many, like me, are now resentful of the corruption in the big Wall St. financial players/Washington cronies and our resentment needs to be addressed by the political system if trust is to be restored in American markets…) The maximally free society must inevitably do just enough and not too much to placate the inevitable resentments of the system, even to some degree the system’s extortionists. The potential for political violence must be appeased, except when that appeasement is likely to prove self-destructive, when it is unwise to avoid a fight. The maximally free society is founded on some forms of political closure, and not other forms of closure. That freedom requires closure, or rules, is a paradox but not a guarantee that some trans-historical economic or political law will rule all in the end.
In other words, history is profoundly open-ended. Chess, whatever its complexity, is a finite game. In Obama & Co.’s seemingly inevitable failure, let us not delude ourselves about the discipline that is needed to bound and renew a free market. Political skill is founded in a respect for paradox, the sacred, and not simply logic.
Dear Truepeers
There is much truth in what you (and several others)say and I’m not insensible to it. Nevertheless, certain ironclad rules do exist in the game of economics, regardless of what system may be in play. When you’re broke, you’re broke. When you inflate the currency indefinitely, then eventually you can’t afford the wheelbarrow to carry the sponduliks you need to buy a loaf of bread. When an economy is based disproportionately on services and information transfer rather than on the production of material goods and the flow of readily available energy (matter=energy, no?), differential rates of implosion ensue. The micro-rules may change; the macro-rules, never.
TO: David Solway, et al.
RE: You….
….STILL think it’s a game of ‘chess’.
I’m seeing indications that it is a gave of ‘giveaway’.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out.....unfortunately, it will likely be too late for most.....]
David:
That doesn’t seem to have stopped totalitarian regimes, of which several still exist. For them, the game is not to fix the economy, but to maintain absolute power.
So what if the realities of economics mean that there won’t be enough economic output to feed everyone? There are so many ways now to find your political opponents and make sure they are the ones short of food, not your supporters. Homeland Security has already identified any opponents of Obama’s politics and priorities as potential terrorist threats.
It might make a difference eventually when everything collapses around them, but that point can be put off a long, long time into the future.
Dear David,
When you’re broke, you’re broke.
-very true, but when you’re the world’s military/political superpower, it’s not clear when you’re broke or who can afford to break you and that’s the uncertainty we’re living through, if only for a time now. Personally, I feel the US is broke, to the point where consumption must decline significantly for a number of years; but I have to admit that many market players don’t yet recognize this and so I can’t be sure what kind of belt tightening must come or when. “Fantasy” can rule, can become a shared reality, as long as everyone, or most, can sign on to it sincerely. “Reality” is when human resentment (prospective or retrospective), or the laws of nature, makes realizing a certain “fantasy” impossible. As for the currency, I think it is probably still a somewhat safer investment than pretty much any asset, including gold or oil, even at zero percent interest. That’s political reality as I see it (but what do I know, really?); deflation all around in the short term because I can’t see any viable political strategy for getting the new money out of the bank vaults and into the consuming hands that can inflate prices.
The macro rules, as you put it, are I think more indicative than declarative, i.e. we can’t consistently articulate them without undermining them, the market can’t know the fundamentals on which it is trading without discounting that information and creating new dynamics. But in what sense can a “rule” be indicative? That takes us back to a shared recognition of what must be sacred.
David,
A fun analogy to be sure, however, in chess the rules don’t change at any point along the game line.
Because America has saddled itself with a President who had absolutely NO familiarity with the “game,” he became a pawn, as did Bush, in the hands of those who pretend to know more, but are really the rule setters. So the taxpayer sat by watching cash disappear into the coffers of the largest financial establishments, covering toxic waste that will never, ever be audited. The money’s gone. The debt isn’t.
…. But watch the real end-game develop, as Goldman and Morgan pay themselves billions of dollars in the face of a dramatic recession, and no one does or says anything about it of consequence.
Why was someone with so little experience elected? Perhaps America was envious of Great Britain, ….
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2009/06/does-america-yearn-for-monarch.html
#1… a true statement, believe it or not.
Elected officials need to be held to live by the laws they pass.
we have had stock in Morgan for many years, before it was Morgan, our quarterly dividends are now zilch!! where did all that money go????
I agree with Paul in Mi. Obamanomics is more like the game Monopoly, as my daughter played it. Like many kids when my daughter played Monopoly she would change the rules by putting $500 in the middle of the board along with any penalties a player had to pay and anyone landing on Free Parking got all the money.
Eventually she started putting all the money that normally went to the bank into the Free Parking pot. Not surprisingly, the bank soon went bankrupt. She solved the problem by printing more money, making up her own $1,000 bills. It was fun for kids I suppose but it pretty much destroyed the point of the game. The player who landed on Free Parking the most usually won, making shrewd deals for the best properties didn’t help much.
Obama is essentially doing the same thing with our money. Under Obama’s rules it is more important to “land on Free Parking” i.e. get a handout from the government than to earn an honest living or make a better product through hard work. I think Obama should play Monopoly (by the actual rules), a few sessions with that kid’s game would teach him more about basic economics than all the Marxist drivel he learned from his radical leftwing friends in academia.
Anna,
Check out what Goldman is doing, … $11 billion in personal bonuses, but dividends? What’s that?
Nixon: “I am not a rook!”
Carter: “I am holier than a bishop!”
Ford: 0-0-0
Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, sacrifice those pawns!”
Bush I: “Who you calling a queen?”
Clinton: “Hi there, queeny!”
Bush II: 0-0
0bama: “It’s good to be the king!”
Well argued article. Yes, there are some big economic facts that are immutable.
The Brits used to produce truckloads of University Graduates best described as “Professional Amateurs”. They were smart but incompletely schooled. Their training was at the hands of largely self taught professors who had mastered a small corner of some large discipline. The students mimicked the teachers – clever, very proficient at a small piece of a discipline but without a formal, rigourous education in a complete field. For example, the professors might learn to be proficient in one statistical technique used in their PhD research, but were ignorant of the formal math and probability grounding upon which the discipline of statistics rests.
For a Professional Amateur, bullshit is an essential skill because you have to paper over the gaps in your understanding. Overweening confidence in your own abilities, far beyond your real but limited expertise is also required to convince people that you know what you are doing.
The Obama group remind me of these British Professional Amateurs. Bullshitters to a man/woman. I’ve never been near anyone in League with Ivy (whoever she is), but does Yale, Harvard etc encourage Professional Amateurs?
As things get more serious White House bullshit will grow deeper and warmer. Exactly then is when they will need real skills gained from formal, rigourous training and honed from difficult real-world experience.
Whistle in the wind – they don’t have what it takes. Mr Solway, I think you have an important insight.
I played Chess when I was younger and bored. Then real life hit and I was working too many hours, going to college, getting my degree and then REAL LIFE hit. Military service for 4 years and Viet Nam for a year.
I earned my degree (BSEE) and worked while doing that. I am gamed out folks. Engineers seem to be required to work 24/7. No more games. I am finally retired; thank God.
To me it seems that Pols think this is a game. It is not a game. They have not worked in their entire lives. Obama? Never did anything productive to date. Community organizer=leach off everyone.
At least Bush could fly a fighter plane. Look what we got now.
BTW we old folks still produce good things. We are having fun with wildlife and more. Please view all of our Birding and travel pictures. We do this to share our blessings. I hope you enjoy them.
http://www.cabinwood.blogspot.com
I hope our Pajamas Media editors enjoy this as much as we do PJM.
May I submit the San Bernardino Train Wreck of 1989? An inexperienced clerk seriously underestimated the weight of a freight train, and an inexperienced lead engineer did not fully ascertain the condition of his brakes. As a result, the engineer miscalculated both the safe speed for the train to reach the summit of Cajon Pass and, once it began to accelerate downhill, the braking capacity of the train. However, as fate would have it, the train negotiated every turn down the grade except the last one, when it reached a hair-pin curve situated in a San Bernardino neighborhood. The resulting crash was much more devastating than if the train had derailed further up the hill. I remember reading that experienced engineers would have intentionally derailed the train nearer the summit because everybody knew that the hairpin curve at the base of the grade would be impossible to make.
So far an inexperienced White House and a Fed Chairman (who, like generals of old, is well prepared to fight the last war, not the next one) have been congratulating themselves in successfully negotiating the first curves of the economic descent. But is there a hairpin curve down the line? Anybody acquainted with railroads or history knows the answer.
11. venividivici:
“Markets always win.”
You changed from politics to markets. Quite confusing. But I guess that markets always win: down, up, down, up.
This exchange doesn’t make sense.
venividivici: so true about vivo, but it goes much beyond this. In fact,last Nov. the electorate most precisely did not vote for this. They thought that they were voting for a moderate. Obama was not voted in because he was a Marxist, nor was he voted in to pull the rears of Zillionare Democrat hustlers and political insiders out of the abyss under the guise of socialism and on the taxpayers dime.
Neither were Socialism nor Crony-Capitalism were what the last election were about. nor was stealing GM and giving it to his political patrons.
If fact, the electorate got hustled, as they always do as far as the Democrats are concerned.
The market may “aways win” but it may be to late for us. IT may winfor China or someone else.
What we are in now is a horse race between the electorate waking up and the Democrats corrupting the political process (including election rigging) to the point that we will never get them out of power.
Vivo: Golly, can’t you get anything right. Obama is using politics as a replacement for markets. That is what this whole thread is about: Political control of economies. No subject was changed at all. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you understand the simplest thing/
48. Mongoose:
I guess you’re right about no subject change, but it was not expressed as “the simplest thing”. It’s a case of verbosity.
@ Marc 43 I wonder if the troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan read Kipling in their spare time:
Politicians may talk of Gin and Beer,
but Iron, cold Iron, is master of them all.
Those troops vote, and will be coming home,
to find what reception,and what future ?
re. Bush II: Strapping on an unforgiving,
single engine Interceptor, and taking to the
skies, requires a personality trait undervalued
amongst people in general, and politicians
in particular.
@ Sulla 45 Trainwreck
Indeed; How many analogous events are hidden
in our near future, at both the engineering
and political levels ?
Vivo: Indeed. Yours.
Obama’s mistake was opening with the Blackmar-Diemer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmar-Diemer_Gambit
The opening of choice for overconfident narcissists who end up going down with their ships.
Actually, I think that chess is a great analogy. Countries play at economics, but eventually, all lose and go broke. The game is then reset. Economics always wins.
Politics and control are merely maneuvers in attempts to win the game, or to change the rules, but the rules cannot be changed, and the game cannot be won. Eventually, people make mistakes, the wrong tactics are tried (usually again and again), and a country loses.
Many tactics, like printing scrip (paper money) and debasing the currency is merely an acknowledgment that one is losing. You are then sacrificing pieces in order to buy more time, retreating and trying to postpone the eventual loss. None of this is new.
The only way to win is to educate the children in history, which rarely happens. Even when it does happen, it is never sustained. Always people come along who think they’re so smart. They come up with something they think is new, as if the billions who came before them have not already thought of it. Then, the decline begins.
51. Mongoose:
“Vivo: Indeed. Yours.”
Was it hard to cut down your verbosity?
See how simple it is?
. . . You’re welcome.
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