All hail paterfamilias Obama!

Masquerading as eudemonistic soothsayers, the soon to be Obama administration strike me of late as condescending autocrats with noble intentions yet a dismal view of the citizens they aim to save. America voted for a president, yet unwittingly appointed a pontifex maximus. President elect Barack Obama has a demonstrated a chilling predilection towards paternalism. And of all the varieties, his seems to be the worst brand; not the comparatively benign demonstrative variety that most politicians trend towards, but rather the dangerous and miasmic type predicated on disimpassioned utilitarian calculations. He believes He is helping the plebeian masses, because only He - The Chosen One - can comprehend the complex world that swirls around and confounds us hoi polloi. He must protect us from ourselves, because left to our own machinations we will surely flounder. Cigarettes are terrible (it's OK for dad to smoke, but best not let the kids), so He will help us all quit by raising the already sizable taxes. (Am I the only one whose first inclination was to draw parallels between this and Kim Jung Il’s dictate that when he quit smoking, everyone in North Korea must also quit?) Trillion dollar deficits? No worries, who better to spend future generation’s monies than His team of the best and the brightest, all under the patria potestas of paterfamilias Obama. He has crunched the numbers – He used focus groups and survey data to pitch his stimulus plan to congress. Mark Twain once opined “there are three types of lies: lies, dirty lies, and statistics.” The governance of the next four years will be strikingly different from that of the last eight, if for no other reason through a shift in tactics from the first two varieties of obfuscation to the third type. Get ready to witness the world when a team of self-anointed Cassandra’s (this time with statistics!) takes charge. Perhaps if we are lucky, they can spare Troy from destruction.

Drunk on technology

I keep hearing that the US is falling behind in science and technology. So what? What are the opportunity costs of gains in science? Less literature and music? Less idle time for the young? Less time spent home with family? Less values? Less joy? In the extreme, we will have a generation that can create the wonders of the future, but have no moral bearings as to if and how they should. It seems that often it is not more technology that is needed, but rather less. The problems of systemic obesity in the US will not be cured through the further implementation of food science, but through its significantly reduced application. The world will not be safer if we continue to master the splitting of the atom, but rather will only be secure if we remove the Damoclean nuclear threat by obliterating the technology used to achieve the feat in the first place. The advances in risk management technologies have not insulated our investments from wild swings, but rather have acted antipodal to this desire, creating unprecedented volatility and uncertainty: created systemic risk. Everywhere I look technology seems to be at the root of our problems; the very same technologies developed a generation before with the intent of fixing the problem leftover from the previous technologies, and so on and so forth. We have become drunk on technology and the misbegotten hangover is just starting to commence.

They did say please...