Time is measured by sequences of changes. Classic examples of sequences that have been used are beats of the heart, apparent positions of the sun and of the moon, and the solstices. In theory, any sequence might be used.

When one measure of time is gauged against another, it is ultimately a matter of counting how many changes of each sort occur. When the rate of some different changes seems to be constant relative to those by which time has been measured, if these different changes occur in greater number then it may be decided to substitute these changes as the primary measure of time, and thus have a finer-grained measure.

Speeds and frequencies are not normally recognized as conversion factors for measures of time against each other, but that is exactly what they are. In the case of speeds generally, the changes are quantifications (of physical position, perhaps). In the more specific case of frequencies, one has a sequence of changes that are attainment of — or departure from — what is regarded as a recurring state; a count of these attainments or departures might be quantified as a pure number.

To say that some changes take place at a constant rate over time is simply to say that there is an invariant correspondence between the number of the changes by which we measure time and the number of the changes whose rate is being measured.

Such constancy occurs trivially when the changes that are used to measure time are measured against time — they're just being measured against themselves. If time is measured by appearances of the sun above the horizon, then the conversion factor for the frequency with which the sun appears above the horizon is necessarily 1. If we use these appearances to meaure the frequency with which the heart beats, that frequency will almost certainly be inconstant; but if we use heart-beats as our measure of time, then their frequency will necessarily be 1 (and the frequency with which the sun appears will almost certainly be inconstant).

If someone should ask about using the average rate at which the heart beats as the measure of time, then he or she is implicitly presuming something other than heart-beats in measuring them, or their average frequency will necessarily be 1. Any comfort in imagining that the reference changes are being averaged is a comfort in confusion.

Someone else will insist that it is obvious that the rate at which any reference-heart beats is objectively inconstant, but it is no such thing. Rather, the convenience for the formulation of descriptions of the world around us of some measures is so limited, and that of others so pronounced as to make it seem that some are closer to objective constancy than are others.

If the measure of time were in terms of Scott's heart-beats, then his mood would figure into descriptions of the universe (the rest of the world would be slower when Scott were excited), and we'd need his pulse whenever we timed things (in particular, all other changes would happen infinitely fast after Scott died). These characteristics make Scott's heart-beats grossly inconvenient for everyone excepting, perhaps, Scott.

What one wants of measures of time are accessibility, for them to result in manageable descriptions of rest of the world, and for them to not to deviate intolerably from our subjective experiences of time. There is a certain amount of rivalry at least between the first two desiderata. Those measurements that are most easily made don't correspond to the simplest descriptions of the rest of the world. But some measurements of time result in many fairly simple descriptions (some of those descriptions are even of other rates as constants) that appear perfectly accurate. It is the latter sort of measurement that is mostly likely to be taken as objective, but if the measurements that supported the simplest statements of physical laws made a very poor fit for subjective experiences of time, then these measurements would not widely be accepted (even by scientists) as measurements of time at all, objective or otherwise!

---

We're often told that the speed of light (in vacuo) is constant. Many people wonder why this constancy is so; others whether it is so. But what is actually meant by the assertion itself that the speed of light be constant is that the changes in the position of light maintain a fixed ratio with the changes by which we have chosen to measure time. In effect, those (such as Einstein) who said that this speed were constant were declaring that we ought to measure time in a manner that made the speed of light constant. And the reason that we ought to measure it thus was because accurate descriptions of the behavior of things of interest would be as simple as possible (or, at the least, as simple as possible without resulting in a measure unrecognizable as time).

The real question is not of why or whether the speed of light is constant; the real question is of why treating it thus simplifies accurate descriptions. And the basic answer is because light and stuff very much like it do a lot. One whoozit affects another by way of that stuff.

Of course, that basic answer shouldn't satisfy anyone with more than passing curiosity. My point is just that the idea that the speed of light is constant doesn't represent a mystery of the sort that many people take it to be.

---

This entry was primarily motivated by my desire to get the point about the constancy of the speed of light off my chest, but the more general part of it actually has application to questions of method in economics.

When I was in the graduate programme at UCSD, there was a student who wanted to do some sort of econometric work where the changes by which time were measured would be transactions, rather than ticks of an ordinary clock — he called this alternate measure market time. (I don't know whether he arrived at the concept or at this term on his own, but he didn't cite a prior source.) Sadly, his initial presentation was a disaster; when he attempted to explain this idea to the professors who were to judge his work, he came across to them and to most of the rest of the audience as incoherent. I might well have been the only other person in the room who really understood what he was trying to say. (I had for some while been thinking skeptically about the propensity of economists to use the physicists' t.)

Afterwards, I sat down with him and tried to explain to him what he had to communicate; but he seemed not to listen to me as he insisted that the response of the professors were unfair. And, the next time that he gave a presentation on the idea, he essentially repeated his previous performance.

It is at least plausible to me that a major part of the reason that he could not communicate what he was proposing to do was that he had only a vague intuïtion about the nature of measures of time and about distinctions amongst them.

I would note that the particular measure of time that he suggested is certainly not the one for economists to use in all or even most cases, and that it has never been one that had distinctively useful application to a problem that I've investigated.

Occasionally, I am confronted with the question of the nature of economics.

A great many people believe that they know what economics is. Many of these people have inferred a definition for economics from references in the popular media and from politicians to the economy, and from popular media presentations of or about various people labelled economist. Some people have taken one or two courses in high school or in college about something called economics, and have presumed that whatever definitions were given in their textbooks were uncontroversial.

Well, the fact is that the popular media do no better job in representing economics than they do in representing those subjects with which you (my reader) have a real familiarity. High school economics textbooks are often disasters written by people who aren't economists. First-year college textbooks often over-simplify things. And when a respected economist attempts to define economics, while his definition may be embraced by a great many other respected economists, it will be challenged by still other respected economists! (I'll define what I here mean by economist below. If you must have a definition right now, then take it to mean one who has received a degree or appointment by which he or she has been so labelled!)

Tromping where angels fear to tread, I am going to tell you how I define economics.

Economics is a cluster of studies. The studies that I have in mind concern these questions:

They are clustered because significant theories (propositional structures) hold that these studies have important inter-relationships.

(And now I'll define economist to mean someone who engages in more than casual study of any one or more of these areas.)

Someone may come along and show some serious flaw in my definition. But, on the expectation that it works, I'm going to discuss it.

There's a whole bunch of things not explicitly mentioned in my definition that lay-people associate with economics. That's because those things are particular cases of more general concepts. For example, households, firms, industries, bourses, and nations are each sorts of communities. There are economists whose studies concern social orders in which all of these communities exist, but the presumption of such a social order is not intrinsic to economics. Business administrators may find economics useful, but they also may find mathematics useful. Neither is simply a hand-maiden of business studies.

Not everyone who has attempted or attempts scientific or scholarly consideration of these questions accepts the existence of the inter-relationships described by the aforementioned theories. In some cases, they may subscribe to theories which accept significant inter-relationship, but on some very different theoretical basis. In some cases, researchers may claim that, where other theories see a bilateral causality, there is just a one-way causality. For example, these economists may insist that, while prices inform individual decisions, those prices are formed without regard to individual decisions.

Further, even economists who accept that these studies are all importantly inter-related don't necessarily spend much-if-any effort studying in all areas. Indeed, some may confine themselves to just one area. For example, every one of the living economists who is widely known to lay-people is a macroeconomist, which is to say that he or she is concerned with the behavior of aggregates such as prices levels, employment rates, and GDP. But, as a share of economists more generally, macroeconomists are a tiny minority. Most economists don't like macroeconomics. It is signally ignorant to ask a typical economist what the stock-market is going to do most days, because that's outside of his or her area of concern.

You surely noticed that the first row of question were non-normative, while the second row were corresponding normative questions. Some economists would insist that there is very little to be said normatively. On the other hand, often of normative theory of a sort is used to approximate non-normative theory, as when it is assumed that individuals have complete, transitive, and acyclical preferences.

---

For what it's worth, the words economy and economics comes to us from the Greek stems ὀικ-, referring to the household, and νομ-, referring to the law or to custom (with the -ic- from the adjectival suffix -ικ-). Greek ὀικονομ[ικ]- referred to management of the household and of its resources.

Transliterated into Latin, ὀικονομ[ικ]- became oeconom[ic]- and entered English thus. Somewhere along the line, the initial o fell silent.

In English, œconomy referred to resource management, typically at the the level of the household, that was wise, frugal, or perhaps tight-fisted, or to a savings realized by such management (a definition that still has some currency to-day); and œconomist to a manager who was wise, frugal, or tight-fisted. Conceptualizing a political community as household, the term political œconomy began to be used in reference to the sorts of management in which political authorities might engage. (German has a very similar term, Nationalökonomie.)

The initial o began to fall away from œconom-; and, in part because of the currency of political [o]economy, [o]economist became increasingly dissociated from thoughts of households or of other work-a-day management, and more concerned with a sort of philosophical or scientific study (though not, as it happens, before The Economist got its name).

Eventually, peculiar association of economics with the literal household was so forgotten that, when a term was wanted with the original sense, the philologically redundant home economics was adopted, with only quiet laughter off in the distance.

---

A few people now-a-days call themselves oeconomist, spelled in that archaic manner, as a way of asserting that they are or seek to be wise practical managers of resources. That's not, however, why I label myself thus.

Although my published work doesn't look simply modernistic but in fact hyper-modernistic, I'm sympathetic to much of the criticism of modernism in economics; I think that we need to reconsider some of the work done before the era of modernism. My œ is a way of saying that there's something deliberately old-fashioned to my thinking.

Yester-day, I finished reading the 1969 version of Choice without Preference: A Study of the History and of the Logic of the Problem of Buridan's Ass by Nicholas Rescher, which version appears in his Essays in Philosophical Analysis. An earlier version appeared in Kantstudien volume 51 (1959/60), and some version has or versions have appeared in later collections. I have only read the 1969 version, and some of the objections that I raise here may have been addressed by a revision.

The problem of Buridan's ass may not be familiar by name to all of my readers, but I imagine that all of them have encountered some form of it. A creature is given a choice between two options neither of which seems more desirable than the other. The question then is of how, if at all, the creature can make a choice. In the classical presentation, the creature is a donkey or some other member of the sub-genus Asinus of Equus, the choice is between food sources, and a failure to make a choice will result in death by starvation. The problem was not first presented by the Fourteenth-Century cleric and philosopher Jean Buridan, but it has come to be associated with his name. (Unsurprisingly, my paper on indifference and indecision makes mention of Buridan's ass.)

Rescher explores the history of the problem, in terms of the forms that it took, the ultimate purposes for which a principle were sought from its consideration, and the principles that were claimed to be found. Then he presents his own ostensible resolution, and examines how that might be applied to those ultimate purposes.

One of the immediate problems that I have with the essay is that nowhere does Rescher actually define what he means by preference. I feel this absence most keenly when Rescher objects that there is no preference where some author and I think there to be a preference.

As it happens, in my paper on indifference and indecision, I actually gave a definition of strict preference: which is to say that X₁ is strictly preferred to X₂ if X₂ is not in the choice made from the two of them.[1] So, in that paper, strict preference really just refers to a pattern of choice. I didn't in fact define choice, and I'll return to that issue later.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary essentially identifies preference as a gerund of prefer, and offers two potentially relevant definitions of prefer:

1. to promote or advance to a rank or position
2. to like better or best

The first seems to be a description of selection as such. The second might be taken to mean something more. But when I look at the definition of like, I'm still wondering what sense I might make of it other than an inclination to choose.

I'm not claiming that Rescher is necessarily caught-up in an illusion. Rather, I'm claiming, first, that he hasn't explained something that is both essential to his position and far from evident; and, second, that his criticism of some authors is based upon confusing their definitions with his own.

When I used the notion of a choice function C( ) in my paper, my conception of choice was no more than one of selection, and that's what I was unconsciously taking Rescher to mean until, towards the end of his essay, speaking of decisions made by flips of coins (and the like), he writes

In either event, we can be said to have "made a choice" purely by courtesty. It would be more rigorously correct to say that we have effected a selection.

Well, no. This isn't a matter of rigor, whatever it might be. The word choice can rigorously refer to selection of any sort. It can also refer to selection with care of some sort, which seems to be what he had in mind.

Some of the authors whom Rescher cites, and Rescher himself, assert that when a choice is to be made in the face of indifference, it may be done by random means. Indeed, Rescher argues that it must be done by such means. But he waits rather a long time before he provides any explicit definition of what he means by random, and he involves two notions without explaining why one must invoke the other, and indeed seemingly without seeing that he would involve two distinct notions. When he finally gives an explicit notion, it to characterize a choice to be made as random when there is equal weight of evidence in favor of each option. However, when earlier writing of the device by which the selection is to be made, he insists

The randomness of any selection process is a matter which in cases of importance, shall be checked by empirical means.

Now, one does not test the previously mentioned equal weight of the evidence by empirical means. An empirical test, instead, adds to the fund of evidence. We can judge the weight of the present evidence about the selection device by examining just that present evidence. The options are characterized by equal plausibility, yet Rescher has insisted that the selection device must instead be characterized by equal propensity. It isn't clear why the device can't simply also be characterized by equal plausibility.[2]

Rescher makes a somewhat naïve claim just before that insistence on empirical testing. For less critical choices, he declares

This randomizing instrument may, however, be the human mind, since men are capable of making arbitrary selections, with respect to which they can be adequately certain in their own mind that the choice was made haphazardly, and without any reasons whatsoever. This process is, it is true, open to possible intrusions of unrecognized biases, but then so are physical randomizers such as coins.

Actually, empirical testing of attempts by people to generate random numbers internally show very marked biases, such that it's fairly easy to find much less predictable physical selectors.

Rescher's confusion of notions of randomness is entangled with a confounding taxonomy of choice which is perhaps the biggest problem with Rescher's analysis. The options that he allows are

1. decision paralysis
2. selection favoring the first option
3. selection favoring the second option
4. random selection, in which random entails a lack of bias

And, proceeding thence, he seems to confuse utterly the notion that choice without some preference somewhere is impossible with the notion that choice without some preference somewhere is unreasonable. In any case, Rescher insists that only the last of these modes of selection is reasonable, and this insistence would tell Buridan's ass that it must starve unless it can find a perfectly unbiased coin![3] Reason would be a harsher mistress than I take her to be!

Another term that Rescher uses without definition is fair and its coördinates, as when he writes

Random selection, it is clear, constitutes the sole wholly satisfactory manner of resolving exclusive choice between equivalent claims in a wholly fair and unobjectionable manner.

I certainly don't see that random selection should be seen as wholly satisfactory (though I believe it to often be the least unsatisfying manner), and I don't know what Rescher imagines by fair. My experience is that when the word fair is used, it is typically for something more appealing than justice to those inclined to envy. In the case of allotments by coin-flip, there may be no motivation for envy ex ante, but things will be different ex post. People do a great deal of railing against the ostensible unfairness of their luck or of that of another.

I recall one final objection, which moves us quite out of the realm of economics, but which I have none-the-less. One of the applications of these questions of choice without preference (or, at least, without preference except stemming from meta-preference) has been to choices made by G_d. In looking at these problems, Rescher insists that G_d's knowledge must be timeless; I think that he ought to allow for the possibility that it were not.

---

[1] That might seem an awkward way of saying that X₁ is strictly preferred to X₂ if only X₁ is in the choice from the two of them, but it actually made the proofs less awkward to define strict preference in this odd manner.

[2] Even if one insists that the selection device must be characterized by equal propensity, there is in fact little need for empirical testing, if one accepts the presumptions that a coin may be considered to have unchanging bias and that flips of a coin may be independent one from another. Implicitly making these assumptions, my father proposes a method for the construction of a coin where the chances of heads and of tails would be exactly equal. One starts with an ordinary coin; it comes-up heads sometimes, and tails others. Its bias is unknown; at best approximated. But, whatever the bias may be, says my father, in any pair of flips, the chances of heads-followed-by-tails are exactly equal to the chances of tails-followed-by-heads. So a pair of flips of the ordinary coin that comes-up heads-tails is heads for the constructed coin; a pair of flips of the ordinary coin that comes-up tails-heads is tails for the constructed coin; any other pair for the ordinary coin (heads-heads, tails-tails, or one or both flips on edge) is discarded.

[3] I don't know that my father could explain his solution to a donkey. I've had trouble explaining it to human beings.

I'm going to step into a debate that no one has asked me to join, concerning the implications of a belief system that I reject.

In Matthew 12:31, Jesus declares that there is exactly and only one unforgiveable sin, and that is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. (It would here be tangential to discuss why he declared such a thing; the relevant point is that he said it.) Every other sin is declared to be forgiveable.

So let's apply that proposition to an issue about which the 'Net has been stupidly buzzing — suicide. A clergyman's son has killed himself, and some are insisting that this son is necessarily going to Hell, or at least that Christianity must hold as much. But how, exactly, can the act of suicide, if indeed a sin, be both forgiveable and at the same time ensure that one goes to Hell?

If, between every suicidal act and actual death, there were opportunity to regret and to repent, then perhaps this would be the way to forgiveness; which would of course imply that suicide weren't unforgiveable. But it seems that, in some cases, there just isn't enough time. Yet, somehow, if the act is a sin, it has to be forgiveable, even without the possibility of post factum repentance in this life. We must therefore conclude that, within Christian doctrine, either suicide is not a sin at all (which appears doubtful, in that the prohibition against homicide doesn't seem to make an exception for killing oneself), or that it is a forgiveable sin — that a person who'd otherwise been saved would not be lost for having deliberately killed him- or herself — which sin doesn't even require specific repentance in this life.

(I'm acutely aware that there are those who will claim that to commit suicide is, really, to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. In other contexts, I've heard some people go so far as to claim that any sin is, really, every sin. But, if this sort of logic holds, then the claim of Jesus that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit were an exception wouldn't. There would be nothing operational to the rule but that exception, and everyone would be going to Hell, regardless of works and of faith. The notion that people somehow more greatly insult the Holy Spirit by killing themselves than by other homicides or by other sins more generally is in sore need of more than hand-waving accompanied by beatific smiles or by stern looks.)

The mainstream Christian doctrine that suicide is a sure route to Hell just isn't supported by their Holy Scriptures. It arose because the existence of the Church here on Earth was threatened by the possibility of believers attempting a short-cut to Paradise. The Earthy flock would be reduced in number, and questions would be asked about the sincerity of those who lingered.

The term ambiguity is often applied to matters that are in fact not at all ambiguous. Sometimes the mis-application is simple carelessness, but in one application it is hard not to see a more active perversion.

Characters (fictional or actual) who are called morally ambiguous almost never are. Instead, the label is most often applied to characters of two sorts.

One sort is morally compromised. Those characters are not all bad; they may even be mostly good; but they are discernibly not all good. The person labelling them as morally ambiguous typically very much seems to be trying for special pleading if a sort on behalf of the character or of the moral short-comings exhibited by the character.

The other sort exhibits a combination of characteristics, some of which the audience will find attractive but some of which the person applying the label finds disagreeable, without his or her being able to make a sound case (or seemingly sound case) against those traits. By labelling the character as morally ambiguous, the labeller is insinuating doubt without reasoned foundation. Challenged, he or she will likely deny having issued a condemnation of the characteristics against which he is directing that doubt.

In application to situations, the term moral ambiguity is more likely to be legitimately applied than in application to characters. But calling a situation morally ambiguous is also often an attempt to introduce by back door a special plea for bad behavior.

---

(One of the papers on which I am presently working, and the paper of that lot that is likely to end-up the least mathematical, compares and contrasts some decision-theoretic states that are often mistaken one for another. One sort of these states entails ambiguity. So I have been thinking about real and specious ambiguity more generally.)

When I went for dinner, I encountered someone slipping into madness. He was polite and pleasant, but going mad.

He was fixated upon improving the world globally. I don't know whether he were going mad because he wanted somehow to improve the world globally, or were obsessively focussed upon improving the world globally because he was going mad; my guess would be that the aspiration and the madness were each feeding upon the other. In any case, he was writing and drawing chaotically with bright marker on loose sheets of paper, and trying to engage random people in his efforts to figure-out How to Save the World. I was a random person.

I sometimes talk to madmen. No less or more comes out of my conversations with them than those with most other people. In this case, I wasn't much occupied at the time with anything else but eating.

He found talking with me to be discouraging. It's not that I don't think that the world might be saved, or that I might do something towards that end. It's that I think that most people, mad or otherwise and including him, fundamentally misconceive the nature of the problem and the potential methods of solution. The Good isn't subject to arithmetic; concern for others is no guarantee against actions that produce horrific outcomes; the meek are capable of over-estimating what can typically be done and thence what they can do; and any attempt to call a convention of the best-and-brightest in each field would attract a different sort (or none at all).

He took his madness to a different table.

The day after my previous entry, Hugo Chávez returned to Venezuela. And the question that I'd like to ask is that of what he is doing there. I don't mean merely to ask why he is there, but indeed to ask in what action he is engaged.

By accounts, Chávez is not faring well; amongst other things, he's having trouble breathing. It doesn't seem that this move was for his health. And so there is speculation as to its purpose.

One suggestion is that he has simply gone home to die. But Chávez, in particular, has not been one to become resigned to the thought of personal death. Such thoughts in 2002 rather unhinged the man. And the official presentation has continued to play-down his medical problems. Whatever apparatus is used to assist him in breathing is removed from his person and from the view-frame when photographs are taken. I think that Chávez is indeed home to die, but not simply.

Another suggestion is that Chávez is home to stabilize the political situation. Under his administration, the institutional framework has been largely hollowed-out; his absence, even when living, creates a vacuum. His physical presence seems to reduce the immediacy of concern about what the nation is to do without Chávez. But the vacuum is far from filled by an inert Chávez, and the stabilizing effect of his mere presence can last only so long as he lives.

If Venezeula is to be stable in the wake of his death, there must be someone or something that can take his place. But only Chávez has the power to position that someone or something. Chávez would have to do something to put it in place. And I think that, in one sense, such preparation is why he is back in Venezuela; but that returning to Venezuela at this time was not Chávez's own idea.

I think that the Cuban regime, expecting him to die soon, encouraged him to go home, and that they did so in the hope that he would anoint a successor, who would keep the petroleum flowing to Cuba. Of course, Chávez was not quite told any of this. I think that the Cubans quietly pray for Chávez to be transformed by the process of dying, and conceivably by the urgings of the Venezuelans around him, into the sort of fellow who will say ¡Ay! ¡Me voy a morir! Guess that I'd better pick-out my Joshua. But, so far, that's not happening. Chávez cannot bring himself to plan for his own death (perhaps especially as the Holy Land is nowhere in sight). Chávez is trying to live.

When a charismatic leader dies aburptly while still in power, his or her supporters quickly begin building a mythology of what would have been accomplished had he or she lived. That is why, for example, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was and largely is so highly regarded; in the minds of his admirers, he would have accomplished wonderful things in the last five years of a two-term Presidential Administration, regardless of what one otherwise makes of its first thousand days.

The mythological episode of such leadership is treated as having the same standing for purposes of comparison as does historical fact. When an opponent tries to construct an argument founded on logic and general fact against policies associated with that leader, supporters treat the mythology as if it is a disproof by counter-example. What's really happening then is that Faith is being mistaken for empirical data.

Even before the dire physical ailments of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías became apparent, his base of supporters had discernibly eroded as the consequences of substituting administration for markets became harder not to see in the specific experience of Venezuela and as, yet again, a socialist regime increasingly moved to forceably silence critics rather than to meet their criticism in open debate. But, if Chávez were to die, then those concerns would be played-down; and, no matter what happened in Venezuela after his death, a mythology would be constructed about how Chávez would, after all, have brought-about a Golden Age for Venezuela, for large parts of Latin America, perhaps for the Third World more generally. In effect, the Hugo Chávez Who Would Have Lived would be treated as-if an empirical disproof of any argument against sorts of socialism that would come to be associated with Chávez.

The world would be better-off without belief in that mythological Chávez. For the long-run sake of the world, I've been hoping that Chávez would bounce-back, retake the helm, and continue to run Venezuela into the ground. (I'd agree that having Venezuela run into the ground even once would be awful, but having it and other nations run into the ground repeatedly by a string of imitators seems worse. And, if Chávez were to die, one imagines that his successors would run Venezuela into the ground anyway.)

Well, it seems that Chávez is not going to bounce-back; perhaps he's going to die. But, if so, he's taking a rather long time about it. And, at least, pretty much anything short of suddenly dying undermines the effectiveness of mythologizing. That's not how it would work if this mythologizing were rational — the Leader Who Would Have Been would have moved across the stage every bit as heroically if not for senile dementia or if not for a crippling stroke as he or she would have if not for an assassin's bullet. But the matter is in the first place very much one of irrational fantasizing. Making matters worse for mythologizers of Chávez, his lieutenants, jockeying for as much power as they might have in any case, insist that Chávez is still calling the important shots; his departure would thus be less sharply defined.

Even if Chávez bounces-back rather completely, we'll still get some mythologizing — just as there will be a mythology of what President Obama Would Have Done had he had an deferential majority in Congress for eight years — but the world may be spared the sort of mythology that would have developed had Chávez died on the operating table on 11 December.

In 1980, I had two or three brief encounters with David Koch.

Yes, that David Koch — David Hamilton Koch, younger of the much maligned Koch brothers.

Koch was on the Libertarian Party ticket as the Vice-Presidential candidate. He was there because his candidacy precluded any statutory limit on how much he might donate to the campaign.[1]

One of these encounters was at a meet-and-greet sort of event for Candidate Koch, in Columbus, Ohio. The last was on the main campus of the Ohio State University, where he delivered a speech and then took questions from the audience. There might have been one other encounter that I've forgot. In any case, at the last encounter, he and his entourage got rather angry with me.

In 1980, the brothers Koch were not the bogey-men of the political left that they have become to-day. Their father, Fred C. Koch had been on the radar of those who lay awake at night in the '50s and in the '60s, fearful of what was then called the radical right. Fred Chase Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society, was a wealthy and vociferous advocate of a view that United States policy, domestic and foreign, was largely driven by a Communist conspiracy, and he very much tended to reaction against change, rather than to seeing any of the social and political developments of the 20th Century as genuine advances. But Fred C. Koch, and people like him, were largely forgotten by 1980. Moreover, Charles and David had gone down a libertarian path, making them seem less threatening. Those in the libertarian movement were aware of the Kochs largely because they supplied much of the funding for the Cato Institute.[2] The business world was aware of the Kochs because the company that their father had founded was amongst the world's largest of those whose stock was not offered to the public. And that was about it.

At the meet-and-greet event, David Koch came across both as quite likable and, well, as a bit of a dork — somewhat socially awkwardly. And, no, I didn't get him angry by later calling him a dork. He and others got angry in response to a different assertion, framed as a question.

During the question-and-answer part of Mr Koch's appearance at Ohio State, someone asked him if he'd be up for another run in 1984. His reply was to the effect that he was really enjoying the present effort, and would be positively inclined to being on the ticket again. This response, which I took to be perfectly sincere, made me cringe. And so I raised my hand. I don't remember my exact words — it has, after all, been more than 32 years — but they were to this effect:

It was incredibly generous of you to agree to be on the ticket for this election, and to give as much of your money as you have; but don't you fear that, if you run again in 1984, you will be seen as having bought the party?

Koch, who gave some sort of dismissal (again, I don't remember exactly what), was visibly angry. There were grumblings from other parts of the room. Later, I was told that people (who never confronted me) had expressed their dismay at what I'd said, as if I'd insulted Koch. Which is, of course, not what I'd done. What I'd done was to warn him of how his efforts would be construed.

Well, David Koch didn't run again in 1984. Not because he took my warning to heart, but because the Libertarian Party Presidential campaign of 1980 was largely a waste of the money and effort that he and others had expended; it received far fewer votes than promised.[3] But he and Charles didn't stop contributing to political causes. And the claim has been made that they have bought those organizations and individuals to whom the Koch's have provided funding. The Kochs have been demonized, and the demonization has been used to depict those causes as villainous devices. Any rational calculation of the results of a contribution by the Kochs must account for this effect. And so, in spite of the fact that David Koch didn't run again in 1984, events have illustrated, in specific application to David Koch, the dynamic that underlay the point that I made in 1980.

Except for an episode of crusading against the prostitution of children, I withdrew from political activism in 1981. And, as an economist, I'd rather wrestle with abiding questions of fundamental theory than involve myself in the research of policy think-tanks. So I doubt that I'll ever meet Mr Koch again. And it's unlikely that, after more than 32 years, Mr Koch even remembers that moment. But, if I did talk with him again, I'd be tempted to say I told you so, … you dork!

---

[1] Campaign finance laws run smack into First Amendment protections of freedom of expression. A right to freedom of expression is no more or less than a right to use one's resources without constraints in response to the expressive content (as such) of the use. Lawyerly distinctions have been drawn amongst the ways that one might use resources to convey the political ideas that one supports, but these are always going to be logically incoherent. And, in the case of the law in 1980 (as still to-day), the absurdity of claiming that there were no infringement in limiting spending of one's own money on one's own campaign was too palpable for such censorship to be imposed.

[2] The Cato Institute is often characterized as itself libertarian, but the word libertarian is best reserved for a more thorough-going (classical) liberalism than that practiced by the Institute.

[3] The mainstream media did what it could to under-mine that campaign, first attempting to displace the LP with Barry Commoner and then, when that didn't take, actively recruiting John Anderson to run as the third candidate. Those who managed the LP campaign had banked pretty much everything on the expectation that the only Presidential candidates on all state ballots would be President Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Libertarian, Ed Clark. There was no planning for the inevitability that the rules would be waived in order to get Anderson on nearly all state ballots. And the Libertarian message had been muddled to make it more appealing to moderates, and stayed muddled even after Anderson was positioned to take those votes.

Assuming that you do much surfing of the WWWeb, you've surely noticed that there are a great many sites that now require one to use an account with an external social-networking service in order to access functionality that previously would have been available without such an account. For example, to comment to some sites which are not themselves hosted on Yahoo! or on Facebook or on Google+, one must none-the-less log into an account with one of these services.

From the perspective of the site-owners, reliance upon such external services can reduce the costs of managing site-access. The external social networks provide this management partly as valued-added to their account-holders, but providing this service is a means of building a behavioral profile of those account-holders.[1] (To this day, most people do not assimilate the fact that most social-networking services exist largely as profiling services.) As you might expect, I feel that efforts to build such profiles should be resisted.

I understand both the problems of the client-sites instead independently managing access, and the difficulties of knowing just where to draw some objective line that would distinguish acceptable and unacceptable external services. (For example, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to require a verified e.mail account, and even to require a verified e.mail account from a service that is not black-listed. But, once one requires a verified e.mail account from a service that is white-listed, one may be pushing visitors into allowing themselves to be profiled (by an e.mail-service provider), if the white-list is overly constrained.)

What seems inexcusable to me is not simply handing access-control over to an external service, but handing it over exclusively to one external service that is a profiling service. The very worse case of such inexcusability is handing control over to the biggest of these services, Facebook, but it remains inexcusable to give exclusivity to any other external service (unless that service has some real guarantee against building profiles).

Which brings me to a policy change that I will be effecting for my own 'blog, not-withstanding that it has never required an external account to access its functionality.

---

At this and some other sites, a list of implicitly or explicitly recommended links is provided, outside of the body of principal content. (With the present formatting of this 'blog, they are in a right-hand column.)

In the case of my own list, I will be removing (or refraining from providing) links whenever I discover that the only evident way to access those other sites or to comment to them is by using an account with exactly one external social-networking site.

For example, if a 'blog is not hosted on Facebook, but the only readily seen way to comment to it is by using a Facebook account, then I will not wilfully provide a link to it. I will continue to link to Facebook sites; I will continue to link to sites where the only readily seen ways of commenting use social-networking accounts, so long as accounts from more than one social network may be used.

This policy only applies to the sort of generalized recommendations represented by that list. I may continue to link within principal content to such things as news-stories at sites that are enabling such profiling.

---

[1] I don't know that those handing access-management off to such services receive side-payments for doing so, but it wouldn't surprise me.