Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

nano-century: “…On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, π seconds is a nanocentury.”

  – more

Sparklines, Very Cool we are lucky to have Dr. Tufte. I did something similar once with histories of build failures. Good things happen when you take Tufte’s principle of minimal ink combined with large amounts of data. I really love the way he inlines these charts right into the formated text; encouraging faster left/right brain switch!

Two things got me interested in power-law distributions. The first was back in the early 1980s. I was involved in a big software engineering project and the system we had built was horribly slow. Collected lots of statistics about it’s behavior; calling patterns, data structure topology, paging behavior, etc. etc. These all came out power-law distributed and I became very disconcerted that I didn’t know anything about this distribution.

So some time later when people started pointing with alarm that the distribution of wealth was growing less and less equitable. Again the power-law distribution! Hm. The system designer in me found that fascinating. Could it be that my software systems shared something fundamental with the economic system?

I haven’t written about the distribution of wealth much recently. The Fortune 500 survey of wealthy dudes is out for 2004. We make scatter plot the 400 wealthly dudes. That’s the first chart. (There are gaps in the data shown because my scrapping script isn’t perfect and there is only so much time I’m willing to spend working on it.) That chart doesn’t do justice to the long tail, since it doesn’t show the other 300 million dudes in the country.

We can plot that data on a log-log graph to show that it’s power-law. More fun is to plot all the data for the last few years and look for trends. The second chart does that; along with fitted lines for each of the years. Presuming that sampling the top of the curve is a good estimate for the rest of the wealth distribution you can calculate your rank by plugging you net worth as Y into the 2004 formula and solving for X. How far out on the tail are you?

The third chart show the trend. The number I label wealth is a measure of the size of the economic pie. You can see the pie swell up during the bubble, pop and then try vainly to recover. The number I labeled equality is a measure of the severity of the distribution of wealth.

Mother nature flings horse chestnuts down from the trees to konk you on head. “Winter is coming!” So too society has arranged warnings of that an election is coming. Society is throwing about all the old chestnuts.

Sorties paradox is back for a visit. You remember old sorties don’t you? A grain of sand is not a heap. I add a grain. Still not a heap. So! Argh! It’s hopeless I’ll never get a heap. Heaps don’t exist. They are impossible. Might as well give up on the heap thing. Move along. Nothing to see here.

The election version of this silly chestnut substitutes votes for gains of sand, and heaps for political power.

The story goes like this. The chance your vote will effect the outcome of the election is very small. So it’s value to you must be small. So be sure to make the cost/benefit analysis before you bother to go vote.

The problem with arguments like these, so popular with the self ascribed rational man, is that in the rush to get a sweet little model we had to kill the patient.

Voting is not a game you win. Voting is one of the rituals performed to denote your membership in the body politic. That body is already heap and to think usefully about it’s function you must focus on the body, not on single cell. The argument is like saying “You don’t need that skin cell over there do you? … So see you don’t need skin.”

Chestnuts like this are deployed to a purpose. In this case the purpose is not to amuse or be cute. The purpose is to suppress turn out. High turn out is good for one side and bad for the other. It serves the same purpose as Republican resistance to simplified voter registration, or deploying a heavy police presence at polling places in black neighborhoods on election day.

It’s purpose is to shape the body politic. Like much of the rhetoric of the right it’s disingenuous. The Right isn’t anti ‘big government” it’s just against a big, diverse, body politic. A small uniform loyal body is easier to coordinate. Everything you have been so carefully taught about how politics is evil, and government is bad - it’s purpose is to convince you to volunteer to exit the body politic. Collective action is not evil. Hard? Yes. Evil? No.

That guy? The one arguing that heaps don’t exist. He’s defending his heap.

From a the school’s parent newsletter…

“The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act mandates that principals supply military recruiters with a mailing list of all high school students in order that the military can send information to students’ homes about opportunities for careers in the armed forces. …”

Reminding me of this phrase: “Language falls dead in the hands of the powerful.”