Trite and not so trite

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

W Dyer “You are what you think about all day long.”

H Ford “Whether you think you can or think you can’t you’re probably right.”

‘pick important problems, fix them and tell everyone about it’

This is a very neat summary by Alistair Cockburn of some key points from Sparrow – a book I’ve read large bits of, but never gone all the way through.

The Regulatory Craft is so good that I found myself reading it online (yes, the whole book is online … but after reading a dozen or so pages I decided to buy it). I was trying to find the paper by Harvey Brooks from 1967 in which he discusses “Problems in Engineering Education”. Google turned up a reference in this book, so I started poking around. Sparrow’s discussions of problem-solving hooked me. Plus, he writes beautifully. The punchline (if there is one, given all the interesting policing and regulatory problems he walks through … e.g., how do you stop smugglers at the Mexican border? He walks through any number of attempts to reduce smuggling there, plus, and this is very important, he addresses the question of How Would You Know If You Had Made a Difference?)… anyway, the punchline of the book is in the chapter on Problem Solving, and Infrastructure for Problem-Solving. I map this to a “learning organization” (see Senge’s The Fifth Discipline).

* Sparrow recommends to people, “Pick important problems and fix them“. * They (of course) reply, “Oh, We Do That.” * Then he asks the kicker questions:

o “Whose job is it to pick what counts as ‘important’ and in what forum do they do that?

o How often?

o Where do they get their candidate problems from?

o How are the candidate problems communicated? o

Who allocates resources to problems and how?

o How is progress recorded?

o What happens to problems that are not picked?”

* After which, the people reply, “Oh, We can’t do all That!” So later he writes about having an infrastructure for solving problems. It consists of (I’ll run out of space before enumerating all, so here are some of them) systems for:

* (a) generating and funneling candidate issues;

* (b) assessing and selecting;

* (c) assigning responsibility and allocating resources;

* (d) channeling reports of accomplishments to performance accounting;

* (e) supporting teams with external resources;

* (f) rewards.

When I was reading through that, I started seeing those as the questions to ask, topics to address, to become a “learning organization.” I’ve had execs tell me, “Oh, we’re a learning organization here” (referring to Senge), but had none of that infrastructure in place. If I were setting up a learning organization, I’d open this book to look for the infrastructure systems to set up to support it. Oh, and not just by the way, his chapter on Stages of Problem Solving is really cool. He has 7 stages. What’s cool is stage 3 is “Determine how to measure impact.” Stage 4 is “Develop solutions.” He writes, “Stage 3 before Stages 4 and 5. No action until the measures are in place. Otherwise no one tell what works and what does not.” Test-first, a.k.a. Dos equis driven design by any other name.

While this summary is good, it doesn’t emphasis the ‘and then tell everybody’ part – a later speech by Sparrow seems to suggest that he learned that bit later and/or that people tend to forget it. He talks a little about about why the ‘tell everybody about it’ part should not be forgotten (at page 9). The speech appears to be from 2002 and to a conference of the US Environmental Planning Agency.

Also in that speech Sparrow identifies 4 types of innovation

At the Kennedy school, we teach students about four types of innovation and it’s worth just
plugging them into the back of your mind

Strategic innovations that is some whole new idea about missions, values, and goals. A
different statement about what the organization is about.

Program innovation is where you invent some new program. The equivalent in commerce
would be when you invent some new product line.

Administrative innovation is when you change some internal system. For the police -
different rosters and schedules 4 x 10 rather than 5 by 8, two person cars rather than one,
different allocations of staff, changes in the financial systems and budgeting system and
the information systems.

Field level innovations this category is when you have a front line engineer confronting
directly a problem and they just invent a solution because the need for one is obvious to
them.

inner workings

Reading thoughtful literary essays by critics/novelists who know their world literature is one of my greatest pleasures. Tim Parks’s Hell and Back is one of many examples, and Robert Dessaix drifts in to this territory in books organised around some other principle eg Turgenev on Love.

J M Coetzee writes often for the New York Review of Books; his efforts 2000-2005 there and elsewhere are compiled in Inner Workings (2007 Harvill; 2008 Vintage from which the following citations).

For those with a strong interest/obsession about Joyce in their late teens/early adulthood the name Svevo pops up from time to time. (Just checking Richard Ellman’s biography where it pops up a lot: Livia Svevo’s first name and hair making it into Finnegan’s Wake by page 5).  Coetzee’s account of Svevo reminds the reader that Svevo’s confidence in his writing was restored by a youngish Irish teacher of English (Joyce) inexplicably relocated to Trieste before WWI; and later in 1923 when Zeno was not all that well received Joyce, by now in Paris, had a hand in ensuring translations were made, and a certain success followed.

In Svevo’s eyes, Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to treat those afflicted with the handicap of reflective thought as a separate species, coexisting warily with healthy, unreflective types, who in Darwinian jargon might be called the fit. With Darwin–read through a Schopenhaurian lens–Svevo carried on a life-long tussle. [p4] From Socrates to Freud Western ethical philosophy has subscribed to the Delphic: Know yourself. But what good does it do to know yourself if, taking your lead from Schopenhauer, you believe that character is founded on a substratum of will, and doubt that the will wants to change. [p10]

And from an essay on an early novel by Musil:

The master metaphor that Musil uses to capture these incommensurabilities (what Torless himself calls ‘incomparabilities’) comes from mathematics. Living among the whole numbers and fractions of whole numbers–which together make up the so called rational numbers–and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the infinitely more numerous irrational numbers, numbers that evade representation in terms of whole numbers. Adults, led by Torless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in making the rational and the irrational cohabit, but to Torless the latter are vertiginously beyond his grasp.[37]

Part of page 5 of Ellman on Joyce

the ways we miss our life are life

Richard Ford set Independence Day, his second novel, after The Sportswriter, about Frank Bascombe, in the US summer of 1988 during the election campaign later won by George Bush senior. It won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Some think his more recent Lay of the Land – same guy, ten years later – an even greater achievement.

“A sad fact about adult life of course is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to coming towards you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are , you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you’ll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don’t. You can’t. Somehow it’s already too late. And maybe its even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, though we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it’s too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it.  And like the poet said: “The ways we miss our lives are life.” [p5]

I’m briefly bemused by Joe’s belief that I’m a man who believes that life’s leading someplace. I have thought that way other times in life, but one of the fundamental easements of the Existence Period is not letting whether it is or whether it isn’t worry you–as loony as that might be. [49]

All of a long passage from bottom of 94:

Feeling of ‘bright synchronicity’ re ‘hopeful activities’ which were what life was about, balanced by “a sensation that everything I contemplated was limited or at least underwritten by ‘the plain fact of my existence’” …”that everything I might do had to be weighed against the weight of the practical ..”

“I now think of this balancing of urgent forces as having begun the Existence Period, the high wire act of normalcy .. the time in life where everything that was going to affect us later actually affects us, a period when we go along more or less self-directed and happy, though we might not choose to mention it or even remember it later were we to tell the story of our lives, ..

“Certain crucial jettisonings seemed necessary for this passage to be a success … Most people once they reach a certain age troop through their days struggling like hell with the concept of completeness, keeping up with all the things that were ever part of them, as a way of maintaining the illusion that they bring themselves fully to life. [... examples]

“Most of these you just have to give up on, along with the whole idea of completeness, since after a while you get so fouled up with all you did and surrendered to and failed at and fought and didn’t like, that you can’t make any progress. Another way of saying this is that when you are young, your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it.”

p 226 “And it can be paralyzing to think an insignificant decision, a switch thrown this way, not that, could make many things turnout better, even be saved. (My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything–a marriage, a conversation, a government–as being different from how it is, a trait that might make a top notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being).

[p439] The strongest feeling I have now when I pass along these streets and lanes and drives and ways and places for my usual reasons … is that holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell. We want to feel our community as a fixed, continuous entity, the way Irv said, as being anchored into the rock of permanence; but we know it’s not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly  all over the surface) it’s anything but. We and it are anchored to contingency like a bottle on a wave, seeking a quiet eddy. the very effort of maintaining can pull you under.

subjective compendium

From cultural appetites [on the scale of Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Godard (who though are "often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements")] comes the creation of the work of art that is on the order of a subjective compendium: casually encyclopedic, anthologising, formally and thematically eclectic, and marked by a rapid turnover of styles and forms.

Sontag ‘Godard’  Styles of Radical Will Picador 2002 p 152

the little known unfair treatment of tax deductions

From Centre for Policy Development item on why a vaguely flat tax may be OK – so long as there is a large tax free threshhold & a higher tax rate at the top.

Paul Loring identifies a little talked about unfairness in the tax system, that current proposals don’t do much to address

I don’t think either the Henry Review or other reviewers since have given sufficient consideration of Deductions.

For a short while I worked as an H&R Block tax consultant, and from the amount of time I spent every day on deductions, and also as seen on their TV ads with the man smothered in receipts, you realise just how big an issue this is for tax payers, but also the impact it has on tax paid, and equity amongst tax payers.

A simple example is the best way of getting to the crux of the matter. Two workers, low paid whose marginal rate is 15% and high paid who is 45%, each buy a work related diary for $10. The low paid gets 15% reduction, ie, effectively pays $8.50, the high paid gets a 45% reduction, effectively pays $5.50 for the exact same work related expense, ie, a Deduction.

In reality this is compunded many fold as gross income rises. Eg, the high income earner actually buys a laptop depreciates it over two years, the low incomer earner can’t even afford the laptop let alone get it at a discount, a much smaller discount than the high paid.

The high paid doesn’t just have a laptop but also an investment property or two, a share portfolio, negatively geared loans, etc.

A flatter system may flatten this descrepency, but it still remains and very much for the benefit of the higher paid.

A system that I think meets several of the Henry Reviews needs, eg, simplier, still gives benefits across the board but with assistance giving the greatest benefit to low paid, reducing progressively with gross income is:
Effectively calculate gross tax on gross income, then reduce gross to net tax, applying a common system to everyone. The expense transfer would start with everyone receiving the same highest rate on the initial band of expense, with succeeding lower rates for subsequent bands, eg, say first $1000 at 40%, $1001 -$2500, 30%, $2501- 10,000 15%, zero beyond!

As now this would apply to all income expenses, work, investment, property, negative gearing, etc.

In this example both would get the same benefit for the $10 diary. If the high income earner wanted to buy a laptop, property, shares, then the decision would increasingly become one based on genuine viability of the investment, not merely the tax benefit. That would better for a sustainable economy.

I think this approach, would also work well with a flatter and lowering of all marginal rates. Acturaries would need to calculate the balance of gross income rates and the expense transfer rates, to both fill the coffers, and distribute wealth.

There are other benefits. Still maintains a graduated taxation approach, a stronger one in fact. It effectively caps negative gearing. It also reduces the need for the massive expenditure currently wasted on tax consultants/accountants, as once the ceiling level for Expense Tranfer is reached, there is no point considering additional expense.

Ben Spies-Butcher – the author of the original CPD proposal on a semi-flat tax – responds generally favourably:

Ben says:

August 18, 2010 at 11:15 am

Thanks Paul.

I agree the system of deductions needs significant reform. Adam and I have done a little work on this in relation to the super tax deductions (which follow the same logic as work expenses). I also agree that a system that provides some uniformity in the rebate it offers would be much fairer. One option is the one you outline, another is to have the percentage rebate decrease with income (rather than expenses), for example those on $40k might get 30% back while those earning $100k might get only 10%. Or we could extend the approach taken already by the Government, which is to offer a standard deduction to all regardless of their claim.

The advantage of this last approach is that it would reduce complexity and administrative costs as only a few tax payers would need to then lodge a tax return. The disadvantage is that workers with large expenses might be disadvantaged, especially compared to those doing similar work set up as small businesses or contractors and therefore able to deduct work expenses as business expenses. It also raises the question of charitable donations, because it eliminates the tax incentive to donate. Personally, I’d prefer this incentive to be given to the institution, not the individual, along the flat-rate line. That is if you donate to a charity, then the government will match 30% of it to the charity (not you). This gets rid of the administration for individuals and cuts it down for the state (it only needs to deal with a few thousand charities not several million tax payers. And it means everyone’s money gets the same benefit.

It is an area well worth reform. I tend to favour a flat rebate – but the issue of equity between workers and business/contractors remains a real one. Your option could be a good way forward.

Collective freedom

Andrew Charlton quoted by Mark Davis

http://cpd.org.au/2008/10/an-economic-fool%E2%80%99s-paradise/

‘[I]n the new millennium individualism is less appealing than collectivism. Whereas in the past individualism was a liberating force that provided freedom from restrictive social and governmental systems, now the public has come to realise that modern challenges require collective action. Now effective government contributes to freedom: good public education increases choices; quality infrastructure increases productivity; labour market institutions increase the bargaining power of workers; product market regulation fosters competition and opportunity.’

I was behind you

At first a narcissistic monomaniacal guy in the mould of Nicholson Baker; a lot less funny, perhaps a bit more serious, eventually you accept he is in a destructive relationship. He dances around his position on it, quite a lot of ‘I am too weak ‘, a fair bit of ‘she’s too controlling’. He justifies his equivocating as similar to, if in a different league from, DV. Are we meant to buy the downplaying here? iI it just a book about how a woman can be as bullying as a man, albeit in different and generally less physically injurious ways? But large parts of it ring true, both the obsessiveness and the carelessness, the guilt and the semi-strident assertion of some kind of right to be free .. followed closely by guilt at the thought the uncriticised acceptance that to claim such a ‘right’ is not ‘ethical’.  Free of of what exactly – can’t change yourself, which is part of the problem here (ie the dishonesty of not saying what you really think).

And it goes into even riskier territory – she is black, her problems – or his problem with her – comes from racial differences, a heritage of oppression that we can only conclude cannot be bridged by love!

But the other woman – who hits on him in highly improbably circumstances -  holds out the prospect of a happiness he is not entitled too.

She even makes me think of a lunch at the Hotel Ivoire , in Abidjan, one July in 1982, when watching the clouds in a limitless sky made me long for a place that was too absolute, too abstract, too beyond, something I couldn’t express and which, already, at that young age, I  felt I’d never find, , and unchanging world of landscapes, skies and lights identical to those of this wold but not of this world, less concrete, less down-to-earth, or something. .. p120

It’s a well structured novel as well. But somehow it is hard to enjoy. Maybe he knows too much, plays too much with culture on top of the story?

But it’s impossible to enjoy happiness consciously.The humdrum appearance of reality, with all its interference and flaws always gets in the way. At the time its inevitable, you have a vague felling that something good is happening, but you’re too busy experiencing it in real time to enjoy it properly, Haven’t you noticed that happiness is always a memory, never the present? I remember reading somewhere “Happiness is when the light is good and you’re not necessarily aware that things are going well.” That’s what lost time is, that’s what any time is-it’s the impossible equation of wanting to hold back time which never stops passing. I’m sure this must also be why human being try to pair up; to make moments of happiness last as long as possible without constantly having to look for them in the past, to try and make things last with the woman who once intoxicated us despite the sobering efefct of time. Because happiness is a woman,isn’t it? Don’t you agree? ‘As happy as with a woman’ wrote Rimbaud. Mind you his poem’s called ‘Sensation’. which just goes to show how much self-persuasion is needed to identify happiness with a woman. Because in fact a women isn’t the emolument of happiness, she’s just the suggestion that [lah blah] … . happiness .. is the absolute felling I get when when I listen to certain songs or when the sky is a colour I particularly like. Every time I feel the need to share moments like this in order to give them more substance I think of an ideal woman … p80-81

Bay of Noon on 1970 ‘Lost Booker’ short list, w The Vivisector.

“So, to the shortlist. We (the other judges were the poet and novelist Tobias Hill, and the newsreader Katie Derham) reached an agreement fairly rapidly on our first four books. The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard, a tale of Naples just after the war, is so exquisitely atmospheric – this Italy is both third-world and impossibly glamorous – that it would have been a sin not to shortlist it.”
Winner of the public vote was JG Farrell’s Troubles:

fall over 20,000 times

A couple of times recently the research on how to get good at complex things has come up – on the radio the other day, in Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book [Blink?]. The argument is an argument against genius – ie Mozart was talented sure but it was all that practice that made him special.

10,000 hours of practice for champions; Practice just beyond your current competence, often.;  praise for work put in, not talent