But off a ways, there was a trail. It went, among other places, to a spot called Solitude Canyon. Sounded good. Even better, there was an overlook. On a hill, high above the bosque, it was possible to see the preserve. The thousands of birds appeared as white and gray pixels, rendered on a pointillistic expanse.
On the way back, I came to a point in the trail. There was a post with a little arrow, pointing to the right. A few people had gone that way. To the left, there were many more footprints.
A time for pondering. Evidently, many persons had read Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken:
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Being the sorts who would amble away from the crowds, away from the honking of geese and crooning of cranes, through Solitude Canyon, they naturally came to the sign directing them to go right, and went left instead.
I, too, wanted to take the one less traveled by. But in order to do that, I would have to go in the direction the sign said to go. That would make me a conformist, obedient. All the mavericks had taken the road less traveled, thereby making it the one more traveled.
It's a world turned upside down, I say.
I merrily hopped right over the post. Enough of this prosaic, one-dimensional thinking.
Meanwhile, our world has moved on to a new season. And we have a guest. It is the recession of 2001. You see, the 2001 recession has become a "double-dip" recession, shaped like, well, a "W." We never really got out of the 2001 mess. Rather, we ran up astronomical debts, making it look as though things were getting better. Eventually we exceeded the maximum debt that the world could bear. Some call it peak debt.
From Robert Frost, My November Guest:
MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Figuring out the applicability of this poem to our current situation is left as an exercise for the reader. It is not terribly difficult, but it may require solitude.
Robert Frost
Frost spent some of his early career at Michigan, so he understands November.
I grew up in Michigan -- not far from Detroit -- during the OPEC oil embargo, so I understand something about economic downturns. But I would not go so far as to say that I understand economics. It intrigues me, though, because of the plain fact that economics is nothing more than a branch of psychology. It is really the study of a narrow slice of human behavior.
What is less obvious is that economics is very much like ecology, which is another subject that interests me.
Ecology is all about organisms developing strategies to optimize success in the face of a changing environment. A brief study of ecology will show that there is no single optimum strategy. What is more pertinent at the moment, though, is the fact that the best strategy today may not be the best strategy tomorrow. Evolution is like that as well. Sure, ecology and evolution are characterized by the phrase, survival of the fittest. But the traits that maximize fitness are not some sort of platonic ideal that, once attained, provide endless success.
Indeed, the history of life on this planet shows that all strategies eventually fail. For while, it might be best to take the road less traveled. But that only works until everyone else figures it out. Then you have to find another way.
People who argue about the merits of capitalism vs. socialism, deregulation vs. central control, supply-side vs. demand-side economics, as so forth, are all stuck in one-dimensional thinking.
Lets all stop trying to figure out what the right answer is. The right answer depends on what time it is; that is, it changes over time.
A lot has been written about physicists leaving academia and going over to Wall Street. Mark Thoma, writing at Economist's View, has a post about allegations that these math whizzes are partly to blame for the financial meltdown. Over at Physics Buzz, this allegation is called a "cop out." The phenomenon of physicists leaving academia is explained here.
Thoma, in my view, is on to something when he says:
Systems with agents who can respond to changes in their economic environment are very different from the types of physical systems quants are used to working with. Starting with reduced form techniques rather than structural/behavioral models and attempting to exploit trends that are uncovered from backward looking procedures runs the risk of going very wrong if the response of agents in the model drives the economy away from its historical precedent. Much of what was done amounted to this approach no matter how dressed up it was mathematically. When the economy did, in fact, diverge from past trends as agents responded to the changed economic environment brought about by those attempting to exploit trends in the data, the models, unsurprisingly, failed.
In biology, it is normal for agents to respond to a changed environment.
Nature is an endless game of cat-and-mouse, but the cats and the mice keep evolving. Financial markets are inherently biological systems, thus it would make sense to model them the way that ecologists model populations.
Does this means that all the physicists should leave Wall Street, to be replaced by biologists? Not at all. As many have pointed out, the problem is not the models, the problem is in how the models are employed.
Consider the situation with gambling in casinos. The casino does not need to win all the time. They merely have to tilt the odds a bit, so that they win more than they lose. It is tempting for investors to adopt a similar mindset. The model does not have to be perfect; all it has to do, is tilt the odds in your favor. So long as nothing catastrophic happens, you will come out ahead in the long run.
The fly in the ointment is the simple fact, that catastrophic things do happen. And that is where the mindset of the ecologist or evolutionary biologist is helpful. Such people know perfectly well that catastrophic events happen.
Persons with a cursory knowledge of these disciplines tend to think in idealized terms. For example, many persons who are superficially familiar with evolution tend to think in teleological terms: that as evolution progresses, it leads to organisms that are increasingly fit.
Evolution, of course, does not lead to higher and higher organisms. Rather, it leads to organisms that have a temporary advantage, based upon what conditions were like in the past.
Persons with a cursory knowledge of ecology will know about symbiosis. They will know of three types of symbiotic relationship: commensalism, mutualism, and parasitism. With a sophomoric level of understanding, it is tempting to think that organisms will tend to evolve toward a mutualistic relationship; that is, a relationship in which both parties benefit. After all, a parasite that is too demanding might very well kill its host.
Consider, now, the relationship between financial institutions (banks, investment firms, insurance) and the rest of the economy. Clearly, these institutions can function in one of three ways. They can act mutualistically, such that both parties benefit; they can interact commensally, such that one side benefits but the other is unaffected; or they can act parasitically.
Which model will they use? Probably, it depends upon the conditions.
Last month, Greenspan was shocked to realize that lending institutions did not act in a manner that protected their shareholder's equity. In ecological terms, he was shocked to see them acting as parasites. But really, what would prevent such behavior? In biology, there is nothing to prevent it. You might think that organisms would evolve in such a way, that they would not suck too much blood, thereby killing the host. But things like that happen all the time. It may limit the success of the parasite; it even may lead to extinction, of one -- or both -- parties.
Indeed, ecosystems do have points of balance, where harmony abounds. It is nice when this happens, even beautiful. But there is no force, natural, spiritual, or otherwise, that causes such a balance. It is accidental. The appearance of beauty may give the impression of an invisible hand, or watchmaker, or whatever analogy suits you. But that is illusory. The harmony can collapse in an instant, particularly where exponential growth is involved, and there is an inflexible limit to resources.
The road less traveled by? That is an illusion too. We are all traveling on the same road.
Species do become extinct. Remember, it happens all the time. In fact, the rate of extinction is increasing exponentially.
Another bit of poetry:
ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT
Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors -- those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.
Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.
That's from Having It Out With Melancholy, by Jane Kenyon. How does it end?
WOOD THRUSH
High on Nardil and June
light I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.
I don't think that Nardil is the solution to our problems, but the maples and the wood thrush might help. That is why I worry about species extinction. The economy will crash. We will run out of cheap oil. Those things, we can do without. But we need the trees and the birds.
