Gene Hackers

The New York Times reports that a group of hobbyist-scientists is working on developing trees that glow in the dark.  They are working in a laboratory in Silicon Valley named BioCurious, which describes itself as a "hackerspace for biotech."

The Agriculture Department regulates genetically engineered plants under a law designed to regulate plant pests, and they have told BioCurious that they will not need approval to create these trees, because they are not plant pests and are not made using plant pests.

BioCurious has raised over $250,000 from 4,500 donors on kickstarter.com to support this project, and they plan to give the seeds to many of the donors when they are ready.

Of course, this project shows how grossly inadequate the laws regulating genetic engineering are.  This project or similar projects could have unintended side effects that could be very destructive.

There has already been a case where corn was genetically engineered to produce drugs for pigs. The pollen spread and contaminated conventional corn. Hundreds of acres of corn had to be destroyed to prevent this pharmaceutical corn from spreading further.  If it had not been destroyed, it would have continued to spread and would ultimately have made corn unusable as a food.

If we imagine thousands of hobbyists doing this sort of project in the future, it seems inevitable that some will have this sort of destructive side effect.  If they give away the seeds to thousands of people, it is unlikely that we will be able to stop the destructive crop from spreading.

If this sort of hobbyist genetic engineering becomes common, it also seems inevitable that malicious or mentally ill hobbyists will deliberately create destructive organisms, such as more virulent diseases and super weeds, just as malicious or mentally ill computer hackers deliberately create and spread computer viruses.

Our regulation of genetically modified organisms is woefully inadequate, because it does not adequately consider their environmental effects.   They are potentially much more dangerous than toxic chemicals, for example, because once organisms are released into the environment, they can multiply and spread endlessly.

This group of hobbyists is creating the new organism by using software that allows you to design new DNA sequences and then sending the design to a foundry that synthesizes the DNA.  It seems unlikely that we can find and regulate hobbyists, but it should be possible to regulate foundries and prevent them from synthesizing DNA without a thorough study showing that it will not have a destructive environmental impact.

Read the Times article

Art: Process or Result?

We can learn an interesting lesson about how today’s art critics think, by looking at two articles by the same reviewer in last Friday’s New York Times fine arts sections.

Look at these two paintings, and ask yourself which one is better art?  The first is Lady Lillith by Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1866-1873), which is an oil painting.

The second is Russian Empire from the series Empire Descending a Staircase by Joe Zucker (2012), which the artist made by removing the paper from a piece of drywall to expose the gypsum, slicing the gypsum into 1/4 inch squares, and then painting each square individually.

There is no question in the mind of Times art critic Roberta Smith that Russian Empire is a far better work of art.

Rosetti and the other Pre-Raphaelites in the exhibit she reviewed were creating escapist art that Smith says is the ancestor of today’s kitch.  “The badness at its core is completely familiar.  … Looking at these paintings, you can see it all coming.  … the visual platitudes of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney; the hallucinatory brightness of psychedelic posters, the sugary scenes of Thomas Kincaid, and the heavy-handed medievalism of countless movies and television shows….”

By contrast, the paintings of Zucker’s Empire series, she says, evoke “flat-band weaving, mini-mosaics, and, from a distance, lush, dappled velvet” (but this obviously does not remind her of the common genre of kitchy paintings done on velvet). Their columns, some broken or falling, represent the crumbling of empires, emphasized by the slightly crumbling gypsum of their surfaces.  She concludes, “… these works gain strength as you look at them, their beauty and their pessimism running neck in neck.”

To anyone who is not indoctrinated in modern art, the most striking difference between the two paintings is that Rosetti’s involves skill and craftsmanship, while Zucker’s is nothing more than a clever idea.

Rosetti is skilled enough, for example, to make the oil paint represent the different ways in which light strikes Lilith’s skin and gown, and represent the face of the model Alexa Wilding.

Zucker shows no skill at all.  He has a clever idea: paint on sliced wallboard, so the crumbling of the gypsum represents the crumbling of the empires, which is no better than a pun in visual form.  There is even feebler attempt at cleverness in the title of the series, “Empire Descending a Staircase,” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.”

One look at Zucker’s painting shows that this clever technique produces a clumsy result: the columns are stiff and awkward, particularly their bases and capitals.  This clumsiness is a result of the technique itself: to paint individual quarter-inch squares of crumbly material, you do not need much skill, and you cannot create a finished product that has much subtlety.

Common sense tells us that, if a technique produces an awkward result, we should use some better technique instead.  Our modernist art critics miss this obvious point because they are more interested in the process of creating the work of art than in the finished product. If you want the critics to swoon, use some unconventional process to produce a work of art, regardless of the result it produces. It is no wonder that we get results of such low quality.

Of course, Roberta Smith is right to criticize Pre-Raphaelite art as escapist.  The Pre-Raphaelites had the skills of artists, but they used these skills to create a fantasy world that helped viewers escape from reality, making them second-rate artists.

But Smith should save most of the vituperation she directs at the Pre-Raphaelites for Zucker and the other modernists she regularly adulates in her reviews.  They are far, far below the level of second-rate artists.

They are not artists at all.  They are only clevers.

See Smith's reviews of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Zucker.

Lean In: Liberation for the 1%

Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, has reached the top of the best seller list.  If a book told men how to climb the corporate ladder, everyone would see that it is adjusting them to the status quo, but Sandberg's book tells women how to climb the corporate ladder, so it is being touted as a progressive challenge to the status quo.  One reviewer wrote in the New York Times:

A landmark manifesto . . . Fifty years after The Feminine Mystique . . . Sandberg addresses 21st-century issues that never entered Betty Friedan’s wildest dreams . . . Lean In will be an influential book. . . . it will encourage . . . women to persevere in their professional lives.

In reality, Sandberg's advice might help the 1% of all workers who are ambitious to climb to the highest ranks of their corporations.

Her own qualifications point to the limitations of her approach.  She is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, and she is on Fortune magazine's list of the 50 most powerful women in business.

She is telling us to play a zero-sum game.  No matter how hard you work, only 50 people are going to get on that list of 50 most powerful women in business. No matter how hard you work, your company is only going to have one CEO and one COO.

To the 99% of Facebook employees who are not corporate climbers, it does not matter whether the CEO and COO are men or women.  Tech companies are known for overworking their employees, and most of the accountants, programmers, and others who Sandberg manages are more interested in having some free time to live their lives and to spend with their families than they are in Sandberg's advice about how to climb to the top of the organization.

Another reviewer in the New York Times got it right when she said:

"her narrative is what corporate America wants to hear. For both the women who have made it and the men who work with them, it is cheaper and more comfortable to believe that what they need to do is simply urge younger women to be more like them, to think differently and negotiate more effectively, rather than make major changes in the way their companies work. Young women might be much more willing to lean in if they saw better models and possibilities of fitting work and life together: ways of slowing down for a while but still staying on a long-term promotion track; of getting work done on their own time rather than according to a fixed schedule; of being affirmed daily in their roles both as parents and as professionals."

Sandberg does not discuss the sort of changes that could give employees better work-life balance and more satisfying lives.

Virtually none of the reviewers criticize Sandberg's unstated assumption that the goal of life is to climb the corporate ladder, in order to get as much money and power for yourself as possible.  If this passes for liberation in the current intellectual climate, then we need to change that climate.

As Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, she is one of the people who are responsible for its work-time policies, and she does not seem to have done anything to liberate its employees from overwork.  If Simon Lagree had been a woman, he would still have been a slave driver. 

Leveling Education Downward

President Obama called for universal access to preschool in his State of the Union address.  The New York Times explains, "supporters herald the plan as a way to help level the playing field for children who do not have the advantages of daily bedtime stories, music lessons, and counting games at home...."

Talking and reading to your preschool children is one of the great satisfactions of life. Universal preschool would take some of that away from the majority of American families, who do a good job of it, in order to level the playing field for the minority of American families who do not do a good job of it.  Average Americans would have less of a role in raising their children, in order to help the minority.

You might as well say that you want universal housing projects.  Let all Americans live in government housing projects to level the playing field for those who cannot buy their own homes.

Child-care advocates sometimes claim that preschools can improve children’s academic performance, but they are distorting the evidence. The overwhelming majority of studies show that parents have a much greater effect than preschool, and that preschool can bring small improvements in the academic achievement of poor, at-risk children, but has no effect at all on the achievement of middle-class children.

Constant repetition has convinced middle-class parents that their children brains will be hard-wired to make them more intelligent if they are in preschools during the first three years of their lives, but in reality, the studies overwhelmingly show that preschool has a small benefit for poor children and has no lasting benefit for middle-class children. In fact, preschools providing “enriched environments” for poor children usually just do the same things that most middle-class parents already do.

Studies have shown that children are more successful in school if adults talk to them long before they have learned to speak, read to them, sing to them, give them interesting toys to play with, and have repeated affectionate interactions with them. Most middle-class parents already do this, but many low-income parents do not talk or read to their infant children.
 
In my book What's Wrong With Daycare,  I offered an alternative:

We could improve child raising dramatically by funding a large public education campaign with advertisements that show pictures of parents talking to infants, reading to toddlers, and having affirmative, encouraging interactions with children, and that tell parents how much these parents are helping their children to become successful.

Public health improved dramatically because of the anti-smoking campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, which spread the word that people should do more to protect their own health. Education could improve dramatically if we spread the word that people should do more to educate their own preschool children.

There may be a good argument for having head-start programs for some poor children, but we should not treat all parents as incompetent, promoting equality by making us all less able to do for ourselves, leveling all families downward.

See the New York Times article.

A Convenient Truth

The idea that simpler living means more sacrifice and more drudgery is the biggest obstacle to environmentalists’ political success.

Environmentalists’ fascination with hanging out your wash on clotheslines is one example of simple living as drudgery. For example, the New York Times featured the story of a woman who said she was following “energy-saving tips from Al Gore, who says that when you have time, you should use a clothesline to dry your clothes instead of the dryer.” When she tried it, “I briefly gave up – the dryer was so much easier – but then tried again.” She finally got in the habit of doing all this extra work, but she found that her electric bill was “still too high, so we’re about to try fluorescent bulbs.”

Doing your laundry with a tub and washboard and then hanging it out to dry was one of the most hated of women’s traditional tasks: Monday was usually wash day, and the work was so hard that women called the day “blue Monday.” Do environmentalists really believe that they can attract wide public support by calling for more drudgery?

If environmentalists advocate forms of simpler living that involve a harder way of life, we are just pushing the public toward the “drill, baby, drill” crowd. Instead, we should call for simpler living that reduces work and make our lives more satisfying.

For example, the average American drives twice as much now as in the 1960s, because we have built so much urban sprawl. There is no real benefit to spending all this time on the freeways, but there is the real stress of doing the extra driving, the real economic burden of paying for it, the real environmental damage done by the from the automobiles, and the real wars that we have fought to secure gasoline supplies. New Urbanists now are designing walkable neighborhoods – and most people can see that these walkable neighborhoods are better places to live than sprawl suburbs, even apart from environmental issues.

New Urbanist neighborhoods are a model for a politics of simple living that could attract widespread public support. These neighborhoods have become popular because they are more attractive, more comfortable, and more convenient than conventional sprawl suburbs – and their residents also happen to consume less land and less gasoline.

A politics of simple living would apply a similar model across the entire economy. Many people would find their lives easier and more pleasant if they had the option of downshifting economically by working shorter hours, if they had the option of living in walkable neighborhoods rather than in sprawl suburbs, and if they had the option of taking care of their own children rather than using child-care.

This, as economist Dan Aronson says, is the “convenient truth” that could help us deal with the inconvenient truth of global warming. We can help save the earth by working less and having more free time for ourselves.

Avant-Gardists as Throwbacks

Today's New York Times resurrected its former architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, to write an obituary for the modernist architect, Oscar Neimeyer, and Ouroussoff inadvertently revealed that his avant-gardism is a throwback to the 1950s.

As architecture critic for the Times, Ouroussoff became famous for focusing almost exclusively on a handful of avant-gardist "starchitects," such as Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel. He was the leading advocate of this style.

Neimeyer became famous for designing Brasilia, the new capital that Brazil built between 1956 and 1960.

Brasilia

Despite the attempt to make it look glamorous by taking the photo at night, you can see very clearly from the picture that Brasilia makes all the errors that have led today's city planners to reject modernism.  Wide arterial streets separate the government buildings in the center from the housing next to it, like a textbook example of how to make cities unappealing to pedestrians.  The housing is a row of identical high-rise slabs with no other function than housing, like a textbook example of how to create sterile, dehumanized housing projects.  The government buildings are surrounded by large spaces that are empty and devoid of life. 

The city is designed as a work of abstract art rather than as a good place for people to live, and Ouroussoff loves that artsy design, saying, "His curvaceous, lyrical, hedonistic forms helped shape a distinct national architecture and a modern identity for Brazil."  If you were a hedonist, would you want to live in one of those slabs of housing?

What is most revealing, Ouroussoff admits that, despite its futuristic pretensions, the avant-gardism of our time is actually a step backward to the modernist esthetic of the 1950s.  

A decade or two after it was built, Brasilia was known as a model of everything that is wrong with modernist design.  As Ouroussoff says:

"Modernism was by then falling out of favor with the architectural establishment. Brasília soon became a symbol of Modernism’s failure to deliver on its utopian promises. The vast empty plazas seemed to sum up the social alienation of modern society; surrounded by slums, the monumental government buildings of its center exemplified Brazil’s deeply rooted social inequalities."

But beginning in the 1980s, the avant-gardists whom Ouroussoff loves began to admire Brasilia again, as he says:

"In the meantime, a growing number of people had begun to re-examine the legacy of postwar Modernism and appreciate his purist vision as a throwback to a more optimistic time."

Though he usually claims that the avant-gardists are progressive, while traditionalists such as the New Urbanists are conservative and "nostalgic," Ouroussoff admits at unguarded moments like this one that the avant-gardists themselves are throwbacks who are nostalgic for the technological optimism of the 1950s.

I do not think it is a coincidence that these avant-gardists became influential during the 1980s, at the same time the Reagan administration was basing its economic and social policies on nostalgia for the the 1950s.

We are not going to solve the problems of the twenty-first century by reviving the technological optimism of the 1950s.

Today, we have reached the point where we need to limit the destructive effects of technology, rather than blinding ourselves to them.  For example, city planners today recognize that we have to build a walkable street grid to connect business districts with nearby housing, in order to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Ouroussoff ignores this point completely because of his nostalgia for technological optimism, celebrating a design that creates auto-dependency by separating functions with high-speed arterial streets.

Though it seems strange, we have a reactionary avant-garde. Ouroussoff actually admits that they are "throwbacks" to the esthetics of the 1950s.

See Ouroussoff' article here.
available to registered New York Times users. 

Work-Time Choice or Creating Jobs

Today, we try to create economic growth rapid enough to give people standard 40-hour jobs. With work-time choice, we would try to create growth rapid enough to give people the number of work hours that they actually want.

Today, the economy must grow rapidly, whether or not people want more products, purely to create more 40-hour jobs. With work-time choice, people would work enough to buy the products they want, and then they could stop.

Our economic debate usually focuses solely on inflation and unemployment, technical questions that only economists can deal with. We also need to ask the underlying human question: What is the economy for?

Obviously, the purpose of the economy is to produce things that people actually want.

Everyone realizes this when they talk about work that we do for ourselves. We do the job of patching the roof because we want to keep the rain from coming in, for example, and when we have accomplished that goal, we stop. We do not keep tearing up the roof and patching it again and again in order to “create jobs” for ourselves.

But when it comes to the formal economy, we become totally mystified, and we believe that there is a benefit to “creating jobs.” We do not work to produce the things that we want to consume. Instead, we believe we must produce and consume more things to create work.

If we thought about the human purpose of the economy, we would realize that in the formal economy, as in informal production for our own use, we should produce what we want to consume and then stop.

Economists have expert knowledge that lets them plan to control inflation, unemployment and other economic disruptions, but ordinary people are the ones who should decide how much they want to consume. The technical questions about inflation and unemployment, which only economists can answer, should be subordinate to the human question about what balance of consumption and free time gives you the most satisfying life. People should be able to answer this human question for themselves, by making decisions about their work hours that reflect the importance they give to more consumption and more free time.