Econtalk Podcast

Fascinating podcast about the incentives of leaders. Main thesis: institutional constraints select for and strongly define leadership behavior.

Each leader is faced with the same problem - that of staying in power, usually accomplished by gifting the "selectorate" with resources gained from taxation. When this group is small, dictatorship results, and when this group is large, societies are more democratic. There is an interesting mention of several leaders - King Leopold in Belgium and the Congo, and Chiang Kai-Shek in China and Taiwan, where different institutional constraints led to really different leadership styles by the same leader, sometimes simultaneously. Also mentioned are Lee Kuan Yew and Mao Zedong.

At the end of the podcast, he advances an argument against term limits, which seems to approve of the way governance in Singapore works - the argument states that term limits cause lame duck terms, when leaders are no longer incentivized by re-election and are then free to give out political favors.

Ever since sitting in on Sussman's classes two years ago, I've had "Semantics vs Syntax" on my list of things to understand. It still floats near the top of that list because of its relevance to many of the other problems I am interested in, namely the principal-agent problem, the question of what differentiates computation from other types of thinking and also the true nature of web2.0 technologies.

This last idea, that there are many ways of thinking and that "computation" is but one of them, is close to the original context in which the sematics / syntax comparison was brought up in Sussman's class. The thesis is that the field of computer science has spent a lot of effort tackling syntactical challenges and not enough time understanding semantic shortcomings.

The way I understand it, it was the desire for proof which led to this bias - computer scientists in the mathematicians' deductive tradition required closed worlds for mechanisms of inductive proof to hold up, so they closed those worlds in pursuit of proof. Dijkstra is an arch typical thinker in that tradition, and the innovations resulting include typed languages and automatic theorem provers.

---

To the extent math refers to reality, we are not certain; to the extent we are certain, math does not refer to reality. - Albert Einstein

One can never escape the need for interpretation when communicating with abstract symbols. This need gives rise to uncertainty, be it uncertainty about correctness or uncertainty about the optimality of the chosen representation.

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/10353

Will Wilkinson and Clay Shirky mention many of the issues which I have been thinking about recently, starting with Ronald Coase's Theory of the Firm, and discussing the relevance of arbitrary, coincidental technological limitations to the nature of mass culture and political organization. (Instance of internet-mediated mass action: students in the UK fighting a HSBC checking account fee increase through Facebook.) Shirky observes the web2.0 technology seems to be bad at filtering for mid-sized groups, as opposed to individuals and big groups. Also, there is a discussion about the supposed impossibility of wikipedia, some nupedia history, and the encroachment of passion-based effort into what were traditionally purely monetarily motivated activities.

HT: EconLog