Capitalism has a number of dangerous inherent flaws. It has no way to deal with externalities, leading to unstoppable depletion of natural resources and accumulation of waste (including things like carbon dioxide and even heat). It has no intrinsic mechanism for determining a "fair" division of surplus wealth (i.e. profits) between workers, management and owners, leading to incessant and often violent negotations over wealth sharing. It tends to create monopolies which are at odds with the basic concept of a free market. The actual way in which it functions is highly dependent on the societal and legal framework in which it operates. It probably isn't even possible at all without strong central governments, whereas it rejects the idea of external regulation and claims to be autonomously sufficient. These are not problems that can be resolved by "tweaking" the pure economics of capitalism, they are inherrent. Clearly only a modified form of regulated capitalism has any chance to function effectively in the long term (if that). This is basically the system that came out of world war II, and it worked fairly well until several things happened that may perhaps be linked. First and foremost, right wing ultraconservatives established a long term explicit plan to roll back as much as possible of the New Deal and post-war evolution, including things like high marginal tax rates, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, Social Security, minimum wages, and so on. This is clearly a case of pure class warfare. It is obviously not sustainable in the long term, as an impoverished population can't afford to purchase the products, thus reducing demand and ultimately making the capitalist system itself dysfunctional. Second, there is the component of pure costs of production, which must be presumed to have risen significantly with the end of cheap US oil in the mid 1970s. I remember myself when gasoline was less than 30 cents at the pump, and each penny increase was a newsworth. Nowadays prices in the US are at least 3-4 times that, and are even higher in Europe. Whether as a source material for chemical industry (as in plastics) or as a source of energy, a several fold increase in price must reduce profits if the price index does not rise equivalently. To me it is highly suspicious that the beginning of the triumph of the right wing neocon agenda began shortly after the mid-1970s. It could be coincidental, but could also be that the increase in oil prices and lack of control of those prices translated into greater energy put into subverting our political process. Further support for this idea comes from the relatively recent recovery of the US economy (in terms of GDP if not wages), also coincident with the use of new technologies to increase national oil production thereby reducing dependence on middle -eastern oil (reducing but not eliminating).

Story coming out of New Jersey, due to problems with budget negotiations many state services are shut down over this Fourth of July weekend. That includes various state parks and beaches. OK, except that the governor (C.C.) apparently took his family to one of those parks and there were various pix posted on the internet of them sunning on an otherwise empty expanse of sand. The sheer arrogance seems beyond belief, except that it's only too believable. We know well that some people lack all empathy, however we prefer that such people not be elected to manage our affairs. In this case, the governor is probably a lame duck, after a seriously failed presidential run plus being spurned by the administration. He may simply be thumbing his metaphoric nose at everyone. But he is still running the state, in theory. And yet, he probably does feel a sense of empowerment, given that America has been giving positive signals to politicians to behave with increasing meanness and haughtiness. In addition to the message that poor people and minorities should not share equal opportunity or even basic civil rights, this is being extended to practically everyone who is not wealthy. How self-avowed populists can reconcile such behavior with the basic idea of populism is difficult to understand. But clearly the republican party, for all its supposed patriotism, has actually little interest in understanding or functioning under the true values by which the US was founded. The founders espoused the values of the Enlightenment, which have nothing to do with the actions (as opposed to the rhetoric) of the conservatives these days.

There is a lot of media attention these days to a supposed crisis in the replication of scientific studies. However, I don't agree that there is such a replication "crisis". Biological experimentation involves a very high degree of complexity, with many variables that are extremely difficult to control. For example, even the same inbred mouse strains, or tissue culture cell lines, can actually be quite divergent between different laboratories. It is very difficult for one lab to assess the number of statistical degrees of freedom in its own work. Thus it is to be expected that some, many even many, results which are reported reliably on experiments performed in good conscience, will fail to replicate among labs. That is part of the cost of doing truly novel research. Just based on an anecdotal sense of the kinds of work being described as "non-replicable", much of it is either in the social sciences, where controlling variables is even harder, or in clinical trials on human cohorts where again it is challenging to control for environmental factors. In contrast, in my own field of human medical genetics, results tend to be highly replicable, as we are usually looking at the effects of severe high penetrance mutations. Different mutations in the same gene typically generate very similar, though not identical phenotypes even in very different populations. A quick survey of the Human Gene Mutation Database corroborates this observation.

That said, it is true that scientists are under way too much pressure to generate positive results, especially for very expensive programs like clinical trials or large scale population genetic studies. Moreover, the hypercompetitive state of grant funding these days encourages hype and excessive optimism over sober analysis. This is not the fault of the NIH, this is the result of decades of government underfunding of science measured as a proportion of national GDP.

What comes after

I woke this morning from a very interesting and (for me) atypical dream. Most dreams are of a private nature and publishing them nothing but an exercise in vanity, but this is perhaps one of those rare exceptions.

In the dream I was in the afterlife. No idea how I got there, that was irrelevant. It was not clearly depicted, but there many of "us", again not very clearly visualized. I seemed to be seated (?) at a console like a microfilm or microfiche machine, and images went speeding by as when one fast forwards through that type of film. The images were in color.

An authority, again not visualized, more like a voice (perhaps I was drawing on Tolkien's short story Leaf by Niggle), was explaining how things worked. Essentially all possible information was available, in other words everything that had ever happened (on earth? in the entire universe?), but it was up to each of us to focus our minds to narrow in on any information of interest to us. As a preliminary exercise, the voice suggested we solve a simple math puzzle, the answer to which was a number. I don't recall the number, but as I focused on it, the images I was seeing slowed, came into focus, and eventually settled on the correct number. As that was happening, I was also seeing images of children. The voice, now close to me, noted that before I arrived here (wherever here was), I had asked to see my grandchildren. They were among the children whose images had gone by, thus I had come near, but not perfectly, at obtaining my desired information. As it happens, earlier in the day (the real day, not the dream) I was leafing through Steichen's classic photoessay, Family of Man; perhaps the images of children in my dream were stimulated by that real-life activity. I am not aware of feeling strongly about grandchildren (none so far), perhaps it's more important to me than I realized.

Anyway, the voice continued that I had wanted to know something else, namely whether quantum mechanics and general relativity could ever be reconciled as a coherent theory of everything in physics. This is indeed something I've love to have solved by physicists (not me of course), and have often joked that that would be my first question on arriving in Heaven (or the other place, hopefully they both know!) The voice said that the answer was that the two theories could not be reconciled. I asked whether that meant both were incomplete approximations of a true mathematically consistent theory, which the voice confirmed.

Then I woke up. If only I had slept a few more moments, I might have had the answer to all physics! Probably not though, probably I woke up because that was as far as I could go. But I awoke with a sense of perfect peace, because the universe was about not struggle, but about knowledge and correct understanding, from which action and consequence flow naturally. This now seems rather buddhist to me, though most of the time I tend much more to activity, spontaneity and trial and error, versus deep thought. My wife must be changing me, or else I am changing myself in response to her wisdom.