Complexity and Contradiction

For some time, another form of assortment has been on my mind: cognitive. The much-maligned Bell Curve is a fascinating read, not for all of the psychometric data that makes people dismiss it as “racist screed,” but for the conclusion it comes to: western society is just becoming too damn hard to figure out. The basic thesis of the book is if you broke out intelligence (i.e. raw cognitive power – information processing) from a myriad of data about society, what would you learn? It turns out that it has some pretty intense correlations. After a long discussion of longitudinal surveys, wartime induction examinations, facets of testing, the “g” factor, and statistical regression analyses; what it boils down to is for income, crime, and a multitude of other issues, the strongest correlating factor is intelligence. This is beyond and in lieu of the standard answers of family structure, socio-economic background, or ethnicity. Which makes a certain amount of sense; it’s not that SAT scores follow wealth, but that wealth (and its helpmate education) follows intelligence. Their data fits nicely even into the observations about the relative ineffectiveness of parenting Steven Levitt makes in Freakonomics. (A good, short, read.)

All of this means that being able to process reams and reams of information is a valuable and necessary skill, which I think we mostly have realized intuitively. The compelling, important question the Bell Curve guys lead up to is: What happens to you if you can’t? For untold decades, the institutional answer to everything seems to have been complication. Mr. Sinclair writes an expose of packing in Bridgeport? Create an overseer board. Worried about corruption in politics? Institute disclosure laws. Want to help out families with kids? Bend the tax code around them. No one trusts your newspaper? Run everything by four editors first. Corporation using too many paper clips? Make everyone file a requisition in triplicate. Publicly traded companies playing a shell game? Sarbanes-Oxley. This amount of complication has a price.

We have not exhausted all the reasons that cognitive ability is becoming more
valuable in the labor market, but these will serve to illustrate a theme: The
more complex a society becomes, the more valuable are the people who are
especially good at dealing with complexity. Barring a change in direction,
the future is likely to see the rules for doing business become yet more
complex, to see regulation extend still further, and to raise still higher the
stakes for having a high IQ. [The Bell Curve, p.99]

The price is almost nobody can any longer figure out what the hell is going on. To pick on the perennial example: when engineers feel like they can’t fill out their tax forms without help, you may have a problem. The more and more complex things become, the more the information-processing skill becomes paramount, and the more the less-than-brilliant become mired in an arbitrary Kafkaesque world with which they have no hope of dealing. This increases feelings of alienation and helplessness, straining the shared good will that makes civil society work and essentially making the vaunted “democracy” that people celebrate endlessly into a meaningless spectacle. In the words of an historian I’ve been reading:

At the same time, it {is} also held that . . . all children {must be} not simply
literate but educated up to and through college – rules, rules, definitions,
classifications, and exceptions = indignation – and litigation. The
welfare state cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state. [Barzan, From
Dawn to Decadence. p.777]

The danger is of creating an untenable system. How often have we already heard “this is what the regulations say, but this is how we actually operate?” Laws that are contradictory and inscrutable devolve into arbitrary power. Commerce that is incomprehensible grows Andy Fastow. As countless third-world examples illustrate, if the formal way of working is cumbersome to the point of impossible the only ones profiting are the black marketeers. (Oil-for-food was probably a great example.) The lynchpin of society is voluntary agreement between people for mutual gain, including the famous “informed consent.” If no one understands to what they’re agreeing, resentment, conflict, and “gaming the system” are sure to follow. For years I’ve been the only guy in the meeting who has actually read the forty-page construction contract. The prophet here is W. Edwards Deming, who famously observed that no one can do a good job in a system that won’t allow them to.

Maybe this isn’t a new problem. I remain concerned that if the rules of the game continue to leave behind those who haven’t been intensively trained and have a natural aptitude for complexity, then the consequences may be dire.

Romancing the Profession

A few months ago, Architectural Record had a column that was hilarious for its description of something that everyone in this line of work goes through: You go to a cocktail party, and every damn person you meet says the same thing, “Oh, I wanted to be an Architect.” This is generally followed by a qualification that “I couldn’t do the math,” or a long story of how they either 1) designed their house or 2) do a lot of that kind of thing anyway. Then they wax rhapsodic about how great your life must be and how much fun it is. These people should be shot.

First, there is no math in Architecture. Well, there’s a course in calculus, and a few engineering classes, but anyone with even a halfway decent secondary education can pull through a five hour calculus class, and the extent of structural engineering is a little simple algebra that all of those liberal arts majors who were in eighth grade with me (you know who you are) would have no trouble with. (The trick, actually, is learning to do all of this on two hours of sleep.) In the real world? No math. Sure, I’ve been trained to calculate the development length of reinforcing, and do the first order quadratic equation for the sectional area of a steel beam, but do I ever use this information? No. The most complicated mathematics I’ve ever done is plugging a few numbers into the allowable area expansion for frontage equation in the International Building Code, and this I’m convinced a large ape could get by with. The average commercial building is a steel frame that we lay out and kick over to a structural engineer who runs a few simple formulas to arrive at the most efficient (i.e. cheapest) size of member. Even for those guys, it’s mostly knowing how to read a chart.

The second frustrating assumption is that guys like me have some kind of absolute freedom regarding what gets built. Sure, we’d all LIKE to just take a carte-blanche brief and put together a piece of sculpture, but that’s not the way it happens. You generally get some developer, or doctor, or city employee, or something else that either a) tries to draw a building for you and can’t understand why you can’t directly transcribe it (see “wanted to be” above) or b) thinks they’re ordering a pizza and can just say “just do a 600 bed acute-care hospital and be done by Friday.” And that’s just the half of it. The absolute first question is “how much will it cost” (this as-yet-undetermined complex three-dimensional object with thousands of pieces in a strict regulatory environment produced by the most opaque, corrupt, and variable industry there is) usually followed by a totally inadequate budget number that their cousin told them would work and a direction to “just do the minimum possible.” This is not a circumstance generally conducive to high art.

Of course, it is possible to do something interesting, but that involves having enough gravitas and reputation to win undying faith from someone that’s spending three million dollars on a scary, confusing, complicated object that they’re generally going into a great deal of debt to pay for. Then there is trying to squeeze everything into the tiny window of time you have to work on it while juggling the conflict and details of the six other projects underway. All of this while producing a myriad of over-detailed drawings and over-complicated specifications done in a desperate attempt to cover every tiny little issue that someone could use against you later. Then, you have to find someone among the army of high school dropouts (usually ex-football players, see competition below) that you can threaten, cajole, persuade, and leverage into doing work that is just a little more thoughtful and careful than “whut I bin doin for thirty years.” Even then, you’re probably working under someone who either a) has been beaten down by the whole transcription / bare minimum thing for so long he’s just stopped caring, or b) spent so long as an underling that the idea of “mine” has completely replaced the idea of quality.

Really, it’s a gig that does have its moments, but keep this in mind at your next cocktail party.

Consumption

In the last couple of months, I’ve gotten a chance to read both Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and E. and A. Warren’s The Two Income Trap. They’re both pretty interesting, and both basically about “getting by.” This is a subject that fascinates me. As a bachelor professional, I don’t really have a point to relate to the “average” person at the point of expenses and family, so I often wonder “just what would it be like to live like a normal person?” There are so many things from school systems to buying a permanent house to paying for children to dealing with someone else financially that just don’t come up in my day-to-day life. I mean, it’s not like I’m living the life or reilly here, but my worries tend to take the form of “how can I BOTH spend a week in New York and buy a new sports car without having less than six months income in the bank?” I’m told that this isn’t normal.

The basic thesis of the Warren book (Elizabeth Warren, of Harvard Law, grew up in Oklahoma, by the way) is that with two-income family households now the normal condition in the labor pool, the additional income sloshing around has demand-driven the price of housing in a “decent” public school district to a level where BOTH incomes are necessary to afford a house. All of this means that if either partner loses their job (statistically almost twice as likely) they can’t afford fixed expenses pegged to 65% of their combined income. Ergo, bankruptcy.

This has been on my mind for some time. I’ve observed the basic Dallas mode of living (especially Collin and Denton Counties, a David Brooks experiment if there ever was one) seems to be two really high car payments and a really high house payment. Think 20% and 40% of income respectively. Now, according to the 2000 Census (www.factfinder.census.gov - GO) the median household income of Collin is $70, 835, with the median per-capita at $33,345, and a high 75.7% labor force participation (Making, by my math, income per wage earner at $44,049.) This makes sense: two people with incomes around 40k add up to 80k, working out nicely with the existing figure. It’s this “household” combination that makes the comparisons a little skewed. My question is this: how many of these people with this relatively high household income are living at the bare extent of their means? Collin county, let’s remember, is the spiritual home of the Hummer H2 and the Yukon Denali. There seems to be a pervading mentality that one buys to the maximum point of “what you can afford (monthly),” a number interestingly set usually by finance companies that are all-too-willing to exceed recommended debt-to-earning ratios. [see assortment below] This dovetails very nicely with the oft-sited plummeting (negative?) rate of current American savings. Why?

I remember dozens of times hearing my gray-haired father shake his head and ask “there are all of these people with a thousand-dollar house payment, what do they do if something happens?” (Don’t laugh about the amount – remember that Oklahoma has some of the lowest costs in the country.) His (incredulous) point was this: No one seems to carry a contingency plan any longer. It’s almost like the element of fear (or realization) of the unknown is not there in people’s planning. I can’t figure out why not. Perhaps it’s a generation used to security and affluence (you’ve heard of the Baby Boomers?) that sees setback as individual and not systemic. Maybe it’s a drive for some sort of competition [see below] that crowds out all other priorities. Strange.

I’d still like to know a little more about how other people structure their lives. Maybe my perspective is either paranoid or conditioned by a frugal environment in my formative years, or maybe having too many members of the family that were used to growing their own food. It’s that sense of context that’s hard to gain.

Travelogue: Chicago

Broad shoulders. Butchered hogs. It’s all there. Three days of French hospitality in the second city, and I’m fascinated by the possibilities. Cars AND subways; Apartments WITH back yards; Chicago remains a city of strange contradictions. A city where you can fairly easily find a taxi but still live in a quaint three-story neighborhood without shelling out the GDP of Bolivia has a lot going for it. I remain amazed that there is a well-populated beach within a short ride of the commercial center, even walkable from a place you can live sans voiture. It’s like Barcelona with really, really cold winters. (and no mountains.) The people still seem a bizarre combination of friendly but not polite; something of a cultural adjustment coming from a culture where one assumes that everyone is armed. Things to suggest: Trap Door Theatre in Bucktown (or the rest of Bucktown, for that matter,) The Bourgeois Pig Café in Lincoln Park (not in any way associated, except in a weird kind of spiritual way, with the Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood,) apartment life at the East end of Hyde Park, Cloud Gate (the jellybean) in Grant/ Millennium Park, and everyone’s perennial favorite Luciano’s. This is a town to make you both reconsider and totally give up on urban theory at the same time. It’s a place where the Nineteenth Century stubbornly refuses to die, and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it. One has to wonder about the thought process of a place that shells out millions of dollars for a titanium bandshell, yet refuses to update the godawful cast-iron monstrosity of a transit system in the next block. Does cold weather addle the brain? Maybe it’s a machine-politics thing.