Month: September 2007

The Not-So Quixotic Quest

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In his novel, Count Zero, William Gibson has his billionaire cancer patient Josef Virek say:

“Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh… I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers… I was touched, Marly, at your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold.”

It turns out that the cancer cell’s pursuit of an individual career may not be as quixotic a pursuit as once thought.

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On War, Comprehension and Persuasion

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There must be something in the water lately as I have been getting an upsurge of inquiries and public comments regarding information operations, public diplomacy, “soft power” agents of influence, 5GW and similar matters. There are other blogs I can recommend as being better on this score – Beacon, MountainRunner, Kent’s Imperative, Swedish Meatballs Confidential and Whirledview to name but a few. Also, I would suggest that interested readers search the archives of Studies in Intelligence, PARAMETERS, The Strategic Studies Institute, Combined Arms Research Library and the threads at The Small Wars Council. Genuine expertise may be found there and for discussions of theory and emerging trends, I recommend Dreaming 5GW.

That being said, I will offer my two cents anyway.

One point of agreement across the political spectrum and that of informed opinion is that the USG has not done a particularly good job of managing “the war of ideas” in the conflict with Islamist terrorism. Or against state adversaries. Or with persuading neutrals and even our own allies to our point of view. When you are having difficulty drawing even in global popularity contest with a crowd of bearded fanatics who put beheading videos on the internet, it’s time to admit there’s a problem.

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Risk and Return

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A recent article in Barron’s magazine was titled ‘Weathering the Storm in Style’ and it discussed what retirees could do if the market tanked in the years while they were living off their retirement savings. The article mentions people who planned to retire just prior to the 2002 market meltdown but whose portfolios went down significantly (25% – 40%) and they had to change their plans and keep working as a result.

Later the article mentions how many “good years” you need in the years following the meltdown in order to make up for the bad times. For example, if the market drops 25% in one year, you will need to gain 46.67% in the following year to recoup the gain plus make 10% more (i.e. if you have a base expectation that the market will make you 10% in a year, you don’t just need to recover the drop, you need to make up for the ‘lost year’.

I covered a similar conceptual issue in a post titled “Percentage Returns… and other Lies” about how the portfolio managers could have a series of good looking years after a debacle like 2002 and yet investors still hadn’t recovered their initial investment (let alone make 10% / year to boot). I used a bit of my own portfolio for color commentary in that post, to “humanize” it, like a good journalist should.

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The Continuing Academic Battle

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It continues because of human nature. Indeed, the tension between our egos and appropriate limits is always a problem; of course, power is implicit in the student/teacher relationship. We always think we know more than we do. We may get so used to standing at the front of the classroom and instructing our students in the metrics of sonnets that we may think we know about politics as well. And, of course, we tend to think we are right. These rather natural human tendencies have also been attracted to current theories which allow us to rationalize. Our relationships with our students have also been somewhat soured by many things, not the least of which are the numerous government regulations and the ease of litigation. But, in the end, we always need self-awareness, respect of those in front of us, and a healthy skepticism about our own motives.

The AAUP and its challenger, the young Turks’ National Association of Scholars set out these contrasts, first in the AAUP’s “Freedom in the Classroom (2007)” paper countered y the brief Peter Wood’s review “InTruth R Us ” in Inside Higher Ed, as well as Peter Wood and Stephen Balch’s response, a point by point dissection at the NAS site.

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