Pecuniology Blog

Reuters via Yahoo! reports, “American[s]… are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior [US] government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions… There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council… Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.” [emphasis added]

Naturally enough, some people have a problem with this.

One could rail against the unfairness of it all, post angry comments below blog posts, or even go to the extreme of sending a sharply worded email to someone in power. As an act of absolute desperation, one might wait two, four, or six years and… vote. Alternatively, one could look for the investment implications.

Because I am neither licensed nor qualified to offer investment advice, and everything that I post here is for educational and entertainment purposes only, I will not make any speculative recommendations, but I will provide some guidelines for forming and testing your own hypotheses.

First, consider that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun testing a project to predict future crimes on members of the public, called the Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) project. FAST “is designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns.” Best of all, a field test was performed at a large venue in the USA earlier this year.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) [i.e., national police] by mid-January 2012 will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in some US states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos.

In other words, privacy is dead.

Love it or hate it, ask yourself, “Who benefits?”

You might not be able to stop Rome from burning, but you can try to profit from it, so that you avoid being a burden on others.

Invest accordingly.

Prof. Evans

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis holds that language affects thought, in part because we tend to think in terms of the languages that we speak. Whether thought is constrained by language or merely influenced is a matter of some debate beyond the scope of this post.

The point here relates to Methodological Individualism, which is the theory or practice of ascribing all human action to individual action, rather than amorphous collectives like races, genders, nationalities, countries, companies, etc. In other words, one would look at the motives of the individuals within a major Wall Street bank for explanations of the causes of the 2007-2008 market meltdown, rather than at ‘Wall Street’, ‘Wall Street banks’, ‘the government’, ‘capitalism’, or whatever.

Employing Methodological Individualism leads one to ask, “If I want to communicate with X, what is his or her email address?” Try it.

“If I want to communicate with the CEO of Citibank, what is his or her email address?”

See? No big deal.

Now, try these:

“If I want to communicate with Wall Street, what is his or her email address?”

“If I want to communicate with Main Street, what is his or her email address?”

“If I want to communicate with blacks, what is their email address?”

“If I want to communicate with Latino voters, what is their email address?”

Silly, right?

Now, let’s apply the same principle to an essay that is making the rounds among the technorati. Neal Stephenson writes in “Innovation Starvation,” “My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space.”

Sounds gloomy, bordering on nihilistic. If I want to communicate with the United States of America, what is its email address?

Unlike Mr. Stephenson’s, my lifespan encompasses the era when a seeming army of NASA employees — who were provided with a clear mandate and huge sums of money confiscated from working Americans through taxation — were capable of launching human beings into space. It now includes the era of the first commercial space flight companies in human history, all of which are based in the USA.

An interesting assignment would be to rewrite Mr. Stephenson’s essay from the perspective of Methodological Individualism, replacing all collectivistic references to ‘America’, ‘us’, etc. with identifiable individuals, even if those individuals are archetypes and not actual living personages.

Invest accordingly.

Prof. Evans

Undue Process

Methodological Individualism & Technological Tribalism