Conservativism underpins the startup culture

Tonight, we were driving home from my in-laws, driving along highway 36 across Ohio from Piqua to Marysville. Traffic was light and the sky was thinking really hard about raining, but hadn't made up its mind whether to continue the afternoon's showers or not.

Most of the land on both sides, when we weren't in one of the five towns, was taken up by farmland or small houses. If you didn't look for very specific details (like cell towers on the ridges or the makes of the cars in the driveways), the view on this road would have been nearly identical in 2003, 1993, and even 1983. With ever-more-noticeable differences, we could probably get all the way back to 1948 before the view becomes so much different that the differences outnumber the similarities. 65 years, or 2+ generations.

In the heartland, most people live where they were raised and are raised where they were born. If not the same town, then somewhere around the same city, or the one next door. My wife spent all her school years in the Piqua school district. Returning back, she ran into a classmate working at the local McDonalds. An hour away in Marysville, she knows at least two people that were in her grade.

These people aren't stupid and they aren't dumb. They also aren't unimaginative. But, like my in-laws, they aren't risk-takers. They tend to grow their lives slowly, like the corn, soy, and hay in their fields. Their lives are slowly-growing spirals, not ever-rising arcs. They are conservative, in the sense of conserving their lives. They live in world where scarcity (a failed harvest) is right around the corner. Life is risky enough on its own, so keeping some back for a rainy day is learned with mother's milk.

Of course, not everyone is like this. But, more than not, this characterizes how a plurality of the heartland thinks. I've seen this in every farming family I've ever known, from Wisconsin to New York to California. Farmers, by the nature of their lives, tend to be conservative because they have to conserve against scarcity.

Risk, by its very nature, is not conservative. Risky ventures are designed to roll the dice and "bet the farm." (Think about that phrase.) Beginning something which has a high likelihood of failure and which takes up a lot of your available capital isn't something a farmer would do. Or even could afford to do. It's an alien thought.

Another post could discuss how much of the conflict between conservatives and liberals stems from this. I'm more interested in how this insight meshes with Elizabeth Warren's quote about people who think they get rich on their own.

Social liberals love that quote, and they should. It really sticks it to the man - you're rich in part because of the taxes I pay and the programs I fought you for. And that's all true, but not what I'm getting at.

Underlying her quote is a deeper concept - each of us succeeds when everyone succeeds AND we need differences in order to succeed. In the heartland, conservatives form a social cushion - a safety net. They create the basis of the life of the American social fabric. These farm-life workers (many of whom no longer farm) keep our society moving forward step-by-step. No great leaps forward. No massive innovations. Just one step at at time.

Out on the coasts and in the cities, in the liberal hotbeds, you have the risk-takers. This is where the financiers and startup developers and risky-innovation-people live. This is where all the boundaries are pushed and the assumptions are challenged. This is where people don't keep to the farming traditions - they bet the farm. Every day. Twice a day.

And they lose. Over and over, these farm-bettors fail. In some parts of Silicon Valley, you're not taken seriously until you've failed at least twice. Preferably in public.

But, we want them to fail. Because in the bones of every hundred failures lies the fragments for a map for a success. Because that seething cauldron of failures is a random-walk exploring the complete map of possible successes. Mathematics hasn't shown how to predict successful ventures yet, so we have to explore how to fill the knapsack over exponential attempts.

But, for those failures to occur, there has to be a foundation. The society has to be able to afford the expenditures that do not yield a high chance of success. There has to be enough in the bank accounts that a hundred failures in a row will not eat into the seed corn. (Another excellent phrase!) That bank account is filled, not in the liberal hotbeds, but in the conservative heartland.

The United States has been the world's engine for 75 years because it innovates better than any nation has ever done. We are likely to be the world's engine for at least another 25 years, or more, because we are innovating at innovation itself. This innovation happens in the liberal hotbeds, but is possible only because of the stability provided by the conservative heartland.

So, if you're a liberal, go thank a conservative. Go thank them for being alien to you, for making it possible for you to fail repeatedly in the service of making the US history's greatest engine. And really mean it.

No-one knows what they're doing!

(My take on this (language NSFW))

When I was a kid, I read a Peanuts strip where Marcie asks Charlie "Why the long face?" He looks at the huge pile of books in front of him and replies "The more I learn, the more I know what I don't know."

I have (among other things) a degree in Mathematics. Math is one of the few subjects where everything you learn very obviously builds upon everything you've learned before. In fact, many professors take pains to connect the dots between seemingly disparate subjects like topology, linear algebra, and multi-variable calculus (to name a few). And, that's one of those amazing beauties of math as a subject of study.

The flipside of this feature is that as you learn each new fact, you are aware of how much of an inverted pyramid mathematical knowledge is. You learn fact A and that opens the door to facts B, C, and D. But you haven't learned those facts yet! You just know you don't know them. And, once you know that facts B, C, and D are out there, you become vaguely aware of the facts that build on those.

In other words, the more you know, the more you realize you could know.

When I was high school, I would never memorize facts - I never saw the point. All I cared about was knowing that a fact was available and where it can be found. (Yes, I love the library. Why do you ask?) While I sucked at biology (why memorize phyla when Google knows them?!), I know exactly where to find information and, more importantly, what information is out there to find.

Maybe that's the best way to learn.

Fear and Middle Eastern politics

I don't care about the religious factions in the Middle East. I have no ties to Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Their faiths matter to them (which matters to me), but I have no preference between them.

That said, the first place to look is at Israel. No, it's not because I hate Jews or because I secretly sympathize with the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, or Iranians¹. The reason to look first at Israel is because Israel seems to be in the mix everytime there's a problem. When my eldest son was having issues in school a few years ago, it wasn't because he was doing anything overtly bad. It just happened that everytime something was going on, he seemed to be nearby. So, suspicion naturally fell on him. By moving away from the center of action, he stopped getting into trouble.

So, why is Israel always nearby when trouble arises in the Middle East? There are at least two sides to this.

Israeli supporters would say something like: Israel is just defending its right to exist, so must strike hard in response to any provocation. Otherwise its enemies will see it as weak.

Arab supporters would say something like: Zionists are attempting to destroy Islam and ensure the domination of the Jewish people. The Arab people must wipe this abomination from the face of the earth.

Not much in common, is there? Well, there is. Both viewpoints are driven by fear. The Israelis are afraid of being destroyed, so they lash out in what they feel is a desperate attempt to preven their demise. And, given the rhetoric, it's not a unreasonable position.

The Arabs, on the other hand, are afraid of losing more land, power, and lives to Israeli incursions. Ignoring for a second whether or not those incursions were provoked, it should be relatively obvious that the reactions taken by the Israelis are very harsh given the provocations. Two soldiers are kidnapped and 15,000 soldiers invade a sovreign nation without a declaration of war, drop 500lb bombs on civilian targets and end up killling around 1000 people in an incursion that lasts over 30 days. That seems to be the standard ratio between provocation and response.

Is it any wonder that compromise is extremely hard to come by?

Footnotes:

1. Did I miss anyone in that list? That there is a list should be a telling point.