Slack

#politics

Slack is effectively forgiveness. It's what we get from UBI.

Doctorow talks about how he went to school, but didn't, you know, go to school, and instead hung out at the library reading odd books. He started protesting the Iraq war. He bounced around to a number of schools before dropping out entirely.

He's still had a pretty successful life!

Today, I hold an honorary Ph.D. in Computer Science. I’m the author of more than 20 books, including many international bestsellers. I am affiliated with three universities on two continents, have been a delegate to the United Nations, and have given expert testimony to the legislatures of a dozen or more countries.

Slack is the ability to take second, third, and fourth chances.

Kids at University of Southern California are brilliant, but are offered NO slack, having to choose their majors as high school(!) freshmen:

According to my students, the path to admission to an elite school like USC starts on the first day of the ninth grade, when your guidance counselor tells you that your college career depends on a straight-A high-school record, and advises you to only take electives that you have already demonstrated aptitude for. This prefigures your whole secondary school career, with your course-load tilted toward whatever you happened to be good at on the first day of your freshman year.

Of course, those courses also determine your suitability for an undergraduate major, and since a year at a fancy university costs as much as a luxury car, switching majors midway through your degree is a prohibitively costly indulgence.

==Thus it is that your entire undergraduate career is based on whatever you happened to be interested in when you were an incoming high-schooler, at 13 or 14 years of age. This, in turn, determines which grad-school programs you can expect to gain admission to and/or what careers you might expect to pursue.

These kids aren't allowed to take intellectual risks, following a plan they drafted years ago, as pre-teens! And who can say if the end of that path is still viable when they graduate: A lot can change in 8 years.

We all need a little slack.

An unforgiving system, designed to work well but fail badly, is monumentally unsuitable to the chaotic world we're inhabiting.

How can we ask 14 year-olds to choose their future paths for the next two decades in a world where climate chaos means we can’t even predict which cities will remain habitable over that timespan?

Finally,

I want my kid to be able to goof off, fail courses, take others, switch majors, drop out, drop in, take a year off, start up again. I want her school to train her for the fluidity and unpredictability of a chaotic future. Instead, she’s growing up to a world where everyone gets one guess at what they should do for the rest of their life — and the best case scenario for the majority who guess wrong is debt-servitude and a life where curiosity is a bug, not a feature.

Monopolies

If you're an established big company, you can lobby for expensive hoops to jump through, because you're able to jump through them. If you successfully get a law on the books that says apple orchards have to pay $10,000 on founding, and you already have a highly profitable apple orchard, well that's not a problem! It only serves to hurt young upstarts who might want to start a new orchard but don't have that money on hand. In other words: potential competitors!

We can imagine the same thing in other fields: Intuit, the makers of Turbo Tax, regularly lobby the US government to keep tax laws byzantine and complex. If they were simple, no one would need their products!

See Bo Burnham on Rape Whistles:

And love is being the owner of the company that makes rape whistles
And even though you started the company with good intentions trying to reduce the rate of rape, now you don't want to reduce it at all cause if the rape rate declines then you'll see an equal decline in whistle sales
Without rapists, who's gonna buy your whistles?

So here's the trick: you make the requirements for other people things that are onerous, but that you already do. You use some obscure software? Great! You know how. If you can mandate other people to have to use that software, you've got a leg up on the competition.

Another example: Starbucks will put too many stores too close to one another, lowering their prices and driving out all the local coffee shops. Then, once they're the only ones in the neighborhood, they close down the redundant stores and raise the prices. You can compete with another neighborhood coffee shop, but you can't afford to compete with Starbucks. They have the capital (and the slack) to burn money forever. (update: when looking for research to back up this specific claim, I turned up empty. Apologies Starbucks. I did find this fascination article about how they actually raise their prices selectively to maintain an air of quality)

For example, consider a researcher facing [a] dilemma. They can keep going with business as normal – publishing trendy but ultimately useless papers that nobody will remember in ten years. Or they can work on Research Program Part 1, which might lead to Research Program Part 2, which might lead to Research Program Part 3, which might lead to a ground-breaking insight. If their jobs are up for review every year, and a year from now the business-as-normal researcher will have five trendy papers, and the groundbreaking-insight researcher will be halfway through Research Program Part 1, then the business-as-normal researcher will outcompete the groundbreaking-insight researcher; as the saying goes, “publish or perish”. Without slack, no researcher can unilaterally escape the system; their best option will always be to continue business as usual.

And from the same article on tariffs, relating to the section on Monopolies, above.

Post-WWII Japan realized that its own auto industry would never be able to compete with more established Western companies, so it placed high tariffs on foreign cars, giving local companies like Nissan and Toyota a chance to get their act together. These companies, especially Toyota, invented a new form of auto production which was actually much more efficient than the usual American methods, and were eventually able to hold their own. They started exporting cars to the US; although American tariffs put them at a disadvantage, they were so much better than the American cars of the time that consumers preferred them anyway. After decades of losing out, the American companies adopted a more Japanese ethos, and were eventually able to compete on a level playing field again.

Slack

A Fred Sanger would not survive today's world of science. With continuous reporting and appraisals, some committee would note that he published little of import between insulin in 1952 and his first paper on RNA sequencing in 1967 with another long gap until DNA sequencing in 1977. He would be labeled as unproductive, and his modest personal support would be denied. We no longer have a culture that allows individuals to embark on long-term—and what would be considered today extremely risky—projects.

Monopolies

See Also

Slack