The times, they are a changin'

Two weeks or so into the reaction to the death of George Floyd it is starting to feel like we are at a major turning point, a cultural Tsunami.  The signs are everywhere.  And lots of people are saying "things will never be the same again".  Are they right?  That's the subject of this post.

The song quoted in the title was written by Bob Dylan in 1964, another time of great cultural upheaval.  It was my time.  I was in High School and College in the '60s and early '70s.  Trust me (and anyone who lived through that time), back then it very much felt like the times really were changing.  That nothing would ever be the same.  Are we in a similar period?  Let me go back considerably further to provide some historical context.

At the time of its founding this country did not have any political parties.  That didn't last long.  After a few early fits and starts the Democratic party was formed.  It's still going strong.  For a while the Whig party, modeled loosely on a British party of the same name, was the other major party.  As the 1800s wore on, a single issue came to dominate public discourse, slavery.  For a while there were large pro-slavery and pro-abolitionist wings in each party.  But the Democratic Party slowly evolved to become a mostly pro-slavery party.

The Whigs had more trouble.  The size of the pro-slavery and pro-abolition wings were more even.  As a result, no resolution was possible.  Eventually the Whig party splintered.  The pro-abolition wing became what is now the Republican party.  Some in the pro-slavery wing migrated to the Democrats.  The rest eventually withered away.

That was the situation going into the Civil War.  Lincoln and the Republicans won the White House.  With the start of the War the the Democratic Party lost most of its southerner members.  By and large, they defected to the Confederacy.  The number of Democrats that remained with the party in the north became too small to make the party competitive, at least while the War was raging.

That allowed the Republican Party to retain effective control of the U. S. government throughout the War.  For this, and many other reasons, the Civil War was a time of great change.  But this was in the context of an ideological struggle that had been going on for many decades.

We don't know what would have happened if Lincoln had not been assassinated at the end of the War.  He advocated for a moderate and reconciliatory attitude toward the south.  With him out of the picture the "Radical Reconstruction" people gained the upper hand.  They set out to punish the south and solidified the already substantial antagonism the south held toward the north.  That antagonism remains to the day, and the Civil Ear ended over 150 years ago.

One side effect was that the south became the "solid south", voting reliably Democratic from the late 1800s until roughly 1980.  If the Democratic Party could be roughly competitive in the rest of the country then the solid south would put them over the top and give them the upper hand at the Federal level.

In spite of this, starting in roughly 1890 the Republicans had a good run.  Their thinking was that "what's good for business is good for the U. S. A.".  People bought it.  One reason was that technological advancement, brought to us by corporations, wrought more change, most of them positive, in the lives of average people for the period running from about 1875 to about 1925 than the world had ever seen before and is likely to ever see again.

Transportation was revolutionized.  Steam trains and ships permitted faster, safer, and more comfortable transportation than ever before.  The telegraph (and later the telephone) and the electric light revolutionized communications.  It also meant the rhythm of the day was no longer tied to that of the sun.

Machinery revolutionized farming and manufacturing.  The sewing machine and the typewriter came into widespread use.  And on and on.  The way that the typical person lived in 1925 was radically different than the way a similarly situated person had lived in 1875.  And the way many people lived in 1875 was not greatly different from how people had lived since time immemorial.

This great advancement in the way ordinary people lived, for the most part brought to them by the corporations of the time, led to great contentment and a general trust in the business friendly Republicans.  And that translated to electoral success.

Then the stock market crashed in 1929.  Almost nobody had money in "the market" so almost nobody was directly affected.  The same companies churned out the same products that consumers loved purchasing.  So, it wasn't the crash that changed everything.  It was the response to the crash.

Republicans applied the economic orthodoxy of the day to counteract its initially modest effects.  They effectively shut down credit and severely restricted what banks could do.  That forced banks into an extremely defensive posture.

There was no FDIC at the time.  When some weak banks got into trouble they were forced to close their doors.  That left depositors of both the individual and business variety out in the cold with whatever money they had in that bank gone.  This was rightly called a panic at the time.  And panics were nothing new.  They had been happening routinely for many decades by the time 1930 rolled around.  So, people and businesses knew exactly how they played out.

Watching an unusually high number of banks go under made everybody skittish.  At the least sign of a bank in difficulty, depositors rushed to pull all their money out.  They started a "run on the bank".  Some banks were actually weak.  But many were sound and would have come through just fine if they had not been subjected to a bank run.  It didn't matter.  For the most part they went under and that made everybody get even more skittish.

And this inability of businesses to do business normally caused businesses to hunker down.  They cut salaries and laid people off.  That left many people (unemployment insurance hadn't been invented yet either) in much reduced financial circumstances, so they drastically cut spending.  That shrunk demand for consumer products and businesses were forced to scale back even more.

This is what is called a viscous circle.  And as the circle wound tighter and tighter the economy got worse and worse.  It took a couple of years but by 1932 people were ready for a change.  They no longer trusted business they way they once had.

The Democrats, headed by FDR, offered a populist approach to governance.  That was enough to give them big wins.  And they started making changes everywhere.  Some worked.  Some didn't.  And some were declared illegal.  But Democrats were manifestly trying to make things better.  That was enough to allow them to retain the trust of the people.

And that cemented the change in public attitude from generally pro-business to much more anti-business.  A long standing understanding changed after several decades of remaining the same.  And, as a result, the business friendly Republicans went out of favor and stayed out of favor for a long time.

Then World War II came along.  FDR was credibly able to argue that he was forced into it so he was not blamed for getting the U. S. dragged into "foreign entanglements".  And he is generally credited with doing a good job of prosecuting the War.  And we ended up on the winning side.

The combination of winning the War and the fact that the U. S. got dragged into it in spite of a concerted effort to satay out caused a change.  The isolationist attitude that had held sway since the country had been founded was replaced by an internationalist attitude.

Truman continued Roosevelt's policies but people were ready for a "return to normalcy".  They found it with Eisenhauer.  On the surface, and under the guidance of Eisenhauer the '50s seemed like a quiet time and people liked that.  In fact, people had always liked peace and quiet. 

FDR could and did argue that he didn't cause the mess that was the Great Depression.  He was just the guy tasked with fixing it.  He could and did also argue that he was just the guy in charge when the bad guys declared War on us.  Truman was not in a position to be able to make similar arguments and his popularity suffered for it.

But it turns out that, contrary to the consensus view of most observers at the time, there was a lot going on under the surface in the '50s.  I don't know the what and the why of it.  But the start of the modern Civil Rights movement happened in the late '40s.

One argument is that a lot of black soldiers came home from the War. They had been asked to possibly give their lives in the defense of freedom.  But they came home to find that they still had no freedom.  It's possible this theory is the correct one.  But I confess I don't really know.

In any case, starting in the late '40s, and accelerating through the '50s, more and more actions were taken in the pursuit of Civil Rights for blacks.  For a long time it was a "backburner" story.

Civil Rights organizers persisted in spite of the fact that most people's attention was elsewhere.  And they initially found the bulk of their support coming from within the black community.  But over time this support broadened into substantial support from the white community.  Why?  One explanation is technological advance.

The TV in primitive form was invented in the late '30s.  More or less practical TV was more widely available by around 1950.  But TV-related technological advances came hot and heavy during this period.

I live in Seattle.  In the early years of TV, network shows were only available live in a few places.  The original west coast outpost was Los Angeles.  There, using a primitive TV set and movie camera lash up called "Kinescope", network shows were transferred to film.  The film was developed, printed, and flown to Seattle.

There, my local station broadcast it by aiming a customized TV camera at a small movie screen.  This complicated process introduced a delay amounting to the better part of a day.  But seeing network shows the day after they originally aired was better than not seeing them at all.  The process also introduced a substantial degradation in the already not very good quality of the picture and sound.  But at the time the results were judged to be good enough.

By the early '60s most cities of significant size, and that included Seattle, were connected to a national "coaxial cable" that distributed the network feed.   This allowed local stations to broadcast "live" without the delay and degradation of the kinescope process.

This also permitted a "national" news show, typically originating from New York City, to be seen all over the country at about the same time.  ("Live" shows were retransmitted over the cable after a three hour delay so that they showed up at the same local time in New York and in west coast cities like Seattle.)

All of a sudden everyone was getting the same news.  And they were getting it at the same time.  (There were three networks at the time but their news broadcasts were very similar in terms of the stories they aired and the perspective they applied to them.)

TV news started out using kinescope-like technology.  Field pieces were filmed with a 16 mm camera.  (Kinescope also used 16 mm equipment.)  The film could be developed and modest editing performed.  The result could then be aired in a segment on the news show.  It was primitive but effective.

It was also eye opening.  Before this people were familiar with short "newsreel" segments shown as part of the "preview" package that ran before a movie was shown in a movie theater.  But few people went to the movies more than once per week.  So, they were subjected to one five minute newsreel per week.  The rest of their news came via print newspapers.  The national news shows quickly expanded to a half hour  And they were broadcast five days per week, every week.

Then as now, the news likes "bang bang" stories, stories full of action, and the more violence, the better.  But, in a nod to the presumed sensibilities of viewers, closeups of blood and dead people were off limits.  But that just meant that cameramen resorted to longshots when filming that sort of thing.

That dodge made everybody happy.  The rules against "excessive violence" were being followed.  But the news could still feature lots of film of things (and people) getting blown up and other forms of general mayhem.  And film of white cops beating up, sic'ing dogs on, and otherwise abusing, peaceful black (and later white) demonstrators, made for great "bang bang" footage.

It's not that the morality of what was going on had changed.  It was that film on the TV news had a more visceral impact on people.  That made it harder for people to pretend that things like this were not happening.  And there were lots of young, hungry, reporters trying to make a name for themselves.  They were willing to do what it took to get the technology to work well enough to get this footage to New York where producers were more than willing to put it on the air.

And, to be very clear, this was a good thing.  These news people were doing exactly what they should have been doing.  It's just that before the technology reached the point that it did in the early '60s it was literally impossible to have these stories land with enough impact to get people to change their minds.

All of us are just too good at ignoring inconvenient truths because they are, well, inconvenient.  There is no doubt that TV coverage gave a big boost to the Civil Rights movement in the '60s.  This boost should have not been necessary but it irrefutably was.

But it's never just one thing.  The Civil Rights movement generated a lot of turmoil.  But then the Vietnam War came along.  The tale is a complex and sordid one.  And, like the after effects of the Civil War, it resonates right down to today.

And again an important factor is the rivalry between the two major political parties.  Democrats had scored major points by winning World War II.  Republicans wanted to take them down a notch.  The business community, long time staunch supporters of Republicans, had and has a fear and dread of Communism, the then political system of Russia.  So, after World War II ended Republican started accusing Democrats of being "soft on Communism" and of "being unwitting dupes" in various Communist sponsored schemes.

The accusations gained some traction so Democrats started trying to out anti-Communist the Republicans.  The French had some colonies in what was then called Indochina.  After the War they wanted them back.  But a Vietnamese nationalist named Ho Chi Minh (who had sat the War out in Paris) became popular in his native country of Vietnam, then part of Indochina.  The problem was that he was a Communist.

So everybody in U. S. politics competed to out anti-Ho everybody else.  The result was that the U. S. gave the French a ton of money to beat Ho.  They failed spectacularly in a place called Dien Bien Phu in '54.  The result was the partition of Vietnam into a Ho controlled north and a "free" south.  Various second raters were put in control in the south.  They were then propped up by western, mostly U. S., interests.  Being second rate, these people did a poor job and Ho made steady gains.

Then, for complex reasons I am going to skip over, President Johnson decided that it was critical to "win in Vietnam".  His real goal was to prevent Republicans from scoring on him by leveling a "weak on Communism" charge.  I also believe that he truly believed that it was important to keep Vietnam out of Communist control. 

But with second raters as a foundation, and an ill conceived "100% military" strategy, the war went poorly.  The result is that a large number of young American men were drafted and sent off to war.  Vietnam was the first TV war.  The technology at the start was the same, 16 mm film shot there and sent to New York.

And the "lots of bang bang but no closeup blood and death" rule was applied to coverage of the war.  But it was obviously a real, not a movie, war.  And that might not have mattered except that it still kept going badly in spite of the fact that at one time over 500,000 American soldiers were thrown into the fray.

In the minds of many Americans, World War II was what the Russians called "The Great Patriotic War".  Germany and Japan were formidable enemies and they attacked us.  With Vietnam things were quite different.   Vietnam was a third world country.  They had neither the population nor the economic ability to mount a serious challenge.  And the aggressors from the north were supposed to be crippled by the "bankrupt" Communist system they operated under.

Sure, Ho got help from the Russians, the Chinese, and others.  But it wasn't all that much help.  And it quickly became obvious to one and all that the American backed South Vietnamese government was incompetent, venial, and corrupt.  So "what are we fighting for again?" was an oft asked question for which a compelling answer was never forthcoming.

And that resulted in a lot of draftees not wanting to be anywhere near where the shooting was taking place.  And that resulted in a large, well organized, and popular anti-War movement emerging.  And that resulted in the same kind of "bang bang" film that the Civil Rights movement had become famous for showing up on the news . Only this time it wasn't blacks in the south.  It was white protesters all over the country.

And, in the middle of all this TV went "full living color".  Blood shows up much better on screen in color than it had in black and white.  Color 16 mm film had been available for years at this point.  So getting color pictures to New York wasn't the problem.  What was lacking was TV equipment capable of transmitting those color pictures to our living rooms.

But RCA, then a giant electronics company, introduced a line of color cameras, TVs, and all the other technical equipment necessary to connect the two together, in the early '60s.  By the mid-60's they were ready to make a splash on NBC, the network they then owned.  Once NBC went "all color", including on their flagship evening news show, the other networks, at the time just ABC and CBS, were forced to follow.  And follow they did.

The Vietnam War, now coming to us in living color, dragged on to the mid '70s.  The story is sad, complicated, and sordid, but I am going to spare you from going through all of it.  The point is that all the commotion and turmoil attendant to factions for and against U. S. participation in the Vietnam War played out during this period.

And remember, commotion and turmoil attendant to the Civil Rights movement continued in parallel during this same period.  In 1968, for instance, we saw a police created riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  This was all televised live and all related to the Vietnam  protests.  In the same year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in events related to the Civil Rights movement.  Bobby Kennedy, brother of President Kennedy, was also assassinated in '68.  He was associated with both Civil Rights and the Vietnam War protests. 

But wait!  There's more.  Along came the Women's Movement, often shorthanded derisively as "Women's Lib".  Women had been involved in the Civil Rights movement and in the Vietnam Protest movement.  But in both cases, they had mostly been restricted to "behind the scenes" roles.  There, they (and by "they" I'm talking specifically about white women here) had supported others.

In the Civil Rights movement it had been blacks.  In the Vietnam Protest movement it had been boyfriends and husbands.  At some point, however, a number of women said "it's our turn now".  The early Woman's Movement consisted almost entirely of white women.  They had little power but women of color had even less.

People have forgotten just how second (or third) class the status of women was at the time of the start of the Women's Movement.  Women were generally expected to marry and become homemakers.  Women who worked were relegated to "women's jobs", secretary, schoolteacher, nurse.

Financially and legally, most women did not have a separate identity.  Their "charge cards" (this was before the modern Credit Card came into widespread use) may have had their names on them.  But the credit history, etc. was attached, not to them, but to their husband.  Women who divorced found that they had essentially no public identity.  So operating on their own was very difficult.

And it was just assumed that men were entitled to certain paternal rights.  Back then, in many jurisdictions it was legally impossible for a husband to rape his wife.  She had a legal obligation to "put out" as much as he wanted and in any form he wanted. And in many jurisdictions it was entirely legal for a husband to literally beat his wife.  He could do it for any reason or for no reason.

A man was supposed to support his wife but he paid no penalty if he failed to do so.  In fact, husbands almost always had complete control of all moneys no matter what their source.  And divorces were very hard to get.  The "no fault" divorce came later.  As long as a husband was not literally caught in the act, he could cat around as much as he wanted to.  No so for the wife.  She was expected to remain faithful regardless of how he behaved.

In any case, the Woman's Movement got its start during this period.  This added to the chaos and the feeling among many that "things were spiraling out of control" and a concern that "there seemed to be no end to it".

Now, don't get me wrong  I think far more good than bad came out of each of the three movements I have discussed.  But by the late '40s it had been twenty years since some sense of normalcy had reigned supreme.  People yearned to go back to a "simpler time" that had never actually existed. That made Eisenhauer very popular in his time.  Twenty years after the late '40s, a lot of people yearned to go back to the Eisenhauer era.  For a lot of people it had been a good time.

But it had not been a good time for blacks.  It had not been a good time for those men who got drafted and had to go off to fight the Korean "Police Action" (for reasons too complicated to get into here it was NOT a War).  It had not been a good time for those women who did not want to be confined to the role of mother and homemaker.

The fact that right was on the side of all three movements did not stop many people from coming to resent all three.  And that formed the basis for s cultural shift.  The roots started earlier but it really took hold with Reagan entering the White House in early '81.  But before moving on I want to reinforce a key observation.

The Civil Rights Movement was a movement long in the making and long in the execution.  You can go back hundreds of years but you don't have to.  The Movement of this period definitely started to gather steam in the late '40s.  Then it simmered in the '50s, only occasionally popping to the surface.  In the '60s burst forth onto the scene but this was after a long gestation.  It essentially ran out of gas in the '70s as pushback against all the chaos gained strength.

The Vietnam Protest movement was an exception to the pattern I have established.  It came and went a lot more quickly because it was tied to a specific event.  Few U. S. soldiers were involved in Vietnam before 1965.  Things quickly moved to a peak in the late '60s.  Then Nixon announced the troop draw down and there were again few American soldiers in Vietnam by early in the '70s.  The War ended for once and for all when Saigon fell in '75.

The key driving force behind the movement was young men being drafted and sent to 'Nam.  That was only in effect in a significant way for a few years.  So, it was a movement with a relatively fixed duration.  But still, it was a powerful force for more than five years.  Before leaving the subject entirely, let me note that the Vietnamese date the beginning of the War to the Japanese surrender in '45.  And the War for them was intensely prosecuted right up until the last minute in '75.  It is with good reason that they call it "the 10,000 day war".  Not perhaps six years but thirty years.

The Woman's movement had been simmering along out of sight for many decades before it surfaced right around 1970.  The turning away represented by Reagan's election dealt it a serious blow.  But it has continued to simmer along, mostly out of sight, ever since.  It never completely went away.  It just dropped off the radar.  Until recently, the same thing has happened to the Civil Rights Movement.  But back to the main thread.

The conservative component of society became ascendant roughly with the Reagan election success.  Republicans also benefitted from a shift by the solid south from the Democratic party to the Republican party. Roughly breaking even in the rest of the country now translated to a win for Republicans.  It also helped that Reagan became immensely popular in a manner similar to FDR.  He was term limited in a way FDR wasn't.  But he was succeeded by Bush "41", who continued his policies but lacked his charm and charisma.

Bush "41' became a one term President when Clinton succeeded him.  He had lots of charm and charisma.  But conservatives staged a comeback two years into his term.  Clinton got re-elected but did not have strong enough coat tails to bring along allies in the House and Senate.  His term was marred by scandals, both real and artificial.

Clinton's charisma challenged Vice President lost to Bush "43". That took the steam out of any kind of "return to liberalism" movement.  Instead, conservatives were back in control.  Bush "43" managed to secure re-election.  And conservatives were also generally able to be successful in congress.  This cemented their ability to control the national agenda.

Another charismatic politician made his appearance in '08, Barak Obama.  He enjoyed large majorities in congress for his first two years.  But conservatives roared back and regained control in congress after that.  In spite of the fact that his administration was generally seen as successful, conservatives were able to elect their man Trump in '16.  With short exceptions conservatives have dominated affairs and set the agenda for about 40 years now.  Is that about to change?

Let's see what we can see.  Liberals were able to swing a tremendous number of seats and gain solid control of the House in '18.  However, in '18 conservatives maintained control of the Senate.  House liberals have been able to block a lot of conservative initiatives and articulate a liberal message.  But they, in turn, have been blocked from enacting much of anything.  We live in an era of gridlock.  But then we have been living in an era of gridlock for most of the last 30 years.

Conservatives have at various times been able to enact parts of their agenda.  Liberals at other times have been able to enact parts of their agenda.  But for the most part it has been a standoff.  From a legislative perspective it is a standoff right now.

But then the video of George Floyd surfaced.  People took to the streets.  After a couple of weeks of this, protesters have a number of wins they can point to.  And that just emboldens them to ask for more.  I am not going to go into the twists and turns of recent events even though it is a remarkable story.  For the purposes of this post I want to focus on the wider picture.

Many protesters are now saying "everything has changed".  Has it?  There is currently considerable evidence to support the conclusion that everything has changed.  But a longer term perspective councils for caution.  Historically, pivots have taken years not weeks to take place.  But before going on let me refer to something I highlighted above.

A technological advancement was key to the success of the Civil Rights movement in the '50s and '60s.  16 mm film could be shot in the field, processed, then shown on the evening news.  This exposed the general public to scenes they that had not previously seen.  And those pictures being broadcast on the newly created half hour nightly national news shows had a profound impact.

The current technological innovation is the now ubiquitous smartphone that is capable of taking video and transmitting it to the Internet.  Events like those surrounding Mr. Floyd's death are now being captured on video.  And that video is making its way to large segments of the public.

Mr. Floyd's death was not the first of these.  Smartphones capable of taking and transmitting video have been around for several years now.  But a few years ago they were rare and before that they were nonexistent.  Back then something like this was captured only very occasionally.  But as the years have rolled by more and more events were being captured in this way.

Police used to be confident that they could stay out of the public eye when it came to routine one-on-one encounters with members of the public.  It may be that those days are now over.  In the wake of the Floyd incident we have now seen a mountain of video of police encounters.  And in case after case in city after city police have been shown to be behaving badly.  Some police departments in some cities behave badly more often.  Some less.  But it is becoming harder to sustain the notion that police anywhere behave badly on only rare occasions.

And it has become blindingly obvious that police behave badly far more often when black and brown people are involved.  There are a number of videos of cops behaving badly to white people.  But the overwhelming number of events involve people of color.  This disparity has been on display for days and days now.  And it has had an impact on white people.  The result is that large numbers of white people have now joined what were originally predominantly black protests.

Before continuing, I am going to make another digression.  A few days ago I watched a movie.  The movie was a typical example of a trope.  In it, a thug-cop good guy vanquishes some bad guys including other thug-cops.  This "sometimes a good guy has to bend (or break) they law in order to render justice" is a common trope in books, movies, and on TV.  We can all reel off dozens of examples.

But there are two big implicit assumptions underlying this trope.  The first is the most obvious.  Justice is impossible if cops follow the law closely.  The other is that there are lots of good thug-cops around working diligently to save us from the bad thug-cops.

This "you've got to break the law to do the job right" idea makes for good drama.  But it provides a license for those, particularly cops, to feel righteous about breaking the law whenever they personally feel that it is justified.  But the only data supporting this idea is to be found in the sales figures, box office receipts, and ratings, of fiction that adheres to this trope.  And let's say it's true that some laws are problematic.  Then how about fixing the laws instead of relying on vigilante justice?

I'm sure every thug-cop thinks he is a good guy doing what good guys in cop fiction do.  But there is another implicit assumption going on.  That assumption is that the good guy thug-cop knows who the good-guy civilians are and who the bad-guy civilians are.  This is demonstrably false.  Lots of  thug-cops assume that, for the most part, white people are good guys and people of color are bad guys.

In reality, race and/or skin color are poor predictors of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.  Here's an example ripped straight from the statute books.  Until recently, laws at all levels said that all pot smokers are bad guys. Federal law still says that.  In fact, Federal law says anybody having anything to do with pot is a "category 1" sleaze ball, the worst of the worst.

Lots of studies have been done and they all say the same thing.  White people and people of color smoke pot at the same rate.  But white bad-guy pot smokers rarely get arrested.  For a bad-guy pot smoker in a minority neighborhood the story is quite different.  They are something like six times as likely to get arrested.

This is a situation that cries out for the kind of vigilante justice that thug-cops specialize in.  Lots of "worst of the worst" total bad-guy pot smokers are skating by without receiving the attention they deserve and demand from the criminal justice system. This wrong cries out to be righted.  Yet where are the good-guy thug-cops working the pot beat on the white side of town?

"Do what it takes" thug-cops are obviously needed there.  If "follow the law as written" combined with regular "by the book" policing could get the job done then it would already have done so.  Something more is obviously called for.  So where's the vigilante crowd?  Isn't this the kind of void they are supposed to fill?  Bad-guy pot smokers are a dime a dozen in many white neighborhoods.  It tells you everything you need to know that there are no thug-cops going hard after white pot smokers.

The point is that cops are bad judges of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.  Cops often do not take people as they find them.  They assume that most white people are good guys that don't call for thug-cop behavior.  Conversely, they assume that it is common to find people of color who are bad guys.  So they go transition to thug-cop behavior at the drop of a hat.  They rarely take the time to find out whether they are right or not.

The fact that you can use any number of books, movies, and TV shows to understand why cops go rogue so often has changed my perception of  this whole category of entertainment.  Back to the subject at hand.

So, paradigm shift, full speed ahead, right?  Maybe.  Part of what's currently going on is that people have been locked up at home for weeks.  Many people currently have no job to go to.  Protesting is a wonderful excuse to get out of the house.

Does this mean that protesters are insincere?  Not at all.  But it must be kept in mind that right now protesting involves little cost or inconvenience.  If you are out of work protesting doesn't lose you any income.  There is no admission fee so the price is right.  You are not missing out on other things you could be doing because most of that is shut down.  And you can feel good about yourself.

That said, participating in a protest can be a life changing event.  You eyes can get opened in a way that likely would not otherwise happen.  That can result in permanent change.  So the possibility definitely exists that this all signals a permanent and substantial change in the direction of the country.

But this has all only been going on for a couple of weeks.  And unique circumstances (the COVID19 lockdown) have enabled large groups of people to show up to protests day after day (or night after night).  What happens when we reach week ten or week thirty or year three?  It's too soon to tell.

The technological change that makes things heretofore hidden now visible is here to stay.  But at some point film from various the Civil Rights events started failing to make the same impact it had previously.  People were "been there - seen that -  not interested any more".  Will the same boredom set in with respect to the video that is currently stirring so much excitement?

And in the Civil Rights era the bad guys eventually got smarter.  They figured out ways to stay out of the viewfinders of news cameras.  And things got better.  A "Civil Rights Act" bill was passed into law.  A "Voting Rights Act" bill was passed into law.  The U. S. military involvement in Vietnam came to an end.  Women won substantial and permanent gains to their positions in society.

But maybe the conservative dominance of our politics will finally wane and we will move into a more liberal period.  And maybe advances similar to what happened with Civil Rights and Women's Rights will happen with respect to how people of color are treated and the way police do their jobs.

And other advances in other areas, the environment, economic equity, universal access to quality medical care, and who knows what else, could become reality.  In short, the liberal agenda could run out of steam by achieving a number of permanent successes.  I'm hoping for it but not counting on it.

60 Years of Sceince - Part 18

This post is the next in a series that dates back several years.  In fact, it's been going on for long enough that several posts ago I decided to upgrade the title from "50 Years of Science" to "60 Years of Science",  And, if we group all of them together, this is the eighteenth main entry in the series.  You can go to http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html for a post that contains links to all of the posts in the series.  I will update that post to include a link to this entry as soon as I have posted it.

I take Isaac Asimov's book "The Intelligent Man's guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science when he wrote the book (1959 - 60).  In this post I will be reviewing two sections:  "Particles and Waves" from his chapter titled "The Waves", and "Fire and Steam" from his chapter titled "The Machines".

"Particles and Waves" is a discussion of the early days of Quantum Mechanics.  Plank had introduced the idea that light, or more generally electromagnetic radiation, had both a particle aspect and a wave aspect.

By the 1920s it was obvious that dualism was not limited to electromagnetic radiation.  Einstein had also introduced the dualism between mass and energy.  His famous equation was just the way you converted one to the other.  In 1915 with General Relativity he had done the same thing with space and time, creating the word spacetime to emphasize the degree with which they were intertwined.

And it was not just ethereal things like spacetime and electromagnetic radiation that had a dual nature.  In 1923 de Broglie came along and predicted that down to earth particles, in this case electrons, could be made to behave in a distinctly wave-like manner.  In 1927 an experiment done at Bell Labs proved this prediction correct.  This surprising development was put to good use almost immediately in the form of the "electron microscope".

The sharpness with which a microscope is capable of resolving images depends on the wavelength of the "light".  (Modern techniques have been developed to fudge this "rule" somewhat.)  The wavelength associated with an electron microscope is in the X-Ray band, much shorter than the "visible" band our eyes are sensitive to.  So electron microscopes are capable of taking sharp pictures of things that are much smaller than anything a standard light microscope can handle.

At the time of this discovery and right through to the time of publication of Asimov's book, electron microscopes were expensive and very hard to use.  So they were used in very limited situations.  Technological advances haven't make them as cheap and easy to use as a light microscope.  But both cost and difficulty have plunged.  So they are far more ubiquitous now.  This has improved both their availability and their frequency of use.

The first crude electron microscope was built in 1932.  The first practical one was built in 1937.  But by "practical" I mean a device that was hand built by skilled technicians in a well equipped laboratory.  All of these early machines were one of a kind devices with no two of them being identical.  It would take a number of decades before you could order a standard model out of inventory from one of several "laboratory supply" companies.

Asimov speculates that some day a "Proton microscope" will be built.  For reasons I am not going to get into, the heavier the particle, the shorter the wavelength.  A Proton, weighing in at roughly 2,000 times as heavy as an electron, has a much smaller wavelength.  That means that it can be used to "see" things that are even smaller than the kinds of things an electron microscope can see.

Proton microscopes are now a reality.  As are devices that utilize even shorter wavelengths than the wavelength associated with a Proton microscope.  These devices are all fantastically expensive and fantastically difficult to build and operate.  So their usage is roughly similar to that of the electron microscope in the '30s.

By now, roughly 1930, things in this area of physics have been getting more and more confusing as the decades had passed.  The simplicity and clarity of Newtonian mechanics kept getting dealt blow after blow.  Things seemed to keep getting wronger and wronger.  And for a long time it was not obvious how to build a new theory to replace Newtonian mechanics.  Sure, it was wrong.  But what was right?

The experimental proof of the existence of "matter waves" (particles like electrons demonstrating wave-like properties) actually helped rather than hurt.  It pointed out the direction in which the new theory must lie.  A consistent set of ideas kept popping up in situation after situation.  They were completely bizarre but they seemed to be the way things worked in a wide variety of situations.

One of these places was in the nucleus of atoms.  Bohr had come up with a model in which electrons orbited the nucleus.  But if electrons behaved just like the planets in our solar system did then all kinds of problems arose.  And by this time it was well known that electrons confined themselves to a small number of fixed "orbitals".

Electron orbitals were quantized in a way that planetary orbits were not.  Schrodinger widened the gulf.  He considered the wave nature of electrons and decided they did not travel in circular "planetary" orbits.  He decided further that they didn't even have a fixed position in the way a planet orbiting the Sun does.

He could get things to work by focusing on the wavelength that de Broglie had calculated for the electron.  He went on to come up with a whole "wave mechanics" to explain all this.  Well, "explain" is not the right word.  But what he did do was come up with a way to make calculations that got the right answer.

But trying to model the "reality" his equations described turned out to be a fools errand.  There just wasn't a "planets orbiting the sun" (or any other kind of) model that could be created that matched either the equations or the reality.

Physics and much of science had made great progress by developing models and then using them to guide their exploration.  But several decades of "quantum" this and that, now followed by "wave equations" and other developments left scientists feeling extremely uneasy.  They did not want to be cut loose from their models.

But requiring a model that seemed anything like day to day experience was holding things back.  At the time this concern was confined primarily to the physics community.  Since then it has spread to all corners of society.  It is one of the things driving the modern anti-science movement.

So Schrodinger dealt a blow to the idea that an electron was this tiny marble orbiting the nucleus like a small planet.  Heisenberg proceeded to demolish this simple, comfortable model.  He developed something called "matrix mechanics" do describe what was going on.

He replaced the simple "variable" of an Algebraic (or Calculus or other branches of higher mathematics) with a matrix.  The "X" of "X + Y = Z" fame wasn't a number.  It was a grid of numbers.  The form looked the same.  You still saw terms connected with operators like plus or minus or times or whatever.  But a term had internal structure.

Mathematicians had worked out the "mathematics of matrixes" long since, if you restricted yourself to regular algebra.  This new mathematics required much higher forms of math.  But the techniques developed for dealing with matrixes in an algebraic situation could and were extended to provide techniques for dealing with this new regime.  It was fiendishly difficult but it could be done.  And Heisenberg showed how it should be done for his formulation.

I'm going to spare you from delving into any of this.  But there is a consequence of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics that we have all become more or less familiar with.  That's his "Uncertainty Principle".

Asimov, master explainer that he is, starts in the right place.  Heisenberg concerned himself with a seemingly simple question:  "where's the electron right now?"  The obvious way to find out is to shine a light on it and look for it.  But what, exactly does that mean?  And what would you see if that's what you did?

Electrons are small and light.  That means they can easily be pushed around by something like the photons that light is composed of.  So, the very process of trying to find out where the electron is inevitably changes its position.  In short, the process of trying to observe an electron introduces some uncertainty in its location.  You can never be truly sure exactly where it is.

That's where Asimov leaves things.  It is a "natural" explanation that doesn't give  anybody any trouble.  But Asimov is doing us a disservice.  What Heisenberg really believed, and what physicists now also believe, is not that there was some technical limitation that rendered positions uncertain.

Rather, Heisenberg believed that the position of an electron is inherently uncertain.  Even if you could come up with a clever experimental technique that would permit measuring the location of an electron without bouncing something off of it, that wouldn't be enough.  Even though you avoided changing its location by bouncing your probe off of it, you would still find that you couldn't nail the exact location of the electron down.

Asimov then goes on to briefly discuss the philosophical ramifications of this uncertainty.  They are widespread and profound.  Religion has been debating the subject of "free will" for millennia.

If the world is "deterministic", then you can predict all future events with complete accuracy if only you know the present to a high enough degree of precision.  In a deterministic universe free will is literally impossible.  Instead, "what will be, will be."

If there is no free will then the concept of sin makes no sense.  If you murder someone but the laws of the universe (determinism) tell us that you had no choice then it's not your fault.  Since you had no choice in the matter you do not deserve to be punished.  Uncertainty provides a scientific justification for believing that free will is possible.

Uncertainty means that we can't know everything.  But that begs the question:  can we know anything?  I could go on.  But lots of books have been written on all this.  And some of the people who wrote them are a lot smarter than I am.

Asimov leaves us here on the verge of Quantum Mechanics.  So he and we will now move on to a new chapter, "The Machine", and a new topic, "Fire and Steam".

With this section we move from the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics, or at least the run up to it, and to the world of backyard mechanics.  As Asimov observes, "[t]he whole civilization of mankind has been built on finding new sources of energy and harnessing them in more efficient and sophisticated ways".

He blithely continues from there as if "onward and upward" was all there was to it.  I'll have something to say about this later.  In the mean time, "we shall make a rapid survey of the engines, machines, and instruments" that have made this ascent possible.

The first of these is fire, "discovered" perhaps a half a million years ago according to Asimov.  Current suggestive but not definitive evidence for the use of fire puts the date at about 1.4 million years ago.  The oldest date for which we currently have incontrovertible evidence of human use of fire is 780,000 years ago.

Fire provides warmth.  But it also enables cooked food to become a diet staple.  Cooking not only warms food.  It also chemically modifies it in ways that make otherwise inedible food edible.  There are numerous other benefits to cooked food.

Fire, or more broadly, the release of chemical energy, provides what Asimov describes as "a practically limitless supply of energy".  But, as an energy supply, it has many limitations.  This is particularly true in the pre-industrial age.  In this period mankind was pretty much limited to burning wood.

Burning wood provides more energy than human muscle power can provide.  But, by modern measures, the amount of available energy is limited.  And in a pre-industrial world it can't be used for much beyond supplying heat for warmth and for cooking.  Oh, and the development of the lamp did enable it to be used to provide a modest amount of lighting.

Early efforts to look beyond wood (and, to a modest extent, fats and oils burned in lamps and stoves) first began in the "Dark Ages", the medieval period in Europe. There some people discovered that coal could be burned.

The military necessity of making high quality swords and other military devices led to an interest in high temperature metallurgy.  Coal made access to high temperature furnaces easier.  And that led to a move from iron to steel in weaponry.  But coal remained confined to this niche use for a long time.

The medieval period also saw the introduction of wind and water driven "mills" to grind grains and for other purposes.  Asimov also notes that this period in time saw the introduction of explosives (a semi-legitimate adjunct to his subject), and the development of the magnetic compass (an illegitimate adjunct as it was not a method for harnessing significant amounts of energy).  Finally, he notes the use of coal and other energy sources to produce glass started during this period.  Very little glass was made before the industrial age so I will grant the subject only a very modest degree of legitimacy as an appropriate adjunct.

But almost all inanimate energy use was then derived from the burning of wood for heating and cooking purposes.  And Asimov doesn't even mention the harnessing of wind power for transportation uses by means of sails.  Using sails to power boats actually precedes the medieval period by perhaps a thousand years.

Asimov gives a brief history of the use of explosives in a military context, noting that cannons featured prominently in the Battle of Crecy in 1348 and were in general use from then on.  He then takes a detour into movable type.  That was an important development, Guttenberg's Bibles were printed in about 1450, but made little difference in the availability or use of "fire and steam".  (He also notes the importance of the nearly simultaneous replacement of parchment with paper as being an important development.)  He then returns to the subject at hand.

At the end of the seventeenth century attention was paid to the problem of removing water from mines.  The obvious solution is the pump.  This presented two subproblems.  The first one was the most obvious.  Where do you get the energy to run the pump from?  The most obvious solutions were manpower and animal power.  Both had limitations.

The second one was the odd fact that you could suck water up at most 33 feet.  Why?  Asimov doesn't address this issue here because he already talked about it elsewhere.  See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-part-8.html for my discussion of his section on "The Atmosphere".  Water can only be pulled up 33 feet because that's how tall a column of water needs to be to balance out the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level (about 15 pounds per square inch).  Back to pumps.

One idea was to fill a chamber with steam then pour some cold water in.  This would cause the steam to condense.  That would leave a vacuum behind which could be used to suck the water up out of the mine.  The first one to get a "steam engine" to work was Savery.  (BTW, at the time "engine" just meant any kind of clever device.)  Savery's engine worked.  But it was dangerous and inefficient.

But this is often true.  Someone figures out how to do something "at all".  The first device works but not very well.  Then others can see what he did and refine it so that it works better.  Soon the child or grandchild or great grandchild of the original device works very well.  And that's what happened in this case.

Newcomen came along less than a decade later with his "new and improved" steam engine in 1698.  It was far less dangerous and a lot more efficient.  But it still didn't work all that well.  Newcomen's design was state of the art for more than 60 years.  But then Watt came along and came up with the first relatively efficient steam engine.  That's why we associate Watt with the invention of the steam engine.

He also gets most of the credit because Watt engines were used for something other than pumping water out of mines.  In 1787 an American, Fitch, put a Watt engine in a boat and made it move.  The boat was a success from a technical point of view but a failure from a financial point of view.  So we have forgotten Fitch and remember Fulton instead.

The "Clairmont", Fulton's steam powered ship, was a success in every way.  In the 1830's, less than thirty years later, steam powered ships were routinely crossing the Atlantic Ocean.  During this same period the "screw propeller" replaced "sidewheel" and "sternwheel" paddlewheels as the method of propulsion.

In parallel with the advent of waterborne steam propulsion came the advent of steam powered land vehicles.  Stephenson built the first of what we now call "steam locomotives"  to power what we now call a railroad train in 1814.  Designs improved rapidly.  As a result the first "transcontinental railroad" was in operation in the US by 1869.

Steam power created the ability to travel by sea more quickly and more comfortably that had heretofore been possible using wind power.  Railroads were quicker, more comfortable, and cheaper, than traveling in a stagecoach powered by horses.  The steam engine revolutionized transportation by making it possible to apply far more energy in a far more controlled fashion than had bee possible prior to its invention.

I could go into my discussion of the whole "onward and upward" business when it comes to energy consumption here.  But I am going to leave that discussion for a later day and end here.

Computer vs. Sudoku

I'm in lockdown mode, just like everybody else.  So what's a body to do to pass the time pleasantly?  If you are this particular body you decide to write a computer program.  I haven't gotten paid to write a computer program in more than a decade.  And I haven't written one in a couple of years.  It's time to dust off the old skills and take them out for a drive once again, or so I told myself.

If you are going to write a computer program it needs to do something.  Otherwise, there is no point.  So I'm sitting around one day when I thought "it would be fun to write a computer program to solve Sudoku puzzles".  And with that I was off.

A little background.  Sudoku puzzles became all the rage a few years ago.  When they first showed up on the "puzzle" page of the local paper I took a look.  It seemed interesting so I gave it a shot.  I was a total failure.  I could see how you might go about solving one.  But I had neither the skills nor the patience to be successful.

I could see what needed to be done.  But scanning here and there looking for a good next move wasn't something I had the patience nor the eyeball to be successful at.  But I could see how it could be done, in theory.

Now what I am not good at is, in this case, what a computer is very good at.  Computers have infinite amounts of patience and are very good at detail.  If you add in my analytical ability you have everything you need.  And to my eye, the problem was difficult enough to be interesting without being so difficult as to demand more effort than I was interested in expending.  So let's look at the rules of the game.

A Sudoku puzzles consists of a 9 x 9 grid.  Each box contains either a number or an empty square.  You solve the puzzle by filling all the squares with numbers.  But what constitutes a "legal" move?  That's pretty simple too.  Each square must end up with one of the digits running from one to nine.  That's extremely simple.  It is the additional constraints that make things interesting.

You can't duplicate numbers.  There are nine squares in the first column.  If there is a "5" in one square in the column then none of the other squares in the same column can contain a "5".  In the end everything just fits.  There are nine squares in a column and 9 digits.  So it's a matter of putting the digits - one through nine - into the squares in the right order.  And, if that was it, then the problem would be trivially simple.

But there is a similar row rule.  There are nine squares in a row and nine digits.  So it is again a matter of arranging all nine digits in the correct sequence so that each fills a square.   So now things are more difficult but not all that difficult.

Imagine viewing the grid along the diagonal.  In the first diagonal you put a "1".  (There is only square in the first diagonal because it is up against a corner.  In the next diagonal you put all "2"s.  In the next, all "3's, and so on.

Once you have filled nine diagonals with "1" through "9" start over.  fill the next diagonal with all "1"s and the one after that with all "2"s.  Keep going and you will have a "solution" that meets the "no duplicates in a row" criteria while also meeting the "no duplicates in a column" criteria.  So, to make things more interesting a third rule is added.

The 9 x 9 grid is divided into nine 3 x 3 sub-grids.  The first sub-grid consists of rows 1-3 and columns 1-3.  The second one consists of rows 1-3 but columns 4-6.  When you are done you will have 9 sub-grids with the last one consisting of rows 7-9 and columns 7-9.  Each sub-grid contains nine cells so you impose a "no duplicates" rule within each sub-grid.  With this third rule the puzzle becomes hard but not impossible.

The way things work is that a grid is published.  It has some but not all squares filled in.  You are supposed to take it from there and figure out what number to put into each of the empty squares.  Here's the starting position from a puzzle that was published in the local paper several weeks ago.  (I have used white space to highlight the sub-grid boundaries):

Column: -   1  2  3    4  5  6    7  8  9

Row:  1 -   *  1  8    *  *  9    2  *  *
Row:  2 -   4  *  *    *  3  5    7  *  *
Row:  3 -   6  *  3    2  7  1    4  *  *

Row:  4 -   *  4  *    *  *  *    *  6  *
Row:  5 -   *  *  5    3  6  4    1  *  *
Row:  6 -   *  3  *    *  *  *    *  4  *
  
Row:  7 -   *  *  9    4  1  3    6  *  2
Row:  8 -   *  *  1    5  2  *    *  *  4
Row:  9 -   *  *  4    7  *  6    5  3  *

So what do we do next?  Well, there's the brute force method.  Row 1 - column 1 is empty ("*" denotes empty).  We can try a "1" there and see what happens.  That doesn't work because row 1 - column 2 already has a "1".  But we can move on and try "2" and then "3" and so on.  Then we can move on to the next empty square at row 1 - column 4 and do the same thing.  After trying a bazillion combinations we will eventually hit on to a legal solution.

But, boy oh boy, will we have to try a lot of different combinations.  Computers are very patient so this would eventually work.  It is called a "brute force" method.  You just try all the combinations until you find one that works.  There are better ways.

And that was the one insight I developed about how to proceed.  I came up with the idea of a "forced move".  Look at square (1,4) - short for row 1 - column 4.  If you work through all of the combinations then only move that works is "6".  "6" is a forced move.  Go ahead and check.  You will see that 1-5 and 7-9 are all excluded by other squares that have already been filled in.

So what I had my program do was to look for forced moves.  It boringly checked square (1,1) then (1,2) and so on.  If the square was already filled it moved on.  For each empty square it first tried "1", then "2", and so on up to "9".  It counted the number of moves which were "legal", that didn't violate any of the constraints.  I called this number LMC for "legal move count".  The program moved along calculating the LMC for each empty square.

As it moved along it noted when it found a square whose LMC was lower than all the previous LMCs it had encountered.  It remembered where it had found that move (and forgot what it had previously remembered about the old lowest LMC champ).  And it remembered for that move the first (lowest - it  tried 1 - 9 in that order) legal move it had found for that square.  Finally, as soon as it found a square with an LMC of 1 it quit looking.  LMC=1 squares are forced move squares.

So the program worked by first playing all the "setup" moves, those moves printed in the paper.  Once that was done it tried the same thing over and over.  It tried to find the square with the lowest LMC.  It did this by scanning the entire grid as I have outlined above.  It stopped and "played" the move if it found a square with an LMC of 1.

And if it got to the end, having scanned all 81 squares, and had found no empty squares then it said "I'm done".  And for easy puzzles, that's it.  It turns out that there is always at least one square with an LMC of 1, a forced move.  The program finds it and plays it.  Then it goes back to the top and starts a new scan.  Eventually all the squares are full and the program is done.  In the case of the puzzle above that looks like this:


Column: -   1  2  3    4  5  6    7  8  9

Row:  1 -   7  1  8    6  4  9    2  5  3
Row:  2 -   4  9  2    8  3  5    7  1  6
Row:  3 -   6  5  3    2  7  1    4  9  8

Row:  4 -   1  4  7    9  8  2    3  6  5
Row:  5 -   9  8  5    3  6  4    1  2  7
Row:  6 -   2  3  6    1  5  7    8  4  9

Row:  7 -   5  7  9    4  1  3    6  8  2
Row:  8 -   3  6  1    5  2  8    9  7  4
Row:  9 -   8  2  4    7  9  6    5  3  1

Remember, that as we fill in moves fewer and fewer moves remain valid.  When we made our move of placing a "6" in square (1,4) that rendered "6" as an invalid move for any other square in row 1, column 4, and the sub-grid consisting of rows 1-3 and columns 4-6.

In solving the above puzzle the computer first places a "6" at square (1,4).  For its next move it places a "4" at square (1,5).  For its third move it places a "5" at square (1,8).  It continues to proceed in this manner for move after move until it finally places a "1" in square (9,9).  On each fresh move it is able to find a square with an LMC of 1.  If you have a good enough eye and enough patience, you can too.

But what if the puzzle is harder?  Then what?  Well, the program is on the lookout for things going wrong.  What if it finds an empty square for which there are no legal moves?  It sounds like the puzzle has no solution.  But there is another possibility.

In the easy puzzle listed above at every stage it is possible to find a forced move, a square with an LMC of 1.  But that is not true when it comes to more difficult puzzles.  With more difficult puzzles some scans may not turn up a square with an LMC of 1.

Remember, what the program actually does is to look for the square with the lowest LMC.  It is certainly true that we don't want to bother with squares that have an LMC of 2 or more if we can find a different square with an LMC of 1.

But with more difficult puzzles sometimes a scan of all the unused squares in the puzzle does not turn up one with an LMC of 1.  In that case the program just goes with a square with the lowest LMC it found.

In all the puzzles I have looked at the program invariably finds a square with an LMC of 2 if it can't find a square with an LMC of 1.  But the program can deal with situations where the lowest LMC it finds is higher.  Here's how that works.

If, on a scan the lowest LMC that is encountered is higher than 1, then the program selects the first square it encountered with that LMC, whatever it is.  It plays that square and "guesses" whatever the lowest legal move is.  It then goes on to find the next move.  If we get to the end and have found a valid solution, hurray!  We won.

But that may not happen.  We may end up encountering a square that now has no valid moves.  That's where a process that is easy for a computer to do and often hard for a person to do comes into play.  We don't give up.  We do what's called in the computer game "backing off".  So how does that work?

As things are going along the computer keeps track of every move it has made.  And it keeps track of the order they have been made in.  And it remembers the LMC of each move.

Now some moves are special.  They are the moves that were used to load the grid with the "setup", the initial configuration printed in the newspaper.  These moves are flagged as "s" for setup moves.  Later moves are flagged as "n" for normal moves.  The first several moves are "s" moves.  After that, the moves are all "n" moves.

So when a problem (no legal move) is detected here's what happens.  The first thing that happens is that the move we were trying to make is abandoned.  All trace of its existence is erased.  Then the last move on the "queue" (the data structure used to keep track of moves) is examined.  If it is an "s" move then the puzzle is unsolvable and it's time to quit.  But it should be an "n" move.

The LMC of the move is examined.  If it's 1 then the move is "backed off".  All evidence that the move was every made is erased.  Then we go back and examine the next oldest move to see what we find.

If, however, the LMC is greater than 1 there is something we can do.  We can take a different "fork in the road".  Here we take advantage of the fact that we always try the lowest legal value first.  Let's say the LMC of the move is 2 and the value we used was "4".  That means that  besides "4" there should be another move that is higher than "4" that is also legal.

We go looking for it.  Let's say it is "6".  We then change the move to use "6" instead of "4".  We also reduce the LMC by 1.  In our example, the LMC is now 1 so, if the "back off" logic again reaches this point, then it would back the move off and keep looking.  If perchance the LMC had been 3 it is now 2.  So, if we later reach this point, then we can again look for a legal move that is higher than "6".

It is possible, at least theoretically, that we won't be able to find a higher legal move.  But that means that the program has screwed up and it is time to look for code to fix.

But if all goes as it should we back off until we find a fork in the road.  Then we go down a different fork.  Once we've done that we return to business as usual.  We jump back in the top and use the usual code to go looking for a move with an LMC of 1 to add onto the list of moves right after the one we ended up modifying.

It may be necessary to do this "two steps forward, one step back" dance several times.  And it is common to end up putting the same LMC = 1 move on the stack only to later have to back it off as we look for an "LMC higher than 1" fork in the road.  Then, still later after we have taken that different path, we end up just adding the same move back onto the move list again.  But, after a certain amount of "toing" and "froing", we should end up with a set of legal moves that ends up filling the grid up completely.

So that's the rest of the logic my computer program uses to solve Sudoku puzzles.  It has solved all of the puzzles I have presented it with successfully.  And it solves them instantly.

It takes me a minute or so for me to create a file with the setup moves in it.  It takes the computer a second or so to print out the "before" (setup) and "after" (solution) grids.  But solving the puzzle is essentially instantaneous.  Computers are very good at doing a lot of this sort of thing extremely quickly.

And with that, let me give you some background on Sudoku.  It is part of a group of mathematical puzzles called "Latin Squares".  They have been studied extensively for a period going back more than a hundred years.  And it turns out that the origins of Sudoku also go back more than a hundred years.

A puzzle similar to Sudoku was first published in a French newspaper in 1892.  Another French newspaper published a puzzle that was almost identical to Sudoku in 1895.  About twenty years later they went out of fashion and stayed that way for a long time.

Then a puzzle identical to Sudoku was published in a Dell puzzle magazine in 1979.  There it was called "Number Place".  (Sudoku puzzles are regularly but infrequently called Number Place to this day.)

It was likely invented by a man named Howard Garnes. Mr. Garns was well known at the time in puzzle creation circles.  No one knows if he was familiar with the earlier French puzzles but he was probably very familiar with Latin Squares.  He died in 1989 before Sudoku became a giant phenomenon.

The Japanese attribution is not completely unreasonable.  That's where the puzzle first became widely popular.  It was introduced in a Japanese newspaper in 1984 as "Suji wa dokushin ni Kagiru".  This unwieldy name was quickly shortened to Sudoku.  It quickly developed a large and loyal following in Japan.  So. it soon could be found in many newspapers there.

In 1997 Hong Kong judge Wayne Gould saw a Sudoku puzzle in a Japanese bookshop.  He spent six years developing a computer program to quickly crank out new puzzles.  The task he set out for himself was much more difficult than the one one I tackled.  But, once he had it working, the result was a nearly inexhaustible supply of new puzzles.  And they could be made available inexpensively.

He then sold the Times of London newspaper on the idea of regularly publishing Sudoku puzzles.  They first published one in 2004.  The first Sudoku puzzle appeared in a US newspaper later that same year.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sudoku has attracted a lot of attention from both professional and amateur mathematicians.  They had long been studying various kinds of Latin Squares when it came along.  Sudoku fit right in.

So a lot is known about the mathematics behind the game but I am going to spare you all of it.  I am also going to spare you from a discussion of the many variants of the game that have been developed in response to its popularity.  If you care, the rich literature on this subject is easy to find.

As for me, I have moved on but not very far.  There is a puzzle called Numbrix that newspaper columnist Marilyn vos Savant champions.

As a programming challenge, it looks very similar to Sudoku.  So I am now writing a program to solve Numbrix puzzles.  I expect to be able to reuse a lot of the code I wrote for my Sudoku program.

I am making slow progress.  But this is because I'm not putting that many hours into it.  It is, after all, a time waster.  I only work on it when I have time to waste.

So that's what I am now up to.

Debt - Public and Private

I am in my seventies.  For my entire life people have obsessed about the Federal Deficit.  Somehow, all that stopped about a month ago.  The reason was COVAD-19.  And this is the one and only time in this post that I am going to get anywhere close to talking about anything medical.  It was the inspiration for the post but it also has nothing to do with what I am going to talk about.

With a few exceptions the Federal Government has run a deficit in every year that I have been alive.  It has spent more than it has taken in.  There is a whole school that says, "this is bad, very bad" because "the money has to be paid back sometime".  Yet somehow, here we are.

The Federal Government is currently running up World War level deficits and right now no one has a single bad thing say about it.  I'll have more to say about that later.  But, in the mean time, what I want to talk about is the "pay it back sometime" part.  And my launching point is going to be a mathematical construct called a "set".

When I was a kid the educational approach taken when it came to mathematics was "just teach them how to do it".  The "it" started with addition and subtraction.  It then moved on to multiplication and division.  Most kids were exposed to entry level algebra ("x + y = z" stuff) but there it ended.  For math nerds like myself, we went on to be exposed to geometry, trigonometry, and maybe calculus.  And mixed in with these other advanced subjects was something called "set theory".

It is no longer done that way.  Now set theory is introduced far earlier into the process.  And various branches of mathematics are explained in terms of set theory.  The Venn Diagram (the thing with the overlapping circles) is something that children are now familiar with.  I think this new approach is actually better.  But what do I know?  I am certainly no expert on the subject.

Early on in a discussion of set theory the "universal set" or the "set of all sets" is introduced.  Say there are a specific, finite number of possible sets.  If you know which sets are included in a specific subset then you automatically know all of the sets that are excluded.  This ability, if you can pull it off, turns out to be very useful.  But, in fact, the universal set contains an infinite, not a finite number of elements.  So all of a sudden the mathematics of infinity get involved.

I spent some time talking about the mathematics of infinity in this post: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2020/01/to-infinity-and-beyond.html.   In fact, it took ideas from set theory to make sense of the mathematics of infinity.  It's a handy example that illuminates just how powerful taking a set theoretic approach to other branches of mathematics is.

And an exploration of the mathematics of infinity demonstrates that the standard rules of arithmetic do not apply to infinities.  As is the case with Quantum Mechanics, only certain specific questions can be asked in certain specific ways.  If you go elsewhere, the result will be nonsense.

As a result, this idea of a "set of all sets" and the derivative notion of being able to partition all sets into "one subset containing the sets we are interested in" and "another set containing all other sets" becomes less useful.  You can't tell how many elements are in at least one, and perhaps both, of these subsets.

It turns out that the problems we were forced to wrestle with when we contemplated infinites also rear their ugly heads when we start talking about the Federal Deficit.  Here too, standard arithmetic does not apply.  So conclusions based on applying standard arithmetic to the Federal Deficit often produces nonsense.

If the Federal Government has a known, finite lifetime and if the books needed to be in balance and all debts paid at the end of that lifetime then a deficit would unambiguously be a bad thing.  The money would have to be found somewhere to pay off all of the bonds the Federal Government has issued on time and in full.

But when is that date, again?  There is no date.  The Federal Government is expected to go on forever.  It's life expectancy is infinite.  Therefore, infinities and the mathematics of infinities must be used instead of standard arithmetic.

Oh, it might not.  Something might come along to put the Federal Government out of business.  But, if that happened, is it likely that all of its debts would have to be paid off from its own resources?  No.  There are two likely scenarios.

Some other country (or group of countries) might invade and succeed in taking everything over.  In that case what's going to happen is completely up to the invaders.  They might write the debt off.  After all, they didn't run the debt up so why should they be responsible for paying it off?    Or they might use the Federal debt as an excuse exact reparations far in excess of the then current amount.  Or they could do something else.  From our vantage point in the present there is no sense in worrying about how it would go.

The second likely scenario is that a new government would be formed that would take over our current one.  That happened to us once when our current government took over from the Continental Congress that operated under the old Articles of Confederation.  In that case, the new government assumed all the assets and liabilities of the old government. So there was no end date when it came to the debt.  Everything just kept rolling along.

There is actually a third alternative.  Our current government might slowly evolve in a step by step manner into something else, say by making periodic Amendments to the US Constitution,  But at every step along the way the government, whatever form it took at any specific point along the way, would maintain continuity when it came to how debt is handled.  This scenario is equivalent to the "the government goes on forever" scenario.

And, from a practical perspective, things have always worked the same way.  The Government issues debt, typically in the form of "bonds".  Any specific bond issue has its own terms and conditions that include when and how the government must pay the bondholders off.  The government has always succeeded in adhering to the terms under which each specific bond issue was "floated".  So the bondholders have always gotten everything they were entitled to.

Now, there is some "smoke and mirrors" going on here.  In almost all cases the government issues new bonds.  Some or all of the proceeds from the new bond issue are used to fulfil the obligations undertaken with respect to the old bonds.  In short, it's a Ponzi scheme!

Every year people discover that the way government financing works is a Ponzi scheme.  They are shocked and think that this is a bad, bad, very bad thing and that people should be alarmed and instantly rise up in arms.  I think it is important that people understand that it is a Ponzi scheme.  But I also think it is important for people to understand that it is not a dangerous scheme that needs to be shut down.

What made Ponzi's original scheme dangerous was that ultimately he was not able to pay his investors off and in full.  A Ponzi scheme where investors don't get what's owed them is a dangerous Ponzi scheme.  But what if at every step along the way all the investors get paid off in full, even though it's a Ponzi scheme?  That's what I call a benign Ponzi scheme.

At this point it might be useful to go back and reread my "Infinity" blog post.  Remember, as soon as you insert infinities into the situation the rules not only become different, they become quite unnatural.  Our instincts are no longer a reliable guide.  Instead they lead us astray.

A good way to understand what's going on is by looking at the debt as a percentage of US GDP.  If the GDP goes up 3% and the Federal debt goes up 3% then the economy maintains exactly the same ability to manage the debt.  But the reality is even crazier than that.  The important question is not "is the debt too high?"  The important question is "is the debt so high that investors lack either the inclination or the ability to purchase it?"

In fact, a question that is never asked but should be is "is the debt growing too slowly to meet the needs of the economy for government debt?"  I spent some time talking about this sort of thing in  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/04/modern-monetary-theory.html.

One of the few periods of budget surplus happened at the vary end of the last century.  And it turned out that the fact that the amount of Federal debt was shrinking rather than growing actually made problems for some parts of the economy.  After the election was over the new Bush administration reversed policy and the government went back to deficit spending thus increasing the amount of government debt available to the economy.

As I also pointed out in my "Modern Monetary Policy" post, there is a need to make sure we don't just run the debt up willy-nilly.  Theoretically, these arguments should apply now.  But no one is currently concerned that the Federal deficit will run to several trillion dollars this year.  People are focused instead on the critical problem (which shall not be named) before us.

What the history of the last thirty years tells us is that all the "rules" people talk about for what is and is not too much Federal debt are nonsense.  And the "rules" are supposed to apply to all governments, not just the US government.  We can take advantage of this to look all over the place.  And when we do what we see is that levels of debt that were supposed to automatically trigger a financial crisis sometimes didn't.  And sometimes debt levels that weren't supposed to be a problem turned into a problem.

Does that mean financial crises don't happen?  No!  It just means they often don't happen when and where they are supposed to.  They also sometimes happen when and where they aren't supposed to.  Instead of the traditional rules we are told to pay attention to we should actually pay attention to two factors.

The first factor is "is the money there to lend to the Federal Government?"  And what the last twenty years have taught me is that it is possible to magic almost limitless amounts of money out of thin air.  Tricks like Quantitative Easing have magicked hitherto unimaginable amounts of money seemingly out of thin air.

Another refrain that has repeatedly shown up for at least the past fifty years has it that "high Federal borrowing is crowding out other types of borrowing" causing bad things to happen in the economy as a whole.   Yet there is zero evidence that this has ever actually happened.

The way we would know this was happening would be to see interest rates skyrocketing.  But high Federal spending and high interest rates seldom go together.  Interest rates are at historic lows right now, for instance  So the money is there.

The other factor is whether the people who have the money are willing to hand it over to the Federal Government by buying government issued bonds?  This is a psychological and a political question.  It is not a technical question.

If we look at various governments in various parts of the world at various times we see little correlation between the "underlying conditions" or the "technical factors" and the willingness of lenders to fork over the dough.

In the US interest rates are, in part, a "risk premium".  So interest rates are an indication of how risky lenders think a loan is.  But interest rates, particularly those paid by the US government, have been historically low for the last twenty years.  Yet by traditional non-interest-rate measures, during this same period US government debt has been more risky, often much more risky, than it had been in the past.

Scores for non-interest-rate metrics have shown that US government debt was far less risky at pretty much any time before the past twenty years.  So the US has been a more risky bet in the last twenty years than during many periods before that.  But the risk premiums lenders have recently charged the government have been at all time lows.

The "rules" aren't actually rules after all.  Right now lenders want to lend the US government money in spite of the higher risk factors, so they will. The risk factors are higher than they were six months ago.  Yet no one expects the Federal Government to have the least bit of trouble selling a quantity of bonds that is several times greater than it ever has ever attempted to sell before.

Before leaving this subject let me reiterate the point that I do believe there are limits to how much debt the US government should run up.  But what you hear about what is or is not too much is mostly nonsense.  And I am going to use the extremely thin excuse that brevity prohibits me from going into what those limits should be.

With that, let me turn to the other area I promised to address in my title, private (non-governmental) debt. And here I am going to ignore corporate debt and focus exclusively on debt incurred by individuals and families.

The many commentators who trot out "the family budget" as the gold standard for how the Federal debt should be managed.  They believe that debt incurred by families will be repaid.  From there they extrapolate to the position that the Federal Debt must also be repaid.

Ignoring for the moment, the differences between a family's budget and the Federal Budget, let's ask if the basic premise is true, do families always repay their debts?  And again, let me start by asking "how much family debt is too much debt?"

When I was a kid if you wanted to qualify for a mortgage you were expected to  be able to make a 20% down payment on a house.  And the house was supposed to cost at most 2 1/2 times the husband's annual salary.  (Back then the assumption was that all house buyers were married and that only the husband worked.)  So, if a husband made $15,000 per year, good money at the time, he was limited to buying a house that cost $37,500 or less.  Now, back then such a house was a very nice house.

Now nobody puts down 20%.  A more typical down payment is along the lines of 3%.  And I don't know what the current income-to-house-cost ratio is but it is much higher than 2 1/2 times.  The old rule actually made some sense.

If you could rent and still save enough money to put 20% down then you could afford to furnish the house, maintain the house, pay all the taxes, utilities, and fees, and still keep up on your mortgage payments.  The 2 1/2 to 1 ratio was also a pretty good rule of thumb for making all this work.

The problem for the economy as a whole was that the percentage of the population that could afford a house in this regime was low.  And that meant that few new houses were needed.  And that meant that few new houses were built, few new houses that need furniture, appliances, etc. were around to drive up sales or furniture, etc.

Building lots of new houses requires lots of ancillary spending on things like washing machines.  Spending on those ancillary things is good for the economy.  And a good economy means more people can afford to buy a house, etc.  It's called a virtuous circle.

Again, lots of economic activity means there's lots of money around.  So again the problem is more psychological and political than technical.  The "rules" are not actually rules here either.  If lenders want to lend they will lend.  And whether the "official" rules that are supposed to tell us whether now is or is not the time don't turn out to make any difference.

And here again let me remind you that although the "official rules" that supposedly tell us when things are getting out of hand don't work, that doesn't mean that more is always better.  At some point "more" leads to bubbles.  Bubbles eventually burst.  When they burst bad things happen.  Avoiding bubbles bursting is a good thing.  Expecting the official rules to tell you when things can be pushed further and when it's time to pull back to avoid bursting a bubble, that's the foolish part.

And as a practical matter the only important question is "will the loan be repaid?"  And that too turns out to be the wrong question.  Some loans always default.  So the real questions are "is the default rate so high it is causing problems?" and "who will get stuck with the bill?"

When the economy cratered in 2008 it turned out that the default rate, which had been predicted to be near zero, suddenly became extremely high.  The prediction that the default rate would continue to stay near zero into the indefinite future is an example of the official rules failing us.  And it is not uncommon for conditions to make a drastic change very quickly without us getting any warning from the official rules.

But the 2008 Panic also showed up a large disconnect.  The people who decided who did and did not get a loan were not the same people who got stuck when the loan went bad.  From the perspective of the people who got us into the mess, 2008 was a great year.

They made tons of money.  Sure, the economy cratered and other people lost lots of money but they did just fine.  In fact, they did better than fine.  You see, someone else got stuck eating all the bad loans while they got keep their bonuses, commission checks, etc.

Wall Street, the banks, etc., have gotten very good at this game.  They make a lot of money when there is a lot of activity.  If there is too much activity and things eventually go south, someone else will again be left holding the bag.  From their perspective, it is good to make shaky loans.

If a lot of activity that will eventually go badly wrong is what it takes to crank the volume up high enough so that they can make lots of money, then so be it.  The fact that everything is built on a foundation of sand is not their problem.  They will suffer no financial harm when the river rises and the foundation washes away.

We are in the midst of a grand experiment.  Nobody knows how much individual debt is too much.  So Wall Street and others keep coming up with new ways to increase loan volume to individuals and families.

Bear in mind that the extremely high default rate that was a prominent feature of the Panic of '08 was not enough to force fundamental change.  So it is not altogether clear that private debt needs to be repaid either.

So maybe the "family budget" doesn't behave the way commentators day it does.  No matter.  They are mostly interested in hammering home the idea that deficits should be kept low.  Except, of course, when their political allies are in power.  Then it's okay to run the Federal debt up higher and higher.

They are actually doing us a service at the moment.  We need to spend the money.  If only they would just shut up all of the time.  When they are talking they are not making us more informed.  They are making us less so.

Financial Panics

Long ago in a Galaxy far, far away . . .  I'm not going to go that far but you know I like my historical context.  I am going to talk about the current economic situation, call it the COVID-19 Panic.  But first, as advertised, some background.

In the middle ages most people lived on farms that existed within the domain of the local feudal lord.  There was no money to speak of and what passed for government was provided by the lord.  He provided for the common defense, maintained the roads, and provided a few other basic services.  He levied a tax that consisted of some portion, traditionally a tenth, of whatever the farmer produced in return.  The important thing was that all economic activity was local.

In the few larger cities and towns Goldsmiths and Silversmiths started providing a service to the rich and powerful.  They would store their valuables in a safe or strong room.  Using this shared resource cut down on costs.  And the smarter of them observed that only a few people needed their valuables at any one time.  So they could make a tidy buck on the side by loaning out some of the stored valuables at interest.  This was the beginning of the banking system.

And it eventually occurred to the rich and powerful and those that they did business with that there was a better way to do so than using the valuables themselves, the plate silver, coins, etc.  Instead, a piece of paper called a "draft" could be used.  The draft promised that "valuables in an amount equal to whatever" would be handed over to the bearer ""on demand".

These "demand drafts" were was the foundation of currency.  And this new and improved way of doing business quickly became very popular.  As a result, some "banks" (places where you "banked" your valuables) got so big and successful that they were eventually able to finance the governments of whole countries.

A country like France would issue a certain amount of "coin of the realm".  But for really big transactions, ones involving more than a bag or two of coins, they came to depend on demand drafts drawn against banks run by the Rothchild family, for instance.

The Rothchild's were one of the first to go international.  Various family members set up banks in various large cities in various countries.  Money in large amounts could be moved from place to place by using a demand draft drawn on a Rothchild bank at one location.  It would be honored by Rothchild banks operating at other locations, perhaps even at a location located in another country.  This became common practice in Europe.

The US ended up with something similar but less well developed.  Various government sponsored "national" banks were created.  But politics did them in.  So, for a big chunk of the history of the US, there were only small banks that confined their operations to relatively small geographic areas.

And for the most part that worked fine.  Most people traveled no great distance.  And the advantage of paper money were so obvious that for a long time it was the custom of each bank to issue its own currency.  It was not only the done thing but it was completely legal at the time.

At this time the Federal government was tiny.  Like the feudal lord of yore it provided only modest services.  It provided for the national defense, maintained some roads, ran a postal service over those roads, and that was pretty much it.  Almost all revenue came from tariffs assessed on imported goods.  The Federal government had little or no daily impact on most people most of the time.

But then railroads and the Civil War came along.  Railroads were the first large business that operated on a national scale in the US.  They needed a banking system that was national in scope and big enough to serve their needs, which dwarfed anything that had come before.  Sadly, there was nothing in place to meet these needs.

The Civil War was an enterprise whose scale dwarfed even the largest railroads.  Soon after the start of the War the Union government was raising and spending unbelievable sums of money.  The Confederate government was smaller but it too was soon operating on a hitherto unheard of scale.

The War cost more than a million dollars a day to prosecute.  That was sum far beyond the capabilities of the then extant banking system.  As a result, the US government, which had previously confined itself to minting coin, got into the business of printing paper money, called "greenbacks" for the color of ink used then and now.

All this was grafted on top of a wholly inadequate system.  And banks were still issuing currency backed only by their good name and reputation.  Back in the time before the War and before the railroads, this business of each bank issuing its own currency worked, sort of.

Local people knew their local banker.  If they spotted something hinky, the thinking went, they could pull their money out before the bank went under.  Only suckers (people who lived some distance away) would get hurt when that bank's currency became worthless.

But after the Civil War got under way that became impractical.  And soon there was fantastic amounts of money sloshing around as the railroads, then the oil industry, the steel industry, etc. became giants.  As a result, we had a "panic" (that's what they were called) about every ten years.

If a small bank here or a small bank there all of a sudden went under it was hard on the locals but had no wider impact.  But after the War ended various developments like the railroads operating on a national scale knitted banks together.  So you now had the possibility of a serious ripple effect.

One bank going down could cause a run on another bank and the situation could now spiral into an event that had a broad impact.  It didn't happen every time.  But it happened often enough, about once every ten years, on average.

Finally, in 1914 the Federal Reserve was chartered.  The thing that allowed it to survive political challenges that had taken down it's predecessors was it's "economic stability" mission.  It was supposed to stop these very destructive panics from happening.

It was not completely successful.  Banks could still go under and people could still lose their money.  The possibility of a panic was enough to cause people to start a "run on the banks".  Panics happened often enough that people were all too familiar with them.

Bankers of the time had the same problem that their Rothchild era predecessors had.  Everything was fine as long as everybody didn't try to pull their money out at the same time.  (And assuming the banker wasn't an outright crook or completely incompetent.)

A run didn't require everybody to demand their money.  It only took a significant portion of depositors demanding their money, all at the same time.  That was enough to turn a sound bank into an unsound bank.

What finally fixed the problem was the introduction of a government agency called the FDIC in the '30s.  It guaranteed that people would get their money even if the bank went under.  Once the Fed and the FDIC were in place we went a long time without anything that looked like a panic.  People and companies could go about their business without worrying about whether or not the bank they used in was in danger of going under.

But this Fed/FDIC solution eventually became a victim of its own success.  The fact that nothing had gone wrong for a long time caused people to forget what a panic looked like.  That amnesia gave political factions the opportunity to weaken the system so they did.  So we went back to a point where panics became possible again.  And with that, I would like to look at some panics.  And I am going to start with the big one, the Great Depression.

We all know that the Stock Market crashed in 1929.  But at the time the Market was not that big of a thing.  Only a few rich people owned stocks.  And the fact that a company's share price had tanked had little or no effect on the day to day operation of that company.  But important people were harmed by the Crash and they forced the Federal Government to take action.

It was not the crash itself but the response to the crash that did most of the harm.  Under Hoover the Federal Government's response was to do what everybody thought at the time was the right thing to do.  That was to clamp down on the banking system.  Bank reserves must be increased.  Loans must only be made to blue chip clients.  Unlike with the crash itself, these changes had a widespread impact.

Many businesses both large and small needed access to credit.  All of a sudden only the people who didn't need credit could get credit.  That caused businesses large and small to pull back.  They started cutting back on production and laying people off.  That meant business dried up for suppliers who responded by laying people off.  Laid off people (there was no unemployment insurance at the time) were forced to cut back on their expenses so they bought less.  And the spiral continued.

In the mean time, banks had less money to loan because they had to hold more back to meet the higher reserve requirements.  And at the hint of any weakness on the part of any bank customers started a run on that bank.  If the bank had been sound before it soon wasn't.  That spawned even more runs as people and businesses got more and more concerned about losing money they couldn't afford to lose by keeping it an a bank that might fail.

The Hoover Administration kept tightening and tightening.  And things kept getting worse and worse.  That ushered in the Roosevelt Administration.  They put in the FDIC and mandated a "bank holiday", temporarily closing all banks.  During the holiday every single bank still in existence was audited.  Some banks were found to be unsound and they were closed.  But most banks were found to be sound.

Once the holiday was over and a bank opened back up its customers were told that it was "backed by the full faith and credit of the Federal Government".  People believed the promise, which was kept then, and is kept now.  Bank runs became a thing of the past.  That didn't fix the economy but it did fix the banking system.

The next time there was a significant problem in the banking system took place roughly fifty years later.  It is usually called the S&L Scandal.  But I'm going to call it the S&L Panic.  It turns out that "there are banks and then there are banks".  (Unfortunately, I will need to return to this later.)

The FDIC promise that a "bank" was backed by the full faith and credit of the Federal Government applied only to "Federally chartered commercial banks".  What?  If a bank has the phrase "National Bank" in it's name then it's covered by the FDIC.  But there are other kinds of what most people think of as a "bank".  The two biggest groups of these other types of "banks" are "Savings and Loans" and "Mutual Savings Banks".

There are technical differences between the two.  But for our purposes we can ignore these differences and lump them together.  Both were considered to be "community banks".  They dealt with consumers by offering car loans, mortgage loans, and the like.  They also took deposits.  But they couldn't provide standard checking accounts.  Nor could they make loans to businesses.

The limits on the types of activities they could engage in was supposed to make them smaller, less risky operations.  So they didn't require the intrusive business standards and audit requirements that the FDIC imposed on Federally chartered commercial banks.  (It turns out that there are also state chartered banks but I am going to ignore them.)

They were not part of the FDIC insurance and regulatory system.  Instead, they had their own insurance system and regulatory agency.  But both were not anywhere near the industrial strength operation the FDIC was.  The thinking was that they didn't need to be.

Anyhow, the people who ran the S&Ls and MSBs agitated to give these institutions more bank-like capabilities.  In the deregulatory era of the time, they got their wish.  They could provide checking accounts, their ability to make loans was greatly expanded, and so on.  They could have been folded into the FDIC system.  But they liked the looser regulatory environment and lower cost of insurance they were used to.  They managed to keep it.

And the hotdogs that had been behind the change behaved like hotdogs.  And promptly got into trouble.  There were lots of crooks who did crooked things.  There were lots of incompetents who did incompetent things.  As a result lots of these institutions got into lots of trouble.

And the FDIC-lite insurance system they were using wasn't up to the task of covering their losses.  Nor was the FDIC-lite regulatory agency they reported to able to keep them in line.  So naturally they applied to the Federal Government to bail them out.  And they got their wish.

This cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.  In the end the remaining institutions were theoretically on a similar sound footing as the FDIC insured national banks.  The bad news was that it wasn't really true.  The good news is that a lot of people went to jail.  Not enough, but still some is better than none.

This "put them on a sound footing" business was true to some extent.  But a lot of it was a sham.  They still had their own FDIC-lite regulatory agency.  It was beefed up but still that wasn't nearly as stringent as the FDIC.  And the insurance requirements were improved but remained FDIC-lite too.  But people pretended that the problem was solved and moved on.  And for a long time nothing happened to contradict this happy picture.

Next in line is what I call the Dot Com Panic of 2001.  I have a low opinion of the movers and shakers on Wall Street.  So, when things go wrong, my first instinct is to blame them.  But this is one of those rare examples where it was not their fault.  The general public did this mostly on its own.  They got little or no help from the usual cast of Wall Street slime balls.

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981.  It was not the first PC but it made a very big splash when it arrived on the scene.  And the fact that it came from IBM, then a giant and well respected company, legitimized the whole thing.

And it turned out that it didn't take much time for smaller, smarter, and more nimble companies to figure out how to cash in.  Microsoft was one of the first.  They got in bed with IBM.  That's usually a recipe for getting swallowed whole.  But Bill Gates outsmarted IBM and emerged on top.

Compaq Computer, then (and unfortunately also now) a company nobody had ever heard of, pioneered the process of legally cloning the IBM PC.  The result was a "compatible" computer that would run all the IBM software but which cost significantly less.

Compaq (and the other clone companies that followed in its footsteps) made a ton of money.  With it now established that "there's money in them there computers" lots of companies started piling in.  And for a long time personal computers (and later the internet) looked like a license to print money.

Both Microsoft and Compaq were financially sound companies.  But then we started seeing companies who said "trust me -- we'll eventually make a ton of money".  The public bought the argument and bought the stock.  So the share price of these stocks went up and up and up.

At first Wall Street steered clear.  They just couldn't figure out how these companies could make enough money to justify their share price.  In many cases, Wall Street couldn't figure out how many of these companies could ever make any money at all.   But the public ignored the advice of Wall Street and bought the stock anyhow.  People made a whole lot of money in a very short amount of time.

Wall Street did eventually climb on the band wagon.  But they never went all in.  And they certainly weren't driving this particular train.  And it turned out that Wall Street was right.  Many of these companies never made any money.  Others made some money but not nearly enough to justify their share price.

And eventually the public caught up with Wall Street and started selling.  And prices went from the stratosphere to the cellar almost instantly.  But by this time these "dot com" companies made up a big chunk of the Market.  So when they went down the market as a whole went down.  People who invested aggressively in these stocks lost 90% of their money.  Conservative investors like myself lost 20-30%.

This shook up Wall Street.  And individuals who had invested heavily lost heavily.  The Dot Com Panic depressed the Market in particular and the economy as a whole in general.  By this time most people had some money in the Market.  Often it was in a company sponsored 401-k.  So the pain was widespread.  But for most people (and for Wall Street) the pain was modest and short lived.  I got all my money back and more within a couple of years.

And that leads me to the "Panic of '08".  This was a typical panic in that Wall Street had its greasy fingers all over it.  In spite of the fact that taxpayers had ended up ponying up tens of billions of dollars as a result of the S&L Panic, the pressure for deregulation continued.  In fact, it probably increased.

In the run up to the Panic of '08 the patchwork of regulatory agencies, audit requirements, reserve requirements, etc. that had built up around "banks" had not been fixed.  Bank-like institutions were allowed to pick their regulator.  Not surprisingly, they tended to pick the one that regulated the least.

And it turns out (as I warned you above) that there is yet another kind of "bank".  Nationally chartered and FDIC insured banks are called "Commercial Banks".  They do business with ordinary people and all kinds of companies.

But there is another kind of bank called an "Investment Bank".  They are children of Wall Street and, the story goes, they only deal with sophisticated customers who have considerable expertise in investments, banking, risk, etc.  So Investment Banks neither need nor want to be subjected to FDIC regulation.  This argument worked.  They were not subject to FDIC oversight.

And for a long time this seemed appropriate.  If an Investment Bank got into trouble then the only people who would suffer a loss were sophisticated Wall Street types.  There was even a law in place to force this.  But Glass-Steagall, as the law was commonly called, was repealed in 1999.  It had said that a bank can be a Commercial Bank or it can be an Investment Bank but it can't be both.

For a long time Investment Banks had been very profitable, far more profitable than Commercial Banks.  But as banking laws changed over time it eventually became possible for Commercial Banks to grow quite large and to diversify into many lines of business.  They saw owning an Investment Bank as a wonderful business opportunity and as the next obvious diversification step.

And by this time some "little" Mutual Savings Banks (the cousin of a Savings and Loan) had gotten quite big.  At one point Washington Mutual, a Mutual Savings Bank that started in my home town and was still headquartered there, was the fourth largest "bank" in the US.  WaMu, as it was called locally, had aggressively shopped for a regulator that was completely unprepared to handle an institution of its size and complexity.  That made it easy to fly under the radar.

And lots of companies were flying under the radar.  They structured their operations so as to avoid all but the most minimal regulatory and audit requirements.  Then they started writing mortgages that were highly unsound.  I'm going to skip over the details.  (If you want more on the subject, it can be found here:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/04/speculative-bubbles-part-2-of-2.html).  But wait, there's more.

Wall Street thought these unsound mortgages represented a great opportunity.  They packaged them up in such a way that they looked like "AAA" super-safe investments and started peddling them to one and all.  Who wouldn't want a super-safe investment that paid a high rate of return?  So they had no trouble selling all they could manufacture.

Eventually reality caught up with the unsound mortgages.  A lot of regular people lost their homes. And, after a short delay, these so called super-safe investments started going bad.  And they took the people who had invested in them down with them.

And the people who had been front and center on all of this had been the Investment Banks.  So they started going down.  Investment Banks going down was only supposed to hurt sophisticated Wall Street types.  But by now it was all tied together.  So the Commercial Banks were soon in big trouble.

The result was the TARP, the Troubled Asset Recovery Program.  TARP bailed out Wall Street and the banking system.  Since we all use the banking system and most of us have at least some money in Wall Street this was good.

But none of the people who lost their homes or were laid off as business took a dive were bailed out.  And nobody went to jail even though there was widespread lawbreaking.  WaMu went from being the fourth largest bank in the country to being the largest US bank to ever to go bankrupt.

Wall Street came back.  And it didn't take all that long.  I suppose that, given the amount of money the Federal Government poured into them, that's not very surprising.  And, after a long hard slog lasting roughly a decade, main street had finally pretty much recovered when COVAD-19 showed up.

To be fair, the COVAD-19 Panic we are now in, is another of those "not Wall Street's fault" panics.  Wall Street is having just as much trouble as everybody else in trying to cope with it.  We've all been forced to become COVAD-19 experts.  Social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and closing down "non-essential" businesses strikes at the heart of the economy.  And a lot of people are getting very sick.  This too sucks up a tremendous amount of resource.

Given all this, what's is the economic lookout?  The short term answer is easy:  It will be devastating.  As I write this ten million people have filed for unemployment in just two weeks.  A lot of the country, including the part I live in, has been locked down for weeks.  The rest of the country will soon be locked down.  While that's going on the economy will head straight into the toilet.  And it will stay there as long as the lockdown continues.

Sharp economic shocks, if they are of short duration, can produce swift rebounds, a so called "V" curve.  The Pollyanna's among us are hoping this is what's going to happen with respect to the COVAD-19 Panic.  But from an economic perspective (and from many other perspectives too) this is an unprecedented event.  It is not like any of the other Panics I have discussed.  So they don't really provide much in the way of guidance.

The event that is most similar to is one I haven't discussed.  A "Spanish Flu" Pandemic swept the world in 1918 and 1919.  Broadly speaking, COVAD-19 is a Flu.  So was the Spanish Flu, named because it was first identified in Spain.  It didn't start there, but by the time scientists figured that out, the name had stuck.

The Spanish Flu panic is inextricably connected to World War I.  It started just as that War was winding down.  And the devastation and unsanitary conditions that were part and parcel of the War helped get it firmly established.  Like COVAD-19, the Spanish Flu was almost impossible to stop once it got established.  Like COVAD-19 it swept across the world.  It would pop up here then pop up there.

There are differences in behavior between COVAD-19 and the Spanish Flu.  But they are unimportant with respect to our discussion.  A lot of people got sick.  A lot of people died.  Medical infrastructure got overwhelmed.

Of course, back then the medical infrastructure was not as sophisticated as it is now.  For instance, the ventilator had not even been invented yet.  But what they did have was the ability to manufacture cheapo masks in large quantities.  So they did.

There are pictures of people out in the streets of Seattle at the time.  Everybody was wearing masks.  It was the law.  Of course, back then you could get masks in Seattle and pretty much anyplace else in the world.

With all of our modern sophistication cheapo masks are now a single source item.  They all now come from China.  China was hit hard and hit first by COVAD-19.  This put a dent in their ability to manufacture things.  But they are now in the process of restarting their manufacturing sector.  And they made zillions of cheapo masks for domestic use as part of their strategy for combatting COVAD-19.

The problem we in the US have is that there is a trade war going on between us and China.  This makes it hard to import the tens of millions of cheapo masks we would need to make a mandatory "mask while you are in public" order practical.  So such an order has not been issued.

People have stepped in with homemade cloth masks.  They are better than nothing but they are not even as good as the standard cheapo mask.  And you need a much fancier N-95 mask for the mask to provide a serious level of protection.

The Spanish Flu definitely depressed the economy.  How much?  We don't really know.  The end of World War I also depressed the economy.  How much should be attributed to one versus the other is something nobody knows.  But it looks like even if we attribute all of the economic damage to Spanish Flu and none of it to World War I, the economic impact of the COVAD-19 Panic will be much larger.

How much larger?  We don't know.  The US response has been disorganized and confused.  And this applies to both the medical side and the economic side.  There things both medical and economic that can still be done to reduce the damage and to bring the COVAD-19 panic to an end more quickly.  So far this is not being done.  And we don't know when that will change.

People have been studying epidemics and pandemics as a medical problem for a long time.  If you can give the experts a few key numbers they can tell you how severe things will get and how the medical part will play out over time.

We have been measuring these numbers.  The best you can say so far is that results are mixed.  Some places are taking the appropriate actions.  But lots of other places aren't.  It is barely possible to close international borders so we aren't harmed by bad behavior elsewhere.  But that can't be done in the case of state and regional borders.  Besides, judging by current statistics, we are one of the places engaging in bad behavior.

The obvious thing to do is to institute national measures to mandate good behavior.  That hasn't happened.  Unfortunately, it may never happen.  What's stopping us is not medical or economic considerations.  It's political considerations.  And that makes COVAD-19 a political problem before anything else.  I wish it were otherwise.