Santorini Dave Travel Blog Advice

Santorini Dave, a popular travel blog, is against the idea of using travel blogs as storytelling vehicles--at least if you want to make any money: 

I’m sorry, but you will not make money from travel tales and adventure stories. Or, if you do, you’re far more talented than me and you’re not reading my lame-*ss post about focusing on your brand. So stop reading and go do it. Start your blog about all your crazy stories traveling the world. (Also: good luck. There’s a place for storytelling in the world but you won’t find a blog post on it. You might as well read self-help books on how to be original. There are a dozen people in the world that will make money from travel storytelling. If you think you could be one of those twelve then go for it.)

Anyone who's read Yuval Noah Harari will initially gasp--until s/he remembers he has a tenured university post, a privilege available to less than 1% of the world's population. Lacking such security, most people will need to sell something to be able to tell a story. Consequently, social media, which relies on quantitative metrics, has turned the internet into a giant marketplace not of ideas, but visual titillation. 

To be clear, I don't mind titillation or mindless distractions, but the Native Americans, Muslims, and to a lesser extent, Jews, have been proven right in their approach against a culture based on figurative images. You may quibble that the ban on figurative images revolved specifically around religion or living things being elevated to the status of idols (God being a jealous mistress), but such categories were close to all-encompassing in olden culture. 

We tend to forget once the Bible was transcribed and translated, it became the primary book marketed by people in power. Consequently, just like any other product, chapters were modified depending on local audiences (whither Lilith?) and promises/rhetoric/advertising didn't always match reality. Regardless of the specific make and model of the book, because advertising/missionary financing was strong, and competition almost non-existent, a single book often became the way a person learned English. First mover advantage has never been disputed, but the point here is that it resulted in moving from pictures as the basis for storytelling to written words--an improvement. 

From Codex Gigas, seen in Stockholm, Sweden.

Fast forward to 2019. On the subway, most people are using mobile phones to play online games (visual, no words) or to shop (visual). Except for Wikipedia and reddit, the most popular apps and websites rely entirely on either the spoken word or visual images. 

No one doubts images are more compelling to the human brain than written words. ee cummings may have said it best: "the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter." Women have always realized this fact about human nature, so cosmetic products are always in demand, and even in periods when women's clothing lacked pockets, small jade purses or ornaments like ivory combs would be deployed to attract the wandering eye. 

Of course no one is arguing we want societies mostly of Socrates or Shakespeares--intellectuals often rely on more daring friends and lovers for inspiration, and obviously technology and buildings do not appear spontaneously--but a society that does not advertise its own individual stories properly will find itself depending on non-native and perhaps outdated stories for cohesion. The lesson? If you let marketers dictate your culture, perhaps you will soon find the underlying reason our ancestors disfavored graven images, especially ones made of valuable commodities. For some of us, it is just as easy to drown in a shallow pool than a deep one. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat 

Privatization vs. the Public Good

Marc Lamont Hill succinctly describes the liberal Democratic platform in a single page in Nobody (2016) (paperback, pp. 177): 

The problem with this approach is that it ignores government's tendency to borrow, particularly from private banks. If tax revenues and other fees do not match the cost of services, especially when new services are needed, private banks provide the loans/bonds. In short, the "liberal" anti-privatization model renders government at state and local levels dependent on private banks. (It should not be surprising, then, that many have called America's Democratic Party the party of Wall Street, and its Republican Party the party of Big Oil.) 

I suppose one could argue "deficits don't matter" and render Congress's power of the purse into a literal money tree, showering all cities and states with interest-free loans. And yet, if governance could be so simple, why not make it even simpler and have Congress give all individuals money directly? Indeed, many have suggested the latter as the basis of UBI (Universal Basic Income), but the experiment has always been directed towards the unemployed or the neglected, perhaps assuming human beings prefer meaningful work over none at all. 

We have now arrived at the true difficulty at the intersection of commerce and government: creating meaningful jobs while avoiding excessive and uneven inflation. 

From local Los Altos, California newspaper (June 2019)
Every single state executive office is run by Democrats, from Governor to Insurance Commissioner.

Even ignoring, as Mr. Hill does, commerce's complex trade/security agreements with other nations and the trillions of dollars of debt these agreements assume, nowhere in his analysis of commerce does he make room for the ambitious, the persecuted, or the minority not agreeing with his definition of the "common good." And while it is true ambition often paves its way through artifice, there we can find government's true calling: protecting common people from the ambitious while creating an economic system bringing everyone together so as to prevent persecution as well as self-segregation. 

The problems of modern commerce are vast and complex, centering chiefly around unimaginative local governments favoring the tried-and-true, leading to uneven development, de facto segregation, then the very inequality Mr. Hill abhors. Private entities are not silver bullets against corruption, but history teaches us any entity suffering from a lack of competition--such as public jails or police departments--will eventually become corrupt or deficient. With respect to privatized jails, we have learned it is possible for the private to become as corrupt as the public without sufficient oversight of necessary adjoining agencies--in this case, ICE and police departments. Finally, if corralling commercial activity were so straightforward as prioritizing the public good over the profit motive, one wonders why the mafia or black markets exist at all. 

The first step to strengthening social cohesion is trust in government, which requires not only transparency, but an understanding that modern commerce is so complex, only cooperation at both the neighborhood and national levels will create viable solutions. States like Singapore are small enough to make the gap between neighborhoods and their national Parliament a short walk, while countries like Norway have such small populations, a gap between their capitals and outlying regions can never become too great. America, like Russia and China, possesses none of these advantages and must work harder to prevent a police state from taking over completely in the name of the public good. As an American resident, I am confident most Americans favor the public good, but less so when it comes to the hard work and humility in getting there. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019) 

Bonus I: when academics without a direct understanding of law and economics talk about the "profit motive," almost every criticism as applied to corporations could be applied to the mafia, which operates across borders using the singular method of violence--a tactic corporations cannot use. (Unlike your local loan shark, Wells Fargo or JP Morgan cannot send someone to break your legs if you default or declare bankruptcy.) 

GQ article by Alex Hannaford (June 2019)

Instead, multinational corporations must contend with three or four layers of overlapping jurisdictions, a level of red tape making it easier for governments, whether liberal or conservative, to demand ever-escalating payments, legal fees, or bribes to do business and to bring consumers more choices. When such choices are made without any regard to long-term planning, chaos results, causing critics to blame the profit motive rather than the target government's poor vision. Thus, the better arguments against corporate power revolve around short-termism (i.e., short term profit motives) and lobbyists' efforts to insulate corporations from accountability or transparency (i.e., giving corporations the same qualified immunity as some government agents). 

Bonus II: while we're on the topic of overlapping jurisdictions, let's review why such a dynamic exists. First, redundancy. If a local police department is overwhelmed (think riots), it needs to be able to request additional personnel. A local entity prepared for all worst case scenarios will bankrupt local government or deprive cities and counties of much-needed social and other services, eventually guaranteeing a repressive police state. (Mr. Hill himself explains this exact issue in discussing Ferguson, Missouri.) 

Second, local entities represent local citizens, who may have different needs and wants than national representatives. By forcing national and multinational participants to adhere to local regulations, cities and counties can shape their own destinies--up to a point. (Justice Louis Brandeis' shorthand term for this interplay is "laboratories of democracy.") 

Third, if a local entity is corrupt (think Mississippi Burning (1988)), a local resident has no recourse but to appeal to an outside authority having jurisdiction. 

In short, overlapping jurisdictions were not designed to promote complexity for the sake of complexity, serving an unnecessary expansion of law school and academic influence, nor to allow looser federal purse strings to wedge themselves between police departments and local residents.

Bonus III: democracy is hard to successfully implement over long periods of time, and even harder the larger the geographical area. A blue collar worker in Kansas, absent some respected intermediary, may have nothing in common (except language) with a software engineer in California. The idea of a common language is to establish respected intermediaries, such as journalists (think Charles Kuralt, Studs Terkel), to bridge the gap and help form a national identity, but of course language can manufacture social dissolution just as well as social cohesion. 

It may be the case that a 5 to 7 days workweek is inimical to a well-functioning democracy by not allowing enough voters sufficient time for study and contemplation. And yet, one can be certain a majority of contemporary American adults, most of whom had ineffective public school teachers, would spend their additional free time on less-than-edifying activities. Is it any wonder, then, that America has become the land of the distracted, home of the vested interests? Why would a minority or immigrant with options choose such a place? And how have less developed areas, which preserve local agency through national neglect or capitol corruption, attained the very character wished upon us by our most educated and most sincere? 

Segregation as Logical Extension of American Policies

Regular readers understand de facto segregation--based on race or class--is the primary scourge of modern Western societies, particularly when governments do not adhere to any borrowing limits. Yet, few people realize modern segregation is rooted in logic, not a nature-based pattern of "birds of a feather flocking together." To summarize, in a decentralized environment without a trusted mediator, new residents gravitate towards informal norms, including those relating to communication and conflict resolution; and because self-segregation allows minorities to replicate their informal norms (for example, see Amish or Mennonites), immigrants as a whole have tended to succeed when they self-segregate and to fail when they don't. (The West's response to its failure to correct racial segregation has been emphasizing or promoting individual minority outliers.) 

When Malcolm X and others discussed separation, they weren't just concerned with violence and police dogs--they were acknowledging a link between failure and ineffective governance in their own communities. More controversially, W.E.B. DuBois, Harvard's first African-American graduate--also referring to a lack of institutional trust--wrote of Germany's Jews banding together due to "oppression in the past." 

Kwame Appiah's The Lies that Bind (2018)

In my own California county, I notice clear distinctions when I drive 15 minutes in any direction, with Sunnyvale "belonging" to Indian-owned businesses, Cupertino "belonging" to Taiwanese-owned businesses, and East San Jose "belonging" to Vietnamese-owned businesses. Like DuBois, I, too, have seen minority Jews succeeding through voluntary separation, though in my case, I had argued other minorities ought to follow the same example in America. In the end, regardless of profession or location, the catalyst for self-segregation remains the same: a lack of trust in institutions, especially police and courts, increases the likelihood self-segregation will provide favorable outcomes, leading to a rise in the informal economy, which eventually weakens social cohesion and inhibits formal economic activity. 

Some countries understand this phenomenon well. Singapore, one of the world's most diverse countries, has taken so many measures to signal integrity, its overreach is sometimes comical--though no one can argue with its success. Like everywhere else, Singapore can be clannish; after all, its Chinese population was famously "kicked out" of Malaysia, and its experience with riots in 1964 led to its founder insisting "on a multiracial, multireligious, multicultural model to provide a cohesive identity for the new nation." (Kwame Appiah, The Lies that Bind Us (2018), hardcover, pp. 93) Despite its hallowed status as SE Asia's least corrupt country, most Singaporean experts have not fully connected their tough social harmony laws with a lack of entrenched mafia or a black market. Why not? Given the West's history, where racial subjugation and slavery have been based on widely publicized theories of inferiority, Western-educated graduates tend to focus on laws relating to "free speech" or race more than others, missing the fact that Singapore's laws restricted all non-modern behavior--to the point of fining residents in their own condominiums for being naked. (LKY, a lawyer educated in London, had no patience for those wishing to maintain "backwards" kampong behavior.) Somehow, Singapore knew it first had to establish social harmony then economic success, especially if it demanded sacrifices from most of its residents. 

Oddly enough, when modern thinkers today argue multiculturalism has failed, they do not cite poorly distributed government funding, inadequate governmental hiring practices, or convergence between vested political interests and historically one-race residency. They certainly do not point to their own failures of institutional integrity, causing either intentional or unintentional misdirection and further strengthening separatists, who often overlap with racists. The popular solution to modern society's ailments has been more meritocracy; however, elevated debt levels in both private and public markets have effectively propped up existing institutions regardless of merit, thereby entrenching the status quo. 

Appiah's The Lies that Bind (2018)

Indeed, any country where a man can borrow billions of dollars to invest in real estate under a tax code favoring such investments, then become president primarily on such a basis, means wealth and banking have become divorced from societal good. The effects of such a result are not only a coarsening of culture and greater skepticism of the kind of public-private partnerships making Singapore and China successful, but disillusionment, especially among young adults. 

As I write, I am reminded of 12 year-old Cassius Clay being assisted by Louisville police officer Joe Martin in a state prohibiting race-mixing in social venues, public parks, recreation centers, schools, and public transportation (one reason Cassius must have been so distraught over his lost bicycle). What was it that made Officer Martin look at a scrawny, tearful boy, realize the bike was gone for good, and decide he had to make sure this kid wouldn't lose hope? Why did the same conservative legal Establishment in that same Louisville city continue to protect the teenager when he was no longer Cassius Clay but a man with a foreign name and an unfamiliar religion? How did one Southern city looked down upon by Northerners look out for a boy different from themselves and then a man even more different than the boy? It must be because social cohesion and integrity, whether in Singapore in 2001 or Kentucky in 1954, are the stewards of any successful enterprise, cities included, and authority, when just, can prevail in spite of written laws or because of them. 

From Louisville's Muhammad Ali Museum, featuring meritocracy in action.

I do not claim to know all the reasons some communities succeed while others fail. I do know, however, the more Americans continue their current path, where they do not learn from Singapore and its foundation of informally and formally enforced social harmony and also from Louisville's refusal to allow formal laws to dictate social outcomes, the more they create a society where a Schwinn bike is just another bicycle, and a police officer's badge just another piece of tin. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck (1884)

From Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, a Norwegian play from 1884. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Bonus: Voltaire in 1770 (France): "Le meglio è l'inimico del bene." 

Henrik Ibsen in 1884 (Norway): "Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal." 

Silicon Valley marketers in 2019 (USA): "Perfect is the enemy of good." 

(Influence seems to be becoming less discriminatory by lowering itself to the literacy level most common around it.)

Poem: For Monica Lewinsky

"Splendour in the Grass," for Monica Lewinsky

You did not make a mistake. No decent person would call falling in love at 22 a mistake. 

It is normal to fall in love at any age, and even more normal for a young woman to love. 

In an office now sullied by political election and genuine threats of impeachment, you alone had the innocent brightness of a newborn, the strength to think of someone other than yourself. 

The only indecency witnessed was the way the tenderness of the human heart by which we live is so often ignored, spat on, and finally, forgotten by prurient politicians whose fingers pinch and poke anyone they please. 

May thou answerest them 

                                            only with 
   

                                 a 

   
       smile. 


© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

Of Cigars, Old Creeds, and F. Scott Fitzgerald

In high school, I was assigned The Great Gatsby, which I despised. In Mexico City, of all places, I found an Indiana University magazine called The Folio, which included reprinted sections from another F. Scott Fitzgerald book, This Side of Paradise (1920). Much better written than Gatsby, it includes his wife's experiences as a so-called flapper, giving the prose a liveliness I hadn't expected. (One of my favorite songs, the Pet Shop Boys' "Being Boring," was inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald.) Here's the portion I liked: 

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

Sounds like Allen Ginsburg and the 50s' Beat Generation, doesn't it?  Excepting my wonderful math and science teachers, the lack of mirth in my American middle school and high school teachers makes me increasingly convinced the Europeans and others are misdirecting Americans on matters of the English language and literature in order to preserve their status as arbiters of Western culture. Here's another segment from the same 1936 magazine:

I don't smoke, but I love this paragraph. It's beautifully written and helps me, a non-smoker, understand why someone would pay to get mouth and lung cancer. The ability to transfer your love of an activity, a person, or a thing to another is the essence of writing, something I see rarely these days. Part of the problem is America's habit of "borrowing" culture from other countries; part of it is North America's geographical isolation; and part of it is its relatively small population, only 4 to 5% of the world's. Taken together, you'd think most Americans would agree immigration is a necessary national goal to prevent well-funded, well-traveled military culture from taking over the dialogue, but as liberal elites began disdaining difference not aligned with popularity, they paved the way for the most dull amongst them to rise, providing little resistance to conservative (think)tanks. 

And so here we are, starved for creativity and ravenously hungry despite being overly fed. Without good, honest, and interesting writers, we cannot place ourselves in a fellow resident's shoes, making politics a game between the out-of-touch and the even more out-of-touch, and giving marketers undeserved influence. My personal solution seems to be reviewing the old creeds, which aren't much different than the new, human nature being what it is. But the more I delve into the past, the more I taste decline in the present, and the more my palate demands justice. 

I go to working-class Calgary, Canada in one week. Let's see what's on the menu there. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

Bonus: meanwhile, in China... 

Lessons in Counterintuition

1. A popular survey question purports to expose our innate irrationality. It goes like this: you can have 100,000 USD if your enemy or your ex-spouse gets 1 million USD. Apparently, most respondents declined the offer. 

But all one has to do is add more nuance to the scenario to get a different overall response, thereby exposing the original question as meaningless. Try this: you have non-dischargeable debt of 50,000 USD. You can have 55,000 USD if your enemy receives 550,000 USD. Answers to the second question will be more varied, indicating short-answer surveys don't offer enough nuance to justify their cost or relevance. 

When such deficient "research" is passed off as newsworthy, serious journalism has died in America, but I'm also worried about inattention to the sociology field. Medical advances, especially in neuroscience, are leading governments and academics to focus on psychology and pharmacology departments without the involvement of independent entities capable of institutional knowledge. Absent relevant and reliable anecdotal evidence, scientific researchers may spend taxpayer and other funds chasing chimeras. 

2. Speaking of a failure to appreciate nuance, people are worried about AI's ability to increase unemployment. 

One person believes AI may wipe out 47% of existing jobs in America,
an astoundingly specific number.

Yet, the AI problem may be even bigger than unemployment if the world's technological AI race gives existing leaders--not necessarily in power by merit--the potential to cement their advantage over others, snuffing out change from local sources. 

Roberto Unger's Free Trade Reimagined (2007).

Imagine a robot that can scan all local residents for weapons as well as criminal records. No longer would a rural recruit dropped in a foreign land need be in a position to kill unarmed civilians. No longer would a wary security guard at a private establishment need assume every patron a potential threat. 

But let's fast-forward to the future. The aforementioned technology has made it easier to invade and occupy different lands if only to prevent another competitor from doing the same. Thus, while such technology would make the weak and unarmed safer in the short-term, the long-term picture is unclear. Nevertheless, if modern history is any indication, one can imagine this technology leading to more occupation, then removal of armed resistance to foreign culture, and finally the supplanting of local culture, beliefs, and methods. In one fell swoop, the same AI technology that protected the weak and unarmed has now extinguished the capacity for the same residents to achieve Roberto M. Unger's "diversity" component--leading to perpetual dependency on a foreign power. 

From Unger's Free Trade Reimagined (2007). 

Unger discusses diversity in ways unlike any other economist or political thinker. In order for workers not to be left out as innovation and creative destruction are financed by larger players, he argues it is imperative that 1) local entities are able to innovate in their own ways, unconstrained by centralized norms (another way of saying local culture ought to be supported through "collective experimentation" rather than subservience to centralized market forces); and 2) all entities are able to disregard prior norms if doing so would improve conditions for both capital and labor. 

From Roberto Unger's Free Trade Reimagined (2007)

Unger's "economic diversity" is the characteristic most under threat with advanced AI--despite not a single politician articulating this potential problem apart from anti-trust concerns. 

3. More lessons in counter-intuition: Country A has an 80% poverty rate. Country B has a 50% poverty rate and a democratic political system. Without knowing more, which country has the better chance of avoiding societal cohesion problems in the next 50 years? 

You'd think it would be the country with less poverty, but America in 2019 proves that when at least half of a country is able to structure the tax code, government funding, and housing inflation in ways that benefit existing interest groups, anyone outside those groups is left behind not just relatively but absolutely. (For the economics wonks: I use these two terms informally, but Unger uses David Ricardo's comparative advantage vs. Adam Smith's absolute advantage as an overall framework, at the same time casting doubt on Ricardo's ideas due to their limited scope, i.e., trade between just two countries using just two popular products.) 

Where economic theory typically fails is its inability to properly incorporate the social costs of underinvestment, meaning over time, absent some mechanism--such as widespread and cost-effective public transportation, genuinely merit-based and affordable colleges, etc.--segregation occurs, cementing physical and abstract (e.g., communication) gaps and reducing opportunities for reconciliation. Worse, as existing winners gain more affluence, they begin to see others outside their increasingly closed-loop system as morally deficient, eventually rejecting public institutions as the costs of reconciliation increase exponentially every year effective solutions are not implemented. (American acceptance of exorbitantly expensive private K-12 schooling is one example of such a breakdown--as if even one K-12 school not properly educating future voters in a democratic system providing equal votes to each citizen is acceptable. As I've written before, "Generally, long-term costs of exclusion, even if unintentional, far exceed the costs of inclusion on the front end.")  

In contrast, a country with an 80% poverty rate cannot easily segregate the country excessively or irreversibly. Any national public works program must consider more rather than fewer residents by demographic default. Moreover, the cost of essential items such as housing cannot be inflated beyond a point of no return even with the assistance of the banking sector unless wages also rise among a greater percentage of the population. To sum up, it is better for individuals to be rich than to be poor, but not necessarily for countries. 

© Matthew Rafat (2019)

Bonus I: "Free trade will flourish when the rules of the world trading system are designed to reconcile openness and diversity, not to suppress diversity in the name of openness." -- Roberto M. Unger 

Bonus II: "Humanity can become more unified only by seeking to develop in different directions... [so as] to establish a machine for the creation of collective difference [that supports] alternatives by making the world safer for them." -- Roberto M. Unger 

Bonus III: continuing the third example above, one can see developing countries' biggest problem is not technological access, but corruption. Why? Because developed countries' need for more consumers, including ones willing to spend beyond their means, will lubricate technological transfers so as to establish platforms. A governor or president who chooses the wrong transportation company contract or who builds asphalt roads instead of Tokyo-style trains is a developing country's greatest threat to long-term success. 

Even if a developing country chooses well, only half of the battle has been decided--for example, if a train is chosen but goes over estimated costs, not only will the government lose taxpayers' money while further mortgaging its citizens' futures to foreign banks, it will also lose credibility, weakening its ability to govern and to regulate.