Akrasia

Posted By Nate Oman on September 3, 2010

Here is the flyer for the conference on D&C 42 at SVU next week.

Download now or preview on posterous

Mormon Theology Seminar Poster (1).pdf (1261 KB)

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Posted By Nate Oman on September 3, 2010

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Posted By Nate Oman on September 3, 2010

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Posted By Nate Oman on September 3, 2010

I just finished Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.  It is a fun read and I think that I kinda sorta buy his central argument.  The book is about ultra running and the Tarahumara, a Mexican tribe of super runners that live in the canyons of the Sierra Madres.  (Note: I recently found out that my father has a large Tarahumara pot in his house.  It says something about my father that this is not surprising to me.)  The book is largely a collection of stories, and it is written with a sports journalist’s relentless urge to make every fact and andecdote “incredible” “record breaking” and “revolutionary.”  Despite the at times melodramtic writing, however, it’s an enjoyable read.  McDougall has a good eye for detail, quirky characters, and a good story.

As a (very modest) runner, the ultimate message of the book is hopeful.  McDougall’s basic thesis is that human beings are designed to be distance runners.  This claim runs counter to essentially everything else that I have heard about running.  As I understand it the conventional wisdom is that running is a disaster for your body in the long term.  We are not meant to pound out mile after mile and it is only a matter of time before runners succumb to knee injuries, shin splints, and all the rest.  Having started to suffer my first semi-chronic running related pains, McDougall’s message is encouraging.  His basic argument is two fold.  First, he notes that folks like the Hopi and Tarahumara have traditions of ultra running and extremely low levels of running related injuries.  Tarahumara grandfathers are comfortably running 50 mile races through the mountains and canyons of the Sierra Madres, so why can’t we?!  At this point the story has more or less two branches.  The first is an evolutionary.  Humans, he says, evolved on the ancient savanna as ultra distance runners.  Compared to other large mammals we are an extremely slow bunch, but it turns out that we are much better at endurance running.  Our breathing apparatus is more efficient (unlike other mammals we can take more than one breath per stride), as is our temperature control (we sweat very efficiently).  Accordingly, he says, our ancient ancestors got meat by running antelope to death, a method of hunting that has been documented among African tribesmen.  The second part of the story is how modernity has ruined our natural running ability by making us sedentary and giving us running shoes.

The running shoe part is what most got my attention.  This is also where McDougall’s writing gets perhaps most controversial.  Essentially he claims that the entire running-shoe-industrial-complex is a racket based on snake oil.  There is no evidence that super expensive running shoes reduce injuries.  In fact, he argues, by changing our stride and causing foot and lower calf muscles to atrophy, running shoes cause injuries.  The natural implication of both story lines is that we ought to run barefoot.  We are naturally designed to run, and the artificiality of the modern running shoe messes up nature’s running miracle, the human foot.  I kinda sorta buy it.

First, the parts that I don’t buy.  There is an enormous amount of romanciticizing of nature and the natural man going on in this book.  The Tarahumara are presented as the quintessential noble savages who live lives of peace and spiritual fufillment.  Modernity taints and destroys their spiritual power.  The twist on the noble savage story comes from the claim that their nobility comes from running.  There are problems with story.  For example, pre-modern societies tend to have relatively short median lifespans and few old people.  Hence, the absence of many chronic injuries may simply be the result of the fact that something else manages to kill off people before they get really bad shin splints.  McDougall’s running-twist on the noble savage story at times becomes really melodramatic.  In his hands ultra running becomes a path to higher enlightenment and the solution to chornic social problems.  I like endorphins as much as the next guy, but this is laying it on a bit thick.

Now for the part that I buy.  Last year I was told that I pronate.  I was told the same thing by an orthopedist when I was a kid, and even had orthodic inserts in my shoes for a while.  At the advice of a running shoe salesman I got a pair of running shoes designed for pronating runners with heavy posts to keep my foot level.  The result was a disaster.  I was training for a half marathon and didn’t want to switch shoes.  Besides I wasn’t eager to shell out another $100 so soon for a new pair of shoes.  So I stuck with them.  I got blisters.  I got back pains.  I got pains in my hips.  Since I went back to simpler (and I might add cheaper) shoes, I have been a happier runner.  McDougall’s basic claim about how shoes lead to the atrophy of muscles that could prevent injuries makes sense to me.

I liked McDougall’s book and for all my skepticism after I finished it yesterday, I ran about three miles and change bare foot pushing my daughter in her stroller.  Of course, I had to walk the final mile or so to get home because I worked the skin off my left little toe and was left with blisters on four of my other toes.

Draw your own conclusions.

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Posted By Nate Oman on April 10, 2009

A while ago I was reading some sermons from the 1880s in the Journal of Discourses. The 1880s, of course, is the decade when the anti-polygamy crusades were at their most intense. Thousands of Mormons were incarcerated, the Brethren were in hiding from the law much of the time, and every time you turned around there was a new law confiscating Mormon property or disenfranchising Mormon voters. Hence, I was surprised to come across a sermon in which George Q. Cannon spoke unironically of his admiration for George Edmunds. Edmunds was a Republican Senator from Vermont, and the chief proponent of harsher anti-Mormon legislation in Congress. Cannon noted that he disagreed with Edmunds and thought him mistaken. Nevertheless, he said in effect that he thought Edmunds an admirable man of principle. Cannon’s remarks reveal a deep double-mindedness in nineteenth-century Mormonism, a double-mindedness whose preservation surely counts as one of the triumphs of the modern Church. (more…)

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Posted By Nate Oman on April 7, 2009

I’ve blogged before about my great, great grandfather who was “called on a mission” by Wilford Woodruff in 1896 to study law at Cornell. 104 years later, I am going to be returning to his old stomping grounds to teach for a semester. I’m looking forward to it. I hear that Ithaca is wonderful in January and February.

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Posted By Nate Oman on April 4, 2009

In the Iowa Supreme Court’s opinion declaring traditional marriage unconstitutional, the justices dealt with the claim that the law was justified because it protected the integrity of the tradition of heterosexual marriage. The opinion states:

A specific tradition sought to be maintained cannot be an important governmental objective for equal protection purposes, however, when the tradition is nothing more than the historical classification currently expressed in the statute being challenged. When a certain tradition is used as both the governmental objective and the classification to further that objective, the equal protection analysis is transformed into the circular question of whether the classification accomplishes the governmental objective, which objective is to maintain the classification.

As presented by the Court (and for all I know as presented by the attorneys defending the law), the argument sounds circular and absurd. As a technical matter the court was applying intermediate scrutiny, but as presented by the Court the appeal to tradition would seem to fail even a rational basis test.

To anyone with a familiarity with the history of the common law, the notion that the appeal to tradition is circular or vacuous is striking. The classical common law theorists of the seventeenth century – Coke, Hale, and Selden – thought that tradition was the primary justification for the law’s authority. Independent of the particular issue of same-sex marriage, the Iowa Supreme Court’s opinion shows how far our legal thinking has traveled.

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Posted By Nate Oman on March 31, 2009

Here is my theory du jour about the origins of the financial crisis, suggested by one of my students: blame it all on the true sale doctrine or rather on its evisceration.  Stick with me to the end, and I have some overly broad generalizations about expertise, property rights, and Hayek. 

The “true sale doctrine” is not a staple of the law school curriculum.  At best it makes a brief cameo in secured transactions and bankruptcy courses.  Notwithstanding this academic obscurity, however, its failure may have had a big role in the current melt-down of the banking sector and with it the world economy.  Here is the gist of the issue: 

Securitization is the process by which financial assets (essentially promises to pay money in the future) are transferred from their original holder to a special purpose vehicle such as an LLC or business trust, which then issues securities entitling the holder to some fractional right to the income from the transferred assets.  Hence, for example, a bank might transfer mortgage loans to an SPV, the SPV would then issue securities to investors, and the cash from the sale of these securities would flow back to the bank.  The investors in the securities have two ultimately inconsistent goals.  (more…)

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Posted By Nate Oman on March 30, 2009

…or at least they liked my Co-op post on A Merchant of Venice. Cool.

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Posted By Nate Oman on March 24, 2009

Over the weekend, I re-read A Merchant of Venice, and I was struck by the fact that Shakespeare manages to include in the play virtually every element of the current financial crisis. Scene one begins with a discussion of risk assessment, and Antonio’s belief that he has managed to tame the vagaries of commercial fate through diversification. Asked by Salarino if he “Is sad to think upon his merchandise” (I.i.40), Antonio responds:

Believe me, no. I thank my fortune for it
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year.
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad. (I.i.41-45)

Having ignored the problem of fat tails and black swans, Antonio decides to engage in a bit of dodgy finance. He borrows in the wholesale market from Shylock under terms that appear favorable, but have a huge downside in the unlikely event of his default. Antonio, of course, is unconcerned. From his point of view he is getting cheap money by taking on what seems like an extremely remote risk. He then takes these borrowed funds and uses them to make what can only be described as a no doc, subprime loan. Bassiano wants money for a speculative venture — the wooing “In Belmont [of] a lady richly left” (I.i.161) — and Antonio agrees, in effect renting out his credit rating:

Try what my credit in Venice can do;
That shall be racked even to the uttermost
To furnish thee to Belmont to fair Portia.
Go presently inquire, and so will I,
Where money is; and I no question make
To have it of my trust or for my sake. (I.i.180-185)

Shylock, for his part, does not approve of the loose monetary policy in Venice, which he rightly blames on wild lending practices, such as Antonio’s loans:

How like a fawning publican he looks.
I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more, for what is low simplicity,
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice. (I.iii.38-42)

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