A True Story of Reaching for the Stars – Physically, Literally

-->

This is a true story of a boy who reached for the stars. I am writing this story because I think of some things I never told to any of my children. The story is a true story of one part of my life, but only one part. I hate having to simplify it, and leave out lots of things important to me, but that’s life. The bottom line is that the most painful part of this great quest has been accomplished,  and you who are younger and who also know some mathematics have an opportunity to change the future more than you may imagine yet. This is about me, but it is for you.

I grew up in the 1960’s, possibly the time of greatest optimism and true heroic feeling in American history.  I refused to accept the old wet blanket “realism” where people said “the best anyone can do is get a nice house in the suburbs, and give up the unrealistic idea of making a big difference to the future.” I was deeply inspired by the space program, by key parts of the vision of John Kennedy, and by stories of humanity someday settling space even beyond our solar system.

At age 8, I learned that I had some very unique abilities in mathematics. I was also inspired by some books in astronomy, most notably Hoyle’s paperback “The Nature of the Universe.” (It took me awhile to assimilate the last chapter, but I had read far enough to be on an upwards trajectory regardless.)  My father once said: “Well, if your two big interests are mathematics and astronomy, you should be an astrophysicist.”

By age 12, I had a deep interest in philosophy, which has also been a big part of my life. But I remember thinking: “Philosophy is basically about what you want to do with your life. If you spend your whole life figuring out what it is, you won’t have time to actually DO it! I need to figure this out… but I also need to make space for actually doing it.”

By the end of age 16, I had enough college credits in mathematics (from Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, including a graduate course in logic from Alonzo Church, and some computer science) to meet most college requirements for a major in that subject, but I asked myself: “What now? What is the MOST that I could contribute, based on my own special comparative advantage?” I read some of the work of John Von Neumann, who said that there are three great opportunities for mathematics to revolutionize our understanding of science and reality – the mathematics of mind, the mathematics of the ultimate laws of physics, and the mathematics of life and self-organization as a universal phenomenon.

By 1968, I resolved to get a PhD in Applied Mathematics, to try to fulfill that kind of heroic vision as best I could. I still felt that reaching the stars, literally and physically, would be a huge advance in human history, far more heroic and important and worthwhile than anything else I could imagine. I also knew that our present knowledge of physics would make that extremely difficult, if at all possible.

Having read a little book on first year quantum mechanics in the summer of 1968, I knew it would be an incredible mess – but concluded that this mess REQUIRED new mathematical insight.  Perhaps humans never will make it to the stars – but to maximize whatever hope we have, the next prerequisite, the critical path, lies in FIRST cleaning up the mess in physics, THEN building a more complete model of how the universe works based on a new more powerful foundation, and THEN the actual insight in design and engineering leading up to an actual starship.

I remember, when my older children watched Star Trek, I said: “All this is exciting and great. But remember – the real hero, the person who changed the galaxy, was not the captain who steered the starship, but the person who built it in the first place. You, my child, could be that hero, that greatest hero in human history  -- IF you learn your mathematics and physics, and if I finish developing tools you will need to be able to do it.” My part would be the most painful and boring, and socially unrewarding, trying to create order out of chaos, and bringing it up to the level where more socially accepted work IS NOW POSSIBLE – by following up. But stage one (my stage) took a lifetime, and the next stage also takes a lifetime to totally fulfill – and I don’t have another lifetime left here. Maybe it all dies here, and maybe no one ever gets to the stars.  But I’ll keep trying, between other things which are also important.

Back in graduate school, at Harvard, I started my first year taking an intermediate level graduate course in quantum mechanics, from Richard Wilson, a nuclear physicist.  Then courses from Schwinger and Coleman, among others.  I learned that the best official theory of physics then available was something called “the canonical version of quantum field theory” (developed mainly by Schwinger and Feynmann, with some help from Dyson supporting Feynman). It is based on strange objects called field operators or operator fields, based on creation and annihilation operators over a strange infinite dimensional space called Fock space. I also learned that Feynmann and Schwinger felt a great discomfort, which I shared, about the ugly and unnatural feeling of that version; we all wanted to find some way to reformulate quantum theory over the usual three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. More precisely, we wanted to find a theory defined over the elegant four dimensional version of space-time that Albert Einstein taught us all about. Schwinger’s efforts became things he called “source theory” or “functional integrals,” which were later called “the advanced form of Feynman’s path integral formalism.”

Schwinger never claimed that source theory or functional integrals would be a plausible model of how the universe works, at a fundamental level. “It is just a phenomenological tool for us to use for the time being when, in our ignorance, we do not know enough to do better.” (That’s what he said in class, but I think I saw similar words in his book on source theory.) I made up my mind to “bite the bullet,”

to face up to the fundamental challenge which other folks kept veering away from – the challenge to find a way to do it right. But by the third year of graduate school, I realized I could not make enough progress fast enough to do a PhD thesis on that subject. For my thesis, I defended the two other mathematical topics which I felt would be most important, but doable. Most people who know about my Harvard PhD thesis view it as an incredible act of ambition for a graduate student – but for me, it was a fallback position, to retrench towards something older, more familiar and easier.

I remember, in graduate school, fully understanding the importance of the question “what is an electron?” In other words, finding a mathematically valid description of the electron as a kind of vortex of force. Finding a way to PREDICT the mass of the electron by the equation E=mc**2, by adding up the energy in the force fields of that vortex.  I remember being deeply intrigued by the mathematics of that question, but overwhelmed by the difficulty of trying to find a way forward in time for a PhD thesis. The difficulty was very depressing to me – and I suspect that my fiancée of the time changed her mind ultimately because of how depressing it was to be unable to solve the problem at the time, and to have to give up (for a time!) and retrench. I made up my mind I would never give up this high quest – but would make a living in another area, working on the basic physics on my own time as best I could.  Of course, it did help a lot much later when NSF asked me to take some responsibility for areas of engineering-oriented physics (like engineering quantum computing) which helped me put more energy into the challenge,  learn more about the best empirical data we now have, and stimulate my thinking in many ways.

So now, after lots of false starts and lots of intermediate scaffolding, I have put together a new paper, under submission to a leading journal, joint with my wife Ludmilla, which brings it all together, and lays out the way forward – the opportunity for the next generation – in the clearest way we know how to do (given the complexity of the subject).  It starts out with four new Lagrangians, two of which have never appeared anywhere (not even in obscure blogs or scribd or such); one of those two is my best guess for the ultimate laws of physics. It is the first genuinely plausible candidate for that which I have ever seen anywhere – but in real science, plausibility is only a starting point, because empirical data is what should be driving us. The new Lagrangian and accompanying tools are open to that exploration, especially by making it possible to take advantage of empirical data which today’s standard model basically does not even try to address. (e.g. medium-energy nuclear physics, little things like nuclear fusion.)  Section 2 of the new paper is practically a work plan.

But at the end of the day – I remember the time, decades ago, when I walked into the office of Marvin Minsky and other leading scientists, with a simple elegant solution to the problems in neural networks which had blocked progress in that field. I remember having a new equation (the chain rule for ordered derivatives) every bit as powerful and fundamental in its area as E=mc**2 – and hoping that this simple easily understood solution would catalyze a huge immediate change. I remember learning how resistant even the most brilliant of humans seem to be to new ideas, even new ideas which fulfill what seemed to be frustrated goals of their lives.

Based on that experience, I do not feel great confidence that the journal will accept the new paper (despite the logic, and the commitment of true science to the exploration of transformative new ideas and worked-out heresy, one of the themes of Dyson’s great videos on the web cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson), or that members of the next generation with enough horsepower will carry the baton forward. But maybe. Given the huge importance of what is at stake, I can only try… between other things.

As for space – I have learned enough about the “thick skulls” out there to realize I have a comparative advantage in something much simpler, like being able to see that it’s better to build an airplane with an engine than without, and that reentry vehicles don’t work so well if they melt every time they go through the atmosphere. Things which ought to be obvious – but create an additional burden of responsibility for those who can see straight.  (See the earlier blog post on how NASA decided to build an airplane without an engine. Hey – I was there; it’s real!) Who knows?

There is plenty of room for one person who sees straight to make a difference, simply BECAUSE there are so few of them…

Best of luck,

   Paul

P.S. Just in case anyone ever does see the paper I submitted… I also have a  version in my files which is slightly more clear about wave functions versus density matrices in the many worlds version of quantum theory, as in the seminal work of David Deutch of Oxford, the real founder of quantum computing. Also, I wish I had added a few sentences about WEINBERG’S recollections on canonical versus functional integral quantum field theory, which appears in his standard text on quantum field theory; it seems that the one and only “empirical” support for path integrals over canonical QFT was the method of renormalization of electroweak theory developed by ‘tHooft; however, the evidential value of that disappears when we do not need renormalization any more in the basic laws of physics, because, among other things, we have a finite mass for the electron, and can use PDE simulations to make predictions.

I suppose I should write something more concrete and easier to understand about how to manage the boundary conditions in PDE simulations for scattering in the general case – but if people do not follow up on other aspects, I probably won’t be motivated. The information is out there anyway. Or maybe the Bell’s Theorem experiment with imperfect polarizers should be a focus. So many things to do…
The biggest hole in this story is that it does not say enough about the essential role of Ludmilla, who taught me aspects of quantum field theory which they never taught me at Harvard (some because they were more recent).  Having someone to talk to, who really understands and contributes, is really essential to energizing the human brain.
Speaking of which, Luda notes some interesting passages in the book by Lawrence Krauss, "Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science":
(1) page 159, Feynman says: "It was the purpose of making these simplified methods of calculating more available that I pblished my paper in 1949, for I still didn't think I had solved any real problems.. I was still expecting that I would some day come through the other end of my original idea... and get finite answers, get that self-radiation out and the vacuum circles and that stuff straightened out.. which I never did.
  (2) page 198, Krauss says:"Gellman.. suggests that Feynman's approach to renormalization, which he had always thought was just an artificial kluge that one day would be replaced by a true fundamental understanding of QED, instead reflected..."
(3) page 254, Feyman replies in effect: "String theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses!... It doesn't look right." (The passage in-between gives the important explanations... but if you are interested, I recommend reading the book.)
Women also played a crucial role in energizing Feynman's thought, though in a different way; for that, Luda recommends other sources.

X-rated joke about Obama

X rated? That means... I listen to lots and lots of sources, some socially acceptable, some unspeakable. This one is unspeakable, not because of anything like sex, but because it comes form the Buddhist thought stream, where we heard...

"Of course Obama is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Isn't it obvious?
The senator from Illinois, experiencing the obvious extension of the three main themes of his life.
First, the relations between black and white. Second, the karma, learning his lesson for what he did
when he created the Republican party. And third, trying to get it right and not set off a civil
war this time, without going back to slavery and the redneck feudalism of the old south."

looking for dice in the universe and stability of particles

Good morning!

This one is not written for a broad audience. Sorry. At some times, I need to get straight to the frontier, without providing much background. This one is like a personal journal entry.

I meditated a little on two mathematical questions this morning: (1) what is the easiest way to truly prove (or disprove) the claim that variational solitons exist in models such as the system which gives the famous BPS monopole, or the four new systems I discuss in a new paper under submission?
(i.e. to prove that such models do explain why stable particles can exist at all in some universes);
(2) how could we rationally look for "dice" -- underlying stochastic disturbance -- in the universe?
("Does God throw dice with the universe?")

Re the first question -- the topological arguments which have been widely accepted as "proofs"
in physics (e.g. by folks citing E. Weinberg, not to be confused with S. Weinberg) do show that
there is no path of small perturbations which go from a state with topological charge to
the vacuum.  In other words, particles with topological charge simply cannot decay away to vacuum. The same can be shown easily for the four new systems, as I show in the new paper.
That's enough to justify working with these systems, but we really should try to know for sure, to develop proofs which meet a higher standard.

One thing which worries me is evidence to SUGGEST that there may be no "state" of minimum energy in the BPS system -- no well defined, C infinity function which minimizes energy. Could there be a whole family of states, starting with the usual BPS monopole state, of ever decreasing energy,
converging not to a function but to a "distribution" like the Dirac delta function? The "proofs" based on the work of Bogomolnyi ignore the energy in the Higgs term, which could conceivably be reduced
by states which reduce that term by bringing the asymptotic solutions ever closer to the origin,
approaching a limit which is not a "function" -- but perhaps is meaningful as some kind of distribution. I would guess, for good reason, that ALL five of these systems (BPS and my four)
actually have variational solitons (basically just states of local minimum energy) which are c infinity functions, but it may be much easier to prove the weaker claim that they have variational solitons within the larger space of distributions. It's a matter of exploiting the fact that sets of distributions are closed under limits, in a way that ordinary functions are not. Probably not so hard.

=

And then, the dice.

I am very grateful that the first text I studied on quantum field theory long ago
was Mandl's old book, Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Lately I often cite the
newer classic Mandl and Shaw, which is mainly an expanded version.

Mandl began with the empirical, scientific approach. He noted that there were three great confirmations of quantum electrodynamics (QED), similar to the three great confirmations
of general relativity which everyone studying that subject knows about. For QED, the Lamb shift and the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron stand out in my memory. The key to getting the Lamb shift right was to calculate the "vacuum fluctuations" and "vacuum polarization" diagrams.
Many people have interpreted those words to mean that there is a huge amount of zero point energy out there, based on the noise terms in quantum field theory. But if you read Mandl's simple
presentation closely, you see that the correct predictions are based on the normal form Hamiltonian with that scalar noise term removed.  The correct predictions are based on the "normal form Hamiltonian." It is normal form Hamiltonian (plus renormalization) which explained what we see, not the songs and dances which preceded it. And -- it turns out that the normal form Hamiltonian exactly describes statistics of unknown fields with dynamics which do not involve random disturbance other than the usual thermodynamic background fluctuations one would have in any nonlinear dynamical system.

And so, I see no evidence out there in the empirical world to justify believing that
"God throws dice with the universe." Unlike Einstein, I have absolutely no religious objections to the ideas of the universe being governed by a stochastic model, if it is mathematically meaningful
(realistic). But I don't see any evidence for it either. Certainly the usual "quantum noise terms" postulated by the ZPE people have no empirical basis.

But... if there MIGHT be dice out there (which is mathematically and logically quite a reasonable possibility to consider), how would we find evidence for them?

It seems to me that the first step would be to study/develop mathematically meaningful theories
in that class, building more concretely on what we actually know from centuries of empirical
study.

One would start from the kind of real mathematics developed for stochastic systems.
I think immediately of the old work on stochastic differential equations, on mixed forward-backwards differential equations, and even of the book by Jacobsen and Mayne on
Differential Dynamic Programming which builds a bridge to concrete algorithms like much
of my work on RLADP.

This supports a kind of crude image... a stochastic model which is formulated by
assuming the existence of a kind of exogenous random number field, e(x-mu),
where e can be a random scalar, a random vector, whatever. The idea of a random field is
not new (e.g. see Markov Random Fields). The question would be how to
hook it up with physics.

There are lots of other formulations one might imagine, which entail asymmetries (e.g. with respect to time) for which there is no empirical support. Considering the possibility of dice is just one speculation, albeit a somewhat natural speculation; imposing new asymmetries at this time is much
more grossly speculative, and a detour from the core question about dice.

And so... it is interesting to ask about the family of models generated by ordinary Lagrange-Euler equations (as with classical PDE) EXCEPT by the addition of the exogenous random e field.
This is a time-symmetric formulation.

What do we know about the properties of such systems?

For ordinary time-forwards dynamical systems, introducing noise typically would introduce
drift. Energy conservation would not be exact at the microscopic level. Laws of large numbers
might reduce the implied violation of energy conservation at the measured, macroscopic level,
but things similar to roundoff error can accumulate and cause instability. Would we really see
the rigid degree of energy conservation we see in low-level bubble chamber events
if there were that kind of disturbance?

And yet -- in a time-symmetric situation it is not quite as clear. The perfect "optimization"
performed by Lagrange-Euler equations might possibly result in a much tighter kind
of law of large numbers, preventing such large excursions in energy at the macroscopic
level. Even at the bubble chamber level.

But at this point, this is just a theoretical, hypothetical kind of possibility. 
I don't see any real reason to believe that there are "dice" out there in the basic laws of the universe.
I see that it COULD be possible, but I do not yet even see a path to testing the idea.
I did a paper once on "Q" versus "P" which is another way to get at the same issue,
leading to the same outcome for now.

There is some relation between this and the "stochastic chaos" work I discussed with Freeman
and Kozma years ago, in Biosystems and elsewhere. But on the physics side,
there are certainly more urgent areas for mathematical exploration at this time
(such as exploration of the four new systems which contain no dice).

An alternative formulation for "dice" might use the modern Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman
equation in place of the old Hamilton-Jacobi or Lagrange-Euler equations, or -- given that
we seem to be seeing a mix-max system -- the Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs equation REVISED
for time symmetry. They sound entertaining, but perhaps the time-symmetric stochastic Lagrange-Euler system has more of the right properties. All speculative for now anyway.

Best of luck,

    Paul

How you could lose all your webmail and how to protect yourself

Just yesterday, I spoke to a very distraught guy who said he just
"lost his whole life" to to a hacking problem on the internet.
"I found out that 11 million people on gmail have been hacked just like me. The hacker shut me out of all access to all the information I had been counting on on the cloud. And google is a totally automated system; they could do nothing to help me or the 11 million others." This
guy was recently retired from NASA, and fully informed about regular security procedures
and technology, so it would be very risky to assume that you are safer than he is.

Suddenly I wish I had paid more attention to another friend, who casually mentioned that he
configured his gmail so that he uses it with Outlook. His gmail is still there on the cloud. He can still access it from anywhere on earth on his laptop or his desktops, which have been set up to run Outlook, using the google servers. But he can very easily make backup copies of all his folders
any time he chooses, so that he is safe, unlike my other poor friend. And the folder structure
lets him organize his life in a way that the default google interfaces do not. This is a serious matter, just as serious as backing up your hard drive.

And... it's easy. It does require searching on "gmail IMAP" and such on the gmail help pages and
web in general. But at the end of the day, it amounts to clicking on the "enable IMAP"
setting in gmail, typing in the names of the gmail servers into an Outlook account, and being sure
you are happy with your settings in Outlook. (like "leave mail on server.") And of course being prepared to wait a little the first time as it copies all your gmail to your computer.


I still don't know what you get from the usual gmail interface when you create folders
(exploit IMAP) for use in Outlook. There are things on that on the web, but not so clear to me.

I never did what my Outlook friend did, because I don't like Outlook very much.
(Not that Thunderbird and its ersatz Eudora are any better.) But the same thing can
be done with AppleMail.

I really wish google had bought out Eudora 7 when it was available cheap. They could
have cleaned up just a few things, and then offered their OWN IMAP client -- and made it
a lot easier for lots and lots of people to use it! A lot of former Eudora users would
pay for that option, just as they paid for Eudora, ""even" if it's "just" available
for use with gmail. 

high speed trains -- could California and China do even better?

There are times when the state of California does more to create real progress
towards sustainable energy than the federal government does.
Thus I was intrigued this morning to bump into a new project which may or may not
survive the "fiscal cliff":

http://www.canv-maglev.com/pid9technology.html

One vision of this is that we burn a whole lot of "oil" in airplanes --
which may be our biggest dependency on fossil oil after cars and trucks
are accounted. Could we build a network of high speed trains roughly
as fast and as cheap and as safe as commercial airplanes, with a higher degree of convenience
and comfort? As one way to reduce or eliminate oil dependency in that sector?
In fact, China is making massive investments in its new network of high speed trains,
which does all of that EXCEPT for the speed part. This week, they announced the opening of
an important new line, eight hours from Beijing all the way down to the Hong Kong area
in the far south -- a huge improvement in speed, but still more than twice the time
of airplanes from station to station.

The question naturally arises: would it be possible to do what China is doing, for trains
almost as fast as airplanes, at the same cost per mile as what China is paying?
(Since maglev trains are faster, this would actually mean less cost PER TRIP --
you get more trips on the same line, and more trips per train.)

The answer, objectively, seems to be "probably yes, if anyone cares, and if someone follows up."

California is not paying for the least cost technology. But a lower cost technology does seem
possible. See:

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0925941&HistoricalAwards=false

 I have done some further checking this week. It seems as if there is a path forward to do justice to
this solid possibility (with the usual mix of serious risk, serious hope, and a need for intelligent adaptability). But it also seems that people do not yet know about it. Myself, I am overwhelmed
by other causes, some "mine" and some not, so I can't do justice to this one. But I view it
as bigger than CHP, for example, and I do hope someone knows a way to follow up.

====================
None of the comments here reflect the official views of NSF, of course. But I do have some knowledge well beyond this brief posting. In 2009, I did have email contact with Thomas Lipo and Jonathan Bird, learned more about the technology, and suggested that they send a proposal to the Energy, Power and Adaptive Systems (EPAS) program, for which I am normally one of the three Program Directors. But that year, since I was on loan to the office of Senator Specter, I could not fund or handle it myself; it was funded by Geworge Maracas, after peer review. All I could do was offer a bit of guidance. And Specter himself (and Matthew Kelly who later moved from his office to Amtrak) should get credit for encouraging me to look a bit deeper into trains, that year. The news from California and from China moved me to do one more check this past week... before I move back to planning and giving lecture 9 in the series also posted here. 

Also -- I do not mean to propose this as a "silver bullet" for the jet fuel problem.  In most key areas,
we need to develop SEVERAL promising possibilities, to be sure of finding the best. For the jet fuel problem, I envision a mix of several things in the future. I am excited by the rechargeable lithium-air batteries actually developed by Excellatron (wwww.excellatron.com)... and by their calculations, working with people at Argonne and Rolls-Royce, suggesting that ELECTRIC AIRPLANES
designed like a Boeing 777 could have a range of 4000 kilometers, cutting energy costs by a factor of four, and substantially reducing the cost of airplane tickets. (Yes, it takes a new engine, but they have cutaways of the design.) And of course, alternate liquid and gaseous fuels provide another
technology path towards meeting the commercial airline market even after fossil fuels run out. Three main pathways to sustainability.. all of which call out for full justice.  But no one should imagine that any government on earth is doing full justice to any of the three.

fiscal cliff -- not at all what you hear

I am not sure of the details here, since I haven 't had time to study the Obama and Boehner "B" offers
in detail, but it does seem very clear that the press discussions are confused. And "going over the cliff" doesn't mean what many imagine.

First, the differences between Obama B and Boehner B seem to be much less that people imagine --
much less than the difference between either and "fiscal cliff." BOTH of them avoid an immediate drop in demand, BY POSTPONING DEFICIT REDUCTION TO FUTURE YEARS. They bite less now, and more later. Any true Tea Party person dedicated to the single goal of deficit reduction would simply prefer the cliff. Anyone else... well, maybe the parties should agree on the key numbers of WHEN the deficit reduction kicks in, to what degree, and on the overall tax versus spending ratios
(maybe just the same as in the fiscal cliff status quo), FIRST, in law, getting rid of debt ceiling issues
contingent on adhering to the agreement.

Next -- Obama has given a WHOLE lot. The bar charts I have seen show about half the deficit reduction coming form "taxes" (i.e., higher than the temporary Bush rates) and almost half
from social security and medicare, and only about 10-15% other government spending 9which Boehner's does not cut at all). It seems quite plausible to me that Democrats in the Senate
would simply not put up with what Obama has already offered. MAYBE they can find just enough
Democrats to vote for cutting social security and medicare, combined with non-Tea-Party
Republicans, but for a given level of deficit reduction, many Democrats would conclude that
this deal is no better for escaping recession than the fiscal cliff would be, and they simply may not accept the mantra that "cutting entitlements" (social security and medicare) is the right thing to do.
It's like offering the middle aged folks in the US a kind of vast credit card swindle, where they
get more money in the short term, but pay for it in spades later on. Maybe Obama could convince them that he can do a lot of that just by improving efficiencies in health care, but maybe not.
Boehner certainly couldn't.

So the chances of a cliff are looking greater by the day...

But again, that's just a quick impression today, between tasks I put more energy into....

Running from the fiscal cliff – or running from reality?

Running from the fiscal cliff – or running from reality?

This week, the smart money is betting more than 50-50 that we will “fall over the fiscal cliff,” that agencies like NSF and NASA and DOD will all be cut by more than 8% immediately, that unemployment will tick up by more than 1%, and the lots of folks will freak out in a way that makes the outcome even worse.

That’s true – but the efforts to “avoid the fiscal cliff” right now are screwed up, in a way which explains a lot of the pessimism.  The “fiscal cliff” is all about last year’s “sequestration law” coming into effect a month from now.  Demonizing that law has gone too far. By demonizing the law, ironically, we make it more likely that it will come into effect. UNLESS we change our way of thinking, it now looks 70% probable that it will come into effect, and maybe 20% probable that Congress will cancel the deficit reduction and freak out world markets in that other way. Hold onto your jobs, folks! And to your backup plans!

Why are they likely to fail? They basically are viewing the sequestration law as a great failure, which they don ‘t want to think about except to run away. And so they are trying to reinvent a new solution to exactly the same problem (deficit reduction) which members of Congress worked on very intensely over a year or two before now. The sequestration bill was the outcome of extremely intense bipartisan discussions and efforts over a long time. How can anyone imagine that Congress will do better in just one month than it could in two years, if it formulates the problem form scratch in exactly the same way as it did before, without any anchor points at all to limit the random groping?  (Did the elections change things? A little, but not much; some things are easier now, and others harder – but let me not get deeper into those “weeds” just yet.)

In my view, the only way to do much better than the sequestration bill is by STARTING from what was already achieved. In particular, that bill specifies what level of deficit reduction, what level of total taxes, and what level of spending will take effect at the start of 2013. Did they make the best choice for those three all-important numbers? Most of us would say no – BUT IF THERE IS NOT enough support in Congress to change any of these three numbers, our chances of doing better than the sequestration bill depend on our ACCEPTING those three numbers and acting within the limits of the constraints which they provide.

Now don’t get me wrong. It would be fine for the Congressional leadership to get together to try to see if they could get agreement in the Senate and also in the House to change the three numbers, perhaps by shifting schedules a little or perhaps by inserting promises for tax breaks that the wealthy MIGHT get in the future automatically IF certain objective criteria are met (like low unemployment and a balanced budget). But the main attention should shift to REVENUE NEUTRAL ways to shift taxes, and to shift spending, each in order to help the economy recover, without  changing the total level of taxes or the total level of spending. The war between less taxes versus more spending, in general, simply needs to be taken off the table, to have much chance of doing any better than what we already can expect.

We also need to think about options to increase jobs without major effects on total taxes or total spending.

When I put it that way, it may sound a whole lot harder. But in fact, it IS hard to do better than the sequestration bill, and we can only do better if we really focus on the hard problem.

So for example, how do we realign total taxes, when total taxes are scheduled to go up under the sequestration bill, without losing as many jobs as that is now likely to do? The obvious answer is to cut back on taxes which reduce jobs and demand, while cutting back to special favors and loopholes which do not produce as many jobs. (They all produce jobs; it’s a matter of HOW MANY, something which real mathematical economists have studied for decades all over the world – arriving at realities somewhat different from the pious hopes form all the various PR departments. People who believe their own propaganda too much do risk driving themselves broke, and the rest of us with them.)

Romney claimed he could find enough real loopholes, nonproducing tax breaks, to allow us to restore ALL of the tax breaks which expire under the sequestration bill. It would be best if Republicans would work hard to make more concrete suggestions about this. In truth, I do not believe that cutting back on the mortgage deduction (at least for middle class people) is one of those nonproductive tax breaks; it not only puts money into people’s pockets, to spend, but it also incentivizes home construction, an area where unemployment is especially bad fright now. It’s  a dumb idea. On the other hand, the oil industry has obtained a whole lot of special tax breaks which are not likely to haver any effect on the level of jobs in the US in that industry; those jobs are driven much more by the demand for gasoline, and the availability of new technologies, which would be funded easily enough even by banks if the oil companies were not already flush with cash. Sure, the lobbyists can argue for a LITTLE incentive effect, but it’s clearly a whole lot less than the home mortgage or the payroll tax reductions.

In fact, if we don’t welsh on deficit reduction (which should be agreed on up front,

If it’s going to happen), it is really hard to do a whole lot, I think. Unless Romney really has some ideas, above and beyond those oil industry special breaks which I know about.

I am not sure that both parties could come up with enough low-productivity tax breaks and loopholes to eliminate in order to restore even all the tax breaks for the middle class (98% of the population, as the President is now proposing to help).

I hope so. But maybe the best starting point would be to come up with enough just to permanently restore the reduction in payroll taxes and in AMT requirements (which affect the sheer burden of filling out and planning for taxes), as a first stage. Get agreement on that first, and pass it as a kind of amendment to the sequestration law, the starting point. And if we can then move on to restore more, try to do that.

Step by step, there is hope of progress – at least a little better than the sequestration bill. But reinventing the wheel won’t do anything, no matter how grand the fantasies which go into it.

The same thing applies to shifts in spending cuts. I don’t expect shifts anywhere near as massive as some folks are hoping for, starting from the sequestration law.

If the President says he can see some ways to improve efficiency in medicare and Medicaid, saving money for use elsewhere, that sounds both smaller than many hope for but also more realistic, a way to do some first aid in crucial things – like

student loans and other relatively less expensive things crucial to our underlying capacity as a nation, and to the spirit of hope and American dream which is far more crucial to our productivity than the size of people’s yachts. I don’t think it is politically realistic to imagine both houses of Congress approving the reduction or voucherization of social security which some folks lust for.

Are there other ways to increase jobs a lot without making the deficit worse? In my view, there are, but they depend on other tracks – and they also involve some issues beyond the reach of political folks. For example, there is a very serious independent inventor in Michigan, CEO of a company in another area, who could give us a new lower-cost solar thermal technology, which, when coupled with new permitting rules (making it harder to block renewable energy projects and the required transmission connections) and German-style feed-in tariffs, could stimulate a whole of benign new private sector investment, yielding new jobs without government spending. The multiplier effects of such investment would far exceed the initial transitional costs. Probably companies like GE would jump on this opportunity – IF

the guy in Michigan bothers, and if the right legal envcironment is created. And similar things could be done internationally – which is essential, in an era where the economies of US, EU and China are really just one tightly integrated dynamical system.  

In sum, the problem can be solved. We don’t need to have an increase in unemployment. But it takes new thinking, and right now the discussions between all parties in Washington is on a course to disaster. Someone better placed than me needs to job their brains…