Obama wins the democratic nomination and ends his first speech as nominee thus:

Now, the other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of policies and positions, and that is a good thing. That is a debate I look forward to. It is a debate that the American people deserve on the issues that will help determine the future of this country and the future for our children.

But what you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon. What you won't see from this campaign or this party is a politics that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to polarize, because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

I caught a programme last night on the beeb about property. Nothing new there - you can be guaranteed to find a property programme of some description 50% of the time the telly goes on: if the schedulers are to be believed, we're obsessed. (Indeed, there was another property prog on Channel 4 at the same time.)

But this one was a little more thoughtful. The last person to be interviewed was an estate agent based in Sandbanks, Poole - not too far away from where I used to live in Bournemouth. A few years back, one place sold for a particularly large amount of money, and worked out at something like £900 per square foot. This particular estate agent did a quick calculation and discovered this made it the fourth most expensive place to live in the world. The next step is brilliant: he then trumpeted the whole area as such. 'Sandbanks: the fourth most expensive place to live in the world!' Thus began Sandbank's insane rocketing into the property stratosphere, accompanied (as he notes) by developing new offices and a whole selling style suitable to people wanting to buy into the Sandbanks glow.

Over at Crooked Timber, there's a great post on the minimum wage where Kathy argues that 1) there are plenty of empirical reasons why increasing a minimum wage may not lead to higher unemployment and 2) that you'll get into trouble with the economic 'fundamentalists' if you try and work on this issue without concluding that it does.

This is probably a foolish venture (given my math ignorance) but here's some thoughts on an economic random walk. (Any pointers to elementary fuck-ups / blindingly obvious things I'm missing appreciated.) I've come across the graphs here in each of the simple models I've done of trade exchanges. This one isn't a real trade exchange - it's had price decisions removed entirely. So apart from the limit on the amount of money in the economy and the requirement that money is 'exchanged', they are random walks. It's like this. We start with:

• 100 people, 100 pounds each (so the amount of money in this 'economy' remains constant: the mean is always 100.)
• Run for 200,000 days
• On each day, each person randomly chooses someone, and gives them a pound if they have a pound to give. If they don't, on to the next person's random choice.

(See links below for graphs and code.)

Was reading this from Crooked Timber yesterday: Maria asks, how does OPEC exist in a world where of legal and institutional free trade? She says "I'm not looking for the realpolitik answer. That's pretty obvious. But what is the legal and institutional answer to this question?"

Tory David Willetts (apparently 'Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills') is to make a speech tonight at the LSE - the Oakeshott lecture indeed - espousing the virtues of reciprocity, community and altruism. He is proposing that institutions be designed to support this sort of thing. The dry stone wall metaphor comes in because, as the Times quotes:

A dry-stone wall, like the one David Willetts pointed out to David Cameron, does not have any glue or cement holding it together. It holds together because of the way it has been designed. Similarly, the aim of Tories is not to pour social glue on civil society through public policy, and armies of new laws, nor is to enunciate some new abstract principle of justice that might be at variance with human nature. It is to help society find different kinds of equilibrium.

Willetts was on radio 4 this morning enthusiastically recounting how game theory, evolutionary economics and neuro-biology are giving scientific weight to his argument: as the lecture website says, he uses 'latest research from these disciplines [or at least popularisers of...] to explain what Government can and cannot do to influence our behaviour.'

Just been re-reading my wibble about romanesques and noted that a strand of human DNA is about a metre long.

The rough number of cells in a human body is 50 to 75 trillion cells. So - presuming only 30 trillion of those actually have DNA (I have a notion that some don't), how far would all the DNA in your body stretch?

Just over 100 round trips from Earth to the Sun. In your body, right now.

Cooool. Who can we test it on?

Just started reading Manuel DeLanda's 'A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity'¹ - a brave title! But it's got me braincells going on a Monday, so it can't be all bad. He's immediately argued against reductionism at the micro and macro levels and started talking about things being 'more than the sum of their parts'. He proposes to take the reader on a journey through all the nested levels existing between micro and macro -

It is my hope that once the complexity of that forgotten territory between the micro and the macro is grasped at the visceral level, the intellectual habit to privilege one or the other extreme will become easier to break.

Digs are had at structuralists (macro-reductionists) and economists / social scientists who build theory on the individual, and aggregates thereof (micro-reductionists.) Oh, and Anthony Giddens (a 'meso-reductionist', apparently!)

Here's some Monday musings its caused, using Icosystem's Game and the genes of ants to bounce off.

It was a night of the long knives for my PhD last week. After much internal bickering amongst the various factions, some of them produced evidence that the leader of the powerful 'planned economy' clique were being funded by the French in a secret plot to overthrow the central question. There was some truth to this, it transpired: references can be found to a title stating -

Aims: to re-examine the 20th century 'economic calculation debate' using 21st Century computational methods'.

(Here is a good summary of that debate.)

A very manly and rugged aim, to be sure, involving what Diane Coyle might call 'macho' mathematics: men in itchy shirts, smoking pipes in the basements of ostensible bookshops, mathematically proving or disproving the theoretical possibility of socialism. (Hayek was above all this, of course.)

But in the grey light of the new year, a Gay Mafia consisting of various 'keepin it real' types carried out the final coup in a moment of wheel-of-fortune-spinning randomness. Well, now the die is cast. Or possibly the dice, I'm never sure. The good news is, it means it won't take me 25 years to finish my PhD - so I've hopefully avoided reaching 60, nourished on stray dogs and fagbutts alone, and submitting a final manuscript on radioactive cardboard written in the bushes of a motorway feed island.

The Guardian reflects on 20 years since the Bonfire of the Vanities was written. Another book I haven't read: added to the blog list of unread, though.

This story marks 20 years of change in New York city:

Wolfe chose New York because it said something about America. Now many are wondering if the safer, cleaner, richer city has not also lost its role as the heartbeat of American culture. Wolfe thinks so: his latest book tackling the modern American zeitgeist is set in Miami. 'New York, while it is flourishing, has become a less interesting place. It is not where America is changing any more,' said Brian Abel Regan, author of Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion.