Tzodek means that he is right. Falkenstein maintains that people does not optimize their profits, that is, they are not motivated by pure self interest or greed, but they are watching what others do at the sides and are trying to harm their neighbors, that is, their motivation is jealousy or some feeling of spite. I was just driving back from Dr Rasputin's clinic when I noticed once and again that the other cars in the street were taking idiotic risks and doing incredible maneuvers such as suddenly accelerating at full gas and then changing directions, just as if they were in some kind of competition with me. What the other drivers do seems to me crazy and purposeless, since the next traffic light is in view and it is changing to red, so in twenty or so meters we will have to stop. At end of their effort, I arrive at the red light and the other fellow is at my left, not even one centimeter ahead of me. He risked a lot and "won" nothing at all. There are a few drivers like myself who calculate the distance ahead and the tempo of the changing lights, and try to drive the car maintaining a steady momentum. I have a pendant (a light-reflecting object that I received in a Koln trade fair) and I always try to minimize its oscillations. Other drivers are motivated by "road rage" and furiously try to get ahead of the other fellow near them. Their behaviour is pointless, meaningless, profitless (as well as risky) to me. Now, the insight that most people drive to feel better or superior to the other fellow is important. Falken is working on some kind of equation based on this insight, that eventually will help him to optimize fund management, but how can I translate the same insight into money for J? That people behaves irrationally is no news for stock speculators.
22 comments:
The natives here treat life, and every interaction in it, as a zero-sum game: you have to be made to lose in order for me to win. That is why it's so important that they cut around you on the road, even if there is demonstrably no benefit to it. The only way to survive is to impose a standard of civility on them, by force if necessary.
Imagine: you are driving in a street and thirty meters ahead there is a traffic light changing to red. You know you cannot pass it and will have to stop at the light. There are two open lines but you drive around my car and arrive ten second before me to the red light and stop. I arrive somewhat later and wse are waiting to the red light to change. We watch each other and he says something offensive to me. Why? He is not trying to win something, except the feeling that he is faster, better driver, etc. and I am a slow old moron. Which I may be, but what is he profiting from it? Irrationality reigns. He is behaving in a way inappropriate to Kever Benjamin 2010. In what environment this behaviour would be rational? In a jungle? I dont know. My problem is how to make maoney and I am not interested in making them to lose money.
Your forebearance shows that you are a superior man, as for myself I would in all likelihood have tried to break the offender's windscreen. For this reason I never learnt to drive, it may be fatal for me. Now that Singapore is getting overcrowded I have some regret in not being able to drive.
In what environment this behaviour would be rational?
In a third-world country. Probably in a generation Israel will adjust to its status as first-world country.
Having millions of Arabs in your country doesn't help either.
@J, your problem is that you think he believes he's winning something tangible or at least measurable. In fact, he doesn't care about status or the accumulation of material goods - he just believes that by making you lose, he wins.
Israelis are some of the worst drivers in the world.
You know the old joke about the Russian peasant who has no cow when his neighbor has one. One day he finds an elf in the forest who promises to grant him any wish. His wish - "Kill my neighbor's cow." There is a little bit of that in the way Israeli's drive.
There is also the irrational fear of being the freier. This is supposedly a Yiddish word but I never heard it uttered by my parents and the concept is completely unknown among American Jews and I never saw it in Yiddish literature written in Europe either (maybe it's because in the Diaspora we don't need other Jews to be made the suckers of our schemes, though they often are - see Madoff). It was an obscure Yiddish word and concept that was turned into a major point of Israeli identity (just as the beigel, a relatively minor bread novelty in E. Europe, became in the disapora, THE Jewish bread. I don't know what it is about Israeli society that makes it so important not to be the freier? I always ascribed it to a bit of Arab macho that had rubbed off on the Jews, because it seems a very un-Yiddish concept for something that is supposedly a Yiddish word.
K
@K, "freier" has a totally different meaning in Yiddish. I have been saying for years to anyone who'd listen that the word entered Hebrew through Russian, and in particular through Russian prison slang. If you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, there's a translator's note at the end of the first volume that explains how "fráyer" has been translated throughout as "sucker," in the sense of "mark," a non-thief who can easily be victimized by thieves.
This is another one of my arguments for why the Israeli ethos is essentially Russian (and not, for example, western).
Yes, our political institutions are basically Russian.
"Freier" is not originally perjorative, and still isn't in former Yugoslavia, where it means "a flashy, well-dressed, good-looking guy" (roughly.) The original meaning was "someone FREE" (frei) of the constraints and codes of the underworld-not holding a job, having a wife and so on.
Israelis are wonderful people, friendly and courteous, until two conditions are met: anonymity and a shared resource, such as a national park or a road. At which point they magically transform into Iraqis-dirty, belligerent primates.
It is an interesting question - if you have an Anglo-Saxon type society where everyone queues in an orderly line for a taxi, to get thru a toll booth, etc. then if you are a non-freier (which is apparently what every Israeli aspires to be) then you can gain some advantage by cutting in line. But if you have a whole society of non-freiers fighting each other to get to the toll booth, then the benefit of being a non-freier is cancelled - wouldn't everyone be better off if they dropped the whole thing and didn't try to cheat? Certainly the 2 drivers in the picture both paid a high price for getting to the toll booth "first". There was a quote in an article a few years ago from Sharon after the wedding hall collapse where he said "WE (meaning the Israelis) are really the freiers because when everyone cheats (on getting permits, etc.) as a whole the society is worse off than if everyone had been honest. But how to you convert a cheat-the-freier society to a civilized one? The Russians certainly never have.
I don't know about freier having a totally different meaning in Yiddish - it's that it doesn't have
a meaning at all - it's not a common word.
K
J, I drive like you, and also see the same kind of gratuitously aggressive behavior in other motorists.
It is not just Israel.
Obviously, people "act out" as Freud would have said, anywhere and everywhere.
Anon.
K,
I believe that courtesy in the American West came about as a result of a founder effect caused by tons of armed Civil War vets with PTSD. Casual rudeness was expensive.
I have heard that Singapore has succeeded in reforming its population in this regard, but can't personally vouch.
"... the old joke about the Russian peasant who has no cow when his neighbor has one. One day he finds an elf in the forest who promises to grant him any wish. His wish - "Kill my neighbor's cow."
This old joke is Falken's insight. He says that investors in the markets behave like the Russian peasant, and not like the greedy and risk calculating businessman the economic theory presumes us to be. Therefore economic theory does not work. He is trying to think out a theory that reflects real human behaviour. I am trying to profit from this understanding of human "Kill my neighbor's cow" insight.
Anyone has an idea where and how can I apply this?
Do you have a neighbor, perhaps with a cow?
Anon.
I'm not sure about B's PTSD theory. I have never been in any Westernized country where I have seen more automatic weapons being openly carried than in Israel (as well as pistols, etc. - whenever an Arab decides to "go postal" in Israel, usually some armed civilian takes care of business even before the police arrive. Plus I'm sure there is no shortage of people suffering PTSD. But it is tacitly understood by all that the guns are for self-defense only and not to be used to settle traffic disputes.
K
I also missed B's thing about the different meaning of freier in former Yugoslavia. I assume this got garbled and a freier is free of constraints of the REGULAR world, i.e. a member of the underworld. But still how did this get twisted to mean the exact opposite - where the freier in the Israeli sense is the victim of the Yugoslav type of freier - the mark, not the scammer?
K
B its true, large parts of Singapore were dirty and stank of poo gas in my childhood. The old Chinese with their TB expectorants and the Indians with their bettlejuice made a mess of the pavements. The Malays were relatively cleaner. Old man Lee Kuan Yew is one of the premier social engineers of the century. Lack of space and interest constrain me from singing his praises but he truly made Singapore to his image. The government politicians cannot speak for nuts, but those that do unconciously imitate all his mannerisms, though of course no one gets his pukka sahib Oxbridge accent.
It's funny you should say - although Beijing has been cleaned up and modernized, the streets still have a faint whiff of sewer gas almost every where you go. I assume it has something to do with a lack of proper traps at some points in the system so the sewers vent directly to air. There are no open sewers or outhouses in sight but still that faint whiff is ever present on the wind. Perhaps J the water engineer can explain. I assume it is not an easy problem to fix or they would have done so for the Olympics. In general they are not shy about spending for infrastructure.
K
The police force of Israel is a bit more effective and much more ubiquitous than that of the Wild West, and it is not considered acceptable to resolve breachesbof etiquette by ventilating your offender.
K, in the traditional Russian underworld, a professional criminal could not hold a job or have a wife and so on; it was quite a rigorous code of life. Much of their jargon came from Yiddish and Hebrew-"hevra," "freier," "ksiva" and so on, and spread to mainstream Soviet slang through the mass Gulag experience later. I am not too familiar with the detailed history-those who are are not very forthcoming. The etymology of the Yugoslav "freier" I am even less familiar with. There were two mass contacts between the Yugoslavs and Russians in the 20th century-the White Russians who fled there after the Civil War, and the Red Army which liberated and occupied Yugoslavia after WW2, many of whose soldiers had been through the camps, some as members of the underworld. If I had to guess, it might have come from them, since I had the impression that it meant something analogous to the Russian "stilyagi," a 60's term for the privileged and stylish youths of the USSR.
I'm familiar (not personally) with the vor v zakone and their code, but I'm still not following. So, a freier is someone who is not a vor? Isn't the word for that suka (bitch) which connotes collaborator or snitch? And how do you get from there to the "sucker" meaning?
K
A freier is, in jail or out of it, somebody who's not a professional criminal and is free of their law, but conversely is legitimate prey, thoughhe is not necessarily to be preyed upon. He doesn't share the same rights and privileges because he is free of certain responsibilities, as I understand. He may also be a loch, from the Yiddish word for salmon, a fish notoriously easy to catch when it's spawning, and sometimes freier and loch are used interchangeably to indicate a sucker. A suka is somebody who collaborates with the administration, a trustee, but formerly was part of the criminal caste, far as I understand.
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