Anomaly UK

A Case for Ispettore Zen

2012-01-20T22:36:00.000Z

I've probably mentioned before that I read a lot of crime novels. My favourites of the modern era are probably the Aurelio Zen series by Michael Dibdin. Zen, a detective of the Polizia di Stato, solves his cases with a blend of staggering luck and an involuntary bloody-mindedness which distracts him from his more important tasks of attempting to understand and navigate the women in his life and the political machinations of the Italian bureaucracy.

I have no idea how realistic Dibdin's grotesque presentation of the corruption and hidden motivations of Italian life really is, but I have not been able to see the Costa Concordia story in any other context than as an Aurelio Zen mystery. The captain who accidentally fell into a lifeboat and then argued with the coastguard on the phone, the mysterious blonde on the bridge, the cruise line that was blaming their own captain for everything even while the passengers were still being rescued: all we can be sure of is that nothing is what it seems to be, and nobody is telling the truth. Only Zen can actually get to the truth of it, and even if he does, we probably won't know, because the official story might be completely different...

Monarchism and Stability in the Middle East / North Africa

2012-01-09T22:23:00.000Z

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution posts a link to a paper by Victor Menaldo, The Middle East and North Africa's Resilient Monarchs.

It's well worth a read; it's not long, though frankly I'll need to spend more time with it than I have this evening.

First and foremost, it's a challenge to the Bueno de Mesquita theory that all that matters is the size of the ruling coalition and the selectorate — a theory that I found valuable but simplistic. Menaldo addresses political culture, observing that the political culture serves to distinguish regime insiders from outsiders. He finds that monarchical governments have less conflict and better economic development.

Particularly interesting to me is the account of elites within the monarchical society. These kingdoms are not the absolute autocracies of my "degenerate formalism", but actually existing monarchies, in which the extended royal family and other important groups hold significant power. Menaldo's argument is that the fact that the political culture defines who shares in power, the struggles between in-groups are limited. Unlike a faction in a revolutionary republic, you can lose a power struggle and still be an insider with some power.

In my view, this is also the strength of our somewhat corrupted democracies: if you're an insider but you're losing, it's still not worth being extremely destructive. Better to admit defeat and preserve the system that keeps you an insider even as a loser.

Because of that, this paper doesn't really make my argument: it shows that monarchy is better than a revolutionary republic, but not that it is better than a western democracy. Still, it's useful that it's showing some of the strengths that monarchy has.

It's not without weaknesses, either. As with other work of this kind, I don't really take the mathematics seriously. Checking that a statistical analysis bears out the impression you get from drawing a couple of graphs and watching CNN is not what I call verifying a testable hypothesis. And a relatively small data set of somewhat subjective categorisations of events seems inadequate for the amount of analysis being done on it.

Also, the paper, as far as I have seen, does not explore the possibility that foreign influence is the explanation for the difference in violence. Bahrain faced nothing like the outside pressure that Libya or Syria did. I don't think foreign action is affected directly by whether the regime is monarchical or republican, but there might be an indirect link with foreign policy stance.

Diane Abbot

2012-01-07T15:38:00.000Z

@bimadew White people love playing "divide & rule" We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

Offensive? Of course not. How can that possibly be offensive? Just because it implies that it is possible to generalise about what "white people" like? You mean like this? What rubbish.

Well, is it wrong, then? I think so, but so what? She's a Labour MP — saying things that are wrong is her job. Further, it's worth arguing about.

Speaking on behalf of white people, we do not love playing "divide & rule". It's strictly a last resort — keeping track of different groups of black people gives us a headache. Which ones are the Tutsis again? We much prefer to have "community leaders" deal with all that stuff for us¹.

I would not have been able to say that had Diane Abbot not raised the issue. She was right to raise the issue, despite being wrong: like I said, that's her job. She should not have been shut up or made to apologise.

The reflex to hang her out to dry is understandable: we are frustrated at not being allowed to say things about race, and when one of "them" does it, we take revenge. But I think that is a bad mistake — ironically, this is one time where we have to risk that headache and play "divide & rule". Abbott is not one of "them" that want us to shut up about race. Rod Liddle says that she has used the same tactics in the past, but when he talked about black crime, she at least disagreed with him on the merits. Probably wrongly, mind, but, Labour MP, etc. Yes, she used the R-word as well, but if everyone complaining had also engaged the argument like her, they wouldn't have been able to shout it down. It is the likes of Alex Massie and Bonnie Greer weighing in that make it near impossible to have such a discussion.

Non-white politicians are generally willing to talk about race. (Sometimes at enormous length). Being offended is Stuff White People Like. And that's not something I'm going to apologise for saying.

¹ If it turns out that the "community leaders" are all from one group, and are using the power we give them to exterminate another, we would rather not know about it, thank you very much.

AI, Human Capital, Betterness

2012-01-07T12:53:00.000Z

Let me just restate the thought experiment I embarked on this week. I am hypothesising that:

"Human-like" artificial intelligence is bounded in capability
The bound is close to the level of current human intelligence
Feedback is necessary to achieving anything useful with human-like intelligence
Allowing human-like intelligence to act on a system always carries risk to that system

Now remember, when I set out I did admit that AI wasn't a subject I was up to date on or paid much attention to.

On the other hand, I did mention Robin Hanson in my last post. The thing is, I don't actually read Hanson regularly: I am aware of his attention to systematic errors in human thinking; I quite often read discussions that refer to his articles on the subject, and sometimes follow links and read them. But I was quite unaware of the amount he has written over the last three years on the subject of AI, specifically "whole brain emulations" or Ems.

More importantly, I did actually read, but had forgotten, "The Betterness Explosion", a piece of Hanson's, which is very much in line with with my thinking here, as it emphasises that we don't really know what it means to suggest we should achieve super-human intelligence. I now recall agreeing with this at the time, and although I had forgotten it I suspect it at the very least encouraged my gut-level scepticism towards superhuman AI and the singularity.

In the main, Hanson's writing on Ems seems to avoid the questions of motivation and integration that I emphasised in part 2. Because the Em's are actual duplicates of human minds, there is no assumption that they will be tools under our control; from the beginning they will be people with which we will need to negotiate — there is discussion of the viability and morality of their market wages being pushed down to subsistence level.

There is an interesting piece "Ems Freshly Trained" which looks at the duplication question, which might well be a way round the integration issue (as I wrote in part 1, "it might be as hard to produce and identify an artificial genius as a natural one, but then perhaps we could duplicate it", and the same might go for an AI which is well-integrated into a particular role).

There is also discussion of cities which consist mainly of computer hardware hosting brains. I have my doubts about that: because of the "feedback" assumption at the top, I don't think any purpose can be served by intelligences that are entirely isolated from the physical world. Not that they have to be directly acting on the physical world — I do precious little of that myself — but they have to be part of a real-world system and receive feedback from that system. That doesn't rule out billion-mind data centre cities, but the obstacles to integrating that many minds into a system are severe. As per part 2, I do not think the rate of growth of our systems is limited by the availability of intelligences to integrate into them, since there are so many going spare.

Apart from the Hanson posts, I should also have referred to an post I had read by Half Sigma, on Human Capital. I think that post, and the older one linked from it, make the point well that the most valuable (and most renumerated) humans are those who have been succesfully (and expensively) integrated into important systems.

Relevance of AI

2012-01-06T09:12:00.002Z

I felt a bit bad writing the last post on artificial intelligence: it's outside my usual area of writing, and as I'd just admitted, there are a number of other points within my area that I haven't got round to properly putting in order.

However, the questions raised in the AI post aren't as far from the debates Anomaly UK routinely deals in as I first thought.

Like the previous post, this falls firmly in the category of "speculations". I'm concerned with telling a consistent story; I'm not even arguing at this stage that what I'm describing is true of the real world today. I'll worry about that when the story is complete.

Most obviously, the emphasis on error relates directly to the Robin Hanson area of biases and wrongness is human thinking. It's not surprising that Aretae jumped straight on it. If my hypothesis is correct, it would mean that Aretae's category of "monkeybrains", while of central importance, is very badly named: the problems with our brains is not their ape ancestry, but their very purpose: attempting to reach practical conclusions from vastly inadequate data. That is what we do; it is what intelligence is, and the high error rate is not an implementation bug but an essential aspect of the problem.

(I suppose there are real "monkeybrains" issues in that we retain too high an error rate even when there actually is adequate data. But that's not the normal situation)

The AI discussion relates to another of Aretae's primary issues: motivation. Motivation is getting an intelligence to do what it ought to be doing, rather than something pointless or counterproductive. When working with human intelligence, it's the difficult bit. If artificial intelligence is subject to the problems I have suggested, then properly specifying the goals that the AI is to seek will quite likely also turn out to be the difficult bit.

I'm reminded in a vague way of Daniel Dennett's writings on meaning and intentionality. Dennett's argument, if I remember it accurately, is that all "meaning" in human intelligence ultimately derives from the externally-imposed "purpose" of evolutionary survival. Evolutionary successful designs behave as if seeking the goal of producing surviving descendants, and seeking this goal implies seeking sub-goals of feeding, defence, reproduction, etc. etc. etc. In humans, this produces an organ that explicitly/symbolically expresses and manipulates subgoals, but that organ's ultimate goal is implicit in its construction, and not subject to symbolic manipulation.

The hard problem of motivating a human to do something, then, is the problem of getting their brain to treat that something as a subgoal of its non-explicit ultimate goal.

I wonder (in a very handwavy way) whether building an artificial intelligence might involve the same sort of problem of specifying what the ultimate goal actually is, and making the things we want it to do register properly as subgoals.

The next issue is what an increased supply of intelligence would do to the economy. Though an apostate libertarian, I have continued to hold to the Julian Simon line that "Human inventiveness is the Ultimate Resource". To doubt that AI will have a revolutionarily beneficial effect is to reject Simon's claim.

Within this hypothesis, the availability of humanlike (but not superhuman) AI is of only marginal benefit, so Simon is wrong. Then, what is the ultimate resource?

Simon is still closer than his opponents; the ultimate resource (that is the minimum resource as per the law of the minimum) is not raw materials or land. If it is not intelligence per se, it is more the capacity to endure that intelligence within the wider system.

I write conventional business software. What is it I spend my time actually doing? The hard bit certainly isn't getting the computer to do what I want. With modern programming languages and and tools, that's really easy — once I know what it is I want. There used to be people with the job title "programmer" whose job it was to do that, with separate "analysts" who told them what the computer needed to do, but the programmer was pretty much an obsolete role when I joined the workforce twenty years ago.

Conventional wisdom is that the hard bit is now working out what the computer needs to do — working with users and defining precisely how the computer fits into the wider business process. That certainly is a significant part of my job. But it's not the hardest or most time-consuming bit.

The biggest part of the job is dealing with errors: testing software before release to try to find them; monitoring it after release to identify them, and repairing the damage they cause. The testing is really hard because the difficult bits of the software interact with multiple outside people and systems, and it's not possible to fully simulate them. New software can be tested against pale imitations of the real world, and if it's particularly risky, real users can be reluctantly drafted in to "user acceptance" testing of the software. But all that — simulating the world to test software, having users effectively simulate themselves to test software, and running not-entirely-tested software in the real world with a finger hovering over the kill button — is what takes most of the work.

This factor is brought out more by the improvements I mentioned in the actual writing of software, but it is by no means new. Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that if writing a program took n days, integrating it into a system would take 3n days, properly productionising it (so that it would run reliably unsupervised) would take 3n days, and these are cumulative, so that a productionised, integrated version of the program would take something like ten times as long as a stand-alone developer-run version to produce.

Adding more intelligences, natural or artificial, to the system is the same sort of problem. Yes, they can add value. But they can do damage also. Testing of them cannot really be done outside the system, it has to be done by the system itself.

If completely independent systems exist, different ideas can be tried out in them. But we don't want those: we want the benefits of the extra intelligence in our system. A separate "test environment" that doesn't actually include us is not a very good copy of the "production environment" that does include us.

All this relates to another long-standing issue in our corner of the blogosphere: education, signalling and credentialism. The argument is that the main purpose of higher education is not to improve the abilities of the students, but merely to indicate those students who can first get into and then endure the education system itself. The implication is that there is something very wrong with this. But one way of looking at it is that the major cost is not either producing or preparing intelligent people, but testing and safely integrating them into the system. The signalling in the education system is part of that integration cost.

Back on the Julian Simon question, what that means is that neither population nor raw materials are limiting the growth and advance of civilisation. Rather, civilisation is growing and advancing roughly as fast as it can integrate new members and new ideas. There is no ultimate resource.

It is not an original observation that the things that most hurt our civilisation are self-inflicted. The organisation of mass labour that produced industrialisation also produced the 20th century world wars. The flexible allocation of capital that drove the rapid development of the last quarter century gave us the spectacular misallocations with the results we're now suffering.

The normal attitude is that these accidents are avoidable; that we can find ways to stop messing up so badly. We can't. As the external restrictions on our advance recede, we approach the limit where the benefits of increases in the rate of advance are wiped out by more and more damaging mistakes.

Twentieth Century science-fiction writers recognised at least the catastrophic risk aspect of this situation. The concept that the paucity of intelligence in the universe is because it tends to destroy itself is suggested frequently.

SF authors and others emphasised the importance of space travel as a way of diversifying the risk to the species. But even that doesn't initially provide more than one system into which advances can be integrated; at best it reduces the probability that a catastrophe becomes an extinction event. Even if we did achieve diversity, that wouldn't help our system to advance faster, unless it encouraged more recklessness — we could take a riskier path, knowing that if we were destroyed other systems could carry on. I'm not sure I want that; it raises the same sort of philosophical questions as duplicating individuals for "backup" purposes. In any case, I don't think even that recklessness would help: my point is not just that faster development creates catastrophic risk, but that it increases the frequency of more moderate disasters, like the current financial crisis, and so wipes out its own benefits.

Speculations regarding limitations of Artificial Intelligence

2012-01-03T22:11:00.000Z

An older friend frequently asks me, as a technologist, when computers will have human-like intelligence, and what the social/economic effects of that will be.

I struggle to take the question seriously; AI is something that was dropped as a major research goal around the time I was a student twenty years ago, and it's not an area I'm well-informed about. As I mentioned in my review of the rebooted "Knight Rider" TV series, a car that could hold up a conversation is a more futuristic idea in 2008 than it was back when David Hasselhof was doing the driving.

And yet for all that, it's hard to say what's really wrong with the layman's view that since computing power is increasing rapidly, it is an inevitability that whatever the human brain can do in the way of information processing, a computer should be able to do, quite possibly within the next few decades.

But what is "human-like intelligence"? It seems to me that it is not all that different from what the likes of Google search or Siri do: absorb vast amounts of associations between data items, without really being systematic about what the associations mean or selective about their quality, and apply some statistical algorithm to the associations to pick the most relevant.

There must be more to it than that; for one thing, trained humans can sort of do actual proper logic, about a billion times less well than this netbook can, and there's a lot of effectively hand-built (i.e. specifically evolved) functionality in a some selected pattern-recognition areas. But I think the general-purpose associationist mechanism is the most important from the point of view of building artificial intelligence.

If that is true, then a couple of things follow. First, the Google/Siri approach to AI is the correct one, and as it develops we are likely to see it come to achieve something resembling humanlike ability.
But it also suggests that the limitations of human intelligence may not be due to limitations of the human brain, so much as they are due to fundamental limitations in what the association-plus-statistics technique can practically achieve.

Humans can reach conclusions that no logic-based intelligence can get close to, but humans get a lot of stuff wrong nearly all the time. Google Search can do some very impressive things, but it also gets a lot of stuff wrong. That might not change, however much the technology improves.

There are good reasons to suspect that human intelligence is very close to being as good as it can get.
One is that thinking about things longer doesn't reliably produce better conclusions. That is the point of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" (as far as I understand it; I take Gladwell to be the champion of what Neal Stephenson called "those American books where once you're heard the title you don't even need to read it").

The next, related, reason is that human intelligence doesn't scale out very well; having more people think about a problem doesn't reliably give better answers than having just one do it.

Finally, the fact that, in spite of evolutionary pressure, there is enormous variation in the practical usefulness of human intelligences, suggest that making it better is not simply a case of improving the design. If the variation were down to different design, then the better designs would have driven out the worse ones long ago. I think it is far more to do with circumstances, and with the fundamental difficulty of identifying the correct problems to solve.

The major limitation on conventional computing is that it can only do so much per second; only render so many triangles, only price so many positions or simulate so many grid cells. Improving the speed and density of the hardware is pushing back that major limitation.

The major limitation on human intelligence, particularly when it is augmented with computers as it generally is now, is how much it is wrong. Being faster or bigger doesn't push back the major limitation unless it can make the intelligence wrong less often, and I don't think it would.

What I'm saying is that the major cost of human intelligence is not in the scarce resources required to execute the decision-making, but the damage caused by all the bad decisions that humans make.

The major real-world expense in obtaining high-quality human decision-makers is identifying which of the massive surplus available are actually any good. Being able to supply vastly bigger numbers of AI candidates would not drive that cost down.

Even the specialisms that humans have might be limited more by the cost they impose on the quality of general decision-making than by the cost of actually implementing the capability.

If that's the situation, then throwing more computing resources at AI-type activity might not change things that much: computers can be as intelligent as humans, but not more intelligent. That's not nothing, of course: it opens the door to replacing a lot of human activity with automated activity, with all the economic effects that implies.

There will be limitations in application because if human-like intelligence really is what I think it is, then the goals being sought by an AI are necessarily as vague as everything else: they will be clumps of associations, and the "intelligence" will just do the things that are associated with the goal clump. We won't be able to "program" it the way we program a logic-based system, just kind of point it in the right direction in the same we we do when we type something into a Google search box.

I don't know if what I've put here is new: I think the view of what the major issue in intelligence is is fairly widespread ("associationism"?), but in all previous discussions I've seen or participated in, there's been an assumption that if in x years from now we will have artificial human-like intelligence, then in 2x years from now, or probably much less, we will have amazing superhuman artificial intelligence. That is what I am now doubting.

With intelligences available "in the lab" we might be able to prepare and direct them more effectively than we do now. But even that's not obviously helpful: with human education, again, the limitation is not so much how long it takes and how much work it is, rather how sure we are it is actually doing any good at all. We may be able to give an artificial intelligence the equivalent of a hundred years of university education, but is a person with that experience really going to make better decisions? The things we humans work most hard at learning and doing: accumulating raw information and reasoning logically, are the things that computers are already much better than us at. The things that only humans can do are the things we simply don't know how to do better, even if we were to re-implement on an electronic platform, speeded up, scaled up, scaled out.

Note that all the above is the product of making statistical guesses using masses of ill-understood unreliable associations, and is very likely to be wrong.

Not Much

2011-12-31T17:03:00.001Z

I've still been a bit too busy/distracted/unwell to produce very much here, but I am following the discussions. (Here's an interesting one at Isegoria). I have unformed thoughts that need more work.

Nydwracu is a young man with a fair bit to say, mostly on twitter, and only some of it incomprehensible to those of us not au fait with Japanese cartoons and whatever popular beat combos the kids are listening to these days. I've stuck him in the sidebar now that I've bitten the bullet of moving to the new Blogger renderer. "Why I am not" seems to have gone dark these last 6 months.

I've ploughed through a lot of Breivik's rant/manifesto/whatever, without being very impressed. He could have done with paying more attention to what sort of society he wants to live in, and less to what medals the Knights Templar should be handing out to terrorists.

I'm pondering whether I should reconsider my attitude to feudalism; I've maintained that the drive to appropriate feudal privileges to the crown up to the 1600s was a good thing, enabled by better communication and administration, but Buckethead makes the point that military technology was a key driver of the process, in the form of the shift of power from mounted knights to massed pikemen/musketeers. Is current military technology compatible with unitary power? Something to think about.

I'm still concerned about the viability of an atheist reactionary movement. Since I'm opposed to political activism, I see the only reactionary possibility being a cultural development laying the basis for a future reactionary regime. I'm not sure it's realistic for us to advance a reactionary culture outside of the churches. It may be the most we can be is cheerleaders for Christian reactionaries. But their struggle is initially and primarily against progressives within their own churches, and there's little we can do to help them from outside.

Does Arnold Kling's vision of a Diamond Age style emergence of traditionalism offer an alternative? The problem is surely that the progressive regime does not permit such traditionalist groups to live within it. In Stephenson's version, I think the old order collapsed first, and "Vicky" society originated within the political vacuum.

Detaching from politics

2011-12-04T16:43:00.001Z

I do not read a newspaper. The only television I watch is "Doctor Who", "Strictly Come Dancing", snooker, and occasionally "Mythbusters" if I'm around when the kids are watching it. I used to to watch "Have I Got News For You", but now I find it too unpleasant to watch anything that takes politics as seriously as it does. I cannot remember ever being able to watch "Question Time" or any serious political reporting without descending into a screaming rage.

Should you be like me? Absolutely not. I am not nearly detached enough from politics. I look at Google News. I follow people on Twitter who talk about current affairs. I see the headlines on the newsstands. All these are things that should be avoided as if they were heroin or crystal meth. Maybe a better analogy would be that they are ritually unclean and one should be cleansed or purged after exposure to them.

An example of my contaminated, junkie state is that I became aware, somehow, that Jeremy Clarkson had said that striking public sector workers should be shot. O, for a mode of living by which I could have avoided knowing such a thing!

Now I find out, from Language Log, that when he made those remarks, not only was he joking, as everybody already knows, but he was explicitly, in so many words, parodying himself and his "BBC token right-wing nutjob" persona.

With the proper perspective, this makes no difference. Whether he was making a joke about the strikers, making a joke about his other jokes, or even if he was completely serious, it still wouldn't be important enough for any intelligent person to give it a moment's thought. But for those without the proper perspective; for those, like myself, who are far too wrapped up in the political process, in that we look at the headlines on Google News a couple of times a day and know who the Prime Minister is, it is a vital reminder. This thing, which was obviously a pointless fuss about something of absolutely no importance, was actually a pointless fuss about nothing at all.

And every other story is the same."Nick Clegg has committed the government to a crackdown on excessive executive pay". What does that mean? It means nothing. It means no more than that Jeremy Clarkson wants to shoot strikers. It means less than that Holly Valance's paso doble was better than Chelsee Healey's jive. Nick Clegg is a meaningless figurehead of a meaningless junior coalition partner involved in meaningless posturing, while the decisions actually being made, which have an effect somewhere between nothing and negligible, are being made elsewhere. That sounds like I am positing some hidden conspiracy—if only! The real decisions are being made essentially at random, swayed by forces that are as large and as ill-understood as the climate, and by whoever by accident happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, for reasons that are as remote from anything we might care about as a butterfly's wings in Brazil.

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to sit still.

Queens and Kings

2011-10-28T19:14:00.000Z

It has been agreed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting that the laws governing the succession of the British Monarchy will be changed to give older sisters priority over their younger brothers.

There are pros and cons to this decision, but on balance I think it is probably for the best.

The drawbacks: first, making any change at all weakens the authority of tradition. If this can be changed because fashion requires it, what will be changed next? I'm not too disturbed by this argument, because a couple of hundred years at least of tradition will have to be upended when we restore the monarchy as the government and get rid of parliament and elections and the rest of it.

Second, I would prefer to have a King than a Queen. I worry that a woman is more likely to be dominated by an outside establishment than a man is. Note that the considerations are quite different than when drawing up requirements for a job. When appointing someone to a position, the reasonable thing is to evaluate their qualities as an individual. If the best man for the job happens to be a woman, that's perfectly fine. But a monarch is a different matter: nobody is making the appointment, the whole point is that we get who we get, and individual qualities don't come into it. Given that, we want the best odds of getting a sufficiently strong personality, and the odds seem better with a law that disproportionately selects males. A restoration is likely to need exceptionally strong characters for at least a couple of reigns.

The conventional wisdom is that of the last four ruling queens, three at least were very successful. In the cases of Victoria and Elizabeth II, I have my doubts: I think their reputations rest more on their acquiescence towards the ruling establishment than anything else. Elizabeth I kicked serious arse, though, which goes a long way towards alleviating my worries on this score.

So much for the disadvantages. The advantages are clear. The monarch must have as strong a claim to his title as possible. If this step is not taken now, it will always be floating around as a possibility, and can be used as a weapon against any King with an older sister. If we are going to have the potential uncertainty settled for good, it can only be settled in this direction.

And, as a more minor point, it is satisfying that this is being treated as significant. We are talking about which of the Queen's great-grandchildren will become monarch; the implication is that that monarchy will be with us for another three generations. A lot will happen in that time, and through all of it, the option will be there in the background to write off the demagogues and the apparatchiks and take another path.

It is also satsfying that this has not, so far, been a matter for public consultation or debate. I'm expressing an opinion here, but I don't want the decision to be based on popular opinion — much better that it be announced by a ruling clique, even if that be our current shower of politicians.

Into the bargain, they're allowing a monarch to marry a Catholic. Again, I'm unsure. I can think of no direct problem with having a monarch who is married to a Catholic. But have I thought of everything?

Nothing To Envy

2011-10-23T12:59:00.000Z

I've started to take more interest in North Korea. The reason for this is an embarrassment: I have argued that a possible route to a form of government closer to what I want to see is that a one-party state comes under the control of a single strong leader who is able to convert it into a hereditary monarchy, by concentrating power to himself so strongly that he is able to leave it to his heir. It later occurred to me that the country which has come closest to doing that is North Korea, now anticipating the succession of the third generation of the Kim dynasty.

Like I said, an embarrassment. Probably the one-party-state to hereditary monarchy thing isn't such a good idea. But I'm amusing myself by studying my own reaction to this inconvenience to my theories. It's interesting to play at being rather more attached to the theory than I really am, and look for cynical ways to rebut arguments based on the evidence of North Korea.

The most fun approach would be to argue that North Korea is actually really well governed, and the problems it is perceived to have are either falsified by the media, or are the results of steps taken against it by jealous republicans abroad.

It is the sheer ludicrousness of that argument that has induced me to look at the question at this "meta" level. North Korea is pretty much the poorest and most backward country in the entire world, while the part of Korea given a different form of government by an arbitrary line of latitute has become one of the dozen or so richest and most advanced. If North Korea had been merely bad, I might have seriously attempted a defence of its system, but as things are it is impossible to do so with a straight face. That situation makes some degree of self-examination inevitable: exactly how stupid does an argument have to be for me to reject it as I have the "North Korea is actually really well governed" line. And what does that say about me?

(This interesting point from Nathan Bashaw seems relevant).

Part of the question is how easy it is to dodge the problem. And here I can really do it. For one thing, we don't really know who has the power in North Korea — for all we can tell, Kim may be an empty figurehead entirely under the control of military and party officials. In any case, the problem in North Korea is not who is in charge, it is that it is attached to a collectivist economic system. Kim is legitimate not because he is the annointed heir of Kim Il-Sung, but because he is the carrier of the flame of communism.

That gives us another data point: North Korea does not in fact convince me that hereditary government is a bad idea. Despite the problem that everywhere else in the world has dumped NK-style collectivism, with the possible exception of Cuba, which... is ruled by the brother of the previous leader. Hmmm.

I don't think I can really draw conclusions about attachment to ideology here. But the question's still open: I'm going to keep an eye on the process of my adapting judgement to ideology and vice versa. I'm well placed to do that, because I am not in a social group united by my ideology — other than a few other bloggers. Also the fact that I've recently abandoned ideological positions I held for most of my adult life gives me an extra reserve of cynicism to draw on.

I already started with yesterday's post, where I deliberately went through the motions of drawing ideological conclusions from the undercover policing scandal.

Aretae has also been writing along these lines recently. One of his most important points is that there is no basis for anyone to be certain or even nearly certain about these difficult ideological issues. When he puts forward ideas, it's all 60% this and 70% that.

That's very sound. But is that the way anyone really sees things? The reason I'm able to take this detached approach to my royalist ideology is that I genuinely do have doubts. Again, that's probably because it's fairly new to me, and it's out beyond the lunatic fringe in the public debate.

For a comparison, take the issue of climate change. I am persuaded by the evidence, and have written here, that there is considerable room for doubt of the pronouncements of the climate science experts. I claim that the evidence tends to support the position that dangerous climate change is not happening and will not happen.

That's fine. But what I haven't said in so many words is that I have a deep inner certainty that anthropogenic global warming is all rubbish. That certainty cannot be justified by a reasoned analysis of the evidence: in no way do I have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the science to achieve such confidence in any conclusion. Where does this certainty come from?

If it is simply overconfidence, that's almost the least bad possibility. At least in that case, the direction of my conclusion is based on reason. What's more worrying is the possibility that the inner certainty is totally independent of my reason, and the reasoned conclusions I have drawn are only rationalisations of my faith.

If that's the case, where did the faith come from? I would have to have made some kind of intuitive, rather than rational, judgement on one side of a very complex issue. What is the source of that intuition? I don't know, though I could take a few guesses. Is that intuition to be trusted? In general, absolutely not. There are too many cases of people reaching opposite certainty on the basis of intuition, and there is no basis for judging one person's intuition against another.

Now maybe my intuition, unlike yours, is reliable. It does have a fairly decent track record. Also, I'm not in the habit of being certain: of all the other things I have written about on this blog, I don't think there are any that I have the same inner certainty about that I have about AGW.

Freemail

2011-10-23T06:03:00.000Z

In The Guardian, a journalist tells of her experience of having her email account hacked.

"The realisation dawns that the email account is the nexus of the modern world. It's connected to just about every part of our daily life, and if something goes wrong, it spreads. But the biggest effect is psychological. On some level, your identity is being held hostage.

"The company that presents itself as the friendly face of the web doesn't have a single human being to talk to in these circumstances."

I love free stuff. I use free blog services and free email services, and I see it as a double advantage that, as well as not costing me anything, these services are somewhat at arms length from my identity. Possession of a few keys and passwords are what make me "anomalyuk", nothing more than that.

My real-world identity is another matter. My personal email accounts, with which I support my personal relationships and business relationships, are provided to me — here's a novelty — as a paying customer. The providers' customer services may be good or bad, but at least they exist and I can use them. It makes no difference to a Gmail user how good Google's customer service is, because Ms Davis and other Gmail users are not Google's customers at all.

I actually pay a couple of quid a month just for my email service, but that isn't necessary. Like you, Rowena Davis has an ISP — possibly more than one, if she gets her mobile separate from her home internet. They will provide her an email address, as part of the service she is paying for. They know it belongs to her, because she pays the bill, and if, as the bill-payer, she phones up and needs it reset, they will do it for her. However, for this service which she correctly observes is the nexus of her life, she has chosen to rely instead on a handed-out-on-the-street freebie instead.

I hereby declare that to be a Bad Idea.

Davis's story links to another recent one, of a 79-year-old charity volunteer who went through the same ordeal. Twice. The police told her: don't use free email services. Her conclusion at the end of the article: the police need to devote more resources. Not her — she's sticking with free.

There is one drawback with using your ISP's email service, which is that you may lose it if you want to change ISPs. As it happens, two generations of free services have come and pretty much gone (remember bigfoot? rocketmail?) in the time I've been with my current ISP, but that may be a fluke. And in any case, the old addresses are still supported.

If that concerns you, then do what I do and pay for it. One leading provider charges 69p a month for email hosting, plus £2.99 a year for domain registration — giving you an address that is transferable across providers and that looks more professional than a vodaphone or gmail address. And they have 24x7 telephone support. Alternatively, Yahoo! do an email service for $19.99 a year. Bigfoot, it emerges, are still around, and charge $19.95 a quarter. Is £1 or £3 a month really not worth paying for "the nexus of the modern world"? I should emphasize: it's not just that paying for the email makes it feasible for the provider to offer you some level of support: the mere fact of there being a payment makes it enormously easier for them to identify you, and therefore to clear up these fraud issues.

The surprising thing is that they're not marketing this more aggressively. The problems Davies had have been common for a few years: everyone in her position should be paying for decent email, but the providers aren't advertising on that basis. Google don't offer a premium service like Yahoo's, Microsoft charge $9.95 a month, which is a bit steep, and the services just aren't marketed.

ISPs could offer domain and mail hosting as an extra, but the consumer-oriented ones don't, or don't push it.

Possibly the providers are worried about adverse selection: if they advertise on the basis of being able to handle hacking incidents, they're offering hostages to fortune in terms of the inevitable dissatisfied customers undermining their name with complaints.

As a disinterested (and irresponsible) third party, I will do it for them: Do not use Gmail. Do not use MSN Hotmail, unless you are paying the $9.95 a month for premium (which I don't recommend, because it's too much). Use your ISP's email account if you're not planning to move or switch in the next five years. Otherwise get a personal domain and get a basic email service from the likes of 1and1, or, if that's too complicated (and it is a bit complicated), get Yahoo! Plus for $19.95 a year. I'm not recommending these through experience, just through looking for email services that cost a little money and offer telephone support.

If you're not willing to pay, or you're not willing to give up Gmail (which, I admit, is a very nicely done service), then remember that you have nobody to whine to if your Gmail is hacked. You have other options, and you have chosen to trust your email to a company you have no commercial relationship with. I have nothing against Google, but if you want a company to have responsibilities towards you, you have to pay them.

Who has the power to authorise perjury?

2011-10-20T21:05:00.000Z

One of the most striking things about the last few decades is that relatively low-ranking elements of the state apparatus have arrogated power to themselves without any legal or legislative basis, and that this has been calmly accepted by the public at large.

Because these seizures of power are technically illegal, they can be challenged in the courts, and occasionally are. See for instance Neil Herron's campaign against imposition of arbitrary parking rules by local councils.

While the courts can, and technically should, rule in favour of eccentrics such as Herron, they sometimes exhibit reluctance to contradict the common assumptions of society, which are that someone who works for the council or the police or a government department can do whatever they decide within the area relevant to their job.

Because it is so accepted, it is not easy to spot, and only becomes really obvious when they overreach. What is interesting about the police decision to "authorize" an undercover officer to give false personal and identity details under oath in a criminal prosecution is not whether they will actually get away with it this time (I assume they won't), but that they ever imagined they could.

The same effect was evident with the MP expenses affair: I quoted at length Nadine Dorries' insistence that a group of party whips and civil servants had encouraged MPs to make false expenses claims, and that that actually made it OK.

A more significant example is the Foot and Mouth cull back in 2001, in which, it is widely argued, the culling of healthy cattle was done without any legal authority.

At this stage in the post, I should turn these observations into a neat argument in favour of whatever broad political position I am in favour of at the moment (formalism, monarchy, etc.) I suppose I just about could manage it: lines of authority are unclear, nobody ultimately admits to being responsible for anything, so people on the spot feel obliged to just assume responsibility, blah, blah, blah. If I thought about it and worked on it for a while, I might really come to take it seriously as an argument, but right now it feels a little dishonest, so I'd rather just put the whole thing forward as an observation and a point for further consideration.

Slavery

2011-09-15T23:04:00.000Z

One issue that comes up when you declare that the last 400 years of political "progress" are a bad thing is slavery. Lobbyists, the International Olympic Committee, sustainability facilitators, interior design licensing, bank bailouts, the Milk Marketing Board, these are indeed changes for the worse, but are you saying you want to bring back slavery?

There are a couple of answers to that. One is to argue that the lot of many in the modern world is no better than slavery, so that, even if slavery is bad, it's not necessarily worse than what we have now.

In "The Servile State", Hiliaire Belloc predicted that capitalism would necessarily lead ultimately to nationalised slavery, as the state would be forced to take responsibility for the poor landless, and would still need them to work.

That things haven't evolved quite as Belloc predicted is due only to the decline in the social usefulness of unskilled work. When, from time to time, the question comes up of forcing the unemployed to do some kind of government-organised work in exchange for their handouts, there is only a little opposition premised on the basis that it is unfair to inhumane to the slaves themselves. The idea fails on the grounds that it will cost more than paying them not to work, and that it will constitute cheap competition against those that are in jobs. The fact that the unemployable are in essence slaves of the state is not widely disputed.

(Of course, the distributivists did not themselves intend this argument as a defence of older forms of slavery; they sought a compromise between feudalism and capitalism)

The true argument for slavery is this: that those who are not able to support themselves are necessarily slaves, and abolition ultimately amounts to an exercise in creative linguistics.

A liberal will object, correctly, that ability to support oneself is a can of worms. The 'inability' of the propertyless is an artificial condition. None of us are able to support ourselves if every hand is against us, and very few would manage in the hypothetical, and impossible, state where neigbours neither helped nor hindered us. The ability of a particular person to support himself is a social fact as much as a physical one.

Even so, given any social arrangement, there are those who can, in and with that society, support themselves, and those who cannot. The distributivists aimed, admirably, for a society of smallholders in which all could live free, but even if their plans were implemented there would still be some failures.

The natural arrangement for such failures has been demonstrated for us by the Irish travellers of Leighton Buzzard. If a person cannot live independently, someone must take charge of him, and if they can profit by doing so, then a solution has been found.

It is alleged that the workers in the charge of the travellers were not looked after at all well. That may be so, though a significant proportion of those "rescued" appear willing to go back. But when this natural arrangement is illegal, and therefore carried out only among that section of the population which cannot be policed without the UN getting involved, it is not reasonable to expect it to be done very impressively.

The conditions of slavery are a matter of compromise: legitimately a matter of public policy. The bulk importation and inhumane handling of captured tribesmen from a remote continent quite understandably gave slavery a bad name. I am not here to argue for any and all forms of slavery. However, drawing the line of what is unacceptable to include all forms of coercion is clearly an error when so many cannot actually live adequately without being coerced somehow. There have been many varieties of slavery, and I will use the term serfdom to emphasise a distinction from the form of slavery most familiar to us from history and fiction, but not to pretend that I am not talking about a form of slavery.

Back to those conditions: ideally, all those capable of freedom would be free, and the incapable should be given the best chance of becoming both capable and free. But there needs to be some compromise here. The welfare state is geared to the capable but unfortunate, is grossly unsuitable for the most incapable, while at the same time dragging far too many of the marginally capable down into dependency. There seems ample room to improve on it with a system of humane serfdom under which a serf is subject to a lord who his responsible for his support and humane treatment. Such an arrangement would probably require a long-term commitment on both sides, in order to work adequately. The lord has insufficient motivation to improve the serf's knowledge and behaviour if he can wander out onto the job market as soon as he has learned enough skill and discipline to do so. I think it is essential that such a step would require some compensation to the lord, or a minimum period, or both. At the same time, every capable person who is not free is a cost of the sytem, so there should be some calibration to minimise that cost. It is worth bearing in mind that assisting those who would most benefit from exiting serfdom - by raising the necessary compensation - would be an obvious and worthy aim of charity.

All this really only leaves one question to answer; one which has probably occured to the reader, which is, "are you actually serious you mad loony???!??"

My answer is, "kind of". The argument above is not presented to convince: I am not convinced by it myself. Rather, as I intimated initially, I am exploring the limits of the reactionary position.

If slavery is unthinkably evil, then the political wisdom of most historical civilisations is basically disqualified by it. If it is defensible, even in some limited way, then that wisdom becomes relevant again, not as infallible authority, but as something to be taken into account. Do I want to reintroduce medieval serfdom? It's not high on my to-do list. But I refuse to accept that political thought begins in the 1780s.

Public Order

2011-08-20T14:19:00.000Z

Distractions have prevented me from writing recently, which is a shame. This tweet of Old Holborn's is worth a book, as I believe it, bizarre as it sounds, to be true, but it is over a month old, and I haven't got round to it.

On the other hand, my silence has at least prevented me from embarrassing myself over the riots, since they look very different with hindsight than they did at the time. The one public comment I made was this, which is not too bad.

The riots lasted two nights in London, with a third in Birmingham and Manchester. They were in no way out of the ordinary; just something that happens every few years in the warm bit of summer.

The police response was initially hesitant and inadequate, but, within 48 hours, that was corrected. My theory was that the police originally thought that these were good rioters, like the anti-cuts riots in March. Good rioters have to be allowed to riot: it is just part of their duty as citizens.

However, as Wikipedia tells us, the 2011 London anti-cuts protest is Not to be confused with 2011 England riots. Those are bad riots, and the police must keep order in the streets, whatever it takes. "Kettling" of good rioters is an infringement of their civil liberties, but when bad rioters are running around, the police must find excuses for not having water cannon and baton rounds to hand.

I don't think they can be blamed for their confusion. I'm not sure if they weren't aware of the distinction between good and bad rioters, or if, like Jody McIntyre, they mistakenly thought that these were good rioters. In any case, once the police understood the distinction, the trouble was cleared up pretty quickly.

Weak leaders and bad leaders

2011-07-23T08:58:00.000Z

Chris Dillow brings up the well-known puzzle that inconsistency is far more damaging to leaders than it ought to be: politicians are so terrified of being seen to change their positions that it is almost impossible to make a reasoned change.

Their fear is not unjustified; it is forced on them by the voters, who prize "strong" character in a candidate above good decision-making.

The puzzle is why this should be, when the quality of government so obviously suffers as a result.

I imagine it is a holdover from days of stable leadership. As I discussed last year: in the days of monarchies, the worst thing that could happen was that the King would be weak and the state would come to be dominated by competing factions seeking to control him. A strong but stupid or immoral monarch would do less damage. It is very explicit in histories written before the present era, that weak king equals bad king, and strong king equals good king.

It seems that the danger of weak leaders is so deeply ingrained that it survives in the popular mind to this day — even though the demise of monarchy has made it irrelevant. (It may even be innate, but that is speculation). With democracy, you get all the disadvantages of a weak king whether the individual politicians are weak or strong, so there is no good reason to prefer a strong personality over one that is open to reasoned argument.

Behind the Phone Hacking story

2011-07-21T20:45:00.000Z

The story about the News of the World illicitly obtaining mobile phone voicemail messages for use in their stories has been around for years, but in the last couple of weeks it has gone stratospheric.

The sudden jump in perceived importance has looked suspicious to some — I was out of the country at the time, but it seems to have started up around the 4th of July, and none of the allegations involved were actually new, though possibly they were better substantiated than previously. (It is a hazard that faces every Private Eye subscriber that stories get mainstream attention only after one is bored of reading about them for years).

On the other hand the timing may be in significant part due to long delays in the criminal investigation; delays that are plausibly suspected to be due to the offenders' close links to senior politicians in all parties and to the police.

There is a air of fake outrage about the whole thing. The facts of the case are reasonably clear, but the attitudes struck don't quite ring true.

Every fictional investigative journalist has his contacts in the police to supply information, often in exchange for gifts. Telephone company contacts are a staple also. Further, the duo of the reporter and the private investigator/hacker describes the protagonists of the epochal Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

That probably isn't the point though. Journalists get a lot of leeway when researching stories about the powerful that is denied them when dredging up sex scandals about celebrities and sob stories from crime victims — the sort of muck-raking that has been the News of the World's core business for a century. The fictional journalists generally resort to the illegal acquisition of information at the dramatic stage in the story where they know roughly what they are going to print but just need a little more, which they can't get any other way. They don't usually just fish for dirt in celebrities' voicemails because it's less work than going outside, as their real-life counterparts seem to have been doing.

All the same, I am far from convinced that what has been going on was restricted to the News International stable, or that it is substantially different from what has happened for decades. Someone else must remember "Benji the Binman", even if bribing servants for gossip is not as widespread an activity today as it was in the 1920s.

Obviously the most important questions are about the political power of the press — the power to topple governments, thwart investigations, shape the public perception of events. And I think that is source of the fakeness, because that is a subject which it is impossible to address rationally in public.

The reason is that even asking the question undermines the assumptions on which the rationale for democracy rests. Citizens have votes because they are autonomous. If voters can be swayed in large numbers by newspapers (as everyone knows is the case), then they are not autonomous at all. To ask who should be able to decide how other people vote, and under what conditions and restrictions, is to produce cognitive dissonance in any democrat.

The trick is to get outraged by the political power the press has, without admitting where that power actually comes from — the malleability of the irresponsible voter. Only when actual malpractice by the press is found can the suppressed outrage be expressed, and then it is multiplied, since at other times the evil of the press is just as real, but cannot be articulated without admitting the basic flaw in democracy. Vince Cable's demise exemplified the previous situation: he could "declare war" on Rupert Murdoch, but he could not satisfactorily explain why. Everyone knew why, but it could not be put into words, and so he was sacked.

Hence the situation today. The malpractice was real, and deplorable, but the outrage is out of proportion, because the true crimes of the press are entirely respectable, and nobody can imagine a way to put a stop to them.

Froude on Democratic War

2011-06-14T21:06:00.000Z

The newspapers and popular orators, accustomed to canvass and criticise the actions of statesmen at home, forgot that prudence suggested reticence about the affairs of others with whom we had no right to interfere. The army was master of France, and to speak of its chief in such terms as those in which historians describe a Sylla or a Marius was not the way to maintain peaceful relations with dangerous neighbours. Neither the writers nor the speakers wished for war with France. They wished only for popularity as the friends of justice and humanity; but war might easily have been the consequence unless pen and tongue could be taught caution.

- "The Earl of Beaconsfield", J. A. Froude, Chapter X

I have a half-written post on Amina Arraf, but that about covers it.

On the next page, an echo of Mogadishu and Manhattan:

The indirect consequences of fatuities are sometimes worse than their immediate effects. It was known over the world that England, France, Turkey, and Italy had combined to endeavour to crush Russia, and had succeeded only in capturing half of a single Russian city. The sepoy army heard of our failures, and the centenary of the battle of Plassy was signalised by the Great Mutiny.

Left and Right

2011-05-22T16:16:00.000Z

A commenter accuses me of "basing the whole of my political philosophy on the seating plan of the French Revolutionary Parliament" because I described someone as "not a lefty".

Twenty years ago, I was happily drawing Nolan charts, representing social liberalism and economic liberalism as orthogonal, and all sorts of other issues as being capable of being decided independently.

Back then, I saw politics as an intellectual pursuit, and policy positions as the result of analysing the justifications and effects of policies.

Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, actual politics was going on. Politics is about who has power, and you don't get power by being on the fringe. You do it as part of a dominant coalition. If you are serious about politics, you support all the positions your coalition holds, whether you really believe the arguments or not. Anyone who is not with the party is against it.

Therefore whether any given idea is placed on the left wing or the right wing may well be arbitrary from an intellectual point of view, but it is an ineluctable necessity from the point of view of a politician. If you are a left-winger in Britain or America today, you'd better support renewable energy and oppose nuclear. Maybe in a couple of decades today's left-wing policy will be a right-wing position, but that doesn't matter today. Also, you must only take as strong a position as the main left coalition does, because if you take a stronger position than them, you're an extremist, which is always bad. Again, an extreme position today may be moderate in ten years, or vice versa, but there is a moderate-left and a moderate-right position on any issue, defined by the two coalitions competing for power.

If you really have strong policy views of your own on a particular issue, you can try to change your coalition's position on that issue, but if you don't hold with your coalition, you're not doing real politics.

For that reason, there always are just two sides that matter, and those two sides each have a position on everything. So it makes perfect sense to describe politics in terms of "left" and "right", in the eighteenth century, the twenty-first century, or arguably even, as Alison Plowden does, in the sixteenth. Any given policy position might be left-wing in one country or one generation and right-wing in another, and the main axis of left-right opposition might be social policy, economic policy, or foreign policy, but there have to be two sides.

Related: Fascism: Right or Left

What a Shame

2011-05-07T14:32:00.000Z

Well, this is embarrassing.

Only weeks after explaining that I didn't care about the AV referendum, I now find that I'm really pissed off with the result.

I haven't actually changed my position, that "I think AV would give voters slightly more influence than they have now. I am quite unsure as to whether that's a good thing or a bad thing". I think what really has me upset is that it would have have been so interesting to see how party politics would have developed under AV.

Would any of the major parties have split? Would we have got a lot of independents running, and some of them winning? Would the total vote of the three main parties have dropped to about 50%, with several outsiders each picking up 10-20% of 1st preference votes in most constituencies? Now we'll never know. It's like having a favourite TV programme cancelled half way through.

In case that sounds shallow, I should point to a few old posts, where I developed the case that the entertainment value of voting actually outweighs any political value. Because this was back in 2007-8, it applies even if, unlike me today, you do believe that voting has some political value.

One Man One Vote

2011-05-04T08:25:00.000Z

Sometimes the way to get to a good explanation is to start with a bad one.

The opponents of AV make the claim that it means that voters for fringe parties get their vote counted more than voters for major parties. This seemed a stupid objection, but I couldn't quite explain why, clearly and simply.

Yesterday I read John Humphrys' complete failure to explain why (via Matt Ridley), and it became obvious:

Yes, in AV, your vote can be counted more than once — whether you vote for a fringe party or a winner or runner-up. If there are only two rounds of counting in a particular example, then the person A who votes for the eliminated candidate gets their vote counted twice: for their first choice in the first round, and for their second choice in the second round.

The voter B for any other candidate also gets their vote counted twice, for their first choice both times.

So in the last round, the one that actually decides the winner, voter A gets counted for their second choice and voter B for their first.

That doesn't settle the larger argument of course: you can still argue whether AV has a tendency to produce centrist coalitions and whether that is a bad thing. But there should be no argument claiming that AV is less fair than FPTP, for what that's worth.

(Disclaimer: I argue about this out of habit, not because I think it matters)

Goings-on in Kakul

2011-05-02T09:36:00.001Z

Guess I picked the right day to write about extrajudicial state violence...

In fact, yesterday's principles apply very easily. The rule of law is a good thing, but it is an instrumental good, not a transcendental imperative. Every state will defend itself from enemies, and if that applies to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, it applies also to the United States of America. And if the line beyond which the government needs to abandon the rule of law and impose order winds through Stokes Croft, then there is no doubt which side of it Bin Laden was on.

As it happens, I do not advocate an immediate Jacobite rising to replace the rotten Whig parliament and restore God's anointed. But if I did, David Cameron would be quite justified in launching a cruise missile at my house.

Update: In the comments, newt0311 suggests "All sovereign entities are above the law". Above, yes, but I would like to see the sovereign choose to act according to law. That's closer to law in the scientific sense than the political sense, in that the essence is that society works better if the state's actions can be predicted, rather than the sovereign being answerable to some oxymoronic super-sovereign body.

But in comparison to keeping order on the streets, that's a luxury, as I described here in 2009.

Charlie Veitch

2011-05-01T16:10:00.000Z

There are accusations that the police illegally detained various malcontents who were intending to carry on public demonstrations of various kinds in London on the day of the Royal Wedding.

That seems on the face of it to be a good thing. If the police can't keep the peace for a Royal ceremony, then there really isn't much point in having them.

Having said that, the rule of law is actually important. If the police are acting with impunity beyond their legal powers, relying instead on popular support, then they are indeed, as the malcontents claim, moving in the direction of fascism. And I am on record as being opposed to fascism, even in comparison to our crappy democracy.

While as a matter of principle I think opposition to any given regime ought not to be tolerated, because such opposition serves to encourage politics, within a democracy like ours the existence of legitimate public protest is a key part of the political formula which maintains the valuable but illusory legitimacy of the regime.

The problem with illegally suppressing protest, therefore, is that it is self-defeating: it undermines the justification for the existence of the regime itself.

There have to be limits, though. It is of little value that the rule of law is observed by the authorities, if there is violence on the streets. If the choice is between order and law, we must have order first.

Really we should have both. The inability of the authorities to lawfully keep the peace, in Stokes Croft or Soho Square, is one sign among many, that our system of law is broken, strangled, like so many things, by bureaucracy and empty ritual, most importantly in the sheer inefficiency of the legal process.

Charlie Veitch ought to have been legally arrested, tried, convicted, and fined a couple of hundred quid. It may be that there was no law that actually applied, or it may be that it was simply too much work to go through that whole process; either way, the practical alternative was to arrest him (possibly illegally), hold him for 23 hours and 45 minutes, then release him. Any attempt to act against the possibly illegal arrest is subject to the same handicap of the unusable legal system. This situation benefits nobody.

Peter Hitchens blames the Scarman Report. That may indeed be the most significant step in the hobbling of the legal system, but it is just an example of the senescence of our institutions, which mean that ultimately, even with its bullshit "democratic legitimacy", the present system of government cannot last. And when it falls, it will probably, as Charlie Veitch has seen, decay into fascism rather than being replaced by something better.

On Pageantry

2011-04-29T14:57:00.000Z

Watching the festivities today, I heard from several directions, that Pageantry is something very British, and something that Britain can be especially proud of.

I can only assume that the people saying these things have been in very few foreign countries. On the whole, pageantry is something Britain does exceptionally little of.

In the USA, every high school has a marching band, and public celebrations on the scale of a Royal Wedding are fixtures in the calendar, taking months of preparation every year. The New Year Tournament of Roses typically draws a live attendance of a million; the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade gets an annual TV audience not much smaller than the population of England. Attempts in Britain to hold comparable events are tiny, amateurish, and attract only bemusement from spectators.

So let's hear no more of the "British love of pageantry". Are their conclusions to draw instead from the relative lack of public celebration in Britain?

One point is that parades such as Mardi Gras and Saint Patrick's day are Roman Catholic in origin, and were suppressed in Britain by the Reformation. The untrustworthiness of the weather here is perhaps of some significance also; we were very lucky today with weather, since there is now a thunderstorm here in Luton.

The most conventional observation would be that the Britain's Royal events are elitist, while American festivals are inclusive. Or, to put it another way, what's the point of having a Royal Family if you have to organise your own parades? That would be almost as stupid as having a Royal Family and electing a government.

Theology of the Arab Spring

2011-04-17T17:16:00.000Z

A few thoughts arise from whyiamnot's latest.

The first is to restate the huge benefits that Western democratic governments get from the illusion that the people are actually in control. People can go out in the street, change politicians, and think they've achieved something, while at the same time accepting that the establishment will carry on ruling with a passivity and fatalism that is the envy of every generalissimo-turned-president-for-life.

But it is the comparison with the demonstrations of the "Arab Spring" which really got me thinking.

There are two kinds of mob, and at first it's sometimes hard to tell which kind one is.

First is the real revolutionary mob. It is a simple fact that if a large number of people are allowed to congregate in a capital city, they can physically overthrow the government. The government is, after all, right there. All they have to do is break the doors down and take it.

The second kind are demonstrators. If the same number of people just wave banners, they can cause traffic delays, but that's about it. They can only get rid of the government if they choose to, by becoming the first kind. That can happen, because just demonstrating does prove that the government hasn't got the will to stop them, and that indicates that a revolution is possible where previously it was assumed not to be. That was largely the mechanism in Eastern Europe twenty-five years ago. In some cases the mob actually happened (Romania), in most as far as I recall the proof that it was possible was enough for the regime to quit before any actual lynchings started.

In a state ruled by fear, then, the fact of a mob in the street is the end. Everyone knows that, if allowed, the mob will remove the government, so proving it to be possible makes it inevitable. If the state has wider support, though, a demonstration can be a bluff. Mubarrak seemed quite willing to just let the demonstrators hang about Tahir Square, and they showed no signs of actually taking advantage of their position.

They won anyway though. That is because they were playing a different game altogether. Their banners were not for Egyptians, either in their houses, in the army, or in the ministries. The banners were in English -- they were for Americans to read.

The democratic religion says that all governments everywhere ought to be subject to the will of the people. Given a clear demonstration that the people oppose a government, democrats have a religious duty to assist them, even if they themselves actually like the government in question.

The actions of the US and EU in Egypt and Libya only make the slightest bit of sense when seen as the fulfilling of an unwelcome religious obligation. Mubarrak was shoved out easily enough, but Gadaffi required a bit more action. However, it is obvious that nobody's heart is really in Libyan regime change. Reluctantly, a few planes were flown over, a few missiles shot off. The Americans have apparently now done their bit and gone home. There was never a plan for victory, because there was never a desire for victory, only a duty to "help", fulfilled with the same enthusiasm as dropping a fiver into the collection plate at the end of the service.

Neofeudalism

2011-04-14T06:51:00.000Z

Bonald of Throne and Altar is aiming to produce a "neofeudalism", which should be interesting. He opens with the challenging line, "We shall never truly defeat socialism until we abolish private property."

To be clear, my own view is different: the problem is not that we got rid of feudalism, it's that the one last obsolete feudal institution that needed to be destroyed unfortunately remains.

I don't think feudalism works at all outside a primarily agricultural economy. If the government is made up of landowners who have the bulk of economic power, then their interests are both fairly uniform, and fairly consistent. Compare with the present day, where the interests of civil servants, bankers, professors, property developers, union leaders, arms manufacturers and media providers are all at odds, and vary rapidly, meaning that government made up of those groups is mostly concerned with internal disputes rather than overall effectiveness.

Authority and Anarchy

2011-04-11T20:14:00.000Z

Aretae has a problem with authority.

I've never been able to understand authority as anything other than thugs with bigger sticks

Well, sure. That goes without saying. But thugs with bigger sticks are a fact of life, unless you set out yourself to be the biggest thug of all. Which, despite his having "chosen reason over authority", does not seem to have been Aretae's plan (I'm not sure exactly how to go about it, but I doubt it would leave much time for cookery).

This is a step back from our previous discussion, because it's not about formalism versus democracy, or monarchy versus neocameralism, it's about law versus anarchy.

The metaphor I would prefer, though, is not a "step back", but a step down. Morality, or "Right Conduct", like system architectures, has layers*.

The base layer is absolute imperatives. These pretty much have to be supernatural, or else non-existent. Aretae believes that nobody can give him an order that he absolutely must obey. I agree. At that layer, I am an anarchist:

There is no God but Man
Man has the right to live by his own law
blah blah blah...
Man has the right to kill those who would thwart those rights.

Having deified my own reason and my own appetites above all alleged authority, I can now follow them to get what I want.

The technology risk/governance types in a large organisation come up with rules about what a programmer on the coalface is allowed to do to the company's precious systems. They frequently come up with rules for application code, and rules for configuration. If they're not careful, or not expert, they end up with definitions that either classify java bytecode as configuration for the jvm, or else classify users' spreadsheets as application code. Code and configuration really aren't different things, they're just different layers. They smell the same.

If Aretae starts to construct rules of thumb for how to act by his own reason for his own appetites, those rules will smell a lot like morality. They may not actually be ultimate imperatives that he has to obey, but then java bytecode isn't actually machine instructions that are executed by a CPU.

So when I argue for authority, I do so not on the basis of ultimate morality, but on the basis of what works better for me. I don't shy away from the words, however, because of the remarkable resemblance between what I reason to be the most utilitarian form of government, and what was once believed to have been imposed by supernatural forces. It is too close to be coincidental — I think for most people, they would be better off accepting the old morality and getting on with their cooking.

Further, the "no authority" attitude is not antithetical to formalism. The real opponents of formalism are those who do believe that some forms of government have an ultimate moral legitimacy that others lack. Aretae and I believe that all governments are ultimately "thugs with bigger sticks", and the argument is not about which has more moral authority, but about which works better for us. That argument of course remains unresolved, but that's because TSID, not because of different fundamental assumptions.

* Also like onions. And ogres. Both of which smell.

Secular Reaction

2011-04-10T18:45:00.000Z

My musings on religion and authority from last week have gone round Vladimir to Foseti to Aretae.

There are two ways to look at the historical relationship between the reformation, the enlightenment, and the unfortunate rise of the concept of popular sovereignty.

One is that privilege can only be tolerated if it is seen as having divine sanction: that if man denies God, he denies that anyone can have rightful authority over him. The reason popular sovereignty followed atheism is that it naturally follows from atheism. I thought it was worth throwing that idea out there because it's plausible and some serious thinkers have proposed it.

There is an alternative view, however, that the old order had used religion to bolster itself, and when rationalism started to show religious beliefs to be questionable, the political system associated with it came under immediate suspicion. According to this narrative, the reactionary case must be made on a rationalist foundation, or else it is always in danger of being undercut again.

That's my own view; since I have been persuaded by the secular argument for authority, it's evidently possible.

The dangerous factor is that what I call "the secular argument for authority" is non-obvious. If you start from scratch to produce a political theory from philosophical foundations, you're not likely to hit it — it really helps to have the evidence of the results of a naive rationalist political system in front of you to lead in the right direction.

Political Formula

2011-04-03T21:08:00.000Z

I wrote the other day that you cannot just create a state of any particular design. Why even discuss designs of states, then?

What I am hoping to take part in is the building of a political formula that will eventually produce a better form of government. To borrow the metaphor used by biologists to explain the role of genes in development, it's not a blueprint, it's a recipe.

Political formulae were brought up by Mencius Moldbug in his post Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction. "A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers". But Moldbug understates just how adaptive the fiction is. He says, "An adaptive fiction is a misperception of reality that, unlike most such misperceptions, manages to outcompete the truth". But it is more than that. A democratic state survives because of the adaptive fiction that democracy is a desirable form of government. But if that fiction were to collapse, so would the state — and it would be messy. In the short run, the false belief that democracy is the best form of government is adaptive not just for the government, but for the believers themselves.

And vice versa. While the political formula of democracy lasts, no undemocratic form of government will work very well. One might be imposed by force, but the force will cause at least as much damage as our democracy does today.

Therefore what I am pushing is not a program of monarchism or any other formalism, but rather the political formula that will support it and make it work well. The formula comes first, and the government later.

The key element of the political formula is that governing is a task, and, other things being equal, those doing that task will do it better if they are not interfered with. I then go further and claim that this is a vital principle that it is worth making sacrifices to maintain — that even if the current ruler is blatantly making a mess of things, in all but the most extreme circumstances it is better in the long run to let it happen and hope for better weather than to act to sort things out and set a precedent that in the long run will lead all the way back to democracy.

There are a handful of minor ideas that go with it, like belief in the value of the virtues of personal loyalty, family loyalty and patriotism. They are not essential, but they help.

We could throw in the divine right of kings, but I'd rather not. I don't actually believe it's true, and the problem with a false premiss of that sort is that, even if its first order effects are beneficial, the most able reasoners will reason from it to ever more lunatic conclusions. While our democracy actually works moderately well, many of its worst effects are due to the absurd theorems derived correctly from its political formula.

It is argued by some — Bruce Charlton, for instance — that it is not possible to create respect for authority in a culture which is secular and largely atheist. They could be right. Atheism and Democracy came in as partners and reinforced each other, and now I am trying to keep the atheism and lose the democracy.

I have reasons for thinking it possible. As the old order died, there were those who tried to retain it who had a very cynical view of the religious angle. I found a lovely quote recently:

he allowed, indeed, of the necessity and legality of Resistance in some extraordinary cases ... [he] was of opinion that this ought to be kept from the knowledge of the people, who are naturally too apt to resist. That the Revolution was not to be boasted of and made a precedent, but we ought to throw a mantle over it, and rather call it Vacancy or Abdication.

That is Bishop Hooper (I think this one), described in "Tudor England" by Barry Coward. "Resistance" here means opposing the rightful ruler, and "the Revolution" is the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Consistent with my formula, Hooper believed the revolution was a good move but a bad precedent. Note that, though a bishop, he is reasoning on entirely secular grounds.

He and the other Tories of the time hoped to restore the form of monarchic government with new personnel. They lost, but I don't believe their loss was inevitable. They had majority support in the country, but lacked the intellectual elite (again, I recommend The Kit-Cat Club by Ophelia Field). However, as usual, Left and Right in this debate had differing visions of what the results of "progress" would be, and those on the Right were proved much more correct by history. That is why I do not believe I am attempting to reassemble an exploded bomb back to the moment before explosion. If the Whigs had known then what we know now, most of them would not have been Whigs.

Aretae's A-G

2011-04-03T13:38:00.001Z

Aretae lists 7 points of disagreement, but in the main for me, I don't disagree with them, they're mostly "yes, but..."

Autonomy. Among the top values people seek, indeed. But the state is very rarely the biggest limiter of autonomy. Where it is, something has gone very wrong. On the other hand, I have little patience with those who happen to exercise their autonomy in attempting to overthrow the state, and then get all indignant when the state runs them over with a tank.

Bad government, and the purpose of the state. States don't need purposes, they happen without one. The nearest thing to a purpose any state has for me is the purpose of preventing a worse state arising.

Chaos. This is one where we agree. Instability succumbs to stability, but too much stability fails in the long run. The question is which is more stable: a broad-based state to which every change is a threat, or a narrow-based state which is more independent of the society it rules, but less limited in what interventions it can make.

Design. Again, agreed. But the exercise of central power is not the same as the existence of central power. Central power is exercised to excess today because each element of the large ruling coalition can exercise only a tiny fraction or the central power, and gains power within the coalition by exercising that fraction. The holders of central power collectively do not benefit from its exercise, but that collective interest is not expressed by constituent individual interests.

Ethics. Ideas of what is ethical are very malleable over a timescale of generations. I suspect that the currently mainstream ethical positions of western societies are incompatible with good government, and I am trying to change them, more than trying to change government directly.

Font of power. The most difficult for me. What enables a narrow coalition to retain power? One answer is the Ethics. For most of history, loyalty to superiors and acceptance of one's desginated place were high virtues. Today, possession of any unearned privilege is unethical. If a move back towards the older ideas could be achieved, would that enable an under-strength coalition to rule peacefully? Or am I idealising a mythical old morality that never really existed?

Game theory. We go full circle. Yes, a narrow based coalition will be more acquisitive, but is that a bigger problem than that of Design above: that the goodies that a broad-based coalition distributes will be distributed on the basis of BDUF? I resent what the state spends for my alleged benefit far more than what its members steal for themselves.

Practical Matters

2011-04-03T12:40:00.000Z

Clarifications from Aretae and Whyiamnot show, I think, that we are all seeking the same things. The "rules" that Aretae wishes to preserve are not political rules but the rules of private property and economic freedom that actually benefit non-politicians, while Why emphasises that he supports voting not as a right, but as a practical method for ensuring better government, and argues that the vote should be taken away from state dependents (and he says he is not a reactionary!)

But perhaps I am not a reactionary. The aim of this theoretical discussion is not to form a movement that will overthrow David Cameron and install an absolute monarchy, either of Stuarts or of Battenburgs. Our tangled old democracy has its benefits (not least that the random shocks of technological change, which I mentioned recently, are less likely to tear it apart).

Its resistance to shocks, however, is also a resistance to improvement. Why wishes to restrict the franchise, but I can find no example of that ever happening: though there is usually opposition to any given extension of the franchise, once it is won, it is won for ever*. There are many other ratchets operating. Even what we are left with today would be worth preserving, if it could be preserved — but our societies contain an ever higher proportion of people with no expectation of working, ever more entrenched tax-eating agglomerations with diminishing value to anyone, ever more expensive government.

It can't be turned round. Thatcher got rid of the miners and the steelworkers, but only because new, stronger public-sector bodies were taking their place. The teachers and the social workers and the environmental consultants and the privatisation IPO advisers didn't need the miners, so they let them go, but the total payroll never went down.

What we have is not too bad, but it cannot stop getting worse, — Why clearly scores a point when he turns my "realistically oppose progressivism" demand back on reactionaries — the question my theoretical pieces are addressing is what we do next.

When is "next"? I haven't the foggiest. Democracy has lasted a hundred years in Britain, somewhat less across Western Europe, and rather more in the United States. As the quality of government has gone down, the quality of life has gone up, improvements in technology and private organisation disguising the increasing damage done by the state.

I don't rule out a total collapse in the near future, from hyperinflation, terrorism, or some black swan, but it's not what I expect. My guess (and it really is no more than that) is that democracy can struggle on another 50-100 years, with decreasing growth rates and more bumps along the road. China could either collapse or join the club, eventually becoming an old democracy of sorts, probably a bit more corrupt and nastier than what we have now.

But it's not going to get better, and someday it's going to have to be renewed. Most likely it will go back round the cycle of a young democracy, waves of Jacobin terror and fascism, until some new establishment can bring things under control behind the facade of a re-established limited** democracy.

But I think a wrong turn was taken in 17th century England and 18th century France, and I expect a similar choice will be presented again in the 21st century. Someone will force order onto the chaos of a disintegrated state, and will then either consolidate personal power or hand it over to some revived or newly-designed constituent assembly. I am hoping for the former.

My blogging is not keeping pace with Aretae or Devin Finbarr, and there are recent points from both to be responded to, with luck later today.

* In comments at his place, Why suggests the Test and Corporation acts as reductions in the franchise. I believe they were restrictions on holding office rather than on voting.

** That analogy to our recent monarchy discussions may be a better terminology than my "old versus new democracy". Old democracy is limited democracy, New democracy is absolute democracy. The only point of confusion is that the limitation is probably not explicit or legalistic, but only practical. An absolute democracy can have a constitution tightly circumscribing its powers, and a limited democracy can have theoretically complete power but work through a practically unreformable civil service or military with independent views.

The AV vote

2011-04-02T17:00:00.000Z

I've discussed some of the arguments about the AV referendum, but not really drawn a conclusion (beyond "whatever")

The main valid argument for AV is that it isn't as sensitive as FPTP to which candidate people think is going to win. It may get rid of the truly inane feature that I reported on at the last general election, where the parties argued more about who was likely to win than about who ought to win.

A second valid argument for AV is that it encourages the expression of non-mainstream views, by not penalising voters for unpopular parties. It doesn't actually give unpopular parties any more representation, as PR does, but it gives them more visibility.

The main valid argument against AV is that it is likely to produce centrist coalitions, whatever the changes in views of the voters.

Putting the three points together, I have to be in favour. In my theory, the value of democracy is that it has perceived legitimacy, reducing the amount that the ruling establishment hsa to do to protect itself. The one anti argument actually helps in this regard, as it makes the establishment even more secure.

However, the pro arguments are still applicable, as it is valuable to make the unconventional more visible, as that will aid thinking about what we should do when and if the current establishment does fail.

The Fukushima Dissenter

2011-04-02T08:11:00.000Z

There is a very strong consensus among the sort of people I read (reg, Tim, Neil, isegoria) that the reporting about the nuclear reactor problems at Fukushima is a typical hysterical overreaction by ignorant greens, lefty ideologues, and sensationalist media.

I threw my own rotten tomatoes at the target, when I looked at deaths from other kinds of power stations.

There is just one voice among my hundred or so blogroll subscriptions saying that in fact a major disaster has occurred that will seriously affect Tokyo.

Well, it's hard to score 100%, isn't it? So one guy happened to fall for the bullshit. Big deal.

The thing is that the one guy isn't a green, a lefty, or a journalist. He isn't as a rule overly trusting of the MSM. And he knows a good bit about nuclear reactors. I'm talking about M Simon of the blog Power and Control.

He could still be wrong. I'm not bringing the question up now to guess at whether he is or not: I don't have to do anything different either way, and we'll know in due course.

I'm interested, though, in the shape of the argument. We know we're surrounded by ignorant greens, lefty ideologues and sensationalist media. But what if, by coincidence, this time they're right?

The situation reminds me of the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument in reverse. Mainstream western scientists know that "science is under attack from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all, well-financed opposition", and that "The real war is between rationalism and superstition", and if a small proportion of Richard Lindzens and Freeman Dysons are mysteriously on the wrong side, well, weird stuff happens in politics.

Mr Simon is so keen on fusion that he wants to get rid of fission generation. And he doesn't like the Japanese. (I knew an old guy who was in the US Navy, and he didn't like the Japanese. Stands to reason). Yeah, that will cover it, I don't need to bother with his extremely detailed arguments.

Easy to do, easy to do... As I said, it doesn't matter this time, because we'll know one way or the other soon enough anyway. But I'm fascinated by how the story plays out.

On Over-Mighty Subjects

2011-04-01T12:53:00.000Z

Even a king has to negotiate, Aretae says. Doesn't that mean that every government is a coalition, with all the nasty effects that entails?

Certainly a monarch will make deals — with customers and suppliers. Nike threatens to move its factory unless it gets a better tax rate? That sounds like it might be a good deal. Reducing tax is, for the monarch, giving away cash out of his own pocket, but if he's getting value for money, why not? That doesn't mean that Nike are suddenly insiders in the coalition, or threats to royal power.

Ah, but now the CEO of Pineapple Computer Co is on the phone. He has a bit of a problem with a foreign journalist who has been investigating worker suicides in the Pineapple factory. Has Your Majesty heard that Queen Tamsin of Lower Congo has just created a duty-free enterprise zone for technology industries? Of course, that's of no real interest to him, given Pineapple's close relationship with Your Majesty. It's not as if he could trust Queen Tamsin to make an awkward media problem just go away...

Yes indeed, it's only natural that Your Majesty wouldn't want to interfere in details like that. It's a matter for the provincial judge, after all. Although, he is getting a bit old... these personnel matters are such a drag. For instance, Pineapple's local legal affairs director is looking for a career change, says he wants to do "public service" of some kind. I bet he'd love to become a judge here. He would handle investigations of industrial accidents, to either workers or visiting journalists, with all the appropriate diligence.

Now is there a coalition?

It looks like the king is starting to give away power, rather than just discounts. In principle, he could dismiss the company's chosen judge at any time, but he'd be starting a fight that he started out trying to avoid. And the longer the company's foothold in power lasts, the more it will come to seem like an established right.

On top of that, he's opening himself to blackmail; he may not have voters to pander to, but there's a level of bad publicity that can be seriously damaging to his interests.

It is conceivable that such compromises could accumulate to the point where the king is just one player among several jostling for control. Such things have happened historically, though usually from a point where the monarch is much less than absolute to begin with (as most historical monarchs were).

It's also obviously the case that a state needs some minimum level of power to be able to resist outside influences. A backward, penniless third world country simply cannot be independent, under a monarchy or under any other structure of government.

I think it's the case, though, that a very large concentration of power is much more stable than a more even division. It is when your power is weak that you find you need to give away more of it, and outside influences can play one element of the coalition against another; on the other hand, for a strong ruler, small delegations of authority really can be taken back if the delegate shows signs of having ideas beyond his station*. Historical monarchs, though mainly less powerful than I am hoping future monarchs will be, were jealous of their power as a matter of principle, and reluctant to tolerate extensions of rivals' scope.

That retention of power does not come for free, of course. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, rapid economic and technological change is disruptive to any political order. Any political system is likely to try to restrain change that is threatening to those currently in power. Otherwise, it will swing power in a somewhat random direction.

I would prefer to have unrestrained technological change, but I don't think it's on offer. Where it has been allowed in the past, I think that has been where an interest group has come to power on the back of a technological change, and has had to support the principle at least temporarily to justify their own position, or where the group in power has simply not recognised the threat that technology holds to them.

In this as in other matters, the more secure the regime, the more confident it will be of being able to benefit from technology while riding the shocks.

And once again, note that the chief value of our current arrangements come, not directly from the division of powers, or from the accountability of elections, but from the security that the regime as a whole has, due to its universally respected right to be in charge. The ruling establishment, large and diffuse as it is, has nevertheless imposed gradually a whole lot of changes that would have been unthinkable when my parents were the age I am now. If they are restrained at all, it is only in the pace of what they can do, not in its limits.

Aretae could argue that the very size of the establishment means that more lunatic ideas are ruled out by a process of averaging. On the other hand, that is counteracted by the effect of groupthink, and the sincere belief among members of the establishment that they really are the only people who matter. Megalomania is an occupational hazard of rulers, but a lone king is likely to notice when he is in a small minority — our rulers seem genuinely oblivious.

* It's not relevant to the question, but I'm actually curious about ideas like that "beyond his station"; in Britain, at least, the moral principles that go with aristocracy are old-fashioned, slightly comical to most, and violently detested by some, but they are still very familiar. It was essential to the old system that only the right sort of people could hold influential positions. It was never a closed caste, but you had to at least show that you respected the hierarchy and were committed to it before you could be allowed into it. It is very important to the stability of the system that actual power stays where it belongs; outsiders can live and prosper, but they must stay outsiders. The worst case is when the proper authorities are secretly under the control of outsiders, as in G. K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Knew Too Much".

Robert Heinlein

2011-03-31T21:45:00.000Z

Steve Sailer wrote yesterday about the unique author Robert Heinlein

Heinlein was a huge influence on me: my near 20-year libertarian phase might not have happened had I not read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love.

But as Sailer notes, Heinlein himself was not an ideologue. And lately I've been thinking less about the relatively easy question, of what you should do should you happen to find yourself in control of a computer that is powerful enough to give you effective rule over your society, and more about the difficult questions of the interaction of reason, courage, leadership, personal loyalty, loyalty to abstractions — the stuff of what I always thought of as his unsatisfactory later novels like Number of the Beast and Friday.

The unsatisfactoriness comes from the lack of coherent answers to the questions. But if I get round to putting up a new strapline for Anomaly UK, it will be "This shit is difficult". I have come to thoroughly distrust easy answers. Not that I don't believe there are right answers, just that I accept that they aren't easy to find or easy to recognise. Also, they are quite likely to be contingent on all sorts of details we would rather abstract away.

Kinds of Monarchy

2011-03-27T12:58:00.000Z

Devin Finbarr asks in the comments whether I'm talking about hereditary or elective monarchy.

The answer is that it is hereditary monarchy that I have in mind. The problems with elective monarchy are, firstly, that it introduces politics to determine the succession. The electors can demand commitments from the candidate that would divide his power. Secondly, it reinforces the damaging idea that the monarch is a "Servant of the people"

The monarch is not a servant, not quite. A monarch is responsible for the well-being of his people, but he is not responsible to his people, or any subset of them.

Rather, I follow Filmer in seeing kingship as an extension of fatherhood. It is clear that a father is responsible for the well-being of his children, but he is not their servant and he is not answerable to them.

Exactly what he is responsible to is not clear — to his ancestors, to his descendants not yet born, to both (to his genes, perhaps, in a modern view of that). Maybe just to himself or to his conscience or to God. (Inevitably, the modern state makes parents responsible to the bureaucracy for their children, with predictably horrific results).

Back to succession, there is a case for giving the monarch the right to choose his heir, rather than going strictly next-of-kin. That involves no division of power, and seems to be a way of weeding out some of the less capable specimens. Against that you have the danger of weak elderly kings being pressured, or of ambiguity.

In any case, it is important to remember, when talking about whether monarchy should be like this or like that, not to miss the point. If we could sit around a table and design a constitution that would be magically enforced, we could do a lot better than monarchy. Monarchy is a natural phenomenon that happens to a society, not something we engineer. The reason for discussing it now is to encourage people to accept it, if and when it happens, rather than to fight against it as modern fashion would dictate. The small print will have to take care of itself.

Incidentally, the "perpetual motion machine" analogy that Devin liked, like so much else here, is due to Mencius Moldbug. I like it chiefly for the resemblance between the designs attempted by enthusiasts to achieve either perpetual motion or separation of powers.

Justice and Fairness

2011-03-26T22:12:00.000Z

What is justice?

That's a notoriously difficult question. For what it's worth, I think justice is an emergent property of a well-functioning society, but that's not important right now.

It is not the same thing as fairness. Fairness is a more limited but less ambiguous concept, resting on equality of treatment. If there's no good reason to prefer A over B, then A and B should be treated the same.

If A and B have a dispute, the fair thing is to split the disputed entity evenly, or to toss a coin. That may not be the just thing however — but justice is difficult and might depend on all the details of the dispute.

(Fairness can extend a bit further than that. If A and B made an agreement, and A has complied with it, then B should too, even if the agreement imposed different demands on each of them. It is not fair for the agreement to be enforced on one party but not the other).

Games and sports, in particular, should be fair. The reason we want them to be fair, is that it makes the result less predictable, which is more exciting. People will neither play or watch sports where the outcome is not in doubt. And the authors of the sport's rules want people to play the sport.

War is the same. If it is made fair, then people will be more willing to play. There is a difference, though, which is that in general we do not want to encourage people to play war.

Which takes me finally to this tweet from "end of tyranny":

#NFZ levels the battle field, which ain't in #Qaddafi's favor. Here's to a free #Libya

The level battlefield. The only thing that nobody should want.

There are three reasonable positions one could have toward the conflict in Libya. One could want Gadaffi to win. One could want the opposition to win. Or one could want peace.

A "level battle field" is not a means to any of those ends. It is a means only to encouraging war for its own sake. To create it on humanitarian grounds is insane.

I think Aretae makes a similar, if less blatant, error in the post I discussed earlier.

He says, in the context of politics:

Manipulating the rules of the game has a high likelihood of having SUBSTANTIALLY higher returns than competing on a fair playing field

Politics, like war to which it is closely related, does not take place on a playing field. Making politics more fair will not necessarily make the outcome more just, but will make participation more attractive, which is a bad thing.

Politics or Rules-Manipulation?

2011-03-26T13:22:00.000Z

Aretae believes that politics is inevitable, and looks to reduce the damage that it can do.

I should clarify what I mean by politics, because I've perhaps warped the meaning of the word a little. I feel a bit like I'm a fish trying to invent a word for water.

The exercise of power is not, in itself, politics. Politics is the process of attempting to gain or retain power. I am concerned with state power, but other forms of power (such as in an organisation) also can produce politics. A company department manager trying to make the department more profitable is not politics; trying to make his department larger is politics.

The actions of a person with power, if he is rational, will be motivated in his actions by one or more of the following three concerns:

To increase the value of those things he has power over ("improve")
To increase the share of that value that comes to him ("appropriate")
To increase or maintain the power that he has ("win")

Improving is positive-sum. The more a ruler acts succesfully towards aim 1, the more I would call what he is doing "good government".

Appropriating is nearly zero-sum. The ruler gains, but whoever would otherwise have received the value loses. Appropriating can be in conflict with Improving, because rearranging resources is likely to reduce efficiency.

Winning can be strongly negative-sum. Whatever resources are diverted to aim 3 are not available for other purposes. A policy of Winning at all costs can be so destructive as to appear insane.

Conventional attitudes to political systems are shaped primarily by fear of Appropriating. Mechanisms are intended to set Appropriating and Winning in opposition, so that rulers avoid taking a large share for themselves as that risks their power. They work.

However, the mechanisms that do this have to legitimise Winning: rulers acting under these mechanisms openly seek to extend their power, because that is "how the system works".

Worse, for the system to work, it has to also legitimise threats to the ruler's power ("Losing"). If the ruler's power is not threatened, Winning is not operative, and Appropriating is unchecked.

Introducing these mechanisms works, and improves government. Introducing a threat to a ruler's power that will become stronger the more he appropriates will discourage him from appropriating.

But for attempts to cause the ruler to Lose to be affect him, they must have a realistic chance of succeeding. A realistic chance of power is power in itself. It can be traded, borrowed against, threatened with. A "politician" is one who holds "Virtual Power", and tries to increase it, just as a fund manager tries to increase the assets he holds.

But since the ruler, by the design of the system, is held responsible for the condition of his realm, and gains power by making it successful, his opponents the politicians gain only by making the realm less successful.

Democracy is a method of producing a group of people with both the capability and the motivation to make government worse.

There is a way around the problem, which is to make authority clear and simple enough that it is obvious when problems are the fault of the opposition rather than of the government.

Aretae says, "One huge component of increasing the net welfare of the citizenry is to decrease the ROI on manipulating the rules of the game. How can you do that?"

Why put such emphasis on manipulating the rules? I would only worry about that if I thought the rules were any good to begin with. You can — and we do — have hugely destructive politics entirely within the rules of the game, as opposing parties quite legitimately divert resources to one favoured group or another in order to acquire and retain supporters. That isn't either a manipulation or a breach of the rules: it's democracy working as designed. Opposition politicans, with their virtual power, also make threats and promise favours, some openly and some in secret.

Notably, the ruler and the opposition have one area of shared interest — one direction in which the power and the virtual power can be united. And that is to keep out of the power system anyone who isn't already in. That needn't even require "manipulating the rules", though that is the obvious way. Threatening those who support outsiders is effective enough. Threats need not be direct. For any identifiable group, there are policies that harm it.

Of course, the outsiders can't be protected, because giving someone any kind of protection from reprisals by the combined forces of politicians means giving them yet another lump of unaccountable power.

Aretae's next solution is to limit the ability of the ruler to do anything — the less power he has, the less his power is worth fighting for.

There are several problems with that. The first is that limited government implies that someone is doing the limiting (the "political perpetual motion machine"). They must have power too. It is therefore not just the power of the nominal ruler that is being fought over, but also the power that belongs to whoever the limiter is. That goes also for any attempt to protect outsider groups from politicians — the result is they become independent power centres.

The track record of limitations on government is possibly even worse than that of monarchs' lack of rivals.

The second problem is that power is always worth fighting for, because power is status. It is worse messing up a country in order to keep power over it, even if the power is limited, and it is worth fighting to increase your power, even if there's nothing particularly useful you could do with more power.

The scale question is difficult too. Small states can be very effective, but they usually require some level of cooperation between each other, at least for defense. That means a division of power between national and supernational authorities, and that division is another variable which can be fought over. The EU is the prime example; for everyone in European-level government, the primary question is what the extent of EU power is. Any ideas as to what would be good or bad to do with that power are entirely secondary to retaining and extending it.

International politics are a problem for my vision too, of course. I mentioned the Sun King in my previous post, without mentioning the fact that his reign was a period of continual war. Will an absolute ruler always lean towards conquest? I need to address that.

Mencius like Aretae preferred the city-state scale, which he called "Patchwork". However, his explanation for why this would be peaceful rested on the rulers of each patch being rational, which itself rested on neocameralism, which rests on our old friends the cryptographic weapon locks in which I do not believe.

My Westphalian World of Monarchies is not going to be as peaceful as Moldbug's Patchwork, because my kings will not be as rational as his chief executives. Some kings are going to succumb to the lure of conquest as a source of excitement and challenge, even if it is clearly not optimal in return-on-investment terms.

Therefore external security will be a much larger consideration in the design of the countries themselves. City-states may turn out impractical on defensive grounds, while very large states have to devolve power for practical reasons, which tends to produce serious internal politics. (If there is a way of managing a very large operation without devolving power, the commercial world has not yet found it.) Maybe there is some sweet spot of size that is large enough to be defensible, but small enough to be managed without compromising centralism. Obviously doing as little active management as possible is a key technique.

Edmund Burke on the Libya situation

2011-03-26T12:34:00.000Z

Highly topical: Burke talking about the attitude of the Revolutionary French government to peace negotiations in 1796, from the first "Letter on a Regicide Peace"

The first paper I have seen (the publication at Hamburgh) making a shew of that pacific disposition, discovered a rooted animosity against this nation, and an incurable rancour, even more than any one of their hostile acts. In this Hamburgh declaration, they choose to suppose, that the war, on the part of England, is a war of Government, begun and carried on against the sense and interests of the people; thus sowing in there very overtures towards peace the seeds of tumult and sedition: for they never have abandoned, and never will they abandon, in peace, in war, in treaty, in any situation, or for one instant, their old steady maxim of separating the people from their government.

It is impossible for a democracy to make peace with a non-democracy. Overthrowing non-democracies is a permanent foreign policy aim of any democracy.

Compare with John Redwood, taking a moderate position, this Wednesday:
"We would all like the Libyan government to behave better, and would like democratic forces to be allowed to protest and to seek peaceful change" (my emphasis).

Obviously I'm not specifically having a go at Redwood, his blog happened to be the next one I read. Almost nobody would disagree.

If our governments make peace, or even alliance, with a non-democratic regime, it goes without saying that they will still wish to overthrow it given an opportunity.

Gadaffi thought he had a deal in 2003: he made a whole lot of concessions to the "international community", and the US would stop trying to overthrow him. And it did, really. Until the moment when he appeared to look weak, and the entire democratic world went in for the kill.

Sandeep Baliga points out the obvious lesson of these events for the likes of North Korea. It is a simple fact, so obvious to us that we don't ever see it spilled out, that the democratic world will never cease to wish to remove the NK regime, whatever if offers, whatever it does, short of calling elections to abolish itself.

No peace is possible; only a ceasefire that will vanish the moment that the regime's grip on power is weakened. Not even allies like Egypt or Pakistan are safe.

A Clockwork Orange

2011-03-20T07:43:00.000Z

Came across this quote by Anthony Burgess, on the last chapter of "A Clockwork Orange" (from his publisher's tumblr):

…But my New York publisher [W.W. Norton] believed that my twenty-first chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don’t you know. It was bland and showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil. The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than the British and could face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam. My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life.

To me the last chapter was far from optimistic: it was a last horrific twist to the whole book. The idea that Alex had something deeply and fundamentally wrong with him to do all those things is a comforting one, and is also the justification of the extreme "corrective" methods that the establishment in the book attempt.

The last chapter tells us that both the reader and the authorities got it completely wrong; that normal people can behave like that if they are not guided through youth not to. That the guy in the pub on the next table might have tortured people to death for kicks when he was a kid, and later grown out of it.

Now I'm sure Burgess knew what he meant. But I don't think my interpretation contradicts his quote — they are two sides of the same coin. The Christians believe that anyone can be saved because they believe that everyone is a sinner. The belief that only a few born-evil people are capable of behaving that evilly is the comforting one, but as Burgess says it contradicts all our inherited beliefs. It is also, coincidentally, wrong.

Actually Existing Monarchy

2011-03-19T14:32:00.000Z

Aretae is the latest, though by no means the first, to observe that the ideal I have described, of the Monarch whose Unchallenged Authority removes all internal conflict and politics, does not closely resemble European history as we are familiar with it.

My response — inevitably — is that those monarchies that were forever engaged in political struggles against internal power centres and rivals were not Proper Absolute Monarchies — they were transitional stages on the way to creating proper monarchy.

Stop sniggering at the back!

But that is indeed how they saw things. Early monarchs were not able to raise armies and levy taxes effectively, as they did not control an apparatus adequate to do so. They relied on an aristocracy to provide those — and the Barons were not under the King's personal authority, but tied to him by a net of property rights.

By the 16th Century (in England, I think France and Spain were more or less in step, or slightly ahead), the Lords' importance for raising armies was reduced, and the apparatus of war was more under the control of the Monarch and his chosen subordinates. However, substantial tax-raising was still beyond the capabilities of the Royal administration. As the importance of the Lords declined due to their military irrelevance, their taxing duties were spread across a wider group of landowners and leading urbanites. The Lords together with representatives of the other tax-raising groups give us the Parliaments of the 16th-17th centuries.

As communications, literacy and the other technology of government advanced, the Royal administration became capable of levying taxes without assistance of pre-existing, independent, local power structures. However, the fact that tax collection had traditionally been done through and with the approval of those structures meant they saw their role in the process as a right, and resisted being taken out of the loop.

Unfortunately, as Charles I tried to complete the process of discarding the last piece of obsolete feudal detritus — parliament — he ran into trouble. He was stymied by a combination of his own incompetence and the after-effects of the reformation. However hard the King and his supporters argued that the path their opponents were on could lead to only to democracy, they were not believed.

In France and Spain, the Catholic monarchies succeeded where the Stuarts failed. Meanwhile in England, as had been forseen by the Cavaliers, the power of Parliament decayed into party politics and a ruling class devoted to the creation of propaganda. (I recommend Ophelia Field's book which describes the process vividly.)

English politics produced more and more effective propaganda (that being, then as now, its main output), and the poison of Locke and the like spread Whiggism to France, and despite the tragedy it produced there, continued to gain ground until the twentieth century, when outright war against all monarchy became practical and in the end successful.

So, on Aretae's point, I do not have a royalist utopia to point to — no English king, even in theory, could do whatever he wanted. The 80 years of Louis XIV and XV does hint at what is possible.

This is the conversation I want to have: let us accept that politics is the problem, and discuss whether absolute monarchy is a solution. I am far from certain, and am open to consider alternative solutions, whether they be rigged elections, institutionalised criminal gangs, seasteads, or whatever. Monarchy still seems the most promising line to me, particularly in Britain where we have a mythology and an extant Royal Family to return to.

The Swiss Canton/Medieval City-State deserves a separate post.

75 dead in power station disaster

2011-03-19T10:58:00.000Z

18 months ago. You do remember the weeks of non-stop media coverage, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_Dam

Not a major disaster, of course. Nothing can compare with the Banqiao Dam failure in China, which killed 26,000 people in 1975.

Of course, communist countries were notoriously careless about safety and the environment. In Western countries, Hydro power is perfectly safe...

39 Dead in Georgia USA, 1977 from a decommissioned hydro plant. Just because it's not in use any more, doesn't mean it's not still dangerous.

And, of course, the only one of these I actually heard of without looking for it, the 2000 killed in Italy in 1963. Hydro plants are particularly vulnerable to earthquakes.

This isn't meant to be an anti-hydro rant. Hydroelectric power is the only proved form of renewable energy. But all power stations of any kind, by their essential nature, concentrate large quantities of energy into a small volume. That is intrinsically dangerous, whether its lakes of dammed water, radioisotopes, oil or natural gas... The concentration of energy almost always has environmental impact, and always has risk.

No conceivable nuclear accident matches Banqiao dam. No nuclear accident in the first world has matched Kelly Barnes Dam (unless something new goes seriously and unexpectedly wrong at Fukushima). Arguably, no nuclear accident in history has matched Sushenskaya — and that wasn't even kept secret, it just wasn't newsworthy.

Repost

2011-03-17T21:05:00.000Z

Briefly reposting a piece of mine from 2005, which was itself a repost from 2003.

At the end of the 1991 Gulf war there was an argument. Some people wanted to remove Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq. Others opposed this either because they felt it would have bad effects on the region as a whole, or more simply because it would cause unnecessary bloodshed. It was decided, in my view rightly, to end the war with the restoration of Kuwait.

Many who opposed an invasion of Iraq nevertheless hoped that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown. Part of the Iraqi population was already in revolt, and it seemed an easy and harmless thing to help things along a bit. The Iraqi security forces could be prevented from wiping out the rebellion by establishing safe areas and "No-fly zones", which could be justified on humanitarian grounds in any event.

Unfortunately the idea, approved by the UN Security Council, was not thought through. Carried away by the prospect of getting Saddam Hussein overthrown "for free", the long-term situation in the case that the rebellion was unsuccessful was ignored. The United Nations, a body whose purpose is peace, and empowered to sanction war only to prevent wider war, was in fact ordering a perpetual war. It is an act of war to send armed forces into another country to protect a rebel army. The U.S.A. and U.K. have, with U.N. backing, been waging war against Iraq every day for over a decade. This situation should never have been created. Once it was decided in 1991 to allow the Iraqi regime to stay in power, then for consistency's sake Iraq should have been accorded the full sovereign rights of any other country, including the right to use force against "traitors" in its territory.

If I had made this argument at the time (which I didn't), I am sure I would have found little agreement. I would have been told that I was putting inappropriate and outdated principles ahead of the lives of innocent people. It is only with hindsight that we can see what has come of the denial of the basic principle of Iraq's sovereignty. The twelve year war against Iraq, with its blockades ("sanctions"), its bombings and its imminent bitter end has claimed more innocent lives than either of the two logical alternatives in 1991 would have done, even without taking into account that it was the immediate provocation for the worst terrorist massacre in history.

At its root is arrogance. GWB has been widely accused of arrogance in recent weeks, but nothing has matched the arrogance of his father and his UN supporters in believing that they could expect peace and cooperation from a foreign government while openly attempting to overthrow it in defiance of its traditional sovereign rights. GWB has the humility to recognise that to interfere in Iraq to the extent of inspecting its chemical factories and limiting the actions its security forces, he must fight a war, take the responsibility and take the consequences. The UN Security Council still has the arrogance to believe it can achieve the same ends without bloodshed.

Anomaly UK

2011-03-12T12:32:00.000Z

I've been doing this for over six years now, and some of the first things I posted I'd written up to a year previously. I want to recap over the major propositions that define what a newcomer would find.

Democracy

Most people would be better off in a society with minimal government as advocated by the libertarian movement. However, this is against the interests of politicians who need to use patronage to defeat their rivals, and therefore is not achievable under democracy or under any other political system.

Politics is not inevitable, however. If rule is in the hands of one unchallenged individual, he would be in the position of owner of the realm, and would act to maximise the long-term value of his asset. In the process, he would provide better government than any modern state. It is politics itself that is the problem.

Back in Democracy, for those not being directly promised bribes by one candidate or another, the amount of predictable improvement in policy by electing one candidate rather than another is often outweighed by the difference in entertainment value between the candidates, as estimated using the market prices of entertainment. Democratic politics can therefore be seen as a small section of the (huge) entertainment industry. That is not to say that government is insignificant, just that the changes that can be made to government by democratic politics are.

My views on this have been dramatically affected by Mencius Moldbug, of the blog Unqualified Reservations.

Climate

The Climate Change debate is about politics, not science. The question is whether the small chance that disastrous change will happen but can be averted by a concerted global programme of austerity justifies the costs of such a programme. The dangers are exaggerated by those who support austerity or transnational government or both. The dangers are minimised by those who support prosperity or small-scale government or both.

The political significance of climate science means that scientists on both sides feel justified in employing levels of dishonesty that they would never contemplate in ordinary scientific disputes. While this dishonesty is very minor in the context of politics, it is destructive of the scientific process, which requires exceptional levels of honesty to function properly.

My impression is that the so-called consensus towards Global Warming is a house of cards built on flimsy speculations, and sustained by special-interest funding and by political animosity towards critics. That conclusion is suspiciously convenient for the political views I held at the time I first reached it, but has in fact outlived the political convictions that one might have suspected of motivating it.

Global Politics

I think the arguments used to advocate the Iraq War were legitimate, but that the costs of the war, both to the OIF alliance and to everybody else, outweighed the benefits and it was therefore a mistake. There were people who correctly anticipated this, but I wasn't one of them; I was a "don't know".

The major competing political forces in the world are the EU's corporatist totalitarianism and the USA's residual individualism. No other world power or ideology - including Russia, China and radical Islamism - comes close to challenging either of them.

Many foreign countries are crap places to live, but I don't think there is any strategy for improving them by military action that will have overall beneficial results, although it might get lucky now and again. I think it is more beneficial to respect the sovereignty of other countries' governments, even where they are very nasty.

Copyright

Copyright exists to correct a market failure: that the creation of new valuable information benefits anyone who obtains a copy, but the costs are concentrated on the creator. Like all interventions to correct market failures, there are dangers, including capture of the regulatory structure by concentrated producer interests, which has clearly been demonstrated by retroactive extension of copyright terms. Also, as with other such interventions, it is not obvious that the market cannot find its own solutions to internalise the externality, nor is it obvious that the costs of regulation and the deadweight losses do not outweigh the benefits of the correction. Getting rid of copyright might be an overall benefit, although it would be dangerous. The evidence is overwhelming that reducing the scope of copyright would be beneficial, and that regulation aimed at suppressing technologies that are used to evade copyright enforcement is very harmful.

Free Software is cool. The overhead of protecting copyright in software is very damaging to the efficiency of the software production process and to the quality of the product.

his post will remain as a kind of "index" to the blog, and I update it if my positions change. For comparison, an older version is here

Why you should be a reactionary

2011-03-12T12:30:00.000Z

Why I am not has disclaimed the label of "reactionary" I put on him when I linked to him. Fair enough, it is a clumsy label (perhaps "Sith" as used by MM is better), and the title of his blog suggests a certain wariness of labels in any case.

Concretely he goes on to paint a more optimistic view of conservatism than you will get from us reactionaries.

Frankly, my lifetime (I was born in 1981) has seen progressivism dragged behind conservatism, as the right has progressively neutered the left and so the progressive need to stand on some of the middle ground has forced them ever rightwards. The current Labour Party is far to the right of where the SDP stood at its formation.

I think that is his mistake. It is true that since the 1970s we have seen privatisation, liberalisation of international trade, and reduction in top tax rates.

But those were just a blip in the tide of advancing progressivism. Even leaving out the nationalisations resulting from the financial crisis, the regulatory state, backed by employment, equality, competition and environmental laws, exerts as much control over a lot of "private" business as the 70s state did over nationalised industries.

Top marginal tax rates are pushing back towards 1970s levels, and for most people the tax burden is much heavier than then.

Voluntary co-operation has been all but wiped out by crowding out from government services and from state-sponsored fakecharities, and also by regulation, most egregiously the protection of children laws, but with health & safety, occupational licensing and so on doing their bit. The coalition has rolled back a tiny fraction of the last decade's impositions, but the expectation is that, like other governments, that is the lot and it will then turn round and start adding on further restrictions. (Remember that Labour on coming to power started by liberalising pub licensing hours — a typical "opposition" policy that looks totally out of place against their subsequent approach).

Voluntary association is also hamstrung by the nationalisation of virtue — the idea that only the state is entitled to distinguish moral and immoral behaviour.

As for "ending the progressive war on the family" — that is long ended; the war on the family was won decades ago. With illegitimacy rates near 50% and most marriages ending in divorce, family life is now a faintly eccentric choice, rather than an expected norm.

In all these areas, everything except international trade, that is, the current Conservative party is far to the left of the 1970s Labour party. And I can say with confidence that the Conservative party in 20 years will be further left still.

So what of the trade question — why is that an exception to the general leftward drift of the Zeitgeist: a mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades? The only answer is that occasionally reality made itself felt. In the post-war period, protectionism was believed to be generally a good thing across left and right. Reality occurred in the 70s, free trade got a good jump in the 80s, and has been fading ever since. We get as much state as we can afford, but just occasionally the left gets ahead of itself and we get a level of state destructiveness that physically cannot be sustained. In that circumstance, and only that circumstance, are rightists allowed some small victories. To claim those as victories for conservatives is to underestimate reality. (In fact, I seem to recall that in its last days even the Callaghan government was moving towards some Thatcherite policies, as the situation so urgently demanded them).

The best understanding of the place of conservatism in Britain today comes from Peter Hitchens (e.g. The Cameron Delusion, as well as his blog. I have not come round to his views on drugs, but otherwise I consider his analysis sound. (Remedies are another matter, but there we are all floundering to some degree.)

Only reactionaries realistically oppose progressivism.

Two points from Ezra Klein

2011-03-12T12:07:00.000Z

Common Mistakes Made By Economists

1. Political power matters. There are many outcomes that are economically efficient in the short term but lead to a dangerous imbalance of political power in the long term

I wouldn't use the word "imbalance" - balances can be dangerous too, but otherwise the most overwhelmingly important point in politics.

8. Policy arguments are often conscripted for political purposes...

This is a great sighting near the surface of something so deeply assumed that the assumption is normally invisible: policy is the opposite of politics.

Klein's strapline is "Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of it". But politics is only allowed in when it forces itself, by point 1.

I have only seen the view of politics being opposite to policy stated so clearly by critics, such as in Mencius Moldbug's Explanation of democratic centrism

99% chances

2011-03-04T22:10:00.000Z

Another sensible article by John Kay, this time about financial models. He mentions the Allais Paradox, which relates to what I called folk probability.

I have a quibble though: Kay says "There are no 99 per cent probabilities in the real world". Clearly, there are. That doesn't mean, though, that you or I know what they are.

The real point is that at very low probabilities, the chances of your model being wrong dwarf the chances you're predicting. If you model a probability as 20%, but there's a 2% chance that your model's significantly wrong, the true probability is somewhere in 20±2%. That's useful to know. But if you model a probability as 0.2%, that doesn't magically make your chance of having got the model wrong a hundred times smaller. What you really have is a probability of 0.2±2 %. It might as well be 1±2% or 0.000001±2% — the question of how sure you are about your model is far more important than whether the model says 1% or 0.1%

More comments on John Kay pieces: ICI rents climate, copyright

Whatever2AV

2011-03-03T06:55:00.002Z

I don't have a strong opinion toward what voting system future General Elections will use. I don't think that who gets elected is very important: voters don't have any control over immediate policy; they only have influence over the long-term direction of policy, and that doesn't depend on who wins any given election.

However, I used to be very interested in voting systems, and I have an intense dislike of bad arguments. The bad arguments in the AV debate come mainly from the No side.

The silliest is the cost argument. They claim that a switch to AV would cost 250 million pounds. That is highly improbable, and includes the cost of the referendum itself, which is a sunk cost in any case since the referendum is now going to happen. But just take it at face value for a moment.

Assume AV is an improvement — if it is not then the cost argument is irrelevant. 250 million is about five pounds per voter. The average voter will probably have the opportunity to vote in another six or seven elections. If a significant improvement in the value of a vote is not worth a quid, then what is a vote worth? The only people who should be influenced by the cost argument are those of us who believe that voting is worthless anyway.

There is also talk of voting or counting machines; that is a much bigger and easier argument than AV itself. Introducing machines is a huge mistake. FPTP hand-counted is far superior to AV with machines, since there is no reason for anyone ever to trust the machines.

A bizarre gem came from John Redwood, who wrote on his blog, "we think it undesirable that elections are settled by the second preference votes of those who vote for minor or unpopular parties". He doesn't say why. If you like your local independent, or Green, then the fact that you also prefer Conservative to Labour should therefore be of no interest?

A more cogent objection is that AV would produce Labour/Lib Dem coalitions into the indefinite future. I do not dismiss that, but I think it is mistaken. For one thing, the current situation shows that the support for the Lib Dems, being as it is a historically-produced random collection of highly disparate groups, with no policy positions in common at all, cannot survive the Lib Dems actually holding any power. But more to the point, the biggest effect of AV is within the parties themselves.

In 1981, a handful of senior Labour figures broke away from the party to form the SDP. That was only possible because of the utter failure of the previous Labour government, and the sheer disarray that the party was in. The SDP held a handful of seats for a few years, then merged with the Liberal party.

But imagine how much easier the job of splitting a party would be under AV. The problem the SDP faced was that for most Labour supporters, voting for the SDP instead of Foot was more likely to produce a Conservative MP than an SDP MP. AV greatly lessens that effect: if 50% of voters prefer Labour to Conservative, it is almost impossible for the Conservative to be elected because of the Labour vote splitting between two rival factions.

In fact, other factors might turn out more important than the voting system itself: in the face of the threat of splitting, I would not be at all surprised to see steps taken to defend the leadership of parties from internal dissenters. Pay particular attention to rules on party funding or ballot entry.

I think AV would give voters slightly more influence than they have now. I am quite unsure as to whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: the Establishment in this country does damage in internal competition and through its religious attachment to Universalism, but on the other hand it is generally less stupid than the voters. So at the end of the day I am in the Whatever2AV camp.

Car Insurance

2011-03-01T21:46:00.000Z

The EU car insurance ruling is a thing of beauty because it rules out most of the theories of why the EU does the things it does.

There is no possible ideology behind requiring insurers to ignore risk factors. There is no favoured class which will benefit — even the benefit to young male drivers will be very minor*, and there is certainly no general EU intention to benefit that class. There is no practical benefit. The only reason for the EU to decide to interfere in this particular question is because it can.

And there is nothing irrational in that. The EU wants to interfere in as much as possible, regardless of the lack of any justification, because everything it can touch increases its relevance — its power. This creates jobs for people to check that car insurance rates are in compliance. It creates opportunities for deals, exceptions, opt-outs, and straight out bribes. That is a sound, logical course action for a self-styled government with no country.

*since if the insurers adjust rates to bring in the same revenue as before, the effect will be to discourage low-risk female drivers and encourage high-risk male drivers, which will cost the insurers a lot more in claims — therefore the insurers will have to set the rate much higher than the weighted average of what it charges now, and accept a corresponding fall in business.

Degenerate Formalism

2011-02-28T20:58:00.000Z

Aretae has responded to my defence of formalism:

My major objection is not North Korea, but china from 1000BC to 1900AD or Japan ~1500-1850. Stable society with stable-ish rulers stagnate hard. In neither case was maintaining rule a big deal...but in both cases, you had enormous periods of malthusian stagnation. That's what scares the shit out of me about the formalist prescription is that the Game theory seems to guarantee that path.

This time the criticism is not that the leader untrammeled by democracy will be too rapacious, but instead too unambitious — happily sitting at the top of a stable but stagnating civilisation.

Once again, true formalism has an easy answer: as in any underperforming enterprise, the CEO of a stagnating sovcorp will draw the attention of investors who believe that by changing management they can get an improved return. They will buy the shares, call an emergency general meeting, and have the management replaced. Their fully-legal hostile takeover will be bloodless, as the share-purchasing crypto protocols ultimately give them control over the keys that activate the guns.

And again, I don't buy all that. Mencius described the joint-stock sovcorp as an advance on the "family business" sovcorp, or hereditary absolute monarchy. Formalism without magic guns is just royalism — perhaps we could call it "degenerate Formalism", as there is just one share of voting stock and it is indivisible.

So, is Formalism in its degenerate form susceptible to this kind of stagnation? I do not feel able to discourse adequately on three millenia of Chinese history. My impression of the last thousand is not of permanent stagnation, but of a complacency that set in after some centuries of being more technically and economically advanced than any neighbour. Success always carries a danger of such complacency, but success is nevertheless worth aiming for.

Japan, similarly, being sufficiently strong and advanced to be quite safe from its only neighbours, made a conscious decision to rest on its laurels, which only ceased to work when the world shrank around it.

No European country made any such abdication of striving for greater wealth and power, not because of different political arrangements, but because the competition between powers never waned.

Malthusian, is, I think, a red herring. Malthus was right about a world where agriculture was the main activity. Adding more people to the same agricultural land produced diminishing returns. It is conceivable that similar contstraints could return, but it does not seem imminent. Again, forms of government are not the determining factor.

On the other hand, it must be recognised that for any government, rapid growth, and particularly growth driven by technological change, is potentially destabilising. The key is that it unpredictably makes different groups in society more and less powerful, so that any coalition is in danger of rival groups rapidly gaining enough power to overwhelm it. Back with Malthus, if one group of families owns land, you can predict that they will continue to own land for many generations. But if another group is powerful because of trade, or manufacturing, or entertainment, they might be bust in ten years' time. That is why the stability of feudalism is unlikely to return.

There are two circumstances in which the natural tendency of government to restrain technological advance is avoided. One is if it is as easy as possible for the newly rich to take power. That way, whatever the new technology is, those who benefit from it are in charge, and they will drive it on. The other is to totally detach power from wealth creation. Then the ruler will not care who is doing well, provided the country is wealthy enough for him to take a generous cut. The aim of formalism is to achieve the second situation. The ruler should be secure enough that he does not fear growing wealth of any interest group. The question is whether such security is possible.

The best government is one that nobody is trying to overthrow. Western democracy works as well as it does not because of any virtue it has, but because of the virtue people imagine it has, which false belief induces them to leave the government unmolested. If people were to understand that government is better when it is unchallenged, they would largely cease to challenge it.

I believe this was generally the case in late-medieval Europe. People did respect the anointed King, not primarily out of superstition, but because they understood that politics would only make things worse, as they were worse in the days of feudalism. This happy state of affairs was undone by the Stuarts' idiotic fumbling of the religion question in England, and the return of politics in England triggered copycats around the world, in just the same way as Tunisia has triggered waves of politics across the Middle East. The world has yet to recover from the English Civil War.

Immigration Poll

2011-02-27T17:22:00.003Z

The Englishman points at a Guardian article on attitudes to race and immigration in Britain. Apparently, "Huge numbers of Britons would support an anti-immigration English nationalist party if it was not associated with violence and fascist imagery", according to a new poll.

Taken at face value, that supports the claim I made recently, that "if fascism had appeared twenty years ago, without the baggage of history, it would now be popular enough across Europe that it would probably have taken over most of it".

It is also, in practical terms, meaningless. Any anti-immigration party is automatically associated with violence and fascist imagery, whatever the views of its founders and supporters, so there is no possibility of such a party becoming genuinely popular.

Taking any opinion poll at face value, however, is unwise. This poll was commissioned by Searchlight Educational Trust, and is the basis of a report to be published in full tomorrow. Whether the report's primary aim is to directly discredit anti-immigrationists, or else to rally support to the anti-fascist cause, is not immediately clear. It may become more obvious when the report is published.

Incidentally, the language of the summary is revealing; Searchlight is nominally anti-fascist, but it highlights as dangerous the finding that 48% of the population would support a non-fascist anti-immigration party. If they were genuinely anti-fascist, rather than just pro-immigration, that would be good news.

On the Interests of Absolute Rulers

2011-02-27T13:47:00.005Z

Aretae raises the question with respect to formalism: Doesn't it depend on the interests of the ruler and the ruled being aligned?

The justification of democracy is that by making the rulers answerable to the population, it prevents the rulers from acting in a manner that is good for them and bad for the population — such as spending all the money on themselves.

Formalism in the true Moldbuggian sense has an answer to that: If a voter has actual influence over the government, that should be recognized alongside whatever other actual influences exist, and turned into a shareholding in the government. That makes the value of the influence more predictable, which makes everything more efficient. Every share in the government is the same as every other, so there is no more need for battle between newspapers and civil service departments, unions and universities, to make one group's influence more than another's. Everything runs much more smoothly, and everyone is better off.

I am not a true formalist, however. I see the joint-stock sovcorp as highly desirable but quite impossible. The enforcement of shareholder rights depends on the cryptographic protocols which link shareholdings to the ability to activate or deactivate the security force's weapons. Without disputing the existence of protocols with the correct theoretical properties, I am utterly unable to imagine them being implemented successfully. It is amusing to contemplate control of the world's armaments falling into the hands of Anonymous, but nobody is ever really going to risk it.

So, without formalism, what is my own response to the conflict of interest between ruler and ruled? It is to live with it. An absolute ruler will rule in his interest and not mine, and will raise money from taxes for his own use.

The ruler will be in the position of the proprietor of a firm; he is in a position to take any spare cash in the economy for himself. Like any government, he can levy taxes on anything he wants, and like any proprietor he can use the revenue raised to invest in the firm, or withdraw it from the firm as a dividend.

That brings us to the Laffer Curve. Everyone but the dimmest of left-wingers accepts that at some point, increasing a rate of tax decreases the revenue raised by the tax. However, the normal discussions of this miss a whole dimension, of time. Tax rates today affect not only the size of the tax base today, but also the size of the tax base tomorrow and into the future. The tax rate that maximises tax receipts over the next 12 months will not be the same as the tax rates that maximises receipts over the next 10 years, or the next 25 years.

In an idealised model of a proprietor of a state, with perfect foresight and perfect security, any extraction of tax that reduces economic growth would reduce the NPV of the proprietor's interest. In more realistic situations, that would not hold; the rational proprietor would seek to diversify by taking profits out of the state and moving them into other investments, even at the cost of some impact on the profitability of the state.

My support for the idea of a secure, absolute ruler is motivated by the expectation that the cost of what the ruler takes would be smaller than the cost of the deadweight loss imposed by a government in which nobody has a significant interest in overall long-term growth, but which depends for short-term survival on appeasing large and changing interest groups — whether organised voter blocs, civil service departments, the military, or any other party on which an insecure government relies for survival.

I am much less worried about a proprietor's extraction of profit from a country than I am about how much he will have to do to stay in power. That is the most important divergence of interest: he has an overwhelming interest in preserving his rule, whereas I am much less concerned.

All but one of Aretae's examples of bad rulers caused damage not to gain wealth from the country, but in the course of maintaining power. The exception is King Leopold's rule of the Belgian Congo, which was not in any sense a productive economy, but merely a pile of valuable ivory over which ran wild animals and (in the circumstances) uncivilisable natives — the experience does not extend to any country which is not a backward colony of a more advanced civilisation.

The example that is most troubling for me is not Stalin or Leopold but Kim Jong-Il. The same family has ruled there for 60 years, and secure rule in my theory should have produced good government. My assumption is that, while Kim Il-Sung and his successor have succeeded in retaining power, the power of the ruler is neither complete nor secure, and they are in a constant struggle with rivals within the regime. However, the lack of information about the internal politics of North Korea means that there is little evidence for or against this assumption.

Nick Clegg Forgets to Pretend

2011-02-27T07:50:00.002Z

Nick Clegg is in the papers, appearing not only vague but unconcerned about "who is running the country" while Cameron is away. (Nick Clegg 'forgot' he was in charge of the Government this week)

One of the most interesting things about politics in the last decade or so is that the fictions are breaking down. That is also the theme of Mencius' latest post, where he wonders if he is being made redundant by the openness of the USG's intervention in Egypt, and by Wikileaks.

The notion that the government of Britain is "run" by a handful of well-known politicans has over the last hundred years gone from being somewhat true, to being something often deviated from in practice, to being an earnest pretence, and finally a flimsy charade.

Now Clegg, who as a Liberal Democrat is somewhat more isolated from the continuity of political office than his predecessors in cabinet, seems to be unaware of the tradition of paying lip-service to the idea. If someone really needs for some bizarre reason to ask the Prime Minister something, they have his phone number, and anyway Clegg is thinking of taking a day or two off.

Jeremy Paxman in his book "The Political Animal" quotes an unnamed Tory ex-minister:

'Once we lost the 1997 election,' one of the best-known Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s told me, 'I knew it was over for me. What was the point of standing up in parliament and lambasting the Labour government, when I knew exactly how limited the options open to them were? It was all empty and pointless.'

It's a very interesting book. While its aim is to look at the character of politicians, in the process it has to show the environment in which they act in more detail than we normally see.

As an opponent of democracy, I am constantly irritated by the suggestion that there are no practical alternatives. The book reminds us that mass democracy as we understand it today is something that appeared in Britain within living memory:

"In April 1925, for example, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, announced that Britain was to return to the Gold Standard, whereby the value of sterling was guaranteed by allowing pounds to be exchanged for gold. This momentous (if ultimately unsuccessful) decision had been two months in preparation, involving heartfelt arguments on both sides of the debate. Yet not a word of it appeared in the newspapers. Indeed, it was hardly heard outside the confines of the Treasury."

Decisions were being made by an establishment, and if ministers were part of the process, that was because they, coincidentally, were also members of that establishment. Paxman also describes what happened when ministers were elected from outside the establishment, quoting from the diaries of Hugh Dalton, from the period of the Labour administration of 1929-31.

The Cabinet is full of overworked men, growing older; more tired and more timid with each passing week. Pressure from below and from without is utterly ineffectual. High hopes are falling like last autumn's leaves. There is a whisper of spring in the air, but none in the political air. One funks the public platform, and one wishes we had never come in. We have forgotten our Programme, or been bamboozled out of it by the officials. One almost longs for an early and crushing defeat.

We have there an explanation for why Britain has got off so lightly from democracy: the parliament of 1925 was elected under a restricted franchise (women under 30 did not get the vote until the 1929 election), and as we saw above major policy debates occurred without reference to the press. Once outsiders started to be elected, they were largely powerless in the face of the establishment. Dalton presumably became more influential in later administrations, but I suspect that was due not so much to the power of the establishment waning, as to the establishment moving closer to the Labour party's views.

This is the important but subtle point I've made before — elections are not what they are claimed to be, but neither are they irrelevant. The establishment rules, but it is not unanimous, and politicans are able to exert crude broad-brush influence where the establishment is divided. Because the politicians are motivated by elections, the influence they exert tends always to be in the same direction. In the period before politicians were answerable to the mass media, the influence of the electorate was lessened.

Anonymous versus HBGary

2011-02-17T15:53:00.003Z

I don't think the HBGary story has had the amount of attention it deserves from the mainstream.

It's worth reading just as drama: Security researcher takes on the "Anonymous" hacker group, and loses so spectacularly it almost defies description.

It's important for what it says about any organisation's IT choices and their security implications. HBGary used Google Apps. Cloud services are enormously convenient, particularly for an organisation that does not really have a physical "home", but using them means losing perimiter security altogether.

Perimiter security has a bad name, because in the old days it was all there was, and today it is not enough. But the things that are possible even if you try to protect your perimiter are much easier if you don't even have one.

A basic IT risk assessment question for anybody is, "how much damage can an attacker do with one password?". With one password, Anonymous downloaded all of HBGary's corporate email from Google and posted it on the internet. They did more than that — the highlight for security commentators was the social-engineering attack on rootkit.org via a Nokia engineer — but the email was enough by itself, as well as enabling the other attacks. They got the email admin password from an ad-hoc CMS with a SQL-injection vulnerability, as it happens, but if your whole company can be destroyed with one password then you're doing it wrong. (Damn, it's so hard to avoid lapsing into dialect on this story).

And the third interesting angle is what is to be found in the data Anonymous posted. The company was proposing to feed fake data to WikiLeaks to discredit it, and to pressure journalists who defended WikiLeaks. There is chatter about government involvement in this, but I haven't seen that actually substantiated. It may be in there somewhere. The HBGary Federal projects aimed at government clients seem to be standard network monitoring / intrusion detection stuff.

In case anyone gets confused, I'm not here to defend Anonymous, or for that matter to attack them. They exist. If they get caught they'll get the book thrown at them, which is understandable, but I'm more interested in what the world looks like with them in it. Whereas Assange attempts to define his aims, and appeals for support, Anonymous claim only to be "in it for the lulz", which is not open to disputation.

Update: Intriguing piece on HBGary government work on rootkits and penetration tools. In principle this should be verifiable from the email dumps, but I haven't checked.

Fascism and Democracy

2011-02-04T22:17:00.002Z

Since I've been discussing fascism, and since it is topical, at least round here, because of the imminent arrival in Luton of the English Defense League, I will look at it in more detail.

I don't mean to imply that the EDL actually are fascists — I don't know what they are, and it really doesn't matter at all. Their enemies, who control the media, all political parties, and every arm of government, will call them fascist, so any discussion of them is a discussion of fascism, whatever it is that they really believe.

I side with the fascists against many liberals in that I don't see dispersed political power as a desirable end. It's not that I'm in favour of concentrated political power as an end — I would happily accept dispersed power as a means if it advanced good ends, but I don't think it does. Concentrated power, for me, is a means towards government that will protect peace, prosperity, security, freedom etc.

I think many fascists, possibly including Schmitt, would not have listed peace as a good end, as I have done. So on that score I oppose the fascists: other things being equal, peace is better than war.

The bad things associated with fascism are excessively aggressive foreign policy, persecution of selected minorities, economic collectivism, omnipresent dishonest propaganda, and a clampdown on opposition.

The belligerence, persecution, collectivism and propaganda all derive from the requirement for a broad popular base. This differs slightly from a democracy: democracy requires the acquiescence of a large majority, fascism requires the active support of at least a large minority. The similarities are close enough, however, that in the last 60 years the democracies have taken on levels of collectivism and propaganda that are indistinguishable from those of 1930s fascism. (George Street is still strewn with the purple streamers of "Luton in Harmony", a fairly typical government propaganda exercise). Collectivism is part of the mix because it enables the government, by controlling economic activity, to reward support and punish dissent in a subtle but sustainable way that a laissez-faire government cannot.

The direction of the democratic propaganda is of course opposite to that of fascism; this reflects the difference between the popularity requirements of democracy and fascism. Luton in Harmony is supposed to generate a diffuse low-level hostility to opponents of the regime across as wide a base as possible, whereas Fascists need to stir active fear and hatred among a a smaller group who will maintain the regime in power — what Dsquared elegantly paints as "arseholes". That is the reason why democracies are generally less unpleasant to live under than fascist parties. The ability of the regime to survive on no more than passive acquiescence of the population is the real advantage of democracy, though it only exists because people believe other good things about democracy that aren't true. It is the feature of democracy that needs to be held onto through a transition to a better system.

Comparisons between democracy and fascism on the foreign policy side are interesting. Britain has operated an aggressive foreign policy over the last decade, but that appears on the face of it to have arisen despite the demands of democracy rather than because of them — it does appear to have been driven by the personal convictions of Tony Blair. But just possibly that is missing the point. The link between war and popularity is not necessarily that war is popular; it is that the people are more inspired by a leadership personality who displays the characteristics that are likely to lead him to war. Hitler and Blair, then, were popular not because they had war policies, but because they had the conviction and charisma of crusaders. That conviction is what then produced the war policies.

Or maybe Blair was just weird. After all, many other democracies are less belligerent. I'm not really convinced either way on this question.

As for the curbing of opposition, I have no problem with it. The reason why it is generally considered proper for a government to tolerate opposition is that it is generally believed that the need to compromise and satisfy opponents pushes government policy in a beneficial direction. I believe the exact opposite: that nearly all governments, good or bad, are made worse by opposition. All competent governments treat sedition as a crime. Politics in the real world is a matter of life and death, and those who perpetrate it must accept the risks.

That is not to say that opposition to any government is bad: even if all governments become worse when they are opposed, they may be replaced by something better if they are actually overthrown. But I don't expect bad governments to cooperate in their own overthrow.

Concretely, if the current events in Egypt result in regime change, that could possibly be beneficial (though I would be surprised). But if they don't, any "reforms" that the current regime is driven to will make things worse. True revolutionaries understand this — they want concessions not for their own value, but because concessions further weaken the regime, bringing its fall nearer.

So to strengthen my earlier post, which was slightly equivocal, I reject fascism. It relies on mass popularity, and therefore fails to improve on democracy, but going further, because it has to win more positive support from the population than democracy does, it has the problems of democracy in a stronger and more dangerous form. One of the worst things that can be said about democracy is that, particularly in it's young form, it has a tendency to devolve into fascism. A young democracy is little more than a battle between competing fascisms — each party is the active street-fighting kind, rather than the passive tick-in-the-box democratic kind.

That actually explains a mystery that troubled me in the past: why it is that there is such an exaggerated fear of fascist or near-fascist organisations like the BNP, despite their appearing laughably weak and incompetent. At some level, the regime must recognise that in intellectual terms fascism is the obvious response to democracy, however irrelevant a particular party might be. I think it's fair to say that if fascism had newly appeared twenty years ago, without the baggage of history, it would by by now be popular enough across Europe that it would probably have taken over most of it.

Carl Schmitt

2011-02-04T06:45:00.004Z

Tyler Cowen linked to a New Republic article about political thought in China

The first point is that the Chinese take politics really seriously — something that looks strange to those of us who live in democracies, where politics is mostly fantasy, and goes some way to explaining the Chinese regime's unnecessarily serious take on such idiocies as the Nobel Peace Prize.

More interesting, to me, is the summary of the thinking of Carl Schmitt.

"Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary... If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, 'absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics'"

That last point is what tore me away, finally, from classical liberalism. You can establish, as the libertarians have done, that politics is basically harmful — that it would be better if it did not exist. That is true, and it gives useful insights. But by itself, it doesn't actually get rid of politics, any more than declaring any other crime to be a crime gets rid of it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. We would be better off without politics, but classical liberalism offers no way to achieve that, and I suspect it is not possible. If I am resigned to living in a world with politics, the question of what form of politics is least bad presents itself, and classical liberalism supplies no answers.

Schmitt, who I was not previously aware of, did not merely point out the problem with liberalism. He did something about it. Specifically, he joined the Nazi party.

Fascism is a fairly obvious answer to the problems of liberal democracy. Get rid of the liars, the elections, the corrupt influences of guild, agency and business, and lets just have a Leader who makes the decisions and is answerable to nobody but God and history. That's pretty much what I've been saying for a while — am I a fascist?

That's a tough enough question that I've been sitting on this draft for several weeks while I work it out. Clearly, I'm not far away — certainly not far enough to be respectable. I want quite a few of the things the Fascists want. But then, when people sit around spouting political theories, they frequently want much the same things: prosperity, security, personal freedom... it's means, rather than ends, that cause most disagreements.

The easy answer is "No, fascism is way too democratic for me", because fascism relies on a mass party, which is a form of demotism even if there aren't necessarily regular fair elections. But that's a bit glib, given that I don't have a clear path forward, and it's possible that in some circumstances fascism could be a path to something I would approve of.

The real answer is that arguing about theories of government in the abstract is meaningless and irrelevant. If I did not believe that, I would still be a libertarian. I am not likely to actively support any real fascist movement, because I am a passivist, not an activist. If I supported fascism I would be committing politics, and becoming part of the problem. When the time is right for a responsible government to exist, there will be no need for a movement with supporters, because the people will acquiesce in the new regime as they now acquiesce in democracy. The new order will not be imposed by an ideological struggle, but by a straightforward business transaction, which at the time will seem inevitable and even minor.

I am not saying the new order is inevitable — just that if it happens it will become inevitable first. Any order that is installed by a struggle is obviously political, and therefore doomed.

[Update: fixed link, corrected source to New Republic, not National Review. Thanks Kalim Kassam]

Belgium under Royal rule

2011-01-11T21:18:00.003Z

Great news from Belgium: after three months without the country managing to elect a government, King Albert has started making policy. Possibly an actual crisis isn't necessary, and a mere mechanical hiccup is enough to start the transition from democracy to responsible government.

More likely not: at some point the politicians of Belgium will presumably manage to cobble together a democratic government, and he will be expected to hand over. However, if that takes a while longer, the idea will start to implant itself in some minds, that there is an alternative. He is in charge now, and the reason really is that it might as well be him as anybody else, and at least it solves arguments. And that is the whole reason for monarchy. As people come to realise that the problems caused by competition for power, even when mediated through an electoral process, are inevitable and finally catastrophic, any reminders of how to settle on an easy choice will be useful.

John Gray on Rights

2011-01-01T09:04:00.006Z

Kalim Kassam has found a fascinating book review by John Gray in The National Interest.

The review is of Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which sounds pretty interesting.

Gray fleshes out some detail of what he wrote about in Black Mass, which I discussed here in 2008. I was put off Black Mass by what I thought was excessive generalisation, a misplaced attempt to force a grand unifying thesis on events.

Dealing with a specific, that problem does not arise, and I have little to quarrel with here.

The first point is the recency of the dominance of the idea of primary universal human rights — Moyn dates the idea to the late 1970s, and Gray blames it on John Rawls. He identifies the key flaw in Rawls' theory, which is that it simply takes for granted a state structure that cares somehow for the well-being of its subjects in a fairly broad way, and only suggests how such a state should best define and pursue that aim. How such a historically unlikely state can come to exist and be preserved is not addressed.

(That is also, of course, the flaw that has separated me from most forms of libertarianism, which is an alternative —indeed superior— program resting on the same unwarranted assumptions^*).

Best quote: But if human rights are artifacts that have been constructed in specific circumstances, as I would argue, history is all-important; and history tells us that when authoritarian regimes are suddenly swept aside, the result is often anarchy or a new form of tyranny—and quite often a mix of the two. Human rights as artifacts echoes what I and David Friedman have said; the anarchy and tyranny following revolution is just what I was talking about in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize. The neatness is slightly marred by the use of that unfortunate word "authoritarian" again — here it seems to mean "anything other than modern liberal democracy", which is at least less mysterious than Assange's version.

The review also serves as an example of Mencius Moldbug's claim, that the common assumptions of today are the Harvard ideas of two generations ago.

Obviously the claim of inherent human rights is not entirely new — I vaguely recollect some mention of "all men ... unalienable rights" in an old document of some kind. What is new, according to Moyn and Gray is the moral primacy of human rights; not endowed by a creator but independent, the starting point of a moral system.

Gray's piece also contains what could be seen as a response to my criticism of Black Mass; he constrains what he calls "utopian" projects to those where it can be known in advance that its central objectives cannot be realized. The question of what can be realized and what cannot is, of course, usually the centre of political controversy to start with. "Politicians make promises they can't keep" — there's a shocking new idea.

^*This is unfair to some libertarians, including David Friedman. Separate post to follow.

Climate Roundup

2010-12-30T13:43:00.004Z

Most of the commentary on the cold winter has been too stupid to discuss, so I haven't. Certainly, cold winters do not prove that the climate scientists are wrong, though it does suggest that alarm is overstated: not only is weather not climate, but climate variability is so dwarfed by weather variability that it is not remotely possible to actually notice whatever climate variation there might have been over the last hundred years. The actual weather changes in any given place from year to year or decade to decade are vastly bigger than any global climate change we have seen. As I say, that doesn't make climate change wrong, but it does make it less relevant.

But most stupid are the desperate attempts to claim that cold winters are caused by global warming. Not because that is impossible, but because there has been scant regard for facts. I have been informed by one earnest physicist that snowy winters here are to be expected, because global warming increases the amount of water in the air. That would be sound logic if English winters were normally cold and dry, but they are not - winter conditions here are normally that if there is a clear night, there is frost, but if there is cloud cover, that keeps the ground too warm for frost, and it rains. We have snow this year because it is colder, not because there is more moisture.

Some random genius on Twitter takes the biscuit for claiming that the cold winter is to be expected, because global warming has melted icecaps, changed ocean salinity, and diverted the Gulf Stream. Again, logically sound, but the ocean salinity has not changed and the Gulf Stream has not moved. Apart from that, good try...

Monbiot's theory, that warming at the pole has disrupted atmospheric circulations, bringing cold weather down, is at least not obviously contradicted by the facts. It might be true. But there was certainly no consensus predicting it.

What has made this issue worth mentioning for me is the excellent collection of articles gathered by hauntingthelibrary, of the climate mainstream explaining that mild winters in Britain are the result of Global Warming. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the classic UEA "snowfall a thing of the past", but he shows that that was not one random nutter.

* Less snow and rain for islands (Hadley Centre)
* Warmer and Wetter Winters in Europe and Western North America Linked to Increasing Greenhouse Gases (NASA,Nature)
* The recent warm winters that Britain has experienced are a clear sign that the climate is changing (James Hansen)

The point is not that they are wrong. The fact is that the climate system is so complex, and the climate signal is so faint against the weather background, that there is no possibility of being right. If global average temperatures really have increased by a degree or so over the last fifty years, and I cannot see that there is any way to tell whether they have, then what the results are is equally unknowable. Weather is just too big a thing to see around.

The other point is the sheer lack of restraint in putting forward ad-hoc climate theories without the slightest thinking-through in response to any weather. Journalists do journalism, but this kind of speculation is what scientists were traditionally so unwilling to do that, 25 years ago, there was a popular stereotype of the scientist who couldn't commit himself to anything because "the evidence is not yet complete". That change is the most significant element in climate science.

Friedman (D) on Rights

2010-12-22T21:19:00.003Z

Some of you may remember my two posts on the nature of rights in 2008. If so, you can now forget them, because David Friedman has made the argument more completely and much more eloquently.

Rights in human societies, including modern ones, are based on the same pattern of behavior as territorial behavior in animals or enforcement via feud and the threat of feud, even if less obviously so. Each individual has a view of his entitlements and is willing to bear unreasonably large costs in defense of them.

Yup, that's what rights are.

Cable and the Cables

2010-12-21T23:15:00.002Z

I can't help thinking that the Vince Cable story is a knock-on effect of Wikileaks.

The biggest effect of wikileaks may not be either the secrets that it tells, or even the fear of the secrets it may yet tell. It may be the secrets that others tell, because of the feeling, "when all that is already in the newspapers, why am I keeping X a secret?"

Is it a breach of confidence to secretly record what an MP tells a "constituent" that he has never met? It's pretty thin... it is just a politician talking to a voter with no extra qualification; if he tells one voter something, what right does he have to keep it secret from other voters? But nobody did it before.

And, of course, the current story is based not just on the Telegraph's secret recording, but on a leak of that recording -- the Telegraph, perhaps for business reasons, chose not to reveal Cable's claim to have "declared war on Murdoch". So someone at the Telegraph leaked it to the BBC.

I rather suspect that norms as to what is publishable and what isn't have changed suddenly.

"Egalitarian Monarchism"

2010-12-21T21:59:00.004Z

Reading Richard Spencer's criticism of John Médaille's form of "egalitarian monarchism", I was initially moved to leap to the defence of Médaille. There is indeed a sense in which the advantage of Monarchy is its egalitarianism.

What I mean is that the modern democratic state shares many of its problems with the feudal societies of the first half of the last millenium. Power is divided between many competing blocs (in the old world, aristocratic families, in the new, agencies and guilds) whose domains are variable and unclear, and much of what passes for policy results from conflicts between them for power.

The medieval problem was solved by the growth of Royal versus aristocratic power. The Tudors and the Bourbons (for example) were able to dominate the aristocracy.

This can be seen as an egalitarian reform -- the vast power blocs weakened, and the ordinary subject becoming more equal, at least in terms of political power, with his Lord who, like him, is under effective authority.

There are many institutions that today have too much power. A true royal restoration would make the government agencies, the quangos, the media, the universities, the unions, the banks, all bereft of political power. Opinions may legitimately vary as to which of those bodies most urgently need their wings clipped, and the Steel Rule means that I do not assert my own view, but the point is not so much that they all will be subservient to the Sovereign, as that he will be subservient to none of them.

One of the most important characteristics of personal power is that it is the power to get things wrong and then fix them. I do not in fact have confidence in the wisdom of some randomly selected King to know which of the above groups perform useful functions, and which are parasites perpetuated by their own acquired power.

I do think that only personal power is a recipe to eventually find the right answer -- all forms of collective decision-making are too easily swayed by the subjects themselves, with the result that the first decision made becomes irrevocable.

So, to summarise, the advantage of more monarchism, either in the hypothetical future or in the 1500s, is the stripping of power from the oppressors, and that can be (though I certainly wouldn't insist on it) seen as a kind of egalitarianism -- even as a kind of democracy if you really want to stretch.

Unfortunately though, Médaille is still utterly wrong. Actually looking at his pieces on Front Porch Republic, he makes an argument not for the ruling monarch of the later middle ages, but for the very confusion of competing political power groups that I see as analogous to the current mess, and which was superseded by what he calls "Regalism".

Once terms like "Tyranny" start to be thrown around in American publications, it becomes necessary to look at what the issues were at the time of the American rebellion. The rebels were certainly not out to free themselves from an absolute monarchy, since no English King had held such power for a hundred years. The Whigs had first made an alliance with William of Orange in order to remove the Stuarts, who were the last Kings who even aspired to really rule England, and with the importation of George I and his reception at the docks by the dignitaries of the Kit-Cat Club, the alliance became completely one-sided and the Whigs established their permanent dominance. (All English politics since that date has consisted of conflicts among Whigs, with the term Tory being revived from time to time by more radical Whigs as an insult to throw at their less radical colleagues).

George III did attempt to re-establish some kind of Royal power, though I am not sure he set his sights as high as the power Charles II had, let alone that of Elizabeth. (If I find out he did, I will adopt his banner as mine). The American rebellion was the Whigs' way of putting him in his place. The small gains he did achieve mostly lasted into Victoria's reign, but were finally expunged by the advent of universal suffrage and the acceptance of purely democratic theories of government in the 20th Century.

Liu Xiaobo again

2010-12-19T13:35:00.003Z

It seems that the Guardian has actually investigated and discovered (by the extraordinary method of finding someone who can read Chinese) what I merely assumed -- that Liu Xiaobo is a professional front-man for American imperialism.

That isn't such a bad thing, of course. There are many worse forces in the world than American imperialism, and many places that might benefit from a bit more of it. China might even be one of them (though I am not persuaded on that point).

What would be significant about the revelations that, for instance, his organisation has been funded by the US government, or that he was outspoken in favour of George Bush and against Kerry, or that he says "to choose westernisation is to choose to be human" would be if they changed anyone's mind about him. Because really, it is all implied by what little we knew about him before the Grauniad dredged up translations of his writing.

And of course, the fact that a paid agent of a hostile power, openly dedicated to overthrowing his country's government and culture, was allowed to remain at liberty for as long as he was, to my mind falsifies a lot of what is said about China today.

Assange's Theory

2010-12-02T18:51:00.002Z

I came across a link to a couple of articles by Julian Assange (from late 2006) detailing his motivation (via zunguzungu):

They don't amount to much. He opens, promisingly, "Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action."

He goes on to completely skip over the first two requirements. His very next words are: "Authoritarian power is maintained by conspiracy" the rest of the two powers covers nothing but how to take apart the conspiracy of government. There is zero discussion of what "Authoritarian power" is, and why we dislike it, or "what aspect of ... behavior we wish to change or remove". Which is rather a shame. It's all means, no ends.

The means, taking apart a government or other conspiracy by breaking the links of trust between elements, should work, and seems to be working, indeed. But what the ends are still eludes me - the word "authoritarian" means less to me than most other elements of unfamiliar theology. The natural consequence of the wikileaks style of attack would seem to be to produce networks with fewer and stronger links. I suspect that would be a good thing, but I have no idea whether Assange would consider it less "authoritarian".

He does say that "The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie". It's not clear whether that's put forward as a hypothesis or as an axiom: as a hypothesis, it's plausible but there are arguments to the contrary.

The real weakness in the analysis is the claim that "Conspiracies are cognitive devices". They are a lot more than that. Modern governments to not include so many hundreds of thousands in their conspiracies merely to enhance their information. Conspiracies gather power, and then they bring power to bear. By cutting off the extremities of the conspiracy, Assange is depriving it of some information, but that seems secondary; mostly he is reducing the reach of the conspiracy, both to gather power (for instance from allied governments) and to bring it to bear (for instance through distantly-deployed armies). The surviving conspiracy will have less total power at its command, which might be the point, but it will at the same time be constrained to use that power in a more concentrated direction.

More crucially, if it can no longer rely on power gathered from its periphery, the conspiracy will have nothing to offer the periphery. After all, the claim of (here it comes) democracy is that we are all part of the conspiracy - we are consulted, we exert influence, we communicate through our representatives. These are the weakest links that will be severed first.

So, I'm not here to criticise Assange's actions - only his writing. I might be on his side, if I knew what side he was on.

The Royal Engagement

2010-11-18T22:32:00.003Z

I hold no brief for constitutional monarchy. It has been observed that constitutional monarchies tend to work better than republics, but to the extent that is true, I would put it down to the presence of a constitutional monarch being an indication that other undemocratic elements are also present — in effect, that the regime is an "old democracy" rather than the inferior, more-democratic "young democracy". The actual monarchy itself has no significance.

There are nonetheless reasons for welcoming the continuation of the line of the Hanoverian usurpers. First, they serve to distract democratic idealists. The centres of real undemocratic power suffer less opposition because purists allow themselves to be drawn into endless pointless arguments about the trivial cost of the Monarchy versus the sentimental value of tradition and the tangible value of the tourism industry. (Back when I believed in democracy, I eschewed republicanism for precisely that reason).

Second, the Royal Family is a contingency plan of sorts. If we are ever to escape slow strangulation by Old Democracy, then an assumption of power by the monarch is about the least unlikely mechanism. The crisis that would lead to such a change would have to be extreme, but it is only very unlikely, not unthinkable.

For instance, there is evidence of some planning of a military coup against Harold Wilson, which it is claimed would have installed Lord Mountbatten as interim prime minister. Mountbatten would have been a logical choice from one point of view, as a member of the Royal Family, a World War II General, and a former ruler (of India). It came to nothing, but there could be a next time, and a King ready to take over ultimate authority would be a large asset to such a conspiracy — particularly as we are a bit short of famous generals or colonial governors. On the other hand, it would be plainly impossible in anything resembling current circumstances, because the USA would not permit it. For any future crisis to produce an escape from democracy, the US would have to be substantially weakened or would have to move first. (The story is that CIA at least were backing the Mountbatten plot).

That story (assuming for the moment it is true) does bring home the danger of any attempt to move to non-political government. Really, Mountbatten? I am reminded that I do not support the idea of a royalist coup in the same way as a democrat supports his party to win the next election. My thought is more that if it did somehow come off well, it would be a good thing. Things would have to get a great deal worse than they are for it to be worth that kind of a risk.

The difficulty is that while the benefits of abolishing politics are real, they cannot be felt for at least a generation: the first ruling Monarch will not have inherited only his crown, not his power, and will have to work as hard to hold it as any other dictator. Charles II nearly pulled it off, and if he had a son rather than his plonker of a brother his efforts might well have been enough. But it is much easier to mess up than to get right.

So, for those thin reasons, I am celebrating the prospect of the continuation of the House of Windsor into the future. Gawd Bless 'em

Speaking of which, I think I may have resolved what I felt was a problem with my political position. I am an atheist who believes in the Divine Right of Kings. There is some hint of a logical inconsistency there. But in fact the two beliefs go together. The concrete premise of my position is that competition for power is more damaging than power misused. Therefore I want no decision to be made about who has power — since any decision will cause competition. What better way to avoid a decision than to put the deciding power into hands that do not exist? God says the King shall rule. If you disagree, do not appeal to the army, the mob, the United Nations or the electorate — take it up with God. In the meantime, the King shall rule. God save the King!

There is one detail of the Royal engagement which might be significant: the princess-to-be is a commoner — one whose parents had, at one time, to work for a living (gasp!). This is contrary to tradition — is it a problem?

The biggest danger is that by choosing a bride from within the realm, the Royal Family is opening up a competition for power among rival interests. In the long run, a monarchy where the heir to the throne tended to choose his bride from his student colleagues (rather than from a predetermined small selection of princesses) might produce hugely destructive competition between political factions to get their daughters into the right courses of the right universities. Factions would seek to control university admissions departments, influence the Royal youths' choice of courses, possibly causing huge damage to academia in the process. That perhaps sounds far-fetched, but in fact compared to the steps taken by lobbies and interest groups today to gain indirect influence over policy, it's quite minor. Minor it may be, but it's not what we want.

(For an analogous line of reasoning, see my speculation about celebrities entering politics. The root issue is the same — if some activity becomes, in addition to its original purpose, a route to power, then in time it will become nothing but a route to power, and whatever useful purposes it had will be lost).

The commoner issue, then, is potentially a bad precedent in the long run. In the current circumstances, I don't think it's worth worrying about at all. Since, for any of the above to matter at all, we first have to take the giant, improbable step from constitutional monarchy to absolute monarchy, anything that makes that step slightly less difficult is worth considerable sacrifice. Attempting to find a suitable European princess is not something we need to be spending effort on.

So, here's to William and Kate.

Effects before causes in the lab?

2010-11-12T20:45:00.003Z

This is very exciting:

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/11/dramatic-study-shows-participants-are.html

Daryl Bem has taken the unusual, yet elegantly simple, approach of testing a raft of classic psychological phenomena, backwards.

Take priming - the effect whereby a subliminal (i.e. too fast for conscious detection) presentation of a word or concept speeds subsequent reaction times for recognition of a related stimulus. Bem turned this around by having participants categorise pictures as negative or positive and then presenting them subliminally with a negative or positive word. That is, the primes came afterwards. Students were quicker, by an average of 16.5ms, to categorise negative pictures as negative when they were followed by a negative subliminal word (e.g. 'threatening'), almost as if that word were acting as a prime working backwards in time.

Got that? The experimenters have used the same techniques usually employed to see how various events affect people's behaviour, but reversed the order of the stimulus and the measurement of the response, and found that the stimulus has the same effect, even if it hasn't happened yet.

If the experiment has been done correctly, then it confirms what I have long believed. No, not that the structure of space-time is fundamentally different to what we are told. Rather, that the normal scientific techniques used to measure effects and evaluate their significance are no bloody good.

Nobody seems to have picked up on that possibility just yet, but I think the idea will gradually get around.

Libertarian Politics

2010-11-07T08:40:00.003Z

It's funny: (h/t Isegoria)

The Country Club Republicans put up most of the money and provided meeting places. Important.

The religeous right provided a lot of work. It was they that walked precincts and they that worked phone banks. Very important.

The libertarians talked. The libertarians also complained. They were always too busy talking and complaining to do any work.

... but I don't think it represents a personal failing on the part of the libertarians this politician attempted to work with. Rather, it exposes the fundamental flaw with libertarian politics. The other groups were important because they had bought into the idea of politics — they had picked their side and were prepared to work to make it win, effectively obtaining what power they could, and trading it with their allies to get help on the few issues they particularly cared about.

For a libertarian, this is fundamentally illegitimate. Libertarians are not comfortable seeking power outside of the specific policy changes they want to make. That makes them, in political terms, useless.

There isn't a way around this. For a libertarian to accept that he needs to fully engage in the political process, he has to accept that there is more to politics than policy — that who has power is an important thing in its own right. Once you believe that, you are no longer a libertarian.

Tweakers and Pioneers

2010-11-05T05:58:00.003Z

Good guest post on the Freakonomics blog: "Tweakers" and "Pioneers" in the world of innovation.

The undervaluing of tweakers compared to pioneers is something I've drawn attention to before, most recently in the context of science (with arts as a point of comparison) in Originality and Science.

Non-violent revolution

2010-10-14T05:20:00.002Z

In my critcism of the Nobel Peace Prize, I didn't address the point that Liu Xiaobo is an advocate for non-violent democratic change in China.

That was because it is irrelevant. It is the violence after the government falls that bothers me, not before.

The Tsar of Russia was removed non-violently, by strikes and demonstrations - the more democratic regime that replaced him lasted a few months, a different gang replaced it, their enemies started a civil war... Long story.

The exemplar of the non-violent revolutionary is Gandhi. He succeeds, the British hand over power, there are rival factions and interests sharing it out, a partition results, social unrest - 5 to 10 million dead.

Both those revolutions might nevertheless have been good things; that's not the point. The point is that either way, the non-violence of the first stage is pretty much insignificant. A non-violent revolutionary is only harmless if he fails.

The Nobel Peace Prize

2010-10-13T21:58:00.003Z

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been beyond the grasp of rational criticism, but I don't think this year's award can be let by with just the usual cynical chuckle.

Timothy Garton-Ash says in the Grauniad CiF that the prize "hits China's most sensitive nerve". In fact, the offence that the Chinese government has taken is all the result of a misunderstanding. They really do have difficulty understanding the level of the West's hypocrisy and stupidity.

To the extent the award means anything at all, it is a declaration of intent, by the Nobel Committee and all those that speak in support of it, to overthrow the government of China and replace it with a Western-style government. Garton-Ash explains that Liu Xiaobo "has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy". It is possible to advocate respect for human rights and the rule of law within Chinese politics, but to advocate democracy is to advocate the destruction of the Chinese government and its replacement with a Western-style one.

To make such a warlike declaration in the name of peace is, of course, just the usual annual joke.

Therefore, it is reasonable for the Chinese authorities to react to the award as a declaration of outright enmity. Their reaction is, nevertheless, wrong. There are two things they do not understand.

The first is that this declaration is purely ritual. In calling for the overthrow of the PRC, the Western intelligentsia have not the slightest idea of any actual program of action; they are merely showing each other how virtuous they are. It is the equivalent of the prayers for the conversion of England that used to be said by Catholic congregations - a creed that had to be regularly affirmed, without the slightest reflection on its actual meaning.

The second is that, because of the lack of such reflection, the self-declared enemies of China actually have no inkling of what they are actually saying. "Democracy", in the mouth of someone like Garton-Ash, is just something that goes with human rights and rule of law - it is a minor adornment of a political system, that can be increased here and there without killing millions of people.

In Britain, that is indeed what it is - as democracy crept gradually into the British system over a couple of hundred years, the system absorbed and to a great extent neutralised it, producing a comfortable and moderately stable synthesis. That is not what happens when it is introduced in one go. Then it destroys one regime and produces another, usually very short-lived, replacement. Then there is generally a settling down into some kind of civil war. France is the model, not Britain.

The Garton-Ashes and Nobel Committees do not understand that. The thought never even enters their heads. They probably assume that even the CPC leadership itself really wants democracy, but is just a little too cautious and conservative in bringing it in, and needs to be gently chivied by the likes of Liu Xiaobo.

If the Chinese really understood Western politics, they would ignore it and watch the X-factor like sensible westerners do. But it is out of place for the politicians themselves to criticise the Chinese for taking them at their word.

I don't say all this to attack the idea of reform in China. While I am no great fan of democracy, and while the Chinese regime does have a fairly decent record over the last couple of decades, I recognise that it is bound to run into serious problems as wealth and economic freedom increase the power of rivals to the present establishment. There are already serious power struggles between central and regional governments. It may well be that political collapse is inevitable, and if so, then a somewhat Western-ish democracy would not be the worst possible outcome. Liu Xiaobo might be the nucleus of a future non-terrible government of China, and the alternative to something worse. It's hard to say. But these aren't the terms in which the debate is being carried on.

A Strong Criticism of Monarchy

2010-08-21T08:39:00.004Z

From the comments to the World Cup piece:

Monarchy is rule by a single individual. It works on this wise. Immediately after his succession, the new monarch enthusiastically attempts to rule the country. For a certain period, shall we call it a year. As there is only so much time between breakfast and supper, this is largely impossible. The next year, he carries on out of a sense of duty. The third year, he announces that he does not want to be bothered with this ruling crap, but if there are any fit women around would you please send them up. Monarchy then gives way to pornocracy: porne is Greek for prostitute.

Previous objections to Monarchic rule which I have rejected rest on the possibility that the monarch might be an idiot or a psychopath. In my estimation, mere idiocy or psychopathy are less damaging to good government than politics is.

The commenter brings up the more fearsome possibility that the monarch could be a normal sane bloke, more concerned about what his girlfriend thinks of him than about whether GDP next year will be 2.5 trillion or 3 trillion.

If decisions simply end up being made by some random attractive woman (or boy) instead of the hereditary ruler, that's not a problem in itself. But the reason this situation is so much more dangerous than mere insanity is that it produces politics, (meaning a struggle for power), based this time not around arming supporters or controlling journalists, but around forming close personal relationships with the monarch. This was often the main form of "politics" in historical monarchies.

I'm not sure that it is a worse form of politics than exists in a democracy or a military Junta, but my aim in proposing monarchy is to remove politics altogether, which is obviously more difficult than I thought.

Devaluation of Significance

2010-08-11T21:15:00.003Z

I referred in my last post to a lost writing of mine on the subject of abuse of statistics in economics. I've sort of found it - I sent it as an email in response to this blog post by Noel Campbell at Division of Labour. (Read it - it's short).

He quoted from my response, but I can't find the actual email I sent him. I do have a draft of it, so it would have been very much like this:

That's a superb question, and I think the answer will surprise (and disturb) many.

Your paper will include a calculation of significance. This is essentially an estimate of the probability that a correlation as strong as the one you found would exist purely as a result of randomness in the data, even if your theory is false.

This calculation assumes the "proper" sequence of events. You have a theory, and you test the data for a correlation. Since you in fact poked around for correlations, then came up with a theory, the significance calculation is not valid. The true significance depends on the probability that, having found a randomly-caused correlation somewhere, you can then invent a theory to explain it. That probability is very difficult to estimate, but is probably much greater - meaning that the significance of the correlation is much smaller.

It is very counterintuitive that the order of your actions affects the validity of your findings, and indeed it is a close relative of the famous Monty Hall problem - the poster child for counterintuitive probability. When you reveal the correlation that you already knew of, you are revealing no information about the chance of your theory being correct, much as when the quizmaster opens the door that he already knows doesn't have the car, he reveals no information about the chance that the door you first picked has the car. Conversely if you pick a door and find that it doesn't have the car, that does change the probability that the first door had it, and if you had no prior knowledge of the data, the correlation does change the probability of your theory being true.

Back to science. As you say, theories aren't formed in a vacuum, and so there is not such an clear division between the "right" way of doing it and the "wrong" way of doing it. Nobody is completely ignorant of the data when they start to theorize. That is a real problem with nearly all statistics-based results that are published today. They are all presented with significance calculations based on the assumption that the forming of the theory was independent of the data - an assumption that is very unlikely to be completely true. Therefore nearly every significance published is an overestimate.

This was much less of a problem when collecting data and analysing it was difficult and laborious. Now that large data sets fly around the internet, and every researcher has the capability of running analyses at the click of a mouse, it is a problem that has already got out of hand.

I didn't want to be rude at the time, but I found Campbell's response shocking. He seemed to fully accept my argument, but wasn't bothered by the implication that pretty much all published research relying on analysing pre-existing statistics was wrong. Rather, his conclusion was that since everybody else was doing what he was doing, nobody should complain and demand "purity" (his scare quotes). That came to mind particularly reading Bruce Charlton's discussion of the state of honesty in science.

The story of real science

2010-08-11T04:58:00.002Z

Bruce Charlton has published what he calls an "mini-e-booklet": http://thestoryofscience.blogspot.com/

I think he is saying, in greater detail and at much more length, and with the point of view of an insider, what I was saying in the last few days: that science has declined, because science has become an industry which no longer allows for the extraordinary honesty that real science requires.

This is the problem of science today – it has been bloated by decades of exponential growth into a bureaucratically dominated heavy industry soviet factory characterized by vastly inefficient mass production of shoddy goods. And it is trundling along, hour by hour, day by day; masses of people going to work, doing things, saying things, writing things…

Science is hopelessly and utterly un-reformable while it continues to be so big, continues to grow-and-grow, and continues uselessly to churn out ever-more of its sub-standard and unwanted goods.

Switch it off: stop making the defective glasses: now...

There are some very general arguments he makes which I have been meaning to spell out for a while. He suggests that the peak of science was in the mid-20th century, and it was a transitional state.

this transitional state of classic science was an early phase of professional science, which came between what might be called medieval science and modern science (which is not real science at all - but merely a generic bureaucratic organization which happened to have evolved from classic science). But classic science was never a steady state, and never reproduced itself; but was continually evolving by increasing growth, specialization and professionalization/ bureaucratization.

I think such transitional phases occur in different fields quite frequently. Part of my disillusionment with libertarianism is that it is an attempt to recapture a transitional state in government that was never sustainable - the state where a new class is taking over power and opens up freedom for everybody because it has not yet thrown off its self-identification as an underdog that benefits from freedom.

The failure of science is also an aspect of the widely-recognised but ill-understood problem of trying too hard: some things can only be achieved by trying to do something else.

The scientists of the past, like the individuals making up the governments of the past, were privileged. They ruled or researched not in order that they optimise some output, but because they could - they had reached positions of genuine personal responsibility, and had to make their own judgement.

If these "very general arguments" sound rather woolly, do not adjust your set. That's why I haven't published on them already - nevertheless, I bring them up now because they're bugging me and I think Charlton's writing is relevant to them.

Back to the specifics, Part 3 quotes an earlier post of Charlton's that chimes very closely with what I was saying yesterday:

Charlton BG. Are you an honest scientist? Truthfulness in science should be an iron law, not a vague aspiration. Medical Hypotheses. 2009; Volume 73: 633-635

Summary

Anyone who has been a scientist for more than a couple of decades will realize that there has been a progressive and pervasive decline in the honesty of scientific communications. Yet real science simply must be an arena where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being science and becomes something else: Zombie science. Although all humans ought to be truthful at all times; science is the one area of social functioning in which truth is the primary value, and truthfulness the core evaluation. Truth-telling and truth-seeking should not, therefore, be regarded as unattainable aspirations for scientists, but as iron laws, continually and universally operative. Yet such is the endemic state of corruption that an insistence on truthfulness in science seems perverse, aggressive, dangerous, or simply utopian.

Indeed.

There are points I disagree with: Charlton tells the orthodox story of Lysenko - he was a gangster, he brought politics and political arguments into science. As I said yesterday, that lacks the understanding that he believed he was not the first to do so, that he believed he was only trying to correct the political influence that had already occurred. We are distracted by the fact that Lysenko's enemies were not merely removed from influence, but actually imprisoned - that is incidental, just part of the difference between Stalin's Russia and our world. The dissenting scientist today is as much an enemy of the state as Vavilov was, the only difference is that our establishment is secure enough to leave its enemies at large, while Stalin wasn't.

The reason I insist on this is that the orthodox story makes the problem seem too easy: don't allow monsters like Lysenko, keep politicians out of science. It isn't that easy - the politics that matters is the "office politics" of science itself, not the real politics of the government.

Charlton does not suggest a solution like mine of yesterday - de-emphasising the quest for originality in favour of more checking and reproduction - but it's clearly a prerequisite for the sort of changes he does advocate. To restore the primacy of truth to science a necessary step would be to ensure that only truth-seekers were recruited to the key scientific positions, and to exclude from leadership those who are untruthful or exhibit insufficient devotion to the pursuit of truth. Obviously, before you can do that you have to have a way to find out who is truthful and who isn't - you have to check.

Certainly there needs to be a slowing-down of science - Charlton and I are as one on that.

There's another point that Charlton gets close to: Real achievement in science requires a great deal of luck - the thing you are looking for has to really be there. However, when someone is in a career, it is unjust to value them by whether they are lucky. That is one of main forces that has driven a wedge between the practice of science and any real product - every research project has to produce something publishable (failing incompetence by the scientists), whereas in reality most research of the most valuable kind finds nothing, producing only a few jackpots for the lucky. The only solutions within the structure of science as bureaucracy is to either know what you are going to find in advance (which is useless), or publish results which are in fact devoid of real content, drowning any real results in the noise. This is largely achieved by abuse of statistics - something I thought I'd addressed in relation to economics, but I can't find. Perhaps I'll post something later.

Originality and Science

2010-08-09T14:32:00.003Z

One probably-final point to come out of the Lysenkoism discussion of the previous two posts:

Yesterday I admiringly referred to Richard Feynman's quote

I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists

As I said, that is a key part of cutting out the cascade of distrust that can occur when science becomes politically sensitive.

The problem is that that was an easy thing for Feynman to say, because Feynman was a flamboyantly insane genius, and the last thing he ever had to fear was being ignored. The situation is rather different for one graduate student or new PhD among twenty aiming for the same grant-funded research post. In that position, playing down the significance or certainty of one's own work is a ticket to the dole queue.

And the density of competition is astonishing. There was a piece in Nature a couple of years back, on the limitations of fMRI, that pointed out that from 2007-2008 there have been eight peer-reviewed papers published involving fMRI per day - 19,000 since 1991. "About 43% of papers expore functional localization and/or cognitive anatomy associated with some cognitive task or stimulus". Thousands upon thousands of papers, each searching for the little piece of originality that will give them importance.

However, this torrent of research demonstrates a solution as well as a problem. I wrote yesterday that "it is ... impractical to replicate every experiment, confirm every observation, check every calculation". Clearly, I was wrong. There is ample manpower in the science industry to double- and triple-check important results, but the system does not value the work highly enough for it to actually get done. Only original work actually merits funding.

That is a widespread problem in non-commercial fields, most obvious in the arts. In commercial arts, most artists make small variations or combinations of existing products, just trying to be a little more attractive and entertainment. The minority who are truly original are highly valued, because they are providing material for the rest to refine or perfect. Indeed, I can think of no other distinction between "high" and "popular" art, but that high art always seeks to be original, and popular art isn't too bothered. In academic arts, the only valid work is to do something really new. The end result is a product that is always different, but never very good. In science, every new paper is original, but most of them are wrong.

I would assume that in the cases of both art and science, the original assumption was that the market worked well enough to perfect existing work, but that originality required help and subsidy. However, the subsidised sectors at length became isolated from the commercial, to the point that now there is no commercial sector relevant to the academic work being done, and the new stuff is being pumped out into a vacuum.

It seems obvious that it would be beneficial for science to move more slowly and carefully, but the academic system has evolved in a way that does not permit it. It would take a major shakeup to get the science establishment to start to value that caution.

What they want to hear

2010-08-08T10:00:00.003Z

There was another interesting point in the discussion at Hans von Storch's that I brought up - an interesting comment by "Toby" on the earlier piece:

Lysenko told the politicians what they wanted to hear - a "short cut" to socialism. Which side of the current "debate" is telling politicians what they want to hear? The ones arguing that money must be spent and sacrifices made? Or the ones advocating that nothing be done?

That is a good question, and is the root of much of the political polarization of climate science.

Toby implies that politicians want to hear that nothing need be done - money need not be spent.

A right-winger - like myself - believes that what politicians want to hear is that their departments and budgets must be enlarged.

As I explained, the distrust of motives is enough by itself - without any actual dishonesty or malpractice - to mess up the scientific process in a field where unequivocal confirmation or rejection of theories is difficult to come by.

Lysenkoism

2010-08-08T09:34:00.003Z

There has been some interesting discussion at Hans von Storch's blog about Lysenkoism. Nils Roll Hansen wrote some posts.

I don't agree with the conclusions reached.

Lysenko was not a politician, he was not a fraud, he was not an ideologue. Lysenko was a scientist.

Lysenko, like the majority of scientists today, worked for the government.

In the scientific controversy that involved Lysenko, he reported to his superiors (the government). That was his job as a senior member of the scientific establishment.

The scientific controversy was politically sensitive. Lysenko claimed that his scientific opponents were politically motivated: their science was based on bourgeois ideas of inherited superiority. That claim was not implausible, and Lysenko had no reasonable alternative but to draw the attention of his superiors to the possibility.

The politicians did their job - they reached a conclusion about how to run a government department based on the advice they received and their judgement of that advice.

When we tell the story of Lysenkoism, we tell it in the knowledge that Lysenko was wrong. What we look for are the indications that the process was bad - that the wrong conclusion was being reached.

My opinion is that there are no such indications. Yes, it was "politicized science", but the main political force on the science was the belief that orthodox genetics was itself the product of the political assumptions of the Western scientists that developed it. That perception was probably exaggerated, if not totally erroneous, but it was a genuine belief honestly held.

The point is that for politics to mess up science, it is not necessary for anyone to let the political implications of a theory take precedence over the evidence. All that is necessary is for some participants to believe that other scientists are doing that. That is enough to cause theories to be suppressed, and thereby for the science to be systematically skewed.

It is not enough, either, to say that at the end of the day the evidence should speak for itself, and the trustworthiness of its spokesmen not be relevant - nullius in verba, and all that. That is all very fine, but it denies the fact that some science is difficult. It is so impractical to replicate every experiment, confirm every observation, check every calculation, that nullus in verba is the next thing to radical scepticism in the philosophical sense. You have to trust some scientists, and that means you have to choose who to trust, and that means you have to take into account politics.

In the very long run, you can learn who is actually trustworthy and who is not. But that is a painful bootstrapping process - you need a little trust to give you some facts, and then you use those facts to evaluate the trustworthiness of those who addressed them. That gives you a little more trust, to gather a few more facts, and so on.

To call, as Hansen does, for "independence" for science does not address the problem. It just means that scientists will be punished for scientific dissent rather than political dissent - which makes the situation worse. If science is run by politicians, you can probably advance whatever theories you like so long as you support the right policies. If science is run by scientists, you must support the authorized theories to succeed.

There is, then, no silver bullet to depoliticise science. There are, however, treatments that can make science work better. Since a small amount of distrust has such a catastrophic effect, the least dishonesty cannot be tolerated. This is behind the now dying attitude that Feynman talked about, of bending over backwards to draw attention to everything that tells against you theory, so that you cannot possibly be accused of concealing any of it.

Thoughts on the World Cup

2010-07-12T20:55:00.004Z

Cephalopods aside, I think the most important fact about the 2010 World Cup is that it was the first in which both finalists were teams from monarchies - and that after a run of seven finals in a row between two republic teams.

His Majesty King Juan Carlos becomes the third monarch to reign over world cup winners, following Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (1934 and 1938) and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth (1966).

Monarchies have lost to republics in 3 finals, Sweden to Brazil in 1958, and The Netherlands to West Germany in 1974 and to Argentina in 1978. So Her Majesty Queen Beatrix joins Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, and her mother Queen Juliana as monarchs of world cup runners-up.

What does this break in the trend signify? Possibly a resurgence of Europe relative to monarchyless South America, but that doesn't cover the poor showing of France and Italy.

Other factoids arising from Victor Emmanuel III and fascism: Mussolini was deposed by Victor Emmanuel in a proper constitutional manner in 1943, and German President Paul von Hinderburg's will is believed to have expressed a desire for Germany to return to a monarchy. (The History Place says he did, Wikipedia says it's disputed).

It is the received wisdom that in 1933-34, Hitler's oratory was so supernaturally spooky that he convinced the German people even to abandon democracy to put him in power. It seems more likely that by then democracy had failed so badly that any alternative looked like a good idea. But that's not the stuff to give the troops.

On Holiday

2010-07-03T18:44:00.003Z

I'm on holiday, and have been for a couple of weeks, which has taken my mind off matters political and philosophical. But I'll be back at work within the week, and in the meantime my distraction has been broken by anticipation of what will be my first July 4th in the United States.

The argument of my previous post leads me to see the patriotism of my hosts as a human virtue, and ordinary good manners demands that I not treat the event as an opportunity to demonstrate the faults of republican government in general and that of the United States of America in particular.

I therefore aim to concentrate my attention on the American People, who have achieved so much in spite of unwisely lumbering themselves with such an inferior form of government - one which brings such predictable and immediate tragedy when attempted by peoples less endowed with individual and collective virtues, of solidarity, initiative, generosity and even, when using a realistic standard of comparison, intelligence. The American People is almost uniquely qualified to overcome the handicap of democracy and to maintain a society that, while visibly decaying, remains the envy of much of the world. Just imagine what they could have done these last two centuries with a decent monarchy!

I can often be accused of gratuitous contrarianism, and while globally the American form of government is more admired than Americans themselves, my tastes have always run otherwise.

Right Conduct

2010-05-25T21:19:00.003Z

Politics and morality can become mired in ill-understood abstractions, so I'm re-evaluating my ideas in more concrete terms; what should be done? What should I do, what should we do, for any values of we that I can get a sensible answer with?

The two questions are separate. Taking the first, what should I do? Taking myself in isolation, there have been two coherent answers to that question: one is "whatever God says", and the other is "Whatever I like".

I prefer the second of those, but it can use some refinement. Doing what I want now could cause me problems in the future; I need to anticipate, and delay gratification to gain more in the long run.

There is a more subtle refinement too: I am not detached from the world; I can change the world, and in the process change myself. It can be easier to manage myself to be satisfied with what is, than to manage the world to satisfy myself. Dispassion is part of the mix as well.

But that's all viewing one person in isolation - an unrealistic approach. Humans are social, and need to form groups to succeed. As well as pursuing my personal goals, I need to gain the cooperation of my neighbours. How to do that is the larger part of what is normally thought of as the sphere of morality.

The most obvious fact is that the answer varies. What will win me cooperation in one society will have me shunned in another; what works in one century (decade, sometimes) fails in the next.

All we can say is that it is necessary for me to conform to the collective expectations of the other people I interact with - to fulfill my designated role in whatever society.

For that to make sense, I have to know what my society is. In theory that's difficult: it's some group of people who interact with me and share expectations of each others' behaviour. In practice, it's usually easier to identify, but not always. I'll come back to that.

As in the individual case, that is not the end of the story. Some societies allow their members to achieve their goals more effectively than others do. Societies change, as individuals do, and they can fail or be replaced. We can say that each person should do what is required of them by their society, and still say that one society is better than another. It might be better in that it is more useful to its members, or it might be better in a different sense in that it is less vulnerable to shocks, more able to grow in reach and strength.

These judgments on societies matter, because, while seeking our own goals and conforming to our place in society, we still may have some power to direct society in a given direction. If we have a vision of a good society, we can aim to change our society for the better.

One practical aside - the aims of improving society and being a good member of it can come into conflict, and attempts to resolve those two competing priorities are often at the centre in dram and history. Froude's Times of Erasmus and Luther contrasts Erasmus's desire to be a good citizen of Christendom with Luther's defiance of his allotted role in the cause of improving Christendom. In this case Froude comes down on the side of Luther, but the question is more important than the answer.

There's an important point missing: We can talk about what makes a society good or bad, and how a member of society can attempt to change it, but ultimately my aim is to advance my own interests, and that might be most effectively done by changing society in a way that is not better either for the society in its own right or for its members generally.

It seems reasonable to say that societies will do better, for themselves and their members, if they somehow prevent this from happening to any significant degree. That's not a theorem - conceivably an arrangement that permits it may bring compensating benefits that outweigh the damage sustained - but they'd better be very substantial benefits.

I'm trying to keep separate two different ways in which a society can be good - it can be good for its members, or it can be good for itself, seen as a metaphorical organism: able to survive, adapt and improve. Inasmuch as a society is a way for its members to better their own lot, the first good is primary, and the second only significant in that it supports the first.

There are a few different forms that can exist to prevent a society being wrecked by selfish interests. (Again, there are two quite distinct ways of being wrecked: the society can be weakened to the degree that it is replaced, either from without or within, by a different society, or else it can remain secure, but provide less value to its members). The first defence is rigidity. If the society is very resistant to any change at all, then it is resistant to wrecking. The problem is it is unable to develop, and unable to react to changing circumstances. Some societies in the past have been successful for their members by being stable, but the rapid changes in the world and in the capabilities of people over the past few centuries have swept all of them away.

To safely accomodate flexibility, a society must preferentially encourage its members to change it in ways that benefit the society and its members.

There is a three-way trade-off: my interests, the interests of my neighbours, and the interests of the organism of society. We rely on society to allow the first trade-off, between each other, to be resolved in an efficient and non-destructive way. The second tradeoff, between a society and its members, is more difficult.

Nothing I've written here is new. Never mind Carlyle and Froude, quite a lot of it can be found in Aristotle. However, it's not a set of ideas that I've put together before, and includes things that I explicitly rejected when I was young and arrogant.

Also, it's not a set of ideas that provides easy answers to difficult questions. That's always a good sanity check1. If your calculations show you can build a perpetual motion machine, or solve NP-complete problems in linear time, you've probably made a mistake. This framework doesn't usually answer difficult questions, but it at least tells you why they're difficult.

I promised to write about patriotism, and now I have set up the scenery. Froude's comment2 on a "distinguished philosopher" seems anti-rational; and so it is, but I am prepared to be persuaded to it.

The problem that society solves is how to cooperate with my neighbours; how to achieve more together than we could in conflict, or even more than we could independently. We cannot do this without some framework that enables us to match expectations, and that framework needs to be stable enough for us to move with confidence from one interaction to the next.

The framework can be changed, for the better or the worse. As well as enabling our cooperation, therefore, it needs to be such that I can be assured of continuing to benefit from it in future. The future, though, is uncertain, and it his hard for me to know that circumstances will not arise where my neighbour can gain by destroying the assurances that I have relied on. This is the second tradeoff above, between the members of the society and the society itself. The society exists for its members, but we need to maintain it too.

There is a smaller-scale, easier parallel to this situation, which I wrote about before. When two people become a family, each is threatened by the possibility that the other will destroy or abandon what has been created. Reassurance is at hand, however, through the irrational attachments that people in that position have been bred to form towards each other, which discourages them from breaking the bonds even if it becomes objectively convenient for them to do so. The irrationality is an advantage to the individual, as it enables him to make somewhat binding commitments in the absence of any external enforcement mechanism, and thereby reach more advantageous social arrangements.

My neighbours' love of our country is what enables me to tolerate their freedom, as my wife's love is what enables me to tolerate hers.

It is a threat to the tradeoffs if the society can be changed by individuals who are not dependent on it either practically or emotionally. That is why it is important to know who is in and who is out. This is often looked on as some kind of prehistoric handicap, but it is not. I've been talking about "societies", not countries, so I have not yet closed the loop to say anything about patriotism. I admitted above that we need to identify which individuals are the ones we care about, from the point of view of succeeding personally by fulfilling our expected role in society. There are two answers, on two levels. First, those who we expect to interact with in future. Second, those who can change the expectations that we have towards the first group, and that the first group has towards us. If someone will be dealing socially with me, I need him to be within the social framework. If someone can affect the social framework itself, I want him to be constrained not to damage its effectiveness or longevity.

That's still, on the face of it, rather imprecise. However, for most people, through most of history, it's been very easy to work out. There's a good reason for that: if you don't know who is in your society and who isn't, you are in a lot of trouble - at least your society is, and that means that, in the long run, you are too. With personal love comes jealousy, and with the patriotism that gives a society its longevity comes a certain chauvinism. That's a necessary feature, not a bug. If someone isn't a member of your society, they need to be kept away from it, or at least made powerless over it, lest they damage it.

Tribes work as societies on that basis. We had nation-states for a few centuries, and they worked too, more or less. Now we do not have a society where it is clear who is in and who is out, and where the members are bound to preserve and improve it. We have many compensations, and I haven't proved we're worse off in net, but I've at least shown how we could be, how, other things being equal, patriotism is a virtue.

In the end, we may go back to tribes, or as John Robb has it, to some new kind of tribe.

Footnotes:

1 "My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on both sides" - Froude, The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character

2 "I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism. He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'

"A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him." - Froude, Times of Erasmus and Luther

Froude and Coke

2010-05-25T20:12:00.003Z

As per orders, I have been reading Froude. I read The Bow of Ulysses, and while he was obviously broadly accurate, at least in his more pessimistic outlook, I thought it was interesting that he had overestimated how bad democracy in the British West Indies would be.

A couple of days later, Kingston collapsed into civil war. Then I happened to notice that Jamaica had already had the highest murder rate in the world. It looks like this Victorian knew more about the twenty-first century than I do.

But that's by the way. I went on to his Short Studies of Great Subjects. I'm less than a quarter through, and while I can't point to any really new insights, I've suddenly found that I'm looking at a lot of things in a completely different way. The first result will be a piece on patriotism, which I'll go onto next.

Red Toryism

2010-05-22T15:10:00.002Z

Libertarian economics is sound. But libertarian politics is an oxymoron.
Individualist Libertarianism and collectivist Socialism are opposites. But they came from the same roots and the first always becomes the second.
Victimless crimes should not be prosecuted. But broken families do more damage than psychopaths.
No-one should be born into privilege. But the alternative is to compete for power.
Mencius Moldbug is a lone nutter. But opinion is shifting more and more against democracy.
Global Warming is rubbish. But it might not have been, and what would have happened then?
I have always believed that morality only makes sense in terms of the individual. But I can't remember why.

Froude Society
Philip Blond - Red Toryism
Cato Unbound

Much more to follow, if I can find my feet again

Conservatives and Climate

2010-05-16T06:31:00.005Z

According to Jonathan Hari, 91% of Conservative MPs do not believe in man-made Global Warming (via The Devil).

The problem is, that really doesn't prove what he wants it to prove.

As an aside, he shows himself in the same article to have a very shaky grasp of numbers: he says "This oddball rabble are five times bigger than the Lib Dems, despite getting only 13 per cent more support." What he means is that the Tories got more votes than the Lib Dems by an amount of 13% of the total votes - in fact the Tories got 56% more votes than the Lib Dems did. That is the only ratio that it makes any sense to compare with the sizes of the respective parliamentary parties. He could also say that the Tories got 38% more of the seats in the Commons despite getting only 13% more of the votes in the country. Using the correct 56% number rather than the irrelevant 13% wouldn't have weakened the reasonable point Hari was making, but it proves he is either habitually dishonest even where it doesn't help him, or very stupid indeed.

Back to the 91%, then, assuming we can in this instance trust Hari to report a percentage accurately. I have just checked the Conservative Manifesto:

We will reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions and increase our share of global markets for low carbon technologies.
Labour have said the right things on climate change, but these have proved little more than
warm words. Despite three White Papers, a multitude of strategies and endless new announcements, the UK now gets more of its energy from fossil fuels than it did in 1997

If 91% of the candidates who successfully ran for election under that manifesto do not believe in man-made Global Warming, what it proves is that politicians' positions on climate change bear no relation to what they actually believe to be true.

It further proves that man-made global warming is a politically convenient position - one that politicians find it advantageous to adopt, even if they don't believe it.

This is tremendously important, because it is the positions taken by politicians that have set the public scene. It is politicians who have set up and maintained the IPCC, set the priorities of NASA and the Met Office, and form the context for any public debate. And those politicians are under pressure to pretend to believe in man-made Global Warming, even when they don't.

Fixed Term Parliament

2010-05-13T21:04:00.001Z

All through the election campaign I told myself, and my loyal readers, that it was just a game - that, out of habit, I would follow it closely, but in the spirit of a major sporting event rather than something that was actually important.

In the face of the new Conservative-LibDem government, however, I am struggling to maintain my cynicism. This government really might make a difference to the real world.

Abolishing ID cards is good. Abolishing ContactPoint is great. But abolishing Parliamentary Sovereignty - that is genius. And done with such subtlety, as a rider on fixed-term parliaments. "Oh, and by the way, Parliament will no longer be able to get rid of the government by majority vote". Talk about balls.

Of course, the newly created system does not make sense. We could end up with a government that can't be sacked, can't resign, and can't govern. What then? Then they will make it up as they go along - and probably at least some of the inconsistency will be resolved by further limiting the powers of parliament.

At the Blogger Bash, I asked the panellist how bad things would have to get before they would give up on democracy. Perry de Havilland (I think) stood up for democracy, saying that it was important that the government could be thrown out. But that is not the same thing as having the voters choose MPs and MPs choose government. You could have the Prime Minister appointed for life, and ministers too, and merely have them recallable by a popular supermajority, and that would still meet the criteria.

Most people think that the government should, in principle, be controlled by the people, but in specific cases most intelligent people come to the conclusion that reducing democratic control actually produces better outcomes. If the new contradiction between the government and the commons majority resolves itself in favour of the government (as I suspect it will), then it should be possible to demonstrate the improvements brought about by reducing democracy.

This would not have been possible even thirty years ago. What has made it possible to casually take away what were always seen as vital fundamental democratic principles is that recent democratic governments have been so bad that nobody cares any more. When I casually mention to strangers that my preferred political outcome is a military coup installing an absolute monarchy, the most common response is "well, it couldn't be any worse." They probably aren't serious, and don't realise that I am, but the reaction is almost automatic - what is the point of defending the democratic system that gave us Gordon Brown? If we do escape democracy, it may not be through violent revolution, or Mencius' "True election", but simply through the influence of voters being chipped away to a chorus of apathy. The electorate will, reasonably in my view, just not care.

Alternative Vote

2010-05-10T21:26:00.003Z

It's beginning to look quite likely that we could end up with the Alternative Vote (AV) system. Aficionados of electoral reform will tell you that it's not a proportional system, which is quite true. The results it produces will be quite different from those produced by multi-member STV or d'Hont. That doesn't mean, however, that it would not be a significant change.

Unlike the multi-member systems, AV will continue to give small parties no seats. What AV does, however, is allow much more effective signalling by voters. It is very plausible that it could help small parties, over time, become big parties.

The point of AV is that it saves the voter from having to do tactical-voting calculations. Currently, anyone who votes UKIP, or Green, or SSP, or BNP is sacrificing their (tiny) influence on the result of the election in favour of making a public statement. With AV, you can do both - vote SSP ,Labour as 1 & 2, and there is less chance that your SSP vote will let in the Lib Dems. (Not no chance - there are still circumstances in which it might turn out that you would have got a different result by voting Labour, SSP, but they're complex and not very predictable)

2.5 million people voted UKIP last year. Only 900,000 did last week, so quite possibly the other 1.6 million didn't vote UKIP because of the wasted vote issue. If in the next general election, the constituencies which went 8% or 9% UKIP became 25% or 30%, they probably still wouldn't get any seats, but they'd get a lot more publicity, and they wouldn't be far short of getting MPs.

The same logic applies to high-profile candidates who defect from their parties to stand as independents. It becomes a straight popularity contest between them and the "official" candidate, since any supporter of the party can vote rebel-1 official-2.

AV might benefit the BNP most of all, since they have most to gain by giving voters a chance to anonymously show support for them. Today, nobody knows, do the BNP get only 2% because nearly everyone hates them, or because they're a small party and it's a wasted vote, or because most people think nearly everyone hates them, since they only get 2%? In the last case, it would only take a few election cycles for them to look less like outcasts to those who are secretly disposed to vote for them, but put off by the opprobrium.

At the end of the day, though, a politician will still win. I'm not paying all this attention because I think it's important, it's just more entertaining than the Premier League. But if you do care about who wins, then while multi-member STV is still the first choice, you probably shouldn't turn your nose up at AV.

The Election

2010-05-08T19:05:00.002Z

Some disconnected thoughts:

Politics as Entertainment - election night was the most entertaining media event of the year. Possibly the most entertaining event ever for me - I sat up until 1am on Monday to watch the end of the snooker, but I was glad when Robertson won the last few frames to get it over with. I didn't go to bed on Thursday. The only bad bits were actually listening to politicians.

Poisoned Chalice - for both major parties, there must surely be a temptation to put the other lot in to bat. Whoever forms the government will have to take over a very difficult situation, and as soon as they hit serious trouble, the government is likely to fall and they will have to fight an election on a record of chaos and failure. The opposition can make a show of being humble and helpful, and then attempt to knock the whole thing over at a time of their own choosing.

Cleggmania - Either Clegg made a big impression in the debates on people who couldn't actually be bothered to vote, or voters were in "X-Factor" mode when answering pollsters, which is different from voter mode in the polling booths

Technical Difficulties - With 40000 polling stations, some few are bound to be affected by incompetence or unforeseen circumstances. This will no doubt be used to argue for hi-tech voting systems, which will solve the problem by making such failures so frequent they cease to be newsworthy

Lib Dems - The Lib Dems told me to vote for them because only they could stop Gordon Brown. They can now stop Gordon Brown, so what do they tell people if they don't do it? But no doubt they told many others that only they could stop Cameron.

Esther Rantzen - was always an irrelevance, and lost her deposit. Was no more worthy of media coverage than the Monster Raving Loony William Hill party

Predictions - the results were in line with a lot of polls, if not the ones from the last couple of weeks. I don't remember anyone addressing the possibility though of the Conservatives not having a majority, but Labour and Lib Dems together not having one either. It seems to be hitting everyone as a new idea.

Voting Systems - radicals of all types hoping for proportional representation can forget it. If anything, we would get AV+, which would help the Lib Dems but nobody else. The BNP might get a seat in the North-West, and UKIP might get one in the South-West, but Marxists, Greens, Libertarians, etc. would get nothing.

Two-horse race

2010-05-05T06:43:00.004Z

3 new leaflets this morning - one from the Labour candidate, one card from Nick Clegg, and one letter from Nick Clegg. All three carry pictures of two running horses. The Lib Dems say only they can beat Labour, but Labour say only they can beat the Conservatives. That's the main point of all the material.

The Lib Dems seem more convincing - for one thing, unlike Labour, their illustration demonstrates that they understand that horse races involve jockeys. But of course, the authorities on horse races are still considering the Lib Dems outsiders, though at 11/2 they've nosed ahead of Esther Rantzen.

Only one of the three documents (the postcard from the Lib Dems) has any mention of policy, and one of the four bullet points there is "action to get our economy moving again", which doesn't quite qualify as a policy for me.

Anyone out there who thinks that democracy is a good thing - how can it be right that the vast bulk of the material given to me by candidates is concentrated on the question of who is more likely to win? OK, PR would change that somewhat, but really, what is the explanation?

Previous posts: Letters from Gordon, Dave and Nick, The Liberal Democrats - an apology,

The Cancer of Bureaucracy

2010-04-30T21:44:00.002Z

I just got round to reading Bruce Charlton's short piece The Cancer of Bureaucracy (h/t Isegoria)

It feels exaggerated and overstated. But I'd be a lot more confident in dismissing it if I could find one thing in it that was actually wrong.

I suppose there is one thing which the article misses, which is the private sector. In my experience, in private-sector organisations, while the bureaucracy Charlton describes does exist, it is subservient to an individual decision-maker. As such, it sometimes shrinks instead of growing, and the bureaucratic process is carried on in the shadow of "what Tom thinks" - where Tom is the person whose opinion matters, either because he is in charge, or his judgment is trusted by the person who is in charge.

But really, how important is the private sector in the direction that our society is taking today? While in raw numbers it's still a bare majority of activity, so much of it is now under the indirect control of public-sector bureaucracy, that private decision-making is restricted to a much smaller, and diminishing, sphere.

Anti-election poster

2010-04-27T05:04:00.003Z

I'm generally in favour of there being posters up encouraging people not to vote, but this isn't precisely what I had in mind:

Recall petitions

2010-04-19T20:49:00.003Z

Voting systems used to fascinate me. I miss caring about which PR system was fairer more than I miss believing that the government worked for me.

That's pretty much gone, now, but I just had a thought about the Conservatives' plans for introducing recall of MPs.

I was wondering whether they had taken into account the small number of people necessary to elect an MP. Luton South is a 4-way contest, so 30-35% of the vote may well win it. If turnout is around 40%, then the winning total may be no more than 12% of the electorate. So finding any way of demonstrating that even a newly-elected MP has the confidence of his constituents won't be easy.

It turns out that the Tory plan is that a petition of 10% of the electorate forces a by-election. I think I can safely predict that there won't be a single MP in the house that 10% of the electorate wouldn't want to get rid of, so the only obstacle to getting a by-election anywhere in the country is being organised enough to collect the signatures.

Any existing research on how easy it is to get signatures is probably worthless, because existing petitions are a complete waste of everybody's time. This is the sort of thing where people are getting very much more efficient.

I wouldn't be surprised if the recall plan led to every week being a by-election week. Should be a laugh.

The Liberal Democrats - an apology

2010-04-18T13:13:00.003Z

Earlier in the week, I wrote of the Liberal Democrats' election literature, that it says "that 'in many areas' only the Lib Dems can beat Labour. It tries to give the impression that I am in one of those areas, without being so dishonest as to actually say so."

Possibly they were stung by my remarks into stepping up their dishonesty, because I got a leaflet yesterday claiming outright "It's a two horse race here - the Conservatives can't win in Luton South."

If I wanted to know about horse races, I would, as the Labour and Conservative parties did, look at what the bookmakers were saying, and they do indeed have the "can't win" Conservatives as odds-on favourites, and the Liberal Democrats as fourth-place outsiders, behind even Esther Rantzen.

I wouldn't criticise the LDs for claiming they have a chance when impartial observers say they don't, but when they claim that the odds-on favourites can't win - why should any intelligent observer believe a word they say about anyone else?

There is a slight moral conundrum. Tactical voting, like other coordination games, can exhibit self-fulfilling prophesies. If the Lib Dems can lie well enough that they are bound to beat the Conservatives, it would become true, as tactical anti-Labour voters who believed them would vote for them. So if they do come third or fourth, will their offence be that they lied, or that they didn't lie enough?

Home Education registration dropped

2010-04-16T05:32:00.004Z

When I wrote my earlier post, the top reason in my mind why a Tory government would be slightly less unpleasant to me than a Labour one was that the Conservatives had promised to repeal the requirement in the new Education Act for home educators to be registered.

As I went through the "filling-in-the-links" stage of the post, I discovered that that clause had been knocked out by the Lords, and the bill had gone through without it.

I felt rather silly for having missed that. However, on checking I could not find one mainstream national news organisation had reported the change. Google News shows 19 stories on the subject, all of them either from specialists or not actually mentioning the home education part. It was also picked up by some local papers such as The St Albans and Harpenden Review

There is a conspiracy of silence on all sides about home education in the UK. Home educators prefer to keep a low profile, because of the risk of the government getting interested and putting in its big boot, particularly since Badman. The education establishment is equally quiet, because they don't want to draw attention to the number of parents who value state education not merely at less than it costs the taxpayer to provide, but as so completely worthless that it is preferable to do the job themselves.

Letters from Gordon, Dave and Nick

2010-04-15T20:35:00.004Z

The other interesting element of the election is the literature I'm being sent. The letter from Gordon Brown is about the sort of policies he would introduce if he were ever to become Prime Minister. It barely mentions the Labour party, and makes no suggestion that this Brown person has ever had power of any kind in the past.

The one from Cameron is about civil liberties - ID cards, ContactPoint, and so on. I'm suspicious enough to think that I am on some Conservative database as being concerned about those things, and my neigbours are getting letters from Cameron about clamping down on immigration or spending more on hospitals, depending on what the database says about them. (Actually, rising immigration is one existing phenomenon that this Gordon Brown chap claims in his letter to be opposed to).

The letter from Clegg is the most interesting. It has nothing to say about policy, but says only that "in many areas" only the Lib Dems can beat Labour. It tries to give the impression that I am in one of those areas, without being so dishonest as to actually say so. (Update: they have since rectified that)

Attempts to guide tactical voters are not restricted to party leaders though. The local Labour leaflet devotes one side to claiming that the Lib Dems can't win in Luton South, and that therefore only Labour can keep the Tories out, and the local Conservative leaflet agrees fully. They are not identical, though - Labour cite William Hill as an authority, but the Conservatives go with Ladbrokes. (if the leaflets are correct that 14/1 is available against the Lib Dems, I think it's probably worth a flutter).

Meanwhile local LD blogger Andy Strange is keen to claim that they're really in with a chance, because Nick Clegg has visited twice...

I'm a bit confused about the Lib Dems claiming on one hand that Labour and Conservative are so alike as to be one "Labservative" party, and on the other that I should not vote Conservative because only the Lib Dems can get Gordon Brown out. If I want the Conservatives, and the Dems' first claim is correct, then I should prefer Labour, who are like the Conservatives, to the Lib Dems who are claiming to be different.

OK, I'm not really confused. I am perfectly aware that the Lib Dems will say anything at all that they think might get them votes. Not that the others have more moral scruples, but they have slightly more actual history to tie down voters' idea of what they stand for, and can't therefore claim as wide a range of different positions simultaneously as the LDs

Election 2010

2010-04-15T20:08:00.005Z

Apparently there's an election campaign on.

By a twist of fate, the first election since I gave up on democratic politics is the first election in which I have the opportunity to influence the result - I would estimate the probability of my vote changing the result as something like 1/100,000 which is non-negligible, and orders of magnitude higher than in previous elections.

My old strategy in elections was, since the main parties are so close as to make no important difference, to attempt to influence the future positions of the parties by voting for fringe candidates.

A related idea is that of Peter Hitchens, who advocates voting against the Conservative party in an attempt to destroy it, opening the possibility of the formation of a new party to represent the conservative majority of the population.

These are both logical ideas, but they depend on the assumption that it is possible to affect the medium-to-long-term political climate by voting, and further, that it is possible to do so in a predictable way. The distinction is important; a butterfly's wings might affect the path of a hurricane, but it's not possible to aim a hurricane at a particular target by strategically releasing butterflies.

I do not accept the assumption. The Conservative Party does not represent the conservative tendency of the population, it is the conservative tendency of the political class. I could affect the political landscape (in a tiny but non-negligible way) by joining the political class, but not by voting. I'm not willing to join the political class, as I have better things to do with my life.

My conclusion is that I now see myself as a subject of the political class, rather than as a citizen of a democracy. That's calming - when I thought the government was "my" government, I was infuriated by how bad it was, but as a subject, I look at the tidbits of protection and freedom that my ruler gives me, and my position isn't so bad really, compared with that of most people who have ever lived.

And next month, as a free bonus, like a free entry in a prize draw, I get a tiny but non-negligible chance to have a small effect on the government itself. Well, why shouldn't I take it? If I thought I was more than a subject, then the trivial choice offered to me by David Cameron would be such an insult that I would spurn it as a matter of principle. Nobody who sucks up to the environmentalist lobby and who accepts that government should control more than a third of the economy can possibly represent me. But as a free gift to a subject - well, no more attacks on Home Education, scrapping ID cards, a faint possibility of lower taxes - I guess I'll take box "C", since you're offering.

I suspect that normal, sane people have always looked at elections this way - that would explain much of the mental gap between idealists such as I used to be and the rest of the population. It does make me wonder what would happen if normal people thought like we do - possibly they would demand a democracy and the whole country would go down the tubes.

That does leave me the choice of what to do about my membership of the Libertarian Party. For me, the party only ever had one useful point from the very beginning - getting Chris Mounsey on television. Now that that's actually starting to happen, I think I should continue to give support, even if it's not, by all accounts, going too well so far.

Private Morality and Professionalism

2010-04-08T20:11:00.004Z

Regular readers may have noticed that this blog went quiet for much of the early part of the year.

That was due in large part to the trouble I had trying to get to grips with a story which I considered of great importance. I just wasn't able to put the issue into the right order to do it justice.

At length, the story ceased to be topical, I admitted to myself that I had missed my chance, and got on with writing about other things.

However, the recent Chris Grayling storm has brought some of the same issues into focus, and gives me context to return to my confused drafts of February.

The vital story I was unable to discuss topically was the decision of Wayne Bridge, the England left back, not to make himself available for selection for the 2010 World Cup.

To recap the story for those with short memories, Bridge was living with and had a son with a young lady called Vanessa or Victoria or something. At some later point the couple were no longer a couple, but coupling was taking place between Vanessa and the England captain, John Terry.

Bridge appears to have taken this badly. He refused to play for England, a decision made much more significant by a long-term injury to serial adulterer Ashley Cole, leaving Bridge an important part of the England defence alongside John Terry.

The affair reached a climax at a match between Terry's Chelsea and Wayne Bridge's club Manchester City, where Bridge pointedly refused to shake hands with the opposing captain, an event which had been the supject of considerable action at the bookmakers'. Once the wagers had been settled, the story began to fade away.

What interested me was the widespread idea that there was something wrong in Wayne Bridge subordinating his professional role as a footballer to his other roles as a man and a lover. There seems to have been a clear expectation that Bridge had a duty to stand alongside John Terry on the pitches of South Africa, whatever their private relationship.

I consider such an idea extremely destructive to society. Many of us spend much of our lives involved with our work. If it is accepted that our private judgement of morality has no place there, whether in the stadiums of the Premier League or the offices of the city, then morality has been eliminated from about half of our society.

Is such personal moral judgement really so important? Yes it is, and the case of the suitors of Miss Vanessa demonstrates why. Apart from the question of professionalism, many have criticised Wayne Bridge on the grounds that she had already left him before carring on with John Terry. That is a significant point, but for me to assess it fairly I would need detailed knowledge of the relationships between the three people. That would require that there be extensive coverage of the events (which, as it happens, there was), and also that that coverage be reliable and truthful (which strikes me as so unlikely that I haven't actually bothered to ascertain the details of the story as they have been presented, though I care enough about it to write all this screed). The reality is that even in a story like this, played out (thanks to Justice Tugendhat) on the front pages, the only people in a position to make meaningful moral judgements are the participants themselves and those very close to them. The person on the spot has to make their own judgement. If they are constrained to subordinate their judgement to that of the Football Association or the News of the World, then morality is left with a busted metatarsal.

OK, so why am I bringing it all back up, now that the world has happily forgotten the most recent melodrama of footballers and their molls? It is because one of the causes of the decline of private morality has now hit the headlines. This is the story of the guest house which turned away a respectable middle-aged gay couple. Like Wayne Bridge, the proprietors of the guest house made a moral judgement that is at variance with that of most of the population. In this instance the facts are not in question, only the moral rules applied. But if we take away the right of a guest-house owner to apply their own moral rules, it does not follow that they will instead apply ours. They will, like the rest of our society, retreat into jobsworthism and deem all behaviour not actually illegal to be none of their business. (I would go further - even illegal behaviour will be tolerated unless the police can effectively prevent it, since they are the professionals and as private people it is "none of our business")
I would like to see it accepted that making moral judgements is always our business, whether we are full-backs, B&B proprietors, or bankers. We won't all be applying the same moral rules, but that can't be helped. The only choice is between personal morality or no morality.

I do accept that while the discrimination at the B&B might seem harmless enough in Cookham, it would be a very different matter if gays faced "not wanted" signs at every turn.

So to see the other side, take the case of Constance McMillen, who wanted to dress in a tuxedo and take her girlfriend to a school dance. In Fulton, Mississippi. The school cancelled the prom rather than let her attend, and when a private alternative was arranged, she was deceived into going to the wrong venue.

While I would say that the immediate problem is that she wanted to socialise with people who didn't want to socialise with her, and that's a game she can never win, I have to admit that, dances aside, life in Fulton doesn't look very attractive for Ms McMillen. How would she get by without protection from anti-discrimination law?

I fear she might have to leave. I don't say that lightly; I know it's an imposition. But after all, I'm not even talking about the hypothetical case of there not being anti-discrimination law, I'm talking about the actual case, given the US law that prevented the school holding the event without her in the first place. Such laws do not effectively protect anyone, unless they want to spend their lives fighting their neighbours on behalf of the central state. There must obviously be somewhere she can go - for the sort of laws we are talking about even to be possible, the wider population must generally support the tolerance the law mandates.

The less obvious point is that, while the existence of anti-discrimination law doesn't much help Constance McMillen, the absence of such law wouldn't much help Suzanne Wilkinson. If Chris Grayling were to repeal the law he voted for, thereby allowing Wilkinson to advertise "No Gays" at her B&B, I strongly suspect that none of the brochures or listings she advertises in would take her money. If she wanted to take a political stand, she could, but if she wanted to carry on a quiet business in accordance with her preferences, a lack of cooperation, and the attrition of local hostility, would mean she would probably not be able to.

I sympathise with her in just the same way as I sympathise with McMillen. There isn't, to me, one side of this which is "pro-freedom" while the other is "anti-freedom"; rather, the cases really are symmetrical - both women want to make their own choices in an arena that is in the wide grey area between the private and the public, and they both are prevented, as a result of being culturally out of step with their communities. One community has the law behind it, and the other against it, but the practical power of the law is very limited, in both cases, compared to the day-to-day weight of the community's standards. (John Stuart Mill made quite a point of the fact that community attitudes could be a lot more restricting than actual law).

If the presence or absence of discrimination law does not make much practical difference, either to Suzanne Wilkinson or to Constance McMillen, then what is it for? Like so many laws, it is primarily meant to send a message, to change attitudes. In the words of the song that passed for a morning hymn when I was in primary school,

And now a child
Can understand
This is the law
Of all the land
(All the land!)

A child can understand that Suzanne's preference is not respectable, while Constance's is, because acting on the one is illegal, and on the other legally protected, in all the land, even Mississippi.

My knee-jerk libertarian response is that that is not a legitimate reason for passing a law. But that is dogma and would need some kind of supporting argument.

If we accept that the law is there to shape attitudes rather than to simply prevent the specific things it prohibits, that puts new moral rules on a different footing from old moral rules. Nobody decided that it is now perfectly OK for a man to sleep with his friends' girlfriends, the way that we have generally decided that it is now perfectly OK for a man to sleep with another man. However, in order to chase those who are deemed to be behind the times, the acceptability of homosexuality, and the unacceptability of discriminating against homosexuals, have been reinforced with anti-discrimination laws. The unacceptability of taking over your friends' women bears no such official imprimatur, and so, without our really deciding that it's unimportant, it loses standing from the contrast.

The law is meant to send the message that integrating homosexuals into mainstream activities is good, and excluding them is bad. I don't have any objection to that message. But is that the message that is really sinking in to our consciences? Or is the real message, instead, that our private moral judgements are to be kept to ourselves, and not acted on in public? Is the message, in fact, that Wayne Bridge has no legitimate grievance against John Terry, who, unlike Suzanne Wilkinson, has done nothing illegal, and that he should therefore shake Terry's hand and play for England?

And is the message that Margaret Moran didn't break any rules when she claimed for her house in Southampton? Is the message that I shouldn't give a second thought to the role I played in the crash of 2008, since I was a professional and I followed the rules? Broken families and broken banks are just things that happen sometimes - maybe the rules need to be changed. If people followed the rules, then nothing else can be done.

That's morality of a sort, and it works after a fashion, but I'm not convinced it's better than what went before.

Shirky on Complexity

2010-04-03T15:25:00.003Z

Clay Shirky has written another essay about the future of media. It's main point is that big established businesses will not adapt to the new media marketplace because it's actually impossible for them to reshape their large corporate structures to meet the new need. That's a good argument, but a familiar one - it's the essence of "disruptive innovation", and it's something Tim B Lee has been saying for a while.

What's new to me, though, is the analogy he introduces the idea with. He cites Joseph Tainter as arguing that a similar process applies to societies - they become more productive by being more complex, but when they become overcomplex, it's not possible for them to simplify instead, and they must eventually collapse.

"Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some"

That's horribly persuasive. It needn't even be, as Shirky puts it, that the elites add more complexity beyond the point where it adds value. If circumstances change so that the previously optimal level of complexity is now excessive, the result is the same.

If there's one reason why libertarians tend to be in software, it's that software is more complex than other things humans design (since it doesn't have to be actually built), and that programmers are therefore more aware that complexity is a cost. The biggest cost of adding a feature to a piece of software is not the time you spend making it, it's the fact that your software is now more complex, and everything else you do with it in future is made more difficult by that complexity. Similarly, the biggest cost of adding a government program is not what you immediately spend on hiring people to do it, it is that you have made government bigger, in a way that is almost impossible to reverse when changes in the world or changes in what you want to do demand it.

Of course, saying that government cannot be simplified at the margin is just another way of saying that libertarian politics cannot be successful. The only people with any approach that can succeed in the face of Tainter's theory are these guys.

The Labour Theory of Value

2010-03-30T20:40:00.002Z

EconLog has some chatter about the Labour Theory of Value.

That's always been a problem for me - I've never understood how anyone could have believed it.

However, thinking about it now, I think I've worked it out. Try this:

Premise 1. A reasonable definition of the value of something is the price that it will fetch in a perfectly competitive ideal free market. (I think this is true).

Premise 2. In a perfectly competitive ideal free market, the price of something will approach its marginal cost of production. (this is also true).

Conclusion. The value of something is its marginal cost of production

That looks logically sound. If two things are both equal to a third thing, then they are equal to each other. An intelligent person might well be fooled by that argument.

It's not logically sound though, because the perfectly competitive ideal free market doesn't just set the "right" price for whatever randomly gets produced, it causes certain things to be produced and other things not to be produced.

Premise 2 should read, "The price of something produced in a perfectly competitive ideal free market will approach its marginal cost of production." The cost of production of something produced not in a perfectly competitive ideal free market (in the real world, for instance) does not tell you what price it would fetch if it happened to land in a PCIFM.

(I've skipped over the equating of the marginal cost of production of something with the labour needed to make it, by counting a share of the capital cost as being "dead labour", because I think that's OK, though I'm not sure it's useful).

Peter Kellner on Democracy

2010-03-30T05:20:00.003Z

Peter Kellner is an expert on British Democracy. President of YouGov polling company, formerly political analyst of Newsnight, visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, author of books about the system from "Callaghan: The Road to Number 10" in 1976 to "Democracy, 1000 years in pursuit of British Liberty" in 2009. As the title of the recent book implies, he not only knows about democracy, he is in favour of it.

How does he reconcile those two things?

[...] George Canning, who was briefly prime minister in the 1820s, gave a speech defending rotten boroughs. One of his points was that rotten boroughs like Old Sarum, which had two MPs and no residents, produced some of the finest parliamentarians of the late 18th and early 19th century: people like William Wilberforce and William Pitt. Canning argued that if you did away with the rotten boroughs you would lower the quality of the House of Commons. Of course, this is an exact parallel to the arguments about the reform of the House of Lords today. And in a way he had a real point: so it demonstrates why, if one is a democrat, it is important to stick to the principle of democracy. Because if you get into the functionality, if you say the principle is to get the best people or the best government, you might well end up arguing against democracy, which has to be defended as a good in itself.

(my emphasis). Democracy is good in itself - even if, nay, even though, it demonstrably produces worse outcomes than its alternatives.

So that's how. Read the whole thing at Five Books.

James Lovelock

2010-03-29T23:01:00.003Z

Apparently James Lovelock is saying that democracy will have to be "put on hold for a while" in order to deal with climate change.

I don't need to write much, I can refer my readers to the answer I gave previously the last time this idea was raised.

I would just add that the idea that democracy is a good way of managing everything except the climate seems about as likely as the idea that it's a good way of deciding everything except MP's salaries.

Agatha Christie in the 21st Century

2010-03-28T19:00:00.002Z

Thanks to the cornucopia that is ITV3, and the regular addition to my living room of an elderly relative, I now find myself many an evening watching that staple of entertainment, the mystery drama. Taggart and Lewis make frequent appearances, but more evenings than not, of course, there is a television adaptation of the books of the best-selling author of all time, Agatha Christie.

Television has been adapting Agatha Christie for almost as long as there has been television. I first saw them played for laughs, in films with Margaret Rutherford or Peter Ustinov. Next, they was played very straight, in the early Joan Hickson Marples. The emphasis moved in the 1990s towards making them primarily period dramas, with a focus on costumes, cars, and architecture, particularly in the David Suchet Poirots with the strong Art Deco theme.

Recently, in the later Suchet Poirots and the Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie Marples, the producers have turned their attention to social commentary, and to showing off their own cleverness, rejecting the purist faithful-to-the-books approach that was dominant in the 1990s.

The new spirit shows itself most crudely and obviously in the Russell-Daviesesque spicing of every story with a piquant extra sprinkle of gay sex. What's more interesting is the adjusting of the social environment of the stories to be more like the programme makers' (or the audience's) impressions of the period, rather than those of Agatha Christie, who, after all, only lived in it.

A good example is the recent Five Little Pigs. In this, Poirot (David Suchet) investigates the cold case of the murder of a celebrated painter, at the request of his daughter, who learned only on coming of age that her mother had been convicted of poisoning her father.

The story is set in the 1930s. We all know murderers were hanged back then, so the 2003 TV production shows us the execution of Caroline Crale, complete with kicking feet, all the better for us to understand the inhumanity of all eras before the 1960s enlightenment. Agatha Christie, with no such agenda, had the sentence commuted, though the wrongly-convicted murderess dies of natural causes a few years later in order to keep her out of the way of Poirot's investigation.

The daughter, in the book, is concerned to reassure her fiance that she will not inherit insane or murderous tendencies. Such a concept is too far-fetched for the 21st century, much more so than the usual intricate coincidences of a whodunnit. The ITV girl is more interested in justice and vengance, and by pulling a gun on the real murderess, displays the very attributes that her literary counterpart was most anxious to disclaim.

An even more interesting plot variation was in the 2009 Geraldine McEwan version of Nemesis, which I saw last week. This was the last Miss Marple novel written, published in 1971 - closer to our own time than to the long-gone world of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Like Christie's other late novels, it expresses the culture shock to her generation caused by the demolition of class barriers and the other changes of the 1960s.

The setting for the denoument of the novel is a house occupied by three sisters, living (like Miss Marple herself) on a small inherited income. Such rentiers were frequent characters in the Christie oeuvre, but they do not exist in the modern world, and are almost too alien to be understood by modern audiences. They were eliminated from Britain deliberately, as a matter of explicit government policy. (Indeed, their appearance in the late Christie novels is quite possibly an anachronism).

The reason for eliminating the rentier class was that it was seen as parasitic and unjust. Why should some people be allowed to live while contributing nothing at all to society, when the vast majority have to work for a living? As taxes and inflation rose, the prospect of living long-term from capital alone was restricted to the super-rich.

That certainly made sense at the time, and if we now lived in a society without a non-working parasite class, I think we could all look back at the destruction of the rentier and applaud. But in the context of the much larger class of parasites who live more richly than the Miss Marples of the world ever did, not from their own jealously preserved capital but on the taxes of the shrinking proportion of working people, envy of the spinster with her few hundred a year in 2½% consols seems as quaint as the air of suspicion and fear that surrounded Christie's occasional homosexual characters.

The rentiers cannot return, however. With a house and 25k a year in investment income, one could live and even raise a family. At current house prices and bond yields, that represents a capital of less than a million pounds - probably within reach of 1 or 2 percent of the population. It doesn't happen, though. Inflation always threatens to wipe out any low-yielding investment, and after-tax inflation-adjusted returns are generally negative. The normal expectation of the better off is to build up a private pension and convert it to an annuity on retirement, but handing on a living income to the next generation is an impossibility.

And indeed, even if it were possible to live from capital without consuming it, it would be stupid. Why attempt to preserve a windfall for the future, watching most of it leak away in taxes and inflation, when one can get full value for it today as a holiday, a car and a new TV, and the welfare state will fill up any gap in the future?

The rentiers were raised to look down on working for a living — an attitude that cannot be said to be socially beneficial. But the partners of that attitude were thrift and independence, and it does not seem that those virtues can survive without the offer of a life of ease as a reward.

And the destruction of inherited wealth has not even had much impact on inequality. The society that no longer accords status to those who preserve capital, instead gives it to the "wealth-creators" who make incomes a hundred times the average and burn through it in orgies of consumption, since it makes no more sense for them to save than it does for the successors of the rentiers. Is the executive who works 70 hours a week for his seven-figure package, most of which goes on supercars, jets, and designer clothes, really any better for the rest of us than the gentleman who dabbles in business while keeping his patrimony safe? Possibly a little, but not, I fear, enough to compensate for the example that is set for the rest of us.

All that might seem a vast tangent from ITV3, but the questions I asked (and didn't answer) are the ones that viewers will not be asking themselves, because Nemesis in the 2009 version strikes not in the now-mysterious surroundings of the last of the rentiers, but instead among the licensed weirdness of a religious order, whose sinister initates are, all regular ITV3 viewers know, capable of any crime.

Advertising Agency

2010-02-17T16:26:00.002Z

This is nothing to do with the Anomaly advertising agency. It's not my fault; I've been writing under this heading since 2003, and on this site since 2004. Paul Graham formed the Anomaly UK advertising agency in 2009 (Britannica). Note, that's not the same Paul Graham that I've written about previously, the technologist and essayist.

I write here about politics: mostly these days about the problems of democracy itself. There's a kind of summary here

Much more interesting than some advertising agency, which if you really want you can find here

Anomaly UK

A Case for Ispettore Zen

Monarchism and Stability in the Middle East / North Africa

Diane Abbot

AI, Human Capital, Betterness

Relevance of AI

Speculations regarding limitations of Artificial Intelligence

Not Much

Detaching from politics

Queens and Kings

Nothing To Envy

Freemail

Who has the power to authorise perjury?

Slavery

Public Order

Weak leaders and bad leaders

Behind the Phone Hacking story

Froude on Democratic War

Left and Right

What a Shame

One Man One Vote

Goings-on in Kakul

Charlie Veitch

On Pageantry

Theology of the Arab Spring

Neofeudalism

Authority and Anarchy

Secular Reaction

Political Formula

Aretae's A-G

Practical Matters

The AV vote

The Fukushima Dissenter

On Over-Mighty Subjects

Robert Heinlein

Kinds of Monarchy

Justice and Fairness

Politics or Rules-Manipulation?

Edmund Burke on the Libya situation

A Clockwork Orange

Actually Existing Monarchy

75 dead in power station disaster

Repost

Anomaly UK

Why you should be a reactionary

Two points from Ezra Klein

99% chances

Whatever2AV

Car Insurance

Blogroll

Degenerate Formalism

Immigration Poll

On the Interests of Absolute Rulers

Nick Clegg Forgets to Pretend

Anonymous versus HBGary

Fascism and Democracy

Carl Schmitt

Belgium under Royal rule

John Gray on Rights

Climate Roundup

Friedman (D) on Rights

Cable and the Cables

"Egalitarian Monarchism"

Liu Xiaobo again

Assange's Theory

The Royal Engagement

Effects before causes in the lab?

Libertarian Politics

Tweakers and Pioneers

Non-violent revolution

The Nobel Peace Prize

A Strong Criticism of Monarchy

Devaluation of Significance

The story of real science

Originality and Science

What they want to hear

Lysenkoism

Thoughts on the World Cup

On Holiday

Right Conduct