Screeds and Quibbles

On Big Money in US elections

2012-02-27T14:16:00.000+01:00

From across the Atlantic, I find the fuss about Big Money contributions in US elections somewhat puzzling. All the critics seem to take it for granted that more money = more votes. But no one really analyses the mechanism by which this comes about.

Having more money to spend on campaigns only buys more attention (TV advertising, mainly) not actual votes. On the face of it, this does this not undermine voters' freedom and autonomy (anymore than any other advertising). Critics of Big Money seem to rely on an implicit assumption about the intellectual laziness or gullibility of at least a large number of American voters who, it is supposed, not only will believe anything they see on TV, but are more likely to believe it and act on it the more often it is repeated. But if that assumption is correct, then American democracy has a problem that no campaign finance reform law can fix: its voters are mindless automatons unfit to exercise judgement on political matters.

If one rejects that repugnant conclusion (!) then one needs to give a different and better account of what is wrong with Big Money speaking its mind about political issues.

Why should we care about Syria?

2012-02-09T12:06:00.000+01:00

Apparently there's a big hullabaloo going on in Syria right now - maybe you heard about it? Several thousand people have been killed and America is pushing for sanctions at the UN. There are videos of government thugs and tanks attacking protesters all over the internet, and a number of human rights activists are being very vocal about how awful it all is and that 'something must be done'.
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Why libertarian politics is an oxymoron, but the libertarian perspective is still worth having

2012-02-08T13:15:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Ron Paul, libertarian politics is enjoying some popularity and mainstream exposure in America these days. Its monochromatic world-view appeals, like Marxism in generations past, to people fed up with 'politics as usual'. It seems especially attractive to students, most of whom have very little understanding of politics at all. So it seems worth pointing out that the reasons for the appeal of libertarianism are also why libertarian politics is a dead end.
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How much tax should we pay to stop global warming?

2012-01-30T12:38:00.002+01:00

Dealing with global warming, and environmental problems in general, has naturally become less popular during the economic recession. The idea is that even if it would be nice to protect the environment, just like it would be nice to end world poverty or cure cancer, we have other more urgent priorities like preserving and rebuilding the economy. So raising taxes on fossil fuel use to spend on government interventions, or imposing regulations like fuel efficiency standards and pollution controls that would raise prices for consumers, is an expensive luxury we can't afford.

This is based on a misconception. Carbon taxes are not like regular taxes where we, via our democratic representatives, decide that something should be done (end child poverty) and then look around to see how we can raise money to pay for it. Rather, carbon taxes are designed not to be political. They are supposed to represent the true price of carbon in terms of the costs that one person's consumption behaviour imposes on the rest of us. To put it another way, the present price is a fantasy price in which your private consumption is subsidised by your neighbours; peasants in India; and future generations.

Elections are about values, not interests

2012-01-06T16:33:00.001+01:00

A lot of people think that democracy is about you getting stuff you want. American lefties in particular have become increasingly obsessed with the idea that Americans are being manipulated into voting against their rational class interests (for free health-care, welfare benefits, etc). e.g. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? which suggests that conservatives have tricked voters into voting about values (gay marriage etc) rather than their better economic interests.

Wealth is a terrible way of measuring success

2012-01-02T22:08:00.002+01:00

We all love money because we can use it to buy the things we want. But in a capitalist system money can go wrong. People start to obsess about how much money they have compared to other people - they see it as a measure of their importance and success. The problem is that using money as a status good undermines its proper economic role and distorts the economy as a whole.
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Tiger mothers and the bamboo ceiling

2011-12-24T19:50:00.000+01:00

It has been noted that members of certain ethnic groups in the West, most prominently South-East Asians, perform far above the average academically but are then underpresented at senior management level in business and government (e.g.). This so called 'bamboo ceiling' thus mirrors the infamous 'glass ceiling' describing the same phenomenon for women. In explaining this both overt discrimination and implicit stereotyping are obviously significant, as may be 'cultural' factors such as unfamiliarity with the importance of informal networking for career progression for those brought up in 1st generation immigrant families (e.g.). But there may be a 3rd under-explored cause: academic achievement is just not a good guide to actual abilities.
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The super rich are bad for democracy and capitalism

2011-12-21T16:14:00.001+01:00

Democracy is fundamentally government by and for the middle-class. The heart of a flourishing democratic society is equality of political status. The brain of a democracy is a shared concern and commitment to making things better for everyone, i.e. an orientation to co-operation even with people you disagree with. When some people are so rich that they don't need to cooperate anymore and can use their wealth to buy outsize political influence, e.g. to tilt the economic rules even further in their favour, democracy dies.
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Political egalitarianism meets economics

2011-12-16T22:36:00.000+01:00

Politicians allow us to believe that it is up to us to decide the principles on which our society runs. But political principles like equality must still be somehow reconciled to the way the world really works, and especially, how much it costs. Take university education. Many European democracies are committed to the ideal of free access to education for all. But that is astonishingly expensive. Public economics 101 says that anything that is expensive will be rationed, one way or another.
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If women do the spending, does it matter that they don't do the earning?

2011-12-14T22:45:00.000+01:00

In western countries there is a persistent gap between men and women's earnings in favour of men. Of course much of that is due to the types of work women do (especially their concentration in the public sector, the 'caring professions', and part-time work). But then, the type of work women do and the status and pay it receives is itself a matter of gender justice. Why is it that 'feminine' jobs tend to pay less than masculine jobs with the same educational requirements? Doesn't the fact that women are far more likely to work full-time relate to an injustice in the division of household labour, particularly child-care, that is unpaid and thus unrecognised? In any case, even after 'correcting' for all this the gap between men and women's wages for the same work is still round 15% (OECD average for median full-time workers).

On the other hand, women are in charge of most household discretionary spending. Estimates of the proportion of such spending by women range from up to 85% in the US, to 65% worldwide (note that unlike the statistics for pay this is not a ratio of men to women - that would be 1:6). That explains why so much advertising is directed at women: they're the ones making consumption choices, not only for themselves, but on behalf of their families. Is this also a matter of gender justice?

Looked at one way, shopping takes time and is cognitively (and even physically) onerous, and so can be considered yet another form of unremunerated labour foisted on women. But looked at another way, there is surely much power in being the one who gets to decide on everything from which car insurance package to buy or which drapes. After all, don't we normally consider that the point of earning your own income is that you get to decide how it is spent? It would seem that a full gender justice analysis of the economy should include not only how gender relates to the composition of household income, but also how household consumption is gendered.

Cosmopolitan quirks: the strange attraction of 3rd countries

2011-12-11T17:01:00.001+01:00

It is commonly noted that immigrants feel an ambivalence to their host country, both in terms of loyalty and in terms of being interested in its cultural and political goings on. Supposedly this is because they retain a strong interest in their old country. Perhaps that is true, but it may also be the case that they aren't all that interested in the old country either. Sometimes the cosmopolitan experience may bring an entirely different 3rd country to the fore as a focus of attention.
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National sovereignty and finance

2011-11-23T15:48:00.001+01:00

A lot of people are whingeing these days about how 'the markets' and international financial institutions like the IMF and European Central Bank are usurping national sovereignty and democratic principles by imposing all sort of terrible things. What a lot of self-deluding cant. It is not the case that these external forces stole your national sovereignty. Rather you threw it away and this is the result.
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Illegal immigrants do jobs Americans don't want to do?

2011-11-10T18:28:00.000+01:00

There is a strange idea that illegal immigrants do jobs Americans don't want to do because the jobs are too icky, strenuous, or difficult for the delicate sensibilities of modern Americans coddled from birth. Things like meat-rendering and fruit-picking. Huh? Has no one noticed that these jobs come without benefits or often even minimum wage? The only people who could want these jobs are illegal immigrants who are prevented by law from even thinking about better options.

These are jobs that have been designed for illegal immigrants. This is not an accident. This is not a failure of the American work ethic. This is a business plan built in the finest traditions of Gilded Age capitalism: the deliberate and brutal exploitation of labour with the connivance of state power. Decades of lobbying on the part of these industries has shaped the rules and regulations responsible for the monstrosity now before us, from half-assed immigration enforcement, to special exemptions from health and safety rules and minimum wage legislation. These companies want to maximise the benefits of their low low wages in the form of low low prices for the consumer, and so they have brought China's sweatshops into America's fields and industrial parks. Strange that it has taken a wave of irrational and rather racist nativism to bring this into the light of day.

Here's an idea. Why don't you test whether it's the work that American's don't want to do, or the job that's not good enough. Try paying wages that can support a basic standard of living and then see.

Conservatives had a point about the authenticity of homosexuality

2011-11-07T16:05:00.002+01:00

Liberals long argued that homosexuality was not a choice, and that people should have the right to live as who they really were. Conservatives were accused of hyprocrisy because they argued that whether or not people were naturally homosexual was irrelevant to how they should behave and how society should treat them.
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Feminism, marriage, and income inequality

2011-11-06T16:00:00.000+01:00

Let's simplify marriage formation greatly and say that people grade each other, consciously or otherwise, on a scale of 1-10 for attractiveness, and that while some individuals are prone to eccentricities (such as racial or religious preferences), the grades are relatively consistent. People then try to marry people with the same grade or higher, which means generally in a well-functioning marriage market, the same grade.
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Outsourcing is driven by fear of commitment

2011-11-03T15:19:00.002+01:00

What's so scary about 'outsourcing'? After all there's nothing new about it. It's just using what we normally call 'the market' to co-ordinate transactions instead of command hierarchies internal to firms. We know there are limits to the extent of the market (i.e. 'oursourcing') because firms haven't yet 'dissolved' into the market and are unlikely to. There are good economic reasons for firms to persist. 1) to minimise the transaction costs associated with using the market (such as trust, contracting, and uncertainty), and 2) to maximise the positive value of a firm's social capital, such as its tacit knowledge about how to do carry out complex tasks. Since we already have the market and yet we still have firms

Now conditions can change the economics of the relationship between firms and the market. In particular, market transaction costs can be reduced by technology (allowing Indian call-centre employees to answer British customers) and improved institutions (better legal systems, Intellectual Property protections, etc). But as the Economist magazine points out, there are still limits to outsourcing, and the world may already be at or beyond the limits of its efficient use. The problem is that if you want to maintain close control of a key aspect of your business, then market contracts are not a good way of ensuring that. Your ability to exercise close control of your sensitive information; monitor and enforce your quality standards; or adapt quickly to changing circumstances are all undermined.

The reason we should be afraid of outsourcing is not because of its ruthless relentless business-economic logic. Rather we should be afraid of it exactly because its popularity is largely unconnected to economic efficiency (and hence economic limits) and is driven instead by a moral pathology which is much harder to reason with.
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So NOW it's the 99%?

2011-11-01T22:55:00.000+01:00

40 years ago the American middle-class abandoned the working class to rot. And now it has the nerve to express solidarity with the rest of the 99%?
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Fair Trade coffee tastes like poor people

2011-11-01T22:07:00.001+01:00

Some people appear to believe that we can solve global problems like entrenched poverty through tiny shifts in our personal consumption habits. Basically, like we solve all our problems these days.

The idea is to de-commodify commodities so that our assessment of them integrates the circumstances of their production, such as the processes (as in organic food) or the people producing it (as in Fair Trade products). That means that when we consume such products we are explicitly directed to taste the circumstances of production as well as their intrinsic qualities. Hence, Fair Trade coffee tastes like poor people. Somewhat bitter.

While FT coffee is supposed to taste like poor people, the discerning palate may also detect the saccharine sweetness of rich people's good intentions combined with the sourness of futility.

Conservatives are communitarians, not freedom lovers

2011-10-28T22:43:00.000+02:00

The Tea Party alliance between libertarians and conservatives gives the misleading impression that conservatives care about individual freedom. In fact this is only an alliance of convenience. Conservatives care about communities, not individuals. They want to preserve a thick normative cohesive ethnic way of life. The reason they object to allowing individuals the freedom to behave unconventionally is that they fear it will undermine their way of life (a way of life firmly situated in a non-existent but deeply cherished recent past). That's why they objected to mixing races and women pursuing non-traditional work in the past. That's why they still object to recreational drugs, unconventional sexual behaviour, and 'foreign' religions. Conservatives (of whichever political party) have always seen the constitution and bill of rights first and foremost as tools for furthering their freedom to live their way of life, which includes using the constitution to protect that way of life from liberal attempts to give individuals the rights and resources to decide for themselves how to live.

In contrast both libertarians and liberals care about individual freedoms, though they interpret this differently. Liberals believe that freedom for individuals is best provided through society, in the form of institutions and resources, and also restrictions that enable more valuable choices for more people (like minimum wage or work safety laws). Libertarians take the more extreme view that individual freedom requires freedom from society as well, even if the results aren't as beneficial for what individuals are actually able to achieve.

So it is not surprising that the libertarians are out there objecting to ObamaCare. What is surprising is that anyone would think that the conservatives in the Tea Party care about the principle of freedom for individuals enshrined in the US constitution. Conservatives are generally uninterested in the structure of power and rights. Rather they are concerned with who is in power. ObamaCare is structurally almost identical to a Republican party plan from the 1990s. The problem conservatives have with it is not its 'attacks' on individual freedoms and constitutional rights, but that the person in charge isn't one of them.

Sustainability is not the aggregation of all things nice

2011-10-27T20:39:00.000+02:00

Sustainability is about the ability of a system to maintain current levels of output. That gives it a neutral and focused remit. However, some people seem to think of sustainability in terms of a general theory of the good. Things which are nice are called 'sustainable'; things that are bad are not. One can then aggregate all the nice things in the world minus all the bad things and call the result 'sustainability'.

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Middle-aged ethics

2011-10-23T13:41:00.000+02:00

University students are notorious for their liberalism. They generally believe in universal principles like justice; believe that progress is possible and want to be a part of it; have faith that human nature is basically good; are tolerant of differences between cultures and religions; and are display an open-minded willingness to learn from others. Politically this show up in their left-of-centre voting choices. 15 years later, things are rather different. Then they are far more conservative and inward-oriented. Why? Two core mechanisms are property and children.

Property seems to bring out the selfish side of people. It's one thing to think that there is a place for everyone in the world, it's another thing when 'different' people move into your neighbourhood and you have to worry about the resale value of your house. University students feel sorry for homeless people and volunteer at soup kitchens. Middle-aged home owners call the police anonymously and have them moved on when they see them sleeping in the park.

Children also narrow one's focus. Not only do people suddenly start holding very strong views about what should be done to anyone who hurts them (like drunk drivers and Catholic priests), but a whole range of issues that indirectly affect children suddenly become of intense and not always honourable interest. The 'bad' or slow children holding up your child's progress in school; the teachers who refuse to recognise their potential; people who own dogs, or smoke on the porch, or swear, or look 'different' (as if they might use drugs), or have any kind of alternative lifestyle that might seduce their cherubs from the narrow path to success.

Advertisers should pay you

2011-10-20T16:20:00.000+02:00

Why is advertising so annoying? Because it is founded on a market failure. Your attention is being bought and sold by 3rd parties, and as a result the advertising industry underprices its value to you. The result is that the cost of advertising to advertisers is too low, and thus an excess amount of advertising is produced which wastes the precious commodity of your valuable attention by distracting you with information you don't want or need. It's the same basic problem as pollution by factories of neighbouring streams and rivers or excessive resource extraction of commons (like global fisheries).
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On rudeness

2011-10-12T17:41:00.000+02:00

David Cameron believes rudeness is on the rise in Britain:

There is just incredible incivility in this country… people are rude to each other… public discourse is so bad mannered… we have come to assume and resign ourselves to the fact that civility is on a permanent and inevitable downward slide.[2007]

What he thinks we need are more responsible adults and stronger communities, which government can achieve by offering incentives.

This whole approach is based on a mistaken idea about rudeness, that there are rude people and normal people, and that something must be done about the rude people to make them more normal. In fact, the overwhelming majority of perceived incidents of rudeness are acts of thoughtlessness by 'normal people' (you and I, dear reader). The problem is that in crowded places where people are focused on doing their own thing (such as commuting or shopping) we cut across each other's paths without realising it. In other words the problem of rudeness is a problem of other people in general in a harried hurried crowded society, not a problem of a particular class of other people. We are a nation of backpacked tourists looking at our maps in the subway in rush-hour. Not a nation of haters.

Addressing that would seem to have much less to do with providing incentives for individuals to become better people (however that is supposed to work!); or to families/communities to bring up better-mannered children (do families/communities currently lack sufficient motivation for this?). Rather it has to address the general culture of thoughtlessness among the very people who are complaining so much about the decline of civility. Civility requires empathy with the perspective of others in public spaces and recognition of how one's actions affect them. This has little to do with incentives.

Medical marajuana: The war on pleasure

2011-10-10T01:20:00.000+02:00

Obama, in a quote from ages ago I just came across:

My attitude is if the science and the doctors suggest that the best palliative care and the way to relieve pain and suffering is medical marijuana then that's something I'm open to ....But I want to do it under strict guidelines. I want it prescribed in the same way that other painkillers or palliative drugs are prescribed.

The reduction of pain is acceptable and will be treated with bitter-tasting pills and soothing gels supplied by legislators' dear friends, Big Pharma. The seeking of pleasure by individuals is an unacceptable threat to society and the economy and will continue to be banned. On this the solid moral majority of democrats and republicans seem to agree. Those who think medical legalisation is a route to genuine grown-up liberalism don't seem to have grasped this.

American elections: the greatest cheapest show on earth

2011-10-08T16:22:00.000+02:00

With the advent of first the first billion dollar presidential election in 2004, followed by the first 2 billion dollar election in 2008, and the predicted billion dollar presidential campaigns in 2012, it might seem that US election spending is an out of control arms race and that all parties would benefit from some mutual constraints.
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Steve Coogan's The Trip

2011-10-05T23:00:00.000+02:00

Steve Coogan could compete in the Olympics for embarrassing awkwardness (an event the British could finally win). Awkwardness is of course a sign of virtue, and by means of it Coogan brilliantly conveys a deeply human character through his performance of agonised self-centredness.

This British style road trip movie is a splendid celebration of the ordinary that was so effective that on leaving the cinema I had the eerie feeling for some hours that I was trapped in the movie myself. It makes one see one's ordinary actions and conversation, and all one's ums and ahs, as if from the 3rd person, and as something worth thinking about. Fortunately this passed.

How I met your mother is a study in psychopathology

2011-10-02T15:15:00.000+02:00

How I met your mother is a hit American TV show (one assumes, since it is now in its nth season). Its characters all appear to be pyschopaths.

Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, deceptiveness, and amorality. All the characters exhibit these traits more or less constantly.
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The real consequences of British university tuition fees

2011-09-25T18:04:00.001+02:00

Some silly analysis I saw recently suggested that British kids will be stepping over to mainland Europe for a cheaper education as the new tuition fees bite. But of course that would only ever be the case for a handful of the particularly adventurous (given, among other things, the paucity of quality undergraduate programmes in English in Europe). The real consequence will be first a rise in a consumer identity among students (and parents) and second, unfortunately, a rise in stupid courses and a further decline in actual education.
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The postcode lottery wars

2011-09-24T21:10:00.000+02:00

According to some surveys, 2/3 of the British public are in favour of more local decision making, but at the same time 2/3 expect the same level of services everywhere. Is the British public just plain stupid? Or are they making a distinction here that politicians should pay attention to?
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The ethics of socialist economists

2011-09-23T18:26:00.000+02:00

Recent notice on the frontpage of the Association of Social Economics website:

Please note that Hyatt Regency workers have not had a contract for the last two years and may be picketing the Hyatt Regency. In order not to cross picket lines it is important that ASE members preregister and complete and return the form found on the AEA website asking that your conference materials be picked up at the Swissotel. Your materials will be at the Hyatt unless you complete and return the form to the AEA offices in Nashville. On-site registration is in the Hyatt and might mean crossing picket lines. All ASE sessions are in the Swissotel.

On the one hand it is charming that some people still take picket lines so seriously. Especially in America. On the other hand, is it really respecting a picket line to advise people about how to get around it without being seen to? It seems that ethical norms are understood as constraints that should be incorporated into one's instrumentally rational self-interest maximisation.

Truly an economistic sense of ethics at work.

Minority dictatorship

2011-09-21T20:49:00.001+02:00

Why is it that in certain social settings we find a dictatorship of the minority? For example, when vegans come to dinner and everyone has to eat vegan food. Or when Mormons/Muslims come over and no one can have a beer out of respect for their beliefs?
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Are Americans dumb, or just rude?

2011-09-02T23:12:00.001+02:00

An abundance of anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans* are gormless and uninformed. This includes Canadians, though I feel mean saying so. For example friends and acquaintances may ask someone studying psychology whether they can read minds. Really. If you introduce yourself as an English person who lives abroad, they may say that your English is very good (?!). They don't know the capitals of states in their own country, or what happened in the last election. The evidence is pretty damning.

But I suggest that the evidence is deceptive and actually points to a different and more morally damning failure. Americans are as smart as people anywhere, they're just not paying attention. They are not in the habit of paying attention to authorities who say things that bore them or that they disagree with, such as about climate science or evolution. More egregiously, they're don't even pay attention to the people they're speaking to. It's not that they actually believe that psychologists can read minds, it's that they are reaching for something appropriate to say and they're not prepared to put much effort into it. Such conversational boilerplate has the same status in communication as the routine question 'How are you doing?' from cashiers, or the conclusion to that conversation 'Have a nice day'. It doesn't matter what you say in between - no one is listening.
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Success is a lottery: America's new work ethic

2011-08-29T18:45:00.015+02:00

Max Weber famously described the American work ethic as deriving from the Calvinist leanings of the protestant settlers of New England. Weber's brilliance was in making this counter-intuitive proposition make sense. The Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination says that it doesn't matter what you do - whether you're saved or not has already been decided. You would think this would make people feel helpless and apathetic, but Weber showed how it could actually motivate people to work harder. He thought Americans worked so hard because they wanted to prove to their neighbours that they had been chosen as special by God.The easiest way of doing that was to earn a fortune, through personal thrift, industriousness, and temperance. But not to spend that fortune, since its significance was as a measure of God's blessing, not opulence.

Unfortunately Weber seems to have used Benjamin Franklin's satirical almanac as if it were a straightforward sociological report on the American soul. In any case, if it was once true that American media reflected back an image of a protestant work ethic it now reflects something quite different: success as a lottery. Just about every success story whether of love or money is presented in the media is about luck, being in the right place to be spotted by a handsome prince who is 'the one for you' or literally winning the lottery. America's heroes, from science-fiction to thrillers, come by their special endowment of heroic capabilities by some kind of lottery: they are born special, have some kind of bizarre accident that gives them special powers, get some kind of secret medical drug/treatment, etc. The story focuses on what they should do with their powers, on the ethics of heroism as it were. Rarely do we see a hero who makes himself special, by the kind of long-term commitment and sacrifice that is in fact required for super-human performance (such as in sports).

The problem here is the problem with lotteries. They take you directly from wishing to achieving, without the intermediate steps and hard work of becoming. They are therefore suitable only as fantasy. Indeed this way of understanding the American Dream is, from the current social mobility statistics, increasingly true of the American reality. It is somewhat ironic that while Americans now generally believe that they can achieve anything they set their minds to, they are actually less focussed on or realistic about how to achieve those things and more ready to hope that luck or fate smiles on them than they were in the time of predestination.

The Ugly Reality of Bhutan's Gross National Happiness

2011-08-25T22:46:00.007+02:00

Bhutan is famous for its pursuit of Gross National Happiness, not Gross National Product. How very enlightened. What a wonderful lesson about harmonious living for us in the corrupt consumerist West to learn from the spiritualist Buddhists. Bhutan's example is brought up whenever governments (such as Cameron's in the UK) try to talk about happiness, so it is perhaps worth spending just a moment looking into how great Bhutan really is.

According to Human Rights Watch, not very nice. Their interpretation of happiness is a communitarian one, of going back to Bhutan's true cultural roots, which has had rather unpleasant consequences. Since the late 1980's its government has pursued a sustained policy of ethnic cleansing against their ethnic Nepalese citizens (around 1/6 of the population). This culminated in more than 100,000 living in refugee camps in India and Nepal (though a large number have since been resettled as refugees in the USA and elsewhere). Meanwhile the nearly 100,000 ethnic Nepalis remaining within the country are classified as non-citizens: excluded from voting and by various laws and bureaucratic obstacles such things as identity documents, government jobs, buying or selling land, higher education and business licenses.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so keen to buy the exotic orientalist bullshit of a land where everything is nice and happy and human nature is better. It's like all those European and American communists who spoke rapturously about how wonderful and happy the Soviet Union was back in the 1930s, almost all without ever visiting. Earthly paradises are always located somewhere far away that you instinctively know not to try to find because they really exist only in your imagination.

Shangri-La is a fictional place you know.

True friends....

2011-08-24T21:36:00.004+02:00

Actual Facebook status update:

Friends will tell you what a bad decision you are making. True friends will stand by you no matter what they believe and support you. So, accept me for my strength. Love me for my weakness. Be there for the good and the bad. Remember, I will never be who you want me to become -- I am who I am.

Apparently "true friends" are dogs.

Defending marriage demeans everyone else

2011-08-22T20:57:00.002+02:00

The rational choice craze that has swept through the social sciences and politics can claim another victim in conservative pleas to defend marriage by giving incentives - extra tax-rights and other privileges - to married couples. But first a rational choice approach to marriage is an oxymoron; and second such privileges work not as incentives for marriage but through demeaning the status of other kinds of relationship.
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Reflections on a visit to Israel

2011-08-21T19:25:00.003+02:00

I recently enjoyed a perfectly pleasant and uneventful trip to Israel, which nonetheless brought me to see the country in a new way. I had been used to thinking of it as an abstract way, as the nexus of various political and moral problems. Now I see it as a more real and normal country and, at the same time, a more unique one.
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6 reasons to junk financial news

2011-08-08T21:09:00.000+02:00

What the hell is the point of the financial news?
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Efficient not effective government

2011-08-02T13:10:00.000+02:00

It's not Big Government that's the biggest risk to your rights, liberties, and prosperity. It's effective government.
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What's so great about teaching evolution?

2011-08-01T14:35:00.002+02:00

Religious types hate their children being taught about evolution in school science class because it clashes with their beliefs. On the one hand those beliefs are wrong. On the other hand, however true it is, evolutionary theory is neither useful knowledge or training for children and could be dropped from the curriculum without doing any harm to their education.
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Errors of the market: Books are not widgets

2011-07-20T12:41:00.001+02:00

Modern publishing is littered with mistakes. Not only typos, but also tense agreement, spellings, word ordering, etc. One can find it in glossy magazines, newspapers, academic journals, and even books put out by Tier 1 academic publishing houses like Oxford University Press. What's going on?
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Against the diverse elite argument for affirmative action

2011-07-13T22:05:00.009+02:00

Motivated by Nicolaus Mills' thoughtful piece in Dissent magazine on the past, present and future of affirmative action programmes in American higher education. Mills argues that affirmative action programmes should be concerned with fairness, rather than restitution for historical wrongs or achieving racial diversity.

In the coming years the aim of affirmative action preferences should be to give sympathetic treatment to all students who have started out in life with disadvantages—whether caused by race, poverty, ethnicity, family, or any other sources for which they cannot be held accountable.

There are both practical and ethical problems with this.
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NOW and the wobbling of the entire British establishment

2011-07-12T17:04:00.001+02:00

Rebekah Brooks: "I am shocked, shocked to find that skullduggery is going on at this newspaper. You're all fired."
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Explanation and justification: talking about rape

2011-07-08T15:16:00.002+02:00

After a Toronto police officer told university students back in January that women should avoid “dressing like sluts” if they wanted to be safe from sexual assault a great deal of hue and cry has ensued. His comments have been widely understood as saying that women who dress in a sexually provocative way deserve to be raped. That seems a very strange conclusion to draw and I think it rests on a confusion between prudence and justice that relates to a deeper confusion between explanation and justification.
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Gay sports celebrities in the closet

2011-06-30T22:17:00.001+02:00

Cross-posted on The Philosopher's Beard

The proportion of openly homosexual star performers varies widely from industry to industry even within the same country. In some sports it is astonishingly low. (Soccer has apparently only 1 openly gay player, at a lower ranked Swedish club.) It has been argued that the fact that so few sports celebrities come out as gay demonstrates that these sports must have an extremely homophobic culture and homosexual players have a reasonable fear of being subjected to perhaps violent abuse and discrimination by fans, club management and other players (e.g.). But there is another possible confounding explanation: players may be afraid that their earning power would be undermined by breaking with the macho hetero stereotype.
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Efficiency unemployment

2011-06-23T15:54:00.000+02:00

Human nature being what it is, we all tend to attribute our successes to our own abilities, and our failures to unfortunate circumstances. Contrariwise, other people's successes are due to their luck, but their failures follow from their flawed characters, abilities, and choices. Take unemployment. It is very common for those with a job (the majority) to blame the unemployed for their status: why don't they just get off their asses and stop scrounging off our taxes! This presumes that full employment (jobs for everyone who wants one) is possible, at least in good economic times, and that only individual laziness or cupidity can explain the persistence of unemployment. But this is all wrong. Some unemployment is deliberately built into the system by government economists who believe that it protects the economy from inflationary spirals.
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Public art is an oxymoron

2011-06-18T11:17:00.000+02:00

Public art is said to brighten up dull cities and attract tourists and the 'creative classes' and to civilise and educate the citizens. Utter bunk.
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What's wrong with academia?

2011-06-08T16:14:00.001+02:00

Academia is publishing every greater quantities of research in an ever growing number of journals but the marginal contribution of each new article to human knowledge is declining. Why?

Firstly we have an industrial model of production. Academia has organised itself into an efficient machine for transforming inputs - research time and money - into standardised outputs - publications in peer-reviewed journals. As with any industrial model, the emphasis is on maximising the quantity of output supplied to the knowledge market.

Secondly we have an boutique model of quality evaluation. Academia has organised itself into myriad semi-feudal disciplines and sub-disciplines that disagree comprehensively about empirical foundations and methodology (compare, for example, the enduring incommensurability of economics and psychology, or Austrian and neoclassical economics). As with the arts, it is the producers are the ones who assess the quality - and if you disagree it's because you don't properly understand what this artist is trying to achieve. The quality of knowledge is crudely its truth and significance. Academia's evaluation system produces a relativism about knowledge by making truth derivative upon what the producers themselves think is significant.

The market for ideas cannot work properly so long as success is measured by supply, and so long as demand is defined and controlled by the producers in the market, who 'buy' the knowledge on society's behalf. We will get as many publications as society is willing to pay the producers to make. But true and useful knowledge? That's something else.

Political shibboleths

2011-05-11T18:19:00.001+02:00

Shibboleths are nonsense phrases which serve as passwords to prove membership of a group because no one else knows how to say them. But they need not be limited to tongue-twisters. Another class of shibboleths is growing in popularity and has its own peculiar dangers. Political shibboleths are nonsense beliefs that serve to prove membership of a particular political group, such as 'Obama is a Muslim'. They work because no one else could say them with a straight face, but they are dangerous because they can come true.
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Ding Dong The Witch is dead!

2011-05-04T12:14:00.003+02:00

The public jubilation and triumphalism in America on the death of Osama bin Laden has left many people, including myself, rather nonplussed. Surely celebrating the death of even such a man is itself a barbarous act? At the very least it seems in dreadful taste.
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Monarchy's attraction is emotional not political

2011-04-30T19:01:00.002+02:00

The political point of monarchy is to assign power in a clear but totally arbitrary way - birth order in a particular family - so reducing the interminable struggle for power that is so very costly. Of course governance quality suffers significantly from placing actual power in the hands of someone whose intellectual capacities will be below the median average 50% of the time (high risk of nincompoops), and whose moral capacities cannot help but be affected by the circumstances of pompous entitled elitism in which he is raised and 'trained'.

So it is all to the good that so many countries have found a way to struggle for power through orderly democratic politics and thus made the monarchy politically defunct.

Nevertheless, the monarchy continues to exert a powerful, magnetic emotional attraction on 'the people'. Astonishingly, even vast numbers of Americans seem to have followed the recent British royal wedding with awe and fascination. This from a country which not only chose quite decisively to reject hereditary monarchy as a political system some time ago, but also chose to do so by rejecting this particular monarchy in their founding documents ('George 3rd, piss off').
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What if poor people are like real people?

2011-04-29T17:32:00.001+02:00

Inspired by the excellent piece by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World: But what if the experts are wrong?

Development theory is founded on simplification and quantification, resulting in the assumption of direct simple machine-like relationships between inputs and outputs. Hence the long held belief that famines are caused by lack of food, rather than the inability of some sections of society to be able to acquire food for economic or political reasons.

Hence also the puzzle that widespread hunger represents in the modern world alongside food subsidy programmes even in many poor countries. What these authors show is that when you look closely at how poor people live you see that they do not spend their money 'efficiently' buying the cheapest most nutritious food available. Poor people are not calorie maximising machines. Instead they spend a significant chunk of their tiny budgets on treats - like tasty calories, tvs, mobile phones, festivals, tobacco, alcohol - and go hungry as a result. Because, you know, life in poor places like rural India is really boring and poor people feel that just like real people do.

Slavoj Zizek: enemy of liberalism, friend to violence

2011-04-24T22:14:00.006+02:00

Slavoj Zizek gets a lot of prime media space as he comments on everything from Western hypocrisy over capitalism to the Libyan intervention. Indeed he is a clever and amusing rebel and it is unsurprising that so many nice young people are so attracted by his eccentric musings. Isn't this combination of popularity and unconventionality the very paradigm for the public intellectual in philosophy?
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Cosmopolitan quirks: The joy of irresponsibility

2011-04-22T22:52:00.002+02:00

It is the unfortunate hard truth of politics that one has only one country, and in a democracy it is inescapably demonstrated over and over again that most of the people in your country are dead wrong about nearly everything. As a result your country always heading in the wrong direction - which hurts - and though you really have no power to change that, you can't help feeling co-responsible nonetheless for what your country does and is. What is being done, is done in your name, and you implicitly acquiesce in it. And after all, there is always more you could have done - joined a party, collected petition signatures, written letters to newspapers, demonstrated on the streets, etc.

Consider then the pleasure of the expatriate, living the free life of the cosmopolitan abroad. Sure it's not your country and you are pretty much excluded from its politics, from having any say in its character of policies. But on the other hand, you're not responsible for their mistakes! You can enjoy an 'out of country' experience and float above all that, making clever remarks about principles of justice and liberalism from a position of glorious irresponsibility.

Economist: pro and con

2011-04-20T13:18:00.001+02:00

The Economist Magazine

Pro	Con
Principled commitment to 'Smithian liberalism' - freedom, the poor, democracy, markets, etc.	Neo-liberal moments and quirks e.g. distaste for unions (but why do they hate the BBC so much?). Courage stops at the bottom line. For example they now treat Singapore (an important distribution hub for Asia) with kid gloves after numerous legal suits by its ruling family.
Generally non-ideological attitude to facts (e.g. pragmatic grasp and use of various schools of economics from Keynesian to Chicago to Institutionalist as intellectual resources rather than gospel)	Editors seem unable to tell the difference between business and economics and throw stuff in either section in a pretty ad hoc way.
Cheap! (look for the student subscription offers: it's not lying, it's just a test of price sensitivity that you care enough to look)	Printed on cheap paper that comes apart in your hands; increasing number of typos these days
General commitment to systematic informed analysis rather than 'newsiness' or sentimentalism (this is rare)	Hideous puns as headlines
Covers countries and issues that are not flavour of the moment. i.e. the editors have the confidence to tell you what they think is important and worth knowing about, rather than jump on the bandwagon of what everyone else is talking about right now.	Analysis of 'the popular mood' in a country often closely resembles that of a tiny Westernised elite, and occasionally suggests discussions with airport taxi-drivers.
	Editorial inconsistency - at Christmas and in summer the proper editors seem to go on holiday and leave the magazine in the hands of interns.
Obituaries are awesome - almost random selection but close, unsentimental, and always profoundly humane consideration of the life lived.	Science section is drivel. Special reports are often very weak and sometimes appear to be vehicles to attract advertising.

See also this piece in The Atlantic.

Any more? Suggestions welcome.

The hideous pointlessness of social media reveals what we are like anyway

2011-04-13T14:27:00.000+02:00

A lot of people have been complaining and whining about how Facebook, Twitter, Farmville and so on are not real but soak up lots of our attention. (See here for a particularly fine dissection of Farmville).

Apparently people waste vast amounts of time achieving arbitrary goals set by external (shadowy corporate designers). We put enormous and continuous effort into trying to create interesting profiles and status updates etc that other people will find interesting and 'Like'. We want to be more 'Liked' than other people, even people we have never met. We strive to collect 'points' which have no monetary value in the real world. We even sacrifice things we do care about in the real world, like money and time, to get these things. Oh, no, it's the end of civilisation as we know it!

Except that, actually, isn't all of this pretty much what most people do most of the time in the 'real world'? Points are virtual currency of no use outside a specific context and spending one's life collecting them is a bit silly. But money is just the same. Farmville may seem like a strange form of voluntary drudgery to commit oneself to, with its arbitrary rules and meaningless 'achievements', but so is an awful lot of what we call real 'work'. And as for running your life on the basis of what other people, even strangers, are likely to think of you, well that also seems quite familiar.

Poor countries are boring

2011-04-12T22:34:00.000+02:00

Of course I'm concerned here with the perspective of outsiders. When one visits a rich country one has the opportunity to benefit from the institutions and amusements that the resident middle class has established. For example, in nice bits of London you can't turn a corner without coming across all sorts of delightful things from safe, well-kept parks, to free museums to restored 18th century pubs with microbreweries in the back and avant garde theatre every Sunday afternoon.

One does not find this in poor countries. Instead one finds oneself extraordinarily limited in one's ability to interact normally with one's surroundings. One can hit the extraordinarily limited tourist trail of Taj Mahal type things from the guide-book. Along with all the other tourists and almost no locals. Or one can do the all-included resort thing. One finds in poor countries for example a great lack of restaurants, because there is no local middle-class to support them. That's not to say that there is no interesting local cuisine, but that people are eating it at home, and you will not really be able to try it.
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Cheap divorce, expensive wedding

2011-04-10T22:54:00.001+02:00

Marriage represents a big and risky investment from both parties. One gives up attractive alternatives (opportunity cost). One makes particular investments in one's time and abilities (e.g. career and family choices) whose rate of return depends significantly on the long-term co-operation of one's partner and the quality of their contribution. Marriage in many ways resembles a joint commercial partnership. In order to assess the quality of this partnership - and whether and how much one should invest in it - it makes sense to get a good idea in advance of how committed the other party is.
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The difference between good books and important books

2011-04-07T22:34:00.005+02:00

Horace said that the purpose of literature was to teach and delight. Isn't it strange then that many of the 'great' books of world literature do neither?
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Is science worth it?

2011-04-05T22:49:00.001+02:00

Pure scientific research is expensive. The Large Hadron Collider cost something like $9 billion. The planned Square Kilometre Array - a new kind of high resolution ground based radio telescope - will cost several billion dollars at least. This is the kind of research that helps scientists answer deep questions about the nature of the universe but has almost no possible tangible benefits to the world.
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When is it time to end the hagiography?

2011-04-04T21:13:00.001+02:00

Reading this blistering review of a new Ghandi biography made me wonder about our relationship with our heroes.

1. sapere aude! (dare to know)
Is this an issue of intellectual maturity, as Kant put it about the enlightenment. Does the end of hagiography mean that we have put away our years of childish tutelage and are ready to cope with the truth?

2. Or is it the opposite - a dragging down of heroes into the muck with the rest of us because we can't bear that anyone could live so much better than we are capable of?

3. In any case, is it ever possible to know the real story of our heroes? Is it possible to even investigate the true facts of their lives in a neutral and balanced way without it being an extension of our existing relationship with them?

4. All of the above may also apply to our villains (cf. the condemnation of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem for portraying one of the greatest villains of the holocaust as rather ordinary).

Environmentalists are not really radical

2011-04-02T22:11:00.002+02:00

Because environmentalists often face off against conservative opponents on issues from air and water pollution to habit destruction to global climate change mitigation one may have the misleading impression that environmentalists are somehow 'radical'. In fact they are just another type of conservative.
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Language politics: raising children ignorant

2011-03-31T11:52:00.001+02:00

Many people in linguistic minorities believe that their language is very important to their identity. These people perceive that their language is at risk when other languages become dominant in public life. Quebecois for example are acutely conscious that their province is an island of 6 million French speakers (and 1.5 million 'Anglos') surrounded by 300 million English speakers.

The solution they have come to is two-fold. First, French is the official language and there is an active and enthusiastic language police engaged in preventing outbreaks of English in public spaces.
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Louis Vuitton shop assistants and mad dictators

2011-03-29T20:55:00.000+02:00

People often frown on arms dealers who sell weapons to evil and bat-shit crazy dictators like Robert Mugabe. Those who buy blood diamonds and other natural resources from these guys are also often condemned. Such kinds of activities enable the continued despotism of these tyrants and untold future human misery and suffering. Even the act of dealing with these people and their cronies provides them with implicit legitimacy - that they have the right to sell those diamonds, buy those landmines, etc.

But dictators are not only kept in power by gold and guns. They are human too. Luxury goods play an unacknowledged role in their motivation and the maintenance of their power base among their cronies. Dictator Mugabe's wife likes to fly to Paris on luxury shopping trips, often spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in stores like Lousie Vuitton.

What do you think passes through the mind of a Lousi Vuitton shop assistant in a nice civilised bit of Paris when they see one of these creatures of darkness enter the store? Do they have any qualms selling them what they want? Pushing them to buy more, while knowing that every few thousand dollars probably represents a human life? Are they acting from duty and propriety? Or from greed (being paid on commission)?

If our soldiers are heroes, what are theirs?

2011-03-27T22:31:00.001+02:00

If our cause is just, then our soldiers are in some sense instruments of justice. So long as they do what they are supposed to.

But if our cause isn't just - NATO troops in Afghanistan say - then what can we say about the people our government sends out there to fight. Are they instruments of oppression and thereby personally condemned?

Many people seem to believe that even if the justice of that intervention is contested, we should all agree that our soldiers are heroes. Heroes because they are motivated by love of country and what they do requires great courage. Even if the politicians who sent them should be indicted by the ICC, that's not the soldiers' fault and shouldn't affect our interpretation of their moral standing.

So then, what about the other side? Are the Taliban soldiers also heroes, since they are strongly motivated by their love of country and are also courageous (very courageous I should presume, given their much higher casualty rate)?

At least 2 or 3 people should drown

2011-03-26T23:42:00.004+01:00

Westchester News Programme*
Item: Drownings

Radio guy: The latest statistics from a government body make very surprising reading for residents of the reservoir, canal, and gravel-pit infested Westchester area Over the last 12 months no one from the Westchester region has drowned in lake, river, or pond. Good news you might say. Well you'd be wrong according to local man Neil Tender who joins me in the studio.

Neil: Good evening. I'm trying to draw attention to the massive waste of public money that's led to a situation where absolutely nobody in a whole year drowns by accident. What that must mean in terms of fencing, warning signs, swimming lessons, people coming into school to tell children to be careful, lifebelts and the maintenance of waterside paths is just staggering.

There has clearly been a massive overspend because in any conurbation of up to half a million - such as Westchester - that's run with the proper priorities, at least 2 or 3 people should drown every year.
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Bright Star is a poem not a film

2011-03-25T23:26:00.000+01:00

Every scene is perfect but when put together they make no sense.

It is interesting to see the invidious effects of Romanticism in action. Fanny, the heroine, starts out a strong, intelligent, no-nonsense, self-confident woman with a great talent for dress-making that suggests a bright and economically self-sufficient future.

Then she meets the poet, John Keats, who seduces her with lines drenched with references to mortality and the sweetness of death. Like, "I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but 3 summer days" .

Then he achieves his life's ambition and dies and she ends up wondering the heath by night mumbling lines from his poems and fondling the engagement ring he gave her.

Uggh!

Rich people are no better than the rest of us

2011-03-24T22:59:00.000+01:00

For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? what is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence?.....To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him. At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him. (Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.III.16)

Let them eat their damned cake and shut up about cholesterol

2011-03-23T23:41:00.001+01:00

Orwell on the eating habits of the poor:

The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potato—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?…Yes it would, but the point is, no human being would ever do such a thing.…A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man does not…When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty. Road to Wigan Pier.

Black Swan: less plot, more character

2011-03-22T22:38:00.002+01:00

Unfortunately if one never comes to sympathise with a heroine at the beginning, because even when she is 'normal' she makes no sense, then when she spends the last 30 minutes having gruesome psychotic episodes all it does is make the audience feel uncomfortable.

Injustice and Revolutions

2011-03-21T22:54:00.001+01:00

The lesson of history is that with notable exceptions (USA) the presence of intolerable injustice does not at all mean that a revolution will improve things. In fact, the more civil society has been oppressed and destroyed, the less likely that will be (e.g. Haiti 1804, France 1789, Russia 1917........) Having good motives is not enough to guarantee that a new regime will be any better.

Stability is undervalued by philosophers, but good liberals should be concerned with it as well as democracy, freedom, and justice because without stability, you can't get those other nice things. That's why the best route to sustainable democracy is gradualist. Like in S. Korea, Taiwan, Ghana, etc.You have to take all the powerful vested interests with you (or you get a civil war). Build up civil society and the components of democracy, like a free and trusted press, personal freedoms, independent institutions, etc (or you get only 1 election, for the new president for life).

Egypt and Tunisia seem to taking the gradualist approach after all. The future of Libya seems much more uncertain.

The United States of Wuss

2011-03-20T22:48:00.001+01:00

Apparently Americans are the kind of people who will spend $1 trillion plus and the lives of 6,000 US soldiers to fight the war on terror in other countries, together with at least 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and an uncounted number of Afghans.

But it is shocked, shocked when the war comes to them and they are required to go through bodyscan machines that take nudey pictures. Somehow that's asking too much.

How did that country get to become so great again?

On star labour theory

2011-03-19T22:20:00.001+01:00

There are no true geniuses, only some people who take longer to revert to the mean.

Libya: academia's scramble to refudiate

2011-03-18T22:18:00.011+01:00

Since the Libyan revolution began the scramble by 'respectable' western academic institutions and thought-leaders to refute and repudiate their connections with Qaddafi's dismal regime has been depressing and amusing.
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Against psychobabble with brain pictures

2011-03-17T22:13:00.004+01:00

Target post: When disaster strikes others: How your brain responds: Empathy and coping in the wake of a disaster posted on Fulfillment at Any Age by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor (!) of psychology.

Somehow this drivel got posted on the front page of one of my favourite aggregators, The Browser.The author says when we look at the suffering caused by the Japanese earthquake on tv special empathy bits of our brain activate and this is a good thing. Helpfully she includes a picture of a brain scan. Then she tells us to exercise our empathy muscle and take action to help.
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The privatisation of knowledge: the scandal of academic journals

2011-03-15T22:43:00.003+01:00

Why is it that although nearly all research published in academic journals is funded in one way or another by taxpayers, these journals are nearly all private, commercially run operations that charge high subscription fees and exclude the public from accessing them? And what a lot of money there is to be made charging extortionate fees to university libraries for access to knowledge.

What service exactly do they provide in return? Typesetting? Printing? Is that really so hard in this electronic age? Their content comes free (though some journals have the nerve to charge submission fees in one way or another). The editors are generally unpaid academics volunteering their research time (though often with generous expenses from the publisher and university support). The quality control system of peer-review is provided on a voluntary unpaid basis by expert academics in the field, who generally acquired that expertise in publicly funded universities and who are using their publicly funded research time to do it. In economic terms, academic publishers are rentiers: business who make their money from other people's work and investment simply by virtue of occupying a strategic position in a production system that comes with bottle-neck owning negotiating privileges.

All in all it looks like the big academic publishers have found a way to take the public's money and convert it into private profit without even providing a public service.

Once one recognises this outrageous situation the next issue is what to do about it. Here I think it's important to think about why publishing has been left to private (profit-making) companies in the first place, and that means thinking about why academics themselves don't want to do it. Academics want a comfortable research environment that allows them to get on with their work. They want a comfortable office, but don't want to be concerned with building maintenance; they want a comfortable salary, but don't want to think about department budgets. Likewise, they want a system for publicising their research without having to set up publishing institutions and worrying about how to set up sophisticated websites, cross-referencing systems, or type-setting; and they want to be able to quickly identify the value of an article among the thousands on any particular topic, without expending their precious time reading it. The only thing they care about is whether this system works well enough that they don't have to think about it.

There's no reason academics couldn't set up their own journals and do a better job. (I've actually been involved in setting one up - all it takes is a budget of a few hundred euros for a simple website and a lot of time.) But it's not where academics' comparative advantage lies. Every hour they spend on things like that or other administrative duties is an hour lost to their productive work. And so it's not surprising that, despite occasional outbreaks of academic run online journals like PloS, most academics are happy to keep outsourcing the whole business to whomever can promise to do a reasonable job and not bother them about it. And that they don't much care if it's run by private or public institutions (since the bills go to the university library).

The whole point of academic publishing is to separate wheat from chaff and so facilitate the price mechanism (impact factor) that allows the market for ideas to run smoothly. That means that it is a natural oligopoly, like credit rating agencies - islands of reputational reliability that channel the mass of information into a recognisable market order. The question of whether this essential piece of academic infrastructure should be run on private profit seeking or public good principles is of most interest not to academics themselves (who don't care what happens so long as their working isn't disrupted), but to the public in general and specific groups like libraries, journalists, and lay-academics. That means it is a political debate that reaches far beyond the universities.

Earthquakes in the news: free tickets to the emotional circus

2011-03-13T18:30:00.002+01:00

Oh there is nothing better than a good natural disaster to get the ratings going. All those people from so far away put on a screen for our viewers to enjoy sympathising at in the comfort of their own homes. Normal people like us, but right now not at all like us, looking so emotionally intense - so desolated, brave, afraid, racked with grief - so much more real than anyone we know. Forget Libya. It was almost used up anyway. This is the real thing.
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Financial markets: unpredictably irrational?

2011-03-12T22:47:00.007+01:00

Financial economics is these days dominated by two equally foolish schools of thought. The neo-classical school follows the Efficient Market 'Hypothesis' and argues that markets are rational: that market prices reflect all available information. The behavioural economics school (associated with people like Richard Thaler) argues that markets are predictably irrational because people are irrational in certain systematic ways.

The debate often proceeds as if these were the only two possibilities. But Keynes himself pointed out a third and rather convincing possibility: markets are unpredictably irrational. That is markets can be stupid, but you still can't make any money from knowing that because the market can stay stupid longer than you can stay solvent. Keynes' point is that markets value assets in conventional not rational ways, like a beauty contest in which you are asked to pick the person you think most other people will pick as the most beautiful, not who you think is most beautiful. In this perspective, market players make their money by being smarter than each other, not by being 'rational' (e.g. understanding the fundamental value of a company in terms of its long-term profit-making, dividend-distributing potential).
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Neoliberal economics?

2011-03-11T22:27:00.001+01:00

Neoliberal economics is a political ideology. It stands in relation to the academic school of neo-classical economics as Stalinism stands in relation to Marx.

Lesons from Haiti: Earthquakes don't kill people, houses do

2011-03-10T22:20:00.004+01:00

People often make a distinction between human-caused and natural catastrophes. Human-caused catastrophes, like civil wars, are the fault of the society and can't be resolved unless the society itself pulls itself together and makes itself more civilised. Whereas natural catastrophes are just bad luck and no one's fault.
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The performativity of epidemiology: how successful smoking bans increase death rates

2011-03-05T22:02:00.021+01:00

There is a joke by the redoubtable Variety Show duo, Flanders and Swann that goes something like this:

"I hear that travelling by air is much less dangerous nowadays than crossing the road"
"Yes, but watch out for the airport buses. The drivers have orders to keep up those odds."
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What's so bad about genocide?

2011-03-04T22:00:00.002+01:00

Bear with me. I'm not saying genocide isn't bad, only that it isn't the worst of all crimes.
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Where have all the smart protestants gone?

2011-03-04T07:03:00.002+01:00

For most of its history the US supreme court was a bastion of WASP power and privilege. Looking at it today, one can't help noticing the oddity that there are no protestants left in a protestant majority country (presently the court comprises 6 Catholics - including the 5 Republicans - and 3 Jews). It is clear that these judges have not been appointed because of their religious affiliation per se, but on the basis of their legal credentials and reliable Democratic/Republican political orientation. The problem seems to be that there are too few qualified protestant candidates in the selection pool. Is this connected with the general intellectual deterioration in mainstream American protestantism?
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Welcome South Sudan!

2011-03-01T12:11:00.002+01:00

Supposedly the people of south Sudan are now free from the terrible oppression of the arab/muslim dominated government and free to determine their own future. Fat chance.
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The King's Speech

2011-02-28T14:17:00.001+01:00

Lovely story and nicely done. But the premise is of course ghastly and absurd. The free world is threatened and it is essential that a complete non-entity who happens to be born to the right people be able to read aloud some words (written by others) to 'his people'. Nor does the ridiculous system of monarchy become any more reasonable by sentimentalising the extreme ordinariness of this person, as when he pretends to be a penguin for his children or lets his familiars call him Bertie.