RSSQuote #254: Democracy
May 06
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Ad Nauseam
Dec 13
books, intellectual self-defence, politics, psychology No Comments
I am reading Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, edited by Carried McLaren and Jason Torchinsky. The book is a funny, smart and sometimes shocking collection of articles from Stay Free Magazine and blog. I first came across Stay Free when I was researching the psychology of advertising and was impressed by their sophisticated take on how adverts affect consumers’ decision making. They discuss in Ad Nauseam how advertising is often misunderstood, with people relying on an intuitive ‘Advertising doesn’t effect me’ view or swinging to the opposite extreme of the ‘Sinister Advertisers Manipulate Consumers with their Mind Control Tricks’ position. Both positions distract from the very real, but not magical, power of advertising.
The book has a great discussion of Wilson Bryan Key’s Subliminal Seduction, the book that launched the idea that subliminal, and often sexual, figures are embedded in random features of adverts such as in ice cube shadows. The idea of these ‘embeds’ is nonsense, of course, but great fun to look for and a great distraction from the real persuasive content of the advert. The book also has a chapter on the origins of modern advertising practice in 19th century pharmaceutical advertising (the manufacturing of ailments for which ready made ‘cures’ can be sold has been covered by Vaughan on mindhacks.com before, in relation to the mental health). Packed with critical analysis of the advertising industry, more informative history and some shocking examples of how consumerism has worked its way into many aspects of our daily lives, this book is essential intellectual self-defense, managing to be critical and aware without ever being sanctimonious or hysterical.
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com
The technology of our wiser, wider, selves
Oct 19
politics, psychology 4 Comments
At the end of this summer I gave a talk in the Treehouse Gallery about technology and thinking. In particular, I told three stories about three pieces of technology which, I argued, fundamentally affect the way we think.
First, I told a personal story about a few months last year when I was without a mobile phone. I found, like others, that this frustration had unexpected benefits (‘Life became slower, and slightly more rewarding‘). I paid attention to what I was doing and who I was with more. I committed to plans easily, both socially and psychically – when I was somewhere I knew I wasn’t going to dial my way out to another arrangement. I made the best of where I was. If I was at a loose end I looked in my immediate environment for things to do and people to talk to, rather than using it as an opportunity to catch up on my email and text message conversations. I don’t know if it was a particularly profound change, but I felt different and acted different because of the lack of a piece of technology (now, of course, I have jumped with both feet back into the world of mobile telephony and the same piece of technology is making me feel and act differently again – its presence rather than its absence is making me feel connected to the wider world, alive with a constant stream of opportunities and messages).
The second story I told was of written language, and in particular some research done by an early twentieth century psychologist called Luria. My point here was to widen the idea of technology. It is easy to forget that written language is a human invention, something that didn’t need to exist but does. Spoken language is a human universal, and will arise where ever humans can communicate in groups. Written language is a historical event, something that was separately created three or four times in human history and which followed a contingent trajectory. Elements of written language we take for granted are no more inevitable than writing as a whole. We invented silent reading – in the medieval period the norm was to read aloud. We invented punctuation and even gaps between the words – early documents reveal their absence. These things had to arise and become embedded in the culture of writing.
In my talk I mentioned Walter Ong’s fantastic “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” in which he talks about the particular habits of thought that are associated with cultures which rely on oral tradition and with those which rely on written language. Writing frees thought from the heavy constraints of memory. Ong details the characteristics that oral language will tend to have, in the service of being memorable; characters will tend to be vivid and extreme, of high emotion and grand actions (think myths and legendary heroes), oral knowledge will be expressed with rhyme, repetition and cliche. In contrast, written language can be nuanced, detailed and even boring. Written language can service lengthy analysis and unstructured lists. Furthermore, because written language is separated in time and space from its audience it will tend to be explicit and comprehensive in its explanations, rather than able to rely on immediate audience feedback and common reference (“like this!”) that spoken language can. Literacy has a tendency towards the abstract, the objectively distanced and the divisive, where as orality will have a tendency towards the concrete, subjectively immediate, the holistic and the conservative (since patterns are hard to establish in memory and fragile once there, the rule is ‘don’t innovate unless you have to’).
Ong discusses Luria’s investigations with literate and illiterate farm workers in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Luria’s investigations showed that questions that seem simple to those from literate cultures involve a whole bundle of learnt habits of thought and ‘unnatural’ assumptions that come along with the acquisition of literacy. Luria asked one illiterate to name the ‘odd one out’ from “a hammer, a saw, a log and a hatchet” and was told “If one has to go, I’d throw out the hatchet, it does the same job as the saw”. The individual questioned saw the objects in terms of activities, not in terms of the abstract category “tools” (the obvious division for a literate). Explained to that three of the objects are tools, the individual still doesn’t find the desired answer “Yes, but we still need the wood”. The mind patterned by orality seeks functional wholes, not division, claims Ong.
Another question of Luria’s is a logical syllogism: “In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Noraya Zembla is in the far north and there is always snow there. What colours are the bears there?”. A literate mind, which is used to answering such questions (indeed, used to being sat down and examined for hours at a time for no immediately apparent purpose) knows to seek the logical structure of the question and answer it within its own terms. Not so the illiterate mind. Luria receives answers such as “I don’t know, go and look” and “I’ve seen black bears, every locality has its own animals”. A question to give the definition of a tree receives similar replies: “Why should I? Everybody knows what a tree is”.
I offer this discussion of Ong and Luria to draw out how fundamental the changes brought about by literacy are for our thought, and how invisible they are in normal circumstances, how for-granted we take tendencies like the pretence of objectivity and abstraction from the immediate and concrete.
My third and final example continued the task of widening the idea of what technology is and can do. I told the story of a clinical case study of a man with memory loss known as S.S (I took this story from a chapter by Margaret O’Connor and colleagues in the book “Broken Memories” by Campbell and Conway). S.S. suffered from a form of brain damage that prevented him creating new memories for episodes in his life. Although he could remember who he was, and events from his pre-injury life, he had no memory for events that happened post-injury. The film Memento gives an extreme illustration of this condition, known as anterograde amnesia. I’ve told S.S’s story elsewhere, in a chapter I wrote for Christian Nold’s book ‘Emotional Cartography‘.
The question O’Connor and colleagues set out to investigate is that of S.S.’s emotional state. S.S. had a buoyant, upbeat, personality, and seemed friendly and cheerful, despite his injury. Conventional tests of mood, which are really formalised sets of direct questions (“Do you cry often?” etc), confirmed this impression. Indirect tests of personality and mental state sounded a warning though – they seemed to suggest that S.S. had profound underlying anxiety and a preoccupation with decay and his own helplessness. These wouldn’t be unusual feelings for someone to have in his position – a relatively young man reduced from being the president of a company and head of the family to being out of work and housebound. The authors ask “was S.S. really depressed or not?”. My interest in the case is around the way in which, it seems likely, S.S.’s deeper underlying anxieties failed to manifest in his moment to moment conscious. S.S., I argue, lacked a particular piece of cognitive technology which most of us take for granted – a reliable memory for the episodes of our life. We can use this episodic memory as a workspace to integrate weak or sometimes fleeting feelings, to store and work out thoughts which may be in contradiction to our momentary surroundings or immediate inclinations. S.S. didn’t have this memory, so his reasonable feelings of anxiety were prevented from ever getting a hold in his consciousness. As they arose they would be repeatedly swept away by his optimistic demeanour.
This example was offered, in part, to illustrate that technology isn’t just something we think about but something we think with (I am following the line of thought set out by Andy Clark in his Natural Born Cyborg‘s here).
So I ended my talk with a question for the audience: ‘If we could invent any technology to help society deal with the future, what would we invent?’. The subsequent discussion never really cohered, I think, in part, because I’d been too successful (!) in broadening our conception of what technology could be. In these terms religions and cultures are technologies of thought too and discussion circuled around the idea that perhaps inventions of these kind are what we need in the future.
I realised, following this discussion, that I was interested in the effect of technology on thinking in a very different sense. The appeal of technology, for me, is that technology embodies in a physical object particular tendencies for thought, and, moreover, that the spread of technology offers a participatory, bottom up, model of how a kind of thinking can spread through the population without government policies, laws or other top-down corporate decisions. Episodic memory, written language and mobile phones spread without centralised control and worked their particular effects on our thinking on one person at a time (but have now had profound societal effects).
One example of a simple piece of technology which affects behaviour is given in Howard Rachlin’s book ‘The Science of Self-Control’. He discusses an experiment in which smokers were divided into three groups. One group was sent away to smoke as normal. The second was given an educational class about the health effects of smoking and encouraged in a number of ways to cut down. The third group, and the one that interests me most, was not told to cut down at all, but simply to record how much they smoked using a system in which, with each cigarette, they tore a tab off of a piece of card. Amazingly, the group that cut down smoking the most was not the group trying to cut down, but the group which was given an effective way of recording and monitoring their smoking. Rachlin offers the convincing analysis that the problem a smoker faces is one common to many situations – that of ‘complex ambivalence’ between single actions which are desirable in isolation, and larger patterns of actions which are undesirable in aggregate. Each cigarette is individually tempting, and carries no particularly large marginal cost, but overall ‘being a smoker’ has a large financial and health cost. You can see that the same pattern of temptation applies to many situations: having a drink verses being drunk or being ‘a drunk’, taking a single flight for a particular reason and being a frequent flyer, for example. The power of the card system is that it provides a mechanism by which people can integrate individual choices into a larger pattern, so that they may make decisions based on their preferences within a larger temporal window. In effect, the card system allows or encourages us to prioritise our longer term interests over the short-termist within all of us. In contrast most new technologies seem to prioritise the opposite self in us – the short-termist over the self that practices delay of gratification.
Another example of a simple piece of technology that can affect our day to day living is an energy meter which displays the momentary electricity consumption of your house (like this one). In theory there is already a mechanism for reducing household energy consumption (known as “your electricity bill”), but these energy meters have been shown to reduce consumption by 30%. Because the feedback between your actions and energy use is immediate – turn on a light and see the meter reading jump by 120 watts – it becomes clear how to effectively cut down your electricity consumption. This will be obvious to all well trained cyberneticists – ‘How can you have control without feedback?’
After the talk, Vinay pointed out to me that the environmental movement has never got to grips with the implications of Amdahl’s Law, a principle in computer programming for optimising the speed of your code by improving the part which causes the largest hold-up. In other words, the principle is a guide to how you should direct your efforts in trying to save a limited resource, in this case time. Without similar guidence – proper context for our energy use – the environmental moment is tempted to fall back on generalised hair-shirt ludditism (build nothing, do nothing, everything is bad). Without feedback our choice is between total rejection of consumption and total indulgence.
In keeping with this latent ludditism, technology and technological solutions are often seen as the enemy of the environmental movement. This is an understandable defence against a techno-utopianism which can be a form of denial about the seriousness of climate change, offering false promise of business as usual for the consumer society. In my talk I wanted to focus on how technology could be part of the solution in a positive way, to help us deal with energy-descent and the move to a sustainable global society, to be part of dealing with change, not of denying it. I wanted to ask the question of what kinds of technology should we be encouraging; energy meters? lifetime guaranteed products? reusable containers? what else?. And what kind of technology should we be discouraging; everything ‘disposable’? things which titillate and encourage our most superficial, immediate and grossly consumptive personalities? what else?
Technologies can encourage and reinforce elements of our selves. Because technological objects are solid things they can be anchors for behaviour which won’t be easily swept away by changes in mood or fashion. We need to find technologies which constraint our worst instincts and encourage our best. I have a liberal’s faith in human nature that, given the opportunity, we can be rational social creatures who recognise their best long term interests rather than being enslaved to momentary passions and immediate rewards. We can find technologies that encourage this long-view. Technology can help us realise our wiser, wider, better selves rather than our greedy, selfish, myoptic selves.
What would you invent?
Quote #247
Oct 01
‘I warn you not to be ordinary
I warn you not to be young
I warn you not to fall ill
I warn you not to get old.’
Neil Kinnock, in a speech at Bridgend, Glamorgan, on 7 June 1983.
Small Worlds, article in Now Then
Feb 17
politics, sheffield, systems 3 Comments
Now Then is an independent Sheffield-based arts and community magazine. They are monthly, good chaps and have an out of date website. It is part of the Opus Productions media empire. For the first issue of the magazine, last year, I wrote them an article about something that has interested me for a long time: small worlds. Specifically I’d been thinking about social networks and what the Watts and Strogatz small-world result had to tell us about them. The article is now here, should you wish to read it. It is pretty upbeat. I think if I had more room and less inclination to try to be positive I would include something about how we tend to organise our social worlds so that it seems, from the ‘ground-level’, that we are talking to everyone important, but in actually fact we are ignoring — completely estranged from — most of the people we are physically close to, insulated in comforting small worlds.
See also bridging and bonding social capital, ‘60 Million People You’d Never Talk To Voting For Other Guy’, We Live in Small Worlds
Colonising the future
Feb 01
Sociological and political attention to what is actually happening on the ground has invariably located the causes of hunger not in an absolute scarcity but in socially-generated scarcity arising from imbalances of power that deny people access to food and water…However such is the power of “scarcity” to colonise the future that even those who, quite properly, locate today’s scarcities in political conflict, frequently crumble when confronted with projections of future population growth, setting aside the insights of political economy in favour of Malthusian metaphors that emphasise numbers over power relations as the explanation for future shortages. In doing so, they grant Malthusianism an explanatory power that they would actively deny it when applied to the present and the past. Instead of the past being a guide to
future action, the future (implausibly) becomes a guide to the present…Yet future crises are likely to be rooted in the same dynamics in which they are rooted today…If society wants to prepare for future resource crises, it would therefore be more prudent to look to the present rather than to some theoretical Malthusian model of the future. The future will grow out of the present, not out of society suddenly turning Malthusian. The better way of dealing with “future crisis” is not imagining a future Malthusian world which bears no relationship to what exists now or ever has existed, and then imagining how to stave off that hypothetical Malthusian world, but rather dealing with current scarcities now on the realistic assumption that what causes scarcity today is going to go on causing scarcity in the future
From “Scarcity” as Political Strategy Reflections on Three Hanging Children by Nicholas Hildyard, paper presented at “Scarcity and the Politics of Allocation” conference, Institute of Development Studies, University of Brighton, UK, 6-7 June 2005 (thanks Josie!)
Complaint response from BBC about DEC gaza appeal
Feb 01
From: complaintresponse@bbc.co.uk
To: tom [at] idiolect.org.uk
Thank you for your e-mail.
We note your disappointment at our decision not to broadcast an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise funds for Gaza.
We decided not to broadcast the DEC’s public appeal because we wished to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of covering a continuing news story where issues of responsibility for civilian suffering and distress are intrinsic to the story and remain highly contentious. We also could not be confident that the aid resulting from audience donations could reach those it was intended for at a time of a fragile ceasefire and sporadic border access. We will of course continue to report the humanitarian story in Gaza.
The BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson has therefore explained the decision in more detail in a number of television and radio broadcasts and online at our Editors’ blog. Please follow the link to read his explanation in full:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/01/bbc_and_the_gaza_appeal.html
Please be assured that we have registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact us.
Regards
BBC Complaints
____________________________www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear
Nov 09
Taking Liberties is an excellent documentary about the erosion of fundamental human rights under the Blair government. In the film, a surveillance systems sales person brings out the classic “If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear”. Now one of the many things wrong with this idea is that it focuses on the person about which things are known and obfuscates the entities that are doing the knowing. “nothing to hide” assumes that you are hiding your knowledge from a single, legitimate, authority, but the truth of the matter is that with privacy you will want to hide different things from different people. The problem with the “If you’ve got nothing to hide” argument is that it makes an assumption of guilt unless you can prove yourself innocent (by having nothing to hide), while simultaneously removing from the individual the ability to decide what defines guilt and innocence. It assumes a legitimate authority while simultaneously being part of dynamic that diminishes accountability, and thus legitimacy. There’s another form of this argument “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to fear”, which again sounds fair enough from the perspective of an authority, but if remember the history of crimes done by those in authority we need to see it from the perspective of the individual “If they do nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear!”. Why give government powers on the presumption that we can, and always, will be able to trust them not to abuse them? The recent history of these so called anti-terror laws shows that once powers these powers are given they will be used for quite different purposes from those which were invoked to justify their introduction.
Previously here: An open letter to Omar Deghayes, Why I want a charter for terrorists and criminals
42 writers
Nov 09
www.42writers.com is “a powerful collection of essays, poems, and stories by 42 contemporary writers, including Ian Rankin, Philip Pullman and Ali Smith.”
We are relieved that the House of Lords have struck down the proposal to hold people without charge for 42 days, but the Home Secretary has made it clear that the Government may try to bring back this dangerous and unnecessary measure. Including new and published works, 42 Writers is a moving and thought-provoking anthology, and its themes of voicelessness, captivity and persecution will resonate with readers even after the political storm has passed
The tragedy of the commons
Jul 22
The phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ was first popularised in an article about population control.
The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794–1852). We may well call it “the tragedy of the commons,” using the word “tragedy” as the philosopher Whitehead used it: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” He then goes on to say, “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.”
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.
…
When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals.
…
The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from he misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.
Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243-1248.
Why I want a charter for terrorists and criminals
Mar 09
The man on the radio said that the Human Rights Act (1998), which incorporates the EU Convention on Human Rights (1950) into English Law, is a ‘charter for terrorists and criminals’. Like that was a bad thing. The mistake here is to assume that human rights exist to look after people who obviously deserve it (you know, people like you and me, who listen to the radio and own sandals). Wrong. Human rights exist to look after everyone, and particularly those who are at risk of persecution. And we all know that the first thing the powerful do when they want to persecute an individual or a group is to redefine what they do as either criminal or (more recently) as terrorism. It’s as simple as that. Human rights laws that only looked after obedient and respectable members of society would be a sham. It is at the periphery of society that human rights are most important and where they should be least up for compromise.
capitalism and growth
Jan 03
Does anyone know if capitalism requires economic growth, and if so, why it does?
We live in small worlds
Dec 11
When I go to the kinds of places that I go to, I tend to see people I know. Sometimes I don’t know the people I meet in these places, but we find out we have mutual friends or acquiantances. Then we laugh and we say “Small world!”. Small worlds are nice. They make a large and sometimes hostile world seem friendly and controllable. Small worlds mean there is a handle on every person I meet — not a stranger, but a friend-of-a-friend I haven’t met yet. I like being surprised when I walk into a pub in a strange city and meet someone I know from university, or go on demonstration and meet someone I met at a party once. This kind of thing happens so often that it is sometimes really hard to believe that there are six billion individuals on the planet. If that was true, why do I keep bumping into the same five hundred or so?
There answer, of course, is one part our ability to ignore what we aren’t interested in (even people) and another part the ability to move in tremendously limited circles, circumscribed by habit, personality and class. The first factor means that we spend a lot of time not noticing the fifty people in a bar, say, who we don’t know, and far more noticing the one person we do. The second factor means that our choices of location are very very far from random. The shops we use, the evenings we spend, the paths we walk are patterned, always and pervasively, by the kind of person we are. Because of this patterning, we tend to run into a circuit of people who are like us — people with the same or overlapping orbits of habits, preferences and class.
The two factors combine when we manage to ignore our own influence in determining who we meet ‘by chance’. Even in foreign cities our habits, preferences and class will make selections on where we go, allowing us to almost unconsciously ignore certain options (“that restaurant looks tacky”, “that restaurant looks pretentious”, etc) so that when we arrive in a place that we tell ourselves was completely random, we are in fact already set up to bump into other people who are like ourselves, and hence have those small world meetings that we love so much.
The dark side of the small world is when we allow our choices to colour who we meet so strongly that we stop noticing that other kinds of people exist. If we never meet people with other attitudes or backgrounds then we lose a contrast against which we can gauge our own attitudes and background. Suddenly the whole world is full of people just like us (vegans, libertarians, motorist, whatever). From here it is hard to avoid self-righteousness and then irrelevance.
A global roar
Oct 04
It would be a wonderful thing if a million people around the world voiced their support for the Burmese democracy movement: Stand with the Burmese Protesters. Here’s the bumf from their petition
Hi, have you heard about the crisis in Burma?Burma is ruled by one of the worst military dictatorships in the world. Last month Buddhist monks and nuns began marching and chanting prayers to call for democracy. The protests spread and hundreds of thousands of Burmese people joined in — but they’ve been brutally attacked by the military regime.
I just signed a petition calling on Burma’s powerful ally China and the UN security council to step in and pressure Burma’s rulers to stop the killing. The petition has exploded to over 500,000 signatures in a few days and is being advertised in newspapers around the world, delivered to the UN Security Council, and broadcast to the Burmese people by radio. We’re trying to get to 1 million signatures this week, please sign below and tell everyone!
http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/s.php
Thank you so much for your help!
Boycott Politics
Sep 30
Boycotts have the alure of radicalism, they give a false impression of action through inaction. Really they are a mode of political action which has been colonised by consummerism. The individual consumer choice is seen as the locus of political operation, and it becomes harder and harder to convieve of political action in any other form. It’s a seductive view in these times. If to be is to shop what could be more radical than to deny yourself something?
Boycotts allow us the pretence of taking a stand when really they are an abdication of responsibility. If something is wrong, then by all means avoid doing it yourself — but recognise that as long as the choice is there to be made, your own abstention is nothing more than a sitting on the sidelines while the tide of the battle goes to those offering the choice.
Contrary to this, to not boycott something whilst campaigning for its abolition is to assert your right and your obligation to demand change. I’ve little respect for medieval monks who believed that outside the monastry was a state of damnation and decay, with final judgement immenent, and whose response was to wall themselves into their monastries and pray for their own salvation. The boycott alone as a political act is just as selfish, just as mistakenly righteous, just as mislead.
I gave a speech once at a debate against the death penalty and the opposition speaker said that if i didn’t like it I could leave the country. I campaigned against an academic publishers involvement in the arms trade and was told that if i didn’t like the arms trade i should quit my job at the university. So here again we have the idea of politics as individual consumer choice, an idea which colonises the debating space. By keeping my job at the university, by engaging with the publishers both professionally – by publishing – and morally – by campaigning for them to drop their arms trade links, i asserted my engagement with them and the legitimacy of my claims on their behaviour.
I’ll repeat, if something is wrong then there is a moral need to avoid consuming it — i wouldn’t buy candles made from human fat, for example. But also i wouldn’t rest while candles made of human fat were available for sale, and i wouldn’t believe that merely refusing to purchase them myself was an adequate or appropriate response.
Questions for economists
Sep 11
books, politics, systems 12 Comments
Tim Harford wrote ‘The Undercover Economist’ and also writes the ‘Dear Economist’ column for the Financial Times. His book is excellent — a very readable introduction to economic theory and how it applies to various facets of everyday life. I was going to write him a letter, but then I found out that he’d sold half a million copies of his book and so, reckoning that he’d be too busy to write back to me, I am posting my thoughts here. This is partly for my own benefit as a note-to-self and partly because I’d be very happy to get answers from anyone or everyone on the questions I ask. Useful references are an acceptable substitute for wordy explanations.
Dear Undercover Economist,
On development — can everyone be rich? Won’t there always have to be someone to work the fields / clean the toilets / serve the coffee? Technologists answer: automatisation will remove much of life’s drudgery. Environmentalist retort: resources put limits on growth. Economists: imagine a world where every economy is ‘developed’. In that world we would expect to find people are wealthy according to their talents (because talents define scarcity). My question : in that world, what will the utterly talentless be paid to do with their time? Presumably we’ll still be forcing them to clean toilets, because the toilet-cleaning robots will be too expensive (they need to be in order to pay the wages of the very-expensive-to-hire toilet-cleaning-robot designers).
Information asymmetry: Akerlof (1970) has a description of how information asymmetry can prevent a viable market existing. Harford’s discussion credits to information asymmetry the reason why you can’t get a decent meal in tourist areas, but I am wondering if the effects are far more wide reaching that this. Big organisations will have an information advantage over individual consumers (on some things), as will anyone who devotes their entire economic energy to a single domain (eg selling avocados) over someone who is time poor (eg the typical avocado buyer). Coupled with a dynamic economic environment, couldn’t those with informational advantage effectively manipulate those with informational disadvantage? In other words, i’d be willing to bet that in a static market even an extremely informationally-deprived / cognitively challenged agent will work out the best deal, given enough time. But if the best deal keeps changing (and those with the information advantage keep changing it to suit their ends) the chances of the individual agent aren’t so good. File under benefits of collectivisation / market failure?
Efficiency of the market leads to loss of diversity (because all inefficient solutions are squeezed out). Diversity has it’s own value, both in system robustness (see ecosystems) and in terms of human experience (belonging to a specific place, variety being the spice of life, etc). So how do we incorporate the value of this diversity into market systems? I would submit that diversity is an example of something that exists above the single-agent view of things — is an example of an emergent phenomenon (see below). (Previously on idiolect Why is capitalism boring?)
Markets don’t have foresight. Do free marketeers admit that this is one of the functions of government? For example imagine agents who like to consume some finite resource. Presumably a ‘free market’ will be the most efficient way to organise their consumption. Efficient consumption of the resouce leads to its disappearence. Then what? In the Undercover Economist (p237) Harford says that in markets ‘mistakes cannot happen’ because any experiments with resources stay small scale. I would submit that while this is true at the micro level, with respect to efficiency — in other words, I agree that markets tend to efficiency — this is not true at the macro level, with respect to whole-system health.
An objection to this is that markets do have foresight because the individual agents have foresight – so they will incorporate into their cost function the anticipated future (so, eg, anticipated future resource availability). But what is agents do not have the information, or motivation to worry about the future? Does my concern just resolve down to the existence, or not, of the tragedy of the commons? Perhaps. I think key is the existence of a discontinuity between agent-level information and collective-level information; ie the issue is really about emergence, which is what the tragedy of the commons is really a specific example of.
Side note: if you are a market economist you are a de facto fan of emergence. Aggregate effects which emerge from mass individual action = emergence. Disconnection between individual goals (eg profit) and collective outcomes (efficiency). Etc. Economics is interesting precisely because their are non-obvious relations between agents and outcomes.
Side note the second: there is an essential similarity between economics and cognitive psychology – a focus on information processing. Further, market economics recognises the power of distributed information processing, as does the connectionist school of cognitive psychology. This is the reason I talk about agents, rather than consumers. I believe that the same principles will not just apply to the economic and social sciences, but also to the social sciences (remember Minksy’s “Society of Mind”). A question: can we usefully apply the idea of a distributed, free, ‘informational economy’ to undestanding neural coding? (Remember Glimcher’s “Neuroeconomics”)
Hope for Omar Deghayes
Aug 07
Following on from this
The British government has requested the release of five former UK residents being held in Guantánamo Bay, the Foreign Office said today.The foreign secretary, David Miliband, has written to the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, asking that the men be freed from the US base in Cuba. They are not British nationals but had lived in the UK before they were detained, the Foreign Office said.
The decision by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, marks a break from his predecessor, Tony Blair, who generally held that the British government was not obliged to seek the release of Guantánamo inmates who had lived in Britain but did not hold citizenship.
Reports the Guardian
An Open Letter to Omar Deghayes
Jul 04
Omar Deghayes, ISN 727
Camp Delta,
PO Box 160,
Washington, DC 20053
USA
Dear Omar
I am writing to you after hearing your brother speak at a meeting in Sheffield, UK, where I live. I am going to send this letter to Jacqui Smith, our new Home Secretary, and make it public as well, so forgive me if I repeat some things to you – I am aware that you know these things only too well, but I want other people who might see this letter to understand what has happened to you and how important it is that you are brought back to the UK.
Your brother told us about how your family came to Britain in 1987 after your father had been assassinated because of his opposition to Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya. He spoke of trips to the UK before that where your father took you to Speaker’s Corner and said “This is what it should be like in Tripoli”. He said how your father pointed to Britain and said “Britain is the most just country in the world”. He told us how it was because of British justice and British fairness that when you fled persecution you came to Britain to seek sanctuary.
You have been detained in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility for nearly five years now, where the American government is making a mockery of ideals of justice which the president tells us he wants to spread around the world. Today, July the 4th, it is two-hundred and thirty-one years since the America Declaration of Independence. That famous phrase must ring hollow for you now: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. It rings hollow for me, hearing how your human rights have been abused: you have been kidnapped, tortured, denied a right to trial, denied even the right to be formally charged, to have evidence presented against you, to even know what the American government believes to be true that they imprison you. It is injustices like these that are listed as accusations against the British King in the Declaration of Independence. That document uses the phrase ‘Arbitrary Government’, and it seems to me that these are the warning signs of a slide towards more ‘Arbitrary government’ and all that that entails.
It is shameful that the British government claims not to be able to represent you because you are officially a citizen of Libya. You are a British resident and the British government should offer you protection from persecution. I know how important it is that when you are released you come back to the UK, to live in safety with your family, rather than be deported to Libya; I heard in the meeting how the Libyan official who visited you in Guantanamo threatened to kill you if you were sent back to Libya. For justice to be justice it must protect everybody.
In Sheffield we have a movement called ‘City of Sanctuary’ which is dedicated to creating an atmosphere of hospitality for asylum seekers and refugees – we want to be a city that takes pride in the welcome it offers to people in need of safety. I sincerely wish that the British government would show some of the same attitude and make representations to the Americans to bring you home. I want to be proud of the British government, and proud of British justice in the same way I am proud of Sheffield as a City of Sanctuary.
Yours
Tom Stafford
Save Omar Campaign website: save-omar.org.uk
Documentary about Omar: here
Text of the American Declaration of Independence
City of Sanctuary cityofsanctuary.com
inner teachings
Apr 05
If you read about Taoist alchemy [1] then, apparently, there is an interesting feature of the teaching. This is that it has a common standard intepretation – an ‘outer teaching’, which is about materials; which substances to add to which substances to get what potions, etc – and a deeper, hidden intrepretation – an ‘innner teaching’ which is about spirituals, what the written lore is really about, and which concerns various tantric practices (i.e. mystical activities, some of which involve putting your genitals into various places). By the by, you get the same theme in western alchemy, the idea that the outer teaching – about turning lead into gold and all that – is really a distraction, or veil, for the inner teaching – which is about (perhaps!?) immortality, perfect knowledge, etc.
There is inner and outer teaching in Christianity as well. The standard intreptation (read: common depiction) of the christian metaphysic is cartoonish: a hell of burning fire, a heaven of clouds and angels with harps, a perverse God who puts apples on trees just so innocents will eat them. Alongside/within this there is a more sophisticated reading of christian theory with all its great themes of sin, forgiveness and justice and wotnot [2]. What interests me is that, here, the inner and outer teachings have conicident implications. Although they differ in their semantic content (and level of sophistication) the implications are the same: go to church, live a pious life according to the teachings of jesus, etc
Here’s a third example, in a different arena, in which I believe there are inner and outer teachings: the justification of the invasion of iraq. Now it is obvious that the outer or popular justifications for the invasion are lies. We obviously didn’t invade because of Saddam’s Links to al-Qaeda, nor was it about WMD, nor was it about Saddam being an evil tyrant. Although they were believed by many misinformed people, these things appear insufficient as causes for our invasion of Iraq in 2003. So, some of us wonder, what is the real reason, the true justification? What, in other words, is the inner teaching that those in power of the Western armies must believe? As with Christianity there is this coincidence of consequences between inner and outer teachings. The misinformed public can believe that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and want vengence, the White House can believe that we need the oil (or want to make a statement of brute force on the world stage to shore up US hegemony, or want to stop Iraq trading oil in euros, or whatever you believe the real reason was for our invasion) – but the effect is the same: invade Iraq.
So I’ve been thinking about this business of inner and outer teachings, in a kind of undirected way; does the categorisation make sense? Is it as common in theologies as it seems from these three examples? Most importantly, is it functional? What social, institutional or psychological work does it do?
This occured to me, and you can tell me if it is convincing – the point of an inner and outer teaching is where there is no true centre to a set of beliefs. The appearence of hidden meaning is really a function of a set of symbols of such fecundity that they yield an intepretation as rich as the mind that decides to interrogate them. One meaning for a superficial reading, another for a deeper reading. And another for a still deeper reading, or for a deep reading which brings with it a different set of biases or assumptions. The existence of inner and outer teachings are the resolution of two dynamics. One made of institutional forces which promote consistency of actions (also known as compliance in some circumstances!), the second a more personal drive to remove inconsistency in beliefs. The different levels of teaching allow everyone to pick a symbol intepretation which they are comfortable with, without needing to feel like they are contradicting those who use another level of intepretation. The belief (meta-belief) in a higher level of meaning – the inner teaching – allows everyone to happily follow the same behavioural path without having to challenge each other over inconsistencies in their symbol intepretations.
Footnotes:
[1] Not something I regularly do, admittedly, but I do have this book ‘The Secret and Sublime:Taoist Mysteries and Magic: Taoist Mysteries and Magic’, John Blofeld (1973)
[2] There are parallel inner and outer teachings for different aspects of Christian theology. Witness the recent discussion on whether the standard story of Jesus dying for our sins indicates that god is ‘perverse’ (not that I follow Christian theology, but it was on radio 4 at about 7 yesterday morning)
The Sustainable Communities Bill
Dec 29
From localworks.org:
On the 23rd November Nick Hurd MP (Conservative, Ruislip-Northwood), the first MP drawn in the Private Members Ballot, immediately informed us that he would adopt the Sustainable Communities Bill. This is excellent news and means it is now officially in Parliament as a Private Members Bill. The first reading of the Bill will take place on Wednesday 13th of December where it will be officially tabled in Parliament.
This is the result of over 3 years of hard work and we would like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all our supporters whose help and actions have made this possible. With continued hard work over the next six months we can win this campaign and see the Bill made law!
Lots of work still to be done
The next hurdle is Second Reading to be held on Friday 19th January 2007. In order to ensure that the Bill progresses on that day we need 100 MPs to be present to win a vote (winning 99-0 is no good)
freedom in the usa
Jul 02
Holy Crap! Why is so much of the US population in prison!? Both relative to other ‘basically well-functioning advanced capitalist democracies’:
(This from Crooked Timber post)
And relative to the the US of 25 years ago:
(from Martin Sereno’s presentation on Peak Oil.)
While we’re at it, here’s another slide which Sereno labelled ‘the beginning of corporate planet’.
(of course, although some would like it to be, what’s true for the US isn’t necessarily true for the rest of the planet)
Multilateralism in an age of decline
Jul 02
It is, then, conceivable that we could be in for a period in which a synchronised upswing in the global economy turns into a synchronised downturn, as weaker demand from the US ripples out to the export-driven economies of Asia and the Eurozone. Protectionism will then exacerbate the recession. To which the response might be: a good thing, too. If, as Al Gore was arguing during his visit to London last week, the world is on the brink of ecological catastrophe, we ought to lose our fixation with growth and concentrate on self-sufficiency and sustainability instead…..From this standpoint, anything that throws sand in the wheels of the globalisation juggernaut is welcome. What we need is a full-scale cathartic crisis that will enable a new and better world to emerge.
It might not be that easy. True, a collapse of the Doha round, and a sharp contraction in global growth, could provide two of the elements that brought about change in the mid-20th century. But in the 1930s, the progression of events did not go stock market crash, recession, new world order. It went stock market crash, financial collapse, beggar-my-neighbour devaluation, protectionism, fascism, world war, new world order.
Clearly, the solution to Gore’s looming environmental Armageddon has to be collective, rather than unilateral. There is no way that the US, for example, is going to take action to cut carbon emissions unless it is sure every other country is doing likewise.
Yet the chances of multilateral action will be diminished in a climate of fear generated by economic weakness. The report on the economics of climate change currently being undertaken by Nick Stern at the UK Treasury is likely to conclude that the costs associated with a reduction in the emissions to the levels deemed safe by scientists are relatively modest. Gore himself believes that tackling climate change will be good for business, opening up plenty of new opportunities to make money.
That’s as may be. Multilateralism is a delicate plant; it does not thrive in harsh climates and the same impulses that drive countries to put up trade barriers when times get tough will persuade policymakers to listen to the special interest groups arguing that the price of tackling climate change is too high. The growth-at-all-costs lobby will be strengthened.
Delayed, but there is a day of reckoning Larry Elliot in the Guardian, 26 June 2006.
use of terms
May 18
Isn’t it peculiar that, among democrats, the word ‘populist’ is used as a term of abuse?
the tiresome, monotone real world
May 02
But synthetic worlds, he [Edward Castronova] admits, have grown so powerful and their architecture so intricate that they are now in direct competition with our daily lives, and the growing exodus or migration of young adults into these mythical worlds must reflect the tiresome, monotone worlds that the players inhabit in the real world. Their online existence, he says, “is better than the alternative, that is, a daily life on Earth, which seems to show no progress towards anything.
- James Harkin in The Guardian
irony
Mar 26
From a brilliant Zoe William’s essay on irony from 2003
Our age has not so much redefined irony, as focused on just one of its aspects. Irony has been manipulated to echo postmodernism. The postmodern, in art, architecture, literature, film, all that, is exclusively self-referential – its core implication is that art is used up, so it constantly recycles and quotes itself. Its entirely self-conscious stance precludes sincerity, sentiment, emoting of any kind, and thus has to rule out the existence of ultimate truth or moral certainty. Irony, in this context, is not there to lance a boil of duplicity, but rather to undermine sincerity altogether, to beggar the mere possibility of a meaningful moral position. In this sense it is, indeed, indivisible from cynicism. This isn’t to say that “truth-seeking” irony has evaporated – many creative forms still use irony to highlight the sheer, grinding horror of pursuits or points of view that are considered “normal” (like The Office, for instance; and much of American literature is masterfully good at employing irony with a purpose – to choose at random, Pastoralia, by George Saunders, Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, anything by Philip Roth, The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen).But other strands of media use irony to assert their right to have no position whatsoever. So, you take a cover of FHM, with tits on the front – and it’s ironic because it appears to be saying “women are objects”, yet of course it isn’t saying that, because we’re in a postfeminist age. But nor is it saying “women aren’t objects”, because that would be dated, over-sincere, mawkish even. So, it’s effectively saying “women are neither objects, nor non-objects – and here are some tits!” Scary Movie 2, Dumb And Dumberer, posh women who go to pole-dancing classes, people who set the video for Big Brother Live, people who have Eurovision Song Contest evenings, Char lie’s Angels (the film, not the TV series) and about a million other things besides, are all using this ludic trope – “I’m not saying what you think I’m saying, but I’m not saying its opposite, either. In fact, I’m not saying anything at all. But I get to keep the tits.
and, later
To know inauthenticity isn’t the same as being authentic. Or even, just because you ironically know you’re wrong doesn’t make you right
Delocator UK
Mar 17
events, politics, technical notes No Comments
Mike Dewar has got the Starbucks Delocator UK to beta and the database now needs populating – so if you know of any cool indepedent cafes, get yourself to www.delocator.org.uk and add them in.
In case you don’t know about the Delocator family (US, CA), the way it works is this: you put in a post code or a description (e.g. “Sheffield City Centre”) and the Delocator shows you were the indepedent cafes are, so you don’t have to visit starbucks and encourage that pestilence in your city.
Well done mike!
Update 20.3.06: I asked mike if the results could provide an emailable URL and he’s done it. Look – here’s the results for near where I work – how’s that for user-responsive development!
who do you trust
Mar 04
This seems important, although not very cheerful
On January 23, Edelman released survey findings that shows (in the U.S.) trust in
total surveillance mission creep
Feb 22
At the end of last month, a leaked letter from Andy Burnham, the Home Office minister, revealed that the identity cards for which we will involuntarily volunteer will contain radio frequency identification chips(8)
If you read George Monbiot’s articles on his website they come with references!
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