April 2008 – Page 2

Invention of Tradition

Tweetable link: https://t.co/giqwREGElC?amp=1

Liberty and Power links to this Grauniad piece on how Highland Scottish culture – in this case specifically bagpipes – is all a 200-year-old fake.

The trouble is, yet again, that the headline doesn’t agree with the story. The familiar narrative is that the formal “Highland Culture” that assails the tourist and the expatriate today was collected and defined by the likes of the “Highland Society of London” after the real highland culture had been dead just long enough to be safe. It was now opportune for the British establishment to promote and co-opt the history.

That’s not the same as saying they made it all up from scratch. The highlanders wore heavy woolen woven cloths, often with various tartan patterns, so the revivers defined tartans and garment types. They played some kind of pipe, so they made bagpipes. The old highlanders didn’t themselves publish reference books of clan tartans and kilts and bagpipe designs, because that’s not the sort of thing a living culture does (particularly a backward peasant culture).

So what the Guardian’s big revelation of the “fake” bagpipes amounts to is that the pipes made by businesses in Edinburgh according to fixed designs for the last 200 years are not quite the same as the ones actually carried by illiterate cattle-herders and peasants two hundred miles north and a hundred years previously. Also particular specimens in various museums are not actually as old as they claim to be. The first point is obvious, the second is important for the museums but not actually of much interest to the rest of us.

Why am I sticking up for the rent-a-Jocks? Do I have romantic dreams about my Grampian ancestors sticking it to the Sassenachs? Hardly. But the arguments that annoy me most are the ones I’ve previously fallen for. I have gleefully debunked the tartans and the like in the past, and I’m embarrassed to have been had. There’s some relevance to the other issue, because, like the WMDs and the last decade’s temperatures, this is a case where the details say one thing and the headline has been spun to say something else.

Unlike the other cases, I don’t think there’s any particular agenda at work here. The base of it was explained best by G. K. Chesterton:

You’ve got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there’s an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it’s probable because it’s prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn’t think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

Debunking feels good. Knowing that what the what the other fellow believes is wrong feels really good. I have a particular weakness for it, which is why I’ve been a perpetrator of this one example before.

Good reason to buy fakes

Luxury watchmakers are apparently starting to add anti-forgery features to make it easier to identify counterfeits (via Division of Labour).

How embarrassing for them to have to admit that the cheap knock-offs are otherwise indistinguishable from the real thing.

As I’ve said before, the legitimate purpose of trademark law is to protect the consumer from inferior goods. A technical or artistic innovation is a positive externality, which copyright and patent law is designed to internalize. A brand established by costly marketing is of no general benefit, and cannot be deserving of state protection except inasmuch as it is a guarantee to the consumer of superior quality.

In defence of lying scumbags

Apparently (via Mr Eugenides) The EU’s new Unfair Commercial Practices directive will mean that psychics will have to prove they do not mislead their customers.

Now I’m more sure that psychics do mislead their customers than I am of almost anything, and we would all be better off if they stopped. They might not all be lying scumbags: possibly some of them are just nuts.

But I’m not sure that making every failed prophecy into a legal action will be an improvement. The problem in dealing with psychics, as with homeopaths, Christians, dowsers, mediums and the rest, is not that they are not obviously wrong (they are), but that many of the “legitimate” alternatives aren’t provably better. If we start demanding proofs, we’ll take out the pychics alright, but what about the equity research analysts? Homeopathy is crap, but how much respectable medicine has not been proved to be better? You can argue that we would be better without all these questionable experts and advisers, but I’d rather make up my own mind than have the choices regulated by the law.

Actually, the two examples I chose: equity research and medicine, are very regulated. Perhaps there are better examples. But even these aren’t actually required to be accurate. Equity researchers have to show they’re not being bribed to make particular recommendations, and doctors have to show that they’re consistent with other doctors, but neither actually have to show that their predictions come true. The required standard for astrologers might turn out to be similar, but if the result of all this legislation is that they just have to put a line of small print at the bottom saying the mystical power of the stars can go down as well as up, I don’t think it’s really worth while.

Expanded blog reading

I’ve added one or two new feeds to my regular reading, as a result of the meet at the ASI on Wednesday.

There were talks from Tim Worstall, “Guido Fawkes” and Perry de Havilland, which served mostly to underscore how good blogging is as a medium, compared with, er, sitting listening to people giving speeches.

Some people really have it, though, and a few minutes listening to Chris Mounsey holding forth in general conversation were enough to persuade me that I should (a) be reading everything he writes, which for some reason I haven’t been doing up until now, and (b) be in the Libertarian Party. Devil’s Kitchen needs no introduction from me, but Mounsey’s vision of a positive libertarian platform that can be put to the general public was an eye-opener.

I may doubt the general proposition that we need a Libertarian Party, but if it is the way to get Mr Mounsey’s energy and vision to a wider audience, then we need this Libertarian Party. Since I let my UKIP membership lapse (for the second time) a few years ago, there’s no reason for me not to be a member.

I also have added Question That, a newish blogger who was there on Wednesday (another Libertarian Party person), and, as a side effect of paying more attention to British political blogs, have added The Remittance Man, Mark Wadsworth, and Iain Murray’s new outing, though as far as I am aware they weren’t there.

Libertarianism and Welfare

Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata kicks off a discussion:

“A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we’d let people starve in the streets.”

I think this is true. And while the notion is fundamentally unjustified, there is a grain of truth in it.

For one thing, to the extent that there are people who believe that the poor should be left to starve in the streets, they are likely to be found among our allies and supporters.

For another, while most libertarians would say, like Johnathan, that the unfortunate would be looked after by private charity, and might well end up better off than is the case today, most would also say that there should be some stigma to being a recipient of charity; that the deserving poor (as judged by donors) should be better off than the undeserving poor, in order to provide useful incentives.

Similarly, people should be encouraged to look after their families, meaning the poor with families to look after them will be better off than those without, and that misfortune falling on one person would also impact their families.

There is a separate problem which results in a bad impression of libertarianism: there are things (like redistribution) which we can see are wrong as a matter of principle. Pretty much by definition, we agree that the state should not redistribute income. There are other issues which do not so easily resolve to matters of principle – like whether the state should invade Iraq. We do not all agree about that, and therefore we do not take such a strong position. So while I, personally, might see the war as a vast waste of lives and resources, I would be cautious in arguing it, because people I respect disagree for reasons which eventually come down to matters of judgement. On the other hand — state funding for opera! That is just wrong, and anyone who disagrees cannot be “one of us”.

The result is that it looks as if I care passionately about withdrawing state funding of opera (or cutting benefit for the disabled, or whatever), but am indifferent to the bombing of civilians. That is not the case. Whatever the right answers, the Iraq war issue is much more important than the arts funding question. If we, as libertarians, give the opposite impression, it’s because we see arts funding as an easy question and the right response to terrorism as a difficult question. For the pedantic mind, which characterises many of us, it is tempting to dwell on the easy but minor point rather than on the difficult but major one.

To improve the image of libertarianism, we should perhaps express more of a sense of proportion regarding things that could be done better, but, on the overall scale of things, aren’t all that big a deal.

State Beneficiaries

Patrick Crozier asked (a week ago), who actually benefits from the state?

He works down the list, from Tony Blair to a welfare junkie, and observes that nobody is doing much better from the state than they would otherwise.

There is a good reason for this: rent-seeking. If any particular position as a tax-eater is excessively profitable, then people will fight over it until the cost of winning it approaches the value of the loot. Hence, becoming an MP, say, and grabbing that lovely 120K/yr, involves a whole lot of hard work and sacrifice, in the same way as getting the best bargains on the opening day of a sale requires camping outside overnight, elbowing and clawing your way to the front of the pack.

The winners of the tournament are making a marginal profit, or else they wouldn’t bother, but they’re not doing that much better than they would at something else.

The individuals who do actually profit significantly are those who do not have to compete for their position, either because the position is not open to competition (for instance because of nepotism), or because there is a lot of randomness in the selection process.

The waste of the public sector is not really to be seen in the rare government-produced fat cat or welfare cheat. They are unrepresentative. The waste is most visible in the vast hordes who have no plans in life beyond collecting handouts or doing worthless public sector jobs. Most of them could do something like as well in the private sector, but in sheer numbers they make up the most solid statist interest group.

Financial Regulation

I think its fair to say that the financial industry has not been admirable over the last few years. One of the best accounts of what went wrong is this:

Prince was saying he was constrained to follow the conventional wisdom, even when it was palpably insane.

It is therefore understandable that people are saying the manifest errors of the industry should have been restrained by regulators. Given that governments end up bailing out the casualties, it cannot be denied that government has the authority to attempt to prevent such bailouts becoming necessary.

The question is not whether the government is entitled to prevent excesses, it’s whether it would actually succeed in doing so. Is it really the case that politicians or civil servants will be less influenced by the crowd effect of conventional wisdom than are financial executives with, in some cases, millions of their own on their line?

One year ago, there was no motivation for regulators to get banks to cut down on lending, to stop buying mortgages, and so on, even if the powers existed for them to do that (which, to a degree, they do). If you are asking regulators to prevent bubbles, you are asking them to outguess the market, which, while not impossible, is not something I would generally expect them to achieve.

How to treat spin?

In March 2003, I wrote:

…much of the propoganda on WMD’s has been misleading or dishonest. Sure, Iraq is months away from making nuclear weapons (if someone else gives them fissionable material). The same goes for the Sons of Glendwyr — getting fissionable material is the only difficult bit.

The government had tried to make us think Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme by telling us, effectively, that it didn’t. That was much more revealing than an actual lie, even an obvious lie, because it proved that the government knew the facts and was spinning them in one direction.

Now some climate sceptics have been claiming that the world has not got any warmer for the last ten years. I actually didn’t think that was true: from what I saw there was a confusion between US and global temperatures. I have not repeated the claim here because I didn’t think it was true.

But the World Meteorological Organisation apparently published a statement that begins:

GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) – The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.

According to the Deltoid blog I got this from, they put out the statement “to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped”

The thing about the statement is that every factual claim is entirely consistent with the claim that global temperatures have not risen for ten years.

Since they unquestionably rose before 1998, they obviously remain above the long-term average, and likewise the last decade is the warmest on record. Temperatures have obviously risen over the last century. The rest of the WMO statement, (at least, the rest of what was quoted by Deltoid) also fails to contradict the proposition that temperatures have not risen since 1998.

Now, as facts go, it’s a minor one. It’s perfectly true that ten years is not long enough to draw any firm conclusions from. But like the 2003 Iraq claims, the fact of the spin is much more significant to me than what I can actually know for sure. I didn’t know what WMDs Iraq might have, but I knew for certain that the government was trying to make it seem like they had more than was actually the case. I don’t know how strong the evidence for AGW is, but I now know as an absolute certainty that the WMO is trying to make the evidence appear stronger than it is, in both cases not because the authorities are lying, but because they are spinning.

Olympic Shame

I do not feel that the Olympics are tainted by being held in China. In fact, I think China is tainted by holding the Olympics. I would think much better of the country if it refused to hold them, and better still if it refused to participate. I would support any boycott of the Olympics, ever, wherever they are held. In fact, I think I will start a campaign to have the 2012 Olympics moved to Yangon.

To me, all the complaints about 2008 are summed up in this priceless photo (h/t Distributed Republic)

No better demonstration could exist of the reality distortion field that surrounds this most objectionable of institutions.

Religiosity

My initial theme here was the difference between Europe and America. One of the most obvious is the importance of religion in America. Various explanations have been put forward for this difference, but mostly they do not account for the discrepancy.

I used to claim that everyone in England who seriously believed in God ran away to America to get away from the Tudors, but that doesn’t explain the rest of Europe.

I have heard it suggested that the welfare state in Europe has displaced religion, but that is too recent to account for a difference in religiosity that is much more longstanding.

I am inclined to a much simpler explanation: religions in America are more successful because they are privatised by the constitution. While the history of religion in Europe is one of religions fighting for state power with which to eliminate the competition, American churches have concentrated their efforts on appealing to the population.

If the US Constitution included an amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, then I believe the US would have the most successful schools in the world to go with the most successful churches in the world.