January 2009 – Page 3

Bob Quick

Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick ordered the arrest of Damian Green in November.

After that, it emerged that his wife was running a luxury car firm from their home, which may have been offering services it wasn’t licensed for.

I’m not directly concerned with the car business, and the Damian Green case has been well covered already. What is interesting here is the pattern: Person makes enemies, enemies dig up dirt. How many people have some irregularity in their personal or business life that they will certainly get away with for ever, provided they don’t attract the attention of someone powerful and hostile?

The product of this situation is that those with power to dig into everyday irregularities end up with arbitrary power. You keep them sweet if you know what’s good for you. You don’t criticize them publicly, you don’t cross them in their personal capacity. The only people who can stand up to them are those that are prepared to “clear the decks” of their private lives for the sake of activism. Admirable as such people are, their very determination makes them seem extreme, weird, or unreliable.

This situation is very unhealthy for public life, as I’ve said here before. The solution is to look around for rules which people routinely break, generally get away with, and don’t do much harm. And get rid of them. Keeping a low profile should not give someone a large advantage in everyday life.

Fernández-Armesto on farming, or, Neolithic Public-Choice theory

My lunchtime reading is currently “Civilizations” by Filipe Fernández-Armesto.

He makes an interesting point, which I’d seen before, which is that hunter-gatherers appear to have better lives than arable farmers. What is significant historically, he argues, is not at what point farming is “discovered”, but at what point, and for what reasons, a society chooses to give up its easy gathering lifestyle in exchange for hard work in the fields.

My assumption was always that farming is inevitable because a farming society, with its high population density, will defeat any low-density gatherer society it comes into conflict with. But this can be seen as analogous to the erroneous group-selection arguments in evolutionary biology; a particular behaviour may be beneficial to a group, but if is detrimental to the individual, individuals without it will take over groups faster than groups with it will out-compete groups without. It is not enough for a farming society to defeat a non-farming one, if farmers can have a better lifestyle by abandoning their fields. My explanation needs a few gaps filled in.

What Fernández-Armesto doesn’t quite say, but suggests strongly, is that the change from gathering to farming particularly benefits leaders. By making underlings absolutely dependent on central infrastructure (cleared land, irrigation), the leader increases his control over them. Public choice theory, neolithic edition. (That sounds so good I’m putting it in the title).

Fernández-Armesto makes an analogy with 19th-century industrialisation. Landowners benefited, but workers didn’t. (Of course, in the long run we all benefited from both farming and industrialisation, but as Fernández-Armesto correctly points out, that could hardly justify them at the time if they made most peoples’ lives worse).

The point here is that central control is the mechanism for preventing “defection” back to more pleasant lifestyles.

(Someone may point out if Marx said something similar – I don’t know whether he did, but his lot were generally quite good on this kind of historical speculation, for what it’s worth. Quite a lot of the history of hitherto existing societies is, to a significant degree, the history of class struggle).

There is a second explanation, which is randomness plus a ratchet – even if going from gathering to farming is unpleasant, going back, once population has increased, is likely to be much worse. So for whatever freakish reason agriculture starts, it’s likely to stay, and spread.

There’s no immediate practical point to all this, but if we’re looking at changing the structure of society, as I have been of late, anything to do with the mechanisms and reasons for major change is a good thing to have rattling around our toolbox.

Using the Aspire One

The last post, on political structures, was the first one which wouldn’t have been written without my new netbook to write it on.

In fact my train home was more crowded than usual, so I was short of elbow room and had to type most of it one-handed. Nonetheless I was able to get my ideas down, and when I got home I looked up the links I needed and posted it.

I’m using scribefire to blog offline; I’m having one or two problems with it but it’s too early to make any judgment.

Politics and Metapolitics

Jacob Lyles at Distributed Republic is concerned about the contradiction between advocating policies of individual freedom, at the same time as political structures such as federalism which are likely, in some instances, to produce outcomes which are extremely hostile to freedom.

The problem is not new – since Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, politicians have announced simultaneously policies that should be followed, and structures by which other people should determine what policies are to be adopted.

If I was absolute ruler of the world, all I would have to decide would be policies. As it stands, any practical proposals any of us make are conditional on getting sufficient agreement to practically implement them. That is true whether we acquiesce in the current political structure, or whether we seek to change it.

When we evaluate a proposed political structure, we have three things to consider:

Is it achievable?

Is it stable?

Is it good?

A total autocracy ruled by me has a lot to recommend it, policy-wise, but fails on achievability. We might be aiming at the long term, but there has to be some possibility of bringing our structure about for it to be worth discussing.

Stability is the other side of that. Even if we have established our new order, others will seek to change it. If it was worth creating, it is worth protecting, but protecting the political structure without doing severe damage to freedom is always very difficult. This is where I think our current, deeply unsatisfactory, political systems score. Bad as their policies are, they are cheaper to protect than most alternatives – cheaper both in material and in human freedom. I think that is true even when you count most of the bad policies as part of the cost, in that they consist of building up blocs of society who are tied to maintaining the system. I am hoping to be convinced otherwise on this point, however.

The third question is whether the structure tends to produce good policies. Some would want other things from the political structure, such as fair or just allocation of power, but I am indifferent to that provided the structure can stably produce good policies. That is not to deny that there are arguments that a “just” political order is quite likely to be more achievable and stable than an “unjust” one.

As to what constitutes good policies, that is the other half of the question – politics as opposed to metapolitics. They may be separate domains, but as Lyles’ previous article demonstrated, it is hard to talk about radical political ideas without straying into the issue of what structures might be more likely to allow them than the status quo. Policies also must meet an achievablility criterion, and they may be more achievable within an alternative political structure than in the currently dominant one.

Addressing the original post in this context, what federalism has going for it, arguably, is that (a) while allowing bad policies in some localities, it will allow good ones in others, possibly better overall, and (b) it may be more stable, in terms of not evolving into an overlarge megastate, than a central political authority. The point that oppressive government is harder to prevent where everyone actually wants it is not a justification of the oppression, but a recognition of the achievability and stability constraints on any political structure.

In fact, both federalism and Patri Friedman’s seasteading are in a sense meta-meta-political ideas, since they have the advantage that by exposing multiple different political structures, they may cause better political structures to come about.

The real stupidity of Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham has been given such a bashing over his idiotic comments a week ago about how the internet should be censored that I felt no need to chime in with a “me too”. Particular derision greeted his claim that he was not against free speech. But the misunderstanding about what the internet is worth elaborating.

He said he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services. The only feasible way to do that is to have a whitelist-based filter that allows “safe” sites to be viewed. That’s quite doable – I do it myself for my children, using squidGuard. It’s very much better done at the home end than the ISP, because that way my 9-year-old can ask for a site that he’s heard about, and I can add it to the whitelist, but the filtering can be done “in the cloud” if you can’t be bothered to learn how to use a computer. Nonetheless, the filter means that essentially, the boys do not have internet access – only this ersatz “pages from ceefax” version, and with the 9-year-old now 10, the time is approaching that it will have to be turned off for him.

The internet is dynamic. It changes year by year, very significantly. That is what has made it what it is. It is able to do this only because of the fact that, on the internet, anything goes. That’s not an incidental feature of the network, it’s what made it what it is. Anything goes in terms of technology (the end-to-end principle), and in terms of content (creating a web page without getting it approved beforehand by the BBFC).

You can make a copy of many of the most useful features of the internet at a given point in time, without that freedom. But what you have is frozen, dead. As the internet moves on, it can’t keep up. It’s like creating a command economy: when you start you have prices, traces of the market that used to exist. You can plan your economy based on those prices (with whatever adjustments you think will improve things). But where the market would have changed, you can’t see those changes. Over time, your dead market prices will become less and less appropriate to reality.

If anything-goes makes the internet unsuitable for children (and a reasonable person might well consider that it does), the only possible course of action is to stop children from using the internet. Let them revive Prestel or Compuserve for them – that would be more useful than the “child-safe” internet Burnham somehow envisages.

Violence and Class

I’m returning once again to the difficult question of whether Britain is more violent, more unpleasant than it used to be.

In the yes corner is Theodore Dalrymple, writing about public drunkenness.

On the no side, older acquaintances who talk of much more casual violence in the past than there is now, and just as much drunkenness.

I think the key to understanding what has changed is the change in class structure. Taking the 50s or 60s as a comparison, there was still a clear distinction between the professional class (“middle class” we would say, but that seems to mean something completely different in America, so I’ll avoid the term), and the larger working class. Over the last half century, the two have merged into one (with arguably a non-working underclass forming or growing underneath, but that’s another question altogether. Also the upper class has always been a law unto itself). That is not to say that professionals have ceased to be wealthier than manual workers, but they no longer have separate cultures.

That would explain the discrepancy – the previously staid professional class has lost its inhibitions, while the working class has the habits of the old working class but the aspirations of the professional class. They all mix without distinction, but those that remember the old middle class are now exposed, by the new mixing, to the activities of the working class that decades ago they would have never heard about, or at least ignored. Add to that the increased purchasing power of today’s revellers, and there’s no need to posit any fundamental change in attitudes.

I’m not sure I’ve got the right explanation (I wasn’t there), but it is important. A lot is riding, policy-wise, on whether we are facing a major increase in violence and drunkenness, or whether it is all just business as usual, blown out of proportion by the press and the nanny state.

Even if I’m right, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. It means there used to be a powerful section of the population which believed it was above punch-ups in clubs and drinking to unconsciousness on the street, and now there isn’t. If something useful could be done, then something ought to be done. I have no useful suggestions, however – the bansturbation approach towards special offers in supermarkets, opening hours, drinks on trains etc. is as useless as it is offensive to liberty, and it’s not possible for a democratic state to clamp down on behaviour most people think of as normal.

There’s no route back to the past, of course. Dividing people back into professional and non-professional classes with different mores would cut off the economy from too many potential skilled resources, quite apart from the question of justice and equality of opportunity.

If there’s any dynamic that could drive up standards, it’s age. People do tend to grow out of destructive behaviour. If the authority of older people could somehow be increased, that might create some restraint on the young.

It will be interesting over the next few years to see how things change in a recession. The long boom may be partly to blame for irrational exuberance in the streets.

See also this earlier post where I suggested a less developed version of this idea

Science and Politics

This is a classic.

For what Mencius identifies as the religious progressive tradition, nothing can just happen to be true. Discovering something new about the world would not have been sufficient reason for Darwin to have formed the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. For it to have been worthwhile there must have been some ulterior political motive.

It’s always a bit of a shock to find that one’s allies are right only for bad reasons. One of the most startling books I’ve read is Correlli Barnett’s The Lost Victory, in which he showed quite convincingly that the Western leaders who argued against Soviet communism on the basis of the efficiency of the market system did not in fact believe their own (correct) arguments.

In the same way, it seems the ruling class of the 20th century accepted and promoted scientific knowledge not because it was true, but because it was politically convenient. We were just lucky it happened to be true too.

Darwin, whatever Desmond and Moore said, had no such attitude. It is very telling that the modern centre-left projects its priorities onto him.

More blogging in future?

I just got a new PC – an Acer Aspire One. My hope is that I will be able to write blog posts on the train, so there will be a lot more posts on this site in future.

Very early first impressions of the machine: the keyboard (as I type this) is causing me a few problems – I believe it is 85% of normal size. I can touch-type, but I am making about double my normal number of errors as I type. I really don’t like the touchpad, but I don’t like any touchpads. I think I will be learning a lot of keyboard shortcuts over the next few days.

The thing runs Linpus Lite. I’m expecting to use it solely for reading, listening to music, watching video, and web browsing/blogging, and it may well be adequate for that, depending on what the media software is like. If not, I will probably install Debian on it. There’s a fairly detailed wiki page on the debian site about using this machine. Many users run Ubuntu on it, which would be another good option; the problems I had with Ubuntu were to do with running non-standard things on it, which would not be likely to be a problem with the range of activities I expect to use this for.

Arnold Kling's Sheriff

I’ve been thinking about Arnold Kling’s “Stern Sheriff” idea for regulatory management of financial crisis. In brief, he suggests that when there’s a rush for collateral from an endangered institution, regulators should immediately step in and “penalize liquidity preference” – i.e. tell everyone to wait.

What that really amounts to is declaring bankruptcy earlier. After all, if you are demanding payment which you are due, and someone is telling you you can’t have it, the debtor is officially not creditworthy.

Put that way, it seems a very good idea. After all, my layman’s understanding of insolvency is that a party is insolvent not when it fails to make a payment, but when it knows that it is not going to be able to make a payment, and that to take on new obligations while insolvent is not allowed. Of course, in real life, that is presumably wrapped up in a whole lot of very necessary, very complicated accountancy. But the principle is that bankruptcy happens not when the money runs out, but before the money runs out, so it can be shared out fairly without chaos and panic. And that’s all that Professor Kling is asking for.

It seems a good idea, but of course the next problem is that no real financial institution can pay all its debts on time without access to more borrowing. If I accept the stern sheriff, I’m likely to end up at the Moldbug position, that all maturity transformation is wrong, that a borrower that will not have cash on hand to pay every debt as it comes due is insolvent. I’ve argued against that view, largely on the basis that it’s too easy, and too profitable, to do secretly. If you stop financial institutions from doing it, the result will be that everybody else does it.

There is, to be fair, some room for action between a run on a borrower’s credit being possible and it actually happening. But it’s very small. And the earlier you are expected to step in and prevent withdrawals, the more incentive you create to withdraw (or call collateral, or whatever) even sooner, before the sheriff arrives, so that window gets even smaller.

The more of a “hair trigger” you put on bankruptcy, the easier it is for the creditors to expropriate the equity-holders at any time. That conflict of interest becomes much sharper and more problematic for maturity-transforming financial institutions than for other enterprises – perhaps those institutions should avoid having two tiers of financing in that way.

Hey! I just invented the investment-banking partnership and the mutual building society! Maybe I’m onto something…