Who Rules?

Mencius is taking a week off and has invited requests. The area I would like to see clarified is the analysis of how western democratic governments actually make decisions. Is the political show of parties and elections a fake, or do politicians really control policy? It often appears that the question of who really has power is answered differently according to the needs of the argument Mencius is making. Events which favour the Democratic Party demonstrate the all-powerful nature of the Universalist church, while victories by the Republican party are mere smoke and mirrors.

My thinking is that elected politicians have some freedom of policy within a “window” defined by what MM calls the “permanent government” : the bureaucracy, the unremovable congressional incumbents and the media. The day-to-day business of politics is therefore not “fake”: it actually drives policy in the short term. And because particular events at particular times can have long-term effects, electoral politics has long-term significance.

However, the predictable long-term trends of politics have nothing much to do with elections and elected office-holders. They are best described as the movement of the window of policy within which politicians can move, and are controlled by other forces: what MM calls the “Hexagon”.

Take an example from the UK – the market liberalisation of the first Thatcher government. Thatcher wanted these, and Callaghan didn’t, and so they happened after Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in place of Callaghan in 1979. That is politics working as normal people imagine.

However, the Heath government came to power in 1970 intending many of the same reforms. It was not permitted to carry them out. The unions opposed the reforms just as they did in the 1980s, but the elected government was not permitted to crush them as Thatcher later did. By 1980 the permanent government had come to accept the necessity of reform, and moved the window to allow it. The reforms happened in 1979-83 instead of 1976-1979 because of electoral politics, but they happened in 1979-83 instead of 1970-73 because of the change in the policies of the permanent government.

There is therefore only some truth in the conventional view of politics. That truth is magnified in popular perception by a unanimous rewriting of the past. Ted Heath, having failed to implement the Selsdon programme, became its opponent, and it is now generally assumed that the only reason the reforms happened in 1979 was electoral politics. More recently in the US it is now widely assumed that Al Gore would not have invaded Iraq, despite the fact that in 2000, as far as military action overseas was a left-right issue, the left was in favour and the right against, not to mention what came after.

On top of the real party political issues, then, issues that are not decided as the result of elections are later treated by history as if they were. when the permanent government’s policies are unsuccessful – such as the preservation of the economic-policy status quo of 1970s Britain, which was imposed on Heath against his will, or the invasion of Iraq, they are blamed on the politicians, who are generally slow to deny that the policies actually carried bout by “their” governments were really their policies (not wanting to look ridiculous).

Indeed, even the most intransigent of extremist, the most unlikely ever to change their mind on a subject, can be turned from one side to the other by the simple expedient of electing them to office and to the duty of defending the policies that they have opposed all their lives but cannot change. This is not hyperbole.

In that way, political questions that are determined by the permanent government become party political issues: the politicians in office defend the policies that they were forced to carry out, and the politicians in opposition have to attack the policies in order to remain relevant. It is almost beyond doubt that if the butterfly ballots of Florida had gone the other way in 2000, the Democratic party would now be the party of the Iraq War and the Republican party would be divided on whether to support or oppose it. Of course, it is quite possible that the course of the occupation may have been different in that case, but that is beyond what I can guess.
2014: dead link http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0213-01.htm updated to https://web.archive.org/web/20080522032238/http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0213-01.htm

Democratic Legitimacy

I said before that I think democracy is a trick, but a necessary trick: a free prosperous people will attempt to overthrow the government unless they think they control it.

I don’t think they really can control it, because the class interests of politicians are so much in conflict with those of productive people that they overwhelm other distinctions. They only situation in which a government can genuinely act in the interest of a class wider than just politicians is when there is a larger class of relatively powerless people – slaves or peasants – who would be a threat to a divided ruling class. That is the characteristic of democracies before the twentieth century.

Any stable government must therefore either fool the people into thinking they have control, or else deny them the freedom and prosperity which makes them capable of temporarily taking over.

The point of democracy’s illusion of control is not to make people think the government is good (there are limits even to illusion), but to make people think it is legitimate. Legitimacy buys government the tacit support of the indifferent, and makes it very difficult to overthrow.

If the population were both informed and rational, they would reject the concept of legitimacy, but would tolerate government unless it were sufficiently bad as to be worth paying the (very high) cost of a revolution, just to replace it with another government that would be no more legitimate, but possibly less bad.

What I am afraid of, therefore, is not that people will become informed. I am afraid that people will correctly reject the legitimacy of democratic government, while incorrectly hanging on to the concept that government should be legitimate. That is the stage that would produce a fruitless and hugely destructive search for a genuinely legitimate government.

Government is not the servant of the people. It would be nice if it were, but it would be nice if internal combustion engines ran on water. Any theories about what government should do to best serve the people, whether good or bad, are of no more relevance to the real world than are strategies for playing video games. In the real world, governments are gangs of thieves, and cannot be anything else.

This line of thinking is as usual influenced very strongly by Unqualified Reservations, but I like to think I was beginning to head in this direction already.

Folk Probability

It is a commonplace that most people are bad at probability. It would be useful to know what sort of errors they make.

Errors which have been observed:

  • People tend to be excessively averse to risks with very small probability – e.g. Mobile Phone Masts (and most other media “health scares”).
  • People tend to be insufficiently averse to risks which are not likely but are quite significant – e.g. falls in house prices, road accidents.
  • People tend to be overly attracted to tiny probabilities of benefits – e.g. one-in-ten-million chances of lottery wins.

These are all explained by the theory that folk probability is not quantitative, but consists of five categories:

  • Practically Impossible
  • Unlikely
  • Unpredictable
  • Likely
  • Practically Certain

The risks that are being overestimated are those that are towards the far end of “Unlikely”, while the risks being underestimated are towards the near end: in Folk Probability they are equivalent. In the popular mind, being involved in a train crash or a car crash have the same probability “unlikely”, even if there is a factor of 100 between the real probabilities.

An argument about lottery tickets between two folk probabilitists would address not expected returns (in the mathematical sense), but whether the chance of a big win should be counted as “Practically Impossible” or as “Unlikely”. The advertising for the (UK) national lottery is aimed squarely at that question (it could be you).

The consequences of these probability errors are severe, both for their perpetrators and for the rest of us. I will visit one particular consequence in a later essay.

What can be done about it? One solution would be to teach mathematics effectively in schools. But since that lies itself somewhere near the boundary between the unlikely and the practically impossible, let’s put it aside for the moment. The best quick fix I can think of is to massively liberalise gambling law. Probability theory originated in a study of gambling games, after all. One of Epstein’s most telling points is that people who struggle to achieve the simplest qualifications are able to master complex skills that they need for what they want to do – such as driving a car. A population of poker players would have a much more realistic idea of quantitative probabilities than we see today.

Self-defence

In an old article, I looked at self-defence in Britain.

I came to the conclusion that the law of self-defence is good and is normally applied well. There is a very widespread but false view that those defending themselves are likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

I was catching up on Samizdata today, and came across the case of Tony Singh, who had “committed the crime of fighting back”, in “another of those man facing prosecution for defending himself stories”.

He had fatally wounded a man who attacked him with a knife. He had been arrested and released on bail.

Fortunately for me, I was two weeks behind on Samizdata. I had not heard of the story, but I immediately predicted that a quick search would show that he had not been charged. Indeed it did, three days after the Samizdata story, which was followed by all the usual comments about the imminent end of civilisation due to the state denying any self-defence.

Now, I’m sure it was very stressful for Mr Singh to be arrested for killing someone. But realistically, anyone can claim to have killed in self-defence, and the police do have to investigate when someone ends up with a knife in their chest. But in actual cases of self-defence, there is almost zero probability of a prosecution.

The false idea that we do not have, de jure and de facto, a solid right of self defence in this country is discouraging people from exercising it, and potentially putting extra stress and pain on those who do exercise it and then believe they might be prosecuted.

People should not be moaning about prosecutions which do not in fact happen, they need to be shouting from the rooftops that we do in fact have the right to fight back.

Once that truth is established in the popular mind, we can then approach the real problem, which is that while we are allowed to defend ourselves, we are not allowed to own or carry weapons for the purpose. That should be where the battle of ideas should be taking place.

Clarkson's Bank Account

Jeremy Clarkson admits he was wrong to claim that leaked bank account numbers are a problem, after £500 is withdrawn from his account.

The thing is he was actually correct. Someone claiming to be him gave his details to the charity Diabetes UK, setting up a direct debit. Anyone can do that to anyone, if, for instance, they’ve ever seen one of their vicitm’s cheques. Under the rules, the bank will refund his £500 as soon as he tells them he didn’t authorise it. Banks are fussy about who they will allow to receive direct debits – it would be very difficult to carry out an actual theft, as opposed to a prank like this, using this method.

Obviously this sort of prank will be a nuisance to the victim, but it’s of the same order as signing someone up for hundreds of catalogues.

Clarkson now says of the case: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

Again, this is to misunderstand the problem. As I said before, the issue is not idiocy, it is the inevitability that data collected this way will leak. Clarkson’s original error was not in claiming that the actual content of the lost data in this case was not damaging, but in not understanding that the next major leak (or perhaps a previous one, because the fact that the leak became public knowledge is much more surprising than that it happened), may be of more sensitive data – health records from the new health database, say, or actual financial data from HMRC, or lists of vulnerable children from the new database of every child in the UK. The conclusion we should draw does not involve cocktail sticks, it is that the government shouldn’t collect information it doesn’t absolutely need.

Blair's Conversion

What’s the problem with Blair becoming a Catholic?

Some people have problems with Catholicism, either with the church policies, or with doctrinal questions, or with the notion of a political leader of one country being under the authority of a religious leader in another. But only a few people; not enough to matter.

Some people have problems with religion itself. But only a few people, indeed I suspect a majority of British politicians would confess one denomination or another.

Some people have problems with the fact that Blair, as Prime Minister, apparently had some kind of informal attachment to the Catholic Church, without making it public or official. Now we are getting closer to the issue, but by political standards of hypocrisy, this is still very minor stuff.

The real problem for the British is that to take religion so seriously that one would change denomination is just icky. It’s OK to have a religion, but, as with a sausage, one shouldn’t care or take too much notice of what’s in it. That makes people uncomfortable. Part of that is a reasoned objection to the sort of behaviour that might result from taking religion seriously, but I think mostly it’s just that worrying about the details of religion is in bad taste.

Even atheism is frowned on for the same reason. I previously held that one who does not positively believe in some specific idea of God should be considered an atheist, since they are not a theist. But I was wrong. The British distrust declared atheists, because atheists take religion too seriously. It’s like being vegan, only worse — there are, arguably, immediate practical justifications for veganism, but there is no practical justification for involving oneself in the details of religion to the extent necessary to call oneself an atheist. It is much more decent to just go along with whatever public aspects of religion fit one’s social activities, while utterly ignoring any inner content, like everyone else does.

I’ve been moving in this direction a long time, but I think now I better understand why. I will in future be vaguely non-committal about my religion, because anything else shows poor taste.

Climate Controversy

I’m really worried about the possibility I’m deluding myself about climate. I see something like this, and I’m so certain that it’s basically correct.

I don’t think there’s another case of new science shooting so rapidly into politics that scientific conventions have huge political relevance. Nor do we have new research being shoved into school syllabuses within two or three years.

This immature science is being accelerated in this unprecedented way for political reasons, and I feel justified in opposing it for political reasons.

On top of that, there’s the group effects. Like Pauline Kael allegedly not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon, I don’t know anyone who believes the full orthodox media view of climate change. That’s not entirely true, but the exceptions are people who I wouldn’t believe if they told me it was raining, never mind what the weather will be in 50 years.

I tell myself that for every one of these people, there are several equally qualified who disagree; I know that there is dishonesty on the sceptic side as well as the alarmist side, I am fully aware of my own political bias, and yet I’m still not even able to take seriously the proposition that the argument is settled.

I reckon I’m in the top 1% for intelligence, and I certainly know a thing or two about computer modelling, but what possible basis can I have for the conviction that I am right and a whole lot of experts are wrong? I don’t even have a degree in a physical science.

At least this isn’t some metaphysical question. The issue is likely to be resolved in my lifetime, one way or the other. I’m looking forward to it.

Democracy and Entertainment

Yesterday’s bit on the greater resources of television current affairs departments compared with political parties was more of a question than an answer. I’ll try to work out what it means.

There are a few caveats:

  • The money that is spent on news programming includes things like studios and cameras as well as developing the content to put on them.
  • MPs get paid by the government, which is extra resource to the parties not counted in their budgets.
  • The civil service plays a role in developing policies for the ruling party.
  • Political parties have an incentive to be vague about policy, whereas media organisations can afford to be more specific and clearer – they gain more by being provocative than by being right.

Nonetheless, I still think that Channel 4’s policy on higher education is the product of more research and investment than went into the Labour party’s. MPs are paid to be MPs, not to develop policy, and the civil service has its own goals and constraints and is not under the control of the Labour party.

What does this mean?

First, I should be less sceptical than I have been about the “power of the media”. I have always felt that, since the media is constrained to doing what gets it audience, its independent influence on policy is small. However, if what it needs to do is to provide some alternative policy with which to challenge politicians, but it has relative freedom to choose which alternative to develop, then its independent influence is greater than I thought.

Next, why is it the case that we (as a society) invest more in reporting politics than we do in politics itself. Either something is seriously screwy, or we value politics as entertainment more than as a way of controlling government. Or both.

I think it’s quite clear that the population does treat politics mostly as entertainment. The resemblance between Question Time and Never Mind the Buzzcocks is too close to ignore. If someone arrived from another planet and had to work out which of the two concerns how the country is governed, I think they might find it tricky. (I think they get similar numbers of viewers). There are even hybrids like Have I Got News For You to make it more difficult still.

Further, I think voters are correct to see politics primarily as entertainment. Since my attempt to construct an argument that voting could have a non-negligible probability of affecting an election – the infamous correlation dodge – died a logical death, I am left with the usual reasons for voting – primarily how doing it makes me feel. Those reasons apply equally well to voting for Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing.

In conclusion, I think our system of government is one which selects leaders and policies as a byproduct of the entertainment industry. This might not be a bad thing: the traditional alternative is to select leaders and policies as a byproduct of the defense industry, which I don’t think is obviously superior.

Basra Update

I’m paying close attention to how Basra develops, not because I have a particular strong opinion on it, but because I don’t. I can make suggestions and interpretations, and wait and see if things turn out in a way that makes sense.

The lastest article from the BBC says that two thirds of residents of Basra city interviewed in a survey overwhelmingly think that things will improve when British troops leave the province.

“The majority of those questioned felt that once provincial control was handed over to local Iraqi security forces, the security situation would begin to improve.”

The problem is that I don’t know why they think this. Do they think that local security forces will have greater legitimacy when not attached to occupying foreign troops, and will therefore be able to keep order more effectively? Or do they think that the security forces will act more competently without the influence of the outsiders? Or, conversely, do they think that local security forces will become irrelevant without the British Army behind them, and that other organisations will take over responsibility for security, and do a better job of it? That wasn’t asked in the survey (full pdf is linked from newsnight page here.

For what it’s worth (and why should I claim to know more than the 16% of Basra residents who answered “Don’t know” to the survey?) I suspect the first answer is true. I think until the troops actually leave, there will always be some doubt among the locals that they ever will. Resolving that doubt will have a beneficial effect.

The other point on the BBC yesterday was about the apparent growth of extremism in the region.

“Many residents told the BBC that militias have tightened their grip in Basra since the last British troops pulled out of the city in September, after months of relentless attacks.

“They accuse Shia militias, including the Mehdi army of Moqtada Sadr, of a campaign of intimidation and violence, particularly against women.”

The key thing to remember here is that religion does not create sectarianism so much as sectarianism creates religion. The reason why extremists are shooting improperly-dressed women now, rather than ten years ago, is because, with a power struggle in the offing or in progress, religion matters now. To disdain religion today is treason in time of war.

If the power struggle goes away, so will the extremism (possibly with some lag).

News and Politics and Money

I get news mostly from online newspapers, and I tend towards the barest reports. As a result, whenever I see television news, I’m shocked and put off by the heavy slant it carries.

But my shock this evening was more than usual. Watching Channel 4 news, what struck me for the first time was that Channel 4 appeared to have a more clearly defined and clearly expressed position on the issue they were reporting than did any of the politicians they were interviewing.

But why should that be surprising? Channel 4 has more resources to devote to policy than does any political party. Channel 4 spends 54 million pounds a year on news, documentary and current affairs programming. The two main parties each spend something like 10 million a year, but most of that is spent not on “content”, but on content distribution – posters, leaflets, etc.

British political parties’ policies are being constructed on an almost totally amateur basis, compared to the media – and I think it shows. There are think tanks, but I don’t think they turn over tens of millions a year.

I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this. In the US they spend a lot more on politics, but don’t seem to get noticeably better policies. But my attitude towards politicians when I hear them is likely to change.

Reference for channel 4 finances: http://www.channel4.com/about4/annualreport/annualreports/index.html page 47