We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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With all the troubling economic news that has come out of late, such as the UK Northern Rock fiasco, or the US housing and mortgage crunch, there has been a fair bit of headscratching on how bad it could all get. Amity Shlaes has an item looking at the mistakes made in the 1920s and 1930s around the time of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent depression. In a nutshell, she says that errors on monetary policy, a disastrous ratcheting up of protectionism and intervenionist economics turned a bad but temporary situation into a catastrophe. This book also comes to the same conclusion and points out how much of Roosevelt’s New Deal failed, even on its own terms, to work, since unemployment actually was worse by the outbreak of WW2 than when FDR was elected.
Meanwhile, to keep us in a jolly mood, the Daily Telegraph highlights some recent economic data from those old-style monetarists at Lombard Street Research, pointing out that there has been a dramatic contraction in the “broad money” measure of the US money supply, known as M3. The Fed stopped publishing data on this in 2005, on account of it not being reliable. That sounds a bit fishy to me. Anyway, the author of the piece, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, points out that sharp moves in his measure presage significant changes, either inflationary or the opposite. He is surely correct. For much of the ‘Noughties, the world was awash with cheap money, much of it in the form of recycled savings from Asia. To a degree, the spigot has been shut, with an obvious impact on asset prices.
My only caveat here is that Pritchard has tended to be a bit of a permanent “we are all doomed” voice these days. If I earned a pound every time he had predicted the demise of the euro, for example, I’d be able to retire to the South of France. But he may be right this time.
This story will not come as a surprise to the techies that read this site, nor many other bloggers, but I was still struck by a report from TowerGroup, the research firm, that says that the day is approaching when millions of people on low incomes living around the world will be able to switch funds to their relatives and friends over the mobile phone with as much ease as downloading tunes on to an MP3 player.
This is big money, when gathered together. The market for remitting money is worth about half a trillion dollars, although goodness knows quite how one quantifies this accurately. Existing middlemen will be cut out of the equation.
“Ultimately, TowerGroup expects mobile phones will do for financial services what Apple iPods did for music – spur a sea change in the way consumers access services and suppliers deliver them,” one of executive said.
Just think what this will mean to parts of the world like Africa, already a continent where it has been easier to put in mobile phones than bother with the traditional wire-based stuff.
As far as I can see, the key issue to get right is security. But then that applies to Internet banking already.
Science writer John Tierney – one of my “must-read” columnists – has a good post which gets us to consider why it is considered so terrible for sportsmen and women to take performance-enhancing drugs, or have special surgery done to make themselves stronger, faster, more flexible, and so on. In years to come, suppose that say, a footballer has a knee operation and as a result, he is able to ride over a tackle, pass the ball more swiftly. Or a fast bowler at cricket has the same operation done to make it easier to send down a delivery to a batsman (bowlers often get injured because if they are big guys, the strain on their knees and back can be large). It seems to me that the key issue is disclosure. If you had an “anything-goes” games, with sports folk free to do what they wanted, there could be no complaints about cheating. And the boundaries between what is and what is not considered okay are not clear cut anyway, but they are more readily solvable than just adopting a puritanical zero-tolerance approach on enhancements. I cannot also help wonder whether some of the constant sniping at sports folk for taking drugs is not so much about cheating per se, as about taking the drugs in the first place. There is a sort of desire for “purity” in sport which is a part of the more general puritanism in our culture.
Like I said, the key is disclosure. If any cyclist, swimmer, footballer or for that matter, F1 motor racing driver takes drugs as part of their sport, then it should be okay so long as they disclose it. One could always use a handicapping rule anyway. For instance, if a motor racer is taking a drug to enhance his concentration during a race, maybe the race organisers can impose a 5 second penalty.
As medical technologies progress, this issue is going to become more pressing. Rather than continuing to hold out against any of this, the sports world should focus on disclosure and be adult about it.
Ronald Bailey at Reason has a nice response to the Prince of Wales’ latest attack on GM foods. The Reason comment thread is also pretty good too. One thing that does not seem to cross Prince Charles’ mind – not a long journey – is the fact that by using disease-resistant strains of crops, it will reduce the need for pesticides, which surely any “Green” should support, right?
The Telegraph seems to have a strange indulgence for this sort of fogeyish/Green/oh-god-this-science-stuff-is-ghastly sort of thing. I wonder if snobbery has anything to do with it – “organic” food tends to be more expensive, after all. But to be fair, that newspaper has carried robust defences of modern science and farming, such as this article by Bill Emmott a few months back. Worth re-reading.
Update: Stephen Pollard thinks Prince Charles should shut up. That seems a bit excessive. I do not think that Charles is overstepping some sort of ancient constitutional rules by saying what he thinks. It seems a bit odd for an opinionated fellow like Stephen to be telling people in public life to put a sock in it. If he were King, and had to deal with tricky political issues, then Stephen might have a point. But let’s face it, being heir to the throne for decades is a pretty desperate situation to be in. If Charles wants to hold views on archicture, the teaching of English or the environment, why not?
This is brutal but sadly true about Andrew Sullivan:
There was, in fact, hardly a bigger cheerleader for going to war with Iraq than Andrew Sullivan. And it won’t do for him to invoke the defense that he was misled into the war because Saddam did not possess actual WMD. It’s true that Saddam did not have stockpiles of WMD, as the Bush Administration, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, John Kerry, and many others believed, along with the intelligence agencies of virtually every nation on earth. In retrospect, we know that Saddam engaged in a massive effort to mislead the world into believing he had WMD. The obligation was on him to comply with U.N. resolutions. He did the opposite, and he paid for his deception (and his cruelties) with his life and the end of his regime.
It is fine for people to change their positions over time, either because of new evidence or because of an evolution in their own views. And almost everyone who has said anything about Iraq has gotten something wrong. But few people have changed their minds as dramatically and emphatically as Sullivan has over the last few years.
Absolutely. And I am not particularly convinced, either, by Sullivan’s reply on his blog today, in which he argues thus:
I simply cannot pretend that what we’ve learned about them these past few years – and what I’ve learned about the Middle East and wider dimensions of the struggle against Jihadism – hasn’t deeply affected my views. Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army – because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?
First of all, no-one, apart from the most deluded hawk, has or would deny that abuses have occurred, involving not just American but other Coalition forces. The point is that those abuses have in some cases already been punished. One can and should argue that the punishments could have been more severe, but that is a detail. As for the other stuff about “abusive” practices, Sullivan is frankly inviting ridicule to argue that the conditions at Gitmo rank on the sort of scale of horrors that have been inflicted on captured combatants in other campaigns, most notably those involving Soviet forces in the past, for instance. For all that one might be alarmed – as I am – about the willingness of some apologists for torture to argue for it, I certainly do not get the impression that it has been widely used or encouraged by the US and other administrations. Of course if that is the case, I might change my mind.
No. I am afraid that the critics of Sullivan have a strong point. His change of mind has been so dramatic, his use of language so heated, that it is easy to see why people who now are on the receiving end of his ire feel the guy has not been entirely honest about his switcheroo. After all, Bush’s Big Government brand of conservatism that Sullivan finds so obnoxious – as I do -was hardly a secret even before 9/11, such as his flagrant abuse of free trade over steel tariffs, for instance.
As to Iraq, what did Sullivan – who is hardly an expert in military affairs – honestly expect would have happened when the invasion began: a squeaky-clean victory, an easy reconstruction and minimal violence? Hardly. To be sure, he was pretty quick to argue that the post-invasion phase needed larger forces, as McCain had argued at the time. And it is easy to see why those who argued that Saddam’s removal from power was justified – as I did – felt angry about some of the errors made post-invasion. But let’s be honest about this. If you back a war, you have to understand the Law of Unintended Consequences – bad shit can happen that you do not expect. To deny this is frankly to invite contempt.
The New Yorker has an interesting article about the risk that excessive granting of patents and copyrights can reduce, rather than increase, the potential level of goods and services. The article is very fair-minded and worth a look.
The issue of patents and IP generally remains a really tough one for me to work out what my own views are. I tend to take the view that state-granted patents are a bad idea, and think it is entirely arbitrary to work out whether a patent should run for X or Y number of years before expiry. But notwithstanding the arguments of the likes of Lessig and other “open source” folk, I can see the case for giving people some financial incentive for coming up with an idea and trying to make money from it. This seems particularly so in areas like drugs, where the costs of research and development are very high, for example.
Thinking about the recent not-so-smart observations on men’s magazines by Tory politician Michael Gove, it is useful to recall that our so-called moral guardians have for a long time got themselves all hot and bothered about the prospect of biddable young chaps getting an eyeful of the fairer sex:
“The French rulers [the Bishop informed the House], while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example, in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenious youth. They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.”
Quoted in Decency & Disorder, by Ben Wilson, page 16. The comments were made by a Bishop sitting in the House of Lords in 1798. The late 1790s were a frightening period for the British ruling classes – as well they should have been. But it seems strangely comical that a Bishop should imagine that pretty French girls showing a bit of leg were more dangerous than the armies of Napoleon. Even at the time, I suspect that the likes of your average British sailor who was in the front line of defending Britain from attack would have thought this prelate to be a bit of an ass.
But however silly the Bishop’s comments were, they do point to something that is actually quite important: soft power, as foreign policy strategists like to call it. Yes, force of arms can subdue a weak nation. But any part of a “conquest” of a culture must take heed of the power, not just of tanks, guns or aircraft, but of ideas and preferences. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we tend to forget that the sight of Western advertisements for goods and services, occasionally glimpsed by people living in the Soviet empire, must have been a shock to anyone told that state central planning was the inevitable course of economic history. And when young people the world over – of whatever religion or of none – get to enjoy greater freedoms, most of them, from what I can tell, rather like them. Of course, religious extremists recoil in horror at such freedoms, just as the bishop I quoted did more than 200 years ago. Such folk may even use moral panics about such things to inflame opinion in reaction. But most people welcome a more liberal culture, which is why religious and other ideological puritans get so angry about it.
Maybe the Bishop was actually being quite wise after all. He need not have worried though, since those ladies’ men, Nelson and Wellington, dealt with the Corsican tyrant in the end, with a bit of help from a lot of Russians and Germans.
Since we are talking about South Africans (see my post below about cricket), ex-South African-now-American Kim du Toit, occasional commenter in these parts, says he dreams about getting one of these.
Kim’s dreams are pretty scary.
It is all so easy when you are an armchair pundit, and we bloggers are no different. With politics or economics, so with sport. Mike Atherton, the former captain of England’s cricket team and a man notable for his dogged, never-say-die style of batting, is unimpressed by the England’s cricket selectors’ choice of skipper, who was born in South Africa, could not get a regular place in that country’s team, and by some means, is now the captain of England. One might say that as the final Test in the series at the Oval in London unfolds, that “Our South Africans are better than theirs”.
It may all, as Atherton says in Eyeorish fashion, end in tears. But by God, what a start. I went to the match’s opening day yesterday with an old South African friend of mine, by the name of Martin. We watched in amazement as the England bowling attack exploited a benign surface and moist air to trick the South African batting with a wonderful spell of bowling that removed six batsmen in short order after the top-order batsmen, notably the captain, looked ominously comfortable. Their comfort proved short-lived. As a result of this marvellous bowling, involving an attacking fielding lineup with so many slip fielders that it looked like the West Indies in the old days, South Africa failed to make it past 200 runs in their first innings. Now England have to beat that target by a good margin if they are to win this match and salvage some honour from this series.
Ironically, the man whom Atherton prefers for the captaincy – Andrew Strauss – had another poor day at the crease yesterday, bowled out after a few deliveries. Ah, the joys of punditry, eh Michael?
“It is many years since British historians felt comfortable in celebrating their country’s triumphs. Once upon a time, Britain’s incontestable naval and commercial supremacy in 1815 would have been explained as the predestined fruit of national virtue, religious truth and political freedom. Among professional historians all three explanations would nowadays arouse varying degrees of amusement, distaste and embarrassment, but no modern consensus of opinion has emerged to replace them. For many years the tendency has been to ignore or belittle the fact as well as the consequences of British naval supremacy. Not many would go so far as to dismiss it outright as a convenient myth, or imply that Napoleon won the Napoleonic War, but a number of intellectual strategies have been devised to ignore it.”
From N.A.M. Roger, The Command of The Ocean, page 575.
This is a quite outstanding book, published a few years ago. I particularly liked its explanation of how the Royal Navy knitted in with the commercial and political world of the time, such as how the need to provide food and supplies for ships going over vast distances encouraged development in things like food preservation, the development of the UK agricultural market, mass production techniques (for things like bits of ship rigging). The famous 17th Century diarist, Samuel Pepys, famously played a key role in developing the administrative machinery that was essential in making the operation work.
And what is also interesting is that the image that we traditionally have of the navy in the 18th century – “rum, sodomy and the lash” – to quote Churchill’s famous phrase about the navy – is not quite the full picture. There were brutal captains, terrible conditions and bad treatment of sailors via the press gang, yes. But Roger balances all this by pointing out how many of the ships we led by relatively humane and considerate men who treated sailors as well as could be reasonably expected (food and conditions were frequently better than on dry land).
It is hard to conceive, as Roger says, that Nelson and the rest would have won their famous victories had the sailors of the fleets been purely driven by the menace of the cat o’ nine tails. Roger explains a great deal of how the Navy was able to play such a massive role in UK history.
For history at its best, this book takes a lot of beating.
We are sometimes told by its defenders that the National Health Service is the envy of the world. Well, I wonder if all those countries yearning for socialised medicine are dreaming of this?
“I thought I’d begin by reading a sonnet by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”
Spike Milligan
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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