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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As I proceed deeper into Popper, I have pondered his ideas on ‘historicism’, the idea that one can define a set of laws of history. Within the context he is arguing I must say that he is correct. Popper argues such laws are unscientific because they are not falsifiable. This is true for the case of all of which I am aware, whether several millinnia ago or within recent memory. But is it a true statement or is it an over-application of inductive reasoning?
I do not think we know enough to make that general of a statement about the possibility of historical laws. With the knowledge at hand we are probably on safe ground to agree that racially based, class-based and simple projections of past events onto future history are non-starters. So what would it take to really have a ‘Seldon Theory’?
Science requires data. Hypotheses must be based on data and should be falsifiable by uncovering new data or effects which are sufficiently counter to the predications of theory so as to bring its viability into question. To do that with history we need not one history but many. True, we can analyze numerous Earthly civilizations from different times and places, but that is not enough. We simply do not have enough detail about many of them. Perhaps new developments in Archaeology will one day make such data available, but for the present we have only a small number of historical, independent civilizations from which to work.
Even worse, were we to generate a theory that was applicable to such pre-technological societies, those theories would still fall upon the same problem when looking at what comes after, because once technology arrives on a planet, the boundaries become fuzzy very quickly and you are back to having only one data point. You cannot build a theory on a single data point. Even worse, we are in a technological civilization in which the rate of change grows more rapid with each passing year. How can you generate any sort of prediction about a world with wildly different characteristics from your own, none of which are knowable to you? How could a Scientific Historian of, say 1950, predict much of anything about a world with global access to virtually all of human knowledge, blogs, twitterers, computerized phones more powerful than Colossus and a third world that is not quite so third any more?
The simple answer is: “They would not have had a prayer of being right.”
So have I proved a Theory of History is impossible? No, far from it. I have simply framed the obvious limitations of the data available to us. It is insufficient to allow anything like a hard science of history to develop. That does not mean such data will never be available. Let us posit one possible future in which there might be true scientists working in such a field…
It would be some hundreds if not thousands of years hence. Humanity has gone to the stars and we have studied the histories of hundreds of other sentient races. We have put our AI’s to work for some decades to analyze and categorize; we have looked at vast amounts of cross-galactic statistical data; we have framed the areas where mathematical Chaos reigns and know the likely set of outcomes. Our learned future historical scientists are arguing over what experimental data is required to falsify their theories: ie, can we find a civilization X in which Y occurred?
Then and only then could we say that history is a science. Of course we still do have a problem. Unless we run across an elder civilization willing to talk to us, we still cannot predict our own future at all. We can only do so for civilizations at earlier stages of development than our own.
Thus Popper still wins the argument against Historicism as a self-analysis tool even in the far future.
There have been so many incidents that some have described as being the death blow to the current UK government that one wonders whether any single news event will finish this lot of creeps off. But for a glimpse at the sheer, wanton corruption and venality of this administration, the story of the various relationships between those involved in handing over a convicted mass murderer to Libya gives you some idea of the morality of this government. It is appropriate that the article was written by Andrew Neil, a proud Scot and Anglospherist who is justly appalled at the behaviour of both the UK and Scottish administrations.
And yet the capacity of such stories to shock, while it should not be underestimated, needs to be put into some sort of perspective. Let’s face it, governments of Left and Right, be they French, American or British, have sold weapons and munitions to often odious regimes in the past, or done commercial deals that don’t bear too much scrutiny. Remember the UK Matrix-Churchill “supergun” affair of the 1990s? Remember the 1986 Iran/Contra kerfuffle that marred the second Reagan term, or the recent issue of British defence firm BAE Systems and sales to the Saudi government? There has been a history of Western governments willing to set aside certain scruples in the name of exports.
The Libyan affair is a grubby business, to be sure. But there is, alas, nothing remotely surprising about how the various parties have behaved.
The world of genetically modified plants took an interesting commercial turn, according to this story by Bloomberg that caught my eye.
“An old guy’s wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, “We’re out of meat.” The old guy blows his top. He yells, “I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you’re out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . ” A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, “Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things.” The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, “Calm down and go home.” The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, “What’s the matter, are they out of meat?” “Worse than that,” says the old guy, “they’re out of bullets.”
An old Russian joke, as told by the one and only PJ O’Rourke.
The idea of the Enemy Class, to coin Sean Gabb’s term, gains credibility by the hour. A distinguished member of this class is Lord (but of course!) Adair Turner, now chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the regulator of UK financial affairs. The FSA was set up by the current Labour administration in 1997, and among its many achievements is to have largely failed to warn of the catastrophic expansion of credit – driven by central banks – which created an asset bubble in the UK. It failed to warn sufficiently about the high-risk lending policies of mortgage lender Northern Rock. Undaunted, the FSA churns out reams of consultations and reviews on how to make financial services more efficient and professional. It would require the patience of a saint to point out that the best way to promote competitive, high-quality financial services is for regulators and other agents of the State to get out of the bloody way and ensure that firms have to build a solid reputation and for consumers to exercise the virtue of caveat emptor.
But the latest foray of the FSA into the issues surrounding the credit crunch may be its lowest point yet. Lord Turner argues that the UK banking sector is too large, so large in fact, that it is harmful to society. He does not, in the widely cited Prospect magazine interview, elucidate what he means by “too large”, or whether it is possible for a civil servant, economist or other such person to figure out the optimum size of a specific sector. When Hayek talked of the “fatal conceit” of socialists imagining they can micro-manage the balance of human activities, this is the sort of hubristic thinking the great man was talking about.
I fear Lord Turner is also missing a crucial point, or just ignoring it. The point is that in a globalized economy such as we now have, financial centres such as London, Singapore, Zurich and New York are almost akin to nations in their own right; they dwarf the economies of their host nations because specialisation in finance has moved to a global arena. They rather resemble the old north European Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages. Take a different sector, such as telecoms. Finnish mobile phone firm Nokia is so large, as a percentage of Finnish GDP that a Finnish equivalent of Lord Turner would no doubt argue that the company should be punitively taxed, so that it shrinks and gives the reindeer industry in Lapland a greater share of GDP, or help those vodka retailers do so, or whatever. It is easy to laugh at such bizarre logic, but remember this: these guys have got where they are not by baldly stating their views in quite such terms, but by insinuating them through such question-begging terms as “excessively large”, or by referring to a sector of an economy as “swollen”.
Now it is true that as long as big banks can exert a sort of moral blackmail over taxpayers by stating that they are “too big to fail”, and as long as we benighted taxpayers are told we have to bail these guys out, then Lord Turner’s odd logic will gain a kind of ready audience. But he is looking at the problem the wrong way round: instead of making banking smaller and less profitable and simply driving it abroad, the better approach is to remove state-mandated deposit protection; to remove arbitrary and often counter-productive capital requirements and above all, to focus on the prime culprit in this business: the central bank as printer of funny money. But to do that will require the sort of analysis that does not give the FSA, or other bodies, the powers to tax and regulate. The FSA, like all regulators, is forever looking to increase its powers; it is hardly likely to consider the problem in such a way as to make itself redundant.
Perhaps we’ll soon be hearing that the casino sector is “excessive” in Las Vegas, gold mining is a “swollen” part of the South African economy, and there is too much reliance on fishing in Norway. And as for those Arabs, they spend far too much of their time drilling for oil. Cannot those chappies do something less fwightfully vulgar?
Lord Turner, by the way, is a former director general of the Confederation of British Industry, a lobby group for big business; he has had a consultancy role for Merrill Lynch and has wiritten a long and quasi-statist paper on UK pensions reform. He’s Enemy Class to the core. That he is, as I can attest, a thoroughly likeable guy does not alter that fact. It makes him actually quite dangerous.
Update: Tim Worstall points out how opposed to the notion of economic liberty this man actually is. When someone says that “an activity is socially useless”, what he or she really means is that “I don’t understand the use for it so it should be banned”.
I picked up the following two items from a Janes newsletter and thought they might be of interest:
US military airborne laser passes first in-flight engagement The US military’s airborne laser (ABL) successfully completed its first in-flight test against an instrumented target missile on 10 August, the prime contractor Boeing said in a statement on 13 August. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is testing the viability of using the high-powered laser to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.
Standard Missile 3 Block IB cleared to begin flight tests The Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) Block IB programme to develop an improved missile for the US Missile Defense Agency’s sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System has completed its critical design review, Raytheon announced on 13 July. The new missile is expected to begin flight tests in 2010. SM-3 Block IB offers significant improvements over the SM-3 Block IA version currently deployed on US Navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers to defend against short- to intermediate-range ballistic missile threats in the ascent and midcourse phases of flight.
So things are still plodding along on all fronts and all becomes simpler as technology improves. I still believe the key number for missile interception is the figure of merit I wrote of a long time ago: instructions per meter. That is the number of machine code instructions that a CPU can process in the time it takes for the relative positions of the target and the interceptor (or laser station) changes by one meter. When this number gets large, the targeting system has more time to ponder what is going on and more time to analyze fused sensor data. Another way of looking at it is that time effectively runs more slowly for the targeting software as the number gets larger.
This is yet another side effect of Moore’s Law. Our processing capabilities are growing to the point where either very sophisticated predictive programs may be used… or very unsophisticated and unoptimized programs will become ‘good enough’.
The journalists who produce the UK’s Channel 4 news programme produced a rather sly piece of leftist propoganda last night (Quelle surprise? Ed). Faisal Islam – whom I have met – had a brief slot on last night’s daily broadcast suggesting that the Chicago school of economics, most famously associated with the likes of Milton Friedman, is somehow partly to blame for the credit crunch. Yes, you read that right.
Mr Islam went on about the “complex models” that were used by these economists and somehow sought to draw a link between the Chicago School, and the decisions taken by banks, both central and private. That seems a bit rum. I don’t recall Dr Friedman or his associates granting a sort of blanket blessing to financial engineering techniques of the kind associated with recent turmoil, suchas using derivatives to put bank liabilities off the balance sheet. That school has also hardly been in favour of encouraging sub-prime lending by legislation. After all, quite a lot of economists with conventional “soft Keyensian” views pretty much signed up to how banking has operated in the last few decades, and of course signed up to the idea that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and his successor, Ben Bernanke, did a spiffing job.
There was no apparent attempt – admittedly quite difficult in a short TV spot – to explain what the key arguments of the Chicago school of economics actually are. Nor was there any attempt to point out that this “school” is only one of the centres of free market economics. The Austrian viewpoint, which tends to eschew statistical formulae completely, went unmentioned. And yet it is the latter approach, as exemplified by the likes of Thomas Woods, that has been most active in pointing out the sheer folly of central bank activity in the past decade or so. And this central bank activity is what has been the prime culprit, a fact that Mr Islam’s documentary left unmentioned.
The programme also failed to ask any questions of the Keynesian tradition, with its love of big, artificial aggregates such as “consumer demand” etc. If one is going to point to the hubris of statistical models of economic behaviour, then the Keynesian macroeconomic tradition is surely as much in the firing line as the Chicago one.
As propoganda, it was very effective on anyone who might not understand the issues. It might have been put together by that performance artist, Naomi Klein.
Maybe the problem is that these issues are often highly complex and difficult to portray intelligently in a 5-minute news slot. Well indeed.
After having it sit on my book shelf collecting dust for half a decade or more, I finally picked up Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” as I had nothing left that was less daunting in appearance for my late afternoon lunch/dinner/coffee break. Whatever else I may get from it, whether I find myself agreeing or not, I most certainly found it a generator of ideas and flights of wild fancy, some of which I will now impose upon you.
First, I have only ever read parts of Plato. A few chapters here and there over the years. I have tended to use my deep thinking reading time for people more like Hayek and the other free market economists and thinkers. Thus I was utterly and totally unprepared for the shock of the Platonic quotation that headed Volume I:
The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace — to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.”
I do not think I have ever had such a horrified awakening to such pure evil in my life. If this is what Plato’s philosophy espouses, then nearly anything built upon him is likely to be totalitarian and I can easily see the direct line from him through the Hitler’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s of well over two thousand years after his demise.
ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:
The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.
In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.
FFS!
Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.
And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill… stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.
PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.
David Gordon, a US writer, has a good review of a book called, unambiguously, The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick.
I liked Gordon’s final paragraph, which is worth waiting for. Assuming his review is fairly based, it is amazing how lame, or downright thin, are the arguments for big government. It is a sort of backhanded compliment to the efforts of free marketeers that collectivists should still feel the need to write such works defending their views at all. Whenever we get grumpy and depressed about the way the world is going, it is good to remember that the other side cares enough about our views to want to try and deal with them, however shabbily.
Update: thanks to a reader for spotting my error in the name of the reviewer. My bad. Now fixed.
Michael Yon emails Instapundit, “The British Ministry of Defence cancelled my embed after today’s dispatch. Please read Bad Medicine.”
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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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