Niall Ferguson in the Boston Globe

Take a read of Niall Ferguson's interview with the Boston Globe (you may need to register but it is free and quick). He is in superb form which is nice to hear as the reviews of the War of the World have been mixed at best.

In particular, this is an incredibly controversial statement but one which has to have more than a grain of truth in it:

"For one thing, nation states are a relatively recent phenomenon: Even at the beginning of the 20th century, 82 percent of the world's population lived in empires. And the problem with transforming empires into nation states-Woodrow Wilson's central idea, and that of nationalists in Asia and Africa-is that the process is extraordinarily bloody. To imagine an ethnically homogeneous nation state is often to imagine ethnic cleansing."

By couching anti-imperialism in terms of rule by an ethnic other being wrong rather than in terms of liberty within ethnically diverse nations and empires the movement has encouraged the bloodshed that comes from attempting to form ethnically defined states from populations which are never distributed so neatly. As such, there are two motivations for anti-imperialism:

1) A struggle against imperial rulers who mistreat their subjects and do not allow them important freedoms.

2) The kind of struggle that has as its aim being ruled by someone of the same ethnicity as your own.

Most independence movements will be moved by a mixture of both motivations but the more it is about 2) the more it is likely to lead to awful bloodshed.

US Healthcare Outcomes

Marginal Revolution highlights a study which finds vast disparities in healthcare outcomes between different portions of the US population. Asian women in Bergen County, New Jersey have a life expectancy of 91.

The main question I think this raises is why, if life expectancies are the result of lifestyle choices to such an extent, they should be included in measures of development such as the HDI. For example, does the Japanese penchant for fish instead of burgers really mean it is more developed?

Porgy & Bess

Porgy & Bess is going to be showing at the Savoy Theatre from the end of October. I'm really looking forward to it. I've never seen a performance of the Gershwin magnum opus in its original form and am curious to see how the standards fit together.

Over the weekend I saw Guys and Dolls, with Patrick Swayze as Nathan Detroit. It had mediocre bits and quite good bits. However, it has been so long since I've seen a musical that I found the whole experience slightly odd. Also, I spent the entire time wanting to shout "thanks for winning the Cold War" at Swayze.

"A clever sheep"

I consider this my favourite comic sketch ever.

Monbiot on Air Fuel

My little brother, when he was somewhat younger than he is today, once told us that he didn't think he would learn much at school in the coming year because "everything I think of, I already know". I think for most people, certainly myself, your perception of how much of the universe there is left to understand goes in an inverted U through the educational experience. You start out young, clueless and constantly being offered new knowledge by adults; you know that you have a lot to learn. From the beginning of secondary school you have a decent grasp of the basics of a slew of disciplines and it becomes quite unclear that there are things you do not understand. Once in university, however, you start to get a sense of the sheer amount of work science has left to do. By the end of my master's programme I had a pretty good sense of how little we know with how little certainty in my field of Economic History.

George Monbiot does not appear to have absorbed this. His opinion piece for Comment is Free argues that Branson's investment is a poor idea as alternative fuels are not suitable for airplanes. It would seem absolutely bloody obvious that Branson knows this or he wouldn't be planning on spending billions on research. The method for a climate change friendly air fuel is that knowledge that Monbiot does not have; he therefore assumes that such knowledge is not there to be discovered.

The rest of his article is equally questionable.

"Now it could be that Branson's money will help develop a new source of biofuel - algae grown in ponds in the desert for example, or waste products from crops and forestry. If so, that's something we should welcome, while remembering that it can't comprise more than 10% of his fleet's fuel. The problem is that we need to cut carbon emissions by 87% by 2030 in every sector - aviation included - and there's no conceivable way in which a change of fuel could do this, especially if the number of flights keeps growing."

Large reductions can be made. 87% by 2030 is a very strong figure, stronger than any practical policy programme can deliver, and is designed to give the answer that only swinging reductions in consumption will work, but large reductions in SO2 emissions have been achieved in the US without drastic measures. It won't be possible entirely through a change in fuel but more efficient engines and larger planes are already increasing fuel efficiency thanks to market pressure.

"Other forms of agriculture are being driven onto virgin land as the global demand for grain rises. Rising grain prices, blamed by the UN food and agriculture organisation primarily on the demand for biofuels, already threaten the food security of the world's poor - and it is likely to get a lot worse."

Biofuels are not the chief danger to food security. There is more than enough food grown in the world and more than enough agricultural production to allow a shift towards biofuels. Starvation is not a result of global food shortages but localised crises as highlighted by Amartya Sen's finding that there are no famines in democracies.

"Branson's announcement was a marvellous publicity coup, as so many of his initiatives are. But is there anything behind it?"

Don't you feel clever and cynical now? If it were aimed at a PR boost spending £1.6 billion would be deeply inefficient. If he were pledging a few million, or even a few hundred million, then maybe but there is no way that Branson will, in selfish terms, make a positive return on this investment. Whether or not Monbiot is right that more drastic measures are needed as well his scorning of a pledge of huge funds towards an improvement in technology demonstrates that his views may have more to do with a dislike of enterprise than a real concern for climate change.

Dave the Chameleon was 'too sophisticated'

According to a BBC report, Margaret Hodge has apparently told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference that "Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman did not understand what we thought [Cameron] was about" and that the message of the Dave the Chameleon ads was too sophisticated for Barking voters.

If I was from Barking I'd be throwing my laptop at the wall right now in rage.

I consider myself sophisticated; I'm intellectually engaged and have been through a rather expensive tertiary education. I can see no message more sophisticated in the Dave the Chameleon ads than "he says different things at different times and in different places and is quite posh". I'm pretty certain even the most troglodyte Barking resident could have worked it out.

The problem wasn't that it was too sophisticated. Rather, it was that it was entirely negative suggesting the party had nothing positive to say about its own programme, tried to revive a dead class war which no one enjoyed, had a very likeable little character as its chief villain and was chronically patronising.

Her proposal is that Labour needs to choose a line of attack on Cameron quickly to avoid getting their wires crossed. If they choose in a hurry and understand how these things play in the country as well as Margaret Hodge does it should be plain sailing for Dave.

Was Gandhi stylish?

Rachel Campbell-Johnston has written an article lambasting the world and its magazines for their shallowness in selecting Kate Moss as an icon of style. After all, she's "a mere clothes horse". Campbell-Johnston's preferred icon is Gandhi.

Unfortunately this seems to arise from her definition of style "a personality that has been won through moral effort and philosophical rigour" appears to be more an effort to define 'virtuous' or, at a stretch, 'good'.

Let's try dictionary.com:

"Characterized by or conforming to style or the fashionable standard; fashionably elegant; smart or chic: She wore a very stylish gown to the inaugural ball."

The homespun pants look never quite caught on and was never particularly chic. Gandhi wasn't stylish; let's leave some meaning in the language please.

18 Doughty Street

Initially I was a little suspicious of the idea of 18 Doughty Street. I'm not convinced that the minor channels on digital television get many viewers and without a decent viewer base such an interactive concept would quickly fall by the wayside. Equally, my monitor is busy and unlike with a TV I'm not used to leaving video running on it while I do other stuff. However, a couple of things have convinced me it is a brilliant idea:

1) Tim Montgomerie's interview with Channel 4. I know Tim does quite a few media appearances these days but even so he did shockingly well. If you didn't know before hand would you have thought he was from the new minority station and Krishnan Guru Murthy a major network anchor?

Guru Murthy's self satisfied assumption that regulation made his network and the BBC 'impartial' was frustrating. Tim's insistence that he preferred to be open about his bias and balance it through other points of view was refreshing. It now seems likely that the channel itself will be equally refreshing.

2) The idea of video podcasting it. I have a fast internet connection and a video iPod. So do a growing number of people. I was sceptical at the idea that I would have the video window running on my computer for a few hours at a time but if I can store it and then watch it the following day on the move then it would be a great way to spend time on the train etc.

One additional idea. I have Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition and an XBox 360 (apologies for the amount of technology I'm referencing in this post). When the XBox 360 is connected to a media center PC it has an 'Online Spotlight' section which allows me to watch BBC or Reuters internet news services on my TV through my computer as well as various other sites. This obviously requires some kind of set up with Microsoft but it is something they're really pushing at the moment so I'd think they would be amenable. This would allow me to watch it on my regular TV from day one unlike the promised internet TV services which are still a while away. It might be another useful method of getting 18 Doughty Street's content out there.

Good luck to all those involved and I look forward to watching.

Lessons for British Cinema from the Koreans

British talent is all over Hollywood. There are British stars: Jude Law, Keira Knightley, Kate Beckinsale, Clive Owen, every Star Wars/Lord of the Rings villain, Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz. British directors are doing some of the best work in Hollywood: Sam Mendes with American Beauty, Road to Perdition and Jarhead; Christopher Nolan with Memento, Insomnia and the superb blockbuster Batman Begins.

The British film industry itself is somewhat less impressive. It consists of occasional romantic comedies, costume dramas, Guy Ritchie's rather worn gangster niche and various gritty social commentaries many of which, Kidulthood for example, are quite good. However, by contrast to the 60s boom with Zulu and Lawrence of Arabia to the early Bonds this is not a mass market phenomenon. We have quite a good answer to the US indie film industry but we no longer have an answer to Hollywood. As such, the vast majority of the film watching done in England is of American films.

Is it important that Britain have a film industry? I usually steer clear of such econ-nationalism but this is a special case. Good, popular, films provide a people with a sense of themselves and a shared experience. It provides a narrative to our past, present and future. The first post on this blog was about the need for a sense of nation as identified by our political leaders. Film making is a powerful medium through which such a national spirit can communicate itself.

I think South Korea's film industry is an example of the way forward here in its sheer ambition. The quota system undoubtedly aided its development but I do not think it was crucial as this article highlights that before a series of remarkable successes the quotas had merely kept the industry on life support making low budget quota fillers. Equally, the Competition Commission does not think there are any uncompetitive blocks to British films making a bigger splash in the UK although this article thinks there may be to success in competing in the US. To my mind it would seem equally likely that increasing protection will lead to lazy UK film makers instead of their creative renaissance.

It was Shiri in 1999, with a large budget and a willingness to play the American game that changed the rules by beating Titanic's South Korean box office record and proving their was money in South Korean cinema. By 2001 domestic film makers had a 42.2% market share; up from a low of 15.4%. By comparison the share of British companies in the British market is around 4%. They now make both blockbusters such as the Saving Private Ryan-like Brotherhood and the historic epic The Warrior (I've used the Westernised titles as it is easier) and some commercially successful creative efforts such as Old Boy and A Bittersweet Life.

If our emigre film makers can succeed in Hollywood one would assume they can, creatively, follow the same track. Equally, we have advantages over the Koreans in being an English speaking nation which is, therefore, more accessible to those overseas who might constitute an export market. There are a few lessons from the Korean success:

1) Competition in the film industry: these are not film funded by charity or government (National Lottery funding is important to the UK industry and has backed a great many flops).

2) Experience of foreign film-making: there is no lack of UK talent working abroad, particularly in Hollywood as described above, so the more important effort may be luring some of these stars home.

3) Offering something different: watch the best Korean films (plenty of suggestions above) and they're offering something quite different to Hollywood. This is something I am absolutely sure British creatives can come up with.

4) Be fun: I hate to sound philistinical but films about the dingy side of British life are neither particularly relevant to the British experience (we're not a dingy nation these days if we ever were) nor good candidates for the basis of a film experience which British filmgoers and an international audience will want to be a part of.

Britain has a lot going for it in establishing a cinema industry. We have a wealth of history and literature from which to draw. Contemporary creative successes in other cultural forms which can take on the world. Internationally we have the world's most valuable national brand which suggests foreigners would be interested in engaging with cinematic treatments of Britain. Translating these advantages into British films about British topics would be a great achievement for anyone ambitious and talented enough to make it happen.

Simon Jenkins on US Schools

I'm not going to do a big long fisk of this Simon Jenkins column as I have for some of his other recent efforts as it isn't all that bad but it is worth pointing out one particular moment when he utterly misses the point:

"There is a reason why the otherwise privatised United States still regards its schools as quintessentially civic institutions, not as Whitehall’s teaching machines."

So, the US schools are an exception in an otherwise private nation. He uses this as evidence that having schools as a civic institution must, therefore, be a good thing. Unfortunately US public schools are also an exception among US institutions in being pretty dismal. Paul Samuelson has written a brilliant article for the Washington Post arguing that the US succeeds despite poor performance in its schools thanks to a massively successful, but far less civic, tertiary education system.

The lesson from US education is not that 'civic' institutions succeed where more market oriented ones fail but quite the opposite.

Online Gaming and Chinese Gold Farmers

The Sunday Times reports a new documentary by a University of California in San Diego student looking at the economics of internet gaming. Essentially Chinese players work huge stretches gaining the experience, currency and items which make a character powerful and then sell this to Westerners who are not willing to take the vast amount of time required to progress. That this practice has developed to such an extent does not surprise me. People care a lot about these games and there have to be plenty cash rich enough to afford such a service but time poor to the extent that they will not be able to manage the enormous task of reaching the end stages of an online game like World of Warcraft.

The growth of online games begins to make the more modest online worlds imagined by authors like William Gibson in his Virtual Light trilogy appear far less science fictional. There are millions of people for whom the quick typing of "irl" to denote an event or thing belonging to the real world signifies a need to shift their perspective out of a virtual world. They are generally playing as themselves, this is not roleplaying in the classic 'being' your character sense, but they are developing social networks which often overlap with but are not dependent upon real life connections. It is a virtual reality in a far more real sense than could be provided by any futuristic headset.

What no one has ever convinced me of is exactly why this is a bad idea. The most common answer is the truistic but unconvincing "it isn't real". Of course it isn't but the real world isn't perfect. If people want to spend their spare time somewhere else where's the harm?

"It inhibits the development of social skills". No it doesn't. While plenty of people playing these games may well, in real life, have problems with social interaction that is not necessarily a product of playing the game. Plenty of people in the world at large have problems with social interaction. The question is whether it is better for people, when facing such problems, to be interacting in the safe environment of the game or not interacting at all; the answer is clear. Equally, plenty of those playing these games do not have social problems, they choose to spend part of their leisure time playing them because it is a form of social interaction that forms a natural part of a modern, wired, existence; they still have the time to meet friends for drinks etc.

"People get addicted and screwed up". This is probably the most serious criticism of these games. A South Korean who died after playing for 50 hours is the, somewhat heroic, extreme. Others have stories of educations or working lives ruined. However, compare the numbers to those injuring themselves through other leisure pursuits such as harder edged sports or drinking and you'll find this risk is a relatively minor one. Millions play these games without any serious harm.

Online gaming is big and here to stay.

Jeremy Clarkson on Richard Hammond

Gavin Ayling points to the Sun article by Clarkson on Richard Hammond's crash, his recovery and the media and popular reaction. There really is nothing else you need to read on the subject.

Minimum wage and the black economy

The CBI has pointed out to the Low Pay Commission one of the three possible responses of an employer of low paid workers to a minimum wage:

1) Keep them on and accept lower profits or greater losses and the potential to become a corporate casualty of this legislation.

2) Fire them.

3) Move employment to the black economy where the minimum wage and other employment regulation do not exist. This was the option the CBI pointed out that many employers might take. Plenty will not but they are likely to lose out in competition with other, less scrupulous, operators.

The usual response to any questioning of the minimum wage is to point out that being paid very little is no fun at all. However, if you wish to help them you don't have to set up regulation which creates an incentive to either leave them unemployed or less legally protected. Instead you can introduce negative income tax style in work benefits, spread the costs of subsidising the low paid more widely and keep the poor in work.

Osama bin Laden Eats Shit and Dies

According to the French Osama Bin Laden has died of typhoid. Looking up typhoid's causes and symptoms I have concocted the following theory:

Osama bin Laden liked to eat shit; contaminated water is the usual cause of Typhus but surely bin Laden was rich enough to afford iodine tablets?

Now, there is no suggestion he is married and even if he was eating your wife's shit would be a little off; "you kiss our children good night with that mouth?" As he cannot violate the Islamist restrictions on contact with women that means he has to eat a man's shit. This implies he is a gay scat enthusiast.

Osama bin Laden ate shit and then died balding, covered with "rose spots", with perforated intestines and a headache.

Ouch.

Crisps equal Oil

The BHF has 'revealed' that one packet of crisps per day is equivalent to drinking almost five litres of cooking oil every year. This kind of study angers me. What does five litres of cooking oil mean? Even when I eat healthy meals, a stir fry say, there is a splodge of oil in there. Fast food presumably contains a good deal more. I would consider it entirely plausible that these will also add up. What this entire story is missing is the connection to some kind of effect that is scary. Drinking oil is a little weird and gross but doesn't exactly instil much fear.

The new advertising campaign appears to be based entirely on the 'drinking oil' premise but does drinking oil really carry much shock value? It isn't like seeing the injuries that come with getting bit by a car or the clogged up veins that are a result of smoking.

As such, I doubt this will change much. If the loss of status and mockery that comes with obesity isn't enough to change behaviour I doubt changes in the media environment such as this or the campaign to ban certain advertising will make a big difference.

I think that sometimes shock advertising campaigns are at the opposite extreme and are unnecessarily harsh. There was a recent cinema campaign aiming at convincing women to avoid unlicensed taxicabs and the risk of rape this entails. It consisted of a group of women enjoying a club but then dragging one of their number off to be sexually assaulted. It then ended on the statistic that there are x number of rapes per year of women who take unlicensed taxis.

Now, I doubt most people knew that statistic before hand and it seems likely to me that it would be enough to change the behaviour of anyone paying attention. For that reason, I doubt it was helpful to inflict that kind of stress on the movie going public; the shock was more likely to turn people off than increase the impact of an already strong statistic.

Andrea Leadsom's recipe for DISASTER!

Andrea Leadsom has a recipe for the perfect British society. Some flaws are immediately apparent:

"Take one cup of Anglo Saxon determination"

Read Mencken's essay on Anglo-Saxon courage. We're remarkably determined because we tend to position ourselves onto the winning side.

"Mix with a jugful of Muslim respect for the family"

Steven Sailer has quite a persuasive argument that this is thanks to the tendency of those in the Muslim world to marry their cousins. This increases the closeness of the genetic relationship within extended families. There are a couple of problems with this. First, marrying your cousins is weird and creates freak babies and premature death. Second, it encourages nepotism which hurts the development of a liberal society.

"Stir in a pinch of traditional Asian modesty"

This modesty often manifests itself as a lack of openness to outsiders. This is why Asian business made use of relation based contracting in its early years which led to the investment bias which unravelled in the Asian Financial Crisis

"Whisk with two tablespoonsful of military respect for authority"

This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the authority in question. Respect for authority will tend to vary based on how attractive the authority is rather than any cultural affinity for authoritarianism. Where this cultural affinity is supposed to exist it is usually a source of trouble, i.e. Jasper Becker's explanation for the failure of nascent Chinese democracy.

"Serve on a bed of East European work ethic"

This is clearly a result of context. The Eastern European work ethic wasn't quite as evident during their period of post war Communist control. Free societies generally build a fine work ethic and socialism generally kills it. However, this actually means that we don't have this to learn from other cultures but, rather, to encourage it through the right institutional framework. 'Culture' as a determinant of national success is overrated.

"And enjoy with a full glass of British belief in the freedom of the individual!"

This is the real winner. May I suggest a liquid diet?

"There is a serious point here - we in the so called 'Western civilisations' have so much to learn from other cultures, and they would stand to gain so much by learning from ours. We don't have all the answers - far from it.......but nor do any other culture or religion. It's only by mutual respect, a willingness to learn and the courage to live together that we will build a better life for our children."

There are many Muslim, Asian and other people, both today and historically with ideas and perspectives to offer which we should be open to. However, I would suggest the West's distinctive values have been its strength.

The strange death of my libertarianism

On Monday the Devil posted up this animation. I first came across it when an angry Irish libertarian friend linked it in an e-mail with the title "THEY SHOULD SHOW THIS IN SCHOOLS". I've been meaning to write about this particular animation for quite some time for a simple reason; it killed my libertarianism.

To be fair my sense of myself as a libertarian had always been precarious. I am of a moderate temperament and could never quite stir myself to the indignation that appears necessary for such a radical philosophy. Libertarianism has to be radical as anyone who calls themselves a libertarian but doesn't verge on anarcho-capitalism is just trying to feel "dangerous" without any real risk; they're listening to gangster rap while stuck in traffic on the M6.

However, for quite some time in my early university years I considered myself a solid libertarian. I was convinced that a lot of the problems people describe as the market's actually came from attempts at state intevention; I remain convinced that this is the case. My credentials were solid: I was a member of the LSESU Hayek Society from within days of entering the university and was one of the first to combine that with activism within wider student politics. It was fun to have a two word answer to almost any political query (privatise X). Finally, in a university full of lefties proud of their socialist-liberal credentials it was great fun to argue social issues at them from the liberal end (legalising heroin for example).

Libertarianism is far better suited than conservatism to university politics as it is encouraged by the libertinism that student life entails. I was always quite good at making use of this advantage to dent the socialist haze in which most student's political understanding operates. Being right wing at the LSE is a lot like being a missionary in that you know you're more civilised but can't appear too smug as you're chronically outnumbered; I had at least one solid conversion to my name and made a good missionary. At one point I even managed to defeat a motion in the Union General Meeting condemning Coca-Cola for murdering trade unionists with a memorable "Lots of murders in Columbia, relatively few in the Coca-Cola company; where do you think the problem is?" defence while carrying a can of that fine Atlantan soft drink.

However, what began to bug at me was the effect that the contradiction at the heart of libertarianism tends to have on its adherents. The contradiction is this: If you believe that the principles in this cartoon are true then you cannot use state power, which always equals slavery and violence, to any end as this would be morally wrong. However, property rights are not rights unless there is some means of enforcement to prevent infringements. That immediately kills the moral simplicity this cartoon is trying to establish. In the society this cartoon seeks to create property rights would not be rights but rather a privilege conferred by popular whim and vulnerable to death by free rider effects.

Most libertarians get over this by the simple device of the night watchman state; property rights violations are okay so long as they are that minimum required to defend property rights. The problem is that in doing so they instantly lose the claim to having an absolute principle and libertarianism loses its moral certainty.

Further, what this logic relies upon is that defending property rights is the kind of duty for the state you can actually fit on the back of a postage stamp. It isn't. The experience for most of humanity both now and historically has tended towards being chronically unsure of their property's security against being lost to the unscrupulous or violent. While the state is often one of the biggest dangers to the security of property and person it tends to be at its most dangerous when a failure to protect its citizens from internal strife or external aggression has endangered its survival. Britain's historical liberalism is not unrelated to its high degree of military security. The European welfare state was built to justify nations following their failure to defend their citizens from invasion and occupation (see A.O. Milward for more on this).

Quite a few libertarians respond to this conundrum by becoming incredibly hawkish on law and order; longer sentencing and even the death penalty are used to create a boiling in oil effect. This is unlikely to prove effective. To create the kind of society where property rights are a reality you need quite a few things: a citizenry sufficiently educated that it can engage in contracts and understand the law, no drug addiction removing the ability to make indepedent decisions in future, the nationalism that makes people willing to sacrifice short term interest for the defence of common rights, the kind of military which can defend against foreign attack.

While libertarians can point to failures in state provision of all these things what they cannot do is get around the possibility of people being ruled out or ruling themselves out of effectively making the free decisions that negative liberty requires. The old question of whether people should have the right to sell themselves into slavery becomes more relevant when you ask the question of whether people should be allowed to fail to educate themselves and their children to such an extent that they cannot understand the law or the market transactions a liberal society relies upon.

All of this implies that the best society to defend property rights in reality may not be the one which most privileges them in the abstract. It was this understanding that was slowly killing my libertarianism; that an abstract of pure liberalism was harmful rather than supportive of the defence of greater freedom in the real world. I still consider liberty to have value beyond its side effects in boosting income etc. I still find most social conservatism off-putting or vaguely comical. However, it was when I saw that cartoon and saw the sheer folly of a utopia where libertarianism leaves the defence of liberalism to ad hoc popular whim that I realised it was no longer a useful term in describing what I thought of the world.

Wall-of-shame.co.uk

Looking at the ConservativeHome picture for the story of a UUP defection to the Tories alerted me to the presence of conservativesni.com. Wanting to see what the Northern Irish Conservatives had to offer the world I took a look. What was the first thing I saw?

The brick wall above linking to wall-of-shame.co.uk. The images down the side of the homepage on wall-of-shame are a little too friendly featuring ethnic minorities, women and a disturbing amount of yellow but other than that it is a first class feast of negativity. Nice to know that the regional party in Northern Ireland is maintaining its own personality. Yay.

John Reid's Speech on Islam

Given the circumstances, with new terrorist plots emerging on a weekly basis, for John Reid, the Home Secretary, to give a speech advising Muslim parents to watch for signs of radicalisation in their children seems almost excessively moderate. After all of these plots are uncovered the stories almost inevitably contain quotes from parents shocked at discovering their children had anything to do with militant Islam. However, the speech was shouted down repeatedly while it was being given and has met significant opposition since.

Ahmed Versi's contention that this is requiring parents to spy on their children is ridiculous. Trying to keep a track on whether your offspring are falling in with a bad crowd is a fairly normal parental occupation.

Suggestions that this amounts to 'demonisation' or a labelling of the Muslim community as potential terrorists are also misguided. Every time another Islamist terrorist plot is discovered or executed that is a far greater contribution to the label of 'terrorist' being placed on British Muslims. If those who see themselves as spokespeople for the Muslim community really wish to defend its interests and image they would do well to commend Reid's message.

The violent threat posed by extremists within the British Muslim community will not be wished away. Measures in the UK's struggle against Islamist terror can be divided into actions by the Muslim community or actions by non-Muslims. The more the British Muslim community does to assist in preventing terrorist outrage the less there will be a need for harsher polices to be imposed upon them. Those, like Mr. Versi, who dislike measures taken by the British state in its struggle to control terror should reflect on whether their opposition to calls for parental "spying" will mean that they wind up leaving the British state to do far more of the work in confronting terror; this is not something they will enjoy.

China, India and the US: The changing balance of economic power

This graph, from the Wall Street Journal and highlighted by Greg Mankiw, does a brilliant job of highlighting the extent to which the US displaced the older economic powers which are now experiencing a renaissance of economic power rather than a first taste of it.

The inclusion of Europe would answer the obvious question of who was relatively declining and then improving relative to the three nations in this study before and after World War II.

The Pope vs. Islam

As I have noted in earlier posts on this blog it does appear to me that it must have been a conscious choice to use the relevant quote, critical of Islam, that the Pope did use in his speech. It would appear to me he included this quote as something of a snipe. Emphasising Islam's irrationality so that his speech about rationality served the additional purpose of making clear that Christianity was special; particulary by comparison to its closest, by numbers, rival. I do not think this was wise for a figure like the Pope whose spiritual authority implies he cannot easily speak just for himself.

However, the reaction of the Muslim world has been so utterly irrational and savage that criticism of the Pope is no longer helpful. What seems remarkable to me is the tendency of the protests to steadily increase after the initial crisis. They appear less out of outrage at the offence itself, which one would assume would dissipate from the moment it was given, but, instead, as part of a desire to prove one's religious piety by comparison to other people and areas of the world. This response has nothing to do with genuine questions over the Pope's comments and does not deserve the succour which comes with continued criticism of his actions even if that criticism is more subtle and sensible among the Western commentariat. If you wish to find offensive opinions and actions you will find that the Vatican is not the best place to look at the moment. The Pope is more sinned against than sinning.

Swiss Interior Minister on the Pope's Speech

Those lucky Swiss. Their interior minister has managed to, in clear terms, describe how a speech confronting a controversial issue but an important one to debate, the place of rationality in religion and faith in science, became a confrontation thanks to the carelessness of a professor new to the scrutiny of being Pope. Couchepin has cut through a lot of the empty rhetoric surrounding the issue on both sides. The Pope committed no great evil, his speech did not deserve the fury it has been getting from the Islamic world, however, the example he chose was a mistake for someone in his position.

Manuel II Paleologus

Peter Robinson's post on the Corner about Manuel II Paleologus is a fine one. It doesn't make the Pope's quote more helpful in assessing the truth of whether their is an Islamic tendency to violence; this was clearly someone more exposed to the savage than the civilised in Islam. However, it would be sad if this diplomatic spat were to leave him tainted, unfairly, as a narrow and unpleasant man. Runciman's history of the Fall of Constantinople is a fine place to start in gaining a broader perspective on the events and people of this historical period.

Can we learn lessons from history on the source of economic crises?

There are storms gathering over the global economy: geopolitical risks in the War on Terror, large trade imbalances between the major trading nations and threatening demographic change in the developed world and some developing nations such as China. However, there is no clear consensus on when shocks such as a commodity shortage or a stock market reversal will be translated into a crisis. As a result, Desmond Lachman has argued that each economic crisis is uniquely dysfunctional, in Tolstoy’s words, “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and that the lessons we can learn from how past crises have unfolded are limited. I would beg to differ: there are important lessons to be learnt from past crises about how the next crisis might unfold.

A more traditional approach is the Galbraithian view, that capitalism tends to crisis thanks to the greed and irrationality the economic system is based upon. However, there is a third option: that economic crisis is caused not by the economic system’s inherent instability but by institutions designed to manage this instability that cannot adapt to new conditions and wind up turning instability into a crisis.

Galbraith pioneered the classic account of irrational excess as the cause of the Great Depression. The greedy, irrational actors who populate the economic system saw an opportunity to get rich quick in the ever rising stock market and built it up to such a level that a crash was inevitable when their greed turned to fear. This approach has received some empirical support from modern studies by DeLong and Shleifer and Rappoport and White but for various reasons these studies are far from convincing. Studies from McGrattan and Prescott, Sirkin, Nicholas and have all confirmed the view of Irving Fisher before the crash that the 1929 stock market was not, a priori, overvalued and the Friedman and Schwartz analysis that the Depression was caused by Fed policy exacerbating the minor setback of a relatively moderate initial stock market fall. However, the refinement offered more recently is that the reason policy failed in this way was the constraint imposed by the Gold Standard. Ben Bernanke, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, did an empirical study showing that the sooner a country left the Gold Standard the sooner it recovered from the depression. A rule that had played its part in the stability of the 19th century created a mess in the first half of the 20th.

The other crises of the 20th century had much in common with this story of institutional rigidity. It is impossible to separate the crisis following the 1970s oil shock from the collapse of Bretton Woods. The early 1990s recession in the UK can be connected to the ERM and the collapse of that attempt to fix interest rates. Finally, the Asian Financial Crisis can be related to an outmoded institution of a different kind. Krugman’s analysis of ‘crony capitalism’ is too simplistic. The East Asian economies use of relation based contracting was successful in earlier years when formal rules were costly to enforce. However, the close knit business relationships were a source of bias in the investment decision and created a financial instability that would be exposed with liberalisation of financial markets that was necessary as the East Asian economies developed.

The common thread running through the origins of all these crises is institutions past their sell by date. These institutions are attempts to control the instability that comes with free markets which can have new products or dramatic changes in costs thanks to technology or suffer shortages thanks to political or physical changes. The volatility that emerges from these changes in expectations of the future state of the economy is put down to speculators, to a greed for filthy lucre and is seen as dangerous. Such attempts at control can appear successful. The Gold Standard presided over the long stability of the pre-WWI economy. Fixed exchange rates set under the Bretton Woods system watched over the European Golden Age. However, the source of stability can usually be found elsewhere and the institutions play a supporting role at best: free trade, technological advance and political stability in the case of the 19th century and liberalisation of trade and sensible policy choices encouraged by the Marshall Plan in the European Golden Age. The instability these institutions create in their death is not matched by stability created during their life.

Attempting to form institutions to defend the stability of the global economy often fatally underestimates the ability of the capitalist system to adjust to external shocks. This underestimation can cause wise men of great experience and solid temperament with state power to be far more dangerous to economic stability than any ignorant fool trying to get rich quick but with only the funds he possesses himself or can borrow. It is institutions, whether the Euro or East Asian Currency manipulation, which try to work against rather than with the corrective forces of the market that should be watched for signs of the next economic crisis rather than the more brutally obvious danger of geopolitical stand offs with Iran.

The Death of the Swedish Model

It continues. Earlier this year we had an account from Martin Wolf, summarising a Swedish study, of the costs of the Swedish Model. Now Bronwen Maddox in the Times sums up quite neatly its political unravelling.

The ability of its state to channel the unemployed away from the official numbers has been exposed, bringing double digit unemployment to light. Immigration has hurt the homegeneity that made it possible to run a welfare state without any serious redistribution and has, therefore, complicated the political task of forming a majority. With a homogenous population a welfare state is far less likely to have to prioritise between the interests of different groups and it is, therefore, easier to find a majority in its favour.

Now a right wing party is expected to win power. Its manifesto is for an attack on the Swedish model which will go a significant way towards killing it in its hometown. Even if the current Prime Minister survives and the Social Democratic party limps along in power the political settlement that made allowed such an all encompassing welfare state to survive as long as it did is now shattered.

An important question for Sweden will be how a people long accustomed to the state looking after them will cope as the welfare state's retreat requires a relearning of habits of self reliance that are bound to have atrophied; this Mises Institute study suggests the damage may have been severe.

The Pope on Islam

A good friend of mine has been having something of an exchange with Michael Ledeen and others on the Corner (there are more posts on Alykhan's blog). Essentially their debate is turning on whether the quote chosen by the Pope should necessarily be offensive given its context and source and whether or not it is correct. I think this is kind of missing the point.

The real question has to be why, of all the quotes in the world, the Pope chose to use that one. If I were to look for an example of the religious arguing that the will of God is not subject to reason I would have chosen this one. Of course, that might be a little beneath the Holy Father but surely he could have come up with some other example over the last millenium?

I'm not saying it should be necessary for him to avoid the topic of Islam and violence. I'm not saying that the Muslim world is right to be throwing such a tiz. My best guess is that it is a ridiculous generalisation to call it a religion of peace or war. However, I find the idea that the Pope, when looking for an example of religious people with a dislike of reason, would leap straight to a 14th-15th century quote about Islam and holy war entirely at random ridiculous. This must have been a conscious choice to focus on the provocative question, for the head of the Catholic church more than anyone, of Islam's irrationality as well as his broader topic and it is entirely legitimate for Alykhan to question this choice.

Sailer on War and the West

Steve Sailer has written up a new perspective on the military history and future of the West. I'm not impressed.

"America actually does have a long term strategic rival that is worth worrying about. It's a country with about 18 times the population of Iran and about a standard deviation higher average IQ."

Most likely the West won't lose its preeminence because China is just too strong. I am not as impressed by cultural IQs as Sailer. The two most flattering to Chinese potential, and less methodologically suspect, ways of understanding their future power are population and economic growth. Now, the population gap looks huge if you compare China and the US but that is what I would expect Europe to bring to the mix if there were a genuine civilisational clash. Europe's half a billion people begins to make the numerical odds far better.

As such, China would need incomes a lot closer to the Western norm to be able to rival us for sheer economic power. Here people rely on assumptions that China can maintain its current level of growth for significant lengths of time; it cannot do this and it cannot maintain impressive growth beyond a certain level with the mix of institutions it has now. Grand projections of the future power of the Chinese state should always be taken with a pinch of salt. China is one to watch but it need not necessarily be an enemy and it will not necessarily become remotely as powerful as the West.

"Three years ago the big threat to America was supposed to be Saddam Hussein, but he turned out to be an old man pursuing his literary interests (when he was captured in his hole in the ground, he was reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment) by writing romance novels. So this year, the most dangerous man in the world is supposed to be Iran's newly elected President Borat, who is said to be re-assembling the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great, mostly, it seems, by running his mouth off nonstop."

Leaving aside the ridiculous in this paragraph, Sailer is working on the assumption that our civilisational defeat is going to happen when the power of the next greatest civilisation exceeds ours. I see no reason to think this will be the case. While there is a strong case, the Ferguson core hypothesis, that Britain's imperial power was spent in war with its most powerful adversaries most great powers are defeated by a steady erosion of their will to defend their interests.

Rome and Constantinople are the classic cases here but others exist in Keegan's selective account of cultures he sees as less martial. All of these nations declined, in Keegan's view, not because they were opposed by a smarter, larger or richer West but because they were peaceable folks not willing to fight the West. If this is the case, the historical analogy holds, and our defeat will not be caused by the strength of our enemies why is the relative strength of our enemies of such concern to Sailer in his assessment of different threats?

The Keegan hypothesis I find equally weak. The Chinese were capable of fighting wars with some spectacular casualty figures throughout their history. Similarly, while the Japanese managed to restrict the drive to more powerful weapons this would seem to be more a matter of a lack of competition between nations and samurai social dominance than any lack of martial instinct. It seems contradictory that in this period people chose to stick to combat 'face to face' with swords because anything else was too brutal whereas earlier in Sailer's extract Keegan's thesis is all about how brutal combat with swords is.

His thesis works if you treat the eras in which empires are created, the Mamelukes, the Mongolians or Early Islam as outsiders and, therefore, to be excluded from an analysis of the cultures themselves. However, that he has excluded the periods in which these empires rose to power emphasises that the less martial cultures were the declining forms of the same cultures which had been deeply violent earlier on. In their rise they were all warrior peoples.

To pretend that the Mongolians, who would become the Yuan dynasty, could not fight a war with European brutality is to ignore the histories that Islamic culture has handed down to us. When the West came to dominate China it dominated a, Manchurian in origin, Qing dynasty which was, itself, no stranger to serious wars in its earlier years when it conquered Han China.

The West's uniqueness is not, then, that it was a martial culture able to dominate those not willing to do so themselves, these fill history. The proper question to be asked is how these martial cultures transition to something more peaceable but fatally vulnerable rather than trying to answer the false question of what we do about an imagined unique characteristic of the West.

Hillary Benn and the World Bank

I knew it! Hillary Benn, our International Development Secretary, makes himself out to be the good, reformed, Blairite. He knows that being identified as another Bennite dinosaur would mean spending his time in Marxism 2006 conferences opining on how great Scargill was to an audience of smelly old men and Islamists. That's a depressing prospect for an ambitious Benn so he jumped on the centrist bandwagon. Now he appears to be jumping off.

His true colours are coming to the fore: Apparently he finds the idea of us imposing our economic creed on developing countries undemocratic. Of course, this isn't a principle as he's quite happy with IMF conditionality in matters of corruption and good governance but when it comes to privatisation he's threatening to stop a contribution to the World Bank in protest.

There is no principle here. Respecting sovereignty means allowing nations to do what they want with their own citizens and their own money. It doesn't mean we have to throw our own money down a hole because we need to wear democratic blinders to avoid telling the difference between a loan which is going to end up spent on subsidies for the Chad auto industry and one which will get used constructively.

There is a sensible debate to be had over whether or not conditionality needs adjusting to, for example, move more slowly in privatising key industries, my inclination from reading respectable analyses such as the Economist's a year or so ago is that the World Bank does a decent job these days. The Bank has learnt lessons from decades seeing the money it is responsible to us for distributing pissed away on countries without the political will to reform. As far as international development organisations go this is a good one. Reforms which may still be necessary are clearly under discussion and don't need posturing to shunt them along.

What I really hope Hillary Benn will remember, but expect he won't, is the economic history of the Marshall Plan and its role in the European postwar Golden Age. The amount provided by the plan was large but not nearly sufficient to have created growth like was seen in post war Europe. Instead, its role was in encouraging, through conditionality like policy requirements, policy reform and providing the funds to make the process of reform more comfortable in the short term. This is a model the World Bank should and does follow.

World Bank conditionality is an easy target for lazy snipes about democracy from socialists who haven't absorbed the historical experience of what privatisation, Britons should know, and trade liberalisation, all Europeans should remember, can do to improve a country's economic performance.

UKIP and the EU conspiracy meme

The devil is remonstrating with Richard North over at EU referendum about his skepticism of the UKIP. I have two experiences of the UKIP which lead me to suspect they are not up to much:

The First was meeting the then head of their delegation to the London Assembly. The man started by sharing out swedish hairdressing magazines; where he made his money apparently. He then introduced himself with a bizarre story about some tangle with a car which I neither comprehended nor really wanted to. His speech consisted of him sharing his sad memories of the ERM while performing a bizarre hitching procedure with his trousers which made the audience vaguely uncomfortable.

When, after the speech, I suggested to him that a strong pound policy might not have originated in the European Union, the Gold Standard being one case he might want to think about, he stared at me vaguely dumbstruck before letting me know that it had, in fact, been a very hard time for us all.

The Second was at a meeting of a venerable speaking group in which, thanks to letting the audience know I was a Tory, a member of the UKIP told me that it would be legally proper for me to be hanged as I was a part of a party that did not advocate withdrawing from the EU and was a traitor (he said this with a matter of fact calmness which made it sinister if amusing). However, he was happy to tell me that he was a moderate and, as such, would be happy to offer me the option of exile.

What made this doubly amusing was that the substance of his speech was letting us all know that he'd switched to the UKIP because the Liberal Democrats had, fascistically, refused to select him to fight a parliamentary seat thanks to his views on Europe. Fascists, eh?

I have no confidence that the rest of the UKIP is much better; I know of so many others with similar stories to tell. As such, even if I did feel the need to leave the Tories for a single issue party because I cared that much about Europe I'd probably retreat to hermitry before being able to swallow my intellectual pride and join the UKIP.

I don't know Mr Farage personally but I don't really demand brains from my politicians: I demand that they turn up to discussions, that they attack things that are wrong, support things that are right. They do not need brains (fuck me, surely the bunch of useless cunts in Westminster have proven that adequately): that is what policy advisors are for.

Now, this makes sense for a single issue party. If you have no aspirations to government then all you really do need is an attack dog and attack dogs can be stupid if they have sharp teeth. However, this does not appear to be DK's chosen path for the UKIP:

But wouldn't it be better if UKIP could actually get people to see them as a credible party of government, not a protest vote? This is what I shall be dedicating my thinking to over the next two or three years.

If you're a government policy advisors are not enough. MPs will be offered different, and all entirely plausible, policy advice from different advisors and it is up to their intelligence and judgement, and particularly that of their leadership, to choose between these options. While there are some in the current government who do not give the impression of having had an identifiable thought in many years even I can, as an occasionally fierce critic of the government, see plenty of intelligent people in the Labour party. Britain isn't nearly resilient enough to survive a true government of idiots.

The question I have to answer is why, if the UKIP as a party is so moronic, it attracts some supporters, such as DK, who are clearly not. I think this is caused by the same thing that makes the UK's blogosphere somewhat stunted by comparison with the US; the EU conspiracy meme. This meme runs as follows:

'The EU is awful; unremittingly sordid, venal, sinister and dreadful. Most of the public agree with us (cite some public opinion poll which highlights public dissaproval of Europe). However, no one appears to care (same opinion poll has Europe towards the bottom of voter priorities). The media rarely gives prominence to stories of European folly. Therefore, voter apathy about Europe must be fuelled by a media which wants us to stay in Europe and avoids stories which reflect negatively on the European project.'

Some see blogging as the solution to this; bypassing the traditional media to get their message directly to the public. There are at least a dozen, some extremely good, blogs dedicated exclusively to cataloguing what is going wrong in Europe. Others aren't sharp enough to see this option and their rage drives them to become UKIP activists.

However, the truth is that, most likely, neither will find an effective means of tackling public apathy about Europe because it is not born out of ignorance. Rather, it is rational and, like most rational public perceptions, mistakes in either direction average each other out to produce that rational result.

Enthusiasm for expanding our commitment to Europe, in the Liberal Democrat mould, is clearly misguided. Those who signed up to the Euro are now regretting it as it does its part in making a mess of the German economy among others. European regulation on working time does not have public support and is economically stifling as well as plain illiberal. Equally, much of European regulation now is flawed and Britain should be pushing for a rethink where this is the case.

However, the EU is also really not going to come for you in the night. It does involve a sacrifice in sovereignty but so do all international treaty obligations, NATO, the UN etc. Unless you wish to go the Switzerland route this is a difference of degree not principle. Given that it does increase, while far from the perfect free trade animal, free trade within the important market of Europe and leaving would cause a severe institutional disruption there seems no driving need to leave immediately.

Britain has played a diplomatic blinder in Europe. Neither side of the debate on Europe in Britain appears to have absorbed this but most of the Continentals know. While the French were shifting their priorities from maintaining their voting equality with Germany, to building up common foreign policy and defending agricultural subsidies we were focussed, even despite changes in government, on pushing EU expansion. EU expansion has probably killed the dream of ever closer union which was feasible between Germany, France, Belgium and the like but cannot function from Budapest, or further, to London.

It is possible I'm wrong. It is possible that the EU will surprise me with the tenacity of its federalist drive but at the moment the integrationists just sound comical. There seems no particular imperative to deal with the possibility of a superstate sooner rather than later.

Whether or not I am right my view of events is, at least, plausible. It is important to recognise that apathy about something important does not always imply ignorance or conspiracy.

What if Permanent Vegetative States aren't so Vegetative?

"The wheels lock, the car skids, you see the 18-wheeler heading for your windshield. You have just enough time to open your mouth. Then the bite of glass and metal, and merciful blackness.

Somebody's talking. You try to open your eyes, but nothing happens. You can't move or feel anything. In the murmurs around you, you make out a few words: prognosis, unresponsive, permanent. They keep talking about somebody who's here, somebody who never speaks and is never spoken to.

A child cries. You've heard that cry before. Out of the blackness, the
thought comes at you, engulfing you: The unspeaking person is you. You're dead. And then a more horrible idea: Maybe you're not.

You try to call out, to scream. No one knows you're here, awake inside your skull. No one will ever know."

I am not sure if there is a more awful fate possible. Surely it would lead to anguish followed by madness. Take the fate of Natascha Kampusch, the poor Austrian girl, and multiply it by something unnatural and you get close to what such a complete cutting off from natural human experience would mean. William Saletan's article for Slate describing the scientific understanding of the discovery that some, rare, cases of permanent vegetative state may be accompanied by a still aware mind must change the debate over 'pulling the plug' and the right to life of those in a Schiavo like state. It would appear that most PVS cases are not of this type. In particular, the more serious cases such as Schiavo are probably genuinely vegative. However, the possibility of it must change the equation, particularly if discovering whether a case of PVS is mentally aware is difficult as this article suggests.

We are all in something of an original position here. A PVS is generally caused by accidents and does not discriminate between wealthy and poor; healthy and unhealthy. Some may have a slighly higher chance of facing such an unenviable position, race car drivers perhaps, but most of us are all in the same boat. We have no idea if we will face a PVS and, if we do, there is the possibility that we will face the position of being entombed in our own heads as we are to wake up if not a lot more likely. That possibility scares me far more than missing out on the vague possibility sometimes cited by right to life advocates that I will wake up.

The debate used to be about heartache and cost to those left behind by people with no hope of revival. It used to be about practicality and allowing someone a dignified death rather than a non-life. Now, we must face the possibility that a vain hope of revival may be consigning the unfortunate to something awful.

Simon Jenkins... again

You know. His opinions aren't exactly original as they add up to the standard lefty line: 'Terrorism isn't the problem it's those neo-cons using it to advance their sinister security industry agenda or foist their American stupidity on us'. The contradictions are not what frustrate me; I have heard the same from many others but something about the god awful preachiness of Simon Jenkins drives me to distraction.

His latest effort, for the Guardian's repository of awfulness over at Comment is Free, is to celebrate a speech from Mr. Cameron that he appears not to have any interest in actually listening to.

"Bush is wrong. My parents endured one life-or-death struggle, against Hitler's fascism, and I grew up during another, against Soviet communism. Both were real threats. When Bush was dodging war service in Vietnam and Tony Blair was a supporter of CND, I had no qualms about backing nuclear deterrence. Foreigners did not just want to conquer my country and change the way I lived, but they had amassed sufficient state power to make that ambition plausible. I call that a threat to the security of the nation. It required massive defence."

Really? So Simon Jenkins believes that Stalin was planning on marching to London? Or Hitler? Both fought or confronted us on foreign fields. While they may have dreamed of invading us on some far distant day our defence against that was the navy. We did not invade Europe on D-Day in order to stop Hitler invading the UK; his Soviet entanglement had made that an unlikely prospect. We invaded because his regime was an evil one, its power hurt our interests and we could release millions from the horrible fate of being under his dominion. It is the lot and fortune of a nation of our power and geographical security to fight wars without the simplicity of an enemy on our doorstep.

The Bush 'dodging war service in Vietnam' bit is the most ridiculous of ad hominems for someone who is not in the army and is not pretending to be a pacifist. I suppose old Simon Jenkins is a veteran of every 20th century war he's supported.

"Putting Osama bin Laden (or Saddam Hussein) in this league is ludicrous. No force they could command could possibly have ranked with Hitler or Stalin as "a threat to the future of civilisation"."

Compare our military casualties in WW2 with our casualties in the War on Terror and it should be apparent that although Al Qaeda et. al. may be less of a threat to us we are also spending far less in our military confrontation of them.

"'the massive [$100bn] homeland security apparatus ... may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists'."

9/11 was not the only attack that the US or its allies have suffered at the hands of militant Islam. There have been others throughout the world before and after. Scarcely existing is a description that is easy for a commentator but would irresponsible of a leader.

"That Nato members are this week refusing to send more troops to die in Afghanistan is a measure of the gap opening between fine words in the White House and Downing Street and reality on the ground."

That the War on Terror is hard places it within that huge category of thing that are both difficult and necessary.

"The Taliban had bowed to western pressure (and bribery) in 2000-01 and briefly curbed poppy production."

This sentence forms the worst part of Jenkins' case for why the Taliban weren't that bad. Never mind that in terms of repression they were as awful a regime as could be found even before 9/11, the Economist described them as such. They were actively sheltering the bases in which men had trained to attack us. When we went to war with them the war on drugs could wait.

"The west was not threatened when it was notionally "undefended" before 9/11 and is not threatened now. Most western countries are healthy democracies with entrenched liberties, near invulnerable to military attack."

Again, complacency. States that are full of fear are created, not by hysteria as he would have us believe, but by a state which cannot guarantee the security of its citizens. The tired old cliche that citizens have most to fear from their own states ignores the stage before where insecurity undermines faith in that state.

"On Monday the Tory leader, David Cameron, lectured Bush, Blair and his putative successor, Gordon Brown, on moderation. He deplored the naive language of counter-terror and pleaded for more humility and patience in dealing with Muslim states." [..] "For an advocate of the Iraq war this is something of a U-turn. Cameron declared himself a born-again "libcon", a sanitised, semi-demilitarised neocon."

No he didn't. He called for a subtler approach, no doubt, but he also described the need to be able to respond more rapidly than the UN machine allows for, that pre-emptive military action can be necessary, how the avoidance of further attacks has been thanks to our security services and not thanks to the threat always having been in our heads. Cameron's was a call for moderate changes in how we do things not an abandonment of the War on Terror.

"It means cancelling Eurofighters and Trident submarines and investing in
infantry and field armour. It means engaging with Iran rather than threatening
to bomb it."

Earlier in this article Simon Jenkins clearly accepted the need for a nuclear deterrent in the Cold War. Strategic nuclear weapons are not something you turn on and off like a tap. Our deterrent is maintained as part of the long term defence of the United Kingdom against threats of which we are not yet aware. Yet again, he is taking risks acceptable to lazy columnists but not elected officials who must consider our security in the long as well as short term.

Engaging with Iran as a friend will only convince them that they can ignore their commitments and be treated as if they had not. The threat of violence is the stick which can make engagement productive. The surreal idea that we can expect much from engagement alone goes nowhere.

"The stupid party in foreign policy is in retreat. Perhaps, at last, the intelligent party is returning to power."

When an ending is this inspired you know it's been a good column.

Democratic Sharia Law

The New York Sun blog reports the Dutch Justice Minister arguing that it would be undemocratic to dismiss calls for Sharia Law. His case is simple:

"It is a sure certainty for me: if two thirds of all Netherlanders tomorrow would want to introduce Sharia, then this possibility must exist. Could you block this legally? It would also be a scandal to say 'this isn't allowed! "

The majority counts. That is the essence of democracy."
Daniel describes this as demonstrating the need for a constitution which limits democracy and protects the liberty of its citizens. I do not think the case for having a constitution is as clear. If you had a 2/3rds Muslim population who wanted to introduce Sharia law does anyone think a constitution alone could stop them?

Constitutions can delay infringements on liberties; they can act as a rallying point for those trying to defend liberty but they cannot protect individuals or their natural rights. That requires a public willing to defend them and willing to allow minorities their rights. As such, the benefits of a constitution should not be overestimated and may be outweighed by the dangers to democratic decision making posed by an activist judiciary.

A better response to our misguided Dutch friend is that democratic legitimacy is not absolute. Suppose the entire population of the UK were to decide, tomorrow, that Simon Jenkins is a bit of a twunt and they feel the death penalty is appropriate. Would that make the action legitimate? Clearly not.

Democratically choosing madness or tyranny does not make that decision more sane or less tyrannical. Inflicting the repressive overkill of Sharia law on a third of a country who do not want it would be wrong. I would not suggest proscribing it legally through a constitution but making clear to all who will listen that being right is not a numbers game.

Blair's farewell to the TUC

Anne Treneman captures well what I could see of Blair's send off speech from the video on the BBC site. From the collosal lack of warmth in the union farewell to the vague sense that something awful was going to happen when the Prime Minister told us it was "getting warm up here".

The impression it left me with was that, for reasons entirely unknown to the RMT dinosaurs who left at the beginning, Blair really does look like a neocon these days. Irving Kristol, as close to a neocon father figure if ever there was one, described how "[a] neoconservative is just a liberal who got mugged by reality". Blair definitely looked mugged by reality.

Here he was telling his audience in simple language how greater spending was going to have to mean reforms they found uncomfortable if it was to be an effective measure credible with the public; telling them that greater regulation to protect employment could not achieve job security. All he was getting in return was the disaffection of people who didn't like what he was telling them and had never been open minded enough to really listen to what he has had to say. He looked resigned to the fact that his legacy was now in the hands of people for whom his Clause Four moment was an unpleasant memory they could now let go of.

Gordon Brown might succeed in keeping Labour within the boundaries of the sane to the extent that Blair has. However, even if he does keep the faith and hold his nerve to that extent it seems likely that, in the end, he'll be left in the same position as Blair; tired and beaten. What a prospect.

Union Trouble

Mr. E. comprehensively fails to hold back the rage in response to the union resistance to private sector involvement in their workplaces. I don't blame him.

I tend to judge British politicians particularly by their stance on the unions. It is like protectionism in the US as a test of whether you are really willing to confront popular, economically irrational, prejudices. It's the reason why I don't have quite the dislike for Livingstone that I once did. It shouldn't take bravery to side against a union striking over a man being fired for getting caught playing squash while off work with an ankle injury but, unfortunately, it does.

It's the reason why the Union Modernisation Fund is, in my opinion, easily the most politically sordid act of this government.

Losing the race to university

Reuters reports that Britain has failed to increase the proportion of its young people at the same rate as other developed countries. While the British rate has increased from 48% to 52% since 1998 the OECD as a whole saw a rise from 40% to 53%. As such, the average has overtaken us.

The economic consequences of this failure, or insufficient success, should not be overstated. Proportions of your population in higher education shows little correlation to economic performance. Porter, in his study of competitive advantage, noted that it was not the total numbers attending university that made the difference to a country's performance but the number and size of those institutions whose reseach was of internationally competitive standards. As such, the OECD's figure has little to do with the variable which is most economically important.

The rationale for expanding the numbers in university is not economic but social. University builds the middle class. When someone has been to university they are equipped with the skills, aspiration and accent that make them able to move in middle class circles without fear. This makes a difference to their earning potential but is sought, and pushed for by parents, for status reasons as much as anything else, I believe. I'm not sure it will be entirely successful; it is far too easy to separate out the new entrants to university education from the others through an innocuous query as to which university they attended.

Despite this it is an entirely decent aspiration which will improve the fortunes and prospects of the young people in question. Even if those from the old guard universities can still identify their own those at the new universities are still broadening their minds, hopefully, gaining some abilities which will serve them well in future and gaining the aspiration to work with their minds rather than with easily replaceable hands. However, these benefits are largely private and do not have the 'public good' implications that increasing national income did and, therefore, undermine the case for publically funding universities.

Daily Kos vs. Free Speech

The Cartman law of television economics, the idea that censorship of television necessarily mushrooms as one censorship justifies more to avoid offending other groups, appears to have been fulfilled. It is now open season. South Park has seen multiple infringements with the censorship of Cartoon Wars, material Scientologists find offensive not repeated or sent to foreign stations and the Catholics getting a South Park episode censored in Australia. This follows the broad failure to emphatically defend the right to free speech of Jyllands-Posten.

Now the Daily Kos's disciples have come pretty close to getting the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 censored. Pretty soon television free speech will be limited to that which is utterly bland and uncontroversial or which only offends the precious few with enough principle not to take advantage of the lack of spine being demonstrated by television networks and the lack of resolve shown by our political leadership. Speech will be decidely less free. This post on the Kos made me want to beat the waste of space twunt who wrote it to death with his own lack of principles.

Thankfully this time the Kossacks appear to have failed and alterations have been minor. However, they came way too close to censoring a programme on an important issue just because they think it is wrong.

If the Devil thinks there is no God...

I have read the Devil's Kitchen's post on philosophy, atheism and the scientific method and I agree with the substance, that there is no evidence for a god and that logic therefore dictates not believing he exists any more than we believe that Klingons do.

However, I disagree with his belief that philosophy all ultimately comes down to semantics. I also disagree that agnosticism is necessarily logically weak. First, all philosophy is not semantic. I'll use a few examples from my favourite philosopher at the moment; Nietzsche:

"If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does."

Compare this to the utilitarianism that underlies the political stance exemplified by Layard and his search for popular happiness through security and you'll see more than a semantic difference.

N.B. The reference to the Englishman is, I think, analagous to modern day lamenting at Americans. When Nietzsche wrote we were the economic leaders and people expressed their envy in accusations of excess materialism directed at us.

"The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal."

The same point restated. Both are from the Twilight of the Idols.

Finally, possibly my favourite passage from any source, anywhere:

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?"

From the Gay Science. The significance of this is worth a discussion that I don't want to linger on in this post but it should be pretty clear that it really isn't getting at semantics. How do we adjust to the effective death of faith that underlies traditional moral codes (with some hints at the answer)?

The death of God marks a fine point to move on to discussing whether agnosticism can be logically justified. I would justify it along the following lines.

If God does not exist then he is dead and it is up to me to come up with my own moral code. To use my own moral and logical senses to look at the world around me and decide what I treasure or despise without the crutch of bibilical scripture promising divine retribution against those who disagree with me.

If God does exist then this conclusion does not change. Firstly, while God may punish me for doing something wrong this can also be done by other figures of authority such as the state and cannot be the basis of morality. Murdering someone is not wrong because I will go to prison or hell for it. Something is not morally wrong because you are punished for it.

The alternative to this may be that we should do what God wills out of gratitude for our creation or his sending Jesus down to Earth to pay for our sins. However, creation is an easy give for the omnipotent and sending your son down to pay for sins that would not be sins but for a moral code that you (God) have yourself created seems mean spirited. For Jesus to be a sacrifice in good faith implies that there must be a moral code independent of God's will.

Finally, and most importantly, if God has created us it would seem that he has troubled himself greatly to provide us with the capacity to make independent moral judgements. If you wanted a follower you would create an ant. I think that if God exists he will think more highly of someone who makes use of the superb mind he gave us rather than someone who merely reads his morals off a cheat sheet.

As such, religion tends to the same nihilism as non-belief and this means that whether or not God exists I face the same freedom and challenge: to form a morality based on what I can see, hear and understand. This means that the existence of God is not a fundamental question for me and I consider myself a committed agnostic.

Input prices fall faster than expected

Falls in oil prices have led to a reduction in the input price pressure which should translate to less inflationary pressure through the supply chain. The conundrum this could pose if house prices continue to rise, and if that rise becomes particularly rapid, is the need to choose between an appropriate interest rate for manufacturing industry which is fragile and has no serious cost pressure and an appropriate rate for an overheating housing market. We've faced this problem before and it rarely goes well. However, on balance I would still be betting on interest rates rising slowly if at all.

The problems we're facing setting an appropriate rate for the different sectors and regions of the UK economy give something of a hint at the nightmare facing someone having to set an appropriate interest rate for Germany and Ireland. Wim Duisenberg wasn't Dim; the European Central Bank faces some awful decisions.

White Sun of the Desert

I've added a link to this oil industry expat's blog on the blogroll. It has recently escaped corporate control and is back to full form. Take a read over some of the older postings to get a flavour for what it has to offer, this account of Syriana's flaws is a good example.

Good old Google

Search Google for OFT investigates supermarkets and the first link you get is me telling you why they shouldn't. Bless.

Sort of an unintentional Google Bomb.

French person dislikes Britain

Apparently another book has been released in France about how awful we Britons are. I wouldn't see this as newsworthy but for what it reveals about the author. I found this particular excerpt telling although the Guardian does not appear to have spotted the irony:

"This makes for boring conversation. People talk only about what they know about"

Indeed. Our lack of 'intellectuals' without any specialist knowledge does mean we have fewer conversations on issues about which we are clueless. The French are fond of pronouncing on all sorts of matters of which they have no knowledge at all; that's the only way economics can still be discussed within the, increasingly, poor old Fifth Republic.

Up to two million terrorists?

The MCB, doing a sterling job of representing its constituents as decent and law abiding, has warned that if the "demonisation" of Muslims continues we could face 2 million homegrown terrorists. He has insulted Muslims far more than any Danish cartoons ever did by implying they are so irrational and violent.

Now, if you were to try and construct an empirical test of this hypothesis you couldn't do much better than a survey of European countries which contained information on the opinions of non-muslims on muslims and vice-versa. You could then see which Muslims were most demonised and compare that figure to how angry they were.

Fortunately, we have just such a survey and it turns out that British Muslims are the most trusted by their non-Muslim counterparts and yet the most angry and dissaproving in return; the MCB could not be more wrong. Perhaps the organisation should stop spending its time publically feeling sorry for itself and do something constructive about extremist Islam in the UK.

The Cold War on Terror

That the Cold War and the War on Terror are, in fact, different things is one of those annoying truisms that are used by commentators seeking to establish their intellectual subtlety without any need to really think. It rarely adds much to an analysis and is often used for lazy sniping at the Bush administration.

I can see some holes in this particular truism. The Cold War featured a confrontation over Israel and had its main ideological struggle in Europe. In these regards it mirrors the War on Terror. These similarities might prove more useful for further analysis than further noting the differences. After all, ideological defeat in Europe appears to me to have been crucial in demonstrating to the Soviets that they faced an enemy they could not defeat. One nation, no matter how powerful, always looks like a lonely enemy, vulnerable to its own demons. The ideological struggle in Europe might be important in this great confrontation as well: in demonstrating that the Islamists do not fight a single nation, the US, which can be bullied into withdrawing or conceding ground, but an idea of freedom which will not be abandoned.

Interest Rates

With all the excitement of discussing the Global War on Terror I missed that the MPC matched my prediction/recommendation on interest rates. For now interest rates are staying where they are.

War Powers in the War on Terror

RealClearPolitics carries an excellent challenge, by Jonathan Rauch at the Atlantic, to President Bush's use of emergency powers:

"The question history will ask is whether Bush's presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon's or only as bad as Jimmy Carter's ... If the country seriously intends to prevent terrorism, then spying at home, detaining terror suspects, and conducting tough interrogations are practices that the government will need to engage in for many years to come. Instead of making proper legal provisions for those practices, Bush has run the war against jihadism out of his back pocket, as a permanent state of emergency. He engages in legal ad-hockery and trickery, treats Congress as a nuisance rather than a partner, and circumvents outmoded laws and treaties when he should be creating new ones. Of all Bush's failings, his refusal to build durable underpinnings for what promises to be a long struggle is the most surprising, the most gratuitous, and potentially the most damaging, both to the sustainability of the antiterrorism effort and to the constitutional order. "

The idea of using war powers in a war that is open ended has to be concerning. A large part of the sensible case for the defence of Guantanamo and changes in intelligence gathering is that this is not a normal war with normal opposition, hence the inapplicability of Geneva and other war time legality. That must also imply that it will require different legal treatment in terms of war powers.

Refusing to grant Geneva protections to those captured in Afghanistan is not a piece of legal trickery. Geneva protections are reciprocal and conditional rights that are given to those who abide by the rules of war. Armies must be organised, wear uniforms to distinguish them from the civilian population etc. In return for these behaviours, which decrease the civilian cost of war, they are granted quite generous rights in the event of being captured.

Equally, there is no need for the trial of prisoners of war. They will be returned at the end of the conflict. With an open ended war such an arrangement is clearly a recipe for indefinite imprisonment. Were the Geneva protections applied to those in Guantanamo it would not bring them closer to release or trial. As such, the proper solution is some new arrangement. Guantanamo is a questionable arrangement as it does not properly put a timeframe on detention but it is confronting a genuine question.

Here lies the comparison to the war powers. Emergency powers for the President in war time are granted on the understanding that wars have definite points of beginning and end. If these are not in place then such powers are simply an indefinite extension of executive power which they were not intended to constitute.

As such, Guantanamo is a flawed solution to the need for new arrangements to deal with a new kind of war. By contrast, the changing nature of war has simply been ignored in the Bush administration's approach to the use of war powers.

Little People

The Little People street art project by a man named Slinkachu is one of the most brilliant ideas I've seen in a while. Take a look for yourself; it'll make you smile.