Why the free market is not meritocratic

The price system does not reward ability. If you want people’s earnings to reflect their ability, therefore, you can’t have a free market.

This simple point is both obvious and universally ignored. Consider:

Bonuses for executives and traders have increased over the past 30 years - can anyone really claim that traders and executives now are actually “better” than traders and executives from 30 years ago?

(Traders and execs now have access to better tools, but surely this is an argument for paying the providers of said tools more rather than the people who use them?)

The point about the free market is that it signals demand. It does not reward past performance, but indicates what people *should* do in the future.

As the free market does not reward past performance (90 year old retired executives can’t go back to their former employers and demand more money from them now because they weren’t paid as much 30 years ago as their replacements are now) the free market cannot be a meritocracy.

The best thing about the free market is the way it matches supply to demand. It is this very thing that means it is not meritocratic.

The best social worker in the country probably earns no more than the average taxi driver.

Of investment bankers, entrepreneurs, VCs, and life

One of the tragedies of investment banking as a profession is that although bankers are paid stratospheric amounts by the standards of most people they spend their entire careers working for the fraction of individuals who end up becoming (much) richer than they are.

Consider: a very successful fortysomething investment banker who has amassed some £5 million in net wealth is assisting in the public flotation of a company.

This company was started seven years ago by a 30 year old. This 30 year old managed to raise £2 million in capital from a VC in exchange for a 60% stake in the company after two years of trading.

Now 37 the entrepreneur is taking her company public, floating at a market cap of £500 million. The entrepreneur will sell half of her 40% stake (i.e. £100 million) to the market, and immediately reinvest half that amount (£50 million) in the business.

Her VC partners are similarly selling half their 60% stake (£150 million) to the markets, and reinvesting half this amount (£75 million) in the business.

The company will raise £125 million to invest in new plant and expand worldwide. If things go as expected the stake held by the entrepreneur will double within three years to £200 million.

Out of all this the bank takes a 1% fee for buying the shares initially. 1% of £225 million or £2.25 million. The banker expects to receive 10% of this in his bonus, or £225, 000. He has already advised on three similar transactions so far this year, and the year is nearly over, so he *expects* his bonus to be around £900, 000, on top of his salary of £200, 000.

Around half of this will be taken in income taxes (compared with 18% capital gains tax or £9 million in the case of the entrepreneur) leaving the banker with take-home pay of £550, 000. After the flotation the entrepreneur has £41 million in cash and a 20% stake in a company that is expected to be worth £1 billion in three years.

The banker end that year with net wealth of £5.55 million. The entrepreneur ends that year with net wealth of £141 million plus whatever is left over from dividends and what she paid herself over the previous 7 years.

This is the heart of the tragedy of capitalism. As the man said, you gotta serve somebody. The banker serves the enrepreneur who probably feels hard done-by that she didn’t keep a larger stake in her firm. The VCs will be happy, but they are accountable to their own shareholders who are themselves accountable to equity and pension funds, who are in turn accountable to clients who really just want to live a quiet life/retirement.

Overall, on average, society wins, but at the cost of everyone being just the tiniest bit pissed off at the place they ended up in the pyramid. So they’ll keep pounding away on the hedonic treadmill in the hope that something will come up.

Sir Simon Jenkins fails again

Simon Jenkins' most recent opinion piece continues his long, glorious tradition of making an utter fool of himself.

In it he lays into Michael Fish and the Met Office for the incorrect forecasts of "barbecue summer" that the press had been bleating about over previous weeks.

One of the many points Fish makes here in defense of the Met Office is that "A lot of blame has to lie with the media who misinterpret the forecasts."

The Met Office, being composed of scientifically trained professionals, in fact said: "there is a 65% chance of above-average temperatures."

Jenkins, however, goes off on one about how the Met Office shouldn't be paid for by the taxpayers if it can't even guarantee "barbecue summer."

Ignoring basic probability theory (that if there is a 65% chance of something happening then there is a 35% chance of it not happening) Jenkins essentially blames the Met Office for the failure of the media to report what the Met Office actually said.

The money quote is where Jenkins says:

We listen uncomplaining to this drivel from one day to the next. We are British. Weather forecasting is like abstract art, any fool can do it once he has got the job.

Ironically, his description of weather forecasting perfectly encapsulates his own "profession" of overindulged, pompous columnist.

Jenkins' piece really is a classic of a certain kind of opinion journalism, based entirely on prejudice and bumptious "common sense" with no reference to actual evidence, statistical theory, or human psychology, and with an hilarious lack of awareness of how much of an innumerate prat he comes across as.

A History of Economics

I forgot to mention I read this book a few weeks ago. Galbraith is an excellent and entertaining writer.

An underlying theme is Galbraith's emphasis on how the economic ideology of different historical periods seems to flatter those who hold power. Hence you have physiocrats in France during the 18th century, mercantilists during the 17th century, and neoliberalism during much of the 20th century, with a dash of Keynesianism for those who like that sort of thing.

I was reminded of this book whilst reading this lengthy thread at Crooked Timber in which Daniel "dsquared" Davis argues that economics should really be split into two disciplines: industrial cybernetics and political economy, with one being based on the development of practical applications of empirical research (like engineering) and the other being based on a discussion of the ethics, morality, and political consequences of different policies (basically a branch of political philosophy).

IIRC Galbraith endorsed this point: the idea that you can separate ideology from reality in political discussions is naive in the extreme (as Daniel argues here). Also Galbraith coined the term "the conventional wisdom" to describe beliefs that are widely assumed to be true for the sake of ideological convenience (think EMH, rational agents, drugs are evil etc)

I was going to write up a lot of quotations but frankly I can't be bothered: I advise you to buy and read a copy of this excellent history of this peculiar science.

[image from here]

The Steep Approach to Garbadale: incest and interest

A good book, all told.

Reading Bank's mainstream fiction is kinda weird. I keep expecting to discover that someone is a Special Circumstances agent in disguise.

Also the shoe-horning in of circa 2005 TWAT lefty politics is interesting. Although nothing has changed in an objective sense it does seem that the world is a better place.

There is just a shimmer of Banks' patented gratuitous-unpleasantness towards the end, otherwise this is a superb novel about family, forbidden love, and beautiful mathematicians.

[image from here]

Enemas of reason

I have established to my own satisfaction the prime source of everything that is wrong with British politics.

Surprisingly, it is not the Daily Mail (at least directly).

The problem is our first-past-the-post system of voting for MPs. This allows parties to gain power despite not having a majority of voters actually vote for them.

Further it means that politicians are not interested in garnering a wide base of support, they are only interested in attracting the votes of "scorekeepers" in marginal constituencies.

Scorekeepers, as detailed in this article by Danny Finkelstein, are people with no particular ideological commitments but who vote for the party (or more accurately, the individual at the head of the party) who they believe to be the most effective manager of the government:

The Scorekeepers “are non-ideological pragmatists who trust or distrust each side equally. They tend to see politics not as a contest of world views, but merely as alternate teams of possible managers of government, each contending that they can do a better job. The Scorekeepers are not choosing directions in their votes, they are hiring managers.”

The problem is that these scorekeepers are engaging in the same folly as managerialists or progressives. The notion that all our problems could be solved if only we all followed this or that political programme, or this or that heroic manager.

If the history of the 21st century teaches us anything it is that grand schemes for the improvement of the masses rarely work, and often have strongly negative outcomes for everyone. And all those scorekeepers are bound to be disappointed, so their support gradually wanders over to the other control party after a few elections.

Polly Toynbee highlights this here:

Our electoral system is the reason why each campaign seems more reductionist and vacuous than the last. The parties are competing for an ever more cleverly identified few thousand wavering voters in marginal constituencies. Pollsters find these few vague voters hardly think about politics at all. They are difficult to engage even for a fleeting moment, don't read papers but may vote if taken by some slogan that catches their eye. Most people are not like that: even if party tribalism has weakened, these target voters tend to be exceptionally uninterested in politics. Yet everything depends on them.

What matters most in politics is the constant churn of debate and argument and conversation and trial and error. I don't believe there is or can ever be one ultimate solution to political problems, rather there must be (controlled) conflict between parties against a backdrop of individual freedom, democracy, and an open society.

This outcome is best served in this country by the replacement of the current FPTP parliamentary system with an STV proportional representation system, a written constitution, separation of powers, and a reduction in the power of the executive relative to the legislature.

Vox stopped

I do not hate. I am not a hater.

However there are a handful of things I loathe.

I have a visceral dislike of those vox pops you get on the TV News where the journos go out into the streets and ask passers by for their opinion on whatever the current Issue of Note is.

My objection to these bits is threefold:

1) They are meaningless. If the intention is to gain an understanding of the public's views on a particular topic then a far more rigorous method is to use polling.

2) They are embarassing. It is painful listening to my fellow citizens embarass themselves with comments that they have not had the time to prepare beforehand. It is clearly patently unfair of the journos to pounce on someone in the street with a question concerning what may be a very complex issue and expect them to contribute a well-thought-out answer.

3) They are fake. There is a script to these things. Journos only ever seem to ask questions that have one obvious answer viz "Are you in favour of MPs swindling the taxpayer?" A: "It is distgusting. They are all the same etc"

The clear and obvious solution to my problem is to stop watching the news. Unfortunately, as I've already discussed, this is not really an option.

Proportional representin'

According to this 'ere news post by the Beeb Gordon Brown is proposing an alternative vote semi-proportional representation system and a fully-elected House of Lords.

This could be big.

A strange love: or how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy politics

I am interested in politics.

This is a matter of some concern.

The reason is simple: what goes on in Westminster is largely irrelevant to me and my life. I live in an advanced, socially stable, pluralistic liberal democracy. I have easy access to clean water, good housing, good food, healthcare, education, information, the company of others, culture, and the opportunity to pursue whatever idle desires may remain now that the problem of my personal comfort has largely been solved.

Politics, however, is a source of depression and irritation. There is so much wrong with how our political system works that observing it is like watching a man sweeping a dusty hall with the brush extension of a fully functional industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

The costs of any possible, and hence marginal, improvements in my personal condition are so high that they outweigh the gains.

Spending more than £10.6 billion on an ID card system that might fractionally reduce the already miniscule probability of me dying in a terrorist attack is an act of such revolting waste and intellectual squalor that I am sick at the thought of it.

The act of vetoing the publication of the minutes of the meetings in which our government decided to embark on an illegal and murderous war (not to mention going to war in the first place) is one of cowardice, both political and primal.

There are better political systems out there. Ones that are more representative and more democratic. And yet we're stuck here with an absurd system of elected kingship.

Given the failure inherent in the Westminster of politics the rational response is to simply ignore the newspapers and blogs that discuss these remote phenomena and concentrate on things of genuine local importance, whatever they may be.

But I am, of course, not rational.

Given I cannot ignore this irrational interest in politics I can only ask the question:

Why am I interested in politics?

The stock answer is that I consider myself a responsible citizen and therefore ought to be aware of and engage in the democratic process. This is of course nonsense. The only duty of a citizen is to obey the law.

I suspect that the source of this political disease is similar to that of the unfathomable interest that some of my friends have in the game of association football. They, like me, lack the power to make any substantive changes to the rules of the game and who gets which job for which team, and frequently decry what they see as poor decisions on the part of those appointed, but ultimately it is the same impulse that leads them to read the sports pages just as I read the politics and business pages.

Chris Dillow comments on this idea of rational inattention of politics:

So, what would be wrong with someone who avoids, as far as possible, all political knowledge - they don’t buy a newspaper, ignore political websites, don’t watch TV news, turn off the radio when the news comes on, and so on?
The obvious answer is that paying attention to politics isn’t a matter of narrow utility maximizing. We should do so because virtue requires it. Being a good citizen requires us to follow politics.

But does it? There’s a long tradition of people shunning public life: monks, hermits, Voltaire advising us to cultivate our gardens, MacIntyre urging us to retreat into local communities. And what’s virtuous about wishing to impose one’s own ego and limited knowledge onto the rest of society?

Nor is it the case that ignorance about politics need, in principle, be associated with general ignorance or incuriosity. It’s perfectly possible in principle to be very informed and cultured on all sorts of matters whilst paying no attention to politics - just as one can be clever and cultivated whilst being ignorant about, say, fruit flies or medieval plainchant

Further: as Nassim Taleb argues in Fooled by Randomness politics is one of those areas of human endeavour where success has more to do with random luck than any exceptional, empirically measurable, skill. What Taleb says about corporate CEOs can be paraphrased for politicians:

Politicians are not administrators. [...] they are often "empty suits" [...] persons who are good at looking the part but nothing more. [...] what they have is skill in getting promoted within a political party rather than pure skills in making optimal decisions - we call that "political skill."

So not only do I lack the power to change things substantively, neither do most of the participants.

Another problem with politics is that most of it is filtered through what is written by journalists.

Taleb argues against listening to journalists' opinions on anything, as the skills required of a successful journalist are not those required of a good political scientist[1]:

A journalist is trained in methods to express himself rather that to plumb the depths of things - the selection process favors the most communicative, not necessarily the most knowledgeable.

To conclude. Politics is my idle entertainment. Just as some watch soap operas and others watch association football games, I watch Newsnight and read political blogs. It isn't all I do, of course, but at least it is explicable.

[1]: Taleb is also highly critical of the whole notion of "political science", but is even more critical of journalists, so I'll let that slide for a moment.

House of Suns: definitely not a review

Just finished this 'ere book by Al Reynolds.

Thoughts:

1) An alright 500 page book with a good 250 page book struggling to get out.

2) There is a lot of boring, pompous, non-political politics goes on in "the Line". I feel the concept of someone creating thousands of clones of themselves and sending them out to explore the galaxy is good, but Reynolds kind of let it go without thinking through how it would operate IRL.

3) I don't know if it's a style thing (Stephen Baxter does it as well) but none of the characters talk as people talk. Ken MacLeod is much better at this sort of thing.

4) The most interesting characters (the Doctor and the Spirit of the Wind) don't get nearly enough of the airtime that is instead given over to the unconvincing political pomposity.

That said I really enjoyed this book. It's not as good as Century Rain or Pushing Ice, but is considerably better than Prefect.

Will Hutton, constitutional glutton

Will Hutton summarises what is wrong with British politics rather well:

Departments of state and, with them, great swaths of public spending, are treated as political spoils. With Geoff Hoon's resignation as transport secretary, this department alone will have had four secretaries of state in three years. It's a similar story in defence, with environment and energy only marginally less hard hit; these are all departments with long-term planning horizons, but whose political leaders are birds of passage. What chance is there of difficult decisions being taken? Systematic policy developed? Of careful attention invested in how effectively and efficiently cash is spent?

Damn straight. The problem is that, as Charlotte Gore points out when discussing proportional representation, a new constitutional structure is a procedural story and as such something no one has the slightest bit of interest in. Except me and other political geeks.

But all the moralising nonsense spoken about MPs and Parliament over the last few weeks ultimately comes back to problems inherent in the system. The press commit the fundamental attribution error and assert that the problem is with the character of individual MPs, rather than a problem endemic to the way the system works.

My own thoughts on parliamentary reform are with those of Thomas Paine, and I describe them over on Charlotte Gore's discussion of an elected Lords.

They are as follows:

Why not have the Lords elected for terms of (say) 12 years, and also have a term limit of one term per person?

Have 300 lords with 1/3 elected every four years.

Also set a time-limit of say, 12 years, until people who have served in the Commons can subsequently run for office in the Lords.

Combine this with an upper age limit of 35 for lords and you have a chamber that consists of older (and hence more experienced) non-career politicians that are not required to respond to every tabloid-editor’s whim or whip’s demand and can use their own moral and intellectual judgement on whether to accept or reject legislation.

Also you need to have separation of the legislature and executive, have independence of tenure of the legislature (i.e. elections every four years), and use the STV PR system to select MPs in the Commons.

And I still want my pony.

And otherwise I basically agree with this Martyn Richard Jones guy[1]. Lashings of democracy.


[1]: The only slight note of disagreement with Richard Jones is with his point 11 - "Elections for all Public offices - no appointments on the nod" - I assume he doesn't mean to elect every clerk and mid-ranking bureaucrat by popular vote. But apart from this he seems bang on the money.

Stuart Rose on feminism

Guardianistas seem split over the question:



I'd be interested to see how that splits on gender lines.

A (very) short story

There are many of these now. Hollow spheres and cylinders, mostly. Some cylinders. A few rods. The occasional torus. An endless fecundity of green worlds.

In the old days before fittle they thought the only way to colonise the universe was by throwing gunk out into space forever. Fapping out an endless stream of phlegm into the face of God in the hope that at some then-unimaginably distant point in the future and at some absurdly remote location the biomatter might just evolve into something you could play poker with.

At least I think that is what they believed. Corruption and degradation are a constant in this entropic universe. So it is said.

Lost in the strata of history we might find the truth of it, there are billions of dead worlds down there. Trillions of corpses that lived full and happy lives and some more that did not. Perhaps with them lies the truth of it. Where we came from.

They might have been Giants, of course, as the legends say. They might have been Gods. Or giant robots. Or intelligent waves of probability and potential. We might even have developed through a process of blind native favouritism.

All we know is what is remembered. And what we remember most of all is the name that was given. Our name.

We are the diatoms.

Sanctimony in the UK

I've been trying to determine exactly why I feel so uncomfortable with the condemnation of MPs over their expenses claims.

The answer is I have been revolted by the sanctimonious priggishness of the newspapers. Sanctimonious priggishness is only fun when it is me directing it at others: even seeing someone else direct it at a third party is unpleasant, possibly because of rays of sanctimonious priggishness being reflected in my direction.

Daniel Davis calls it right: the MP who said that he deserved his taxpayer-funded duck house is exactly the kind of guy I'd vote for. Honest, to-the-point, pro-duck. Too bad he was a Tory.

Anyhoo.

During my working day I am exposed to a lot of newspapers.

As such I end up reading a lot of front pages. I'd rather not, but it is an occupational hazard, just like putting up with idiots buying shitloads of crap they don't need and then objecting to paying one penny for a bag "on principle".

Newspaper headlines are full of bile and self-rightous indignation at the best of times, but the tabs, and The Telegraph, have outdone themselves with their inane rantings on the issue of MPs expenses.

My objection is not to the reporting of the facts of MPs expenses (they should of course be public knowledge as a matter of course), rather it is to the attitude of the reaction to the reporting.

There is my visceral dislike of the vox-pop faux-outrage of TGBP as they rant away at their elected representatives whilst ignoring the various ways they're being fucked over by businesses, the media, their bosses, popular culture, and 21st century life in general.

But there is more to my dislike of this story.

Let's step back a moment.

In a society there are a few problems that need to be solved. One is the problem of how you identify error in a complex society. Another is how that error is broadcast, such that a solution may be found.

In a civilized society (or, in the absence of a civilized society, a pluralistic liberal democracy such as wot we 'ave 'ere) if you identify a problem you broadcast it, it is debated, critically analysed, and many solutions are proferred.

A solution or group of solutions will be selected after various deliberations and debate and compromise, then you move on. At some indeterminate time in the future the solution is tested or re-evaluated.

The way our system of liberal democracy has developed has lead to an important part of this process (primarily the identification and broadcast components, or as I shall call it "I/B") being carried out as a worthwhile byproduct of the profit-seeking activities of a collection of businesses called newspapers.

Newspapers are run by humans, so as I/B systems newspapers are subject to all the usual cognitive biases, and are therefore prone to horrible failure modes.

I suspect in the phase space of all possible ways of solving the I/B problem newspapers occupy a local maxima. There may well be better ways of dealing with I/B (some kind of universal Panopticon and a million bored apes?).

But here the press has failed in that is has chosen to concentrate on a minor side-effect of the wider problem:

MPs were writing the rules for their own expenses. To whom are they accountable?

Half our legislature is unelected. This is a bad joke.

Our executive is more powerful than our legislature. This is a bad idea.

If there is a problem here it is bigger than the problem of MPs expenses, it is a problem with the way our legislature is set up and our government is elected.

So why are the newspapers focussing on the sneering, snide, grumpy, petty, priggish, holier-than-thou, expenses-obsession rather than the actual issues.

The British are possessed of the same peasant mentality as the Americans. Easily distracted by the threat of external foes but fundamentally incapable of addressing the real problems.

I agree with what Joan Smith writes in The Guardian

The British public – not all of them, but the smug guardians of morality who are enjoying this crisis so much – say they are disgusted by the behaviour of our elected representatives. Let me say that it works both ways: for the first time in my life, I am sick of my country. I am sick of the daily undermining of democracy, and sick of the sadistic pleasure people take in humiliating decent public servants. Even so, I will go on urging my friend not to give up her seat. She is a brilliant constituency MP, and I don't believe anyone should give in to bullies.

Indeed.

The Accidental Pornographer: not actually a review

A brief summary of lessons learned from The Accidental Pornographer:

1. Do not fall in love with the concept before you have scoped out opportunities for expansion. Griffiths discovers that the potential market for his product is smaller than he assumed only after he is well into it.
   
2. Do not get hypnotised by the prestige of others. Griffiths uses M&C Saatchi for marketing, despite their high-cost.
   
3. In planning your cash-flow always bear in mind the worst case scenario.
   

I've actually met the author, Gavin Griffiths, though I didn't know who he was at the time. I was working in our local branch of WH Smith and he came in to ask if we had this book in stock, as he had written it and wanted to know if it had hit the shelves yet.

My fleeting impression of him was of an earnest and unobjectionable individual. This is reinforced by his book and his blog.

The book is recommended for much the same reasons as Paul Carr's book Bringing Nothing to the Party. It is story of business failure, though neither Carr or Griffiths fail completely.

And you learn more from failure than you learn from success. Karl Popper teaches us this.

MPs expenses

I've been trying to articulate exactly why I don't care about the MPs expenses row. It could be because of the dry pointlessness of it all (as discussed here by Alex), it could be because of the po-faced hypocrisy (as identified here by Stephen Fry) of the public and media, or it could be that after having written to my MP about this I feel I've already done my civic duty and therefore have no need to be outraged.

But it mainly comes down to my belief that the purpose of a free press is to highlight error in as efficient manner as possible. Going on and on about this dishonorable behaviour on the part of some MPs distracts from more serious dishonour and dishonesty: when Jack Straw used executive privilegeto veto the publication of the Iraq war minutes, where were the days of outraged front-pages?

Parliamentary expenses should be public knowledge as a matter of course. And political error should be highlighted as a matter of course.

My problem with the "MPs expenses row" is that:

1) The media has taken years to respond to this issue.

2) The media does not respond as strongly to undisputably more serious problems.

Update 15/05/2009:

On second thoughts, I agree with Shuggy.

Laughter as an error-correction mechanism

Some bloke called Carlo Strenger has written a superior article on enlightenment values:

...the Enlightenment has created an idea of immense importance: no human belief is above criticism, and no authority is infallible; no worldview can claim ultimate validity. Hence unbridled fanaticism is the ultimate human vice, responsible for more suffering than any other.
...
it applies to the ideas of the Enlightenment, too. They should not be above criticism, either. History shows that Enlightenment values can indeed be perverted into fanatical belief systems. Just think of the Dr Strangeloves of past US administrations who were willing to wipe humanity off the face of the earth in the name of freedom, and the – less dramatic but no less dismaying – tendency of the Cheneys and Rumsfelds of the GW Bush administration to trample human rights in the name of democracy.

As one of the commenters points out, the profound principle that both 20th century secular ideologues and religious authorities throughout history have ignored, is that of always bearing in mind the possibility you might be dead wrong.

The healthy human response to harmless error or misunderstanding is to have a laugh. Thus error is highlighted for all to see and forgiven by all parties.

A further mistake on the part of humorless fanatics everywhere is to assume that there can ever be one, insoluble, and eternal truth. It may be that such a thing exists, but it is likely to be beyond our capacity to discern its true form from the vague shadows on the walls of our epochal cave.

And so human beings are prone to error. There's no problem with this, as failure teaches us more than success.

This idea was only properly articulated by Karl Popper in the 20th century: it is the idea you can never conclusively prove that an idea is correct, but rather disprove false ideas.

And so human knowledge grows and the enterprise of civilization advances, one laughter-inducing blooper at a time.

John Sutherland: fool?

Just read this weird nonsense about Sir Jim Rose's report on primary school education by columnist John Sutherland.

I'll just highlight a few of the more ridiculous pronouncements:

In a library, you choose the book. Put another way, you control the book. I can't get over the feeling that, somehow, the computer controls the kid - he or she becomes nothing more than an information servo- mechanism. Or an empty file in which knowledge is not being discovered but (hateful word) downloaded. And computers, it seems to me, work best with what George Orwell called “Newspeak” - language stripped down to skeletal simplicity. Language, in fact, that is not language at all but code. Many skills have been enhanced by the computer but vocabulary, I suspect, has been shrunk, rigidified and deadened.

Deary me. Where to begin?

1) "You control the book" - no. As far as a child is concerned, the book is written, published, and printed by adults they have never met. The books they have access to are chosen by their school.

2) "the computer controls the kid" - no. With a computer connected to the Internet the child has the option of creating their own blog, editing Wikipedia, or interacting with their friends over social networking websites. If the child is particulary precocious they may even by able to write their own code, thereby truly taking control of the computer.

3) "computers, it seems to me, work best with what George Orwell called “Newspeak” - no. I don't see how anyone can make this claim without fundamentally misunderstanding what newspeak is. But wait...

4) "language stripped down to skeletal simplicity. Language, in fact, that is not language at all but code." - no. Although newspeak is "simplified English" the objective of the totalitarian governments of 1984 is to remove the capacity of the language to describe rebellion in terms anything other than negative. Newspeak is about control, not simplicity. It is about replacing ambiguity with certainty, and leaving no room for doubt.

Anyone who has read Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language will know that Orwell decried the lazy use of metaphor, as it substituted rational thought with mindless sloganeering.

Precisely the kind of mindless sloganeering that Sutherland uses when he talks of language "that is not language at all but code." It is not clear if Sutherland is referring to actual computer code or to leet speak or to the asanine babbling of most high-profile blogs. And that is part of the point.

Sutherland is unconsciously shutting down debate by making unfounded cliched statements that he has heard others utter about computers.

Sutherland's basic point is that he agrees with the general conclusions of Jim Rose's report: that "play" is a necessary and valuable part of a child's education. This can be filed in the "no shit, Sherlock" cabinet.

On a more cheerful note this discussion allows me to reference the Monkey Dust sketch that summarises the problems of education in the UK far more succinctly than Prof. Sutherland manages.

The Night Sessions: a few thoughts

I read this book over the weekend. A few thoughts:

1) Very good treatment of religion. Harsh criticism of faith-based brutality mediated by a genuine understanding of the nature of faith. There is a part near the end that captures the essence of what losing a strong religious faith is like perfectly:

He knew exactly what he now believed, because it was exactly what he had rejected until now. He'd stepped out of shattered armour not naked and shivering, but fully clothed. It was as if his new world-view had all along been inside the armour and being kept in, rather than outside and being kept out.

2) Very plausible treatment of sentient robots. Probably the best treatment I've seen in a while. The key point that MacLeod makes is that yer typical sentient robot is likely to have a superior theory of mind to yer typical sentient animal. Therefore robots are likely to be kinder, gentler, and more empathetic than humans.

The book is strongly recommended, being well-written, and the characters spend a lot of time talking in pubs. There is little and life that could not be improved by spending more time talking in pubs. Certainly Stephen Baxter's work would gain a lot.

[pic borrowed from here]

A mixed bag of economics

I took this test Are You an Austrian? The actual number of ticks for each economic tradition I got are as follows:

• Keynesian/Neoclassical: 10
• Chicago: 8
• Austrian: 5
• Socialism: 1
• Keynesian: 1

My score was 47/100. So I am nearly half Austrian. Who knew?