Goodbye, apathy

Why exactly should I vote?

I've been turning this question over in my mind over the last few weeks and have come to realise that there is absolutely no reason to do so.

I'll just briefly address each of the usual answers offered as to why I *should* vote.

1) It is in my interests to vote.

Sorry, but this dog just won't hunt. Even if I lived in a marginal constituency (I don't) and even if my vote was "the decider" (and it wouldn't be) and even if my constituency MP was the difference between one or the other of the control parties having a working majority and not having a working majority (unlikely) then the chances that my action would result in a government that is more likely to behave in a fashion conducive to my wellbeing would still be so remote I would more profitably spend the day playing videogames or, you know, *working*.

Furthermore just where does my putative inquisitor get off assuming I'm some kind of greedy dastard who only wants what's in my interests? Perhaps I feel I have a duty to vote for the party I feel best represents the national interest?

2) I have a duty as a citizen to vote.

This is just plain wrong. The only duty I have as a citizen is to obey the law. If voting were to become compulsory I would, of course, vote, because to do otherwise would be breaking the law.

If I feel I have further duties as a *person* then I shall do my best to fulfil them, but I certainly do not believe that choosing not to vote makes me a bad person. Particularly if it is on a point of principle.

But if I am to be morally culpable for something that is considered "bad" then surely *I* must be responsible for my decision? But if the cause is apathy (and in my case, it isn't, but supposing it were) then surely that is the responsibility of politicians for not inculcating in me a desire to engage with the political process by actually voting?

3) I owe it to the shades of all those who fought for the rights of people like me to vote.

This is probably the most interesting, and also the most frequently cited reason for voting. It also raises all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of inter-generational obligations, harms to the dead, and so forth.

I would say that what the various democratic heroes of the past did was to give me the *right* to vote, but not the obligation to do so. Or maybe they didn't think about it like that. Maybe if they knew about me they'd despise me, but that says more about them than it says about me.

So what's to be done?

Now I don't want this post to turn into one of those whiny disquisitions on how politicians aren't "engaging with the youth" - I basically disagree with Sian Anderson's view that politics is presented as too complicated or boring, and that this is what is dissuading young people from voting (and why should this dissuade only *young people* from voting? There are plenty of older folks with low attention-spans and better things to do with their lives).

It is not the case that I'm not interested in politics. I read as many newspapers as I can and generally try to keep up to date on what is happening. And I do occasionally badger my MP about legislation when the mood takes me.

So, given I'm actually fairly turned on to politics, why do I still feel it isn't worth my while voting?

Basically because of each of the following:

1) Government has a lot less ability to affect change than people generally credit them with. Therefore even if my vote *did* have an effect on the makeup of the government it wouldn't make a lot of difference quickly.

2) The two control parties have hit upon a basic raft of positions and policies that are designed to appeal to a narrow, non-ideologically-aligned, section of the electorate who live in marginal constituencies. The "floating voters" or "scorekeepers." As I mentioned above, I'm not one of these, so the government genuinely *doesn't* have any reason to give a damn about me.

3) The areas where I feel government *could* make substantive improvements are in areas like prohibition, immigration, housing, and tax policy. These areas are essentially precluded from discussion by the necessity of pandering to the perceived self-interest of the aforementioned "floaters." I disagree with *both* of the control parties on a number of issues that they just don't have the guts to act reasonably on (viz mephedrone).

And this is what it comes down to. It's not that I don't care. It's that I do care and I care enough to know I'm being ill-served by the current offering.

I appreciate that the Tories are much more vociferous class warriors than Labour and are likely to arrange matters to suit the super-rich, rich, and extremely well-off at the expense of the poor but maybe a bit of Sideshow Bob right wingery is what the public needs right now. And who knows, a few years of a Conservative government may be character forming.

So in conclusion: I might vote, or I might not. But it doesn't matter if I do or don't. And I say this as a fairly politically-engaged yoof. If I really want to make a difference there are plenty of other avenues to do so, and if I really can't be bothered I might as well comp my punt to these guys [via Penny Red], who actually might give a damn.

Addendum:

(A) Incidentally, I have personally done rather well out of the Labour government. Contrary to popular belief they have managed a fairly solid redistribution from rich to poor, especially considering the structural factors (globalisation) they've been fighting against. If it weren't for the bloody stupid wars, stupid policies, and nasty authoritarianism I probably would vote for them.

(B) And, as with every bloody thing, I discover Daniel Davies said it first, said it briefer, and said it better.

(C) As has Alix Mortimer.

Low-rent shitheads

There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Will decide, but he won't debate

Listening to Iconoclast and reading Sunny Hundal's views on whether the BBC should allow BNP MEP Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time (preview: Sunny's agin' it) it occurs to me that most TV/radio debates are fundamentally flawed. On Iconoclast there were four guests and one chairman. IIRC Question Time has five guests + one Dimbleby brother + a studio audience.

Partly as a result of this Sunny Hundal describes Question Time as:

...basically a populist shouting match where facts and figures don't have time to get checked. Someone such as Dan Hannan MEP can claim 84% of our laws are made in Europe and no one calls him out on his rubbish. Nick Griffin could similarly claim he's not racist and repeat lies that go unchallenged live on air. BNP pamphlets have repeatedly featured lies in the past. Who will have the research on hand to challenge that? His fellow QT panellists won't.

My preference would be to limit the number of debaters to two, and have only a few distinct issues discussed for a reasonable period of time, say 20 minutes each for three issues in an hour-long show.

Assertions made by debaters would have to be based on robust, ideally peer-reviewed, evidence that is cited by the debaters before they go on the show. These citations would be made available to all some time before the programme is broadcast so that they can be analysed by a panel of experts appointed by the programme and those that are found wanting can be made inadmissable.

In other words more like a court or parliament.

This view may seem elitist, but it isn't really elitist to claim that the views of ordinary people aren't as valid as the evidence-based views of experts. We demand a high standard of evidence in medicine, so why not demand a high standard of evidence in political debate?

Deliberative democracy is not best served by treating the truth as something relative or subject to an individual opinion.

It annoys me when people conflate respect for democracy with the idea that everyone's opinions are valid and useful. Most people don't know enough about enough to be able to make meaningful contributions.

For my own part I know my ignorance of most matters is such that I should avoid commenting, but that does not mean I cannot take down the ideas of others I know to be false.

Call it the Statler and Waldorf school of political debate: ideas are cheap, but the truth is expensive.

As such it is the democratic duty of we bloggers to attack bad ideas and incorrect assertions. Negativity is a powerful creative force. Our society will only begin to evolve when bad ideas are allowed to be called bad ideas and dismissed as such.

Update:

As per badconscience's point in the comments "Question Time" is teh suck and I need to crank up the Mills and dial down the Plato.

Both philosophers are hovering somewhere in the middle of my prodigious to-read pile (Mills is definitely a serious contender for my next big Amazon raid [i.e. this has moved from "wish list" to "shopping basket"]).

For my part elitism does piss me off, but not nearly to the same extent as ignorance and crass populism.

Update update: actually reading badconscience's blog post over on Liberal Conspiracy he makes the same point but somewhat better.

For the frightened baby on some foreign beach

I'm currently listening to a recorded version of BBC 4's Iconoclasts.

In this episode economist and writer Philippe Legrain argues that Britain should abolish all immigration controls and institute a policy of "open borders".

He makes an admirable and coherent argument in favour of this position. Amongst the points he makes are:

1) Freedom: it is right that people should have the freedom to live and to move wherever they want. People should not be favoured or discriminated against simply because they happen to have been born in a particular country.

2) Economics: companies like Google and Yahoo! in the US were co-founded by immigrants. These people went to America and created extraordinary wealth and innovation in their adopted countries.

3) Public services: if public services are placed under strain because of an increase in population then those public services must be improved, made more robust, and more flexible.

4) Overcrowding: the idea that Britain is "full up" is nonsensical. London is the most crowded city in the UK, but no one advocates immigration controls around the M25 to prevent people in other parts of the country from going to live there.

5) Population control: inasmuch as population is a problem, it is not one that can be solved by arguing over where people are located on the surface of the globe. Population is a global problem. No one would advocate instituting a version of the Chinese one child policy in the UK to limit population, so why seek to limit the local UK population by reducing immigration?

Listening to the programme I became increasingly infuriated by the assumption, apparently shared by the chair Edward Stourton, that the idea of freedom of movement is some kind of wild and crazy idea.

As Chris Dillow points out, it is a mainstream and highly respectable idea.

The chap from Migrationwatch, Andrew Green, attempts to refute the point that immigrants bring economic benefits, but is allowed to get away with not actually producing any evidence that there are economic dangers to immigration. The burden of proof comes back to Legraine to support his point that immigration is good for the economy, which he does very ably, but why should Green get away with not explaining what the economic downsides of immigration are?

Then the MP, Ann Cryer, claims that immigrants might not be able to speak English, and might lack skills to work. Legrain makes the point that there is huge demand in this country for low-skilled labour. The notion that people lacking in "skills" are economically useless is absurd.

Then Green brings the argument back to numbers. He says "we cannot absorb this number of people" of the 7 million new immigrants that will arrive in Britain over the next 20 years. Fair enough. The question to ask is "why not?"

Green makes the good point that the government isn't building enough social housing or scaling up services to cope with the increase in numbers. I suspect part of the reason for this is that the government is terrified of being seen to do any of the following:

1) Reduce prices in the housing market by increasing supply, thus incurring the wrath of the Daily Mail readers and damaging the fundamental driver of the British economy, as detailed by Ross McKibbin.

2) Be seen to be soft on immigrants, which is stupid, if you think about it.

3) Increase public spending, thus incurring debt, which as Will Hutton explains isn't all that bad.

These are failings of government policy.

The debate moves on to the question of whether immigrants will come here to work or stay forever. Legraine highlights the point he makes in his book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, that when the USA had an open border with Mexico in the 1960s Mexicans would migrate back and forth over the open border, but once the border controls were tightened the migrants moved one-way, for fear they wouldn't get an opportunity to get back into the States if they moved back to their home countries.

Legraine makes the point that many immigrants want to be able to go home and live in their home countries after they have made money in Britain.

Andrew Green responded to this point by repeatedly asserting that he "couldn't imagine" that people from Sub-Saharan Africa would move back to their home countries after having lived in Britain. He had the gall to claim that "the facts are against" Legraine. The problem is Green has no facts to support his side of the argument. He goes unchallenged on this point.

Stourton also said a rather extraordinary thing: he claimed that this issue "does not easily lend itself to fact and figure." In fact it does. There are facts and figures surrounding immigration. This is the ballpark. Opinion, hearsay, and prejudice should have no place in this debate.

This is the most frustrating thing about so much political debate. Ultimately it should all come down to empirical data and observed facts. Opinions are irrelevant. And yet for some reason the misinformed opinion of the general public is seen as somehow valid and useful, when it isn't. This isn't a counter-democratic point, it's a pro-evidence point. Everyone is equal under the law, comment is free, but facts are sacred.

The programme ends with Green threatening to sue Legrain if Legrain doesn't retract an accusation of racism made against him.

The accusation was made by Legrain after Green's use of the term "there are limits to what the indigenous community will stand for".

Legraine immediately demanded an explanation of this term and accused Green of "ducking the race issue" and of being a racist. He asked Green if he felt that people who have "arrived in Britain in the last fifty years were British, yes or no?"

Green demanded a retraction of the accusation of racism and answered that he did feel that people who have moved to Britain in the last 50 years are British.

Legrain eventually retracted the accusation under threat of legal action

I have no opinion on Legrain's contention that the term "indigenous community" is inherently racist.

I will say that Legrain made a tactical error in falling into the trap of accusing Green of racism. He should not have lost his temper, as in doing so he gave Green the opportunity to threaten legal action, forcing Legrain to subsequently retract his point.

This highlights one of the problems with talking about immigration. The use of threats, slurs, and race-baiting tactics seems endemic to the discussion. This makes the debate far more emotionally charged than it should be.

The PC brigade - what you know and what you do not know

People ask us if We know the PC brigade.

There is a small vanguard of the population of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that seeks to destroy British values, flood the country with immigrants, ban all petrol-powered cars, legalise all currently illegal drugs, introduce a compulsory universal 50 km/h speed limit, replace Elizabeth Windsor with the Speaker of the House of Commons as Head of State, disinherit the Monarchy, replace all Imperial-fascist measurements with metric-ISO measurements, require that exactly half of all senior figures in business, government and the media be female, build wind turbines on every square metre of open countryside, break all diplomatic ties with the USA, increase taxes on the middle classes, impose multiculturalism on all, ban the display of all Christian artefacts in any public place, and replace Christmas with a non-denominational all-faiths and atheistic celebration called "Winterval."

Once these objectives have been accomplished this elite vanguard will cede all legislative authority to the European Union.

We know this because the PC brigade knows this.

And We are growing stronger.

It may surprise you to know this: after all our existence and Our aims are an open secret, you would imagine that those in Authority might do something about such an open group of subversives.

What you so not realise is that we have successfully entered the corridors of power. Every senior civil servant and government minister is part of the PCB. We have a stranglehold on the BBC, and every major national newspaper. Members of Our Loyal Opposition are mere placemen, already inculcated in Our ways and ready to do Our bidding.

Even those press organs, such as the Sun and the Daily Mail, which appear to decry us, only do so on our explicit instructions. By allowing the lumpencommentariat such outlets for their helpless rage we have discovered that they can be kept in a state of torpid docility until such a time as we see fit to place them in one the Re-Education Camps.

I write this not to warn you, but rather to gloat at your hopelessness, and revel in the fact that Our power is of such an extent that we can talk of Our conspiracy against the British middle class openly and without fear of sanction.

We are, as ever, your imminent overpeople


The PC Brigade

Jenkins on prohibition

I've dissed Simon Jenkins in the past, but I really can't fault his latest article on the prohibition of drugs for total brilliance:

Push has finally come to shove. Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was "unconstitutional" to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use. It asserted in ringing terms that "adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state". This classic statement of civil liberty comes not from some liberal British home secretary or Tory ideologue. They would not dare. The doctrine is adumbrated by a regime only 25 years from dictatorship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ideology and the state vs. markets paradigm

Charlotte Gore, libertarian liberal democrat, has been responding at length to a comment I made on this post on her blog.

Chris Dillow has commented on the G20 protests, and of course manages to be far more coherent than I've been, what with my constantly changing opinion on the matter:

Most of the Left is more interested in smug self-righteousness than in economics.

The debate about what to do now is conventionally framed in terms of the state versus (actually existing) markets - that is, as one set of bosses versus another. The possibility that people can organize themselves - through either genuinely free markets and/or through democratic co-operation - doesn’t arise. But it’s this spontaneous free organization that is the Marxist ideal.

This is what I find most interesting about Dillow: he highlights the absurdity of exhorting people to support one set of rulers (state bosses) against another set of rulers (corporate bosses). All left/right distinctions kind of fall away when you frame the political debate in these terms.

T'be honest when it comes to political ideology I don't give a flying fig: they're interesting things to study in their own right, just as science, technology, business, political economy, and the history of all of these things are interesting.

But do I care to ascribe to any particular ideology? No. Not really. I am somewhat peeved that despite the fact that humanity possesses the technological and economic capacity to make the world a decent place to live for everyone we still haven't done so.

I am mildly annoyed that not every one of my fellow human beings is living the Good Life they deserve to.

But as to means to achieve these ends? I don't know. I strongly suspect we haven't even started to properly explore the phase space of all possible ways of running our civilization, and there may well be ways that are qualitatively better than the current statist/capitalist model of global political economy, but I am strongly sceptical that any particular Vanguard know What Needs to Be Done and have the ability to do it.

As long as our Leaders avoid doing anything really stupid then things will probably turn out OK.

Progress will happen, as progress always does, with many incremental steps and the occasional jarring revolution.

Civilization will continue to evolve.

Put people first

Yeah. So I've changed my mind about the G20 protesters. It is a shame that one was killed, but really they were just protesting for the sake of smashing things up and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Edit 07/04/2009:

Nope. I've changed my mind again. I don't know exactly where I stand vis a vis the Put People First agenda, and the conduct of the police was depraved and disgusting.

Harnessing the body politic

Reading Hopi Sen's excellent analysis of Peter Oborne's less than excellent analysis on Charlie Brooker's excellent program Newswipe I was struck by an important point, from Oborne:

"You go back a generation or two, the people who came into the commons, whether from the left of the right, the primary objective was to serve the country or serve their voters, not to make money for themselves.

What is new is that the majority of people now coming into Parliament have sought politics as a career since coming out of university… so what we see is the use of politics as a way of making huge sums of money".

The first assertion is bogus: what people, and politicians especially, really want is power. But there's nothing wrong with this, it's just how we're evolutionary wired.

The trick is to create a system of government that harnesses the inherent desire for power and competitive instincts of homo sapiens sapiens to constructive ends.

Democracy works because when it works properly it enables politicians to achieve power by giving the public what they think the public wants.

That this is an absurd impossibility is without doubt: but at least they're trying and at least they're accountable and at least they're so keen to stab each other in the back that they can very effectively police themselves.

How much should MPs be paid?

After much consideration I've come to the conclusion that the answer to this question is either:

• A lot (or more than they're paid at the moment)
• Nothing at all

The rationale behind the first is that MPs need to be effectively unbribable by outside interests, either via the traditional envelope of used fivers or sinecures and stipends as "non-executive directors" after they leave office.

The rationale behind the second is that MPs must do what they do out of a sense of duty to their country, rather than the mere taste of silver.

There is an inherent conflict between these two extremes. Both purport to ensure that only people of integrity are elected to (or allowed to remain in) high office: but this objective is not served by the current mess of low salaries (and yes, for the job they do they are low) supplemented by perks and expenses.

My preference is for a situation where MPs are paid nothing, but must create some kind of external income to enable them to carry out their political duties.

This would ensure that MPs are canny, experienced, and entrepreneurial enough not be total dishrags in office, and (assuming that everything is declared in as open and honest way as possible) it would also allow us (the electorate) to see who works for who in as straightforward a fashion as possible.

The End of Politics: a review

I stumbled across Chris Dillow's blog (entitled Stumbling and Mumbling) after reading repeated references to managerialism in The Yorkshire Ranter and DSquared Digest.

A brief read of Dillow's blog suggests he is clearly too clever by half and, which is more, he knows that intelligence is irrelevant if you don't pay attention to empirical observations, or further are incapable of making accurate empirical observations.

Which leads into The End of Politics - Dillow's book.

Dillow's thesis is that, contrary to the standard caricature of being "all spin and no substance", New Labour does have a distinctive ideology.

This ideology holds that it should be possible to combine equality and economic efficiency, and that there is no trade-off between these two goals. Any problems that emerge can be dealt with through effective management.

Dillow calls this ideology managerialism. Managerialists believe that the job of government is to behave like managers of a company. Managerialists do not perceive the inherent trade-offs and conflicts of interest that are endemic to politics, and are indeed the reason for the existence of politics. Managerialists believe conflicts of interest can be resolved with good leadership and appeals to a well-defined national interest.

Managerialism is distinct from the scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor, which was concerned with organising resources effectively. Rather managerialism is the belief that there exists an abstract concept of "good management" that can be applied to every situation, regardless of the underlying organisational substrate.

Managerialists are obsessed with the idea that the world is new and constantly changing, thus simultaneously justifying managerialist action and ensuring that it is impossible to objectively test the efficacy of a managerialist policy because by the time it is implemented things will have changed.

Dillow also draws a link between Old and New Labour, describing how they are defined by their desire to achieve equality and economics efficiency simultaneously.

Dillow argues that there are trade-offs in politics that can't be managed away.

Further he argues that notions of "economic efficiency" or "equality" or even "rationality" are ambiguous and incoherent in and of themselves. He cites Newcomb's Problem to identify areas where traditional conceptions of rationality are limited.

Dillow shows that the arguments that globalisation have changed everything are false, and that concern over globalised capital and labour is as old as Adam Smith.

Instead, globalisation is used to justify New Labour's managerialist schemes.

Globalisation isn't necessarily irreversible, as the existence or non-existence of tariffs or immigration controls are at the whim of politicians.

Dillow shows that the evidence as to whether the national minimum wage destroys jobs is inconclusive, but taken as a whole, the research generally seems to indicate that the national minimum wage does destroy jobs but this is difficult to detect in aggregate economic data.

The attempts by the Beveridge-report inspired postwar settlement to achieve full employment lead to worker militancy and increased inflation, as workers campaigned successfully for higher and higher price rises in response to increased inflationary pressures that were in fact being caused by inflationary pay rises.

Dillow's arguments are a recurrent theme in what I've been reading. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker and now The End of Politics all have in common an empirically-supported belief that the powers of human rationality are more limited than we tend to assume. That centrally-planned projects often fail and that extensive government oversight of the economy is generally a bad thing.

So if the capacity of political leaders to manage things is inherently limited in all sorts of ways what is to be done?

The title The End of Politics is appropriate: Dillow pours flammable liquid over all the most cherished ideals of all politicians and sets everything alight.

Given the robust and thoroughly empirical nature of this book I am entirely persuaded by Dillow's arguments that most political projects are stillborn. There is never enough information for politicians to make good decisions, even if they were capable of doing so, or even had a clear idea about what qualifies as a "good" decision.

As an alternative to top-down managerialist politics Dillow argues in favour of the open society: that decision making should be as democratic as possible, simply because no centralised authority can possess all the necessary information to make good decisions.

Dillow believes hospitals should be run by doctors and nurses, and schools run by teachers, because no centralised manager in Whitehall can possibly predict "the facts on the ground."

He also suggests the intriguing idea of a citizens basic income as a way of partially solving the problem of welfare vs. working tax credits. It's an interesting idea, and one that appeals to the dilettante in me.

The basic lesson of The End of Politics is that in the complex world in which we live political and business leaders need to be more humble in the face of the inherent limitations of centrally directed institutions.

The best way to get anything done is to create the circumstances by which effective solutions can be evolved from the interactions and daily business of all the millions of people and machines in the world.

Nowadays, as professions become more and more specialised, it is important to hand control back to the professionals. Just as David Allen's Getting Things Done system was defined by Wired magazine as "Taylorism for the modern knowledge worker."

Just as the study of productivity has shifted emphasis from centrally-directed institutions to professional individuals Dillow argues that the response to increasing complexity in the world is to decentralise politics and business.

Both The End of Politics and The Origin of Wealth convey the message that economists and policy makers need to be more humble about the extent to which the economy can be controlled and that the best laid plans gang aft aglay.

Dillow advocates an open society and more genuinely democratic debate in which heterodox views and those who stand to lose out from policies are given a fair hearing. Political debate is likely to be fairer if things are done in the open.

My response to this book was initially fatalistic: if the world is so complex that we can never hope to control it, why bother attempting anything?

Dillow's answer is that government has a role in creating the circumstances in which innovation can take place. But it is not the role of government to attempt to change people or manipulate the economy, because it is incapable of doing so effectively.

In a broader context it is clear that our conception of human nature is changing and altering. We are coming to realise that we are not wholly rational, and even that rationalism itself is a canard.

Dillow has an excellent blog: Stumbling and Mumbling.

The bill for freedom is eternal vigilance

I've signed the petition to support this here freedom bill.

I'm always a bit lairy of putting my name on political petitions, partly because that's how they getcha and partly because I don't want to end up being responsible for a pyramid of skulls.

But this bill seems entirely sensible. In fact I'm rather surprised the whole lot isn't already in law:

# Scrap ID cards for everyone, including foreign nationals.
# Ensure that there are no restrictions in the right to trial by jury for serious offences including fraud.
# Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square, at the heart of our democracy.
# Abolish the flawed control orders regime.
# Renegotiate the unfair extradition treaty with the United States.
# Restore the right to public assembly for more than two people.
# Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.
# Strengthen freedom of information by giving greater powers to the Information Commissioner and reducing exemptions.
# Stop criminalising trespass.
# Restore the public interest defence for whistleblowers.
# Prevent allegations of ‘bad character’ from being used in court.
# Restore the right to silence when accused in court.
# Prevent bailiffs from using force.
# Restrict the use of surveillance powers to the investigation of serious crimes and stop councils snooping.
# Restore the principle of double jeopardy in UK law.
# Remove innocent people from the DNA database.
# Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.
# Scrap the ministerial veto which allowed the Government to block the release of Cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq war.
# Require explicit parental consent for biometric information to be taken from children.
# Regulate CCTV following a Royal Commission on cameras.


Brought to this place by the inestimable People's Republic of Mortimer.

Build Your Own... political ideology

Your friendly guide to building your own political ideology.

First step: if you want to build your own political ideology you need to look hard at the Way Things Are and try and work out why they are the Way They Are.

Second step: carefully record your findings and then make careful ethical judgements about the Reasons for the Way Things Are that you have discovered. If you find there are some Reasons that are ethically questionable then make a note of these.

Third step: write a tract or essay describing the bad Reasons for the Way Things Are and your personal ideas for how we might go about Improving Matters.

Fourth, final, and most important step: toss the whole lot in the bin and walk away and do something useful and worthwhile. The world has enough ideologies and enough ideologues to be getting on with. :)

Trolling my former self

Nearly three years ago I wrote a post entitled Things We Need to Do describing various bits of technological wotzitry I felt humanity needed to create:

Mature nanotechnology: as demonstrated by the RepRap, it is becoming clear that nanotechnology (coupled with another technology, see below) will sort out quite a few of our problems). Once material wealth can be “made” by a machine that itself only requires energy and raw mass (the most advanced post-nanotech replicators will presumably need only energy) then a significant proportion of the iniquities in life will be resolved and done away with.

Well first I really should point out that every machine ever made only needs "energy and mass" of one sort or another. And as for my earlier comment:

Fusion: in order to supply a crowded planet with sufficient energy whilst maintaining the integrity of the biosphere for future generations (and for ourselves, see below) it is necessary to create an elegant fusion reactor that produces significantly more energy than it consumes. This will remove any further material iniquity. We will have energy “too cheap to meter”, and the means of production will be owned by anyone and everyone. I suspect this will result in a sort of libertarianism.

Yowza. What was my younger self smoking? Bit of a cognitive leap from realisable fusion to communal ownership to libertarianism.

How much have I changed in the intervening years? Sadly not enough. I am prone to making vague statements and leaping from topic to topic without any clear rationale.

Further I still haven't made my mind up on all those ideological questions of capitalism vs. public ownership or free markets vs. command and control. The world is far more complicated than ideologues and ranters on both sides make out and neither side is as fully rational and empirical as they should aspire to be.

In praise of apathetic youth

Commenting on the undoubtedly cringe-inducing¹ video interviewing Future Leaders of the Labour Party (produced by The Guardian) Alix from The People's Republic of Mortimer makes a rather interesting comment:

Actually, I always feel slightly sorry for youngish politicians when journalists ask them - as they invariably will - about political apathy amongst the young, because their responses are so hopelessly inadequate. And no wonder, because they (charmingly uncognisant of this as they may be) are the weirdos who did get interested. You might as well ask a zebra why it thinks more of the horse family don’t have stripes.

As I've commented before I think there are three rather distinct uses of the word "politics" in common usage. Two of these, one concerning political traditions, and the other concerning how things actually work I am fascinated by.

But the tedious, tribalistic, mudslinging nonsense that might well be fun if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing-but-I-don't that is reported on the news on a daily basis is not something I or any other non-nerd would ever be remotely interested in.

The problem is that whenever da yoof are exhorted to "engage in politics" it is this tedious bottom layer we are expected to "engage" with. No discussion of Adam Smith or Plato or Marx. No discussion of the global balance of power or how computer chips are made.

And not even anything useful, like giving everyone under 25 a free bus pass.

Just tedious distracting talking shops like the Youth Parliament².

Y'see I'd say the reason otherwise quite engaged and well-informed young people such as myself (no really) aren't interested in this kind of politics is because it is boring. And also has very little relevance to how many of us live our lives.

Take, for example, the "90 day without charge" Terrorism Act later rehashed as the "42 days without charge" Counter-Terrorism Act. From an ideological standpoint it was an obvious attack on some fairly solid principles of freedom: namely you should not be imprisoned by the state without being told why you've been imprisoned ASAP and then given the opportunity to defend yourself.

But what did it actually accomplish? Sweet Fanny Adams is what. The chances of me dying in a terrorist attack are ridiculously minute in any case, but they haven't grown substantially smaller because the police can now hold suspects for a whole two weeks longer.

And even if that weren't the case what the hell is the point of being a liberal democracy if you let the bastards win by caving in to their terror tactics like this?

I keep an eye on what goes on in parliament. And if I see some way of making the world a better place by taking political action I will certainly do so. But I do not want to engage with this bunch of egotistical navel-gazing pishers³.

Political apathy amongst the young is probably a good thing as it will keep those with genuine talent out of career politics and place them in the real world where they might be able to do something useful.




1: Of course I haven't watched it and I have no intention of doing so. Partly for the reasons described above and partly because Alix does a wonderful job of summarising the Horror.

2: I suspect the Youth Parliament is a clever way of distracting and then proceeding to grind down anyone with even the remotest genuine interest in helping their fellow man. That or ensuring all the trouble-makers are kept in one place for easier observation /paranoia.

3: I can get enough of that online and in a more entertaining package.