26 January 2017

Rewriting the rules of economics

An interesting article by Tim Worstall attacks MP Liam Byrne’s call to “rewrite the rules of economics”, as a cure for the supposed problem of inequality. As Tim points out, you cannot rewrite rules if they represent the way economies work.

Getting academics to generate models that will produce the answers you want seems the wrong way round to do research.

A couple of things jarred when I read Mr Byrne’s article (co-written with Professor Colin Hay, co-director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute).

The article cites the relation between a person’s level of education and their earnings, committing the common fallacy, when discussing this topic, of assuming correlation means causation. At least, that is the obvious way to interpret the writers’ assertion that
a degree remains the key determinant of a middle-class income
It seems to be taken for granted that the average non-graduate – if we could go back in time and arrange for them to attend university – would see their income higher by the so-called “graduate premium”: the difference in average salary between graduates and non-graduates. This presumes there is no innate ability factor to generate two different effects, with a correlation between them: (1) level of education and (2) level of earnings.

The blank-slate presumption is not supported by data but is frequently made nonetheless, perhaps because it chimes better with egalitarian ideology.

25 January 2017

Markets are voluntary, politics is coercive

Milton Friedman:
The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate [...]

The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest — whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform.
From ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’,
The New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.

24 January 2017

Paternalism for traders

The government is proposing to restrict spread betting on financials, which will primarily affect small investors.

This is wrong:
a) because paternalism is immoral,
b) because speculators (particularly small players) increase the efficiency of markets.


IG Index gives the following example of what will happen.



Even for experienced traders, the margin requirement (the amount of cash you need to deposit with IG) will go up from £345 to £1725, a factor of five. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a way of prohibiting trading, without making it outright illegal.

The vast majority of small traders, argues the consultation document, lose money – but so what? If that is how they want to spend their hard-earned pay, they should have that choice.

To express your views on the proposed legislation, fill in the online response form here.

23 January 2017

The individualism myth

In her recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Theresa May blamed individualism for our (allegedly) declining sense of responsibility towards one another.

‘Individualism’ is maligned by both Left and Right. The Church of England attacked it in its 2015 pre-election report.


The Oxford English Dictionary gives this as the primary definition for the word:
independence and self-reliance
I am not aware of any evidence for a correlation between (a) independence/self-reliance and (b) behaving with less consideration. Conceivably, there is a negative correlation.

The Prime Minister should refrain from reinforcing social myths. Perhaps by “individualism” she actually means indifference to family, arising from reliance on the state. If so, she should use a different word.

22 January 2017

Donald Trump and the conservatives

Everyone – including Daily Telegraph editors – seems to be complaining about President Trump, comparing him unfavourably with Obama, Reagan, Kennedy etc.

But there is nothing very surprising about what is happening, other than the election result.

If an ideology is pushed into a corner, it gets nastier.

Many conservatives seem to despise Trump for lowering the tone. Perhaps they should be grateful to him for shaking things up a little.


There are two preferred positions for the enemies of mediocracy [...]

Option 2: they can play by the rules, and compete by offering a more aggressive brand of mediocracy, with emphasis on authoritarianism and/or military activity.
(Mediocracy p.58)

02 June 2013

French Polish

Good old Chopin. He is definitely up there. In the top five. In my opinion.

His piano pieces are little symphonies in miniature. They often start with deceptive simplicity and apparent harmlessness. Then the music builds up to something more ominous and dramatic.

Critics have not always been kind to Chopin. During his lifetime he seems to have irritated a number of people, though not always for obvious reasons. At various times he was accused of being offhand, supercilious, reclusive, unmanly, babyish, frivolous and lightweight; and dismissed as capable only of ‘salon music’. Being Polish-born and only half French may have given him some problems in the haut-bourgeois Paris society which became his milieu.

Wagner, whose generosity and expansiveness when composing were not always matched by similar qualities in his social dealings, dismissed Chopin as “a composer for the right hand”. This verdict fails to grasp — perhaps intentionally — the nature of Chopin pieces, which are supremely lyrical. In style, they can seem like a piano version of bel canto singing, which is why most of the obvious action does happen on the right of the keyboard.

In tune with the fashion for hatchet jobs on figures from the past, a number of recent biographers have attacked Chopin as a disdainful snob, disloyal to his native Poland, or as hopelessly effete. The uninhibited emotionality of his music arouses enthusiasm in some, but seems to produce negative reactions in others.

It is interesting how individuals like Chopin, who deviate from normality but not in a readily definable way, are capable of provoking hostility of a kind which, with hindsight, seems irrational.

Still, his position seems safe, for now. 2010 — the 200th anniversary of his birth — was Chopin Year, and the composer received plenty of favourable attention, particularly from his homeland, Poland. His music is rightly celebrated for its astounding depth, notwithstanding its surface floweriness. Chopin pieces contain little storms of emotion, but often calm down again towards the conclusion.

And sometimes there is a funny little coda at the end.
Oh yes.



● Two things are required for successful performances of Chopin: (a) complete mastery of the keyboard, (b) faithfulness to the original emotional messages. Because of the impressionistic quality of the composition, this still leaves a wide range of possible interpretations.

A few major pianists fail with the first of the two criteria — personally, I like to hear all the notes — but at least as common is falling at the second hurdle. There are a couple of key themes in particular which one must be able to reproduce with conviction, if one is to do Chopin justice: nostalgia and courage.

Performances featuring (a) but not (b) can be interesting as demonstrations of virtuosity, but are otherwise as dull as looking at Gauguins in black and white.

Based on which pianists can and can’t do (b), I suspect that one ideally needs to have either East European or Jewish* in one’s make-up to get this part right. As someone with elements of both in his ancestry, I ought to be eligible to give it a go myself. Unfortunately, however, I do not play.

● Like all putative group differences, the one about playing Chopin is likely to be statistical, if true. The Spaniard Pedro Carboné is an excellent Chopin interpreter; while on the other hand there is one prominent Hungarian pianist who, as far as I am concerned, does not cut the mustard Chopin-wise.

By far the best young Chopin player on the scene, Rafal Blechacz, is a Pole. Blechacz’s performances are, quite simply, breathtaking. His playing of Chopin seems at times so correct that it’s almost macabre. Perhaps this is how the music was meant to sound, though of course there is no way of knowing. Technically the playing is flawless but, more importantly, the emotional messages are clearly there. One hears an urgency, and power, which it’s tempting to believe are authentically Chopinesque, but which very few pianists seem capable of reproducing.

Even the greatest performers have idiosyncrasies that one can quibble with. Blechacz’s playing occasionally comes across as a little too contemporary. One hears echoes of Rachmaninov, sometimes even McCartney. The performances can seem a trifle on the hard side, perhaps emphasising precision over reflectiveness. However, for all one knows, Chopin himself leant towards stern correctness, rather than in the romantic direction as heard in (say) Tamás Vásáry, another of the great Chopin players.

Blechacz** may sometimes seem to lack heart, but Chopin was accused of this himself. Perhaps the popular image of him as a dreamy poet is wide of the mark. A cousin on his mother’s side, General Krzyzanowski, fought in the American Civil War. Pictures of the General suggest a thoroughly robust character.

Whatever minor reservations one may have, it has to be admitted that Blechacz’s Chopin playing is astounding. I do not think Irish pianist John O’Conor was exaggerating when he described him as “one of the greatest artists I have had a chance to hear in my entire life”.

Blechacz’s performances of Debussy, I have to say, leave me cold. Technically perfect, they seem to miss the essential Debussy qualities of dreaminess and shimmering. On reflection, I don’t recall having heard a non-Frenchman play Debussy convincingly.

It’s interesting, incidentally, that French pianists seem to ‘get’ Debussy, as you would expect, but apparently not Chopin. It suggests Chopin’s heart was in Poland, not in Paris. (As indeed it now is, being immured at Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church, while the rest of his remains are buried at Père Lachaise.)

Apart from a superb recording of the Preludes, there has been relatively little Chopin output from Mr Blechacz since he bowled over the judges at the 2005 Warsaw international piano competition.

It must be tempting to diversify. On the other hand, a career as one of the greatest Chopin players of all time beckons. I hope it will come to fruition.

* East European fits with Chopin’s ancestry. The Jewish association seems harder to explain. The renowned Chopin interpreter Arthur Rubinstein claimed that it also helped to be gay, but I am not sure about this.

** the -cz is pronounced -tsh




The word “racism” has become one of the most loaded and dangerous terms in the modern vocabulary. One would therefore hope that those who are influential in determining its meaning are extremely careful about how they use it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a definite creep away from the original sense, so that the word now — functioning typically as an accusation — seems to cover a very broad array of things, some of them ill-defined.

The motive for the creep may seem hard to understand, unless one postulates that some people, particularly perhaps left-leaning intellectuals, have a desire to prohibit discussion by widening the range of ideas considered offensive — thereby restricting the lives of other (rival) intellectuals.

In Chambers’ 21st Century Dictionary (1996), the definition given is close to the common-sense meaning, involving as a crucial element an evaluation about superiority.
Belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race or races over others, usually with the implication of a right to be dominant.
Ten years later, in the 2006 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, we have the following.
The belief that each race or ethnic group possesses specific characteristics, abilities or qualities that distinguish it as inferior or superior to another such group. [italics mine]
The newer definition starts with a reference to a belief in group differences, a reference which doesn’t occur at all in the earlier definition. Nevertheless, this second version of “racism” still crucially involves a belief about superiority/inferiority.

The current online OED* definition, by contrast, makes the meaning depend primarily on the issue of group differences, so that this now supposedly becomes the crucial component. The belief in superiority/inferiority — the element which, by itself, constituted the original definition — has been relegated to secondary importance (“especially ...”):
The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. [italics mine]
Extrapolating from the current trend, it seems we may soon get a definition that dispenses with the phrase “all members of”. (This would not be surprising, considering that the usage is already with us.) This would rule as ‘racist’, for example, the suggestion that the average Belgian might be intrinsically different, however slightly, from the average Swede.

To evaluate any discussion of possible average innate differences between nations or ethnic groups as racist seems ludicrous and pointless. It censors meaningful discussion of the topic, reducing it to a choice between complete avoidance or recitation of platitudes. It also makes research in this area impossible, given that the merest hint of transgression of the taboo means no external funding, and negligible chance of publication.

I am not blaming the compilers of dictionaries for the corruption. They only record — or ought only to record — the usage they observe. For responsibility, look to journalists, academics and other members of the ruling class.

* retrieved 1 June 2013

● The change in emphasis may reflect the preferences of the il-liberal elite. Perhaps superiority is no longer regarded as an issue, now that the ideology has decreed that no one may feel superior to anyone else, on any grounds. (Except members of the il-liberal elite, but they only because their positions were assigned to them by exercise of the collective will, at least so the theory goes.)
The stress now is on homogeneity. Not only is no one superior; no one is intrinsically different from anyone else. None of us have any significance as individuals, only as members of undifferentiated groups, any apparent differences having been socially determined. (We are of course permitted to make trivial choices to express our pseudo-individuality — e.g. hair colour, sexual orientation.)

● Based on personal experience, I regard it as probable that there are innate variations between different nationalities, in terms of averages.

For example, it seems fairly clear to me that the personality of the average German — allowing for the effects of language and customs — is slightly, but noticeably, different from that of the average Brit, though it would be difficult to define precisely how. I do not believe the difference can easily be explained solely by reference to cultural backgrounds.

I am not of course expecting anyone to take anecdotal data as proving there are genetic attributes which vary between nations or races. My working theory about this issue is based on the best I guess I can make, given limited evidence. I am open to the idea that the theory is wrong, and that observed differences are entirely derived from environment rather than genes.

However, to label as taboo any discussion of the possibilities is anti-rational.

● An institution which adopts the strategy of censoring or forbidding the discussion, for whatever reason, is breaking a putative principle of objectivity, which ought to hold in academia, at least as an ideal from which one tries not to depart.
Breaking the principle, knowingly and actively, is a move that will surely colour the institution’s attitude in other areas, and undermine its objectivity on a wider scale.



● South Korean rapper and YouTube sensation Psy is endorsed by the United Nations?
David Cameron and Barack Obama have learnt the moves of Gangnam Style?
But of course.
Where would we be if our political leaders did not demonstrate a working knowledge of filesharing dance culture?
And always twirling, twirling, twirling



Lack of funding means I am limited to making brief comments on complex issues. Those with access to state finance, who could provide more detailed expositions from a similar perspective, do not.

Private capital is necessary for scientific and cultural progress. Modern institutionalised academia is not well suited to generating paradigm shifts. Those with surplus funds should regard it as a responsibility to support individual innovators, including those with unfashionable viewpoints — irrespective of whether they agree with them.

Oxford Forum is seeking patrons to provide financial backing. Donations support the work of Dr Celia Green, one of the few female geniuses there have ever been, and at present scandalously ignored by the intellectual establishment.

01 April 2013

Airstrip One, A.D.2014

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Thirty years after the passing of 1984, Oceania found itself in an extraordinary position. The state — that entity which, according to theory, exists for the benefit of its citizens — had grown into a thing of nightmarish size and scope.

Decades earlier, an academic named Eric Nordlinger had warned that the government apparatus of a democracy would automatically try to expand itself and its powers, at the expense of the individual — but his work had been dismissed.

It became clear that the state was no longer in any sense the servant of those who ‘voted’ for it, but an autonomous agency which, like any corporation, was focused on its own interests and agenda. These involved increasing its powers, and its revenue, against what few constraints remained.

The full horror of what had been allowed to happen slowly began to dawn on a small minority. Meanwhile, the vast mass of ordinary citizens appeared neither to notice nor care.

Beneath their facade of indifference, many had negative reactions to what was happening, ranging from discomfort to terror and despair. They were kept mute, however, by their obeisance before an ideology which decreed that all was done for the good of the ‘needy’ and that anyone who opposed it was ‘uncaring’. Some wondered why the lives of the ‘needy’ never actually got any better, failing to realise that the point of the concept was purely a narrative one, intended to justify ever-increasing intrusion and confiscation.

The ideology cleverly co-opted groups such as women and ethnic minorities to its cause by convincing them that it served their interests, and that enemies of the ideology were their enemies too. In reality, those who were taken in by this were mere fodder to be exploited.

Many found it difficult to accept that the state had essentially become an instrument of evil, because such a large proportion of the population was employed by it. What was not appreciated (until too late) was that the absolute power of the state automatically corrupted anyone working for it. Even those sceptical about the state quickly converted to its point of view once they began carrying out its orders.

People were also befuddled by the fact that while sex and money had been heavily flagged as sources of negative motivation, the more dangerous lust-objects of power over others or (worse) ability to frustrate had been carefully avoided as topics for discussion.

* * * * *

The apparatus of Oceanic government was divided between eleven distinct Ministries (four having been found to be not nearly enough), with free exchange between them of files, database records and other information on individual citizens.

Ministry of Peace
Responsible for involving citizens in opportunistic wars supposedly promoting ‘justice’ and ‘peace’. These distract attention from domestic failings, and provide justification for greater powers of snooping, intrusion and incarceration.

Ministry of Health
Primarily responsible for (a) ensuring that citizens do not survive beyond their allotted lifespan, and (b) allowing practitioners to experiment on human subjects.
Regularly employed euphemisms include: ‘care pathway’ (starving patients to death in order to free beds), ‘informed consent’ (extorting a signature), and ‘in their best interests’ (doing the opposite of what patients or families want, including invasive treatments, sometimes for the mere thrill of exercising power over another person’s body).
The Ministry of Health is also responsible for the prescription of brain-deadening medication on a widespread scale — as only the thick-skinned are able to tolerate a society this grim without anaesthetics — and for enforcing compliance with the drug regime.

Ministry of Learning
Responsible for exposing children to damaging environments, in order that they avoid acquiring the skills which would enable them to see through falsehood, while instilling ideology to ensure the resulting frustration in later life is (ironically) turned to anger against opponents of the state.

Ministry of Knowledge
Responsible for running ASLCs (after-school learning centres), formerly called universities. Goal is to ensure that intellectual output is restricted to material supportive of the state, and world views compatible with increasing state control.
It is vital to the health of the state bureaucracy that intellectuals should always express sympathy with pro-state trends, and that no dissidents be given a platform — except those clamouring for even more radical forms of state control.
Applicants for ASLC courses are screened for ideological suitability, with those evincing independence of thought diverted to the less prestigious ASLCs, or denied access altogether.
Graduates of ASLCs join the Outer Party — an elite class of writers, media controllers, bureaucrats etc. — and work for one of the Ministries. Outer Party members are permitted to live in relative comfort, as insulation from the common herd is thought to make it easier for them to compose unrealistic sermons and pseudo-analyses.

Ministry of Plenty
Responsible for ensuring government finances are always in deficit. It was realised some time ago that getting massively into debt is not bad for the state in making it appear inept, but good, in that it provides a more compelling rationale for confiscating citizens’ property.
Middle-class competition can be usefully exploited in this regard, with richer members proclaiming ‘no really, please tax us more!’ as a devious means of impoverishing their poorer rivals and thus enhancing their own relative advantage.
New, creative methods of taxation are regularly proposed — mansion tax, bedroom tax, fat tax, granny tax, banking tax, airport tax, etc. — but when it gets tired of such game-playing the state simply confiscates a percentage of everyone’s savings accounts.

Ministry of Fun
Outer Party members working for the Ministry of Fun are responsible for producing and disseminating cultural products for the masses that will insidiously instil the dominant ideology. This process includes the rewriting of history, a goal best achieved using tendentious docudrama.
Cultural products should be entertaining in a suitably mind-numbing way, and reinforcing of the correct ideological messages. They must be free of bourgeois content, celebrating instead the glorious proletariat, who should be shown demanding more intervention and rebelling against a snobbish and exploitative bourgeoisie.
Audiovisual dramas are required to portray certain practices as necessary and tolerable, e.g. betrayal, aggression, theft, torture, murder, involuntary euthanasia.

Ministry of Protection
Responsible for providing criminals with education and other forms of social support, and for protecting them from persecution by property owners.
Also responsible for implementing laws against thought and speech crimes, and for collaborating with the Ministry for Families in the removal of children.

Ministry of Love
65 years earlier, George Orwell had written that the aim of the Big Brother state
was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control [but] to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.
In practice, however, sex had not been found a threat to state authority, but instead had become a useful outlet for energies that might otherwise generate dissatisfaction or unease.
Sex now functions as an analgesic, and the search for sex as a usefully distracting counterirritant. Pursuit of sex is therefore encouraged, as is the breakage of existing relationships in favour of new ones.
It is loyalty to one’s partner, and genuine affection or empathy, that are seen as threatening. Relationships built on trust are discouraged in favour of ‘designer love’ — a consciously phoney and ‘ironic’ imitation of an earlier model, in which the parties regard sentiment as a slightly embarrassing means to a necessary end.
The idea of innate feeling or thought is seen as atavistic, proven by biology and psychiatry to be a cognitive delusion.

Ministry for Families
As a result of the prevailing love/sex model, even apparently stable family units are blatantly founded on contingency and cynical pragmatism. One side effect of this is that sensitive individuals tend to be traumatised, soon after emerging from the womb, by the harsh atmosphere prevailing in the home, so that many take refuge in emotional flight — a condition explained away as ‘autism’.
In general, the attitude to families is negative. ‘Support’ is used as a euphemism for coercive intervention aimed at destabilisation. Children are readily taken into state ownership, where they can be forcibly exposed to the ‘real world’ (e.g. sexual suffering). It is mandated that the business of child rearing cannot be entrusted to biological parents, who are perpetually scrutinised for signs of ‘abuse’.

Ministry of Truth
Responsible for publishing misleading data about examination success, falling crime rates, improving citizen health etc; and for issuing gagging orders.
Passes information about undesirable whistleblowers to the Ministry of Protection (see above).
Also responsible for authorising torture of prisoners to reveal ‘information’ — whether real, or invented under pressure.

Ministry of Justice
The really frightening one ...
The Ministry of Justice upholds a system of arcane and opaquely worded laws and regulations, numbering in the tens of thousands, which are interpreted in whatever way best suits the authorities.
In particular, the Ministry makes frequent use of an instrument called a closed material procedure, a term that strikes terror into the hearts of those prosecuted under it, for they know then that their doom is upon them, whether they are guilty or not.
In a closed material procedure (CMP) case, your fate is determined in Kafkaesque fashion by authority figures deliberating behind locked doors, and neither you nor your lawyer is allowed to be present or to know what evidence is being used to convict you.
The CMP procedure for civil litigation cases had been sneakily introduced by Airstrip One’s perfidious premier and his dishonest deputy, during a time when the public’s attention was distracted by hoo-hah about gay marriage (an issue which, these two personages claimed, validated their PR-manufactured reputation as ‘liberals’).
The legislation was drawn up in response to demands from leaders in New York Territory, and was inspired by a popular TV series about intelligence officers devising creative ways to torture suspects.

image source: SovietBuildings



● A number of journalists have expressed sympathy with Vicky Pryce, said to be one of the cleverest women in Britain, who was given an eight-month prison sentence for taking speeding points for her then husband, LibDem minister Chris Huhne — a punishment somewhat like using a bulldozer to crack a nut. Her career is supposedly over, and the “terrible waste” of her abilities is bemoaned.

Celia Green’s career was also ruined, and her considerable talents largely wasted, though she broke no laws. Her only crime was to incur the hostility and jealousy of other people, including officials at Essex County education authority and the former principal of her Oxford college.

No journalists have enquired about Dr Green’s position or her problems. This may be because her story would not sell papers in the way blather about the Huhne-Pryce affair does. But perhaps it also reflects squeamishness on the part of the media about criticising the establishment in fundamental ways, as opposed to merely exposing its members’ sexual and financial shenanigans.

Those who have written about Professor Pryce no doubt assume that she does not want to be in prison, that she has a strong desire to make use of her abilities, and that she will find it frustrating to have no opportunity to do so. Strangely, this logic is typically inverted in the case of Dr Green. Those who respond to her complaints reveal a belief that she cannot be suffering particularly, or even that she ought to enjoy her position of being a struggling, unfinanced intellectual — did she not choose it? But Green no more chose her present life style than Einstein chose to be a patent clerk.



Did you fall foul of the criteria mentioned at the top of the page? And you’re still reading this? Frankly, your standards of conduct leave something to be desired.

03 February 2013

weekend notes #11

Once upon a time there was a world which was culturally productive but rather inegalitarian. Then the inhabitants invented ‘social justice’ as a device for legitimising their mutual hostility, and soon things were in a pretty pickle.



- more on the mythology of inequality
- note from a small island
- patronage (contd.)
- Church of England, Les Mis, Financial Times, Fifty Shades



Last time we considered the alleged link between
• increasing inequality and
• financial market dysfunctionality,
and concluded that while they may be effects of a common cause they are unlikely to be directly connected. Their coincidence may however reveal something about the current state of society.

The evidence on this is still accumulating, but it seems possible that democracy — in which ‘the people’ and the state are touted as morally superior to individual capital owners, supposedly justifying the confiscation of resources from the latter — tends to result, with time, not only in
(a) a lowering of standards [1], but also (less obviously) in
(b) an increase in concentration of power and money, in the hands of a new elite, superficially in tune with egalitarian ideology but in practice no less ruthless than their predecessors.

This hypothesis is of course unacceptable in terms of the currently dominant ideology — as is any suggestion that there might be serious intrinsic flaws to democracy [2] — and is therefore unlikely to receive much attention from the university sector. Most analysts of supposedly rising inequality focus on more ideologically palatable explanations. A popular story, cited for example by Raghuram Rajan, is that educational opportunity is failing to keep pace with economic need. This supposed market failure may well be a leftist fantasy, however. There seems little convincing evidence to support it, and plenty of counterevidence in the form of graduate unemployment.

On the other hand, there are a number of possible explanatory factors which are not considered at all by most commentators on inequality, presumably because they do not fit with the desired conclusion of more intervention. For example:

- Welfare that generates distorted incentives for having children between different social classes, leading to a relative expansion of the lower-IQ population, some of whom may be unemployable in the modern, ‘high-skill’ economy habitually referred to.

- An ideology which encourages people to have inflated ideals about the kind of work they ought to be able to do, so that the rewards available to those who would once have been employed in (say) manufacturing go to workers in developing countries instead. In other words, exalted educational expectations could be a cause rather than, as Rajan suggests, a solution.

Even if one is too squeamish to consider ideologically taboo explanations, there are plenty of others that are neglected. For example, tax, welfare and other legislative interventions may generate a disproportionately large wedge [3] between costs and benefits at the lower end of the labour market, meaning that parts of this market dry up altogether.

Aside from the question of what is causing ‘rising inequality’, there are two key issues which analysts carefully avoid:

1) A crude measure of inequality like the Gini coefficient may mask a more complex effect, namely that while a tiny minority are getting super-rich, the section of society describable as middle-middle to upper-middle class is getting poorer, once you adjust for effects like the increasing awfulness of state schools and the difficulty of getting people to do reliable work (e.g. domestic) for individual households. Neither of these latter two effects is considered by conventional analyses, which assume (for example) that state education and state medicine are worth what they cost to produce or more, as opposed to having negligible or even negative value.

2) Much of the push for interventions in the name of inequality reduction does not come from the supposed sufferers (those at the bottom end of the income curve) but from an inflated and politicised pseudo-intelligentsia, created by excess ‘university’ education and hungry to tinker with the social fabric in line with their ideological preferences; ostensibly to benefit the ‘underprivileged’ but just as plausibly because they simply enjoy exerting political power.

This second point puts a somewhat different light on the assertion by Rajan and others that government is forced by ‘democratic’ pressure to respond to inequality by (say) artificially expanding credit, or whatever it supposedly takes to appease the electorate. Is it the electorate as a whole pushing for change — including easier credit for all — or is it state-subsidised medical practitioners, state school teachers, philosophy professors, social science researchers and media folk?

1. Lower standards can take considerable time to show up in the form of macroscopically visible dysfunctionality. After banking and nuclear power, my best guess for the next most obvious victim would be air/space travel.
2. Scepticism about democracy should not be taken to imply belief in the existence of a political model that is preferable.
3. The term “wedge” is normally applied when a tax creates a difference between buying and selling price, with the resulting decrease in output used as a rough measure for the loss of economic welfare. However, the term could be used to cover any situation where an intervention results in agents facing ‘incorrect’ incentives.




Modern Britain really is a curious place. Having spent the better part of two centuries cultivating an image of hauteur, it now seems to be bent on producing the opposite effect, representing itself as a kind of repository of all that is cool and laid-back — the Rolling Stones, soccer yobs, Estuary-speak, mockney manners, irreverent comedy and so forth. Even the Queen herself is said to have adapted her accent, if not her manners, to the new climate of openness and equality.

There is still, one gathers, something called the “Conservative Party”, but it is extremely eager nowadays to demonstrate that it can “get down” and “josh” with the best of them. For example, its current leader regularly shows off his familiarity with the pop culture of (admittedly) the 1980s, lauding groups such as The Smiths, though the groups themselves do not always seem best pleased by the compliment.

Subversive comedy in particular is regarded as somehow quintessentially British, though ‘subversive’ is perhaps a misleading word now that such comedy is regarded as a more dominant feature of the cultural scene than, say, monarchy, or the City (the somewhat quaint term given to the financial services business carried on in a strip of London between Fleet Street and the former haunts of Jack the Ripper). Yes, comedy is now big business in Britain, so much so that erstwhile rebels such as the Monty Python team have become darlings of the establishment, with Michael Palin and John Cleese surely in line for lordships, or at least knighthoods.

I was therefore not at all surprised to discover (having just finished reading Bill Bryson’s amusing, and occasionally catty, take on his native America — his reputation-establishing The Lost Continent — and deciding to look up his authorship record on Wikipedia) that the aforementioned Mr Bryson’s occupations do not merely include that of writer, but also that of university chancellor. Fascinated, I went on to learn that Mr Bryson (or “Bill”, as he is known to friends and colleagues) is in fact a former Chancellor of the University of Durham, a post he apparently held from 2005 to 2011.

Of course, in my own student days Durham was still regarded as Oxbridge-upon-Tyne, and a place to which high-born young ladies and gentlemen would be admitted if they failed to secure a place at Christ Church or King’s. In those days, Durham was perhaps more likely to appoint an elevated member of the establishment — a former minister, a gonged ballet star — to its Chancellorship.

Nevertheless, Mr Bryson is to be congratulated (belatedly, if necessary) on being permitted, in line with the said climate of openness and equality, to rise to so exalted a position as the chancellorship of a pre-1850 British university. It is true that Mr Bryson is not in fact a British citizen, hailing indeed from Des Moines, one of the more charming conurbations of Iowa, USA, but in the new era of globalisation this should probably not be held against him.



Private patronage may be the best hope for a research culture that has become ludicrously collectivised and ideologised, so that on present progress it will soon begin to resemble the Soviet model. Unfortunately, the concepts of noblesse oblige (and richesse oblige) seem to have died out several decades ago.

What if one did care about reviving the process of intellectual evolution, and one had capital to spare? The popular option here is imitation. You set up your own rival sausage factory, or finance a new component of an existing sausage factory which then bears your name. This has some attractions, but it may be worth considering the drawbacks.



Assuming, on the other hand, that you go down the road of support-the-individual, rather than expand-the-institutionalised-establishment, how should you pick your individuals? Here again there are a number of options. You could (a) give preference to those who already have status and/or who are endorsed by the leading lights of the field, or (b) appraise someone on the basis of how long and extensive a training they received, and how many years’ experience they have of ‘working’ in the area in question.

There is a third possible option, though it is not exercised much these days. This is to look for someone with unusual innate ability and motivation, who clearly wants to make advances and is not interested in much else, but who hasn’t necessarily been endorsed by anyone with social status and hasn’t necessarily had years of experience. Making the right choice in this case is likely to be more difficult than in the case of options (a) and (b), calling more on your own powers of judgment and intuition, but — if you get it right — could prove more rewarding.

l have little doubt that my colleague Dr Celia Green, for example, could make revolutionary advances in any one of a number of fields if she were provided with the resources. On a tiny budget, she pioneered research on two phenomena in psychology (lucid dreams and out-of-the-body experiences) — although, as she was not financed to continue her preliminary work, their significance, as potential code-breakers for understanding the processes of sleep and perception, remains unappreciated. Ostensibly a mathematical physicist, Green showed that her abilities transported readily across subjects; the topics she chose were determined by what she thought she could obtain independent finance for, and by what could be done on a shoestring.

Trusting someone to make advances where others, more experienced and socially successful, have failed, purely on the basis of the person’s supposed intelligence and drive, and because the person says they can? Very risky. Unheard of. Sure to be counselled against by anyone in a position of authority.

The sausage-factory model, like the welfare state, has now been in operation for so long that it is difficult for most people to imagine anything different. “That is how research is done these days, it is no good touting an older model, a person needs to stick to their area of expertise, horses for courses, etc.” Oh, you mean ‘research’.







● I am intrigued by the fuss made over women bishops and gay marriage. It seems curious that these topics should be so contentious among the clergy when presumably most of them no longer believe in God anyway (the old-fashioned biblical entity).
I respectfully suggest that a schism could be in order, with existing venues apportioned between the two sides, and colour-coding for easy identification.
- One section (purple?) should do what they believe God wants them to do. (‘Purples’ may wish to consider availing themselves of minority protection.)
- The other (orange?) should concentrate on social and political usefulness. Perhaps a closer alliance with academic humanities departments could be cultivated, as there is plenty of common ground. More tea, Professor?

● Why is Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables so enduringly popular? The version with songs is one of the highest-grossing entertainment products of all time, second only to Lloyd Webber’s Phantom. If you throw in viewings of the movie (said to be a notch above the Phantom film), it may well nudge into first place in terms of global headcount.
I suppose the story is intended to inspire hope. The two main characters are outsiders in a world which doesn’t care that they are being unjustly treated, who both manage to survive by dint of sheer heroic irrepressibility.
Jean Valjean is battling against a zealous agent of the collective who seeks to crush him in the interests of society. As an outlaw, Valjean can expect no sympathy or cooperation from anyone else, but must soldier on regardless.
Cosette’s story probably rings bells with those who in early life encountered people like the Thénardiers — brutal, sneering, ruthless; meanness to such a degree that they literally find being generous physically painful.
Hugo plays on a popular prejudice by linking their bad behaviour to greed, but in real life mere malice, or adherence to socialism, may provide sufficient motivation.
For some, the Thénardiers were people with whom they had to live for a time, or under whose power they came: relatives, boarding school masters, summer camp leaders. And for an unlucky few, the Thénardiers were their own parents.

● What is it about the FT’s love affair with the current US President? There is evidently some “special relationship” going on, but its origins are unclear. Possibly staff have picked up an image of the ideal political leader from their Oxford PPE tutors, and Mr Obama ticks the relevant boxes. The excitement over him certainly seems far greater than over Abe, Merkel, Hollande and Rousseff [Who he/she? Ed.] combined.
A financial newspaper must aim to be supranational these days, so perhaps the FT is trying to be the paper of choice for American capitalists — but isn’t that what the Wall Street Journal is for? I would have thought they would do better targeting Asia, where carrying a wood-based publication is still regarded as aspirational, and where they also have the Burberry factor [4] on their side.
Before the 2008 election one noticed a distinct sense of irritation with the reluctance of blue-collar US voters to warm to the new political messiah. “Why aren’t those demmed plebs voting Democrat?” it was asked. “Don’t they know what’s good for them?” [5]
The collective sigh of relief in November, when Mitt Romney bit the dust, must have been tremendous.

● It is sad when a marriage is on the rocks but — as memorably portrayed in the movie The War of the Roses — the signs of impending dissolution tend to be fairly unmistakeable. If the frequency and intensity of betrayal and gratuitous destructiveness increase with time, rather than diminishing, the chances of anything further of a positive nature coming out of the union become slim indeed.

Fifty Shades of Grey, which recently became the fastest-selling paperback of all time, and which features spanking and miscellaneous other saucy practices, is not something I am inclined to sample. Like all pornography (D.H. Lawrence included), the writing is likely to be clunky and unconvincing, because the psychology of sex is too non-rational to capture by means of verbal descriptions. Such descriptions may be arousing, but only because arousal works by association, not because the writing is realistic.
My interest was, however, stirred by seeing pictures of the book’s author, Erika Leonard. Sadly, it appears Ms Leonard is already taken.

● Although it beggars belief, it seems there are still some regular readers of this site who haven’t even bothered to buy a copy of the book. I thought I had made it clear that freeloaders are not welcome.
Not being currently in receipt of a salary, you understand I am not thrilled to be providing a gratis service to someone who is.
Arranging for encryption and passwords is tedious, so I am relying on whatever personal moral compass you may possess.
Kindly purchase the book today [6] if you have not already done so, otherwise I look forward to not seeing you here again in two months’ time.

4. English cultural iconography as an intangible consumer good; particularly popular in Asia.
5. The word “plebs” may not have been used. Memory can be deceptive, even for the professionally trained.
6. Corporate cache subscriptions by arrangement, otherwise the rule is: one book per reader. Please note, I am serious.




Lack of funding means I am limited to making brief comments on complex issues. Those with access to state finance, who could provide more detailed expositions from a similar perspective, do not.

Individuals who take an interest in culture should support the expression of unfashionable viewpoints, even if they do not themselves agree with those viewpoints.

Oxford Forum is actively seeking patrons to provide financial backing. Donations support the work of Dr Celia Green, one of the few female geniuses there have ever been, and at present scandalously ignored by the intellectual establishment.

03 December 2012

Egalitarianism, not inequality, caused the meltdown

Once upon a time there was a world which was culturally productive but rather inegalitarian. Then the inhabitants invented ‘social justice’ as a device for legitimising their mutual hostility, and soon things were in a pretty pickle.



Appeasing the mob is a thing politicians may sometimes have to do in order to maintain social stability. In the process, they are liable to use arguments that are biased and incoherent. Senior economists working in the public sector, on the other hand, should avoid using dodgy lines of reasoning to assuage public opinion.

A recent speech by the Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane, apparently delivered in response to the Occupy protest movement, contains some useful points. Haldane asks his audience not to blame the financial crisis on individual greed or negligence (he doesn’t mention individual stupidity) but to focus on systemic failings. More importantly, he points out that the easy credit of the Nineties and Noughties, encouraged by government — partly in pursuit of egalitarian policies — was a contributory cause of the bubble that led to the meltdown. But to begin his speech with the tendentious statement that
at the heart of the global financial crisis were and are problems of deep and rising inequality
seems irresponsible.

If the state responds to a perceived condition (in this case, inequality) by interfering with markets in ways that lead to trouble, it is misleading to suggest that the original condition can be regarded as the ultimate cause of the trouble. It is a particularly questionable thing to do when there is already a popular belief system to this effect.

The Financial Times, a publication that likes to parade its right-on credentials, predictably picked up on the inequality point in Haldane’s speech — in the process transmuting “heart of the crisis” to “root of the crisis” — but ignored his point about cheap credit driven by egalitarian ideology. This point is less readily assimilated into the Occupy world view, but is more important for understanding the 2008-09 crisis, and more important for preventing another one.

Super-easy credit (or the attempt to provide it) is of course not only a cause of, but also the policy response to, the crisis — at least, the one which central bankers around the world have selected as appropriate. Whether fighting fire with fire can be a successful strategy is something which remains to be seen.

• Haldane mentions Raghuram Rajan’s book Fault Lines. As is pointed out there, the subprime bubble was set in motion by the US government’s encouragement of home ownership, via a lowering of retail lending standards (see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), although the baton for making dodgy loans was later enthusiastically taken up by the private sector.
As more money from the government-sponsored agencies flooded into financing or supporting low-income housing, the private sector joined the party. After all, they could do the math, and they understood that the political compulsions behind government actions would not disappear quickly. With agency support, subprime mortgages would be liquid, and low-cost housing would increase in price. Low risk and high return — what more could the private sector desire? Unfortunately, the private sector, aided and abetted by agency money, converted the good intentions behind the affordable-housing mandate and the push to an ownership society into a financial disaster. (pp.38-39)
According to a study cited in the book which looked at different zip code areas in the US, the number of mortgages obtained in a given area during the 2002-05 period showed a negative correlation with average household income growth in that area — clear evidence, according to Rajan, of “a government-orchestrated attempt to lend to the less well-off”.

• In fairness to the parties concerned, one should mention that Professor Rajan’s book exhibits even more blatantly the symptoms of Haldane’s speech, i.e. of trying to put a twist on the basic position, to the extent that we end up being presented with an inversion of it. Several of the chapters are devoted to a lucid analysis of how an egalitarian policy eventually led to a general mania for making dodgy loans, but the usefulness of this is undermined by earlier chapters which make the case for why redistributive policies are justified and necessary — in effect excusing the intervention that led to the disaster, and adding to pressure for a repeat, if not perhaps exactly in the same form.

Every other paragraph of these interpretative chapters seems to contain some dubious claim, reminiscent of the pronouncements of New Labour apparatchiks — there is not enough education, human capital is not reaching its full potential, we need more graduates, there is increasing demand for skilled labour etc.

Among the more nebulous assertions we have the following.
To the extent that [inequality] is caused by a significant part of the population’s not being able to improve themselves because of lack of access to quality education, it signifies tremendous inefficiency. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and the United States is wasting too many of them. (p.27)
The concept of underutilised talent may have relevance in biology or psychology, but in economics it is surely out of place, unless one can point to a specific market failure. It could be that 90% of the mental capacity of every person on the planet is unused, but that does not mean that liberating these capacities to allow a massive expansion in supply of landscape paintings and mediocre novels would produce a Pareto-superior outcome.

More plausible, though unmentioned by Rajan, is the idea that the inflation of substandard textual output, as a result of expanding the ‘university’ system, has crowded out scope for the few individuals genuinely capable of making intellectual progress to use their unutilised abilities.

• An effect of the current cheap-credit policy may well be to increase inequality via inflation of asset prices. If the present round of hyper-easing leads to a second financial crisis, I hope post-crisis analysts will refrain from seeing a spurious explanatory link between that crisis and inequality. Correlation is not causation, a fact which many contemporary economists seem to forget.



- inversion (& deception)
- a role for capitalists
- police and Two Jags, Teletubbies v Muppets



Inversion, in psychology, is a concept that goes back to Freud, though Celia Green developed it further in Advice to Clever Children. The basic idea is that an attitude or drive which is considered unacceptable (socially and/or internally) is masked by being expressed as its opposite. For example, hatred of a family member or spouse is transmuted into professed ‘love’ for that person, the underlying motive of course remaining operative. Inversion works better, psychodynamically, than simple suppression, and has the added advantage that the target of the negative feelings may be sufficiently deluded by what is presented to allow the agent covert scope to express his/her real desires.

You may like to experiment with applying the concept as an observational aid. Try imagining what someone — say, a politician, social worker, or doctor — may really be wanting when they express an interest in enhancing someone’s ‘welfare’ or expanding their ‘opportunities’. Analogous phenomena are observable in the office and the home.
Here are a few pointers to get you started. (Astute readers will notice that some of these are not strictly inversions but mere deceptions.)

“Being able to deal with others is very important.”
I enjoy stabbing people in the back.

“Communication is an essential basis for success.”
I love listening to people who share my prejudices.

“One cannot overestimate the importance of hard work.”
Daddy got me my first job!

“I am modest and self-effacing.”
My smugness is so ripe it could oil locomotive wheels.

“I believe everyone should be treated without bias.”
The categories of people I secretly hate make a list as long as my arm.

“I find it distasteful when individuals ask for money.”
Bermuda or Capri this year?

“Being connected to family is very important.”
I left my second wife and kids for my secretary, but I regularly visit my mum at the old folks’ home.

“My new book? Oh it’s nothing, it’s probably all nonsense.”
I’m going to make damn sure that publicity assistant gets the sack, after the fiasco at Waterstones.

“Markets are frightfully imperfect, and need more regulation.”
Fortunately, I’ve already got rich from flogging my dodgy wares to gullible customers.

“I’m an ordinary, down-to-earth bloke.”
Did I mention, I used to own the Ritz?



Something has gone wrong with the advancement of knowledge. This has been creeping up on us over a period of decades. Two main factors — (a) collective capitulation in the face of conceptual difficulties, and responding by fudging the issues, in many cases by use of excess technicality, (b) the belief that all must have opportunities — have resulted in a ‘sausage-factory’ model for universities in which research has been inverted: its primary purpose is now to conceal and suppress meaning, and to block real advances.

The issue is masked by the fact that we continue to have apparent technological progress. New treatments, new substances, new techniques. Whether the university system is the best place to generate those things, given the amount of money spent relative to useful output, is not clear. What is clear is that no major theoretical advance has been made in any of the key disciplines — physics, psychology, biology, economics — for at least fifty years. ‘Soft’ subjects such as philosophy or anthropology have become hopelessly bogged down in ideology, and nothing genuinely progressive is now likely to come out of the university versions of those.

Over-institutionalisation is sufficient to explain lack of intellectual innovation, without having to invoke political developments. However, the political context is certainly compatible with the way academia has changed, and clearly some of the specific tinkering has made things worse. Much of what is labelled as ‘democratisation’ may be phoney, but to the extent society is genuinely run by majority viewpoint we cannot expect much support for the concept of culture for its own sake. The average person has no interest in devoting their own resources to it, given it has little bearing on their life.

The culture of the past, on which the culture of the present is largely parasitic, arose non-democratically. Cultural producers either had sufficient capital of their own, or benefited from patronage — patrons being motivated either by an impersonal interest, or by the wish to signal dominance (“I can afford to indulge in non-profitable activities”). In either case, progress depended on the existence of inequality.

Intellectual activity financed by a fully democratic state may continue to generate minor technological improvements, but it is unlikely to produce major advances in knowledge, and in fact has not done so. We need patronage of individual innovators if we are to escape the research-by-committee effect, but there appear to be two main reasons why it no longer happens on a meaningful scale, in spite of a supposedly high degree of inequality.

1) State-financed research has crowded out privately-financed research. The state now dominates research, largely determining what gets done. Private capital owners do not feel they have a role to play or, to the extent they still do, take their lead from what the state does and no longer view their own opinions as meaningful in this area. As in medicine and education, the state’s dominance in research, in terms of volume, means the standards it applies become the standards outside the state sector as well.
The views of a group of university professors, however closed to new ideas, are usually going to be taken as outweighing the views of a lower-status individual, although the fact that the professors have been elected by one another to posts need reflect nothing more than a mediocre competence and a willingness to defend the dominant paradigms.

2) As inheritance tax has taken its toll on estates, and markets have become more ‘massified’, the character of the average millionaire has changed. Political commentators may applaud the fact that an individual is now more likely to get wealthy from selling something that a lot of people want than from inheritance, but the kind of discrimination and interest needed to support innovative culture is likely to be easier for someone who has not had to work for their money. The high point of patronage by the Medicis, for example, came with Lorenzo, who supported artists Michelangelo and Leonardo, but it was his grandfather Cosimo and particularly his great-grandfather Giovanni di Bicci who built up the family fortune.



• Local communities electing their own Police and Crime Commissioners, as an expression of decentralised democracy? What a waste of time and paper. When a non-market service has its bourgeois standards replaced by pseudo-egalitarian ones, one cannot expect to remedy the resulting dysfunctionality by forcing would-be beneficiaries of the service to take a nominal role in running it, any more than one can expect to improve state medicine by artificially importing pseudo-market mechanisms.
I was disappointed, however, that Lord Prescott did not win the Humberside post. Might he not have knocked a few heads together?
On the topic of Prescott, I have never understood why an MP should not have two Jaguars, even if he or she is Transport Minister. It seems more fitting an expression of respect for our institutions than eating maggots for TV. A country’s acceptance of a reduced role in world affairs does not have to mean degradation for its politicians. And God preserve us from bicycling monarchs.

• I understand that a disgruntled former employee of Potato-Chips-R-Us has alleged that the culture at the company is “poisonous” and that managers habitually refer to customers as “Teletubbies”, implying they are dumb, fat, and permanently glued to TV screens. However, the company’s own ethics compliance department has now carried out a rigorous review of over 30,000 internal emails, and discovered only 188 occurrences of the words “Teletubby” or “Teletubbies”, all of them innocent references to the popular BBC show.
Clearly the former employee must have been lying. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Potato-Chips-R-Us revealed that someone had told her that the former employee had been overheard complaining about his salary, only two weeks before giving notice.
We trust that no other ex-employees will be tempted to make critical allegations about their former employers. It is not seemly, and you know what to expect if you dare to risk a slugfest with a company as large and well-connected as Potato-Chips-R-Us.

in other news:
• Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the planet Jupiter for “hundreds of millennia of exerting a benign, calming influence”
• Pacific Ocean nominated for Chemistry Prize



Lack of funding means I am limited to making brief comments on complex issues. Those with access to state finance, who could provide more detailed expositions from a similar perspective, do not.

Individuals who take an interest in culture should support the expression of unfashionable viewpoints, even if they do not themselves agree with those viewpoints.

Oxford Forum is actively seeking patrons to provide financial backing. Donations support the work of Dr Celia Green, one of the few female geniuses there have ever been, and at present scandalously ignored by the intellectual establishment.

02 September 2012

Diamond Bob and the biggest boson in the world

Robert Hinkmeyer (Sophia Loren Professor of Particle Physics, and Head of Collisions at CORN — Central Organisation for Research on the Nucleus) was waiting anxiously by his office telephone. His colleagues might call him “Diamond Bob” in deference to his reputation as veteran of hundreds of dangerous high-energy experiments, but right now he was nervous as hell. The call he was expecting came from high up — right from the very top, in fact.

The phone rang, and Hinkmeyer jumped.
Is that you, Bob? the clipped voice at the other end demanded.
- Yes sir, Hinkmeyer replied.

You’re definitely alone?
- Yes, sir.
And you’ve had the room thoroughly searched for bugs?
- We’ve been through it several times. I’m certain we are not being overheard.
Good. Now, as you know, I’m very concerned about the results you have been reporting on the particles observed in the Collider. The energies seem rather on the low side to me, well outside the range we have been looking for.
- Sir, I appreciate that the world’s eyes are on us, and that we’re expected to find the Higgs boson, a particle which — as you may recall — is heavier than a hundred hydrogen atoms. But the fact is we haven’t observed it, and I really think we have no choice but to call it the way it is.
Look Bob, I take it you realise it would be very much in everyone’s best interests if this damn Hicks thingy were found.
- Higgs, sir. The Higgs boson.
Whatever. The point is, surely you can see that with the world in economic crisis — teetering banks, Western nations bankrupt, food prices soaring due to climate change — we need all the morale-boosting we can get right now. Announcing a result that looks like long-sought confirmation for a popular theory will make people feel good about themselves again, and also give much-needed relief to our people in Brussels, who have been desperately trying to generate recovery with inadequate tools. It would be plain irresponsible to report an overall negative result at the moment, quite apart from the flak we’d face if ten billion euros turned out to have been spent for nothing.
- But sir, isn’t it possible that the theory is just wrong, and that the best thing to do is to admit it?
You, me and everyone on the funding committee knows that the standard theory is a crock. It’s got more holes than an Emmental. The Hicks thingy isn’t called “toilet particle” for nothing. But what’re you gonna do? There are no serious rival theories — and unlikely to be any time soon, given the promotion policies at physics departments these days. We need to soldier on with what we’ve got, and we need to go on providing our stakeholders with results they want to hear.
- You don’t seem to have much respect for the concept of scientific truth, sir, if I may say so.
That’s all very well, Bob, but the world has changed since we were at college. As you know, recent research has shown the concept of truth to be flawed. In any case, what matters these days is whether something is in the public interest. Would it be better if a hospital’s performance figures suggested that operations were mostly successful, or better to scare people and undermine the healing process? Is it a good thing for a bank to report its interest rates with a pedant’s obsession for correctness, or better to save the financial sector and the whole economy by announcing data that reassures the markets?
- I don’t see what ...
We’re not asking you to lie, Bob, that would be unethical, and anyway too likely to be leaked. All I am saying is: it does not always need to be the case that your figures appear to be as low as they did recently. Get my drift?
- But sir, surely you realise the impossibility of ...
Come off it, Bob, you’re not talking to an idiot. You and I both know the joys of a little creative tweaking of data. Everyone’s at it these days, it is positively expected, and you only seem foolish and prissy if you take a rigidly purist line. Have you forgotten when we both worked for Steve Corking, how he would never allow a negative data set to spoil things, without first indulging in a little redrawing of the curves?
- Well, I suppose there have been some areas of ambiguity where we could perhaps ...
That’s the spirit, Bob, I knew you wouldn’t fail me.
- Won’t someone notice if we fudge the results?
Who cares enough to trawl through the data? Anyway, as Richard Feynman said, no one on the planet understands quantum theory, and they won’t want to risk looking foolish. Don’t get too uptight about it, Bob. Just remember: principle without power is futile.
So, I’ll be able to tell my boss we’ll shortly be seeing headlines about discovery, money well spent, established theories receiving ultimate confirmation, and so on. Shall we say ... by the end of May?
- I think end of July is the earliest we can promise, sir. There’s been a problem with the power supply which we’ve only just resolved.
Damn. Can we blame that on high frequency trading?
- Probably not.
Never mind, end of July will have to do. I’ll think of something to keep the media off our backs until then.
- Incidentally, sir, did you get my memos about a possible breach of the rules on communicating with Iranian physicists? I wonder whether we shouldn’t make full disclosure to the folks in Washington.
Bob, Bob, Bob. What have we just been talking about? Straight dealing is for losers, you need to wake up and smell the jungle. Effing Americans, who are they to tell us what to do? They’re worse than anybody — look at the way [xxx] and [names of major investment banks deleted] have been manipulating every market from pork bellies to vanadium, in the interests of themselves and their government.
- You have a point there, sir.
By the way, Bob, I visited the facility the other day, and I have to say I was a bit taken aback by the general sluttiness of the place. Some of the corridors were strewn with litter, and I’m sure I saw a couple of rats.
- Er, we may need to get the cleaning rota improved, sir. I’ll get onto it.
Do that. Goodbye Bob, and don’t forget: if there is ever an investigation, this conversation never took place.

apologies to: Barclays, Standard Chartered, Bank of England and PhysicsWorld



- retrophobia
- London 2012
- chartered accountants to the rescue
- a difficult audience



“You can’t go back to the past” is a mumble I come across quite often.

Some of the time the mumble may even be a reaction to something one of us has written, given that we are one of the few organisations who come close (or so it may seem) to saying that the past was in some ways preferable. However, since those who might mention us are committed to a policy of Totschweigetaktik, there is no way of telling.

I say “mumble” because the position that is being expressed by the person doing the mumbling is usually so fuzzy and muddled that it would not survive unpacking, or even being analytically stated, and can therefore only take the form of a grumbling epithet, intended to invoke a matching prejudice in the reader.

In fact, none of us goes in for stating anything as simplistic as “things were better at some point in the past”. For one thing, the concept of ‘better’ is far too broad to allow one to make that kind of assertion without a lot of prior definition. It is interesting to note, however, that there is clearly a resistance to the idea that things have deteriorated, indicated by the fact that it arouses glib knee-jerk responses.

One possible reason for the resistance is that a false dichotomy is assumed: either (A) things are unequivocally better now than they were, or (B) we have to go backwards. Either we reconcile ourselves to the way things are now, or we have to return to precisely the position of some earlier state of affairs; no other options are supposed to exist.

But a more likely explanation of the resistance is that any favourable allusion to the past is a discomforting reminder that some of the more unpleasant features of contemporary life are not inevitable. Discomfort is something people generally try to avoid, if necessary by adapting their beliefs. As long as we can convince ourselves that conditions in the past were much worse, what bothers us about life now is easier to ignore.

The solution? Excessive fear of having to revisit the past may be treatable with simple cognitive therapy. E.g. by repeatedly exposing yourself to the observation that we are already going backwards. Note that many of the policies currently marketed as ‘progressive’ actually involve moving in the direction of a state of affairs observed in its most obvious form in primitive tribal life. I.e. more control by everyone, acting collectively, over what everyone else can or cannot do, and less freedom for the individual.



Danny Boyle’s Olympic Ceremony was mostly great fun, though of course it came packaged with a lecture on the correct way of viewing the world. I felt both proud, and embarrassed, to be British — which may well have been the intention, given that ambivalence is the approved stance towards British history.

From Kenneth Branagh’s Bopping Brunel, to Voldemort’s ejaculating wand, to a stunning celebration of state medicine, to a touching family drama set in BBC-world, the performance was clearly in the best possible tradition of music hall, and confirmed that British strengths are in visuals, subversion, humour, and leftist ideology. The one ingredient which could be said to have been lacking was aggro, with the result that there was just a hint of declawed tiger. The scene where four soccer yobs beat up a rival to the tune of Knees up Mother Brown must, I suppose, have been quietly dropped.

The ceremony’s egalitarian intentions were, however, undercut by a reminder of the rule that life ultimately belongs to the strong and the successful. The section on popular music was monopolised by the usual ‘stadium acts’ — the Bowies, Queens, Kinks, Jams, Coldplays and so forth; and by the artistically (if not commercially) applauded — Dizzee, Arctic Monkeys, etc. What of the British groups that did not make it into the premier league in terms of either sales or trendiness, ranging from the cultish to the naff, such as Traffic, Wizard, Ultravox, Sailor, Gentle Giant, Rubettes, Hot Chocolate, and Keane? They were ruthlessly passed over, making a subtle mockery of the supposed theme of inclusiveness.

One other thing gave me concern. The subversion of (e.g.) Chariots of Fire — a 1981 movie which took itself and the image of British grandeur seriously (though it already contained anti-establishment themes) — was amusing. But when London’s turn comes round again in sixty or so years, will there be anything left to subvert, given that much of the current era’s content is already predicated on subversion and postmodern irony? There is, of course, the cod-proletarianism of such things as EastEnders, contemporary broadcasters’ voices, and rap — but will that be a permissible theme to parody?

• Britain’s haul of 65 Olympic medals, putting us third behind the USA and China, is more impressive still when measured in terms of per capita. For every million inhabitants, we won (roughly) 1 medal, compared to ½ or so won by Russia, Germany, France and South Korea, and America’s ⅓. However, Australia (35 medals) and Hungary (17) did better still, achieving 1.5 and 1.7 per million respectively. Measured relative to GDP, Hungary’s achievement is even more astonishing: 12 medals per US$100 billion of annual national income, compared with most major countries’ one or two. Other former Soviet states also did well by this measure, including Ukraine (a country poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than Namibia) which similarly scored 12 medals per 100 billion dollars. Perhaps money isn’t the crucial factor when it comes to sporting success.

• Indignation was expressed over the fact that there were relatively few state school alumni among the British medallists. But I wonder how likely a comprehensive school is to tolerate the attitude that one has a legitimate need to be the best in the world — let alone a right. Unless a pupil has some kind of handicap thought to give him a moral entitlement to compensatory success, he is likely to be encouraged to believe he is no better than anyone else, and brought down to size* if appearing to think otherwise. This is probably unhelpful from the point of view of sporting achievement, if that is what you happen to want to promote.

* This phenomenon is also, of course, found at private schools. However, the no-better-than-others criterion applied in those institutions typically differs in the important sense that the category of “others” is confined to fellow pupils, and does not include the hoi polloi.
A story on the web says that diving bronze medallist Tom Daley moved from a state to a private school because he was being bullied. Whether or not this is correct, it seems plausible that someone intensely focused on individual achievement would have a relatively hard time at a state institution.






Being an accountant seems to have become less boring and more trendy, judging by recent issues of the Chartered Accountants’ magazine — a publication which formerly carried the humdrum title “Accountancy” but which has now been rebranded as Economia! The design has become snazzier, and the implication of a new pro-state leaning is hard to avoid, what with all the Labour politicians’ photos and New Statesman adverts.

The April issue was devoted to “reshaping capitalism”, and is full of good advice about how to regulate the wicked tendencies of the corporate world.
The global economy has been in a critical state since 2008, when greed, hubris, an under-regulated financial sector and some high-risk mortgage deals almost brought the house down
writes the Editor, adding that the Occupy protest at St Paul’s Cathedral
needs to mark the start of a genuine political debate about the role of business in society and its responsibility to a wider range of stakeholders.
Just a moment, though. What, primarily, was it that brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse? Was it something to do with the untrustworthiness of finance packages that were labelled as “assets” but which then proved to be toxic, and the resulting loss of faith both in, and by, the banks?

And who was it that we might have relied on to distinguish assets from liabilities correctly, and to ensure that financial instruments were appropriately classified and valued — which in turn might have alerted people to the problem before it had got out of hand? Accountants perhaps?

Curiously, I saw little in the “Reshaping Capitalism” issue which suggested that a solution to the problem might lie in the more diligent application of existing accounting principles, as opposed to an increase in government interference.



This is worth repeating:
Why are people hostile to us?

It appears that social approval is very important to people. When they see someone aiming to do something without social approval, even something perfectly legal and respectable, because he or she has not given up on what they originally wanted to do, it makes them angry. Why is this? Is it because it reminds them that at some time in their lives they gave up on something important to them, perhaps gave up their original ideals and aspirations, lowered their standards and became uncritical of socially approved goings-on, in order to go with the flow and take advantage of the reduced and rather mouldy pickings that were on offer?

... We here are trying to build up an institutional environment in order eventually to fulfil the same functions as intellectual writers and researchers (in the sense of heads of research departments) as we should have been able to fulfil within the context of the recognised universities, but found ourselves blocked in working towards doing.

When people see us doing this it evidently arouses no sympathy or inclination to help us move even a little faster towards our goals. Rather, it arouses anger and energetic opposition. Perhaps this is because it reminds them of the aims and aspirations that they have themselves given up. Probably they have a predominant underlying anger, resentment, and sense of loss; some very obviously so. If people are reminded of what they have given up, the anger is aroused, but it is directed against individuals who have not given up, and practically never against the society that has ruined their lives, or the agents of that society who made things difficult for them at crucial times in their lives. (Celia Green)
There is a variant, which I sometimes encounter, on the theme of resenting those who are still aiming at what most have given up on. This is anger at being reminded that there is still a choice of world view, when it had been assumed that the debate was over and that the older viewpoint had irrevocably lost the battle. (Remarkably, what is often supposed to have clinched the debate amounts to little more than an insistence that things have changed, and that it is time to “move on” — clearly a somewhat circular logic.)

The kind of prickly resignation which I am referring to is, somewhat paradoxically, to be found particularly among the middle-aged middle class. The new ideology having taken over, to the extent that their children’s heads are crammed full of its tenets, which the children repeat parrot-fashion, they (the parents) have tried hard to make themselves feel okay about it all, and think they have succeeded. They feel the thing to do now is to acquiesce and have a comfortable, carefree old age, before departing this world and leaving it to get on with its new and improved order.

“Look, we’ve had to work hard enough to get our heads round the new morality, including the idea that the bourgeoisie (i.e. we) are rapacious and deserve to be penalised. We joined the winning side as it seemed less trouble. We don’t want to have to rethink it all again. Go away!”

It’s a philosophy, I suppose. I wonder, however, whether many of them will have as comfortable and carefree an old age as they like to imagine.



Chicken come home
Lying about Libor was picked up by this blog in May 2008, in response to a Bloomberg story. A couple of weeks later, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation into the numbers. After that, the issue sank from sight.
Nearly four years later, it was announced that the US Justice Department was conducting a criminal investigation, and the thing snowballed from there.
Might other sins from the past be lurking in the wings, waiting to make a dramatic reappearance?

We got plenty o’ nuttin’
Never mind banks going bust, what about the possibility of central banks becoming insolvent? According to Scott Minerd, a 1% increase in US interest rates
would cause the market value of the Federal Reserve’s assets to fall by about 8 per cent, or $200bn, leaving it insolvent ...
I think the Fed going technically bust might not have any immediate effects, given the incredulity factor. After a few days, however, it might dawn on people that a key guarantor of paper money was no longer in a position to provide guarantees. I wonder would happen then.

Tiddles for President/PM/Kanzler/etc.
According to CNN (via The Week), the mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska is a cat named Stubbs. In an election 15 years ago, Stubbs won more votes than his two human rivals, and he has held the post ever since.
The citizens of Talkeetna seem pleased with the mayor’s policies. His owner is quoted as saying that Stubbs
doesn’t raise our taxes ... He doesn’t interfere with business. He’s honest.
Sounds purr-fect.



I am an unsalaried academic. Like my colleagues at Oxford Forum, I am excluded from the present academic system because that system primarily rewards vacuous reproduction of stale paradigms and ideologically palatable theories.

I am therefore unable to write in detail about intellectual issues to which I could be contributing, and have to limit myself to brief blog comments on topics of interest to the general reader, while I struggle to support myself and my fellow outcasts.

If you have visited this blog more than once, could I suggest you make use of the Oxford Forum donation button located in the sidebar. Three percent of gross income seems like a reasonable minimum, and something over £1000 looks like you mean it.

Donations help to support the work of my colleague Dr Celia Green, one of the few female geniuses there have ever been, and at present scandalously ignored by the intellectual establishment.

Why should you spend your hard-earned pay on subsidising intellectuals? But you already do. The tax you are forced to pay is used, among other things, to finance ‘research’ — though it tends to be the kind which reinforces the dominant ideology, including the notion that it’s morally desirable for you to pay even more tax.