Kahneman: pseudoscience on a grander scale

• I thought it would be interesting to alternate our reading of Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism with a book by another highly decorated economist: Daniel Kahneman. Professor Kahneman is a well-known name among economics students. Research carried out by him and Amos Tversky in the 1970s highlighted some of the limitations of conventional economic analysis, by showing that choices made by the average person often fail to conform to what economic theory predicts. But in Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this awareness of theoretical limitations is inverted, and spun into a grand narrative about human rationality.
   The work has become hugely popular with intellectuals. "Daniel Kahneman has done us a great service" is a typical comment by a reviewer working in the humanities. Why has the book struck such a chord with intellectuals? Various explanations are possible, including that proposed by another reviewer, claiming that Kahneman is on a par with greats like Freud in advancing understanding of human psychology.
   I suspect one of the principal reasons the book has proved popular is its central thesis, according to which research shows that humans are irrational. Why does this thesis appeal to intellectuals? Because it provides ammunition for the interventionist-paternalist programme, which tacitly assumes that intellectuals should rule society (in the sense of controlling, among other things, education, medicine and cultural output — supposedly in everyone's best interests) rather than leaving things to the decisions of individuals and the markets.
   It's ironic that, having carried out research which usefully demonstrated that some of the assumptions of economic theory about how humans behave were plain wrong, Kahneman’s book assumes another theoretical model of rationality, and in effect says that where theory and practice differ with regard to behaviour, it is practice which is wrong!

• The issue hinges on the concept of rationality, and whether it is possible to define it objectively. The short answer is: no, it's not. There is no behaviour, or belief, about which it is possible to assert irrefutably "this is irrational".
   Take for example a textbook illustration from economics: you are bargaining with a buyer, who could be an employer, for the sale of an object or your own labour, and the buyer offers a choice between you getting £1000 and £1100, all other things being equal. Some would argue that you are definitely irrational if you strongly prefer the £1000 option — after all, you could (they would say) dispose of the extra £100 easily enough. But you may well have reasons for making that choice which cannot simply be dismissed. You may not even be aware of what the reasons are, but it would be impossible to disprove the proposition that ultimately, in some sense, this choice is in your interests. (All sorts of effects could be present here to complicate the picture but being left out of the equation; some of them known about, such as reputational effects; others not known about.)
   Or take a belief in something supernatural, for which (a sceptic would say) there is no good evidence. How about belief in the existence of God? Richard Dawkins has argued this belief is irrational, but that would make a lot of clever people from history irrational. In any case, the concept of God is too ill-defined to say what would constitute evidence. How conclusive would the evidence have to be? The evidence for global warming, or the carcinogenicity of tobacco, is strong, but not completely conclusive. At what level of evidence does a belief stop being irrational, and start to be rational?
   The point is: the question of what is rational is ultimately subjective. Kahneman, and the psychologists he cites, may have done experiments which comply rigorously with scientific standards and which generate interesting results, but such experiments are — and arguably always will be — incapable of yielding the sorts of conclusion that Kahneman draws.
   Conclusions such as the following; Kahneman is here referring to an experiment in which subjects are asked to express a preference between two types of experience involving mild pain (my italics):

An objective observer making the choice [on behalf of an individual] would undoubtedly choose [differently from the individual].

... The choices that people made on their own behalf are fairly described as mistakes.

Again, there's an irony in the fact that Kahneman at other points in the book criticises evaluations made on a gut basis, in ignorance of reality being more complex, yet is here guilty of the same thing. He appears to think we can obviously dismiss some judgments as being irrational or inadequately thought out, and that some preferences are just wrong. "This person says she prefers strawberry jam because it leaves a nice aftertaste, but she ought to prefer blueberry jam because it is more satisfying while it is being consumed" is a statement Kahneman does not make — but it's analogous to some of the things he does say.

• Some beliefs or preferences may strike a high percentage of ordinary people as bizarre or unjustifiable. Others may strike an even higher percentage of intellectuals as ridiculous. No doubt some intellectuals would like to have conclusive scientific support for rejecting certain beliefs or preferences. Attempts to use science to justify the decisive rejection of one preference over another, however, inevitably involve the abuse of science.
   I don't wish to de-legitimise the concept of 'irrational' as used in an everyday context, but we have to recognise that judgments about rationality are judgments, not scientific findings, and are ultimately not capable of being given irrefutable justification.
   Whether something is true or not may seem simple in some cases (is London the capital of the UK or not?) but most questions do not have easy yes-or-no answers, meaning there is little conclusive basis for assigning irrationality to one answer rather than another.
   With regard to preferences, there is certainly no adequate justification for intruding on individual choices to argue: your preference for A is wrong, our data shows you should be preferring B [*said in severe tone, by figure in lab coat carrying clipboard*]. Believing such intrusions are justified by science is not only wrong, it is dangerous.

• In the next instalment we'll take a look at the experiments on which Kahneman bases his conclusions.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2011. Quotes are from p.409.

social mobility

• More on the topic of science and morality, and how getting them muddled can have bad results: a follow-up to my previous article on social mobility.

Social mobility ‘research’:
science vs normativity

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• I consume a fair amount of Kindle Unlimited fiction and like to give a plug to anything particularly noteworthy. Harriet Smart's Northminster mysteries are set in Northern England during the first years of Victoria's reign, and feature a police officer and a young surgeon, both male, as the main protagonists. Some of the books could do with additional proofing and I occasionally find them a bit grisly for my taste, but there is a touch of genius in the portrayal of early-Victorian society and of the psychology of the characters, as well as in the complexity of the plots.
   Speaking of male protagonists, I recently read a contemporary sci-fi novel in which all the spaceship team were male (though from diverse alien races). Highly unusual but also highly refreshing. I used to find novels refreshing in which plucky heroines proved they were better than their stuffy male counterparts, but it has now become so monotonously regular a feature that it's getting tedious. I came to realise, in reading this unfashionably androcentric sci-fi book, the possible advantage of leaving female characters out altogether. For most contemporary writers, the moment a female principal character is introduced, there appears to be a need on the part of the writer to demonstrate that she is at least as 'good' as the males, in whatever department. (A type of virtue signalling?) She cannot be allocated a merely supportive role, since this might be taken to imply something about being female, and we cannot have that, even if the something is merely statistical. Thus in practice women in fiction are now largely confined to certain predictable roles — just as they were in the past, except that the predictable roles are now different ones. We see this in Amazon's Rings of Power, for example, where (a) it's fairly inconceivable that the position of lead character could have been assigned other than to a female character, and yet (b) a little digital tweaking of the appearance and voice of Galadriel (ably played by Morfydd Clark), and many viewers could surely be fooled into assuming, from the action and dialogue, that it was a male elf that was being represented.

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     Queen Elizabeth II (1926 - 2022)     

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world leaders in inflation

That America has called its latest piece of pro-state legislation an "Inflation Reduction Act" may well come to be seen, in due course, as the defining irony of Joe Biden's presidency. There seems little in the Act likely to significantly impact inflation in the intended way. We know from history that once inflation hits levels where everyone feels the pinch, it tends to become self-sustaining. We also know that trying to control prices or wages under such conditions tends not to work and can make things worse.
   The time to reduce the risk of inflation was before it started, by being aware of the possibility that massive money creation might eventually — under certain triggering conditions — cause problems; and by not getting complacent, as Mario Draghi for example seems to have done, that because we had not had the triggering conditions for a long time, that could be relied on to be permanent. (Comparable to the delusion, popular a couple of decades ago, that busts had been eliminated, simply because the boom had lasted longer than usual.)
   It is unfortunate for America, and for the rest of the world, that the time when caution was, and is, particularly needed has coincided with the White House being occupied by one of the most spendthrift Presidents in US history. In sharp contrast to Donald Trump, Mr Biden's approach receives support from an army of pro-state intellectuals. There still appear to be a few financially responsible politicians in America, otherwise Mr Biden's original $4 trillion plan might have been implemented, rather than the c.$2 trillion committed so far.
   Signs of suppressed inflation have been hiding in plain sight for years, prior to the recent wake-up call. (Among other things, progressive shrinkflation and skimpflation; and consistently faster-than-headline inflation in sectors where efficiency gains from the IT revolution — an effect that will run out eventually, and may already be starting to do so — haven't exerted downward pressure on prices.) Either successive Presidents have chosen not to listen to the warnings of their economic advisers or, more likely, those advisers didn't bother with warnings, choosing instead to look the other way.
   Of course America is not unique in this respect. The UK, the rest of Europe and Japan have all adopted comparable programmes of money expansion and ballooning state expenditure. It's conceivable, however, that they might have felt a bit more restrained without the USA's example.
    Governments' best hope at this point for controlling inflation is to commit to fiscal prudence — not to engage in posturing, let alone indulging in even more state largesse.

science and morality don’t mix

• We are continuing our reading of Professor Paul Collier's book The Future of Capitalism. This is proving to be a useful way of exploring a range of issues in political theory. My reason for choosing this particular book is not because it's an especially egregious example of leftist academia. Collier's brand of ideology is relatively mild, and his book shows some recognition of opposing points of view. Collier isn't fundamentally opposed to capitalism as many of his peers are. It's because the book's approach is relatively sober and unemotive — compared to similar publications by other humanities professors — that it provides a convenient springboard.
   Despite the book's relative mildness, many of its core themes are essentially the same as those of most other books on politics or society written by academics over the last forty years. Indeed, the regularity with which the same ideas recur in each new book that comes along is nothing short of remarkable, and suggests the possibility of some kind of underlying motivational bias.
   Feedback can be given via the email listed in the sidebar.

• Chapter 2 of TFOC is entitled 'The Foundations of Morality'.
   Let us start by noting that there is not, nor can there ever be, a science of morality.* Science and morality occupy different parts of the intellectual landscape. A long line of philosophers, stretching from David Hume to A.J. Ayer and beyond, have pointed out that the gulf between is and ought blocks the possibility of proving that any particular moral position is correct.
   That hasn't stopped other philosophers persisting with the search for proof. People want to know how they ought to be behave, and intellectuals of course would like to know what to tell them. This leads to the temptation to believe that, given a clever enough mind working with the latest ideas, irrefutable moral or political truth is potentially accessible. In his 1993 book How Are We to Live, for example, philosophy professor Peter Singer endorsed the view that, with further advances in academic philosophy, we could arrive at ethical propositions that are as indisputable as those of mathematics.
   Since science has now become the only generally accepted basis among intellectuals for generating objective truth, attempts to provide firm ethical or political conclusions often try to hang their arguments on some scientific finding or other, but this endeavour is doomed, and usually relies on a fudging of the issues.
   For instance, TFOC cites a study purporting to show that the regrets which people say they feel most keenly, in relation to decisions they might have made differently, are about social bonds or obligations and not about financial or other economic choices. That is interesting, but hardly enables us to say anything profound that goes much beyond the raw data. Collier treats it as evidence about "the relative psychological importance" of wants versus oughts. This is a good example of a tiny piece of data, probably highly dependent on the way the study is framed, and on how exactly the questions are put, being used to support a grand narrative about psychology or politics. Simply because some factor features larger in the conscious mind at any one time need not necessarily reveal much about how big a driver of behaviour that factor is, quite apart from the question of how honest subjects are in questionnaire studies.

• There are three tasks facing someone who wants to write a political philosophy book — at least one that seeks to offer 'solutions'. First, they need to identify 'problems'. Second, they need to identify the root of the supposed problems. Third, they need to predict what policies will attack the supposed root in such a way as to eliminate or reduce the problem.
   None of these tasks is one that is particularly amenable to science. The best that can be done is to tell a convincing story. In the process, you can adduce some research that seems supportive, but the likelihood in that case is that your conclusions are reached via a sort of 'logic lite' that can easily amount to pseudoscience. The implications of the research finding are stretched way beyond its significance. The chain of argument seems loosely scientific because you cite some peer-reviewed academic paper, the data of which the reader is unlikely to investigate for themselves. It's pseudoscience in the sense that it's made to look scientific but isn't.
   Furthermore, task (1) inevitably involves the writer's own moral biases. In identifying something as a problem, the writer will have to make assumptions about other people's preferences, those assumptions typically being based on his own preferences. Or assumptions will be made about what other people's preferences ought to be.

• Having read chapters 1 and 2, it has not yet become clear what core problem Collier sees as plaguing modern society. He complains about social engineers inspired by utilitarianism, and about populist politicians; and seems to see the former as part of the cause of the problem, and the latter as a (bad) response to the problem. But what precisely is the problem? Apparently something to do with the loss of communitarian values, but this is not spelled out in any detail. What we do get is:
(a) allusion to the well-honed idea that capitalism tends to promote selfishness, and an assertion that what is needed is to "build reciprocal obligations";
(b) the idea that there's a way to tackle the selfishness issue that is different from the old paternalist-utilitarian approach.

• By the end of chapter 2, Collier confidently asserts:

We now have a coherent picture that shows us how individual behaviour is shaped by obligations, why it matters, why it might "go wrong", and how it might be put right.

The chapter started with a discussion of the possible origins of communitarian behaviour (Collier uses the analogy of sheep — is this sending the right signals?), and ends with the claim that a coherent picture has been generated of what might "go wrong" and how it might be "put right". What logic is used in between, to get from one to the other?
   Collier proposes that a society can be wrong and yet stable, in the sense that everyone would prefer another kind of society but agreed norms mean that no one is in a position to bring about change. Though he doesn't use this as an illustration, it seems plausible for example that Soviet-style communism was unloved by the vast majority of its subjects for many decades but nevertheless remained highly stable, and that it required a revolutionary movement to flip Eastern European societies into a different configuration. Of course, this is speculation: we have no way of knowing for sure what the majority of (say) Poland wanted, and no doubt there were some Poles who preferred communism. This is the problem with getting into the position of having opinions about 'wrong' and 'right', beyond simply describing such models as theoretically possible: you need to make assumptions and/or value judgements.**
   Beyond this reference to the possibility of stable but suboptimal collective outcomes, there is nothing in chapter 2 to explain how the specific defects of "individual behaviour ... shaped by obligations" might be identified for a particular society, and nothing about how to ensure that proposed remedies will make things better rather than worse. The basic problem of how to identify right and wrong in relation to a society, in a way that is objective and not dependent on an intellectual's own preferences and prejudices, is left wholly intact.

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* I am not talking about the kind of science that investigates what moral beliefs people actually hold (a question of fact); or the kind that asks why particular moral beliefs might have developed in response to particular drives or needs (a question of biological or sociological theory). Both can be illuminating but don't get us very far. One might be told that most societies commit genocide, one way or another; or that genocide is beneficial for the genes of the survivors; but one would not find either a compelling reason for regarding genocide as a good thing.

** There may be a good reason why it was not in Collier's interests to mention communism at that point, as an illustration of a suboptimal social configuration, given that TFOC is trying to promote the idea that the state can be used to change configurations to more positive ones. Communism and its collapse is too suggestive of the opposite idea: that the use of the state to improve things generates a worse (but stable) outcome, and that societal improvement may require rejection of the state as an instrument of welfare.

Sir Paul's book on capitalism — part 2

I am finding Paul Collier's book The Future of Capitalism readable and thought-provoking. Unlike most other books in its subject area, it displays some sympathy for the opposition. But given that the book aims to be a blueprint for socialism, this sympathy is unlikely to run very deep. It behoves readers to remain on the alert for the standard assumptions and devices of anti-capitalist ideology.
   Readers also need to be aware that a socialist canny enough to highlight the flaws of other socialists is not necessarily going to avoid falling into the same traps. There is something irresistible about socialism for many intellectuals; the fact that Collier himself draws attention to some of the features of this phenomenon early on doesn't mean he is necessarily going to eschew the standard tropes further down the line. For example, he criticises use of victim-ideology, but is not immune himself to the temptation of representing people as the passive casualties of circumstance, desperately in need of help from the state. He talks of the less-well educated being in crisis, stigmatized as the white working class; of a collapse in the sense of a purposeful life among the American working class; and of redundant over-fifties drinking the dregs of despair.
   Crisis, incidentally, is a standard trope of socialist ideology. Well before the Great Depression, early twentieth-century socialist pioneers such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb were talking about the supposed crisis of capitalism, and the trope has remained in the intellectuals' top ten ever since — to a large extent regardless of rises and falls in economic fortunes.
   One of the standard devices of anti-capitalist ideology is to be vague about what the word 'capitalism' means, and to treat it as a bucket concept. Roughly speaking, the term refers (or ought to refer) to a society in which there is minimal state involvement beyond maintaining personal and property rights; in other words, a society where interactions between individuals depend predominantly on what those individuals agree between themselves. With advanced capitalism, the state may issue and enforce more complex rules that facilitate relatively sophisticated interactions, such as credit rules for banking, or the existence of corporate entities which are treated as legal individuals.
   We, by contrast, live in a world in which the state spends nearly half the national product. The state intervenes massively in employer-employee and consumer-vendor interactions. Most of education and medicine are provided via the state. In other words, we do not live under capitalism, but under a mixed system of 50:50 capitalism and socialism. This 50:50 condition has prevailed for many decades. Thus in talking about some supposed current problem of society, one ought to at least pause for thought before rushing to the conclusion that 'capitalism' is to blame. This, however, would complicate the narrative; hence most commentators on 'capitalism' — academic or otherwise — ignore the issue.
   It's easy to produce a knee-jerk reaction against capitalism — socialism is supposed to be about 'helping' (controlling?) other people, so it must be 'nicer' than capitalism; this reaction is readily exploited by authors who want to induce the standard head-shaking and breast-beating responses. Hence 'capitalism' becomes a bucket concept: it's the obvious villain when discussing social problems.
   This bias — that capitalism is automatically on trial, assumed to be guilty, and has to justify itself before 'we' (the elites) will allow it — already makes an appearance in the first chapter of TFOC. Collier argues that

capitalism's core credential of steadily rising living standards for all has been tarnished: it has continued to deliver for some, but has passed others by.

Having accused others of preaching ideology that deviates from normal people's values, Collier here appears to be doing the same thing. Surely only a socialist intellectual would demand that capitalism must deliver "steadily rising living standards for all" in order to avoid being ditched in favour of state control of the economy (probably involving management by socialist intellectuals).
   With further reading of chapter 1, the apparent underlying message of TFOC begins to emerge. The tone is patient, parental even. 'Dear voters, yes you have been right to resent the leftist elites, but their arrogance is not a failing of socialism per se. We need to give emphasis, not to the individual's supposed rights against the collective (such rights do not exist), but to the communitarian values that we had under the type of socialism that prevailed in the 1950s and 60s.' (my paraphrasing)
   The theme there is too much individualism, we must have more community — very popular among intellectuals of both Left and Right — appears to be another theme of TFOC. But what Collier means by 'community' may simply equate with collectivism — in the sense of control by the state, even if a state ostensibly endorsed by the majority. A nostalgia for community of the voluntary kind, perversely expressed by trying to impose 'community' from above, is another standard trope of socialist ideology. Collier seems not to understand the difference — or else he is being disingenuous. He approvingly describes the rise of cooperative societies in the nineteenth century.

Through recognizing that they had a common attachment to the place where they grew up, communities such as Sheffield's built co-operative organizations ... that reaped the benefits of reciprocity ... From its crucible in northern England, the co-operative movement rapidly spread across much of Europe.

From there the book jumps to state socialism as being similarly benign, one of those sleights-of-hand popular with political philosophers.

By banding together, these co-operatives became the foundation of the political parties of the centre-left: the parties of social democracy. The benefits of reciprocity within a community were scaled up as the community became the nation. Like the co-operatives, the new policy agenda was practical, rooted in the anxieties that beset the lives of ordinary families. In the post-war era, across Europe many of these social democrat parties came to power and used it to implement a range of pragmatic policies that effectively addressed these anxieties. Health care, pensions, education, unemployment insurance cascaded from legislation into changed lives.

There is a big difference between a genuinely cooperative movement, based on the consent of all its members, and 'cooperation' imposed by the state. Presumably some of the citizens actually want to cooperate in the way commanded from above, perhaps even the majority, but others will inevitably be coerced, giving the venture a very different character from the original voluntary communities.

Sir Paul's book on capitalism

Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Oxford. Browsing Amazon for books on capitalism, I came across his The Future of Capitalism. Unlike many books in this area, Collier's makes an effort to take on board the post-2010 backlash against the paternalist-interventionist approach that has been popular with intellectuals since the late 1800s. This makes the book relatively readable. We don't get the leftwing virulence of a Stiglitz tome, or the dogmatic fervour of the average American philosophy professor. The book is critical of Marxists who have failed to learn lessons from the collapse of Soviet communism.
   Left-leaning readers need not be alarmed however; Professor Collier remains firmly in the socialist camp. He hopes his book can become another socialist blueprint, along the lines of Tony Crosland's The Future of Socialism.*
   TFOC is not of course an economics book. Like others in its subject area, it is little more than informed story-telling. Collier tries to extract meaning and morality from hard data, but this requires the weaving of a subjective narrative around the data that, by necessity, is highly sensitive to the worldview of its author. A completely different narrative is possible. The success of any one narrative tends to be judged by how well it is told, and how well it fits with the preconceptions of its readers. Collier's story certainly starts well, and his first chapter hits some of the right notes.

The newly successful are ... the well educated with new skills. They have ... developed a distinctive morality, elevating characteristics such as minority ethnicity and sexual orientation into group identities as victims. On the basis of their distinctive concern for victim groups, they claim moral superiority over the less-well educated [and have] forged themselves into a new ruling class ...

One of TFOC's targets for criticism is utilitarianism. It's an attitude I broadly have sympathy with, though some of Collier's detail seems a bit skew-whiff.

The intellectuals of the left were attracted by the ideas of a nineteenth-century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. His philosophy, Utilitarianism, detached morality from our instinctive values, deducing it from a single principle of reason: an action should be judged as moral according to whether it promoted 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Because people's instinctive values fell short of this saintly standard, society would need a vanguard of morally sound technocrats who would run the state.

Bentham and J.S. Mill are credited with building utilitarianism. (J.S. Mill's father James Mill, who along with Bentham was one of the earliest appliers of utilitarianism to practical policy, is left out of Collier's equation.) Their philosophy was implemented by a vanguard of social planners, confident of their moral rightness.

The emblematic illustration of this confident paternalism was post-war policy for cities. The growing number of cars needed flyovers and the growing number of people needed housing. In response, entire streets and neighbourhoods were bulldozed, to be replaced by modernist flyovers and high-rise towers ... Bulldozing communities made sense if all that mattered was to raise the material housing standards of poor individuals. But it jeopardized the communities that actually gave meaning to people's lives.

There are two major difficulties with Collier's analysis. First, he sees part of the problem stemming from the fact that Bentham and J.S. Mill "were not latter-day moral giants, equivalent to Moses, Jesus and Muhammad; they were weirdly asocial individuals."

Bentham was so bizarre that he is now thought to have been autistic, and incapable of having a sense of community. Mill stood little chance of normality: deliberately kept away from other children, he was probably more familiar with ancient Greece that with his own society. Given such origins, it is unsurprising that the ethics of their followers are highly divergent from the rest of us.

It's always helpful for a story if you can identify one or two specific individuals on whom to hang the blame. But it's unlikely that the source of the problems Collier discusses were the personalities of Bentham and John Stuart Mill, or that things would necessarily have been very different if they had been more like Moses or Muhammad. Any philosophical idea is capable of being over-applied, and the drive for doing so came largely from the social tinkerers who came long after the initial philosophical input. Marx and Engels may have been less 'autistic' than Bentham or Mill; that didn't stop their followers from generating policies that were seriously at odds with the values of those on whom the policies were imposed.
   From a socialist point of view, Bentham should surely count as heroic rather than dodgy. He helped to reduce the barbarity of many aspects of British law, particularly with regard to sentencing and punishment.
   The second oddity is that Collier blames the excessive application of utilitarianism on economists. That doesn't chime with my understanding of the history of utilitarianist policy. It's hard to know what to make of this nostra culpa assertion. Should one respect Collier for being willing to criticise his own profession? Or is it a way of avoiding criticism of other professions such as sociology — which we know doesn't go down well within the academic community (the likely response would be: you're not qualified to comment).

The weird values of Bentham would not have had any impact had they not been incorporated into economics ... Economic man is utterly selfish and infinitely greedy, caring about nobody but himself. He became the bedrock of the economic theory of human behaviour. But for the purpose of evaluating public policy, economics needed a measure for aggregating the well-being, or 'utility', of each of these psychopathic individuals. Utilitarianism became the intellectual underpinning for this arithmetic ...

I think Professor Collier may have his history a bit askew here. It was part of nineteenth-century ideology, following on from the Enlightenment, to seek secular intellectual input into policy issues. It's how the whole -ism thing got going in Europe (ultimately culminating in disaster and disillusionment). The involvement of professional economists doesn't seem to have been an essential ingredient in this process. To give one illustration, in Uday Mehta's fascinating book Liberalism and Empire we read that James Mill was told in 1827 by the Governor-General of India:

"I am going to British India, but I shall not be Governor General. It is you that will be Governor General."

In other words, there was a definite plan to apply the utilitarian logic of philosophers to social policy in India. This suggests a British state that was already very open to input from intellectuals and their abstract systems, independently of any later detailed cost-benefit rules contributed by economists.

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* Privately-educated Anthony Crosland is now best remembered as the 1960s education minister who said he was determined to destroy "every ****ing grammar school" in Britain — a quest at which he largely succeeded.

sundry

intangibles
An interesting article (subscription required) from champion stockpicker Quentin Lumsden, about non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a new kind of digital asset class which — like Bitcoin — depends on blockchain technology. Last year Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold the NFT of his first tweet to Malaysian billionaire Sina Estavi (via auction website Cent) for the princely sum of $2.9million. NFTs seem to be hot right now in the art world.

The pandemic has brought much of the doggedly analogue art world kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and NFTs are benefitting from that seismic shift. "Covid is definitely a big piece of this frenzy, people are sitting at their computers all day — they’re locked inside and have fewer options. If there was no Covid-19, I honestly don't think the space would have accelerated this fast," Winkelmann says. (Winkelmann is the real name of an artist known as Beeple, one of whose images sold at Christie's for $69m.) Another Beeple piece, Crossroad — a 10-second video NFT showing animated pedestrians walking past a giant, naked likeness of Donald Trump, collapsed on the ground and covered in graffiti — sold for $6.6m in Ether on Nifty Gateway. The seller was Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, who had bought the piece in October for about $67,000.

   The fact that it's considered possible to hold assets as intangible as a person's 'autographed' tweet, and that serious money is changing hands for NFTs, gives me more confidence that blockchain technology is reliable, which in turn makes me feel less suspicious of cryptocurrencies.
   (I've given a link to Simple Wikipedia's article on blockchain ... even that will probably be above most people's heads ... like the cloud, it's a concept that will gradually become comprehensible as people rely on it more.)

'recreation centres'
Britain used to have places called recreation centres. They were sites financed and run by local councils where individuals could engage in a range of leisure activities, from sports to adult education. I hadn't visited one for some time but recently happened to be passing one and thought I would look in. A couple of people were coming out, chatting in a relaxed way and casually dressed, which boded well. There were plenty of posters up near the doors, the most prominent of which warned visitors to wear face masks in the building. Like a good citizen I donned my face mask and entered as the two people were leaving. Having passed the first set of automatic doors, there was a second set which did not open. A red light was showing and there was a spycam, so I guessed one had to be visually vetted to enter. I realised then that the first set of doors was similarly secured and so found myself trapped between two sets of doors, waiting for the light to go green so I could go in. After about a minute, an officious-looking agent arrived and grimly advised me that the recreation centre was not open to the public. Fortunately she permitted me to leave the way I had come.
   Looking more closely at the posters near the door, I saw one that said the recreation centre was closed to the public for the foreseeable future. I was left wondering: if there are no actual leisure activities taking place at our recreation centres, what exactly is going on at these sites? Secret government research? I think we should be told.

music streaming
Is the music streaming business model starting to crack? Trialling Apple Music again a year after a previous trial, I was surprised to find a number of key recordings have disappeared from their catalogue, or have gone partial — you can listen to some of the tracks from an album but not all.
   Artists have been grumbling for some time about lower revenues in the digital economy, though not much in public, presumably for fear of sending the wrong signal. (It has been estimated that it takes about 200 streams of a whole album to generate the same revenue for an artist as the sale of a CD.) With far lower income from live performances under the COVID regime, the grumbling has become more audible.
   While the finger is being pointed at streaming providers and record companies, the main source of the problem is surely the internet ethos which has everyone used to the idea that content is, by default, available without charge.
   People have been illegally sharing MP3 files for decades, but the blatant copyright breaching tacitly endorsed by YouTube since 2005 seems to have established in people's minds that music is essentially free — though you may expect to pay to gain full control over what you listen to, or to have it free of ads.

time to push back
Tolerating intolerance is dangerous. (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil etc.) And free speech needs to be supported whether you agree with what is being said or not. (I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death etc.) A culture of punishment has developed, in which anyone saying anything that might upset someone is an excuse for others to roll out intimidation tactics. This needs to be actively opposed or it will only get worse.
   I was appalled, for example, by the attempt to shut down British empire researcher Professor Nigel Biggar using bullying on social media, and I expressed my disapproval in an article which received significant attention. But obviously I cannot write an article every time this happens. For lesser transgressions, I've decided to start a blacklist (see sidebar). When I come across an organisation, or other group, that have tried to use their own supposed respectability to penalise an individual for saying something they don't like, or who otherwise try to boycott free speech, they will be added to the list. It's a small way of pushing back.
   What has triggered this was my coming across the story about the American Humanist Association stripping Richard Dawkins of his humanist-of-the-year award (granted in 1996). His supposed crime? Speculating about gender definitions on Twitter. This kind of action is not only unethical, it stifles any meaningful scientific discussion. (Note to celebrity intellectuals: J.K. Rowling returned her award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center after the Center's president criticised her views on gender. Why not go one better and preempt any withdrawal of rewards by not accepting them in the first place, at least not without some kind of 'pre-nup' clause preventing clawback.)
   I am also adding the Chicago Review of Books which in 2017 tried to use its influence to stop Simon & Schuster (and, by implication, other top publishers) from issuing books that are too rejecting of liberal ideology.
   Other miscreants will be added as and when I come across them. Removal from the list is simple: issue a public apology, and reverse any action as required — e.g. restore an award inappropriately withdrawn. (Actually there's an argument that an award or an honour should never be withdrawn. If you can't issue such a thing without it being conditional on future behaviour, or you're not sure you'll be able to stand up to external pressure for it to be rescinded years later, don't issue it in the first place.)

COVID and the West:how to destroy capitalism

• Workers in the West are leaving the labour market, possibly permanently, a phenomenon that has been termed the great resignation. The reasons are unknown but there is of course plenty of theorising. Given the phenomenon roughly coincides with COVID, and with a massive increase in state intervention, it's worth considering workers' possible attitudes to what has been going on. As is often the case, however, the considering we get from our paid intellectuals (many of them remunerated, directly or indirectly, by the state) seems to have a pro-state bias. Theories include 'workers are dissatisfied with too little employer support for sickness', or 'workers are fed up with the political status quo' (in the Marxist sense), but not 'workers are fed up with a workplace that has become over-regimented in terms of state-imposed policies'.
   Microeconomics tells us that mass phenomena can be generated by changes at the margin. Workers choose to work because the benefits (money, work satisfaction) exceed the costs (negative aspects such as stress or regulations). Increase the negative effects for all employees, and the overall incentive to enter the workforce drops. Small changes, if universal, can have big effects, though inertia means it may take a crisis or other trigger to shift behaviour. Employers have to compete to attract workers, and so have to make some attempt to make things attractive for them, but they have little control over what the state forces them to do.
   It's not inconceivable that the gradual rise in state control over the workplace, including the increasing intrusion of ideology (e.g. sensitivity training, quotas, widening definition of 'harassment'), is part of what is turning people off formal employment. The threat of compulsory medical intervention, mediated via the workplace, may be functioning as the straw that breaks the camel's back. This explanation is as plausible as any other, but is unlikely to receive meaningful attention. It conflicts with the preferred worldview of humanities professors — who, as a rule, favour state intervention and are hostile to markets and capitalism.

• The hospitality sector is in deep trouble. It's not clear how much longer the hotel and catering industries can endure the current restrictive environment, before they suffer a collapse that could take years if not decades to recover from. Markets generally work well even for things that require long-term investment, but that depends on a relatively unregulated and predictable environment. Technological business may be semi-instantaneous in some respects, meaning it can bounce back quickly after a hiatus. By contrast, businesses that facilitate communal leisure activities generally depend on expensive infrastructure, and on building up reputations and consumer habits, both of which require long time horizons. A prolonged disruption, with an uncertain terminus, can play havoc with the sophisticated mechanisms on which this process depends.
   The sector was already having to deal with above-average change and uncertainty before COVID hit, due to more rapidly varying social behaviour patterns, and a ballooning regulatory regime including smoking bans and dietary red tape such as trans-fat bans.
   Your local pub or bar may well be on its last legs.

• Lockdowns, travel bans, mandatory vaccination. These measures seem severely short of democratic legitimacy. I am not just referring to parliamentary debate/voting, though there has been little enough of that. The Brexit issue revealed that a parliamentary democracy may easily exhibit major divergences between (A) majority wishes and (B) the preferences of elected representatives as expressed in parliament. Doubtless this phenomenon is not unique to the UK.
   In early 2020 when the COVID crisis first hit, there was some basis for proceeding undemocratically given that any action had to be taken quickly. Now that many countries have had nearly two years of quasi emergency powers, and we are used to COVID — new variants notwithstanding — the fast-reaction argument is no longer adequate to justify the mild authoritarianism that seems to have become the new normal. Government policy in the West (health policy, education policy, economic policy, tax policy) is in effect being driven by what medical professionals say is good for us. Perhaps a new political term is called for — medico-cracy?
   Science in itself cannot make policy, it can only inform it. Policy is a question of preferences and trade-offs. Someone has to make a decision about the relative priority of (say) saving lives using increased state powers, versus the civil rights of individuals. This decision can be made either by the majority or by a minority. If it's a minority, the fact that the minority is relatively knowledgeable doesn't prevent it being anti-democratic. 'Research shows that policy X is correct because it saves lives' is a fallacious type of assertion we have frequently heard over the last two years. Just because something saves lives doesn't mean it should be imposed on the citizenship by a technocratic elite, however well informed that elite may be.

• The Trump era generated extraordinary levels of combative rhetoric among Western (especially American) intellectuals, much of it based on emotiveness rather than sound arguments. Supposedly, Trumpism was anti-democratic and authoritarian, though these accusations were supported by little evidence. Where are those vociferous defenders against anti-democracy and authoritarianism now, when there's a genuine call for them? Judging by a quick Google search they're invisible as far as COVID policy goes, or confined to the marginalised. More evidence for the thesis that what Western intellectuals disliked about Trump had little if anything to do with pro-democratic or anti-authoritarian convictions. They didn't like Trump because he cocked a snook at them, refusing to give them and their preferred ideology the level of respect which they'd got used to receiving from politicians, and which they clearly believe is their due.
   For many intellectuals, 'democracy' seems to mean what they want it to mean — in other words, whatever fits with their ideas of rationality, social justice etc. The question of popular mandate is regarded as of secondary importance. Similarly, 'authoritarianism' is used to mean whatever doesn't fit with their ideas.
   If anything among recent Western policies should be described as authoritarian it's compulsory vaccination. It isn't described as such, presumably because most intellectuals either approve of it or feel they ought to approve of it — it doesn't tick any of the inequality boxes, so it 'must be ok'.

• If one leaves aside what intellectuals think people want, or what they think people ought to want, the question naturally arises of what people actually want, in relation to e.g. COVID policies or the changing nature of the workplace. It is clear that elected representatives don't necessarily deliver what the majority wants — or necessarily even care what it wants — but is there some other way of ascertaining people's preferences? Polls and surveys used to provide some information, but seem to have become subverted by the pressures of political correctness. There are now numerous positions deemed (by intellectuals) to be ideologically unacceptable. Both before and after the popular votes that produced Trump and Brexit, intellectuals were telling people that some choices were simply wrong. It's no surprise then if individuals are no longer willing to be open about their preferences to strangers, or prefer to massage what they say in directions they suspect are more likely to receive positive acknowledgment. The result is that, as with most other 'research' in the humanities, surveys have become subject to ideological bias and hence effectively useless.
   Anonymous voting is still the best we've got, but to function properly this needs genuine diversity among politicians and their ideologies, which in turn requires that intellectuals stop trying to impose their preferred values, ganging up to making dissenting positions unacceptable, or thinking it's their job to second-guess voters by putting a spin on results. It's clear, for example, that liberty is now a value to which the intellectual elites give zero weight. Their spin on the surprising 2016 US election result — after their initial reaction of simply dissing voters — has been to argue it represents a reaction against inequality. (Their preferred narrative having been restored, pseudo-intellectual debate could go back to normal. Hence the result has had minimal effect on elite thinking.)
   Even when citizens try to express their rejection of control by elites in the form of demonstrations or other direct action, the dominant narrative has sufficient inbuilt stabilisers to allow it to remain intact. (The phenomenon is similar to what happens under communism: any signs of popular dissatisfaction are taken as evidence that the evils of capitalism have not yet been sufficiently eradicated.) Thus the gilets jaunes, like the blue-collar workers who voted for Trump, were merely 'motivated by economic injustice'. And when Belgian or Austrian citizens protest against COVID authoritarianism, the elites' primary reaction is: 'perhaps we should consider the possibility that there may be a downside to coercion — it might discourage vaccine uptake!'

• The UK government's stance on COVID may seem ambiguous and hence confusing to many, but this probably reflects the difficulty of trying to maintain a relatively non-interventionist approach in a world dominated by those with a strong desire to 'manage' the crisis. Boris Johnson's apparently preferred approach conflicts with that of other major Western states (the USA, Germany) and of other professionals (medics, journalists, academics). The 'sensible' option, globally, is evidently seen as being more interference rather than less. To maintain opposition to a global intellectual establishment is as precarious for the current Tories as it was for Thatcher's government. The result is mixed messages and a somewhat inconsistent policy, though overall (so far) Mr Johnson has managed to keep his crew reasonably together, and perhaps as much on the right side of the liberty-vs-statism spectrum as can be expected.
   The US's recent behaviour, incidentally, has reinforced the impression that the country has moved from the role of leader in pro-individualist thinking to that of being in the vanguard of statism and Marxist ideology. The relatively anti-state position implicit in Trumpism is thus more likely to have been an aberration than — as some politics professors were insisting a couple of years ago — an indication of a change in hegemony.

• If a foreign power had wanted to use germs to accelerate the West's shift away from capitalism and towards statism, it could hardly have done a better job.