Dr Tassano's notes

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

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

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.

30 June 2012

04 June 2012

weekend notes #10

- universities
- financial house of cards
- BBC tv
- Beecroft, Hodgkin, Milburn, Facebook
- on allegedly being right-wing

• I note there has been another piece of textual output purporting to concern itself with the topic what are universities for? This question (and similar ones like whither the humanities?) provides endless fascination for contemporary intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, given that there is something anachronistic in the old ideas of university, humanities, etc. Remarkably, the antiquated versions of the concepts still linger, in spite of the intensive programme of reform that has taken place.

Universities were once places where only an elite would go — the cleverest, the most suited [1] to academic study. Those who got to attend were not necessarily envied for it, since not everyone wanted to engage in that kind of activity. Now, regardless of how intrinsically enviable a particular activity is, the notion of elite has become deeply suspect. It is felt, as a kind of reflex reaction, that there is something morally wrong with a group that is in any way exclusive; that it needs to be invaded, broken up and brought into line with egalitarian ideology.

One of the most important elites — the individuals at Westminster running the country — has been partially neutralised, by making it subject to endless criticism, scrutiny [2] and ridicule, though it must be said that it would probably be getting degraded even without the assistance of the media. Another important elite — the group of individuals running large corporations — looks set to go the same way. Those inside academia, by contrast, still retain an element of being answerable to no one.

In the case of universities, the anti-elitism strategy has been to insist that the degree experience become a near-universal benefit. At the same time, the belief has to be maintained that the whole thing is still in some way a major achievement, a reason for enhanced self-esteem. (This, of course, generates the familiar prizes-for-all inconsistency.)

The nagging doubt remains: as long as it is not literally for everyone, and as long as there are some institutions which are more exclusive than others, there is something about universities which is at odds with the prevailing ethos of perfect, Facebookish horizontality.

It is this ambiguity which seems to keep the what-are-universities-for programme busy, and makes boggling about the question so appealing. Nothing is said which contravenes the basic pseudo-egalitarian ideology, but a certain frisson is generated by juxtaposing mutually inconsistent requirements, such as in the following extracts.

The current government certainly seems hell-bent on trying to make universities function more like cost-cutting skills retailers to whom employers can outsource their job-training [and] it is this element of ideological fantasy that is so worrying ...
[Universities are] perhaps the single most important institutional medium for conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific, and artistic heritage of mankind.
... [We are] merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create, and which is not ours to destroy.
(Stefan Collini, ‘The threat to our universities’, Guardian)

But clearly ‘we’ do seem to believe that it (the complex intellectual inheritance) is ours, and that we are free to alter it out of all recognition; and the writer approvingly cites the ideology which has allowed ‘us’ to do it.

[Universities are] expected to serve several important social functions, from vocational training to technology transfer, just as they are asked to further several admirable social goals, from inculcating civic values to promoting social justice.
... 18 of the 24 largest universities in Britain (in terms of student numbers) in 2010 did not exist as universities before 1992. Such educational enfranchisement has, in principle, been a great democratic good, one we should continue to support … (ibid.)

To pretend — as is habitually done by academics criticising current developments — that one can expand higher education into a mass product, serving ‘social justice’, without having to sacrifice insulation from public or governmental demands for economic justification, or other criteria of ‘usefulness’, is simply dishonest.

There is, of course, one type of education which by now fits very well with mediocratic ideology: school. Although there are differences in quality, everyone goes, and everyone learns largely the same kind of material. This makes schools an attractive model to emulate in the process of reform. Universities should, according to this, be places which everyone attends at a certain age, ideally with a component of compulsion, or at least pressure; that are run on principles determined by the state; and where the material presented is limited to such a level of prosaicness that it cannot possibly lead to the enhancement of differences in ability, but rather functions as an instrument of conformity.

More simply, universities are beginning to take over the job of schools themselves: teaching basic literary and mathematical skills. This, however imperfect from an efficiency perspective, certainly helps to dispose of the inequality problem.

1. Also, let’s not forget, those willing and able (without the aid of artificial loans) to pay for the experience — and why not, it helped finance the others.
2. If you need reminding about the appalling treatment MPs are now liable to receive from the legal and parliamentary systems — and in a curiously arbitrary way, considering who gets punished and who escapes — take a look at this. Whatever the shortcomings of former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, for example, she surely did not deserve to be humiliated in the way she was.

• 16 December 2008: for the first time in history, the US Federal Reserve lowers the interest rate to zero. (More precisely: it lowers the target for the overnight federal funds rate to a range of 0–0.25%.) The event reflects (a) the dramatic contraction of banking and business as a result of the subprime bubble bursting, (b) the Fed’s willingness to push accommodative policies to the absolute limit in order to avoid a serious recession.
23 May 2012: for the first time in history, Germany issues two-year bonds with zero coupon. Buyers of the bonds are promised to get their money back after two years but will receive no interest, yet demand for the bonds outstrips supply as savers seek a safe haven from turbulent capital markets. The event reflects (a) fear about the fallout from possible impending fragmentation of the eurozone and collapse of the associated currency, (b) the increasingly precarious position of various major European banks, (c) the fact that Germany is one of the few countries left whose unlikelihood of default is rated as “excellent” by the credit rating agencies.

The federal state is not planning to issue bonds with negative coupons

said a spokesman for the Finanzagentur, the body responsible for German state borrowing. In other words, Germany is not going to sell bonds where the holders (i.e. lenders) would have to pay for the privilege of loaning money to the government. Not yet.

• The more Moody’s et al. downgrade Western governments’ credit ratings in response to worsening debt-vs-productivity scenarios, the more we hear them denounced as “utterly discredited”.
The credit rating agencies did not, it is true, behave in exemplary fashion during the rosy years of the dodgy-loan bubble.
But surely they do not keep becoming more discredited, just because they keep noting additional notches in the gentle downward path of governmental financial trustworthiness?

• We have had “libertarian paternalism”; now the latest chalk-and-cheese-are-compatible buzzphrase is “growth-friendly austerity”. Cool!
Now, if we could only work out how to have expenditure-friendly austerity, we could finally call an end to recessions — this time for real!

• Oh, the temptation to break the rules [3] of fiscal and monetary discipline, so essential for the efficient working of a country’s money and credit system, but so tediously old-fashioned and bourgeois.
I wonder how many unbroken rules will remain among the former major powers by the time the current crisis is finally over.
Not many, by the look of things.

• What does economics professor Tyler Cowen believe the moral of the eurozone crisis to be?

The final lesson of this debacle is that smart nations with noble motives can make very big mistakes. And that should concern us all.

This sort of thinking absolutely guarantees there will be no lessons from the debacle at all.
When countries follow programmes of transformation that turn out to be fatally flawed, the response is not to hand-wring about “noble motives”, but to appreciate the fallacies in the ideology underlying those programmes.

3. For example: Do not make major changes to a central bank’s remit, merely to address a temporary crisis.

• Tried watching a new BBC nature programme, The Great British Countryside, but quickly had to stop.
The presenters, Julia Bradbury and Hugh Dennis, seemed to have been chosen to illustrate the new approved adult roles. Gender A: pompous, patronising, in-your-face. Gender B: defensive, apologetic, depressed about having to play a subordinate role.
The results of feminism can seem a little bizarre at times. Perfect equality is (as any fool knows) impossible, but a certain entertainment value can, I suppose, be generated by swapping costumes.

• Sampling the BBC’s recent TV drama offerings, I find that much of it has a quality that can only be likened to pornography. The ostensible action is so obviously forced to serve the primary purpose of wish-fulfilment fantasy — in this case, satisfying some ideological prejudice or other — that the narrative becomes ludicrous to the point of surreal.
Viewers are familiar with the ilk of drama that includes The Tudors, where historical themes are cheerfully plundered to produce the 21st century equivalent of a Carry On romp (updated with more violence, more fake nods to fact). At least there, the travesties are obvious and could be seen as a form of postmodern irony. In more recent docudramas, the rewriting of history to suit the ideology is less obvious and hence more grating.

In We’ll Take Manhattan, for example, sixties icons David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton’s role as class heroes, brightening up a stuffy post-war world, had the intensity button pushed ridiculously high, presumably so that even the obtusest viewer would get the ideological point.
So, of course, the pre-Bailey/Shrimpton establishment is hideously snobbish, cruel and class-bound, while the cocky couple have fun telling the wicked incumbents where to get off.
I suspect DB and JS were, in reality, much like every other talented person from the wrong side of town: desperate to get on, and willing to do whatever it took; while the establishment, given the incipient ideology of the time, were only too happy to demonstrate their egalitarian credentials — in theory at least, if less so in practice.
Behind a façade of tolerance and openness, the incumbents were no doubt as keen as anyone to protect their own position, just as the power elite in today’s BBC (say) is in practice careful about keeping out the wrong sort (people who might disagree with their preferred world view), while maintaining an image of inclusiveness.
But a layered analysis about the respective roles of incumbents and newcomers, here in modelling/photography, was evidently considered too complicated, even for a BBC4 audience.

• The new documentary series Meet the Romans, presented by classics don Mary Beard, seems refreshing if a trifle prosaic. Professor Beard may be no oil painting, as some reviewers have unkindly suggested, but I suppose one needs a bit of a character for presenter if one is going to be focusing on the eating, drinking and defecating habits of the ancients.
Beard reminds me of botanist David Bellamy — another presenter whose appearance and mannerisms could be distracting, but who nevertheless proved strangely compelling.

• Easier on the eye, though perhaps shorter on substance, has been Orbit: Earth's Extraordinary Journey. As is now a reliable feature of BBC productions, it was impressive in terms of visuals.
Personally, I feel Kate Humble works better as a presenter of more serious subject matter such as meteorology, than of wildlife. I think I would have enjoyed having her as my geography teacher.

• Spotted in a radio guide, about a legal drama series:
“This week, the team deal with the case of a right-wing academic who is up on an assault charge.”
I was thinking, it would have seemed odd if it had said “the case of a left-wing academic”, but why?
Then I twigged. Of course: that qualifier would have been superfluous.

• Came across this assessment of venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft’s report on employment law, snickering at the idea that someone from industry might be asked to advise on government policy:

Forget civil servants. Forget academic expertise. Forget irksome consultation and careful study of what happens in other countries. No, today’s Downing Street wonk knows just how to sort out any problem of public policy: just add CEO. (Guardian)

Actually, with regard to the first part of this extract, this may be exactly what one should do.
- Civil servants, judging by various debacles over the years, seem to have been more infected with mediocratic ideology even than elected politicians. (This would seem to make sense, given that mediocratic ideology is largely a characteristic of the chattering classes, rather than of the electorate in general.)
- “Academic expertise”, in areas related to public policy, tends to mean little more than “expertise in expounding and interpreting the dominant ideology”.
- “Consultation” is often just a euphemism for putting a sheen of democratisation on a decision that has already been made by the people who matter. A good idea in principle perhaps, in an ideal world, but in practice usually a waste of everybody’s time, and dishonest to boot.
- What happens in other countries is of little help if the other countries are also sliding down the path of mediocracy, and referring to one another (selectively) for spurious support.
Whether the remedies proposed by chief executives are themselves free of mediocratic bias these days is another matter. Certainly when the exalted figureheads of large corporations, particularly from the financial and professional sectors, are called on to chair enquiries, the results usually seem remarkably reinforcing of the status quo.
On the other hand someone who, like Philip Green, has actually had to deal with the day-to-day realities of generating economic output, and in the not-too-distant past, seems more likely to have useful insights into how to run things efficiently than most people in Westminster today.
Whether such individuals go in for tax avoidance strikes me as irrelevant to the question of whether they have helpful ideas for getting out of holes. There is no published research supporting a link between talent and readiness to pay tax, even if one were to have any confidence in the conclusions of state-financed ‘research’.
As for the Beecroft Report’s suggestions, it is certainly easy to believe that the difficulties and risks currently involved in dismissing useless staff are a blockage in the pipeline, especially in a Britain in which one third of 9-10 year old boys are classified as “special needs”. How can employers hire those nice hard-working Asian and East European immigrants if they cannot fire the lazy natives?

• Among post-war British artists, I have a certain fondness for Howard Hodgkin, designer of the swimming poster for the London Olympics. His Rain (formerly viewable at Tate Britain, but currently — like many of Hodgkin’s works — not on display) is particularly appealing, managing simultaneously to convey coolness, melancholia and optimism.
(Note to Nicholas Serota: isn’t it time to give Hodgkin a bit more prominence? Not that I’m a believer in art by democracy, but I think one might well find that more people enjoy looking at his works than at, say, the Chapmans’. Online is never going to be the same as live, even for two-dimensional art.)

• That Facebook wants to ‘help’ you donate your organs to the medical mafia does not surprise me much. With their matching levels of respect for privacy and the individual, the two parties seem to have been made for each other. Catch you later, douchebag. (Or whatever the friendly greeting between young Americans is these days.)

• Hearing that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was once again trotting out his well-worn noises about the evil bourgeoisie hogging everything, I checked to see what had triggered this. It appeared there had been an “independent review” of social mobility. That could be interesting, I thought, if it is really independent. Perhaps for once a small degree of critical analysis would be devoted to the concept of mobility and the philosophy behind it, along with the usual homilies. My heart sank slightly as I thought of it being chaired by some state-financed academic, who would be sure to have a leftist bias. But perhaps not, I admonished myself; there are still, after all, a tiny but non-zero number of academics who are not married to leftist ideology. Also, even the most left-leaning academic might feel it incumbent on him to mention a few of the limitations of that kind of analysis, inevitably involving normative [4] assumptions that are ultimately a matter of subjective preference. Excitedly, I looked to see who had chaired the review. It turned out to be someone called Alan Milburn. The name rang a bell, but I had to check Wikipedia. Imagine my disappointment and, indeed, disgust, to discover that the “independent” reviewer was a former Labour minister. Really!

• If anyone is genuinely interested in having an independent review of social mobility — which is unlikely given that those interested in the concept almost invariably have fixed ideas about it — they should engage us (Oxford Forum) to conduct it.

4. Although the link here takes you to Yahoo (the answer is B), the question comes from Texas A&M (number 5).

• The other day we were accused of (complimented on? it wasn’t clear) being a “right-wing think tank”.
But if we are right-wing, how come we are never referenced by mainstream media folk of a rightist persuasion? Including those who claim to be committed to the defence of traditional values and/or civil liberties (and not merely, we are to suppose, their own careers), and who bewail the dominance of leftist ideology and culture. How terrible, these flag-wavers cry, that there is nothing to rival the pro-intervention, anti-British, anti-conservative bias of the cultural establishment; but they would not dream of sullying their columns by mentioning a suppressed research organisation, especially not one which might generate potential competition for them. Despite their moans about bias, these people evidently have no sympathy with those who have been excluded from the system, preferring — like everyone else — to play safe and stick with their establishment friends. (In their case, in the minuscule portion of the cultural arena reserved for the Right, a sort of heritage centre cum retirement home for the old guard.)

No, it seems reasonable to assume that none of the mainstream clubs recognise us as one of their own. We are non-denominational and non-conformist, in a world where intellectuals have largely become like football supporters: atheists, evangelists, Muslimists, interventionists, authoritarianists, warming fanatics, warming deniers, paranormal believers, paranormal despisers, and so on.
In any case, we are not a think tank. We are an incipient university, with the standards that academia used to have.

• I do not think of this blog as right-wing, though others may. If I had to file it under anything, it would be under {critique, genuine}. This in contrast with {critique, phoney}, meaning the kind of critique you currently get from the cultural establishment (e.g. Britart is “challenging”, literary theory is “deeply questioning”, contemporary sociology “analyses prejudices”), in which the original sense of the word critique has become inverted.

If the Right were dominant, I would probably be writing material which would get labelled as left-wing. However, to pretend the cultural landscape is not at present utterly dominated by leftist sentiment (pro-state, pseudo-egalitarian, anti-capitalist) is just silly. The fact that such sentiment tends no longer to be referred to as leftist is merely a sign of how hegemonic it has become.

• I suppose it is only to be expected that one should be labelled as right-wing. A consequence of it being tacitly accepted that anyone inside the system is automatically left-wing is that anyone outside it, and critical of it, must be right-wing. What other explanation could there be? Surely it cannot be the case that the entire system — or at least the parts of it that are dominant and therefore the parts that matter — is intellectually flawed and biased, and that the outsider is the one who is being objective?

Regrettably, there seems to be a hard-wired cognitive bias which makes the latter hypothesis almost impossible for most people to entertain. Whole semi-intellectual professions (e.g. banking) may turn out to have been knowingly operating on obviously dodgy assumptions. An entire supranational government structure may emerge as the crazed architect of a currency system clearly scheduled to lead to eventual economic disaster, generating misery for millions. Nevertheless the average person will continue, instinctively, to presume that a class that is large enough and which carries the insignia of social status cannot be wrong, and that a small group of critics — isolated, and despised by the establishment — cannot be right.