Stumbling and Mumbling

Brown and Berlin on liberty

Brown's piece in the Guardian yesterday blurted out the truth about New Labour's attitude to freedom. He wrote:

What will bring out the best in Britain is advancing liberty not as selfish individualism but as empowerment.

This looks like an endorsement of what Isaiah Berlin, in his famous Essay "Two concepts of liberty", called positive freedom:

The 'positive' sense of the word 'liberty' derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind...I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for.

Berlin distinguished positive freedom sharply from negative freedom - the absence of interference. Two of the reasons he did so are implicit in Brown's thinking.
The first lies in the question: who exactly is it that should be empowered? As Berlin pointed out, advocates of positive freedom don't mean that it is people's "poor, ignorant, desire-ridden, passionate, empirical selves" that should be given control. Instead, they say, it is people's higher selves that should attain mastery.
I suspect Brown has something like this in mind. Certainly, he doesn't think people should be empowered to be lazy. When he launched the New Deal, he said:

From today there will be no option of simply staying at home on full benefit doing nothing.

Liberty, it seems, is something for our higher, hard-working selves - not our empirical selves.
Berlin was clear on the danger this thinking led to:

Enough manipulation with the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes.

Secondly, said Berlin, advocates of positive freedom see it as a means to some higher goal - it's meant to "lift men to a height to which they could never have risen without coercive - but creative violation of their lives."
We see this sort of teleological thinking in Brown's view that his conception of positive freedom will "bring out the best in Britain" - positive  liberty is the servant of nationalist impulse.
Brown also, of course, grotesquely caricatures negative freedom. There's nothing selfish about it. In wanting negative liberty for myself, I want it for everyone else.
And I want it because I recognize that the ultimate values in life - the constituents of the good life - are incompatible, and that we should be, individually, free to choose among them. Here's Berlin:

Pluralism, with the measure of 'negative' liberty it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than than the goals of those who seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of 'positive' self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer because it does, at least, recognize the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.

But then, a defining feature of New Labour is that there are no such conflicts between ultimate goals, merely an insufficient knowledge of how to mange modernity to achieve them all.

Unbundling politics

There's much to admire in the report of the Power Inquiry, summarized here, not least the call for citizen-initiated referenda and the recognition that non-voting is motivated by contempt rather than apathy. There's one trick, though, the report misses. It's hinted at in this from Helena Kennedy:

Principle and ideas seem to have been replaced with managerialism and public relations. it is as though Proctor and Gamble or Abbey National are running the country.

Whilst this contains much truth, it is way too kind. Politics could learn a lot from business.
For one thing, no shareholders would allow their chief executive to have as much power (or as much conflict with their finance director) as we allow our Prime Minister.
And for another, business has progressed in the last few decades in a way politics has not. Political parties are like 1960s-style conglomerates. They contain a bundle of policies - Iraq , public services, ID cards and so on - just as conglomerates were a bundle of businesses.
Eventually, investors realized that conglomerates were a bad idea. Why should I buy a dozen bad businesses, just to get a couple of good ones? they asked. They shunned conglomerates, just as voters now shun political parties - and (partly) for similar reasons.   
Conglomerates responded by breaking up. Hanson, for example, once one of the most sprawling conglomerates, is now a focused building materials company.
Indeed, much of the history of finance in recent years is a story about how bundles of services have been split up.
Take government bonds. Once, if you wanted to buy these, you had to buy  a bundle of interest payments and a redemption sum. Now, strips markets allow you to buy just the income streams or just the redemption. Similarly, credit derivatives allow you to buy a firm's default risk but not its interest payments (or vice versa). There are loads of other examples. But in all cases, the unbundling increases demand.
If politics really were like business, then, politicians would ask: how can we increase our appeal to voters  by unbundling what we offer?
But of course, unlike in business, there's no pressure upon politicians to raise this question. Whereas company bosses suffer if investors lose interest - because the share price falls - politicians don't give a damn if people ignore them.
So, when people say politics is like business, they are flattering politicians. Can you think of a more damning indictment than that?

An outlier speaks

Am I a freak? The Sunday Times cites research (pdf) which suggests I am.

It says men’s IQ at 11 is strongly positively correlated with their chances of being married later in life. One standard deviation higher IQ is associated with a 35% greater chance of being married.

When I was 11, my IQ was two standard deviations higher than average; it’s since collapsed. I’m also taller than average, and have earned more than average, both of which are also correlated with marriage probabilities. On all counts, my statistical chances of having been married should be astronomically high; after all, even an average chance of being married is a high one.

But I’ve never come close to being married and don’t expect to.

This isn’t because my standards are too high*. I know it’s too much to expect a woman to have the mind of Dar Williams and the body of Kerry Katona, but most women I’ve met haven’t even had the body of Dar Williams and the mind of Kerry Katona.

Instead, I suspect my childhood IQ is a major cause of my being single. It caused me enter male-dominated environments: boy’s grammar school, a mostly-male Oxford college and the City (where early mornings militated against going out at night and meeting people). And, coming from a lower social class, I haven’t had much in common with the few women I have met. As Ruth Kelly once said to me (she was speaking generally I think): “women don’t go for men who are good-looking and intelligent. They want ones they feel comfortable with.”

The academic research suggests these IQ-related handicaps to marriage are more than offset by the tendency for high IQ to lead to higher social class. But for me they haven’t been.

However, I don’t at all feel like an outlier. I feel normalish – after all, the single geek is a common stereotype - even though the statistics say I’m not.

Which raises the question: is my feeling of being normal just one of those self-protecting subconscious mental strategies that pretty much everyone adopts?

* It’s not because I’m fat and ugly either. I'm slimmer and better-looking than this guy, who's done more than good enough for himself.

Against Pro-Test

I’m not happy about Pro-Test, the campaign to defend scientific experiments on animals. By all means, oppose the more lunatic antics of animal rights campaigners; I don’t see how burning my old college’s pavilion promotes animal rights. But actively defending experiments on animals is a step too far.

The argument for such experiments is a cost-benefit one; the benefits – Pro-Tests give a long list of drugs and procedures developed through animal testing – outweigh the suffering inflicted on animals.

Let's grant a large chunk of this argument - that it's empirically correct, and that utilitarianism is morally acceptable. Why should we experiment on animals rather than humans?

In some cases, there’s a practical reason. If you want to study multiple generations, it’s better to experiment on rats or mice as these have shorter lifespans.

However, the ethical argument for experimenting on animals rather than humans is more obscure.

Many supporters of Pro-Test, I guess, believe humans have a right not to be experimented upon. Why don’t animals have this right? What’s the difference between animals and humans?

Some of the (implicit) arguments here look a lot like some defences of slavery: they are mere brutes, without our delicate sensibilities. And how can things that look and behave so different from us have the same rights we do?

But it’s not obvious that our superior rights over animals derives from our physical features. Why are bipedelism, opposable thumbs and some language morally important, as generators of rights?

A better line of argument is that rights arise from some type of implicit social contract. But this distinguishes some animals from other animals, not all humans from all animals. Cats, dogs and horses have entered into society with humans, generating reciprocal obligations, whereas rats and monkeys haven’t. I can see the case, then, for experimenting on the latter but not the former.

However, if rights originate in a social contract, then surely serious or persistent criminals – by breaking that contract – lose their rights. So why not experiment on him, him, or them, to name but a few.

Logical consistency, I reckon, requires that Pro-Test call for experiments on (some) humans, rather than all animals.

I can’t, though, be too harsh on them. Despite all I’ve said, I eat meat. The fact that I would, I suspect, have no problem eating some humans (if properly hung and cooked) does not exonerate me from the charge of hypocrisy.

But then, the dominant species is no more capable of clear, honest thinking about its position than is the dominant race, gender or class. And I include myself in all four.

Livingstone and democratic failure

Sunny, David T and Nosemonkey are right. The decision to suspend Ken Livingstone for a month for  "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive" remarks to some snivelling little squit are an affront to free speech and democracy.
David T, though raises an interesting point:

The only way to counter left-racism and the "Galloway-lite" religious communalist politics which Ken Livingstone, and his Socialist Action chums have been pioneering, is for us to organise, politically, against it.

Within our current political system, I've little hope of this succeeding. First, because rational persuasion doesn't work; as Max Planck once said, ideas disappear because  their supporters die, not because  people are persuaded against them.
Second, our political system doesn't allow our preferences to be unbundled.  I voted for Livingstone - despite his moonbat ideas on many issues - because I wanted to support the congestion charge and ensure that its obnoxious Tory opponent got a good hiding. I could not, however, express my first preference - which would have been for a candidate who supported the C-charge, gave Norris a bloody nose, and who wasn't a loon.
Until we can devise a way in which public choices can be expressed more precisely, our electoral system will be too weak an instrument to discipline Livingstone properly.
Our choice, then, is between tolerating his silly (or worse?) outbursts or allowing the repression of democracy and free speech.
Faced with this choice, I'll take the former.

Ritual and rationality

On going out for a sandwich, I pass these guys protesting against Huntingdon Life Sciences. Although their cause is good, everyone's ignoring them. The protest seems a terribly bad way of persuading people.
This, I guess, is true of most protests; whoever changed their opinion about Iraq as a result of seeing an anti-war demo?
This misses the point. Protesters aren't trying to rationally persuade anyone. Instead, they are engaged in ritual. They are signalling the strength of their belief, and reinforcing that belief by meeting like-minded people.
Here's my hunch - we secular rationalists under-estimate the importance of ritual.
The Church has not made this mistake. It has long known that ritual matters. I suspect bells, smells and music have done more to strengthen religious faith than any ontological arguments. Is it a coincidence that the religions that are in decline are those, like methodism,  that offer few rituals, whilst the  growing religions, like American evangelism, offer spectacles like speaking in tongues, healing and charismatic preachers?
But it's not just the Church where ritual matters. In this fine book, Gerd Gigerenzer says the doctor-patient relationship has a big ritualistic element; the patient looks for reassurance and the doctor offers it. The TV drama House illustrates this nicely; doctors' puzzlement about the patient's condition is discussed in a separate room, whilst the patient usually gets a display of confidence and certainty.
And both Gigerenzer and Deirdre McCloskey (pdf) argue that a lot of statistical testing is not an attempt to get at the truth, but rather a ritualistic going through the motions. (But see this for a different view.)
These, I suspect, are not isolated examples. I reckon many - most? - of what we think of as efforts to change the world, or people's behaviour or thinking, are in fact ritualistic. They are efforts to signal the sort of people we are, or to strengthen our own views. Into this category, I'd put: parents' disciplining their children; condeming others' behaviour; political speeches and writing (including blogging) and - of course - management.
The strange thing is - sometimes, ritual works.

Is American Idol racist?

Yes, says this paper by Jungmin Lee:

I find strong evidence for same-race preferences, in particular among black viewers. Featuring more black contestants attracts more black households to tune in to watch the show. And, with more black viewers, a black contestant is less likely to be voted off.

There are two possible interpretations here. The benign one is that colour is just a proxy for musical tastes. If blacks, more than whites, have a preference for RnB-influenced singers, who tend to be black rather than white, voting and viewing will split on racial lines, without racial prejudice.

The other explanation is that because the voting is anonymous, no-one feels a stigma from expressing a racist preference, and so indulge their tastes. This might explain why American Idol is racist, but The Weakest Link (pdf) isn’t (except against the Welsh).

America's coming productivity slowdown

Is the US productivity boom coming to an end? This is the question raised by yesterday’s CPI numbers.

These show that, in the last three years, core consumer prices have risen by just 0.1% a year faster than core producer prices. This is the smallest difference between the two inflation rates since 1979; over the last 30 years, CPI inflation has averaged 1.2 percentage points a year more than PPI.

What’s this got to do with productivity? Simple. It’s the Balassa-Samuelson effect. This says that productivity grows faster in goods than in services industries, with the result that goods prices fall relative to services – that is, PPI inflation is lower than CPI.

We could, therefore, read the recent rise in PPI inflation relative to CPI inflation as a sign that productivity might be slowing down.

You might object here that, barring a normal cyclical slowdown in Q4, there’s not much sign of a slowdown in the labour productivity numbers.

Not yet, there isn’t. But the PPI/CPI ratio should be a lead indicator of measured labour productivity. Imagine a manufacturer were to suffer a slowdown in its rate of technical progress. It might react by cutting prices less aggressively. PPI would then rise relative to CPI. Only when customers have reacted to the price change by reducing demand growth would output growth per person slow.

For this reason, PPI/CPI has predicted some productivity fluctuations in the past – for example, the mid-70s slowdown and 80s recovery.

This, though, is not the only evidence for a coming productivity slowdown. The PE ratio on the S&P 500 is below its post-1990 average. Could it be, therefore, that investors are anticipating slower trend growth?

The productivity slowdown, it seems, is everywhere except in the productivity figures.

Which raises the question: what's wrong with this? What other explanations are there?

A lucky man...

Trade Secretary Alan Johnson confirms that there really are no limits to the imbecility of New Labour. Epolitix says:

He will urge British business and universities to think more creatively about globalisation, and encourage what he calls "Sgt Pepper economics". "If the Beatles had carried on producing albums like Please Please Me, they'd have ended up with a dwindling catalogue, dwindling sales and a dwindling audience," he will say.

Some guy lectures business on the desirability of innovative, creative thinking by citing a 35-year-old record made by dead hippies.

And can you imagine what businesses make of this drivel?

“Ah, that’s where I’ve been going wrong. I wondered why those stove-pipe hats weren’t selling.”

(Via Recess Monkey, who fails to spell this band’s name correctly, thus demonstrating that he doesn't come from Leicester.)

Iraq versus education

Via Pub Philosopher and Bloggers4Labour comes this line from Diane Abbott:

The billions that Blair is spending on his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could have been better spent on schools and hospitals here at home.

Is this true?
For the billions we're spending in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are buying a chance of democracy in those countries. Democracy doesn't just make people happier. It also makes them richer. This matters, because the discounted present value of a rising income stream can be a very large sum indeed. Even the small chance of such a sum could be worth billions. If so, the billions we're spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is money well spent.
By contrast, spending on schools and hospitals might not be effective.  Research by Ludger Woessmann (such as this) and Eric Hanushek shows that, across developed countries, there's little relationship between education spending and outcomes.
In the UK, recently, the link between spending and outcomes also seems weak. This paper (pdf) estimates that spending in the Excellence in Cities programme had a "positive but very small" effect on results. Howard Glennerster says primary school performance improved in the early years of New Labour even though education spending fell as a share of GDP - and as spending rose, the rate of improvement tailed off .
Diane Abbott should know this. One of her concerns - rightly - is the failure of black boys in school. On this count, and as a "socialist" she should therefore be aware of John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, in which he estimates that, in the US, an equal opportunity policy requires that nine times (pdf) as much be spent on schooling blacks as whites. Why the huge difference? Because education spending has little impact on results.
Again, the same might be true in the UK. This note (pdf) says expensive City academies "may be the only way to bolster performance among the hardest-to-reach pupils.
Nor is it clear that there's a great link between health spending and outcomes. Some OECD figures are here. I reckon that, among the 31 developed countries in their sample, the correlation between health spending as a share of GDP in 2003 and life expectancy was positive, at 0.34, but barely statistically significantly different from zero (p=6.4%. t=1.94).
Now, everything I've said here is controversial. My point is merely that Ms Abbott's claim is highly dubious. It requires a lot of arguing for, and is sensitive to differences in assumptions - for example, about the probability of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan or the productivity of health spending.
Why, then, does she seem so strident about such a suspect claim? Could it be that she thinks an increase in Labour's client base - public sector workers - is inherently good, even if it doesn't much improve health or education? Or could it be that she implicitly thinks it's better to spend money on English people than Iraqis? How odd that an article in The Voice should carry a racist undertow.