Thinking Out Aloud

Violating Western civilisation

2012-01-27T14:38:00.005+11:00

Picking on a vulnerable minority group has a great advantage and a great disadvantage. The great advantage is that one can sell effortless virtue to a large majority: lots of people can feel superior without any effort. The great disadvantage is that one clearly picking on a highly vulnerable group: without some cover, it is just members of a large majority bullying a small and vulnerable minority.

There is a standard response to this problem: claim that the minority group is some great and corrupting threat to "civilisation as we know it". Preachers of Jew-hatred turned this into a fine art. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, aptly labelled a 'Warrant for Genocide', is merely the most famous manifestation of what was, and continues to be, a continuing theme of Jew-hatred.

Jew-hatred is no longer an acceptable technique of mainstream Western politics (or religion). Queer-hatred still is (though less so as time passes). And queer-hatred has exactly the same advantage (effortless virtue to large majority) and disadvantage (bullying a small and vulnerable minority) as Jew-hatred. Hence the standard accusations against Jews are recycled against queers (that they are enemies of God, of Christianity, of Western civilisation; that they prey on children; that they spread disease; that they corrupt everything thing they touch or institution they are let into; and so on).

So, in a recent conference call with evangelical leaders, in the midst of some apocalyptic language from participants about the impending fall of the United States, Christianity and Western civilisation, Presidential hopeful Newt Gringrich offered the following:

It's pretty simple: marriage is between a man and a woman. This is a historic doctrine driven deep into the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, and it's a perfect example of what I mean by the rise of paganism. The effort to create alternatives to marriage between a man and a woman are perfectly natural pagan behaviors, but they are a fundamental violation of our civilization.

(Via) A claim that could be (and was) previously cited against Jewish emancipation and female emancipation. (It was also used against other emancipations, but usually against less venerable restrictions.)

It is perfectly true, oppression of queer folk has been an enduring feature of monotheism. But one reason we no longer talk of "Christendom", but instead of "Western Civilisation", is that it has become a civilisation which no longer defines itself religiously. Its most defining feature is precisely its dynamism, its capacity for evolution and change. Including in moral perspectives: those of the C4th and C5th (when Jews, women and queers were stripped of rights they had enjoyed under Roman law) are no longer determinative.

Which gives conservative Christians no end of frustration. The reality of human sexual diversity is endlessly useful for certain conceptions of religious authority; as an endless war against human sexual diversity creates both endless selling of effortless virtue and endless training in moral exclusion. But this notion of a "frozen" moral perspective attacks one of the most fundamental features of Western civilisation--its capacity for growth: in knowledge, in moral understanding, in encompassing human aspirations. The notion that Western civilisation is so fragile that giving a small minority equal protection of the law will bring it down is nonsense.

But a necessary type of nonsense is one is going to pass queer-hatred off as anything other than a large majority monstrously bullying a small and vulnerable minority.

Genes do not motivate

2012-01-26T15:25:00.002+11:00

Natural selection is one of the great breakthrough ideas in human understanding of ourselves and of our world. Particularly when added to the discovery of genes. Unfortunately, human minds are pre-programmed to see intentions: particularly when thinking about living things. So, there is this constant tendency, by folk who should know better, to talk as if genes motivate behaviour.

Take this passage from Steven Pinker:

The child sees things differently. Though an offspring has an interest in its siblings' welfare, since it shares half its genes with each full sib, it shares all of its genes with itself, so it has a disproportionate interest in its own welfare (The Better Angels of Our Nature p.431).

A child typically having greater interest in its own welfare than that of its siblings has nothing to do with its genes. It has to do with being a motivated being which experiences its own existence rather more intensely than it does other people's.

It is likely that a child will have greater empathy with its siblings than with other folk, but that is to do with long and intimate association. Nor does that always work out: siblings can end up disliking or even hating each other. Moreover, the capacity to see others as "sibs" is a moveable feast, that can be adopted by other social mechanisms. The whole notion of "brothers in arms" works on that. Similarly, it is a much-attested feature of life on a kibbutz that those raised together because quasi-siblings, if even if there are no common genes.

Yes, natural selection works to select for certain behavioural traits. Such as the capacity to develop strong, non-sexual (or even de-sexualised) attachments to others. But the genes themselves do not provide any sort of motivation: they do not drive behaviour in that sense. Hence a capacity that evolved for one reason can end up being attached to other behaviour.

The real power of natural selection is to see how order can evolve without intention. Putting intention "back in" misses the explanatory power of natural selection, not to mention committing one to false characterisations of human behaviour. Writing in such intentional terms does not display your understanding of natural selection, it displays a serious lack in such understanding.

(BTW This is not a shot at Pinker or his book: which is a great and enlightening read. He just provided an example of an all-too-common mode of thinking about natural selection.)

ADDENDA Further on, Pinker adds the caveat:

As always, teleological terms in the explanation--"wants," "interests," "for"--don't refer to literal desires in the minds of people but are shorthand for the evolutionary pressures that shaped those minds (p.431).

But the notion that framing language in intentional terms has no implications is naive at best. Shaping capacities is very different from motivating actions, as we can see from considering how the capacity for non-sexualised/de-sexualised attachment can operate for non-relatives. The language of intention is certainly easy and familiar: it is also highly misleading.

The globalisation of empathy (military version)

2012-01-25T09:40:00.004+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

With the ongoing public protests, Syria is in the situation where "honest (public) emotion" has become far more possible and hereditary President Assad is not killing enough to deter that. Kiwi political scientist Xavier Marquez (globalisation strikes again) has some great posts on cults of personality. Such as how poor an indicator public emotions when totalitarianism is operating are for what people will do when it collapses.

Whatever else they did, Western military interventions in Bosnia, Kossovo, Iraq, Libya have established outside military intervention is a live strategic possibility, regardless of its specific probability in a particular circumstances. What Steven Pinker calls "the Humanitarian Revolution" periodically has military back-up due to Western military dominance and the globalisation of empathy. And has so under centrist Democratic (Clinton), conservative Republic (Bush II) and liberal Democrat (Obama) Administrations. We can see the constraint that imposes on dictators operating in front of us in the streets of Syria.

Alas, the other side of that is seeking the "nuclear veto" to foreign intervention. The other open question at the moment being whether seeking the nuclear veto can end up provoking foreign intervention. [Go here for a discussion of likely success of such a military strike.]

Public Debt

2012-01-22T10:01:00.001+11:00

This is based on comments I made here.

Bob Murphy has a terrific (and funny) post on public debt and in what (if any) sense it is collective burden using producing, spending and receiving apples as the base economic activity. It establishes that if the public debt is being paid, it is not a burden on future generations (though the distributional effects between cohorts may be significant).

I do have two major caveats, however. The first is that we are not paid in apples, we are paid in money to buy apples (in econ-speak, debt is a nominal not a real variable) and the central bank can drive down money incomes so it becomes much harder to service the debt. The second is that the real issue with public debt is the "room to manoeuvre" issue:

(a) how much of current taxes are consumed to service it?;

(b) how much extra-debt raising ability remains available for emergencies?;

(c) implications of what the debt is spent on for future income (and so future [a] and [b]).

These are the reasons why Australia is in a good position because the Howaard-Costello Government paid off so much public debt while Greece is screwed. (In particular, why Greece’s pathetic revenue-raising record is a crucial problem, aggravated by the European Central Bank’s “tight money/lowered incomes” policies.)

In other words, the key issue government as intermediary. Yes, debt is both a liability and an asset: an asset to bondholders and a liability to taxpayers (these being overlapping groups). Using public debt-to-GDP ratios as the most common measuring metric for public debt is a bit odd; but not completely so, since the thing being borrowed against is the taxing capacity of the government.

Debt is basically a structure of promises. The larger the (public debt promises) structure compared to GDP, the greater the difficulty in keeping the promises (to pay); the more risk that promises will not be kept; and the more difficulty in making further promises (to pay). Hence interest rates on government bonds vary between polities and over time.

If the welfare state systematically generates more debt (i.e. promises to pay) while also putting pressure on revenue (ability to pay), there is a potential problem. There is a difference between public debt at 15% of GDP and public debt at 150% of GDP. There is also a difference between debt when (money) income is rising and debt when income is falling (and the more so the more it falls).

Any story about debt that does not include risk rather misses the point. After all, risk is the most single important variable in valuing debt. Because debt is a structure of promises (to pay) and, in valuing promises, what is going to be more important than their expected reliability?

To put it another way, the larger the structure of promises to pay, the more difficult it is to keep all the promises, the more likely there will be some unravelling and the more the likely damage when it occurs. The issue is not debt as such, it is the state-as-intermediary, as manager of the structure of promises.

What homosexual provocation defences say about the status of women

2012-01-17T09:37:00.004+11:00

There has been (and in a few places such as Queensland, still is) a legal defence in cases of murder that provides mitigation in cases of violent reaction to homosexual advances. It is known under various titles (such as the “guardsman defence” in the UK, the “gay panic defence” in the UK or New Zealand, the “homosexual advance defence” in Australia) and is a form of provocation defence. The claim is that the defendant (or defendants) was so panicked by homosexual advances that their judgement was (violently) impaired.

There are many things one could say about this legal manoeuvre, but an Op.Ed. piece puts a key aspect of this legal defense in stark perspective:

Would it be acceptable for women who are "gently touched" in a bar to stab the heterosexual culprit repeatedly to death? The short answer is no.

Women are expected to deal with unwanted sexual advances from men in a restrained and civilized fashion.

Men, on the other hand—in the logic of this defense—do not have the same expectation put upon them. On the contrary, being the object of male sexual advances is such a dire threat that it can mitigate murder: even when—as is generally so in such cases—the “provoked” person is physically stronger or more capable than the person allegedly making the sexual advance.

It is a fairly stark case of male privilege. Despite generally being larger and physically stronger than women, under this legal defence, men dealing with male sexual advances do not have the same expectation of restraint as women do. This lowered expectation flows from a privileged perspective: being subject to male sexual advances is somehow much more potentially frightening for men than for women.

While I dislike the term ‘heteronormative', in this case, male sexual desire directed to other men is treated as so out of the ordinary, to be so threateningly different from everyday expectations, that responding with murderous violence is given (some) legal credence.

Again and again, the issue for same-sex attracted people is being defined out of the “properly” human. Homosexual provocation defences do this quite explicitly. Homoerotic desire being so utterly defined out of the permissible, its absolute repression has been taken to frame expectations; to be something so extraordinary that normal social restraints are seriously weakened when it does appear.

Men are much more likely to think homosexuality is immoral than women: one Australian survey (pdf) found that only 27% of women thought homosexuality is immoral, compared to 43% of men. Male sexual desire being felt to be much more threatening to other men than it is to women may have something to do with this.

The legal defence of provocation inherently operates differently for men and women: both because men and women tend to respond differently to anger (men tend to have a much quicker adrenalin rush than women) and (a not unrelated factor in framing likely responses) men tend to be physically stronger than women. It is simply generally easier for men to kill in immediate anger. Neither provides justification, however.

If the simple human politics of homosexual provocation defences to not bear examination, the gender politics are hardly less contemptible. Men are somehow “permitted” to be far more “threatened” in a situation where they are much less physically disadvantaged than women typically are in analogous situations. If courts are going to give credence to such vicious nonsense, then legislatures need to step in and assert much more civilised expectations which do not so privilege male fears, nor define citizens out of the “properly” human.

The function of marriage: a response to Grigis, George and Anderson

2012-01-10T13:56:00.010+11:00

The fundamental normative conception of natural law theory is that, in the words of (pdf) natural law theorist David Oderberg:

natural law theory sees normativity as built into the very fabric of reality in the first place.

So there is no Humean ‘is-ought gap’.

Olderberg takes a traditional “strong metaphysics” view of such normativity. “Agent-centred” natural law theorist Robert George holds that the:

first principle of moral judgment is that one ought to choose those options, and only those options, that are compatible with the human good considered integrally—that is to say, with an open-hearted love of the good of human persons considered in all of its variegated dimensions.

There is a clear, knowable, human flourishing that generate moral principles. That concept of human flourishing turns out to be very ready to discount various human claims by invoking definitive metaphysical claims. “Agent-centred” natural law theorist John Finis provides an example of such discounting in his Law, Morality, and "Sexual Orientation".

The basic notion of natural law theory is that things have definitive natures that create definitive functions (telos in the original Greek). In their much-discussed What is Marriage? Grigis, George and Anderson define marriage as follows:

Marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally (inherently) fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together. The spouses seal (consummate) and renew their union by conjugal acts—acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction, thus uniting them as a reproductive unit. Marriage is valuable in itself, but its inherent orientation to the bearing and rearing of children contributes to its distinctive structure, including norms of monogamy and fidelity. This link to the welfare of children also helps explain why marriage is important to the common good and why the state should recognize and regulate it.

How do we know this? This is a central question, for all sorts of arrangements that anthropologists have labeled ‘marriage’ are excluded by this definition. A lot of people seem to have been “ metaphysically mistaken”. Including the Old Testament, for it claims that Solomon had many wives, yet the authors argue that only monogamous marriage is marriage.

So, this is a definition that excludes a very large number of actual historical marriages. Hence it is not a definition that is arrived at by examining marriage in history. It is not a definition that works on the basis that something reveals its nature in its history. The notion being propounded by the authors is that marriage has intrinsic nature regardless of contradicting instances of its history, so that what appear to be cases of marriage are not so.

This is the typical natural law move of “the conclusion gets to declare the ambit of its premises”. It is the move whereby some cases are declared authoritative while cases that fail to conform are declared perverse or in some other way as not counting. Thus is ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ allegedly defined by how-things-are but are actually defined by preselected criteria that cut out contradicting cases. It is the application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

If any lawyer argued like that, their reasoning would be dismissed. But lawyers have to contend directly with opposing arguments and concern for evidence. In natural law theory, since to argue in the above way is an essential element in the whole approach used by natural law thinkers from Aristotle and Aquinas on down, it is happily proceeded with: for, without that move, the entire mode of moral reasoning collapses.

The problem is that reality incorporates the moral and the immoral or, in this case, the proper (“real marriages”) and improper (“purported marriages”). If reality is where the standard is to be found to separate the moral and the immoral, the proper and the improper, in a normative (rather than merely descriptive) way, then reality is judging itself. Or, more precisely, the conclusion gets to choose the ambit of its premises, since cases that contradict the conclusion do not count. They do not get their norms from the nature of things: their norms drive how they define things.

I propose a different definition of marriage: marriage is an arrangement whereby two or more people build a life together. Notice that this definition of marriage actually incorporates all the historical cases of marriage. It incorporates the historical reality of both polygamous marriage (a person being a member of more than one marriage) or group marriage (two or more people married to each other). It does not say that there are “real” and “purported” marriages, that some people have it “metaphysically correct” and some folk (indeed, entire cultures) are “metaphysically mistaken”.

Note also that my definition does set boundaries on what counts as a marriage. It does not include animals (‘two or more people’) for example. It involves at least a presumption of living together, some (or complete) sharing of income and property and some presumption of sexual bonding (‘build a life together’). It also happily includes all philosopher John Corvino’s test cases of marriage.

What it does not do is expect a definition to resolve any issues about how marriage should be legally treated. After all, a definition of marriage as-a-thing-in-the-world will include a very wide range of marital arrangements. It does not involve endorsement, merely identification.

But, in natural law theory, morality comes from following the proper nature of something. So, to define correctly is to endorse (and, of course, dis-endorse).

The definition I proposed does not include raising children. But it does incorporate why marriage is the normal (and normative) vehicle for raising children: that people who are bonded together, who are building a life together, provide a presumptively suitable home for children. This extends beyond being biological mother and fathers: it incorporates adoption and re-marriage. It is perfectly compatible with having and raising children being a great blessing of a marriage. It is even compatible with getting married in the expectation, hope or purpose of raising children. But it does not make having children definitive of marriage, because it is not. A marriage remains a marriage before having children, after children have left and if there are never any children. Infertility does not make a marriage, not a marriage.

If having children was defining of marriage, we would expect to find infertility to be reason to nullify a marriage, proof of fertility as a natural condition for marriage (or at least confirming it) and that children of any member of the marriage to be automatically included in it. While versions of these features did occur in some cultures (humans really are quite varied in their marital arrangements), they have never been part of Western marriage. Illegitimate children were most definitely not included within the ambit of a marriage unless their parents married: marriage as a bond between two people trumping mere procreation.

On the contrary, it was what is actually defining of marriage – two or more people building a life together – which makes marriage a suitable vehicle for raising children.

So, our authors have simply got it wrong. They have defined marriage incorrectly. Their “direct apprehension of reality” has proved to be not all that direct. Their failure, discussed below, to distinguish between group and polygamous marriage is indicative of a bigger failure.

How natural law theory goes wrong, again and again
But this is not an isolated failure. Natural law theory again and again gets sex wrong. It defines sex as having a single legitimating function: reproduction. So, the mechanics of sex really matter, for only unimpeded penile-vaginal sex (coitus) fulfils the legitimating function of sex. But, once again, the ‘how do we know?’ problem pops up. For natural law theorists have disagreed on how restrictive this function is. Clement of Alexander said all sex acts had to be intended to be procreative; Aquinas that that they had to be possibly procreative; Pope Paul VI that they had to procreative in form, even if procreation was not actually possible. It turns out ‘procreative’ is not nearly as determinative as is purported.

On the first appearance of this argument, by the Athenian in Plato’s The Laws, we know sex is naturally procreative because animals only ever engage in procreative sex. This at least gave a realm to provide a benchmark – nature. But it fails on two grounds. First, because it turns out we are highly selective on which bits of the realm of the natural we choose to take as normative (nature being ‘red in tooth and claw’ remember). Our authority is not nature at all, but the criteria by which we pick and choose.

Second, because it is flatly not true that animals do not engage in homosexual activity and bonding. Indeed, in one of our closest primate relatives (bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees) same-sex bonding is central to their social arrangements, to the extent that there seems to have been selection in favour of more prominent clitori to promote female-female erotic bonding.

It is also flatly not true that procreation is the defining function of sex. Sex is also used for pleasure, express intimacy, catharsis, bonding, favours, etc. That something starts off with a particular function does not mean that remains its defining function. Look at your hand: it was once a fin and used to move our distant ancestors through water. We now use our hands for many things: hands have a defining form but not a defining function (a hand, for example, hits, carries and signals). Natural law theory ultimately rests on a “everything was created for a specific purpose” notion of reality which is simply false.

To claim that procreation is the defining function of sex is not to find one’s norms in the nature of things, it is, in the normal natural law style, to use one’s norms to define the nature of something. It is choosing which function to focus on.

And it is to do so by presuming far too much knowledge, to put far too much confidence in our direct apprehension of reality. Consider masturbation: natural law theory holds that it is a non-procreative use of sexual organs, so immoral. But suppose masturbation before sex clears out dead sperm and makes a male more likely to be fertile while masturbation after sex promotes ovulation and makes a female more likely to conceive. Does masturbation then serve a procreative role or not? The problem is, even on a procreation-only view of sex, without scientific study, we cannot tell. Our direct apprehension of reality is nowhere near good enough to bear the weight natural law theory insists it does.

The essential irrelevance of the mechanics of sex
If having children is not a defining function of marriage, then we do not need to enquire into the mechanics of the sexual arrangements between married persons. We can presume there is likely to be sexual bonding and intimacy within the marriage. But we do not have to enquire into the mechanics.

Now, historically, it is true that consummation (as in penile-vaginal coitus) was required for a legal marriage. (Well, it was required if either partner made a fuss about it.) But this was because the law explicitly incorporated the Christian natural law conception of marriage: it incorporated it for religious reasons. If one enquires into the history of the Christianisation of marriage, however, we find that it was a matter of genuine debate within the Church whether a marriage needed consummation to be a valid marriage. It was decided, ultimately, that it was but it was not taken to be “self-evident” that this was true. Now, on the authors’ take on marriage, this is completely mysterious. On my definition of marriage, it is not.

Which goes back to my original question. How do we know? If we cannot find our “proper” marriage by enquiring into marital arrangements across human societies, how to we know what are “proper” marriage and what a purported-but-not marriages? The authors propose a definition, but anyone can do that. My definition has a test – examining the range of marital arrangements across human societies. Their definition has no such test. Referring to historical practice within Christianised marriage law, or the pronouncements of philosophers within the natural law tradition, merely tests the theory with itself.

A small polygamy problem
The problems with the authors’ approach becomes clear when they get to the “what about polygamy?” move:

Revisionists often capture this point with a question: “How would gay marriage affect you or your marriage?” It is worth noting, question could be turned back on revisionists who oppose legally recognizing, for example, polyamorous unions: How would doing so affect anyone else’s marriage? If this kind of question is decisive against the conjugal view’s constraints on which unions to recognize, it cuts equally against the revisionist’s.

Actually, that is almost ludicrously easy to answer. Allowing marriage to be between more than two people immediately, in a monogamous legal marriage culture, changes the terms of every existing marriage since it opens up the possibility of one or more people being added to it. This is obviously not true from legally recognising same-sex relationships or legalising same-sex marriage. Moreover, allowing polygamous marriage allows richer or otherwise advantaged folk to grab more of the available spouses. (An effect almost guaranteed to work unevenly between the sexes.) Again, legalizing same-sex marriage does not have this effect: on the contrary, it extends, rather than restricts, the benefits of marriage.

But then, I am arguing from a facts-first perspective rather than a “normative” “only convenient facts count” perspective. So I don’t need to worry about whether definitions do my work for me. For the ones with the problem barring polygamy are the authors themselves. Marriage has to be monogamous because:

Such a union can be achieved by two and only two because no single act can organically unite three or more people at the bodily level or, therefore, seal a comprehensive union of three or more lives at other levels.

But, on their own argument, penile-vaginal coitus only has to happen once for the union to be comprehensive in the essential way to satisfy their definition. So, clearly, a husband can be comprehensively united with several wives. (Or, for that matter, a wife with several husbands depending on whether we are talking of polygyny or polyandry.) Their notion that the Bible is lying, or is metaphysically mistaken, when it refers to ‘Solomon’s wives’ is patent nonsense: particularly as Solomon’s wives did not marry each other, they married Solomon. The authors’ argument against polygamy, that it is not “real marriage”, simply fails.

Clearly, the authors’ do not want to permit polygamy: but to claim that polygamy is not marriage demonstrates that they are trying to get mere definition to do far too much. For if polygamous marriages are, indeed, marriages according to the essential features identified by the authors’ definitive definition, then their definition of marriage does not provide a definitive legal guide. For there become marriages which have the declared essential features but, nevertheless, are not to be legally recognized. You see their little problem?

The authors’ solution that permitting polygamy is a metaphysical, and thus moral, mistake does not work—after all, did we ever think Solomon’s wives married each other? Of course not: hence the issue of bodily unions between them never came up and is not relevant to their marital status. The authors’ rather desperate move comes from trying to get far too little to do far too much. That the authors’ fail to distinguish between group marriage (where three or more people marry each other) and polygamous marriage (where one person marries two or more others) is very unimpressive. It is, however, a revealing obtuseness: revealing of their ludicrous over-confidence in what definitions can do.

Using one’s conclusion to determine the range of one’s premises is a great way to rationalise desired conclusions: it has nothing to do with the truth, moral or otherwise. Same-sex marriage is not a “definitional mistake”. And the nature of marriage makes it a suitable vehicle for raising children, not the other way around. Defining marriage is not the end of the moral debate, it is the beginning of it and thinking that the correct definition resolves such debate is a sign of what is wrong with your thinking, not what is right with it.

Rhetoric matters

2012-01-09T14:54:00.002+11:00

US Presidents generally fulfill, or seek to fulfill, their campaign promises (via):

Michael Krukones in Promises and Performance: Presidential Campaigns as Policy Predictors (1984) established that about 75 percent of the promises made by presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Jimmy Carter were kept. In Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance (1985), Jeff Fishel looked at campaigns from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan. What he found was that presidents invariably attempt to carry out their promises; the main reason some pledges are not redeemed is congressional opposition, not presidential flip-flopping. Similarly, Gerald Pomper studied party platforms, and discovered that the promises parties made were consistent with their postelection agendas. More recent and smaller-scale papers have confirmed the main point: presidents’ agendas are clearly telegraphed in their campaigns.

Or, to put it another way, what Presidential candidates say as candidates is generally what you get as Presidents.

Sure, we remember broken political promises (generally, more than kept ones) but a President is generally going to do (or seek to do) as they promise. So, paying attention to what Presidential candidates say on the campaign trail is a very good idea.

Which is good news for democracy-as-voter-power. What candidates tell the voters is what they will (mostly) do if elected. The implicit contract with the voters (if you elect me I will do X) has genuine power. Indeed, a study of how members of Congress behave indicate just how much power:

What he has found is that representatives and senators see every election as a cycle that begins in the campaign, when they make promises to their constituents. Then, if they win, they interpret how those promises will constrain them once they’re in office. Once in Washington, Fenno’s politicians act with two things in mind: how their actions match the promises they’ve made in the previous campaign; and how they will be able to explain those actions when they return to their district. Representation “works,” then, because politicians are constantly aware that what they do in Washington will have to be explained to their constituents, and that it will have to be explained in terms of their original promises.

No wonder Americans generally like their local representative even as they dislike Congress. Their local representative is far more likely to try to do what they want than Congress as a whole.

The deeper question is why? Why are politicians from the President down so fixated on their political promises?

To which the simplest answer is: that there is an implicit contract, an exchange, a transaction, going on between candidate and voters. The exchange is votes-for-promises. In offering this exchange a politician faces various dangers: insufficient promise-credibility (insufficient, that is, to offer voters something worth their votes); misdirected promises (not what the voters want to be offered); misguided promises (not the consequences voters wanted when enacted). Acting as if promises matter signals credibility and so keeps the politician in the exchange-for-votes game.

And, since they are all in that game, it becomes a crucial currency with each other as well as the voters. They do promises trade-offs because that gives them win-wins--they give each other credibility. A clever politician offers specific promises so they can "horse-trade": they can help other politicians keep their promises without breaking their own. Which means politicians with congruent promises will tend to work together and those with contradictory promises will tend not to.

But they are not only signalling to voters, they are also signalling to their activists, staff and subordinates. This applies particularly strongly to Presidents, who have to signal to an entire Administration. The notion of "secret" channels of communication successfully hermetically sealed from public communication is deeply implausible (especially in such an open society as the US) and hardly any more functional, given the need to interact with other office-holders.

So, what you see is (mostly) what you get because the key communications are public. True, there is some talking in "code" (in phrases which resonate in particular ways with particular groups) but it is a "code" embedded in public speech. Rhetoric matters because it is crucial to the signalling that is so much the stuff of politics.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied]

A dramatic contrast in civility

2012-01-07T14:44:00.001+11:00

Glen Greenwald (who is not remotely a supporter of Ron Paul), puts his Presidential candidacy in a striking context (via). I often disagree with Greenwald, but this is a wholly admirable essay. One quote provides the flavour (though I urge you to read the entire essay):

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

In dramatic contrast is Seumus Milne in the Guardian, who rails against any notion that Margaret Thatcher was a great leader, worthy of a state funeral (the lady is not dead yet: the psychology of his chosen subject matter says something methinks). He finds nothing admirable in her career or Premiership.

Now, Milne has made a career of being self-righteously wrong and his judgement about Thatcher is of a piece with this. He is a walking stereotype (of the narrow-minded, morally purblind Graudinadinista) who preaches to the converted. Greenwald is far more intellectually serious, in part because he is far more morally serious. He considers where Milne merely manifests.

(On the matter of those Ron Paul newsletters, Steve Horowitz says what needs to be said [via]. Matt Stoller's essay on Ron Paul's challenge to US liberalism is, as Glen Greenwald says, also worth reading.)

Perhaps one way to make political civility more attractive is to point out that it is smarter. Milne has never convinced me of anything and I never bother to read him except as a manifestation of everything that is wrong with the "anti-imperialist" Western left. Even when he annoys me, Greenwald is at least worth engaging with and his essay on Ron Paul is a splendid example of why.

[Crossp-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

The practical choice

2012-01-06T13:14:00.002+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

What people fail to notice about the "traditional" view of marriage as being people of the opposite sex is that it was an imposed tradition.

First, lots of cultures and societies have recognised versions of same-sex marriage: the social form is a great deal older than people realise. This extends to Roman law.

Second, if you ban such marriages (as the early Christian emperors did) and then kill (i.e. judicially murder) people who engage in same-sex activity then same-sex marriage is precluded. Given the reality of human sexual diversity, such brutality is needed to maintain the "tradition" in any society with some form of moral universalism. Take away the (necessary) enforcing brutality and, given the reality of human sexual diversity, the want to settle down together with legal support will re-assert itself. In a morally universalist society, there is no stable rest point in the middle. You either buy into the (thoroughly utopian) endless repression of sexual diversity or accept equal protection of the law: that is the practical choice.

Agitation for same-sex marriage is not a manifestation of modern "decadence", it is a manifestation of modern decency.

Born in misogyny

2012-01-05T14:45:00.007+11:00

Arab Spring or Islamist Winter? is the title of a new piece (behind subscription wall) by Michael Totten.

The Islamist surge is not good for the region's women. Monotheism has a long history of misogyny. The Islamist revival manifests particularly intense versions of this.

The Arab Spring was sparked by the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. While there is no doubt about the desperation of the act, nor the grievances (including much petty, and-not-so-petty corruption) which made it resonate, there is another aspect which is notable. In the words of Wikipedia(tm):

Regardless, Bouazizi's family claims he was publicly humiliated when a 45-year-old female municipal official, Faida Hamdi, slapped him in the face, spat at him, confiscated his electronic weighing scales, and tossed aside his produce cart. It was also stated that she made a slur against his deceased father. Bouazizi's family says her gender made his humiliation worse. His mother also claimed Hamdi's aides beat and swore at her son. Countering these claims, in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, a brother of Hamdi claimed neither his sister nor her aides slapped or otherwise mistreated Bouazizi. He said they only confiscated Bouazizi's wares. However, an eyewitness told Asharq Al-Awsat that he did not see Hamdi slap Bouazizi, but that her aides did beat him.

Being humiliated by female authority made it that much worse, apparently.

There is a powerful historical resonance here. So much of the Islamist revival is a revolt against modernity, with female empowerment being at the heart of what is being rebelled against, what is found to be so repellent about modernity. In a region where power is concentrated in the barracks and the mosque--both bastions of male power--women, even more than its other residents, are stuck between mosque and military and the pervasive misogyny that links and surrounds both.

UPDATE But many Tunisian women are willing to stand up against using dress to publicly control and restrict women.

Patterns of monotheism

2012-01-02T13:04:00.004+11:00

Monotheism typically both universalises morality—on the grounds that we are all children of God, all part of the same moral order—and subverts it—by exempting various categories of people, in whole or in part, from moral protections. This subversion itself has persistent tendencies: for example, in matters of sex and gender so that women are typically denied authority, and otherwise constrained (especially by stripping them of control over fertility), while anyone who falls outside of the binary equating of sex-and-gender is subject to varying degrees of denigration, brutality and repression.

Another persistent tendency within monotheism has been a suspicion of pleasure, as diverting attention from God. (This clearly overlaps with its sex-and-gender patterns.) A third has been a strong tendency to the policing of thought and belief.

A common feature in all this is that monotheism has a strong tendency to generate an enormous sense of entitlement in its adherents: a sense of entitlement very much reflected in the various subversions of morality noted above.

An event which brought together many of these tendencies—self-righteous brutality, misogyny, policing thought and belief—was the notorious murder of Hypatia in Alexandria in 415 (whose life and death has recently been the subject of a biopic.)

Almost 1600 years later, and Egypt is going through a monotheist revival where many of these patterns are once again on display. Philosopher Stephen Hicks has drawn attention to the Hypatia comparison. The recent destruction-by-arson of the L’Institut d’Egypte represents an act of destruction—of profound vandalism against truth and scholarship—that both illustrates V. S. Naipaul point that Islamic imperialism is the most alienating and pervasive of all imperialisms, since it alienates those conquered or absorbed by Islam from their own past, and fits in with a wider pattern with monotheism. (For example, the Portuguese destruction of the records of the Thomasine Christians.)

The destruction by arson of the L’Institut d’Egypte and its hundreds of thousands of documents is an attack on scholarship and truth that has gone largely unremarked in the Western media (though the blogosphere has paid more attention): possibly in part because it contradicts various consoling narratives about Islam and about popular revolutions.

The problem with integrating Islam into Western societies (and global societies more generally) is not that it displays patterns not seen elsewhere. It is that commitment within Islam to enduring patterns of monotheism is still so robust (as, for example, Gaza Christians are discovering under the rule of Hamas). As Mark Durie points out this Islamic robustness, and that the robustness is increasing rather than decreasing, is no accident but rests on decades of painstaking grass-roots Islamic activism.

But it easier for such subversion of morality to be so robust in Islam as mainstream Islam has historically been so limited in its universalising of moral protections and so systematic and entrenched in its subversion of morality. But this does not put it outside the patterns of monotheism: far from it.

Don’t reason from a trade balance

2011-12-31T13:43:00.002+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

The idea of the Euro was simple—a Deutschmark for everyone who signed up. With Deutschmark interest rates for everyone. And it worked, for a while.

But it married together different political economies. The PIGS countries relied on competitive devaluations to compensate for their institutional failings. Germany had long accepted the institutional demands of a "hard" currency (think Ludwig Erhard's "bonfire of the regulations").

Germany and co are net exporters because they have the institutional back-up to be competitive given the value of the Euro (especially within the Eurozone): the PIGS countries are net importers because they do not. Which is fine if you have the future productive capacity (and current debt-servicing income) to back up the required importing of capital. But they don't because of the ECB's tight money/low income growth policy's effect on their current income and their institutional failings on their future productive capacity. It comes back to institutional differences (common currency bad) and current income (ECB monetary policy bad). The sovereign debt/financial crisis (lender of last resort needed) is a product of the interaction of ECB policy with institutional differences and failings. With different countries suffering different levels of intersection of these problems.

Scott Sumner warns to not reason from a price change: perhaps people should not reason from a trade balance either.

The atavism of totalitarianism

2011-12-27T11:33:00.013+11:00

The term ‘totalitarian’ was originally coined by Mussolini: ironic, since Fascist Italy was not a totalitarian state. Most land, industry and commerce was privately owned; the monarchy persisted; the army remained very much the Royal Army; the Catholic Church retained its schools: the alleged totalitarianism was, like so much of Fascist Italy, surface bravado with considerably less substance behind it. The Fascist project was ultimately a limited one of Italian “national greatness”, however usefully defined. Without a truly transformational project to direct it, the Fascist Party-State ruled what it surveyed but its control extended only as far as the project required, which was not all that far into the enduring structures of society.

The Nazi project—of a racially-purified Greater Deutschland ruling, as the Reich of the master race, over a vast lebensraum empire—was far more transformational, so the Nazi Party-State was far more totalitarian than its Italian Fascist precursor. The title of Thousand Year Reich was itself millenarian. Even so, German capitalism was dominated and directed, but not abolished. The Nazi project did not require the complete transformation of society, so the totalitarian urge did not go all the way.

The Leninist project of an absolutely “equal” society free of “exploitation” did require the complete transformation of society. The more absolute the commitment to equality of outcome, the more thorough the social transformation required, the more totalitarian was the result: hence North Korea under the Kim Family Regime and Enver Hoxha’s Albania being the most totalitarian of societies.

Italian Fascism and Nazism both used Lenin’s model of total politics: politics that acknowledged no limits in ambit and means. Mussolini’s great operational insight was to so quickly perceive that Lenin’s model of politics could be harnessed to other political projects: though Lenin's own project was a failure:

Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

Mussolini's strategic insight was that the collectivism of nation was much more socially resonant than that of class. As he stated:

We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article which only the elevated can practise, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.

As Lenin’s model of total politics was politics acknowledging no limits, the only limit was set by the nature of the project it was harnessed to. Hence, the animating project determined the level of totalitarianism of the various regimes.

What is striking is the atavism of all three projects. The atavism of Fascism and (even more so) Nazism was obvious. Both extolled heroic virtues in revolt against the bourgeois virtues of capitalist modernity, so looked back to previous ages—the Roman Empire in the case of Fascism; mythic Teutonic history in the case of Nazism. Ironically, both were modernising revolts against modernity. Both used cutting edge political and propaganda techniques for their atavistic projects.* Since the Nazi project was so much grander, it was far more modernising in its effects than Fascism.

But the equalitarian urge is also an atavistic one. It is a revolt against the dynamism, the complexity, the uncertainty of modernity. A society of equality of outcome is a much simpler society than one where the discovery processes of commerce—seeking new things to sell, seeking new people to sell them to—operate far more freely. This simplicity is no accident. Given the multi-dimensional nature of equality, the more thorough the equality sought, the more social dimensions have to controlled or blocked. This is a process of eliminating complexity; so freedom, dynamism and other drivers of modernity.

But it is also a process of massive centralisation of power, so a process of profound inequality. Not merely the massive power inequality between those being equalised and those doing the equalising but also the profound status inequality between those with the moral and cognitive insight to determine the supreme purpose, and to know how to carry it out, and those upon whom that insight is inflicted.

Which creates an elite whose profound insight sets it apart from the ordinary run of humanity. (The ardent partisans of “equality” in other societies often have a profound sense of their own moral and cognitive superiority.) The logic of greater insight and profound centralisation of power inherently tends to anointing a Great Leader of more than ordinary human insight: the Great Intermediary between society and the underlying true drivers of History and Society. Which is profoundly atavistic: a ruler who directs and controls the social surplus while acting on behalf of (a substitute for) the divine. The over-the-top praise offered up to Pharaoh, or a Khmer Universal King or similar has its exact analogue to that offered up to the Great Leader of Leninist (and particularly Stalinist) societies. In the case of the Hereditary Stalinism of North Korea under the Kim Family Regime, this extends to hagiographic stories of their supernatural birth.

It is an indicator of the power of such atavisms, of the appeal of a sense of profoundly greater moral and cognitive perspicacity and how intellectuals often understand so much less than they think, that such profoundly atavistic projects have been so often passed off (though, thankfully, much less as time goes on as their failure becomes ever more obvious) as the cutting edge of history.

* The similar atavism of the jihadis, with their violent extolling of C7th Arabia as the pinnacle of human social and political understanding is equally obvious. The term 'Islamofascism' captures some important similarities between Nazism, Fascism and the salafists--such as the atavism, the extolling of violence and heroic virtues, the unlimited ambit of politics, being a modernising revolt against modernity.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

ADDENDA: This post has been adjusted somewhat for style without any change in the argument. I also added the footnote about the jihadis.

FURTHER The "human shield" rhetoric of the North Korean regime reinforces its atavism.

The Civilization of Angkor (2)

2011-12-26T13:35:00.008+11:00

This is the second part of my review of Charles Higham’s The Civilization of Angkor. The first part is in my previous post.

"Sun Kings"
Jayavarman IV, the son of Indravarman’s daughter Mahendradevi who married his aunt, Jayadevi, half-sister of Yashovarman, took power. He built a rival centre at Chok Gargyar/Lingapura from whence he ruled. Higham provides statistics that illustrate the enormous scale of construction under these various rulers. Jayavarman IV was succeeded by his son Harshavarman II, whose brief rule was marked by conflict. He was succeeded by Rajendravarman, his uncle and first cousin, who moved the capital back to Yashodharapura (Pp70ff).

Inscriptions tell of the power and authority of provincial leaders, preceded by eulogies to the king. Acts of merit were delineated. Land boundaries and taxes in kind are set out: the latter usually rice, but also other goods of use to the court. Temple foundations included having assigned workers (Pp76ff). That this was a form of bondage is expressed by an inscription stating that a worker born in such temple lands had escaped and, when caught, had his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed, his family being exclusively assigned to the temple (p.79). In the aristocratic families, headship would pass down to sister’s son (p.84).

This was system based on a court with central officials, regional officers and aristocratic landholding families, often descended from supporters of founding ruler Jayavarman II and who intermarried with the royal dynasty. The administrative hierarchy tended to get more complex over time. The king stood at the apex of a legal system that was used by the elite to resolve disputes (typically over land). The service of “slaves” (those with various levels of bonded service) was sold or exchanged. Reservoirs, channels and canals were constructed. Temple foundations, with assigned land and workers, were a major part of the surplus extraction-and-use system. The last king in the first dynasty of Angkor, Jayavarman V, came to the throne as a 10 year old boy: after a period of regency arrangements, he took the throne in his own right. At his death, there was a prolonged civil war that brought a new dynasty to power (Pp79 ff).

Weaving through inscriptions setting out the (contradictory) stated histories of aristocratic families provides some glimpse into a period of civil war and competing kingships which was brought to an emphatic ritual end in 1011 when Suryavarman I held a great ceremony of allegiance where a large number of officials swore undying allegiance and service. The period of civil war seems to have been highly destructive and disruptive and be followed by much re-building (including starting the largest of the baray at Angkor) and widespread assertion of rights over land. His successor Udayadityavarman II was also an extensive builder, though his reign was marked by insurrections. In 1066, Udayadityavarman II was succeeded by his brother Harshavarman III, before another dynasty took the throne (Pp91ff).

A new dynasty
In 1080, Jayavarman VI was ritually enthroned, first of a new dynasty of rulers (ancestors of the current royal family) who seems to have come from the upper Mun valley (in modern Thailand). Inscriptions continue to record land grants and other favours to supporting families and donations to temple foundations. One such inscription records that the land purchased and donated was purchased with cattle, silver, bronze and tin vessels, gold rings, cloth, elephants, vehicles, salt, rice and goats. The donor also gifted workers and built a reservoir (Pp110-2).

Jayavarman VI was succeeded by his brother Dharanindravarman I c.1108, who appears to have been a somewhat ineffectual ruler. He was overthrown and killed by his grand-nephew Suryavarman II who was ritually consecrated in 1113 and set about re-uniting the empire, accepting submissions and building on a monumental. He was the builder of Angkor Wat, which makes him one of the great builder-rulers of history. Higham takes us through the enormous scale of the construction and the labour resources it must have taken (Pp107ff).

Suryavarman II’s reign was followed by a series of short reigns, internal strife and a devastating Cham invasion that included a sack of Angkor. The ruler who defeated the Cham and re-unified the Khmer empire was Jayavarman VII, the greatest of the Khmer ruler-builders, the builder of Angkor Thom and the Bayon. His massive building effort was a particular boon for scholars since he covered his buildings with carved battle and life scenes rather than mythological ones. From the pinnacle of his success he also showered his guru with extensive gifts. The inscriptions reveal the scale of some of the temple foundations (Pp120ff). One had:

Eighteen high priests and 2740 officials lived and worked there, together with 2202 assistants, which included 615 female dancers. In total, 12,640 people had the right to lodge within. Feeding and clothing this multitude involved the provision of rice, honey, molasses, oil, fruit, sesame, millet, beans, butter, milk, salt and vegetables, all these quantities being scrupulously listed for appropriation from the royal foundations and warehouses. Clothing was also required, and even the number of mosquito nets is set down. Assigned to supply the temple were 66,265 men and women, a figure rising to 79,365 if you include Burmese and Chams. The inscription then provides an inventory of the foundation’s assets: gold and silver vessels; 35 diamonds; 40,620 pearls; 4540 precious stones such a beryl; copper goblets; tin; lead; 512 silk beds; 876 veils from China; cushions; and 523 sunshades. There were musical instruments to ‘charm the spirit’ and, with nightfall or for rituals, there were 165,744 wax torches (Pp126-7).

All sustained by an empire built on a barter economy, without any coinage.

An empire that provided healthcare. The foundation was responsible for 102 hospitals (each of which had two doctors and their assistants, two dispensary workers, two cooks, water heaters, specialists in preparing medicines and other attendants, including those who prepared offerings to the Buddha) across the kingdom, to which 81,640 men and women from 838 villages were assigned to supply with rice, clothing, honey, wax and fruit: supplies which included 1960 boxes of salve to ease haemorrhoids (p.127). Another temple had 5324 villages housing 97,840 people assigned to its services (including 1000 dancers). Jayavarman VII was also recorded to have constructed 121 rest houses for travellers (p.129). How much his building program was continued by his successor Indravarman II is unclear. Like his father, he did display a preference for Buddhism. His successor, Jayavarman VIII, whose reign began in 1243, was an ardent Shivaite who destroyed or transformed “every image of the Buddha he could lay his hands on”. He was replaced in a palace coup by his son-in-law Indravarman III in 1295-6(p.133).

In 1296, the Chinese commercial attaché Zhou Daguan visited the Khmer realm. The surviving volumes of his journals are the only surviving contemporary description of the Khmer Empire, which Higham summarises. His descriptions included reference to female palace guards. Higham points out that his description of a royal procession in 1296 was very similar to that from 1901 (Pp134ff).

Diminishing evidence
After Zhou Daguan archaeologists rely on a small and diminishing number of inscriptions. Various rulers ascended the throne, of whom we know little. The last Sanskrit inscription dates from 1327: the high quality of the verse suggests that scholarship was still thriving (p.139). Warfare became endemic as the power of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya increased in power—to the extent of sacking Angkor in 1430-1 after a long siege. Many statues of Buddha were moved to Ayutthaya. When it was sacked by the Burmese in 1569, they were taken to Pegu and then, in 1734, to Mandalay, where they can still be seen. The capital of Cambodia moved back to the Mekong valley, from whence it had moved seven centuries earlier, and Angkor Thom reverted to jungle (p.140).

Around 1600, the Portugese began to report legends of a rediscovered city, which was discovered by Europeans over the next few centuries: a process interrupted by war and Cambodia’s appalling late C20th history (Pp140ff).

The civilisation in summary
Higham concludes with a summary chapter on the civilisation of Angkor. He reprises the sequence by which the civilisation arose: the prehistoric Iron Age; the Delta state (150-550); state formation in the Mekong Valley (550-800); the capital at Angkor (800-1432). Higham notes that:

It is very difficult to pin down the status of the workers. Some could be bought and sold, some were war captives, while others may well have been in service to members of a noble family for generations and were assigned to develop a new foundation. Tied labour was not unusual in South-East Asia. As recently as the Ayutthaya period in Thailand, which ended in the eighteenth century, workers were tattooed to record their assigned place of work and to maintain a stable workforce (p.152).

His summary is an excellent consideration, showing a fine sense of what is, and is not, in the evidence (Pp 143ff).

High concludes with a comparison of Angkor with other “archaic states” (Pp162-6). Particularly in revealing the processes of state formation:

Robert Carniero, for example, has advanced six conditions for the emergence of a state from preceding chiefdoms. They revolve round the power to defeat neighbours and incorporate them in a larger polity; the power to enslave prisoners; the power to take tribute; the ability to provide a corps of fighting men; and ability to place supporters in control over conquered territory. There is considerable support for these propositions in recent instances of state formation assembled by Kent Flannery. The ritual and physical control of trade is a further variable, which recurs in many cases, while Henry Wright has noted how early stages in state formation are characterised by ‘chiefly recycling’: the ebb and flow of social complexity before the transition to the state has occurred. (Pp162-3).

There are also questions of patterns of expansion and contraction in state power.

Higham notes that rice, strong draught animals and iron technology are obvious differences with the jungle civilisations of Mesoamerica, but that there were considerable other similarities. There is also the issue of what role irrigation and water control played in state formation:

A further widespread feature of early trends towards state formation is the existence of drainage and agricultural improvement to maintain the loyalty of followers (p.164).

As trade, and so the Delta, declined, the shift in power towards the riverine flood plains saw:

two diametrically opposing forces at work. The first involved high chiefs, overlords or kings attempting to control land and labour through force and the projection of a sacred persona. This was offset by other local leaders pursuing independence and their own push for regional hegemony (p.164).

That looks like the same process to me—the struggle to control surplus (production beyond subsistence). Hence the cyclic rise and fall of overlords: a process that, as Higham notes, was also seen in the Near East the Americas.

As part of this process:

One does not need to look far to find evidence for growing social inequality. The very names are sufficient evidence; on the one hand, the Sanskrit title of the king meaning protégé of the great Indra, and on the other hand, workers with Khmer names meaning dog, stinker, black monkey and arse (p.164).

Which raises the question of what role successful kings played, what was their authority based on? He notes one scholar’s recent analysis that Mayan rulers were not much concerned with intensifying agriculture or trade beyond that which supported what they did care about—playing out and demonstrating their role as intermediaries with the divine. Higham holds there is insufficient evidence to support royal control of irrigation as being central to royal power and authority, which suggests more the role of divine intermediary: a suggestion that the scale and form of architecture, and the content of many inscriptions, support. None of which abolished the need to control distant provinces and protect borders: something the rulers of Angkor did with varying success.

But with enough success to produce seven centuries of rulership and dramatic construction which continues to be deeply symbolic to modern Cambodia.

Approaching an unfamiliar civilisation
The Khmer Empire, the civilisation of Angkor, is unfamiliar to most Western readers. In considering an unfamiliar civilisation, there are helpful questions to consider. For example, what is like, or unlike, other civilisations? For example, I am struck by the lack of fortifications: there were a few walled cities, but there seems to have been very limited use of fortification. This is in stark contrast to the Buddhist lands of the Tibetan cultural region, where fortified dzongs, palaces and monasteries are the dominant form of architecture.

But in the dry and cold Himalayan highlands, it is easy to store food for long periods and very hard to either “live off the land” or otherwise supply forces to sustain a siege. The geography also generates strategic “choke points”. Fortification is a very cost-effective strategy. In the hot, humid, teeming-with-life plains of Khmer civilisation, storing food for lengthy periods would be more difficult, sustaining a siege, or even just avoiding fortified points, much easier. Fortification is a much less cost-effective strategy. Walling one’s capital is about as far as it would be worth going.

Nor did it develop a self-aware horse-mounted warrior class such as the azadan of Zoroastrian Iran, the knights of Latin Christendom, or the samurai of Japan. This was in no useful sense a “medieval” society. On the contrary, it was a classical autocracy.

The centralised control, the monumental architecture, the importance of temples and religious institutions, the lack of coinage, means the civilisation of Angkor has a lot of overlap with Pharonic Egypt. Which also works in reverse: the similarities and differences then reflect back on one’s understanding of the civilisations that are more familiar.

Ironically, there is one aspect of medieval Latin Christendom which does seem to have an analogue in the Khmer Empire, the institution of serfdom. Scholars of Khmer history seem to have difficulty understanding how many graduations in forms of human bondage there can be between outright chattel slavery and freedom: something medieval scholars could explain quite readily.

The civilisation of Angkor was one capable of enormous and sustained building projects, with complex economic activity, including trade in assets, that had no coins. It was a barter economy. It had various mediums of exchange, various stores of value but, as far as we can see, no single unit of account. Certainly no medium of account: so no money in any useful sense of the term. A useful corrective example to presumptions and congenial “just so” stories about money: only one way in which studying Khmer civilisation is enlightening. Particularly in such a comprehensive and useful text as Higham’s The Civilisation of Angkor provides.

The Civilization of Angkor (1)

2011-12-24T15:00:00.006+11:00

Charles Higham’s The Civilization of Angkor is very much focussed on the rise, achievement and decline of the civilisation of Angkor: of what led to the creation of the amazing constructions of Angkor. As Higham writes, the book:

sets the supreme architectural achievement of the civilization of Angkor in its historic context (p.4).

Higham precedes his narrative with a timeline interposing events from Anglo history with Khmer history from 2300BC to 1600AD—so 410, the year of the Roman abandonment of Britain, becomes “the fall of the Western Roman Empire” (Pp xiii ff).

We start with the European discovery of the ruins of Angkor, their amazement on the scale, the lack of belief that they were created by the local Khmer people and the contemporary (1296) report of the Chinese visitor Zhou Daguan (Pp1ff). Higham then provides a general description of Angkor:

Angkor is the name conventionally given to the cities and the associated monuments that lie between the Tonle Sap and the associated monuments that lie between the Tonle Sap and the Kulen Hills. The name derives from the Sanskrit nagara, meaning ‘holy city’ (p.4).

New temples were built there for seven centuries or more from about AD 700 (and included a reservoir 8km x 2.5km).

As Higham notes:

Illuminating an extinct civilization is a demanding and challenging endeavour … This is particularly the case for the Western scholar where the civilizatioin of Angkor is concerned, because the people, the religion, the environment, indeed virtually all aspects of its life and culture are alien (Pp4,6).

The sequence leading up to the establishment of Angkor Higham sets out as being Iron Age (starting 500BC), the formation of the earliest state around AD 150 in the Mekong Delta which declined “due largely to changing trade patterns” (p.6), then several rulerships competing for power AD 550-800 culminating in the establishment of the Angkor royal centre.

Rulership in context
To put this process in wider context, Higham examines three key questions:

What is a state, how does it come into being, and how is it maintained (p.6)?

Higham provides a brief summary of anthropological understanding of chiefdoms:

in which leaders dominate a social web where individuals are related by kinshipo [which]… usually involve a central settlement in which the chief resides, and one or two categories of smaller, dependent settlements. The chief is usually distinguished by symbols of status, and will often be accorded elaborate mortuary rites (p.6).

From these evolve states in which:

although kinship ties remain, people are also identified by their class within a complex social network … one comprising the ruling elite. The royal tier will usually be accorded a divine origin and the ability to communicate with the gods. There are four levels of settlement hierarchy from the capital down through provincial settlements to villages. The king will live in a palace, and play an important role in rituals. His court absorbs surplus production from a much larger sustaining area than in a chiefdom, and high-ranking members of the court are recognized by special titles, offices and symbols of status. The regulation of labour and the appropriation of surplus production is essential in the support of the administrative machinery for an enforceable legal system, an army, full-time priests and state temples (Pp6-7).

In other words, a state is a chiefdom on steroids, while a chiefdom is a proto-state. Both are about rulership and control of surplus, but a state operates on a greater scale that involves considerably greater social complexity.

To illustrate the processes by which a state can evolve from chiefdoms, Higham goes through the C18th-C19th history of the Yao people of Malawi as:

the recorded course of their development is so similar to what we think might have occurred in the Mekong Delta (p.7).

The Yao started off in villages where a group of sisters appointed their oldest living brother as village headmen. These villages rarely exceeded 50-60 people as:

this social system encouraged young aspiring leaders to leave and found their own settlement (p.7).

Contact with Arab traders seeking ivory and slaves in exchange for beads, cloth and metal wire radically changed this. As the headman traditionally managed trade and distributed its benefits, an upsurge in trade increased their standing while the demand for slaves “engendered much tension among the Yao and their neighbours”. Male slaves were sold, female slaves increased the headman’s retinue:

The transition from village headman to great chief was swift, happening in the space of half a life span. As the emerging chiefs expanded their domains and increased their power through trading for guns, so they adopted the exotic manners and customs of the Arab traders. This enhanced their prestige in the eyes of their followers. Some accepted Islam, and changed their names … They began to use Arab writing to keep their records. As towns developed from villages, it became necessary to grow more food, and irrigation was brought to their fields (p.8).

Swap Islam for Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, swap Arabic for Sanskrit, and this looks remarkably what happened in the Mekong Delta: including that the process was chosen by the headmen, not imposed from outside.

Prehistory
Higham examines the process of Indianisation, and the key ideas of Hinduism (Pp9-11). Followed by the role of rice (Pp11-12). As he notes:

States are fuelled by the energy supplied by agricultural surpluses (p.11).

Having summarised the key issues, Higham moves onto the prehistoric periods in South-East Asia (2300BC-AD 400) (Pp13ff).

Archaeology is beginning to greatly expand our understanding of prehistoric South-East Asia. These societies:

were vigorous and powerful. They engaged in distant maritime exchange, and their leaders organized large-scale water control measures. They maintained specialized bronze and iron workshops, and were recognized in death with rich burials, which would include gold and silver jewellery and hundreds of bronze ornaments (p.13).

Rice farmers and farming arrived in the region about 4300 years ago, setting in train the normal supplanting of foragers and foraging. As Higham notes:

The pathway to civilization required the energy provided by rice agriculture … the adaptability of this marsh grass, its nutritional value especially when it is consumed with fish, the degree to which the landscape can be modified to expand it production, and the relative ease with which it can be stored. Rice is the solid rock on which South-East Asian civilizations were founded (p.14).

Higham takes us through the interaction between human society and geography (including the importance of the monsoon), the development of the local Bronze Age (1500-500BC), helped by good local supplies of tin, and then the Iron Age:

the Iron Age ancestors of Angkor lived in large communities in which some individuals, both men and women, were interred with opulent grave goods and much ritual. Iron was employed not only to increase agricultural efficiency but to forge weapons of war. Salt processing reached an industrial scale; specialists were able to produce for their leaders outstanding ceramic vessels and ornaments of bronze, glass, gold, silver, carnelian and agate. There was increased competition and conflict, as skilled and intrepid navigators engaged in international trade. Iron Age chiefdoms were now poised for the transition to the state (p.22).

Evidence of trade between the Iron Age communities of central Thailand and India dates back to at least 380BC (p.23). Chinese sources claim South-East Asian ocean-going ships 50m in length and weighing over 600 tons by the C5th. Chinese dynastic records include a report from emissaries Kang Tai and Zhu Ying to the Wu emperor about a state they call Funan operating in the Mekong Delta in the C3rd. Archaeology at a site named Oc Eo confirmed many of the activities in the Chinese reports and a local coinage (which does not seem to have persisted). Oc Eo was linked by a canal with Angkor Borei, a walled city of about 300ha, 90km to the north. The city wall is 2.4m wide and 4.5m high, with a moat of 22m in width—so a considerable construction. There were also water reservoirs—or baray—whose function remains the subject of much scholarly debate (Pp24ff).

Rising complexity
Higham takes us through the archaeological evidence, including early Sanskrit inscriptions. He observes that no prehistoric sites have been found in the Delta, presumably because of the regular flooding. With the development of flood retreat rice farming (where water is stored and released during the dry season) it became able to support substantial populations (including urban centres). Nevertheless, the social and political structures that grew up (including significant specialisation) were clearly dependant on the benefits of maritime trade. How centralised political structures were is unclear (the large canals suggest political centralisation). The rise of Java from the C5th as the maritime connector between China and India massively undermined the Delta, leading to the shrinking and abandoning of urban centres due to loss of trade (Pp29ff).

A C13th Chinese compilation includes description of a C7th Khmer ruler of some power and magnificence. This period seems to be one of competing rulerships, where inland rulers may have achieved varying levels of dominance. Inscriptions reveal various dynasties (one of which seems to have three generations of ruling queens) with fluctuating areas of control. Inscriptions also reveal a mixture of appointed and hereditary (pon) titles with a court-centred social hierarchy. Management of temple foundations, including what appears to have been significant levels of trade (including of assets), seems to have been a path to wealth. This was a barter economy:

there was no system of coinage. Goods were valued by reference to the weight of silver, or quantity of rice or the length or quality of cloth (p.48).

This did not preclude sophisticated economic transactions:

There are records of assets being exchanged through individuals through the aegis of the temple management. On occasion, we find that land was mortgaged, as it were, to a temple in return for silver or cloth, and the product of the land was assigned as a form of interest payment (p.49).

Inheritance was indirectly matrilineal (through sister’s son), though one major dynasty shifted to patrilineal succession along with its assumption of the style of gods while another, for three generations, had direct matrilineal (mother-daughter) succession. Higham argues that direct succession better promoted intergenerational asset accumulation. Jayavarman I was the first king recorded to have divine honours in his own lifetime, an act which went with royal authority superseding those of pon in control of assets. Now the king, not temples, would be the final arbiter of assets and land use. The centralisation of authority from 720-770 coincides with a drastic reduction in the number of inscriptions, limiting our knowledge. Higham summarises the period 550-800 as one where states emerged, conflict was recurrent and a “thin veneer” of Indianisation was adopted over local patterns and worship (Pp50ff).

Empire
From about 800 to about 1000, the aforementioned patrilineal dynasty with divine honours ruled a substantial empire as universal kings. This kingdom, Kambujadesa, was a agrarian surplus rulership which controlled the Delta, the lowlands around the Great Lake and the agricultural lands to the west. It engaged in increasingly substantial temple and baray construction.

The first king of this universal rulership, Jayavarman II, established the tradition of having himself consecrated king-of-kings in an elaborate ritual:

The court was projected at the centre of the kingdom and a representation of heaven, but was sustained by the agricultural surplus. The inscriptions are filled not only with references to the elite aristocrats and their meritorious acts, but also contain details of land ownership, field boundaries and the duties of retainers. We find many references to slaves, but it would be wrong to regard this as a slave-based society. The rural populace donated part of their time and labour to maintain the local temple. Thus part of their production, be it rice, butter, honey, cloth or livestock, was directed to the capital. Our knowledge this, the first dynasty of Angkor, comes from the inscriptions, reservoirs and surviving stone or brick temples. On the one hand, we encounter a dynasty of kings who built on an increasingly massive scale and extended their power through elite aristocrats to the sustaining populace. On the other hand, we find endemic instability rooted within disputes in a dynasty that had no clear rules to govern the succession, and the constant problem of maintaining control over the provinces (Pp53-4).

The concentration of control over surpluses naturally created a target for attempted seizure.

How Jayavarman II came to power is unclear, though sites with relevant inscriptions provide indications of the extent of his power. A map (p.55) usefully charts where inscriptions associated with various rulers have been found. For details about events of Jayavarman II’s reign we are dependant on inscriptions dated about 260 or more years later. Higham takes us through the archaeology, how little is known about his son and successor Jayavarman III then the building, and unclear lineage, of his successor Indravarman I, who describes himself as a great warrior. His son and successor Yashovarman I also described himself as a great warrior and built on an even grander scale (Pp54ff).

The inscriptions of Yashovarman’s reign show royal control over the allocation of land, with a social hierarchy radiating from the king:

The key element in this great architectural achievement is the control of labour … It may be that the same people who worked on the buildings during the dry season would return to their duties in the rice fields with the rains. … The state superstructure … fundamentally relied on the agricultural surpluses, a situation that illustrates the importance given to land tenure and agricultural production (p.69).

Inscriptions from the reign of his sons and successors Harshavarman I and Ishanavarman II tells us of an official in charge of collecting the rice taxation and grants of exemptions from service.

This review will be concluded in my next post.

The consequences of equalitarianism

2011-12-21T13:37:00.009+11:00

Equality involves considerable complexity under apparent simplicity. The US Declaration of Independence famously declared that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Who was equal and in what respect did not turn out to be a remotely simple question. Women were obviously excluded (the US has Founding Fathers but no Founding Mothers) as were slaves: slaveowners being prominent among its signers and protection of slavery being, fairly obviously, a significant motive for the Declaration (given the outcome of Somersett's Case a few years previously). As was settler land hunger clashing with the British Crown's public commitment to its treaties with the Amerindians. (The American Republic's appalling history of breaking treaties with Amerindians was somewhat encoded into its founding "DNA".)

But that multi-dimensionality can make equality a very useful banner: since there are so many dimensions along which equality can be considered, there are always new realms for the partisans of equality to conquer. And, while the slogan "no taxation without representation" was fairly clearly brilliant political shorthand for a range of public policy issues, it was brilliantly effective because it was true: British subjects in North America were denied any say in public policy decisions that affected them deeply. There was a profound inequality at work.

But we can differentiate the egalitarian urge--concerns with legal status, opportunities, having a say--from the equalitarian urge--trying to create a society equal in outcomes. What distinguishes the equalitarian urge is that it creates a profound inequality: the inequality between those who are to be equalised and those who do the equalising. The more complete the equality to be sought, the more complete the control, and so the power, flowing to those doing the equalising over the lives of those being equalised.

In this equalitarian drive, private property gets in the way: variations in luck, skill and past legacies mean private property precludes equality of outcome. Yet no complex society can abolish property since property is just the right to control a specified resource. So, in an equalitarian society, property clearly needs to be controlled by the equalising authority. Which is just a specific manifestation of the logic already set out in the previous paragraph.

Which is why the societies most ostentatiously committed to equality--Enver Hoxha's Albania, North Korea under the Kim Family Regime--have also been the most totalitarian societies. The absolute drive for equality creates an absolute centralisation of power. In the case of North Korea, that has been taken to the stage of creating hereditary Stalinism. The ruling tyrant becomes effectively the owner of the entire country (including its people) since all are under his control (in a very direct and practical sense) so he can choose to pass that ownership onto his son.

Which is a grotesque negation of the stated original intent of creating a profoundly equal society. But a straightforward manifestation of equalitarian logic as a political program. For it is not airy intent which matters, but how the intent's logic works out when implemented. Bob Carr's claim that North Korea is the logical working out of Marxism possibly goes a little far. But that Albania under Hoxha and North Korea under the Kim's represent the working out of the equalitarian urge is clearly true.

Though the equalitarian urge is not the only form where ostentatious equality undermines itself. Even in more limited versions, that partisans of equality so often, so clearly, regard their commitment to equality as a manifestation of moral superiority is another way ostentatious equality undermines itself. The forms of equality worth having typically involve some strong sense of reciprocity. Where that is lacking, the equality on offer is probably not worth having: or, worse still, will make things much worse.

There are forms of equality which matter deeply: and there are others which are disastrous to seek. The apparent simplicity (even "self-evidence") of equality can be treacherously misleading.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Emancipation

2011-12-16T16:43:00.008+11:00

Much of the history of the last few centuries is the history of emancipation, sometimes labelled that, sometimes labelled differently. Catholic emancipation, the emancipation of the Jews, the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, civil rights, queer emancipation; the list goes on. The process of extending basic moral and legal protections to an ever wider range of people.

This history of emancipation is a history of expanding capacities, particularly cognitive and economic capacities. They are products of the Scientific, Commercial and Industrial Revolutions.

Farming can support much higher populations than foraging. But it is also a highly constrained existence; one is tied to a particular plot of land and the rhythms and vagaries of the seasons. If the population increases too much, then the constraints pinch tighter. As niches get more constrained, they are defended more rigorously. As the risk of hunger increases, patterns that have proved viable will be clung to. There are good reasons why landed peasantries are notoriously socially conservative. (Landless peasants, by contrast, can be an explosive social force since they both lack assets at risk from social disorder and seek the security of landholding—by expropriation, if necessary.)

Religion can both validate the moral constraints needed to make such a society function and legitimise particular social arrangements that provide order. And order has very strong value to a farming society. Seeing the cosmic order as a struggle between order and chaos is much older, and more widespread, than seeing it as a struggle between good and evil.

Commerce can be disruptive because it is dynamic: it seeks income from exchanges, so seeks both people to exchange with and goods and services to exchange—it is a process of discovery. Though commerce is much concerned with risk, the new or unusual has much greater implications of benefit than in farming. It is why static orders tend to frown on commerce: its dynamism is disruptive; as is its focus on exchange, on gains through trade. Features that can loom large in static orders—ethnicity, belief, gender, sexuality—are a matter of indifference to a commercial order. Commerce has persistently treated marginal groups better than has religion or politics.

French man of letters Voltaire expressed this memorably in a famous passage in his Letters on the English, first published in 1734.

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There thee Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.

So a shift towards a more commercial order will tend to be a shift to a more cosmopolitan or ecumenical social order.

Science can also be disruptive to established orders: the expansion of knowledge, the discovery of how things work, can both undermine old rationalisations for existing arrangements and validate the possibility of new arrangements. This includes discovery of other cultures: awareness of potentially very different social patterns can make existing social arrangements seem much more contingent and so contestable. Either way, the expansion of knowledge makes received wisdom seems less authoritative; more up for reconsideration, even rejection.

Technological change can magnify both the commercial and the scientific effects: the need for new skills, the experience of new possibilities, makes existing arrangements seem even more contingent and, worse, impediments. What was previously reassuring and protective can come to seem outmoded and constraining. It is not that people are not still threatened by change (some can be very threatened), it is that change acquires more partisans. The Industrial Revolution, the expanding commerce of multiplying technology, was a conjunction and magnification of the disruptive effects of commerce and science.

The shift from being a society dominated by the land/population ratio to one dominated by the capital/population ratio creates both a more dynamic and far less constrained society. Capital can not only expand far more than land can, but comes in far more varied forms and social consequences. Social possibilities increase greatly.

In such circumstances, the dynamics of emancipation are a push-and-pull interaction. With the expansion of commerce, science and technology, it becomes easier for the traditionally repressed to conceive of a situation where their repression goes away. As incomes rise, and transport and communication capacities expand, it becomes easier for them to interact and organise. As labour becomes more scarce (compared to capital), and so more valuable; as incomes rise; as commercial possibilities expand; paying attention to the formerly repressed offers more gains. As more people experience social change, further change becomes more “normal”, so less dramatic and threatening. Change begets change. The example of the emancipation of one group, the lifting of some socially imposed constraints, inspires another.

Some socially imposed constraints turn out to still have value: that part of the process can overshoot. Some of what went on in the 1960s is reasonably construed as having done that. But the process of expanding legal and moral protections, so that all have the same protections, is a process that cannot overshoot—provided full reciprocity is maintained. That is, provided it is a process of expanding the moral and legal community so all share the same protections, not a process of finding new ways to privilege certain groups. After all, emancipation is basically the process of achieving full legal and moral reciprocity.

It is no accident that the liberal capitalist societies of the West have led the way in the processes of social emancipation. They, more than any others, had the triad of expanding commerce, science and technology.

[This post has been amended to expand the argument and has been cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.)

Doing it better Downunder

2011-12-04T11:12:00.006+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

Looking at the on-going crises of the eurozone, the problems of the UK, the serious economic slump in the US all give grounds for appreciation of how much better Australia's political class has performed compared to those of other Western countries.

The Hawke Government (1983-1991) did broad economic reform; the Keating Government (1991-1996) reformed "super" (expanded private pension arrangements) and some labour market reform; the Howard Government (1996-2007) did more labour market reform, tax reform and massively retired public debt; the RBA brought in explicit (inflation-over-business cycle) targeting (1993). Our political class Downunder has done so much better than most other folks'.

The tyranny of distance and the long term decline in our terms of trade concentrated minds. Too much of the EU political classes seemed to have think the EU, or the euro, or both, were magic talismans that would protect them from Bad Things Happening.

Folk such as Paul Krugman banging on about how worrying about debt was way over-rated did not help. (Taking reassurance by comparisons with very high post WWII debt was not appropriate--there is a difference from debt generated by a major emergency and debt being structurally generated; there is also a vast difference between positive baby-boom demographics and "easy" technological growth--catching up with the US--compared to adverse fertility-crash demographics and more restrained technological growth--more countries near the technological edge.)

Australia had very bad 1890s and 1930s depressions in large part due to high public debt levels, so economic history encouraged scepticism Downunder about high structural debt levels. Holding the recent commodity boom to be solely, or even mostly, responsible for Australia's much better economic performance than other developed economies underplays decades of sustained reform effort by Australia's political class.

The Great Depression in a nutshell

2011-11-30T16:47:00.005+11:00

This was based on a comment I made here.

In the late 1920s, most developed economies were on the gold standard. The Bank of France and the Fed took gold out of (pdf) the monetary system, driving up the price of gold inside the monetary system, which drove up the price of money (since gold set the price of money) which drove down the price of everything else, and so people’s incomes. A significantly leveraged economy suffering an income crash (for debt, nominal income is what counts) leads to bankruptcies and bank failures in a disastrous downward spiral in economic activity.

The quicker countries left the gold standard, which the Bank of France and the Fed had turned into a doomsday machine, the quicker they recovered from the Great Depression. (If they were not on the gold standard, they did not suffer it at all.) There does not seem to be much mystery to all this.

R. G. Hawtrey (pdf) and Gustav Cassell (pdf) accurately predicted the danger in the early 1920s and explained what was going on at the time. Alas, Hayek was a brilliant economist who brilliantly expounded the Austrian (the real one, not the internet one) theory of the business cycle at precisely the wrong moment. Alas, Keynes was a brilliant economist who decided to revamp macroeconomics in quite unnecessary ways, when a Swedish economist and a British Treasury official had already got it right. But a Swede and a bureaucrat were not nearly as well placed as Keynes-the-public-intellectual and brilliant (if not always entirely honest) rhetorician to capture the debate.

It is strange, how much people seem to want complicated or new, or complicated and new, explanations for grand disasters in preference to a simple one already available.

Amazing

2011-11-29T07:30:00.001+11:00

It is a striking thing, that those who look for racism always seem to find it.

Another triumph of human analytical ingenuity and confirmation bias.

Bad metaphysics parading as economics

2011-11-27T16:05:00.001+11:00

Based on a comment I made here.

Bill Woolsey made the observation that: Critics treat nominal GDP as the product of real output and the price level.

We do not live in a barter economy with money add-ons, we live in a thoroughly monetised economy where prices, contracts and debts are set in money terms. I find this thinking that there is a "real" economy that generates monetary "epiphenomena" just bizarre. It is bad metaphysics parading as economics.

(As I discuss in my previous post.)

Money is not an epiphenomenon: the unreality of the “real”

2011-11-25T12:19:00.004+11:00

There is no such thing as “real wages”. Economists talk about “real wages” but what do they mean by that? In a monetized economy, prices and costs are measured in money terms. So, a firm has to worry about the terms of labour—the ratio of labour costs to the prices of what it sells (weighted by how much labour produces how much product: so constraints on the use of labour will still affect the terms of labour). It experiences these things, and makes judgements accordingly. If the ratio moves adversely (which might be because the prices of its products have fallen, or because they have risen less than labour costs: any movement in either labour costs or output prices is potentially compatible with an adverse shift in its terms of labour, since it is the ratio of the two that matters) the firm will tend to cut back on hiring. If the ratio moves positively, the firm will tend to increase hiring.

But the terms of labour are not the same was the terms of wages—the ratio of payment to the worker to the prices of what the worker purchases. First, because wages received are not the only labour costs. Second, because what a worker purchases has no particular connection to what the firm sells. Indeed, different workers will have different terms of wages, since they will not have exactly the same pattern of purchases; just as the terms of labour will vary between firms and, even more, between industries.

So, when economists talk of “real wages”, what do they mean? Do they mean the terms of labour or the terms of wages? If they mean both, they effectively mean neither but instead some mystical (because very unclear) amalgam of both which is not specifically either.

And how do we measure “real wages”? By “deflating” wages (which are not the price of labour, but leave that aside) in terms of some general price index? If it is some specific index, such as the CPI, then that is yet another general amalgam which, at best, crudely correlates to what either the worker or the firm is experiencing and making their judgements about. If it is a general measure, such as a GDP deflator, it has less arbitrary selection problems but still has only a crude connection to what the worker or the firm experiences and makes judgements about.

But, why bother going to that effort? The process of deflating adds nothing to the information to be had from terms of labour and terms of wages. Indeed, it is worse than that, because it actually takes information away. Sticking with the money prices and costs both reflects what people actually make judgements about and does not lose information.

The underlying idea that the notion of “real wages” taps into is that money is some epiphenomenon which overlays a “real” economy. But, as we have seen, trying to postulate something called “real wages” fails to pick out a specific phenomenon, suppresses information as it does so and does not capture what people actually make judgements about. If our concern is with human behaviour then the issue becomes what information do people use to make their decisions. The notion of “real” wages fails to accurately capture any specific thing.

Consider the asymmetry between increases and cuts in (money) wages. If money was an epiphenomenon over some “real” economy, there should not be any difference between raising money wages when the price level is rising and cutting money wages when the price level is falling. But contracts, debts and financial obligations are set in money terms and operate across time periods, so there is a clear difference between the two. Cutting money wages increases the burden of existing debts and obligations. So, it is perfectly rational for workers to resist cuts in money wages even if their general terms of wages are rising. Looking at “real wages” again suppresses information; indeed, it seriously misleads.

Nor is the notion of “real prices” any better. There are only two sorts of prices: money prices and barter prices—prices in terms of money and prices in terms of other goods and services. The first can be expressed in a common range of numerical values, a measure of prices that operates across goods, services and assets. It is one of the great advantages of money. The second can only be expressed in terms of other goods and services. The notion of “constant price” is not a “real” price: it is simply prices expressed in “frozen” money abstracting away from general shifts in money prices/the barter prices of money. One is using a key characteristic of money while pretending to get “past” it. To so attempt to use money to get “underneath” to the “real” economy is to, in fact, express how much money is not an epiphenomenon. One is still using money, just in a particular way.

Yes, people are aware of shifts in the barter prices of money: which is to say, the inverse of money prices. But there is not some “real price” beyond that.

Money is a transaction good: people use it to transact to get the goods and services they want. So, if we have three goods in an economy (consumption, assets and money) then we have two markets (money for consumption goods, money for assets). The process of transacting uses a medium of account (money) and does so for good reasons. The advantages of money over barter are not some epiphenomenon. They are major advantages that change how people behave and so how the economy works, particularly given money operates across time periods (we can spend now or later; we have previous entered into obligations expressed in money terms).

Using the concept of "real" prices abstracts away from “actual” money while continuing to invoke its functions. This is not analytically helpful, for we then make money what it is not—immediately, transparently “neutral” about prices in terms of goods and services. Cognitive simplification—being able to express prices in common numerical values—means precisely that and is a genuine economic function. It takes time to register general shifts in the barter price(s) of money and for credit, contracts and other prices to adjust. Which means that shifts in spending have effects on output, until people adjust for any general change in what money buys (in terms of goods, services and assets). By "abstracting away” from money (even though we are actually not fully doing so) we also abstract away from money being a cross-temporal constraint due to contracts, debts and other financial obligations.

The notions of “real wages” and “real prices” do not get to “underlying” realities, they obscure economic realities because they abstract away from how people are actually making decisions and constraints on those decisions. Money is the prime form of information in a monetised economy. By treating it as some epiphenomena, we are not revealing, we are obscuring.

Money is not an epiphenomenon and it is actively misleading to use economic language that implies it is: particularly when such language ends up suppressing relevant information.

A Socratic dialogue with the inflationphobics

2011-11-23T15:29:00.005+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

Perhaps we need a bit of Socratic dialogue with the inflationphobics.

Q: What has caused more damage; entrenched inflation (the 1970s) or massive deflation (1929-32)?
A: Deflation. But that is not what we face.
Q: What has caused more damage; entrenched inflation (the 1970s) or unexpected disinflation* during a leveraging crunch (2008-?).
A: But inflation is evil.
Q: Why is inflation bad?
A: Because it distorts private decisions.
Q: Does it do that making basic parameters for judgement unreliable?
A: Yes.
Q: So it is about creating a clear and reliable framing for private decisions?
A: Yes.
Q: So, a central bank should provide a reliable framework for private decisions?
A: Yes.
Q: So it is about framing expectations in a credible way?
A: Yes.
Q: So, what is more important to people, expectations about income or expectations about prices?
A: [Some obfustication]
Q: So, should not a central bank seek to credibly generate expectations about income?
A. [Some more obfustication]
Q: In a highly leveraged age with many wages set by contracts operating across time and a range of "sticky" prices, which is more important to people, expectations about money income or "real" income?
A. [Even more obfustication]
Q: So, would not a clear target about aggregate income (aka NGDP aka Py) create a framework to anchor expectations in what people actually care about?
A: [Meltdown]

* Yes, other things are going on, but the surreptitious disinflation was when the US economy really nosedived.

ADDENDA Lars Christensen was good enough to repost the comment as a blog post.

Forms of employment, unions and wages

2011-11-22T11:57:00.008+11:00

Loath as I am to disagree with an economic historian as eminent of Peter Temin, his paper The Great Recession in Historial Context (pdf) has a claim about wage stickiness and its source I disagree with.

In explaining the development of stickiness of wages and the rise of unions. Temin writes:

As the size of production units, whether mines or factories, became larger, the ability of labor markets to be optimally competitive also diminished. Large employers yielded little bargaining power to workers to negotiate wages and working conditions. If a factory, for example, was the only large employer in town, the options for workers were even more limited and the market power of the employer more obvious. Workers formed unions to countervail the market power of employers, and wage bargaining and strikes supplanted the individual wage negotiations implicit in Hume’s and Smith’s analyses.

This is a wonderful (indeed popular) “just so” story. The trouble is, it is clearly wrong. Large employers tend to pay more than small employers, just as large supermarkets tend to be cheaper than corner stores. Size does not equal market power and does not determine comparative wages or prices.

There is a much simpler reason why unions arose in response to large employers. The workforces of large employers are easier to organize. The rate of unionization increases with the size of the employer (hence the public sector is far more unionised than the private sector) because the bigger the employer, the easier its to organize the employees—they are easier to identify, collectively talk to and have more commonality of interests. Moreover, the power of unions comes from their ability to exclude competing workers. The true enemy of a union is not the company, it is the “scab”, the non-unionised competing worker. The more centralised the workplace, the easier to exclude.

Similarly, wages are “sticky” outside unionised workplaces and across employers regardless of size. The “stickiness” comes from the labour relations being across time periods and asymmetric information. Reliable workers who understand how the firm operates are worth keeping, are valuable. Massively undermining their status as bargaining agents—and your own reliability as a bargaining agent—by unilaterally cutting wages is not the way to have a good relationship with your employees. Particularly given they have obligations set in money terms, so cutting their money income makes their situation worse regardless of what money prices are doing generally. Nevertheless, that money is how contracts “keep score”—so go directly to employee status as bargaining agent and employer reliability as bargaining agent—is even more important.

Moreover, with the development of extensive regional, national and global markets, and increased complexity of products, it becomes harder to workers to judge employer claims. A medieval peasant could see how good the harvest was, and could observe grain prices, so variability in income was much more manageable because far less trust was involved. A modern employee has far less information to directly observe about inputs and outputs in what they produce. That leads to more emphasis on what workers can judge as “proxies” for what they cannot. The reliability of employer behaviour, the respect (or lack) of employee status as bargaining agents has to be increasingly relied upon in an ongoing interaction (a repeated game, if you like).

It is not the size of the company that determines “stickiness”, but the form of the employment contract. “Spot” markets in labour allow much more flexibility in wages since there is no ongoing relationship. It also provides an example where unionisation provided large gains to (some) workers—the unionisation of the waterfront. But that is a case where unionisation changed the form of the labour contract. It is also a case where exclusion of competing labour is particularly intense—employment on the Australian waterfront, for example, has practically become hereditary.

It was not unionisation, but changes in the forms of labour contracts, in the structure of labour relations so that labour became much more an across-time interaction with increased information asymmetries, which increased the “stickiness” of labour. Unions are a symptom of that change far more than they are a source of wage “stickiness”.

Contemporary unions confront a range of problems. First, with the growth of two-income households, variation in income became rather less of an issue for many households, so workers become more willing to shift to forms of labour provision not susceptible to unionisation. Second, the increase in incomes and growth of regulation and other government interventions has meant that legal mechanisms (lawyers) and political ones (politicians and media) became increasingly competitive to unions as bargaining mechanisms. Third, the interests of unions is to make employment remuneration as complex as possible—both because that increases the need for a bargaining agent and because that provides various “victories” for unions to trumpet. The problem is that such a strategy increasingly generates wasted resources that can be harvested by moving to different forms of labour provision or contractual arrangements. Just as it was not employer market power which drove the rise of unions, nor is it driving their decline.

As to why large corporations tend to pay more than small employers, consider why large supermarkets have lower prices than the corner shop. The corner shop is, indeed, the corner, that is local, shop. A large supermarket has to make it worth your while to go that extra distance. Once you have decided to travel further (typically drive) to shop, then it is competing with all the providers in reasonable driving distance. It offers range and low prices to compensate for more travel time and less personalised service.

A large corporation finds it easier to spread/manage risk than a small employer but harder to tie worker effort to productive outcome. So, it pays a “hostage premium”—more than the employee can get elsewhere so that they police themselves more, as they have more to lose. This “hostage premium” is not merely basic salary; it includes a range of benefits and common activities to try and encourage self-policing. So, even in the absence of a unionised labour-exclusion premium, wherever the corporation finds it hard to tie employee effort to productive outcome, we can expect a “hostage premium” to encourage self-policing.

This does not explain what we observe of CEO pay, however. Tying the pay of CEOs to performance should be a lot clearer than executives further down the corporate hierarchy. Yet, what we observe is pay rates that seem unconnected to performance. A (very high) premium that is apparently often not hostage to productive behaviour.

So, consider the mechanism that selects pays for CEOs. In political science terms it is like rigged election autocracies. What we get is an "insider's game": insiders agree that you should be rewarded for being an insider, a game they all hope to benefit from so seek to maximise the return for being an insider. Benchmarking just increases the “gaming” (pdf), since it just increases information to insiders without increasing effective accountability since it does not breach the insider dominance of such decisions: the problem is not information asymmetries, it is insider privilege. The real puzzle is not why CEOs are paid so much, it is why their compensation can be notoriously unconnected to actual performance.

Forms of employment (including expected length of interactions), degree of centralisation of workplaces, information assymetries, insider privilege/outsider exclusion: they explain a lot more of how labour markets work than alleged employer market power. Including wage stickiness and the rise and decline of unions.

Of human bondage and history’s selection processes

2011-11-15T17:46:00.004+11:00

In farming (i.e. agrarian) societies it has been standard for about 8 out of 10 people to be farmers. The land/labour ratio is a crucial determinant of social patterns in such societies. For example, which of the two factors – land or labour – is more constrained affects profoundly the use of human bondage.

If land is more constrained than labour (i.e. the fertile area is densely populated for the existing technology level), then the cost of labour will be low and control of land will provide the basis for extracting a surplus (for production above the level required to support the producers). Any use of slavery is likely to be limited to households, specific forms of production that dangerous or unpleasant and easily supervised (e.g. mining, cotton production, rowing galleys) or to tie loyalty to rulers by eliminating family ties (eunuchs, state slaves, slave warriors).

If labour is more constrained than land (i.e. the fertile area is lightly populated for the existing technology level) then the cost of free labour will be high, the return to control of land low and there is likely to be extensive use of bondage to extract a surplus, since the cost of subsistence plus supervision and lessened productivity will still less than that of free labour. Some form of bonded farming (such as serfdom) is likely to be used, since it has lower supervision costs and productivity loss than outright slavery and, unlike slave populations, serf or similar populations will reproduce themselves, so provides more reliable continuous labour supply than outright slavery.

(The only substantial slave population which might have reproduced itself is that of the antebellum American South and, even there, is seems likely that slave smuggling was significantly larger than has been commonly admitted. Elsewhere, the total lack of family rights usually pushed slave fertility well below replacement. Even in the Roman Empire, the significant prospect of manumission [pdf] is unlikely to have substantially improved fertility before freedom was gained.)

Some classic examples where loosening of the land constraint led to mass use of human bondage are the Americas after the importing of the Eurasian disease pool decimated the existing population, enserfment in Eastern Europe after the defeat of the “Tatars” and blocking of the Ottoman Turks freed large tracts of land for farming and the development of coloni in the later Roman Empire after the devastation of the Antonine plague and the Cyprian plague, a process which accentuated after the population crash at the end of the Western Roman Empire. Demand for staple products such as grain, sugar, tobacco (production of which are easily supervised) accentuated the process.

There is one great exception to all this: post Black Death Latin Christendom. Attempts to re-imposed serfdom failed, because the various Crowns refused to provide the necessary enforcement. The most obvious reason why they failed to do so is that knight’s service (i.e. military service by landlords) was no longer their key source of military power: taxes paying for the hire of free peasants was a crucial part of their forces and their men-at-arms were often contracted rather than feudal levies. (In Eastern Europe, by contrast, the reliance of the local Crowns on the military service of the servitor class meant that the Crowns were willing to enforce serfdom.)

But even among the knightly class of C14th Latin Christendom, the pressure for re-enserfment was uneven. This was not merely a matter of great magnates having other options (they were to be also less interested in enserfment in Eastern Europe than the lesser servitors) or the uneven impact of the Black Death (which just encouraged labour to “spread out”). It was also that tenancy and capital substitution provided alternative ways landowners could respond to labour shortages. The technological and capital market dynamism of medieval Europe, along with the depth of available skilled (i.e. “craft”) labour, the range of enforceable contracts and forms of property, made capital substitution a much more “live” option than it was in any of the other cases.

In other words, C14th Latin Christendom had, far more than the others, more intensive use of capital as an alternative to imposing bondage on human labour. Social capital in the form of effective laws and range of property rights; human capital in the form of skilled labour; financial capital in the form of sophisticated capital markets; and physical capital in the form of a machine-oriented production. The efficiency of mixed production (pigs, sheep, cattle, crop rotation), by raising supervision costs, may also have been a factor.

One might object: why did this not happen in the later examples of the Americas and Eastern Europe? To which the answer is: it did, eventually. As the institutions of the Commercial and then Industrial Revolutions seeped into Central and Eastern Europe, serfdom decayed and was eventually abolished. Greater New England adopted the free labour/capital intensification approach while the antebellum South remained with the “tropical zone” pattern of cheap labour and concentrated wealth. Unfortunately, the combination of British institutions and American practicality led to slavery becoming more profitable and efficient, hence the resistance to any abolition of slavery (which would have wiped out about a third of the wealth of the South and reduced significantly the value of white votes). Latin America lagged somewhat, as one would expect from its lower level of capital intensity. Islam lagged further still, in part due to slavery having Sharia endorsement. Conversely, densely populated and comparatively capital-intense Japan was one of the first non-Christian countries to abolish slavery in the medieval and post-medieval era.

The Soviet Union re-introduced both slavery (state slavery, in the forced labour camps) and serfdom (as workers were banned from leaving their workplaces without permission: the essence of serfdom). Neither proved particularly efficient and the man who oversaw them longest – Lavrentiy Beria – moved to abolish both as soon as Stalin was dead.

The shift to the capital/labour ratio playing an increasingly important role in society (generally) encouraged the abolition of bondage. (The antebellum South, the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin and Nazi Germany being conspicuous exceptions to the general trend: In the first and last case, the arbitration of war resolved the issue.)

Selection processes
To put the early exceptionalism of Latin Christendom another way, there was a lot more for the selection processes of history to work upon in C14th Latin Christendom than there was in the other cases (such as the later Roman Empire). Which is a general reason for the rise of North-Western Europe and its descendant societies. A significant number of competitive jurisdictions in close proximity between which ideas, capital and skills were relatively mobile; displaying a range of institutional forms; with legal and cultural diversity plus a rich intellectual and historical heritage from its Classical predecessor civilisation to draw upon. There was both more for the selection processes of history to work upon and more intense selection processes which were nevertheless operating within sufficient political stability for institutional learning and evolution to take place.

No other civilisation centre in Eurasia had that mix of features. Most others were dominated by autocracies as essentially the sole (or overwhelmingly dominant) form of government. Many had long periods of a single, dominant, autocracy. Even when that was not so, the ability of ideas, capital and skills to move between jurisdictions was often somewhat limited. In the case of Islam and Hindu India, laws being held to be of divine origin (Sharia, the laws of Manu) limited the possibilities of legal evolution.

The civilisation centre which had the largest overlap in features was Japan, with its competing daimyo—unsurprisingly, it was the non-Western civilisation which was most easily able to adapt Western methods because it already had the most similar institutional structure. But it lacked the cultural diversity of Europe or the intellectual depth provided by the Classical heritage incorporating memory of institutional variety and mathematised abstract theorising about the structure of things. It was unable to achieve the take-offs North-Western Europe did: but it was able to be first to catch up.

Having much more for the selection processes of history to work from, and a competitive-but-continuing institutional framework for them to work in, proved to be a world-beating advantage for North-Western Europe and its descendant societies.

On the stupidity of (some) Central Banks

2011-11-08T15:00:00.003+11:00

The short answer from history to the question of how stupid can a central bank be? is: a central bank can be really, really stupid.

I am using ‘stupid’ in a technical sense: doing things that seriously adversely affect lots of people with no justifying benefits to any wider public good—that is, which show a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, wit or sense. The actions may seem a good idea to the central bank at the time—due to perverse incentives, policy framings disconnected from economic reality or whatever—but in terms of wider public policy, they are (to varying degrees) disastrous. Central banks exist to serve, so how that “serving” is framed can make a great difference.

For example, hyperinflation is usually a deliberate attempt to inflate away government debt and/or generate revenue well beyond the willingness or ability to tax. It may be wicked, but it is not stupid in quite the above sense. (There are justifying benefits for decision-makers, without necessarily justified benefits.)

Beware of the French and central banks
Among stupid central banks, the all-time winner is the interwar Bank of France turning the gold standard into a doomsday device (pdf), helped by the US Federal Reserve, by building up its gold reserves without issuing money to match, so taking gold out of the monetary system, thus driving up the price of gold in the monetary system (and so the price of money, as such gold set the price of money) and thus driving down the prices of everything else. It and the Fed created the Great Deflation of 1929-32 we call ‘the Great Depression’ and so mass unemployment, the impoverishing of millions, the unravelling of much of (pdf) the world trade system, the fall of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism (followed by the Fall of France). It was a disaster of monumental proportions.

It was hardly the only disaster of central banking, however. Another (in)glorious episode also came from France with John Law’s Banque Générale gaining the right to issue paper money, which stimulated economic activity. The Regent, the duc d’Orleans, decided that if some paper money was good then even more paper money must be even better, leading to the truly spectacular Mississippi Bubble. This French disaster was based on the same logic (using that term loosely) as that which created the Great Deflation/Depression namely, “if some is better (some paper notes, some level of gold backing of the franc) then more is better and even more is better still.” One is reminded of the Abbe Sieyes dismissing the argument for bicameralism on the grounds that if the upper house agreed with the lower it was pointless and if it disagreed it was pernicious. Pernicious simplification passing itself off as sophistication: how very French. (Perhaps the baleful influence of Cartesian rationalism?)

By contrast, the Bank of England has a long history of considerable policy success, starting with vast improvement in management of government debt. The South Sea Bubble was rather less of a problem than the Mississippi bubble precisely because the Bank of England had disapproved from the beginning. While the Bank’s management of the gold standard over the two centuries up to 1914 suffered various bumps and problems, it had nothing to equal the aforementioned French disasters.

In our own time, the Bank of Japan’s management of the yen since the collapse of the bubble economy has come in for much criticism. However, the demographics of Japan make some of that criticism less clear-cut than is often suggested.

Even though some of the ECB’s problems are “built in”, there are also plenty of grounds for criticism for the European Central Bank (ECB), until recently with a French head (perhaps not encouraging; especially as the euro is effectively an artificial gold standard for its member countries).

Doing right
A contemporary example of successful central banking is the Reserve Bank of Australia. It has run an inflation target since 1993 (pdf). Its website is very clear on its policy target. In the words of the Reserve Bank:

The Governor and the Treasurer have agreed that the appropriate target for monetary policy in Australia is to achieve an inflation rate of 2–3 per cent, on average, over the cycle. This is a rate of inflation sufficiently low that it does not materially distort economic decisions in the community. Seeking to achieve this rate, on average, provides discipline for monetary policy decision-making, and serves as an anchor for private-sector inflation expectations.

The minutes of its Board meetings are published two weeks after each meeting: this matters much less than that it has a clear monetary policy regime.

The Reserve Bank sees its role as providing an anchor for private sector inflation expectations and it does so by being upfront about its policy target. That it has an explicit target since 1993 is no coincidence: the experience of the severe 1992-93 recession where inflation was squeezed out of the Australian economy in a particularly costly way made it clear to policy-makers that being explicit about monetary policy was preferable. As had the problems with monetary policy in the 1980s:

In the early 1990s, the Reserve Bank did not enjoy the largely uncritical press it receives today.
The conduct of monetary policy in the 80s was fundamentally incoherent, unsuccessfully pursuing multiple objectives and shrouded in a veil of secrecy.
Without a policy commitment to price stability, the Australian economy lacked a nominal anchor.

(Does any of this sound familiar, by chance, to American readers?)

The success of the Australian economy since then has provided strong evidence for the good sense of this approach of a clear monetary policy regime via an explicit target. But there is also no mystery about why being explicit has been a successful approach. The point of money is to facilitate transactions by massively decreasing transaction costs. Not only are the search costs that barter imposes avoided by use of money, but there are a range of problems with barter than using money eliminates or greatly ameliorates, thereby greatly facilitating transactions.

If people have reasonably accurate expectations of how (money) prices in general will go, they can make arrangements (including contracts) based on those expectations. As Canadian economist Nick Rowe points out, inflation targeting in Canada came out of pressure from the private sector. They wanted reliable expectations about prices so as to set wage contracts.

Sudden, unexpected changes in prices can leave these arrangements misaligned with actual prices. If, for example, that results in changes in the terms of labour—the ratio of labour costs to the price(s) of what the firm sells—so that wages become seriously over-priced (in normal, somewhat imprecise, economic speak, “real wages have risen”) then firms will stop hiring, workers may be sacked, firms may collapse (i.e. they absolutely stop hiring and all their workers lose their jobs). It is not good to have significant, unexpected downward shifts in price movements, since that essentially guarantees that the terms of labour will rise unexpectedly. (So unexpected disinflation can have similar effects to deflation.)

Doing wrong
Which is what happened at the beginning of the Great Recession in the US. When uberblogger Matt Yglesias calls it a “huge failure of central banking” he is absolutely correct. To put it another way, serious expectation failures were imposed on the US economy, resulting in a dramatic drop in transactions. (That the Federal Reserve decided to surreptitiously disinflate as a financial crisis—the sub-prime crash—was building made things much worse: including the financial crisis, providing some reprise [pdf] of the Great Depression.)

How did this happen? Have a look at the US Federal Reserve website. There is no statement about what the specific aim of US monetary policy is. The US Federal Reserve provides no explicit anchor for expectations in the economy. So, the US Federal Reserve can decide to disinflate—to significantly reduce the inflation rate—and there was no warning for private agents that this was happening. To act in this way is to actively degrade the level of information in the economy and so misdirect expectations.

This is deeply stupid in both theory and practice. There is no economic gain from changing monetary policy surreptitiously, there are only unnecessary costs. Australian policy makers found this out the hard way in 1992-93. They learnt the lesson and have moved on. But, alas, almost no one takes what Australia does seriously: we are too small, too far away, too “lucky”, too “colonial”. Europeans and Americans tend to be deeply parochial people, seeing themselves as the measure of all things, and so are rather bad at learning from the policy experience of others.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or a slightly revised version at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Understanding history differently

2011-11-05T11:09:00.003+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

The big divide between the Sceptical Enlightenment and the Radical Enlightenment is that the former believes in a constant human nature, so history provides lessons, and the latter believe in a malleable human nature (either in the sense of a "true" nature which is being horribly distorted or a "better" nature which can be created) so history has no lessons, it is merely a legacy of oppression and failure to be transcended. In the former, human reason discovers and (hopefully) acts upon those discoveries. In the latter, human reason (properly directed) can direct and transform human history. The Glorious and American Revolutions were Sceptical Enlightenment Revolutions, and succeeded. The Jacobin French Revolution (and its descendants) were Radical Enlightenment Revolutions, and so failed.

Mainstream economics is very, very Sceptical Enlightenment, since a constant human nature is taken as a fundamental premise. But something to keep in mind about radical critiques of economics is that such folk typically believe in malleable human nature--which is part of what offends them about mainstream economics: it "celebrates" things which (allegedly) block positive human transformation.

But one reads history very differently if one views human nature as constant than if you believe it to be malleable. ('Constant' meaning 'have enduring structures and patterns', even if beliefs, framings and expectations can vary widely--such as, between those who view human nature as constant and those who view it as malleable.)

Viewing human nature as malleable also leads naturally to demonisation of those who disagree (they are "blocking history") and massive discounting of existing human preferences (they are pre-transformation).

Which makes me wonder about the Euro project. Is it pushing the envelope of "transforming people"? Or are we in a form of Counter-Enlightenment, where faith, emotion & will trump reason? Maybe it is just a form of Machiavellian arrogance: create a structure which can only work with full political union so that people are driven to go all the way. Or possibly it is just the continuing consequences of a flawed conception of European history.

The profoundly differing implications of ideas about human nature is just a particularly powerful example of ideas having consequences.

Barter

2011-11-02T18:02:00.001+11:00

Wikipedia claims that:

Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter.[2] Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.[3]

It cites the work of two anthropologists (Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies and David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value) in justification.

The claim is misleading. There was extensive trade, across long distances, in societies without money (which, in the world before printing, essentially meant before/without coins). This was so in hunter-gatherer/forager societies: there is evidence of long distance trade in Australia before European arrival, for example. It was even more so in agrarian societies. Thus the Khmer Empire had no coinage but the testimony of Chinese ambassador/commercial attache Zhou Daguan—the only eyewitness evidence we have for the Empire—is that there were vigorous markets and a significant foreign trade community.

It is perfectly true that gift-connections and guest-host connections could be very important in pre-money societies, but these were often implicit exchanges: a form of mediated trade. The almost universal arrangement in forager societies of men hunt and women gather was precisely such an implicit exchange. (The one known exception was a society where the foragers exchanged meat for the produce of the neighbouring farming society: so both men and women hunted and then traded—i.e. bartered—what they caught.)

Similarly, when Chinese sources talk of ‘tribute’ what they are often doing is reconstruing trade relations as an acknowledgement of Chinese superiority, of China being the “Middle Realm”. Notably in the exchange of horses-for-silk that was so central to the trade networks of Eurasia for so long.

The reason why rulers could introduce coins so successfully is precisely because there were already considerable barter-trading which coins make dramatically cheaper and easier. When Adam Smith wrote of:

a certain propensity in human nature … the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

he was far more accurate than what Wikipedia™ is trying to claim.

Perhaps someone can explain this

2011-10-30T09:43:00.007+11:00

A common comment on the eurozone crisis is that it would be very difficult for any country (say Greece) to leave the eurozone. There is even a prize for someone to come up with a good way, which Tim Hartford tells us would be very hard to win.

That the debt problem in itself would not go away by changing currencies is clear. But decolonisation involved literally scores of new countries issuing new currency in replace of the imperial currency. (Not India, it was always on the rupee, but plenty of African countries, for example and including by countries such as Canada, Australia, the US if you go far enough back ....) Why is leaving a currency zone and adopting a new currency regarded as so hard? It has been done many times.

UPDATE. Ed Dolan sets out the mechanisms by which countries have exited from currencies.

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (2)

2011-10-25T18:00:00.013+11:00

This concludes my review of Michael D. Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. The first part of the review was in my previous post.

Classic Angkor: society
Having traced the path of the Khmer Empire, Coe now takes us through the society of the Empire in The Life and Culture of Classic Angkor. After a survey of the sources (Pp131ff), we start at the top with the imperial compound, which probably had so many people resident (“bureaucrats, servants, slaves, guards, religious specialists and others … including a sizeable corps of pages”) as to resemble a small city. Khmer society lacked a hereditary nobility: instead, royal officials were appointed (mostly from the major landholding families). Membership of the royal family was only recognised out to the fifth degree and entailed “little authority except that conferred by the monarch”. The appointed officials had the title khlon (in the C19th, they were known as okna).

This bureaucratic class was enormous, and existed on all levels of administration from the capital down to the smallest village (p.134).

Caste was never adopted in Khmer society: the notion of varna was used to grade folk at the royal court, but membership was allocated by the king. The king:

seems to have combined the secular, military role of a Kshatriya with the religious functions and ideology of a Brahmin (p.134).

The virtue of being able to pick and choose which parts of Indian culture and civilisation one found useful: the monarchs being the dominant pickers and choosers.

As for the peasant farmers (about 80% of the population in most agrarian societies), such rice farmers were:

subject to regular corvee labour and to occasional military service, and obligated to provide goods and services to the religious foundations, to landlords, to the mandarin bureaucracy, and to the king. Many of these laboured on the estates of large landholders, while others were attached to specific temples; and some were dedicated to providing the palace with certain types of products. Some of these sound like serfs, but little is known about serfdom in ancient Cambodia (p.134).

Where wealth comes from control of labour rather than (plentiful) land, some form of bondage is likely: if they were forbidden to leave without permission, then they were serfs. Either way, it seems likely that labour service was how land rent was paid.

Which leads to the issue of khnum “usually translated as ‘slave’”. In the C19th, outright slaves were of two sorts:

1) debt slaves, a theoretically temporary category, and 2) slaves for life, who were far less numerous, and who were either those who had been sold by their parents during childhood, or aboriginal Mon-Khmer tribesmen captured in the eastern highlands (these were treated abominably by the Khmer majority). The Classic inscriptions describe three kinds of slaves: 1) slaves legally acquired, 2) slaves who are inherited, and 3) religious slaves (p.134).

. Chinese chronicler Zhou Daguan says of the full slaves:

If young and strong, slaves may be worth a hundred pieces of cloth: when old and feeble, they can be had for thirty or forty pieces (p.134).

This being a barter economy based ultimately on control of labour. Indeed, it seems likely that khnum actually described “obligated provider of labour”:

The reality is that while khnum could never be aristocratic or bureaucrats (no individual khnum ever belonged to the varna), the term covered a wide spectrum of society from peasant commoners to the most abject tribal chattels living in degradation on the ground floor with the animals (p.135).

The ultimate font of authority was the raj (Sanskrit) or stach (Old Khmer). He was executive ruler, chief judge and law-giver. He had to rule through agents, who had their own kin and other networks: a clear limitation on his power, a limitation that varied with the “vigour” and circumstances of particular monarchs. There are few surviving portraits of monarchs, who lived in the centre of thousands of servitors. A teenage prince would have a Vrah Guru, a Brahmin teacher entrusted with his instruction according to the classic Indian texts (Pp135ff).

The empire was divided into provinces (likely 23 at its height) that were divided into villages (sruk or grama):

At every level there were mandarin bureaucrats (khlon, ‘chiefs’) representing the central administration, and who ensured that revenues (rice, goods, corvee labour, and the like) flowed smoothly upwards through the system. Most or all of these were appointed by the king (p.141).

The village headman (khlon sruk) was a royal agent: the village elders (mavrddha) represented the village.

An ambitious individual from a prominent family could by a tract of unoccupied land or obtain it from the king, then found a new (sruk with royal approval (p,141).

The incomes of many villages could support wealthy landholders: one C12th monastery within Angkor (Ta Prohm) received the revenue of 3,140 villages. Since Classical inscriptions were overwhelmingly religious in nature, knowledge of the religious hierarchy is much more extensive than that of the secular hierarchy. The latter included a corps of travelling royal inspectors (p.142).
As for law and order:

As in the rest of the Indic world, the Angkor state and empire were governed by rules laid down in the Code of Manu, a great compendium of Brahman law probably composed in the fourth century BC. Of course, modifications had to be made to a legal system that had been devised for the rigid four-caste system of Vedic India. … The Khmer king was the defender of law and order in Cambodia. His law courts, present on every administrative level right down to the village, instituted criminal proceedings against transgressors and guaranteed the integrity of landholdings and the settling of boundary disputes. Not even religious institutions such as temples were immune, since they as well as private individuals could be sued over land.
In theory, the king owned all land in the empire, but in practice he did not … his main function was to serve as umpire in unresolved land disputes, and to sanction transfers of rights to religious foundations and private individuals (p.144).

Much of the countryside is likely to have been largely controlled by such. Zhou reports there was an annual census in the 9th month: if control of labour is central, then keeping track of it would clearly be important.

The economy was an agrarian rice economy. Since the only surviving writings are on stone, there is a great deal that is not known. Including the actual function of the baray, the vast water features regularly constructed by rulers (they covered millions of square metres with volumes of millions of cubic metres). Coe reports the competing scholarly positions (Pp145ff), though recent evidence has confirmed they were used in irrigation.

Zhou was Chinese commercial attaché, so an authoritative contemporary source on such matters:

Because it was generally the women, not the men, who had charge of trade, Chinese merchants … took care to get a Khmer wife (p.149).

According to Zhou:

In small transactions barter is carried on with rice, cereals, and Chinese objects; fabrics are next employed, and, finally, in big deals, gold or silver is used (p.149).

Zhou’s list of trade goods is reproduced: unsurprisingly, the list of Khmer exports is rather shorter than the list of imports (a common situation when production is dominated by primary products).

As for taxes:

The Classic Khmer state was an immense revenue-gathering machine, and every individual in Cambodia except religious functionaries, priests, monks and slaves was subject to taxation, which was paid in kind, since there was no system of coinage. The king was the supreme receiver of taxes—there was a Khmer formula that went svey vrah rajya, ‘he eats the kingdom’ … but officials at every level participated in the system … The king also benefited by revenues from his immense landholdings, as well as from at least part of the booty gained from military victories.
There seem to have been taxes on everything – on land, on rice, on salt, wax and honey, and so forth. Land taxes were based on paddy size and productive capacity … Payments could be made in all kinds of goods, including not only rice but also slaves, buffaloes, elephants and especially cloth (p.150).

The religious exclusion was deemed a metaphysical exchange.

Drawing on Hindu precedent, Brahmins were excluded from taxation by virtue of the theory that they transferred one sixth of their spiritual gains to the king, a notion that was extended to exempt the great private religious foundations, themselves the recipients of vast revenues from land grants (p.150).

There appears to have been a considerable network of roads and bridges as well as use of horses, elephants and carts. Elephants travel around 24-40 km a day, and consume vast quantities of water—supplying the royal elephant herd must have been part of the purpose of the baray. Elephants and two-horse chariots were used in war (Pp151ff).

Wooden buildings do not survive, so inference from stone construction is required. Of such there is a vast amount, all mortarless. Khmer civilisation produced amazing sculpture, not a single piece of which is signed. Many aspects of Khmer civilisation remain little studied (Pp155ff). Zhou Daguan is the main source on daily life in Angkor and there is a clearly an element of exoticism in his descriptions (not to mention projection). He seems to have been particularly struck by the sexual openness of Khmer society, especially the women.

The region’s humidity is not kind to much of human creation:

No costumes, dress or textiles of any kind have survived from Classical times (p.175).

Zhou describes strict sumptuary laws in C13th Angkor. Sculptures depict no one with upper body covering except warrior kings and soldiers, who often have jackets or bodices ending above the waste. Coe takes us through the (limited) information on aspects of daily life (Pp184ff).

The scholarly debates on Khmer history are interwoven into Coe’s narrative. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the notion that the Indic states of SE Asia were theatre states where display was the purpose; that, in his words, ‘power served pomp, not pomp power’ (p.179). Zhou’s quoted descriptions vividly describe massive ritual and ceremonial display centred on the monarch (Pp179ff). The history of modern totalitarianism suggests that display can very be much an aspect of power: of manifesting and expressing a converging set of expectations based on the prestige and dominance of the ruler—given that much more intensity if the ruler is seen as the conduit through which grand cosmic purpose flows.

Coe notes that:

There never seems to have been a time in Cambodia’s history when Khmers were not fighting each other, or waging war on foreign enemies (p.185).

This is hardly surprising, since there was such an enormous, concentrated extraction of surplus to fight over. It does mean there is a great deal of sculpted pictorial material on Khmer warfare, which Coe takes us through. Zhou was less impressed, saying “generally speaking, these people have neither discipline nor strategy” (p.187). It very much seems to be the warfare of “biggest wins”, with little evidence of a dedicated warrior class, rather than paid officers mobilising (possibly conscripted) peasants. Such a mode of warfare encouraged imperial dominance: the universal monarchs would have had little interest in creating a warrior elite that might be difficult to control.

There are over 1,200 surviving inscriptions from ancient Khmer, almost all in the early Kingdoms and Khmer Empire periods. Those in Sanskrit tend to be in poetic form. There was much concern for the cosmological, including astrological but no evidence that literacy extended beyond a small elite: on the contrary, the vast pictorial displays very much are what would impress and communicate to largely illiterate peasants (Pp188ff).

Coe notes John Miksic division of SE Asian cities into the heterogenetic, found along coastlines and borders of ecological zones, with few public monuments, but intensive trade, entrepreneurship and high population densities and the orthogenetic:

… located well inland, and were correlated with the production of a surplus staple crop – that is, rice – which could be commandeered by the authorities. Stability and ritual were the prevailing order, and there were impressive monuments of a religious nature. There was no money and little evidence of large markets and significant trade. … overall population density was very low. From everything that we know about Angkor, it would appear to have been orthogentic (p.191).

The old Thai capital of Ayutthaya (founded 1351, destroyed by the Burmese in 1767) was a “conscious clone” of Angkor. From this city, still little understood as a lived-entity but well-mapped as an archaeological one, the Khmer monarchs ruled an Empire that lasted as long as Rome’s (p.194) (at least the Western Empire).

And after
In the final chapter, The post-Classic Period: Decline and Transformation, Coe takes us through the distinguishing characteristics of post-Classical Khmer civilisation and the many theories (but little clear knowledge) of how and why the Empire collapsed.

Post-Classic Khmer civilisation was marked by:

The monarch is no longer a chakravartin, but merely king of Cambodia.
The capital in various locations between the Great Lake and the Delta.
Theravada Buddhism as the state religion, with Pali rather than Sanskrit as its language.
Stone temple architecture and prasats replaced by wood-built viharas (‘pagodas’) and other monastic buildings.
State and ancestral temples in disuse; or converted to Buddhist worship and made the object of long-distance pilgrimages.
Predominance of the Sangha (Buddhist order of monks) in all aspects of life.
Middle Khmer replaces Old Khmer as the language of the people and the court.
Written royal chronicles, but few contemporary stone inscriptions.
Absence or abandonment of large-scale public works, such as the barays and the major canals in Angkor and elsewhere.
Strong development of maritime trade with China, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia.
Marked Thai (Siamese) influence in art, architecture, theatre and court life (p.195).

Clearly, the level of extractable surplus was much less. As Coe points out, the expansion of maritime trade gave Khmer monarchs could reason to move their capital to the “Quatre Bras” region “easily reached by junks coming up from the Delta” (p.197). Trade was “almost entirely in the hands of foreigners” (p.210): predominantly Chinese (and Japanese, before the Tokugawa bakufu closed off Nippon to the outside world) but also Malays, Arabs and various Europeans. The lack of a Khmer merchant class may well have seriously limited the standing of mercantile interests at court. The continuation of barter (i.e. the failure to adopt a coinage) probably limited the monarchy’s capacity to profit from maritime trade. While the continuation of monarchical domination of surplus extraction may well have helped foreclose the rise of a Khmer merchant class. (The monarchy displayed a remarkably cavalier attitude to Vietnamese migration into the Delta in the late C17th: this resulted in the subsequent loss of major direct access to oceanic maritime trade with the Vietnamese takeover of the Delta around 1700.)

Coe concludes that:

… civilizations – like biological species – usually fall from multiple causes, not single ones. Alterations in the religious paradigm, military incursions, over-population and ecological collapse, and the shifting of trade routes and patterns, finished off the Classic, monsoon-forest cultures of both Cambodia and the Maya area (p.197).

A civilisation is a system (or, if you like, an interlocked network of systems): if any key part starts to unravel, interactions can easily widen the pattern of unravelling. Resilience in the face of stress can require openness of thinking at least as much as institutional responsiveness and centuries of success can easily close off both.

Coe summarises the sources available for the post-Classic period (p.197ff), examines Theravada Buddhism and its role in Cambodia (Pp201ff), the use of Angkor as a Theravada centre (Pp204-5), Cambodia’s precarious place between Thai and (particularly) Vietnamese expansion (Pp205ff), the course of post-Classic history until Cambodia became a French Protectorate in 1863 (Pp208ff), the operation of post-Classic life and administration (Pp213ff), trade and commerce (p.219), post-Classic warfare:

There was no standing army – in times of war, the patron was expected to muster a force of his clients, and place himself or an officer designated by the king at its head (p.219)

post-Classic art (Pp220-1) and mental life (Pp222ff). This includes the Reamker, a reworking of the Ramayana to reflect Khmer culture and Theravada Buddhism. The chapter finishes with a one-page epilogue of Cambodian history from 1863 to the present, noting that Angkor’s five towers are on its flag, a descendant of its rulers is the monarch and Buddhism is again the state religion (p224).

Coe concludes with a list of rulers of Angkor and known pre-Angkor rulers (p.225) and a note on visiting Angkor (p.226).

Michael D. Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization is a very accessible survey of a civilisation which did so much to set the patterns of SE Asian history and culture: one that managed great architectural achievements while remaining a barter economy.

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (1)

2011-10-23T12:49:00.011+11:00

Michael D. Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization is “volume one hundred and nine in the series Ancient Peoples and Places” (p.4), a numbering which nicely indicates how large Khmer civilisation does (not) loom in the Western historical consciousness. Most people would be aware of the Angkor ruins, but have only the vaguest notion of the civilisation that produced it, except as the forerunner of modern Cambodia.

Which is a bit like saying the Roman Empire was the forerunner of modern Italy. Khmer civilisation during its classic period (802-1327) was the seminal civilisation of mainland SE Asia, dominating modern Cambodia, southern Laos, the Mekong delta and central Thailand. Coe’s book is an excellent survey of the rise and decline of this civilisation.

Coe’s scholarly speciality is “the other great monsoon forest civilisation” (p.7), the Maya of Mesoamerica, a comparison that informs his treatment. He divides the trajectory of Khmer society into Early Farmers, Early Kingdoms, Classic and post-Classic (p.9) with a useful full-page timeline (p.10).

The Introduction deals with European discovery and engagement with Angkor and Khmer history (Pp11ff) concluding with a full-page explanation and potted summaries of the various periods: hunters and gatherers to c.3600-3000BC, early farming period to c.500BC, Iron Age to c.200-500AD, early kingdoms to 802AD, Classic 802-1327 and post-Classic 1327-1863 (p.20): or, to put it another way; foragers, farmers, chiefdoms, states, empire, aftermath.

The ruins of Angkor are vast: the first colour plate is a synthetic-aperture radar image of Angkor from the space shuttle Endeavour:

The entire urban complex covers about 1000 square km (386 square miles), and its core area c.200 square km (77 square miles). There is nothing else to equal it in the archaeological world (p.11).

Coe then moves on to the geographical setting (Pp21ff) – the various black-and-white illustrations throughout the book and magnificent colour plates are helpful. So, for example, the picture of the massive Khong Falls (the modern day boundary between Laos and Cambodia) makes it quite clear why they “effectively block all boat communication between the lower and upper reaches of the river” (p.21), which makes the Mekong far less of a conduit for human traffic than it might be. The great waterway of Angkor was not the Mekong but Tonle Sap (the Great Lake) on the Tonle Sap River, a tributary of the Mekong.

The setting
Like much of Asia, Khmer was and is a rice civilisation. Khmer is one of the many Asian languages where the word for ‘food’ is ‘cooked rice’ (bai). Rice and fish are the basis of the economy (p.29), Coe taking us through the varieties of rice cultivation; dry rice, bunded field, flood-retreat and “floating” rice (Pp30ff).

Then it is on to peoples and languages (Pp33ff). A map of languages (p.35) makes it clear that linguistic boundaries do not entirely coincide with modern political boundaries. There is a significant Khmer borderland in Thailand and a minority remnant in southern Vietnam.

In modern Cambodia, there are some Tai (Thai, Lao) speakers along the upper Mekong, significant areas of Mountain Mon-Khmer as well as Mountain Cham and Cham enclaves. But language boundaries have also changed over time. The Mekong delta was Khmer until the late C17th, when the Vietnamese influx began, while the Tai peoples migrated down from Southern China in the C12th and C13th (displaying some similarities in their role vis-à-vis the Khmer Empire as that of the Germanic peoples vis-à-vis the Western Roman Empire). There is also the normal history of language mixing:

It is now generally recognised that Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language that shows the effect of long contact with Chinese in its vocabulary, in its use of tones, and its tendency to be monosyllabic (p.36).

The animist-shamanistic Mon-Khmer mountain peoples have been traditionally despised by the Khmer and subject to slave raids. The Cham had a significant rival kingdom before being conquered by the Vietnamese in 1471: the Cham had been Hindu-Buddhist but converted to Islam from the C11th onwards (Pp36-7).

The Khmer script (the first inscription of which dates from 611) is Indic in that it is far more complex than a simple alphabet. The language itself tends to be very concrete, borrowing abstract terms from Sanskrit and, after the adoption of Theravada Buddhism, Pali (still the main source of neologisms in contemporary Khmer). We have about 1200 surviving rock inscriptions, most in Sanskrit, and religious: the surviving Khmer script, while still largely religious in context, tends to deal with more mundane administrative matters (Pp40-1).

Foragers, farmers and early kingdoms
The fourth chapter, The Khmer before history (Pp43ff), deals with foragers, farmers and chiefdoms, the latter apparently the result of the advent of iron tools and weapons and increased social differentiation:

Onto this Iron Age ‘basement culture’ was to be grafted a belief system that had its origins over two millennia ago in the plain of India’s Ganges River, laying the foundation for what was eventually to become the civilisation of Angkor (p.56).

Moving on to the early kingdoms period (Pp57ff), Coe notes that the region known as ‘Indochina’ has culturally far more that comes from India than China: the exception being ‘Tonkin’ or the Red River valley (i.e. the proto-Vietnamese), which was sinicised.

Ironically, there are almost no Indian texts on the region (apart from reference to risky-but-high-return trading opportunities) but several Chinese texts which, given the linguistic difficulties of transliterating from non-tonal polysyllabic languages (Khmer, Sanskrit) to a tonal monosyllabic language (Chinese), and Chinese disdain for ‘barbarian’ peoples, are more ethnographically revealing than historically so (p.57). Coe quotes at length from various Chinese reports on the Mekong Delta Khmer cities and societies:

They have neither rites nor propriety. Boys and girls follow their penchants without restraint (p.59)

conveys the general tone. (The relative freedom of the sexes—and so sexuality—is a recurring comment on Khmer society by outside observers.)

The picture the Chinese chronicles give of a dominant state or states (‘Funan’, ‘Zhemla’) is contradicted by contemporary Khmer inscriptions, which indicate no dominant state or rulership. Scholars relying more on the latter (i.e. contemporary) records have built up a picture of a series of Iron age chiefdoms which, as Chinese demand for luxury goods increased, coalesced in the Mekong delta into trading ports with local rulerships:

The chiefs of these palisaded settlements bore the Mon-Khmer title of pon, an office that was passed down matrilineally (passing from the deceased to sister’s son). The population of a core pon-dom formed its own lineage or clan, with its own deity whose representative was the pon himself …
There was a hierarchy of pon, probably based on wealth and political influence. As early as the fifth century AD, superior pon started claiming kingship, taking on Indian names and titles … although Khmer names linger (Pp61-62).

The earliest Khmer king whose existence is firmly historically established, Rudravarman, ruled the Delta pon in the first half of the C6th (p.62).

This was the period in which Hinduism and Buddhism became firmly established in the region, particularly amongst the Khmer. Indian traders operated from the Red Sea (linking with the Roman Empire) to the Mekong Delta (thereby linking to Chinese trade). Buddhism spread easily along trade routes, being both a congregational and proselytising religion, comfortable with trade. That Brahmanism also spread was more surprising, since it is highly agrarian in its origins and structures (p.62).

It is less surprising if one considers that what actually spread was worship of the Hindu gods, particularly Vishnu and Shiva—figures of awe, power and prestige—and Brahmin status and learning. The caste system never established itself in Khmer society (p.63), except as a vehicle for court language. To put it another way: what spread was those parts of Vedic Brahmanism that were most compatible with royal status-seeking and Buddhism, particularly Mahayana Buddhism. Even better, the Indian states and principalities were not expansionist outside India, so Khmer rulers could pick and choose which aspects of Indianisation suited them: coins, for example, never took on, the Khmer lands remaining a barter economy until the arrival of the French in the mid C19th (Pp62-3). The archaeology of the Delta has been much disrupted by the violence of its C20th history (Pp64ff).

Being a barter economy was another similarity with Pharonic Egypt and Mayan Guatemala—barter societies whose rulers produced great monumental architecture. As the Khmer lands were barter societies, they lacked mechanisms to transfer obligations across time, with (given the hot and humid climate) particularly poor ability to store produce over the longer term. One can see the appeal to Khmer rulers of great projects that soaked up surpluses in ways the kings controlled: hence the constant building by the rulers of the later Khmer empire of yet new “temple mountains”, complexes and artificial lakes.

By the early C7th, political power seems to have shifted from the maritime cities of the Delta to inland cities controlling rice surpluses. Societies became more stratified, kings became more powerful, the pon title faded away, temple foundations spread. This is the period when the first Angkor site, Angkor Borei, was established, linked to the Delta by a long canal, with considerable striking Hindu and Buddhist sculpture based on lively reinterpretation of Gupta styles. Coe takes us through the archaeology of this and other Khmer sites from the period (Pp68ff). Several page inserts take the reader through the central points of Hinduism (Pp80-4) and Buddhism (Pp85-8).

Classic Angkor
Then it is on to the classic Angkorean period of Khmer Empire. Coe lists the defining characteristics (even though some also pre-dated or post-dated the period) as being:

A universal monarch as head of an imperial state.
The capital of the empire almost always based in Angkor.
Hinduism and/or Mahayana Buddhism as the state religion.
Religious architecture primarily in stone (sandstone and laterite) rather than wood.
State and ancestral temples.
Workship of the linga.
Prasats (shrine towers) housing images of the gods, often arranged in quincunx and supported by stepped pyramids.
Massive and extensive public waterworks, including canals and vast reservoirs (barays).
A network of highways, causeways and masonry bridges.
Inscriptions in Sanskrit, as well as Khmer.
Iconography primarily Hindu, mainly derived from the epics and from the Puranas. (p.97)

With no serious geographical barriers to unity, the warring minor kingdoms eventually produced a warlord able to conquer them all. This was Jayavarman II (‘protected by victory’) known posthumously as Parameshvara (‘supreme lord’) whose crowning as universal monarch in 802 in a Brahmin rite is taken as the establishment date of the Khmer Empire (Pp97-100).

An inset explains the somewhat chaotic dynastic succession processes in Cambodia whose tendency to fratricidal conflict was somewhat balanced by a tendency to select for competence (p.100). Jayavarman II established his capital at Hariharalaya (named after the deity that unified Vishnu and Shiva). His son Jayavarman III engaged in significant building in stone in the new capital, establishing styles that persisted through the history of the Khmer Empire including the building of an ancestral temple and a state temple, the last including a representation in stone of Mount Meru, home of the gods (Pp.101-2).

After a fratricidal conflict over the succession, Yashovarman I won and, after building 100 ashrams across his empire and embellishing further his father’s capital, moved to the capital to Angkor, where it remained for the next five centuries, except for “one brief lapse”:

There were probably several compelling reasons for this move – economic, socio-political, military and probably religious (undoubtedly he was advised by Brahmin gurus where and when this should take place), but suffice it to say that the Angkor region is strategically located about halfway between the hills of Kulen and the margins of the Great Lake, on the right bank of the Siem Reap River – not only an abundant source of water for whatever hydraulic schemes the ruler might be contemplating, but also a waterway as holy to the Khmer as the Ganges still and is to Indians (p.103).

A two-page map conveys the scale of what was eventually constructed on the site (Pp104-5). There was much construction:

Each of the major chakravartin who ruled the Khmer Empire felt it necessary to build important public waterworks, an ancestral temple, and a state temple, usually in that order (p.107).

Hence, given the resources at their command, the architectural splendours that so impress to this day in Yashodharapura (‘Glory-bearing City’). One of Yashovarman’s waterworks was 7.5km (4.7m) by 1.8km (1.1m): one estimate is that it must have taken 6 million man-days to build its embankments alone (p.107). In an agrarian barter economy, labour service cannot be “held over”: it must be used each year or lost.

Kings followed kings, until Jayavarman IV (reigned c.928-41) moved the capital to Koh Ker (Chok Gargyar), 90km (56m) to the NE. Why, we do not know. As the site provided easy access to sandstone, the monumental and other statues of this interlude have produced many of the admired masterpieces gracing various collections around the globe. After a period of weak rule and disintegration, Rajendravarman II (r. 944-68) moved the capital back to Angkor and reimposed imperial rule on the breakaway rulerships. He built Banteay Srei, a Shivaite complex that gets its own two-page insert (Pp110-1). He and his son and successor Jayavarman V (r. 968-c.1000) were both pious Buddhists, but Mahayana Buddhism is a tolerant and syncretic faith (p.112).

Then followed a 9 year civil war, won by Suryavarman I (r.1011-49), who demanded of 4,000 officials an oath of loyalty (that if one broke it one would be “reborn in the thirty-second hell as long as the sun and moon shall last”) that was still being used by the Cambodian crown in C20th. Suryavarman also required it be sealed in blood.

The wealth of the Khmer Empire rested on extraction of surplus from rice-growing peasants. Goods and labour service sufficed for the needs of its monarchs: particularly as the surplus was “soaked up” in uses controlled by the monarchs—notably huge building projects. This did, of course, mean that the Khmer Empire’s history was dominated by using and fighting over that surplus—foreign invaders attempting to loot the products of that surplus or acquire surplus-generating territory, internal rebels seeking to gain control of the surplus in their region, usurpers seeking to gain control of the surplus for the entire empire.

The succession of kings continued, marked by grand building projects, revolts and wars. Rulers of such power had to be praised. One inscription tells us of Undayadityavarman II (r.1050-1066 ) that:

He excelled in seducing women to his will by his beauty, warriors by his heroism, sages by his good qualities, the people by his power, Brahmins by his charity (p.114).

The ‘cult of personality’ is a perennial feature of autocracy for, when loyalty is compulsory, how does one successfully signal loyalty? Playing the game of excessive public flattery is a form of signalling that has some costs involved, so is more reassuring. Various kings succeeded to rule of the Khmer Empire. Some were successful, some less so; some favouring Buddhism, some Shiva or Vishnu. Success and grand building projects tended to go together. So, Suryavarman II (r.1113-c1150) extended the empire, defeated the Cham enemies, invaded the Vietnamese realm based on the Red River by land and sea repeatedly (if unsuccessfully) and built Angkor Wat, which gets its own multipage insert (Pp117-121).

A Cham invasion threatened the continuity of the Empire, but Jayavarman VII (r.1181-c.1215):

arguably not only the greatest of all the Khmer kings but also the greatest personage in Cambodian history (p.122)

restored the power of the Empire, crushingly defeated and conquered the Cham, avidly promoted (Mahayana) Buddhism and engaged in the normal grand building projects: including the grandest of all, Angkor Thom (Pp122ff).

Rulers after Jayavarman VII found keeping the Cham within the Empire proved too hard (though the Cham later succumbed to the Vietnamese). At some point in the C13th, there was a massive (royal) reaction against Buddhism, since every single Buddhist sculpture in Angkor was smashed or defaced while Angkor was “re-Hinduised”: this was iconoclasm on a massive scale and a manifestation of religious intolerance previously foreign to the region. Meanwhile, chiefdoms of the Tai people migrating down from Southern China began to put pressure on the Empire’s northern frontiers. In the early C14th, the Empire rapidly declined. The last Sanskrit inscription was carved in 1327, which is taken to be the end of the Khmer Empire. But not, of course, of Khmer civilisation, which transmuted into something different. In particular, it became overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist, the first Pali inscription being carved in 1309 (Pp128ff).

Rulerships are based on patterns of expectations, incorporating particular framings (such as religion). Stress can lead to shifts in those patterns that can encourage the adoption of new framings. Alternatively, shifts in those framings (such as religious changes) can themselves cause stress that may undermine expectations rulership relies upon. With our limited information, it is very hard to see whether the shift to Theravada Buddhism was a response to stress, a cause of stress or both.

This review will be concluded in my next post.

Civilisation and surplus

2011-10-22T11:33:00.010+11:00

I once asked an Israeli archaeologist why archaeologists (and historical anthropologists) seem to be so influenced by Karl Marx. He replied that it was because Marx talked about economic surplus and they study the products of economic surplus. Makes sense.

Civilisation rests on the production of surplus—that is, the production beyond the needs of subsistence. In agrarian civilisations, typically 8 out of 10 people worked as farmers. That meant that they produced enough surplus food (and other agrarian products such as material for clothing) for 1 in 5 people to do something else. That "something else" being all the things that make a civilisation (which may include farmers working on other things in down times).

Early civilisations start off in warm climes near water (i.e. river valleys towards the equator) because you can have a concentrated population cultivating fertile land and less effort is put into staying warm, so it is easier to produce a surplus.

Surplus is not exploitation as such (although there are certainly exploitative ways to extract surplus: the most efficient ever exploitative extractor of surplus being Stalin's regime—he could make mass starvation work for him). Surplus is the basis of civilisation.

As technology improves, being in a warm area becomes less important as better technology means it becomes easier and cheaper to stay warm. Indeed, there is some tendency for the technological "cutting edge" of civilisation to move to colder climes, since they get more pay-off from technology and tend to be more time-conscious due to the need to store food and other supplies over winter. (Climate's effect on temporal outlooks may have had something to do with which parts of Europe adopted the Reformation and which did not, though distance from Rome and consequent command-and-response issues were clearly also important.)

With the transformation of production we call the Industrial Revolution, the ratio of people needed to produce food dropped dramatically as technology allowed more to be produced with less human effort. By 1920, primary production stopped being the biggest employer in the US. (By 1930, services were the biggest employer, so the "manufacturing moment" in US economic history—when secondary industry dominated employment—lasted 10 years.)

Institutions make a difference; some sets of institutions are much better at facilitating transactions (and so gains from trade and thus the production and use of surplus) than others. Clearly, the British institutional heritage of US and Canada works better than the Iberian institutional heritage of Latin American. (Which is why Hispanics flood North: they can earn more income simply by being in a different institutional context.) Scandinavians in the US do considerably better (in terms of average incomes) than do (pdf) Scandinavians in Scandinavia.

Culture (which overlaps with institutions and is profoundly affected by religion) also makes a difference as it affects attitudes to time, willingness to transact, etc. Hindus and Sikhs from South Asia, on average, do considerably better in the UK (in terms of employment and income) than do Muslims from South Asia.

Combinations of differences within cultures and institutional contexts also make a difference: Muslims in the US do considerably better (in terms of income, employment and integration) than do Muslims in Europe.

Geography can make a difference beyond producing food and staying warm. Water transport is generally much cheaper than land transport. It is easier to produce a surplus operating out of water hubs than relying on land transport. Capital markets are about trading in surplus: ideally, directing it to more productive ends. And, if you are a trade hub, the demand for capital will be greater. There is a reason why the Serene Republic of Venice was a persistent financial innovator (inventing bonds in 1171, for example).

So, Marx was correct in that surplus matters: but he was utterly wrong in what it represents and the implications thereof.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Why did the Middle East select for monotheism?

2011-10-20T03:24:00.002+11:00

A variation on the Whig interpretation of history that still has surprising sway is of human religious history as having a “natural” progression from animism through polytheism to monotheism. It has led to such nonsense as the psychotic tyrant Akhenaton being written up positively solely because he was monotheist (or, at least practised monolatry: Kerry Greenwood’s Out of the Black Land provides a revealing fictional treatment). This animism-polytheism-monotheism “progression” is an interpretation that has nothing to recommend it, apart from monotheist self-satisfaction.

If one doubts that polytheism is perfectly compatible with highly sophisticated societies, I refer you to classical Rome and Greece; to India, China and Japan. If you doubt it is perfectly compatible with thoroughly modern societies, I refer you to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. If you think monotheism is necessary for a highly compassionate morality, I refer you to Jainism and Buddhism.

Not only does the animism-to-polytheism-to-monotheism progression fail as a moral and intellectual claim, it fails as history in the quite basic sense that monotheism is purely a product of the Middle East. It spread from there around the globe (indeed, it is still doing so), but it evolved nowhere else.

The Middle East itself produced not one but several forms of monotheism: the proto-monotheism of Zoroastrianism; the monolatry-turned-monotheism of Judaism; the universalising monotheism of Christianity; the universal dominion monotheism of Islam; plus various offshoots of the above. Monotheism in its various forms now thoroughly dominates the religious landscape of the Middle East. So, what is it about the Middle East that it has repeatedly selected for monotheism?

Social geography
When looking to a recurring pattern in a particular region, it is a good idea to start with social geography; the patterns of interactions of people with the terrain.

By the time monotheism first arose, the enduring patterns of Middle Eastern social geography were already in place. River-valley civilisations dominated by major urban centres interacted with herding pastoralists living in the surrounding deserts, mountains, plateaus and plains. Their interactions were those of trade, raid and conquest: interspersed with retaliation and protection payoffs. The fear of the settled (and thus vulnerable) farmers had for the mobile (and thus dangerous) pastoralists is well expressed in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel.

The great conquering peoples of the Middle East after the demise of the last Mesopotamia-originating empire (also subject of a famous Biblical story)—the Iranians, Arabs, Turks and Mongols—were all pastoralist peoples. Pastoralist conquest became so much a pattern of the region that Abd-ar-Rahman Abu Zayd ibn Muhammed ibn Muhammed ibn Khaldun, statesman, jurist, historian and scholar, in his The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, written in 779 AH (1377 AD), famously developed his cycles of history based on it.

His analysis is that rule is based on the rise of group feeling (asabiyyah) that leads to rulership over others (pp 107-8). Having conquered urban lands, the ruling group becomes distracted by the luxuries available that weakens group-feeling and courage. This proceeds until it is swallowed up by other nations or dynasties (p.109).

Ibn Khaldun’s theory is based on internal dynamics and external response. Expenses grow (p.134), the ruling group become complacent and lose their edge (p.135), rulers become more isolated seeking people directly beholden to them (p.137) leading finally to dynastic senility and wastefulness, making them ripe for eventual replacement (p.142). Decay in authority usually starts at the edges of the dynasty’s territory (p.250). He repeats the theory in different words at various places (e.g. p.246ff), usually providing historical examples of the various processes. Russian demographer Peter Turchin has developed the theory further.

A review essay on a book on tribalism in the Middle East puts ibn Khaldun's model well:

… outlying tribes tied together by traditional kinship solidarities conquer, settle, and rule a state. In time kinship loyalties loosen, the rulers urbanize and grow effete, their state loses control over distant tribes, and the cycle begins again.

Precisely because herding life is mobile, kinship and lineage provide protective and support services. This provides a strong, but constrained, source of social solidarity. As the Arab proverb goes “me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, my brother and cousin against the stranger”.

What began as a response to the demands of pastoralism can also deal with other sources of social insecurity. In the words of an enlightening review essay on Pakistan:

At the heart of Lieven’s account of Pakistan is kinship, pervasive networks of clans and biradiris (groups of extended kin) that he identifies as “the most important force in society,” usually far stronger than any competing religious, ethnic, or political cause. Several millennia of invasions, occupations, colonizations, and rule by self-interested states resulted in a “collective solidarity for interest and defense” based on kinship becoming paramount in the area that is Pakistan.

Monotheism’s advantages
The aforementioned great conquering pastoralist peoples—Iranians, Arab, Turks and Mongols—were all, with the exception of the Mongols (who came from furthest away and were profoundly affected by the long history of interaction with China), in their conquering phase, monotheist. Monotheism offers a motivating identity and framework of expectations able to operate across lineages. The common identity of believer is, in the right circumstances, able to unite people across otherwise competing lineages—Muhammad’s success in being the first person to unify most of Arabia is a striking example of this.

The common identity of believer can also unite across the pastoralist-farmer divide and do so in a way which gives an identity to cling to in adversity: both clearly important in early Hebrew history. Given that the pastoralist-farmer barrier in the Middle East can be particularly porous, depending on circumstances, an identity that can be persisted with across it has clear selection advantages.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or at Critical Thinking Applied]

We are APES

2011-10-16T11:47:00.008+11:00

In an article in the October issue of Quadrant, Paul Monk labels homo sapiens as Apprehensive Pattern-seeking Emotional Story-tellers or APES. As nice a summary of our cognitive nature as I have come across.

Paul Monk writes:

As neuroscientist William Calvin puts it, our brains are susceptible to colourful rhetoric, to being swept along by group dynamics that overwhelm our emotional autonomy and critical faculties, to finding hidden patterns where none exist. They are highly susceptible for these reasons to myths, stories, superstitions and mass emotions. Our memories are selective and unreliable, our decision-making easily swayed by the last thing to make a vivid impression on us; our intuitions about logic, probability and causation are powerful but flawed in a number of ways and these flaws are actually magnified rather than diminished by our creation of complex, increasingly data-dependent social orders.

Given Paul Monk is a principal of Austhink, cognitive biases are his meal ticket.

A fine, if somewhat poetic, description of our Apprehensiveness is provided in John Carroll's flawed-but-engaging (and interestingly flawed) book Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Wow the Ancient City Ignited the Modern World:

Fear is the dread of the known threat. Angst is the dread of the forever unknown, what is essential to becoming. The future does not hold danger, the future is danger. ...
Animals live in the eternal present. Humans live in the eternal coming-into-being. Angst, not fear. ... the inevitable incompleteness of experience, a being that is always becoming. What we call intellect is compelled to record that incompleteness in two dimensions, time and space.Time is measured against the past and the future -- memory and anticipation (Pp28-9).

While he somewhat exaggerates the gap between us and animals (such as higher primates), what Carroll is alluding to here is a distinction in our expectations about the future. Economist Frank Knight famously distinguished between risk and uncertainty:

Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated. ... The essential fact is that 'risk' means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating.... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.

To put it more simply, uncertainty is risk that is immeasurable, not possible to calculate. But both are about anticipation, apprehensiveness, expectations: about looking forward.

As anyone in business knows, risk is heterogeneous. For example, small business copes with the unknown variances in hiring new people by using any risk-minimising techniques that are available (notably, use of networks that provide implicit “guarantees”: as in “I don’t know X but they were recommended to me by Y, who I do know and I do not believe Y wants to damage their connection to me by recommending a dud”). Large businesses, more able to cover risk and less able to directly connect effort to output, compensate by paying a “corporate premium” that acts as a “hostage” for productive behaviour by the employee. (I see no particular reason why training profiles—which are often used to explain the wage premium in large corporations—should be greatly different between large and small businesses: difficulties of supervision strike me as far more differentiating.)

Interest rates, asset prices and assessments of risks are intimately connected. As David Glasner notes:

... interest rates emerge out of the process of evaluating all durable assets, which are nothing but claims to either fixed or variable future cash flows of various durations and risk characteristics. ... One of the good things about Milton Friedman’s 1956 restatement of the quantity theory of money was his explicit recognition that interest rates are determined not in a narrow subset of markets for fixed income financial assets, but in the complete spectrum of interrelated markets for long-lived physical and financial assets.

(There are some complications in this, which need not detain us for the moment.) What makes an asset an asset is its potential for future use.

In aggregate terms, it is generally reasonable to assume that risk in an economy “bell curves”—that failed judgements of risk and successful judgements of risk cancel out around a ~~positive~~ mean. [If that mean is positive, risk assessments on average are too high and will tend to fall: if the mean is negative, risk assessments on average are too low and will tend to rise.] But suppose some economic shock leads to a sudden downward shift in the general ability to meet established obligations: the [previous experience] ~~assumption~~ of successful overall coverage of risks ~~may~~ [will] no longer apply. There will [likely] be an increase in people’s preference for holding money (to reduce their exposure). Ironically, the overall risk profile of the economy [will then tend to] ~~may~~ improve, since bankruptcy and closure will disproportionately hit those on the tail end of the risk bell curve. The effect will [then] be to put downward pressure on interest rates, reflecting shifting assessments of risk.

In this situation, there may well be an increase in (negative) uncertainty: but this will not be directly reflected in interest rates because these cover only risks-as-calculated. Prices cannot directly incorporate what cannot be calculated but can and will reflect the consequences of uncertainty’s effect on behaviour.

I say negative uncertainty because, as George Ip notes:

… it is not “uncertainty” per se that bothers business. Whether uncertainty is unwelcome depends entirely on what’s at stake. What would you prefer: 100% probability of dying next year, or 50%? Most of us would choose the latter. Similarly, business would prefer zero probability of a burdensome new rule, but if that’s not possible, would certainly take 50% probability over 100%. The administration’s decision to delay implementation of a new ozone standard perpetuates uncertainty. Business welcomed it nonetheless because now they do not have to spend money to meet it for at least two years, and perhaps forever if in the interim a new president chooses never to implement it. Does the Federal Reserve create some uncertainty when it undertakes quantitative easing? Probably, but in the process it makes the stability of inflation around 2% much more certain, and that, most businesses would say, is a reasonable trade-off.

In the absence of any ability to calculate, the framing through which one views the incalculable determines responses. A classic instance of uncertainty shifting from positive to negative is that, when the stock market was booming during the late 1920s, lack of information over the weekend would be interpreted positively. As and after it crashed, lack of information was interpreted negatively.

Economic “confidence”—including business confidence—is, to a large degree, how what cannot be calculated is being framed in a given time period: whether it is being framed positively or negatively and how much so. This is likely to be based on various indicators but, by its non-calculable nature, cannot be definitively so. The wider the range of uncertainty, the more unstable confidence is likely to be, because the greater the possibility of new information changing how the uncertainty is being framed.

Just because something cannot be calculated does not mean we will not frame expectations to cover that uncertainty: it just means that such expectations cover more than is directly inferable from such information as we have. We will apprehensively tell stories based on (at least partly created) patterns that fit with our preferences, because we are APES. But, of course, without preference and expectations we would have no basis to act (other than randomly). Being APES may go with the territory of having a certain level of cognitive complexity.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied]

An age of every day marvels

2011-10-12T08:03:00.001+11:00

Economist Arnold Kling recently posted on the issue of "scientific stagnation", and whether we were in a period of it. Now, without getting into the arguments about string theory, and whether it is a dead-end (there is more to science than physics), I offer the following excellent paragraphs from the above post:

... we tend to under-estimate the achievements of computer technology because they become so widely available so quickly. Going to the moon seems amazing, because almost nobody participated in that. Using Google Maps seems pedestrian, because all your friends can do it.

and

One could argue that the social payoff from space travel just hasn't been there. The trip to the moon was not epoch-making because the moon had very little going for it. If Christopher Columbus had discovered a continent with the ecology of the moon, that discovery would not have been an epoch-making event.

On the latter point, one commenter on the post noted:

Anyone know who Captain John Davis was?
No? He was the captain of the expedition that was the first in recorded history to set foot on Antarctica. I'd say no epochs were made, pretty much proving the professor's point.

We live in an age of every-day marvels. Perhaps we should appreciate that more.

Migrants, jobs and voice

2011-10-10T11:15:00.003+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

Alabama has recently enacted a law that makes it illegal for illegal migrants to work to support themselves and their families with spillover effects to any migrants who have family members who are illegal migrants:

Many legal Hispanic workers are fleeing the state because their family and friends don't have the proper papers and they fear they will be jailed.

Observing both the US and Australian debates over immigration, it is clear that anti-immigrant sentiment (which this law is pandering to) is primarily a function of two factors:
(1) level of unemployment;
(2) how much sense ordinary citizens have that migration is "under control".

In the US, the solution to the first is for the Federal Reserve to fix by increasing aggregate spending. (Any supply side reforms, however worthy, are unlikely to be anywhere near as effective.) Or, to put it another way, do its job as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia has.

The second is bedevilled by the fact that one side of the debate "wins" if nothing effective is done about illegal immigration while ordinary citizens can only get a sense of having a say if legal policy (the one they get to vote on) matters. In Australia, there was a notable and dramatic drop in anti-immigration sentiment when the then Howard Government ostentatiously cracked down on boat arrivals: this despite the same Government running a high immigration policy and the least "Eurocentric" policy in our history.

(Australia is also the world-champion at "cherry-picking" migrants--it is helpful to be a prosperous, English-speaking island-continent.) The effects and experience of high level of migration vary greatly between different segments of the society: which naturally reflects how one reacts to, and frames, the issues. A certain amount of ongoing sentiment about migration simply flows from this but it also affects how the above factors operate.

By simply labeling any concern by voters that they get a say over migration as "racist", the "open borders" folk generate a comforting sense of moral superiority, completely elide the issue of democratic control and the status of citizenship while profoundly discounting the concerns of those who disproportionately bear the costs of migration. All of which poisons public debate over the issue, (deliberately) obscuring much of what is at stake.

As one would expect, given this, problems are most intense in Europe, since lack of accountability is so built into contemporary European politics.

Just price and human autonomy

2011-10-08T12:43:00.004+11:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

In any discussion of “just price”, one should not blame the Romans, even by implication, for any notion that extends beyond fair bargaining. They had no truck with notions of intrinsic value, as we can see in this quote from Servius Sulpicius Rufus, writing in the first century BC here:

All buying and selling has its origin in exchange or barter; there was once a time when money did not exist and terms like ‘merchandise’ or ‘price’ were unknown. Rather, each person bartered what was useless to him for that which was useful, according to the exigencies of his current needs; it often happens that what one man has in plenty another lacks. However, since it did not always and easily happen that when you had something that I wanted, I, for my part, had something that you were willing to accept, a material was selected which, being given a stable value by the state, avoided the problems of barter by providing a consistent medium of exchange. This material, struck in due form by the mint, demonstrates its utility and title not by its substance but by its quantity, so that no longer are the things exchanged both examples of wares, but rather one of them is termed the ‘price’ [Praetorian Edict: D.18.1.1pr].

Medieval “just price” thinking had other origins, including that development of Aristotelian natural law philosophy known as Scholastic philosophy.

At the heart of natural law theory is a notion of things having defining purposes (their final cause). So, interest on money was verboten since the purpose of money was exchange and interest charged for what was not the purpose of money. There was also argument that money—remembering their only form of money was coins—was sterile, so it "growing" of itself was against nature. Hence Aristotle’s denunciation:

There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural (Politics, Book One, Part X).

Once you have a notion of proper (indeed defining) purpose, that puts limits (sometimes severe limits) on where bargaining can go. This is particularly clear in sexual ethics: the "defining purpose" of sex and genitals is procreation, so there is no permitted "sexual bargaining" that allows sex outside marriage (the vehicle for raising children) or sex that does not permit the possibility of conception (no masturbation, no oral or anal sex to point of ejaculation; no artificial blocks to conception, all of which is use of defined-to-be-procreative organs against their nature). Which is the same sort of reasoning as "money is round bits of metal the purpose of which is exchange, so charging interest is against its nature".

So, in Scholastic thinking, a just price has to fit within the defining uses, the final cause, of things. Such as, the purpose of economic activity is to sustain life. Which has all sorts of implications, such as limitations on return; on what you can charge for.

One can have notions of fairness, or even of commonality, which do not rely on notions of "just price" grounded in intrinsic nature of things. There are good reasons to have rationing in a besieged city, for example.

But there is a difference between "this is a violation of our sense of fair play/common life" and "this is a use of something outside its nature/proper purpose". Between "this is not just behaviour to fellow citizens" and "this is an against-its-nature use of x". The latter involves potentially quite serious limitations on human autonomy, the former is paying a particular form of attention to it.

A misbegotten Union

2011-10-05T23:57:00.002+11:00

The people who supported the euro, and particularly UK entry into the euro, were wrong. Not arguably wrong, not partially wrong; just flatly, unequivocally, completely wrong. Rarely in the history of public policy has one side in a public policy debate been so swiftly, and so comprehensively, vindicated.

A tale of two islands
The debacle is so complete that citing specific evidence seems unnecessary but we merely have to compare Iceland with Ireland. Iceland decided that a small island of 320,000 people had some niche advantage in grand finance. It was hubristic nonsense that went horribly wrong. But Iceland had two saving graces in the disaster. First, it realised that it was far too small to guarantee the banks and did not do so, thereby failing to saddle its taxpayers with enormous liabilities. Second, it was not in the euro so could let its exchange rate reflect the change in its economic circumstances.

Contrast this with Ireland. The “Celtic Tiger” bought into the nonsense that is land-rationing and suffered the normal penalty of land prices surging way beyond likely income returns as expectations of capital gain fed themselves, helped by cheap credit. (I say ‘land prices’ because houses are large decaying physical objects, it is the land a house is on which shoots around in value.) When it all came tumbling down, the Irish Government made things worse by guaranteeing the banks (who therefore had much less incentive to change behaviour or fix their own problems) saddling the hapless Irish taxpayers with huge liabilities. Ireland was also stuck with the euro, so could not let its exchange rate reflect the change in its economic circumstances, thus becoming a test case in exactly what was wrong with the euro. Hence Ireland's drop in employment has been considerably worse than Iceland’s.

Looking at the graph of 2007 to 2010 changes in employment for OECD countries, Australians can note what a different place we have been in compared to the US and most of Europe: for us, the Great Moderation is still going (particularly clear if you move the start year back to 1959). While any Australian who has been paying attention over the last 30 years can appreciate the useful role of a floating exchange rate as economic “shock absorber”. That is what countries in the euro now lack.

ECBing downwards
The European Central Bank (ECB), with its trumping focus on maintaining price stability, has made things worse. The point of the euro was, in effect, a deutschmark-for-everyone, just sign up. The ECB has pursued a policy that makes some sense for the German economy and no sense for anyone who is not. In a weird historical resonance, the ECB is playing a similar role in our period of the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession that the Bank of France did in the 1928-1932 period (pdf): driving down expectations of the path of money supply and spending, so having a depressing effect on economic activity—just the thing to make a debt crisis worse (pdf).

Once as tragedy, then as farce
In another weird historical resonance, while many Americans seemed to have thought they were elected a new FDR, what they ended up with is a new Herbert Hoover—someone with a high reputation for intelligence and energy, willing to break from the “stale” patterns of the past, who engages in a lot of activity (pdf) which is either pointless or actively counter-productive while failing to pay attention to the Fed’s disastrous monetary policy. Kevin Baker offered the Obama-as-Hoover analogy early but it is now in some danger of becoming conventional wisdom.

The historical resonances continue, as the Fed has engaged in a mix of passive (and not so passive) monetary tightening intermixed with feeble and temporary easings—the net effect being to drive down expectations of the path of money supply and spending, which encourages people to hold onto money, given falling inflation and economic activity expectations, causing a downward spiral in transactions, pushing the US economy well below its trend growth path. Yet people babble on about inflationary risks, just like the 1930s. (Alas, much of the economics profession seems clueless, the key central banks seem to be running on myths, worrying about inflation is popular, though misguided, even as financial markets have very low inflation expectations, which is not helping asset markets while international prudential bank regulation is set to make things worse.)

A paper on who went protectionist in the 1930s and why (pdf) helps explain why we are having these historical resonances. Just as a lot of the problem now is people reacting to the stagflation of the 1970s, so the problem then was people reacting to the post WWI inflations, including the notorious German hyperinflation. In both periods, people's fears about returning to past inflationary episodes encouraged inappropriately tight monetary policies.

A recent post points out (scroll down to the version in English) that a striking historical resonance is that the countries which had problems with the gold standard during its 1873-1895 deflationary period included Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal: the same countries which are now having problems with the ECB’s tight money policies.

Euro nausea
As the euro disaster unfolds, it is worth remembering what is at stake. There are more euros (banknotes and coins by value) in circulation than US dollars. The euro is the second largest reserve currency and second most traded currency. The question increasingly becomes, not whether Greece will default, but where the process of default will stop and how much of the financial system is at risk of collapsing as sovereign bonds fall to, and then beyond, “junk” status. With the IMF issuing serious warnings about the global implications. As does George Soros while the co-author of the classic study of financial panics This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly thinks the situation is (fairly but not absolutely) dire.

Now, it is true that Greece is a deeply fiscally dysfunctional polity. But that is the point: Greece should never have been part of a common currency with Germany. There was simply never enough economic commonality among the members for the thing to work (a problem expressed nicely here). But, here’s the thing: the attempt to do what could not be done made things worse. This is not a crisis that the poor euro got caught up into, this is a crisis that not only has the euro made worse, it is one that it (and especially the ECB’s management thereof) did a significant amount to cause.

[Read the rest at Critical Thinking Applied, or a slightly earlier version at Skepticlawyer]

Whiteman’s Dream

2011-10-02T09:58:00.002+11:00

October 2011 Dinner - The Australian Adam Smith Club

Prof Gary Johns
on
Aboriginal Self-Determination:
The Whiteman’s Dream

The Adam Smith Club will host a dinner meeting on Wednesday the 5th of October 2011, at the Curry Club, 396 Bridge Rd, Richmond 3141.

The Hon Dr Gary Johns is Associate Professor in Public Policy in the PPI. He served in the House of Representatives from 1987-1996 and was Special Minister of State and Assistant Minister for Industrial Relations from 1993-1996 and as an Associate Commissioner of the Commonwealth Productivity Commission 2002-2004. He was for 10 years, Senior Fellow Institute of Public Affairs, Australia, and a senior consultant with ACIL Tasman economic consultants from 2006-2009. He is a member of the editorial board of Agenda (ANU) and President of the Bennelong Society.

Gary Johns will outline the thesis of his book, Aboriginal Self-Determination: the Whiteman’s Dream. Land rights, welfare and culture have locked aborigines out of the good life. Land has become a burden, welfare has become disabling, and bad behaviour is mistaken for culture. There is a way out. Aborigines must abide by the same rules as every other Australian -- seek out opportunities, study hard, and free themselves from a culture of bad behaviour. This is in contrast to the white man’s dream of Aboriginal self-determination. This grand experiment has failed. Aborigines, especially those in remote Australia, need an exit strategy from the dream. The exit strategy outlined in this book destroys the rallying cry for culture. Instead, it shows that the way to self-determination is through individual dignity.

Attendance is open to both members and non-members. Those desiring to attend should complete the pdf (link below) and return it to the Club no later than Tuesday the 4th of October 2011. Tickets will not be sent. Those attending should arrive at 6:30pm for dinner at 7:00pm. The cost is $40.00 per head for members and $45.00 per head for non-members

download the invitation and newsletter at
www.adamsmithclub.org/LF100.pdf
(the file is ~200k acrobat file)

A crisis for whom or what?

2011-09-30T12:50:00.006+10:00

As much of the developed world, particularly the US and the eurozone, struggle with prolonged economic stagnation (and looming worse), who or what is this a crisis of or for?

Not capitalism as such. This is not remotely the worst "crises of capitalism". Indeed, in much of the world, capitalism is doing just fine, thanks very much. People are continuing to move out of poverty at record rates (pdf). Even within the OECD, some countries are doing just fine.

So, not a crisis of capitalism but a crisis for some (important) capitalist economies.

It is a crises of cheap credit (or, more precisely under-priced and over-extended credit). Nothing particularly unusual in that, had them in the past. The perennial issue of appropriate prudential regulation thereby yet again becomes salient. With, as is normal, issues specific to this particular credit bust (notably land rationing encouraging housing booms which busted).

It is a crises of bad monetary policy. Also had them in the past, but the similarity between current failures by the Fed and the ECB and past failures by the Fed and the Bank of France raise issues about institutional incentives and corporate memory for central banks.

Which leads into the crises for macroeconomics. Macroeconomists have not collectively shone: those with public profiles have shown a marked tendency to lapse into political partisanship. The discipline clearly lacks analytical resilience. Too much fairly basic stuff is simply not agreed upon.

It is a crisis for the EU (or at least for the European Monetary Union): the euro has failed for much the reasons that Milton Friedman predicted it would in 2000 (pdf):

… the various countries in the euro are not a natural currency trading group. They are not a currency area. There is very little mobility of people among the countries. They have extensive controls and regulations and rules, and so they need some kind of an adjustment mechanism to adjust to asynchronous shocks—and the ﬂoating exchange rate gave them one. They have no mechanism now.
If we look back at recent history, they’ve tried in the past to have rigid exchange rates, and each time it has broken down. 1992, 1993, you had the crises. Before that, Europe had the snake, and then it broke down into something else. So the verdict isn’t in on the euro. It’s only a year old. Give it time to develop its troubles.

To the extent that it is a crisis of public debt, it is also a crisis for poorly managed social democracy/welfare states. With Greece as the cautionary worst case.

So, a crisis of poor or problematic public policy and its mainstream analytical support. But not of capitalism, as such.

A seriously bad idea

2011-09-29T10:51:00.004+10:00

This expands significantly on a comment I made here.

The Obama Administration's American Jobs Act has a seriously bad idea of the type that one might expect from an Administration headed by a Chicago corporatist who was a humanities academic and "community organiser". The notion is to allow unemployed people to sue employers who fail to hire them for discrimination. This despite the fact that very few US job ads say unemployed need not apply. Econblogger Tyler Cowen has already suggested it may be one of the worst (economic policy) ideas ever.

Let us apply some elementary economic reasoning. The more unemployment there is, the lower the cost of discrimination. So, if you wish to lessen discrimination, aim for full employment. Since the "allow suits for discrimination" proposal will increase risks in, and costs of, hiring, it will discourage hiring, meaning unemployment will be higher than it otherwise would be. So, the net effect is likely to be to increase the overall level of discrimination.

It will also encourage more hiring to be "within networks", as they provide implicit "guarantors" and more sources of information. Marginal workers are less likely to be plugged into such networks.

So, a bad idea even in terms of lessening discrimination and improving the position of marginal workers.

But it sadly fits in with the Obama Administration's track record: we are suffering from serious economic stagnation, so let's stuff up the supply-side of the economy even more! Alas, the evidence is mounting that President Obama seriously does not understand economics.

Climate change, Social change 2

2011-09-27T07:23:00.005+10:00

In my previous post, I outlined the apparent underlying strategy of the Gillard Government's Carbon Tax proposal and expressed scepticism that it was likely to work.

A recent piece by Henry Ergas suggests that my scepticism was premature. As he points out, the Government's proposal includes the creation of new property rights:

START with what is uncontested. First, once carbon emitters are issued permits, those permits will be property they own, so any government that abolishes them will have to pay compensation, possibly in the billions of dollars.
Second, entitlements created by statute may be found by the High Court to be property even if that is not specified in the legislation creating them. But specifying it in the legislation, as the government intends, makes that outcome, and the need to pay compensation, far more certain.
Third, a future government could not get around the need to pay compensation simply by mandating a zero carbon price.

Under provision 51 (xxxi) of the Australian Constitution, property can only be acquired by the Commonwealth under "just terms", which the High Court has ruled effectively means market price and includes regulatory changes which destroy property value.

So the policy of moving Australian public policy against comparative advantage and creating a whole new structure of interests dependent on that may be much harder to overturn than it first appeared. Indeed, the entire strategy seems to be to ensure no future Government can overturn it, except at huge expense:

In short, a new government would be comprehensively locked in. But that, Mark Dreyfus, the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change, assures us (The Australian, September 22), is not the legislation's intention. Rather, its aim is merely to provide certainty.
Dreyfus does not explain why certainty should be provided here but not for water entitlements, taxi licences, fishing quotas or development approvals.

The short answer would be--because they are not attempts to entrench a whole new set of political interests.

As part of the strategy a move very familiar from past Australian policy history is being undertaken:

As a result, when the Gillard government promises investors in "green" activities certainty, it is not eliminating risk: it is merely shifting it from those investors on to taxpayers and the community, magnifying its cost along the way. And while private investors get a choice about whether to bear risk and are compensated accordingly, the victims of this risk transfer do not.
To add insult to injury, the victims are not even being told how big the resulting loss could be.

The “Deakinite Settlement” (pdf) of White Australia, Wage Arbitration, Trade Protection, State Paternalism, Imperial Benevolence represented just such a shifting of risks to the taxpayer. It was a system that made Australia's economy more susceptible to economic shocks and depressed economic growth.

That environmentalism is a substitute for the failure of socialism has long been clear. But it seems it can also be a vehicle for substantially reversing 30 years of successful economic reform. And just as commodity prices, which have given us historically high ratio of export prices to import prices (i.e. our terms of trade, the value of what we sell compared to the value of what we buy), are declining (which has been their long term trend).

The struggle and debate over the Carbon Tax suggests that Vaclav Klaus is correct: climate change has become a defining socio-economic issue of our time, and not in a good way.

Climate change, social change

2011-09-19T17:51:00.008+10:00

Walking through Footscray, I passed a poster that advertised for “an activists conference” under the title Climate change, Social change. I am old enough to remember when the standard radical left critique of environmentalism was that it was bourgeois sentimentality that diverted folk from the true revolutionary struggle. But then folk worked out the great revolutionary advantage of trees and animals over the proletariat: they don’t answer back, they do not suffer “embourgeoisment”, they do not vote the “wrong way”.

It turns out that workers—and queers, blacks, women, etc—do not want to overthrow Western capitalism, they wish to be get better access to its goodies (plus not be treated like crap anymore, thanks). This makes them rather unsatisfactory vehicles for radical social change.

Not so beasts, plants, land- and seascapes. As any action that affects them can be deemed noxious, so Western capitalism can be declared to be radically illegitimate to a far greater extent that any championing of marginalised humans. The very thing that makes Western capitalism so attractive to people—its productiveness and freedom—is the very thing that makes it profoundly illegitimate in “deep green” terms. Western capitalism’s greatest strength is turned into its profound and irredeemable “original sin”.

Hence environmentalism has become a prominent response to the failure of socialism. The collapse of traditional religious belief is, as Michael Lind notes, also a factor:

The religious vacuum to the left of center in the U.S. and Britain, where liberal Protestantism has undergone a similar collapse, has been filled with three new creeds. The first is radical environmentalism, which is best understood as a kind of nature-worshipping pantheism.

A recent post by Skepticlawyer on the resurgence of “paganism” suggests that there may be considerable room for environmentalism-as-religious-impulse. It has already become the de facto “religion” of public (and much elite private) schooling.

Part of the reason why the poster caught my eye is that last week I went to a talk on the economics and politics of the Gillard Government’s proposed Carbon Tax. It is clear enough that the tax will have no measurable effect on the climate, since what Australia does is completely irrelevant: we are simply not big enough in economic and environmental impacts to matter. The claim that we will provide an “example to the world” is arrogant nonsense: various successful Australian policies have notably not been adopted by other countries. This is despite Australia avoiding both the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession. Again, we simply do not matter enough, even without considering the fact that the US and EU both have much bigger concerns at present, which is making climate change increasingly politically unimportant.

Both of these considerations lead to the conclusion that Australia’s response to climate change should be adaptation, not mitigation. Meanwhile, the Carbon Tax itself is unpopular and contributing to the diabolically low poll standing of the PM and the Government. Which raises the question: why go there?

The answer “to keep her coalition partners The Greens happy” hardly seems a satisfactory answer on its own. Which is where the presentation last Wednesday was so helpful. (It was Chatham House Rule, so nothing will be attributed.) For the carbon tax is much more than a tax: it is a vast and complex package which goes far beyond its redistributive compensation. Though that clearly has policy appeal in its own right.

What it represents, as was put to us, is a profound reversal of the basis of Australia’s considerable public policy achievements of the last 30 years. If there was one principle underlying that it was: allowing Australia to use comparative advantage more effectively.

The Carbon Tax and associated policies represents a thorough reversal of that principle. Which is the genius of the thing: for it thereby creates a plethora of “green” interests which are absolutely reliant on state action. This is a major exercise in social change, in institutional reconstruction. (There was a lot more detail, but that is the core thesis.) The activists at that conference advertised in the aforementioned poster have got their slogan spot on.

So, the question becomes, will it work? I am sceptical, and on two grounds. First, operating against comparative advantage like that will depress economic activity. A policy whose abolition opens up extra resources for politicians to offer is not a stable policy regime unless it provides other compensations to a stable electoral majority, such as the risk suppression provided by the “Deakinite Settlement” (pdf) of White Australia, Wage Arbitration, Trade Protection, State Paternalism, Imperial Benevolence. Achieving such a stable set of benefits seems unlikely. Particularly given that the problem with environmental benefits is, even if they are real, animals and plants do not vote: which is why environmental amenity has been increasing—that is where environmental management (or its lack) does affect people.

On the contrary, it seems much more likely that those adversely affected by the proposed policy principle will tend to form an electoral majority.

Secondly, I am sceptical how much environmentalist politics can “slip into” non-monotheist spirituality. The fundamental problem is children: the logic of "deep Green" environmentalism is against them. Yet a key way for burgeoning religions and quasi-religions to spread is via families. If having children is antipathetic to voting Green (as it currently strongly is), then there is a clear natural limit to the potential “Green” vote: Labor Senator John Black summarises the in-depth polling data:

… if a woman has two children or three children or more, they simply don't vote Green. They tend to have less disposable income and they tend to vote Labor, until they're in their 40s and then sort of drift off to the Coalition, which is sort of a pattern that's been going on since about 1900, so that's pretty much written in stone.
But if they have no kids, their support for the Greens remains strong right up until their 60s. If they have one, their support for the Greens doesn't start until their late 30s, but if they've had two they're lost to the Greens. So the Greens are a party of the inner city, of the professionals, of the higher incomes, and that's all a function of basically no kids. If you have kids, as a female professional you don't get the job opportunities, you don't get promoted, that's the cruel fact of life.

Unless the Greens can overcome their parent-vote deficit, they are doomed to third Party status.

All of which suggests that the Carbon Tax is not likely to transform Australian public policy in the intended way: but the ambition to do so does much to explain its appeal.

Goal displacement in monetary policy

2011-09-15T15:03:00.005+10:00

This based on a comment I made here.

Here are, as commenter Mark A Sadowski suggests, some "words to live by":

Moral: Inflation is not the greatest economic evil, and absolute price stability is not the greatest economic good.

In considering money and monetary policy, one should always remember to ask the question: what is money for?

The short answer is: to make transactions easier, to reduce transaction costs (for both on-the-spot and across-time transactions). The notion that "price stability" at the cost of pushing transactions seriously below trend is some advance is a classic piece of goal displacement.

This is what makes targeting money GDP/Py make so much sense (the goal of the "Market Monetarists" as Lars Christensen names the new macroeconomics school in his useful summary paper [pdf] and which I have argued for on expectations grounds). It is the monetary authority aiming to optimise money's performance of its central purpose--to lubricate transactions: both immediate and cross-temporal transactions. Even better, it is using a goal which provides a clear empirical evidence about whether it is doing that or not (and so, as Joshua Hendrickson points out, making the central bank far more accountable).

Lowering inflation from 13% to 4% in the "Volcker Transition" is one thing. Lowering it from 3% to 0% while pushing transactions seriously below trend and creating a much worse economic downturn is quite another. What do the people who preside over such an outcome think money is for? What do they think they are for?

The misbegotten European Union

2011-09-14T16:36:00.003+10:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

Commenter Tomasz Wegrzanowski made the comment that:

ECB [European Central Bank] is officially supposed to care only about inflation. It’s a retarded design of a central bank, so [ECB President] Trichet doing retarded things and bragging about them is by design.

As is normal when it comes to EU dysfunction, the problem is not a bug but a feature. Being the most inflation-pure Central Bank was the “winning” strategy on which to make the euro credible, so that was taken.

One has to understand that the EU is misbegotten at its core. Its core idea is that nationalism was the great sin of European history, that nationalism is a popular sentiment, so inappropriate popular sentiments are the great danger. The so-called “democratic deficit” is the original EU-not-a-bug-but-a-feature. All based on the idea that the EU elite can steer the benighted masses into a new world of harmony. Plato’s Republic Bureaucratised. (Or is that Eurocratised? Possibly Brusselscratised?)

Actually, the great problem of European history was irresponsible power, and creating a new regime of irresponsible power is a “cure” which is just more of the disease.

A badly designed European Central Bank focused on what the elite thinks is a mark of “true” credibility is just par for the course.

Put not your faith in labels

2011-09-13T10:36:00.002+10:00

Any time there is a serious economic downturn, mainstream economics drops in popular and intellectual esteem, even though mainstream economics generally does not pretend to have abolished the business cycle while it explains why reliable, systematic prediction of future economic conditions is impossible.

However, serious economic downturns are almost invariably the result of bad policy, and economists and economics will be berated for failing to give successful advice. (Indeed, one view is that serious downturns can be manifestations of market predictions of bad policy.)

This loss of esteem is generally unfair about microeconomics. In the words of former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr Michael Keating, microeconomics is successful at “producing robust predictions of general tendency”. It is rather less unfair about macroeconomics, which has failed to achieve even a common analytical language.

Of course, some folk can be correct in predicting some particular event or trend, but it will generally not be continually the same folk. Outlier predictors are, of course, a statistical possibility—consider having a large number of people predicting heads or tails: some folk will continue to get it right though fewer and fewer as more throws are made, but that is a result of that a particular sequence will occur and, with enough varied predictors, some people will pick that sequence; it is not that they have some insight into “heads or tails”.

That said, economics also creates rods for its own back, and it does so by some poor naming of major ideas. Typically, such names misleadingly over-claim and either provoke hostile responses from the unsympathetic or encourage poor thinking or both.

Information and expectations

Consider 'rational expectations': it should really be labelled consistent expectations since the fundamental notion is that expectations of agents in the model of the economy should be consistent with the model. That is, you should not base any economic model on the mere presumption that the modeller has significantly and persistently better insight into the operation of the economy than the (other) agents in the economy. It is fundamentally a principle of analytical humility but, unless one can provide reasons why the modeller would have—in a systematic and continuing way—better information than people for whom a great deal is at stake, it is a sensible analytical principle.

The principle is a formal expression of the reality that people react to information about the economy: which includes (implicit or explicit) models of the economy. But labelling the principle ‘rational expectations’ is misleading and invites misreading as putting some very high value on the “quality” of expectations rather than their common cross-agent limitations. (Yes, the notion is that agents are rational in their use of information but rationality is a general economic principle: the principle involved here is specifically about analytical consistency in application of information.)

Then there is ‘the efficient market hypothesis (EMH)’: which should be labelled the informed market hypothesis, since the notion is that prices will reflect information available to agents. The problem with terming it the efficient market hypothesis is that it then looks like a principle of market perfection, which it is not. (There is a strong version[, a semi-strong] and a weak version: I am talking here of the weak version.) The weak version does imply that open markets will the best way of pricing assets, but that does not entail that markets are perfect: merely there is no systematically better mechanism for pricing assets. It does not even imply that information is transferred instantaneously.

Nor does EMH imply that asset price bubbles are impossible: on the contrary, it is precisely because we cannot predict new information that we cannot predict turning points, so asset price bubbles become possible (since if we could reliably and systematically predict turning points, prices would not rise to a level for people to be caught by them when the bubble bursts) while expectations of capital gain both motivate agents and are part of the information feeding into prices. Asset bubbles are clear enough in hindsight, when we have the information about how they ended: specific information not available to the participants in the bubble (hence there are always folk denying that any bubble exists: and if income on said assets rises to “catch up with” the expected capital gains, they will be correct).

If EMH was labelled the ‘informed market hypothesis’ it would be less misleadingly named and less of an affront to folk not enamoured of markets. (And yes, EMH is about the efficiency implications of use of information but, again efficiency—or its lack—is a general feature of economic mechanisms; EMH is specifically about markets and information.)

Putting consistent expectations and informed markets together—the alert reader will have noticed that they both enjoin the analyst to take information flows seriously and not presume one is a privileged observer—suggests that considerable scepticism about regulation is appropriate. (Particularly discretionary regulation, where the approval of officials is required.) As there is no reason to think regulators will be systematically better informed than economic agents in general. (Noting that regulation is based on some implicit or explicit model of behaviour.) Indeed, there is good reason to think that discretionary regulation will make markets more chaotic, rather than less, by narrowing the use of information and generating perverse incentives: an expectation that has considerable empirical support (pdf), particularly in the experience of command economies.

There is a large debate about central banking in particular around the discretionary/rule/open markets possibilities (central bankers should have discretion; they should operate according to some policy rule; they should be abolished). Hence Swedish economist Lars Svensson’s suggestion to target the forecast; so policy action and market information work together.

Note: I am using “layperson friendly” characterisations of both “rational expectations” and EMH: for much more sophisticated discussion of both and critiques thereof, see Stephen Williamson’s review essay(pdf) on John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics.

Mal-labelling

Another case of poor labelling is the Austrian economics concept of 'malinvestment'. What is or is not a good investment significantly depends on larger economic conditions. What is a great idea in New York may be a really dumb one in Port-au-Prince. The notion of malinvestment is that unwarranted monetary expansion misleads folk about the future path of economic activity. As conditions change, investments based on such unwarranted expectations are "exposed" and need to be liquidated to free resources to go to more valuable uses.

But the label implies (in compete contradiction of Austrian value subjectivism) that being a malinvestment is an intrinsic quality of an investment. If so, the level of economic activity becomes irrelevant to the level of malinvestment. So, you can happily advocate any amount of restrictive "adjustment" because the level of "bad investments" wasting resources is set.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Against the notion that error has no rights

2011-09-09T18:49:00.003+10:00

A comment I made here.

“Hate speech” laws are just modern blasphemy laws (as an historically literate lawyer points out here) and entitled to no more respect. If error has no rights, then that just means power is given to whoever gets to define “error”. Moreover, such laws are never operated evenhandedly. Neither in what counts as “hate speech” nor in which “hate speech” is prosecuted. Regarding the latter, everyone knows that, in jurisdictions with such laws, they are broken in various mosques every Friday and that such folk will rarely, if ever, be prosecuted.

Common law notion of incitement provides a well-attested mechanism against speech that actually seeks to break legal protections. It is as far as one needs to go.

Hate crimes are in a different category; first, because there are actual crimes involved. Secondly, because it is a criminal attempt to intimidate an entire category of people.

Speaking as a gay man, I particularly dislike the way “hate speech” prosecutions give conservative Christians a warm sense of victimhood.

Slowly seeping through

2011-09-08T14:25:00.005+10:00

The message about supply constraints on land/"house" prices (that quantity constraints have price effects) is steadily spreading. In the Oz blogosphere, the Unconventional Economist has been posting excellent posts, full of clear data and analysis.

In the US blogosphere, Matt Yglesias puts the problem with common framing of discussion of "house" prices well:

If I were to pick something to quibble with in Ryan Avent’s The Gated City it’s a perpetuation of the American habit of mixing up discussions of the price of houses with discussion of the price of land. … There are lots of perfectly ordinary reasons for land to go up or down in price. A house, by contrast, is a large decaying physical object.
In my experience, people living in rural areas are generally clear on the difference here both because land is put to more varied uses and perhaps because more people live in trailers—homes sold separately from land. But it’s just as true in a urban or suburban setting.

Ryan Avent agrees:

When broader shifts increase the economic potential of a place like Silicon Valley, land with easy access to that place also rises in value. The natural market response is to maximize the return on valuable landholdings by using them to provide shelter to the many people who’d love to have access to the local job market.
Unfortunately, the response in many productive cities is to try to circumvent this response. Residents use lots of different tools to prevent landholders from providing the access to the local economy that the market demands. As a result, we fail to take full advantage of the productive city’s economic potential, jobs in productive industries that would otherwise be created are not, and the economy as a whole is worse off.
When you see rapidly rising home prices in a rich city, that’s the process you should be imagining to yourself; it’s lost economic growth and lost jobs made manifest.

(Both via).

Which is not quite how I would put it, given that restricting land use can greatly increase the value of land permitted to be used for housing (though not necessarily in a very stable way). Avent also fails to note the property-tax/political donation incentives acting on officials.

Still, it is very useful to have an uber-blogger such as Matt Yglesias make the misleading framing point--that the issue is land supply and prices, not "house" prices--so clearly.

The argument from excluded diversity

2011-09-04T19:27:00.008+10:00

A post at the excellent information source Box Turtle Bulletin has fun with what poster Rob Tisinai calls "the stoner argument against same-sex marriage". He is referring to a post by Prof. Robert John Araujo, SJ in which the good Professor opines:

[Tribe] also derides the use [of] arguments against same-sex marriage that rely on what he labels “pseudo-scientific claims.”
He does not identify the reasoning underlying these claims, but I wonder how he would consider this argument: Let us assume that two planets which have not yet been inhabited by humans are to be colonized by them; on Planet Alpha, heterosexual couples only are assigned; on Planet Beta, only homosexual couples. In one hundred years, will both islands be populated assuming that reproductive technologies are not available to either group? I suggest that Planet Alpha will be; but Planet Beta will not. Why? The basic answer is to be found in the biological complementarity of the heterosexual couple necessary for procreation that is absent in same-sex couple. This is a scientific argument, but perhaps it is, in Tribe’s estimation, counterfeit.

As Tisinai points out, there is no argument here. In Tisinai's words:

It’s just a long-winded way of saying two members of the same sex can’t conceive a child without outside help. That’s it. Granted, Araujo takes many words and a convoluted path to say it, but he never makes an argument of it — never links to it to a clear point. It’s a kind of pointless pseudo-profundity that reminds me of stoners smoking weed back in college …

Hence Tisinai's label, "the stoner argument against same-sex marriage", with funny dialogue added to demonstrate.

It is clear from what Prof. Araujo SJ writes that he is (as one would expect from a Catholic theologian) advancing a Thomist natural law position. This particular notion he advances in his non-argument is one that turns up quite a lot: best summarised as "but what if everyone acted like that?" I have seen, for example, in a debate on same-sex marriage, an elderly gentleman question the (gay) supporter of same-sex marriage in precisely those terms.

You can make the position into an argument by added an appropriate premise. Such as, for example,

No stable arrangement recognising sexual diversity is possible.

It would be an odd sort of premise, since it is clear enough that presuming opposite-sex attraction and bonding as the only acceptable option did not stop people from being sexually diverse. So it seems very odd to imply that, by including same-sex attraction and bonding within acceptable options, somehow opposite-sex attraction and bonding would be undermined.

But if one takes the view that one cannot broaden the nature of something, one can only change it, the notion makes more sense. That is, the possibility of x + y is excluded, it is only x or y. It is still a strange notion, but it is understandable in its strangeness. It becomes a case of “why does one think reality is like that?”, rather than merely “what a strange way to look at the universe!”.

The reason why comes from Aristotelian metaphysics: specifically, the four causes—in particular, the notion of final cause. The notion is that, just as the purpose of eyes is to see, the purpose of sexual organs is to procreate. So human nature has a single “proper” form—heterosexuality. From this teleological conception it follows that human nature does not have a diverse sexual form: it has a single sexual form, heterosexuality, with any divergence being improper—failing to conform to one’s proper form.

Such thinking tends to conflate causal role, biological (or other) function and sentient purpose as if they are the same sort of thing. But it also encourages an “either x or y not x and y” view of the world: that one can only have a different form with another, single defining purpose; not an expanded form.

The view not only rests on a notion of definitive form, it also rests on the notion that we have direct access to those forms. (So, in Thomism, that the form in nature and the form in our mind are the same form.) It permits the exclusion of contrary cases as “not proper” because we have direct knowledge of their defining purpose.

This is a version of the “no True Scotsman” fallacy, where the conclusion is permitted to set the ambit of its premises. So, evidence for same-sex activity, couples and parenting in nature are dismissed as “not true manifestations of sex, couple or parenting”.

Neither the claim of defining form (including purpose) nor the claim of direct understanding of that form (and so purpose) stand up to close examination. For example, the claim that the defining purpose of marriage is procreation: nonsense, the function of marriage is to allow people to build lives together. By creating that connection, marriage then becomes the prime social vehicle for raising children. But raising children does not define marriage: hence all those societies where infertility was not grounds for divorce or annulment, fertility was not a requirement for marriage and same-sex marriages have been recognised. This even without considering the very strange places such Thomist epistemic confidence led to or similar problems of natural law theory.

But, if you think in terms of definitions of “proper” form (with defining purposes) that actual instances can fall outside of, then it is not so hard to think in terms of “excluded diversity”. That the consequences of all marriages being same-sex is somehow an argument or counter-example against some marriages being same-sex.

Not that the good professor’s example works even in his own terms: it is perfectly possible to have same-sex couples “cross-pollinate” and raise children—there is even a film and a book trilogy using that premise. (It is also roughly what bonobos do).

Still, the "argument from excluded diversity" is a strange way to look at the world and that Thomist natural law thinking leads one to think in such terms is a sign that there is something wrong with it.

Quantity controls on land use do not make infrastructure cheaper

2011-08-30T17:57:00.004+10:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

The problem with zoning solutions for traffic congestion problems is that they do not work. Indeed, they are counterproductive since:

(1) the price effects of quantity controls on land use decrease the incentive to provide infrastructure, since the quantity controls provide easier revenue increases from higher land prices than does increased land values from providing (expensive) infrastructure (the reason to have government provide infrastructure in the first place, since it benefits from increased land values via taxes, unlike a private provider, so captures more of the increased value from the infrastructure so is more likely to provide it);

(2) they increases the cost of providing infrastructure (by making the land more expensive) and increases the resistance to providing infrastructure (by increasing resident activism to protect capital gains from rising land prices; there being a difference between being serviced by a freeway or railroad and being next to it). There is a reason land-controlled California gave us BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone): i.e. NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) on steroids.

Congestion charges (i.e. road tolls) work better if there are choices between modes of transport as how effective they are depends greatly on how much usage is responsive to price. They can be a useful part of any traffic management system, but are not a substitute for providing appropriate infrastructure. Which is why controls on land use can be so noxious: they actively frustrate appropriate provision of infrastructure.

Rorty on truth

2011-08-29T08:05:00.002+10:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

Matt Yglesias is a very clever guy, so it is sad to read him writing Rortarian mush. Yes, of course language is a matter of social conventions. It has to be to be language – that is, something used to communicate between sentient beings. If you do not know the operating social conventions, you cannot use the language.

But notice the cognitive slide involved in the term 'social convention'. It has that useful, to sceptical arguments, ring of "could be anything/it is just made up stuff". That any particular sound or symbol has a particular reference is arbitrary. That is why it is so hard to decode lost scripts. There is nothing in the structure of the universe that impels any connection between any particular sound or symbol and any referant beyond that which sentient beings give it.

But there is more to language than social convention. There is the whole realm of "meaning" – reference, connotation, etc. That 'water' refers to water is social convention. That water is wet is not. If language did not have the ability to usefully connect to the world, there would be no advantage to it.

But that utility is a consequence of such connection, not a driver of it. Nor is it an arbitrary or conventional consequence. The utility in "look out for that truck!" is a consequence of a connection between the statement and how the world is. And it is the ability of language to make and express such connections that make language useful. The connection is not a consequence of the utility, the utility being captured is a consequence of the connection and does not exist without the connection.

And whenever Matt Y explains what he means, he is making truth claims. Language is not possible without some concept of truth because otherwise no statement has any specific meaning. Every act of definition is a truth claim, a setting of connection.

Moreover, that a statement has utility does not mean it is true: lies can have utility. Being useful in general has no specific connection to being true. To have some specific connection between being useful and being true, including if one attempts to redefine truth in terms of utility, one has to define ‘being useful/having utility’ in some specific, restrictive way. When one does that, one will find that connecting to what is, is actually driving the restricting: ‘being useful/utility’ will not be adding anything to the process.

That statements are abstractions from reality, are about reality, so not the same as reality, and can never be complete representations of reality, is all true, but not a problem for truth: just overblown concepts thereof. Rortarian sceptical pragmatism obsesses over motive, distracts over convention and misses the underlying reality: which makes it archetypal post-modernism.

A History of Cambodia (2)

2011-08-22T11:38:00.004+10:00

This is the second part of my review of David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia (2nd edition). The first part is in my previous post.

Between Thailand and Vietnam
The period when Angkor is abandoned by kings and rule shifts to Phnom Penh is very poorly documented. Likely, the rapid expansion of Chinese maritime trade under the Yuan and early Ming had something to do with the shift from an inland centre to a river port and what seems to have been a much more commercial version of kingship, particularly by the C17th. There were also regular wars between the Thai kingdom centred in Ayudha and Cambodia.

After being permitted to set up customs posts in the Mekong delta in the 1630s, the Vietnamese poured into the region, rapidly reducing the Khmer to a minority in what is now southern Vietnam, cutting Cambodia off from maritime access to the wider world. Increasingly, the pattern grew of Cambodia moving to a shifting pendulum of conflict and alliance between Thailand and Vietnam. Conflict with Thailand in particular seems to have been perennial, with the Thai capture of Lovek in 1587 being seen as a traumatic defeat for the Cambodians. This was also a period of increasing contact with Europeans, with at least one Cambodian king even promising to convert to Christianity if the Spanish would help him against the Thais. One Cambodian king converted to Islam, was defeated by the Vietnamese and carted off to Vietnam in a cage (Pp77ff).

From the late C18th to the mid C19th, Cambodia was a weak state oscillating between its more powerful neighbours Thailand and Vietnam. Succession disputes within the royal family would have aspiring would-be kings attempt to the support of one, leading to the incumbent king to seek the support of the other and successive invasions by both neighbours (Pp99ff).

This culminated in Vietnamese occupation and Cambodia’s (temporary) disappearance as a separate state. Chandler observes that:

Just as Jayavarman VII’s ideology can be compared in some ways to the ideology of Democratic Kampuchea, the first half of the nineteenth century bears some resemblance to the 1970s in terms of foreign intervention, chaos and the sufferings of the Cambodian people (p.117).

Thai and Vietnamese forces fought over Cambodia, with Vietnam essentially attempting to incorporate Cambodia from 1834 to 1847, being defeated by Thai military power and how different Cambodian society and rulership was from Vietnamese patterns. The reign of Duang (1848-1860) saw Theravada Buddhism and the Cambodian kingship restored, although a kingship subservient to the Thai monarchs Rama III and IV (Pp123ff).

Enter the French
In 1863, Cambodia became a French protectorate. Up until 1906, Cambodia was self-governing. After Sisowath’s coronation in 1906, French control intensified. In its last period, 1941-53, the French were reduced to trying to retain their position under pressure from Thais (France and Thailand fought a brief war, which went well for Thailand on land but badly in the sea and air), the Japanese and agitation for Cambodian independence (Pp 137ff).

The picture Chandler paints of French colonialism is of a colonial power that never understood the society it was administering; a colonial rule which was very much, indeed increasingly, driven by its own internal dynamics. As Chandler observes:

… the volume of reports required by residents, and consumed by their superiors in Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi, and Paris, increased dramatically. Residents, more than ever, were tied down to their offices, presiding over a two-way flow of paper; they were seldom in contact, socially or professionally, with the people they were intended to protect. In automobiles, tours of inspection became speedier and more superficial, for residents and their aides were confined to passable roads. In fact, the intensification of French economic and political controls over Cambodia, noticeable throughout the 1920s and after, was accompanied, ironically, by the withdrawal of French officials from many levels of Cambodian life (p.152).

Much of the revenue seems to have gone to support a colonial bureaucracy that was mostly concerned with revenue collection (and one technique of said rule was to supply plentiful free opium to the reigning kings [p.149]). Competence in Khmer declined among French officials (p.156).

There were some rationalising campaigns such as abolishing “slavery”—a campaign pursued without much sign of understanding the role bondage played in the economy and society, nor how to replace its functions (though a cynical view would be that there was in fact a deliberate intention to disconnect the local elite and replace them with French officials: either way, it provoked a major popular revolt in 1885-6 [Pp144-5]). But there was not much concern with, for example, suppressing brigandage in outlying areas (p.155), providing any education, electricity or similar C20th intrusions (p.156). They did succeed in creating a small, French-speaking intelligentsia whose aspirations they mostly frustrated and many of whom, ominously, picked up Sorbonne/Ecole-style Marxism.

Comparing the post-colonial experience of South-East Asian countries, clearly it was much better to be subject to British colonialism (Malaya, Singapore: though Burma is a bit of a black mark), retaining independence (Thailand) or Dutch colonialism (Indonesia) than suffering French colonialism (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam). This was not merely a matter of the direct colonial experience but also what framings your post-colonial elite imbibed. Even given the drag the Permit Raj has been on Indian economic growth, clearly it was better to have your post-colonial elite be Oxbridge/LSE-educated by such as Harold Laski than Sorbonne/Ecole-educated by Louis Althusser and his ilk. But Western intelligentsia criticisms of “colonialism” rarely consider the responsibility of folk such as themselves for post-colonial disasters.

From the 1930s, a sense of Cambodian nationalism began to arise among the small, French-educated elite. Including Saloth Sar (better known as Pol Pot) whose elder sister was one of King Monivong’s concubines (p.162). But, up until the fall of France in 1940, no doubts were offered by French officials about the permanence of French control: there were certainly no policies directed at a post-French rule future (p.164). The experience of French weakness from June 1940 to October 1945 changed everything:

By the end of 1945, Cambodian independence, impracticable and almost unthought of in 1939, had become primarily a matter of time (p.165).

In April 1941, a shy young prince, Norodom Sihanouk, became King: he was do dominate the country and its politics for most of the next half century (p.167).

The French continued their “improvement” projects, including an attempted replacement of the Khmer alphabet with roman letters; one of the first acts of Cambodian government after the Japanese pushed aside the French in March 1945 was to rescind this decree:

… as so often in Cambodian history, what the French saw as self-evident improvement in the status quo the Cambodians saw as an attack on the essential character of their civilisation, defined in part by what had been passed down from Angkorean times (p.170).

At Japanese request, King Sihanouk declared Cambodia independent. There followed a brief period (March – October 1945) when patriotic politics operated openly: along with the beginnings of anti-French guerrilla resistance. By 1946, Cambodia was once again a French protectorate, the French having control over defence, foreign affairs and finance, with the Cambodians promised the right to a constitution and to form political parties (p.172).

The re-imposition of French dominance turned out to be temporary. While Cambodia largely avoided the guerrilla warfare that convulsed Vietnam it (though the Thai government did finance anti-Japanese and anti-French guerrillas along the Thai-Cambodian frontier [p.174]), along with the rest of Indochina, became independent.

From what Chandler writes, it is clear that the model of modern statehood the French provided was little connected to the wishes or perspectives of the general populace, still less concerned with service delivery. It was marked by “rationalising” projects that arose out of the framings of the officials, not the needs, wants and perspectives of the ruled. This was an ominous model to impart.

Becoming independent
In the years prior to independence, political parties formed. Politics rapidly devolved into the Democratic and Liberal Parties, both led by Princes. The former proved to be much more electorally popular, leading it to a position to make the Constitution as it wished. Sihanouk resisted, eventually being able to achieve complete dominance over politics by effectively turning Cambodia into a one-Party state under his control, starting with his June 1952 French-assisted coup against his own government. In the lead-up to Sihanouk’s seizure of power, the Democrats faded, various right-wing groupings organised and the guerrilla movement transformed into the Cambodian Communist Party eventually led by Saloth Sar (Pp173ff).

Having achieved political dominance within Cambodia, Sihanouk then led the campaign for independence. In October 1953, the French caved, granting Cambodia control over its defence and foreign policy while the lack of fighting in Cambodia gave Sihanouk’s delegation a strong position at the Geneva peace conference. Sihanouk’s government, the French and the Vietnamese communists all agreed to freeze out the Cambodian communists (Pp184ff). As for the last:

For several thousand of them, 1954 marked the beginning of a “Long March” that that would take them to exile in Hanoi, not to return to Cambodia until the 1970s when almost all of them were killed by U.S. bombing, Lon Nol’s army or internal Communist purges at the instigation of Pol Pot, by then the leader of the Cambodian Communist party. A few hardy survivors of this group were given cabinet positions in the post-1979 government of Cambodia (p.186).

The story of Cambodia thereon is a countdown to disaster and its aftermath.

Sihanouk dominated Cambodian politics until 1970, treating the Cambodian people as his children, dissent as treachery, engaging in endless hard work, weaving a path between Americans and North Vietnamese, trying various (generally unsuccessful) economic schemes and eventually retreating more and more into making films he starred in and directed (Pp186ff).

One dynamic was that commercialisation basically meant more wealth to the Chinese and Sino-Cambodian minority: the association of “capitalism” with ethnic difference encouraged state-driven economic policies (p.201) even beyond confidence in state action being so much a dominant theme in intellectual and policy debates at the time.

After Sihanouk
In 1970, Sihanouk’s own Assembly (whose 1966 election he had failed to supervise with his normal care, giving priority to a major state visit by President de Gaulle [p.194]) voted him out of office and installed Lon Nol as Chief of State. Sihanouk retreated to exile in China and made common cause with the Cambodian Communists, who began to steadily win the civil war that now broke out in earnest. This culminated in the total victory of Pol Pot’s forces (Pp204ff).

For three-and-a-half years, Pol Pot’s surreal regime tyrannised, destroyed, slaughtered and starved: about a million Cambodians, or one in seven, of the population died. Chandler manages to tell the bizarre and horrid story in dispassionate language. Eventually, Pol Pot’s revolutionary hubris provoked a Vietnamese invasion, which rapidly subdued most of the country and installed a puppet government, to the relief of the vast majority of the population (Pp209ff). In all the appalling global record of Leninist tyranny and slaughter, Pol Pot’s regime remains the epitome of utopian madness: of the attempt to transform people and society by totally centralised control, heedless of human cost, aimed at creating the “final society”.

In the second edition, Chandler concludes with a chapter on post-Pol Pot Cambodia, up to 1991 (Pp227ff). So the edition does not include the UN intervention, the the 1993 restoration of the monarchy and a multi-party democracy. Hun Sen, one of the leaders brought to power by the Vietnamese invasion, remains PM; having been such since 1985, the longest-serving head of government in South East Asia. With Cambodia once again a monarchy, those elements of continuity in Cambodian history that are so much a part of Chandler’s narrative manifested again.

Precisely because the details of Cambodian history are so limited for so long, Chandler is forced to concentrate on patterns. Even better, he does so in a way that is clear, perceptive and revealing. Throughout the book, he keeps the reader well informed on the sources used and available. A History of Cambodia is a useful and enlightening work of history.

A History of Cambodia (1)

2011-08-20T10:02:00.007+10:00

I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in why Buddhism and won out over Hinduism in South-East Asia, when matters had gone the other way in India. She loaned me David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia (2nd edition) which a Quaker friend who had worked in Cambodia had told her was the best history of Cambodia.

And a fine history it is too.

The Introduction sets out several themes of Cambodian history: from the mid C18th onwards, the effect of its location between Thailand and Vietnam; the relationship of C20th Cambodia to its past; the “pervasiveness of patronage and hierarchical terminology in Cambodian thinking”; and the inertia of a largely peasant society:

Until very recently, alternatives to subsistence agriculture and incremental social improvements of any kind were rarely available to most Cambodians and were in any case rarely sought, as the outcome could be punishment or starvation. In the meantime, crops had to be harvested and families raised as they had been harvested and raised before as they had been harvested and raised before (p.2).

This social inertia encouraged a myth of “changelessness”.

Given my interests, this caught my eye:

the spread of Theravada Buddhism (and its corollary, Thai cultural influence) diminished the importance of the brahmanical advisers to the kind and broke down the influence of brahmanical families who crowded around the throne looking for preferment. In Angkorean times, these families controlled much of the land and manpower around Angkor through their connections with royally sponsored religious foundations. As these foundations were replaced by wats (Buddhist temples) the forms of social mobilization that had been in effect at Angkor diminished in importance; so did extensive irrigation. The two or three annual harvests of rice that had been reported at Angkor diminished in importance came to a halt. The elite undoubtedly grew less numerous as a result (p.3).

That brahmin power and wealth depended so much on royal patronage would clearly be very important in explaining how a series of Buddhist dynasties and kingships replacing Hindu ones would lead to religious change.

It is striking to learn that Cambodia’s population at independence was four times the size it had been when the French originally took over (p.5).

Continuity seems to be the main theme in Cambodian economic history: a peasant subsistence economy based particularly on wet rice with a persistent technology and, prior to colonisation, exports largely limited to what grew wild in the woods—notably rhinoceros horn, hides, ivory, cardamom, lacquer, and perfumed wood (Pp6-7).

Beginnings
People who knew how to make pots lived in caves in north-western Cambodia as early as 4200BC. Skulls and human bones from c1500BC suggested they looked much like modern Cambodians, given recent infusions of Chinese and Vietnamese bloodlines. Khmer is likely a very old language, dating back in its local origins thousands of years. A certain conservatism:

perhaps, is characteristic of a subsistence-oriented society, in which experimentation can lead to famine and in which techniques of getting enough to eat are passed from one generation to another (p.10).

Likely continuing elements in Cambodian life and thinking across thousands of years are:

the village games played at the lunar new year; the association of ancestor stones (nak ta) with stones, the calendar, and the soil; the belief in water-spirits or dragons; the idea that tattoos protect the wearer; and the custom of chewing betel, to name a few (p.11).

. But lots of continuity does not mean there has not also been considerable change.

Indian Asia
The first set of revolutionary changes being Indianisation; the adoption of aspects of Indian life and thinking over a thousand years of Cambodian history, likely starting around two thousand years ago. Cambodians came to dress in Indian styles, eat with fingers and spoons, carried goods on their head, wore turbans and skirts, use Indian forms and styles of musical instruments, jewellery and manuscripts—living and acting more like Indians than like their neighbours the Vietnamese. One scholar suggested it was a matter of a common “monsoon culture” converging on Indian models (Pp11-12). Up to about 500BC:

India provided Cambodia with a writing system, a pantheon, meters for poetry, a language (Sanskrit) to write it in, a vocabulary of social hierarchies (not the same thing as a caste system), Buddhism, the idea of universal kingship, and new ways of looking at politics, sociology, architecture, iconography, astronomy, and aesthetics (p.12).

Cambodia was thus very much part of “Indian Asia”.

This being a process of neither conquest nor colonisation, Cambodia’s relationship with India lacked the angst that characterised Vietnam’s response to China. It seems to have been very much a process of Cambodians adopting what worked for them; the caste system never took root in village life and its use at court seems to have been more a ritual respect for Indian traditions than anything more substantive (Pp12-13).

For the first few centuries, written sources about Cambodia are almost entirely Chinese, and so filtered through Chinese framings. Remains of a port active in C2nd and C3rd—which include Roman coins and Indian artefacts—suggest trade between and with India and China, likely including warehousing facilities. The port likely declined in the C4th and would have been a useful conduit for Cambodia exports of forest products, such as elephants, feathers, wild spices and the products listed previously. How developed or centralised a political authority underpinned this is still an open question (Pp14ff).

A crucial feature of social dynamics is that:

People, rather than land per se, are needed to cultivate wet rice. … as well as the low density of the population in the entire area (always excepting Java, Bali, and the Red River Delta in Vietnam), it is easy to see why throughout Southeast Asian history overlordship and power were so often thought of and pursued in terms of controlling people rather than land. … territory per se (mere forest in most cases) was never as important as people.
Indeed, the notion of alienable ownership of land, as distinct from land use, does not seem to have developed in traditional Cambodia. Land left fallow for three years reverted to state control. The king, theoretically at least, was the lord of all the land in the kingdom, which meant he could reward people with the right to use it. Many of the Cambodian-language inscriptions from the Angkorean period … dealt with complicated quarrels about access to land resources (Pp.16-7).

Land-controlling, land-dispensing kings whom brahmin families were dependant on, plus no caste system for brahmins to administer, left them in a much weaker position than their Indian equivalents. If the kings switched to Buddhism (particularly Theravada Buddhism), then the brahmins had little or no basis for social power.

It is likely that, in the first 8 centuries A.D., Cambodia was divided into lots of small states with a local king and elite, operating both as Indian “universal” kings and local Cambodian chieftains, their power resting on their perceived ability to provide protection, both practical and divine (Pp17-8).

In this period, Hinduism and Buddhism both flourished in Cambodia, operating similar notions of merit and reward across a chain of lives. Localized religious cults seemed to have stressed community welfare:

for without communities to perform the work, irrigated rice cannot be grown (p.19).

A concern that, at least one location (Ba Phnom) included an annual human sacrifice to a consort of Shiva at the beginning of the agricultural year, this continuing to occur as late as 1877 (Pp18-19).

If land use was granted by royal authority, and private landownership was unknown, then genealogies mattered less:

Because genealogies were not maintained in Cambodia, except among the elite, the nak ta, or ancestor people, had no family names. They became the symbolic ancestors of people in a particular place, or by dying in a place they came to patronize its soil. Nak ta in inhabited sites could be spoken to and tamed; those in the forest or in abandoned places were thought to be more powerful and more malignant (p.19).

There is much similarity with the kami of Japanese Shinto. But a similar sensibility pervades animism generally and feeds easily into polytheism. Chandler is surely correct to suggest that Hinduism was more likely to adopt and blend with such sentiment than confront it. Indeed, the nak ta could become gods during periods of high Indianisation while the gods could blend back into ancestors when such receded (Pp19-20).

The first dated Khmer-language inscription was incised in 611, the earliest Sanskrit one being carved in 613. For centuries, the two languages served different roles: Sanskrit spoke in prose and poetry to the gods, Khmer (always in prose) to the people. Sanskrit was the language of poetry, praise and merit; Khmer of the founding of temples and temple administration (such as how many slaves were attached to a particular place, inventories, duties and protective curses). Recording land grants on stone provided recognition and protection while curses sought to protect the same. Sanskrit was the language of those few “rescued from the mud” as Khmer was of those whose rice-growing labour supported all (Pp21-2).

Bondage
Chandler then tackles the vexed issue of what knjom (usually translated as “slave”) meant. Wherever land has been more plentiful than labour, bondage has been a normal social mechanism to extract a usable surplus. But how much, in Cambodian usages, we are talking of slaves—full property who were bought and sold—or some sort of bondsperson or “serf”—bound to a place, is not entirely clear from the available evidence and may have varied considerably (Pp23ff).

It is likely the region remained a welter of small principalities. Indian notions:

seem to have played a prominent role in molding and directing these societies, perhaps because ideas of this hierarchical kind were useful in legitimizing the extraction of surpluses more or less by force (p.27).

Or, at least (if one accepts a recent critique of the notion of legitimacy) providing a common framework for expectations.

Angkor
Having set out the themes of Cambodian history and its beginnings, Chapter 3 moves on to Kingship and Society at Angkor, the most architecturally dramatic period of Cambodian history. Conventionally dated by historians as 802-1431, Chandler points out that Khmer-speaking peoples had inhabited the Angkor region for centuries; that the royal city was briefly re-occupied in the 1570s; that Buddhist statuary continued to be placed there every century to the C19th; that the latest inscriptions date from 1747; and that:

When the Angkor complex was “discovered” by French missionaries and explorers in the 1850s, Angkor Wat contained a prosperous Buddhist monastery inside its walls, tended by more than a thousand hereditary slaves (p.29).

(Though ‘bondsfolk’ is likely a better translation of knjom in this instance: as for any shock to our sensibilities about Buddhism or monastic life, there were Christian monasteries in Western Europe supported by bondsfolk up until the late C18th.) Still, the dates are useful because:

they mark off Cambodia’s period of greatness. At various times in those six hundred years, and only then, Cambodia—known in its own inscriptions as Kambuja-desa—was the mightiest kingdom in Southeast Asia, drawing visitors and tribute from as far away as present-day Burma and Malaysia as well as what were later to be Thai kingdoms to the west … these periods of systematic domination were infrequent and relatively short (p.29).

One gets the distinct impression that Southeast Asian rulership was more fluid, and embedded in less dense and resilient institutional networks and connections, than was the case for Latin Christendom in the same period. There was also clearly no warrior class even vaguely equivalent to knights, samurai, azadans, mamluks, or even iqta or similar: these are not medieval societies in any useful sense of that term.

It is also worth noting that the notion of ‘tribute’ was likely often a particular way of framing trade relations (such appears to be a feature of Chinese history, for example).

Even during the Angkorean period, the historical sources are seriously limited (Pp29ff). Historical inference has to be gleaned from inscriptions, made for particular purposes and often referring to events decades or more earlier. The likely third Angkorean ruler (Indravarman r.877-889) followed what seems to have been (or became) a conventional pattern of building: irrigation works, followed by honouring of his parents and capped off by creating a temple-mountain (Pp37-8).

His son, Yasovarman (r.889-c.910) created the royal city at Angkor (Yasodharapura as it was known until the C14th) and was the first of the grandiose temple builders, bespeaking ability to command considerable labour resources (Pp39ff).

A succession of kings either rejected or (more commonly) extended the Angkor complex. Chandler examines Angkorean kingship through the prisms of the king’s relationship with Shiva, their public role as hero of Indian epic and their connection to everyday life (Pp46ff). While Cambodia stopped short of importing the Indian caste system, the vocabulary of varna provided a way of framing the radiating patterns of patronage through which kings ruled (p.48).

Manifesting the fluid religious framings, the largest Angkor complex—Angkor Wat—was dedicated to Vishnu (Pp49ff). Chandler suggests that Angkorean rulership was, in its close relationship between water management, priesthood and temple foundations, was much like that of Pharoanic Egypt and Mayan Guatemala (Pp53-4).

Jayavarman VII, who was crowned in 1181, shifted the dominant model from Hindu to Buddhist kingship. Where Hindu kingship focused on the king as the fount whose approval all sought, Buddhist kingship celebrated the king’s merit manifested in his compassion for his subjects:

Put very starkly, the difference … resembles the difference between a monologue that no one overhears and a soliloquy addressed to an audience of paid or invited guests. A “Hindu” king’s rule was an aggregation of statements—rituals, temples, poems, marriages, inscriptions and the like—and his grandeur and godliness. A Buddhist king made similar statements, but he addressed them, specifically, to an audience consisting of his people. This made the people less an ingredient of the king’s magnificence … than objects of his overwhelming compassion, an audience for his merit-making and participants in his redemption (p.58).

Jayavarman VII’s dramatic break with the past seems to have been connected to the traumatic Cham invasion of 1177 and 1178. Having defeated the Cham in battle prior to his coronation, he spent his reign of about 30 years essentially turning Cambodia from a Hindu kingship to a Buddhist society. He seems to have been a man in a hurry, imposing his personal stamp on Cambodia more than any other ruler before modern times (Pp58ff). Chandler notes some ominous parallels in:

his break with the past, his obsession with punitive expeditions, the impetuous grandeur of his building program, and his imposition of a national religion rather than his patronage of a royal cult (p.69).

The only feature of Angkorean life:

singled out for praise by Democratic Kampuchea was precisely the full-scale mobilisation of the people that Jayavarman VII, but very few other kings, managed to carry out (p.69).

He was a devotee of Mahayana Buddhism. Over the next 50 years, Mahayana Buddhism gave way to Theravada Buddhism as the dominant Cambodian religion. While we know that missionaries from the Mon-language parts of Siam, Burma and Ceylon played a role, the reasons for the shift are unclear, though the lack of inscriptions at Angkor during this period imply an interaction between political and religious upheaval (Pp68ff).

A Chinese traveller, Chou Ta-Kuan, wrote an account of his visit to Angkor in 1296-7, by far the most detailed picture of everyday life and appearance at Angkor. Brahmanism, Shaivism (whose followers Chou calls ‘Taoists”) and Theravada Buddhism co-existed. The former seem to have been largely an official class while Shaivism was clearly in decline—monastic Shaivism disappeared entirely after Angkor was abandoned, though Indian cults persisted. Chou was struck at how accessible the king was, with his twice-daily audiences (Pp71ff).

This review will conclude in my next post.

Against the notion of malinvestment

2011-08-19T14:18:00.004+10:00

This is based on a comment I made here.

I do not like the Austrian concept of "malinvestment" because what is or is not a good investment depends very significantly on larger economic conditions. What is a great idea in New York may be a really dumb one in Port-au-Prince. If you are going to make any sense of the notion of "malinvestment" it is that unwarranted monetary expansion misleads folk about the future path of economic activity. As conditions change, investments based on such unwarranted expectations are "exposed" and need to be liquidated to free resources to go to more valuable uses.

But suppose one slides into (in compete contradiction of Austrian value subjectivism) the notion that being a "malinvestment" is an intrinsic quality of an investment. Then the level of economic activity become irrelevant to the level of "malinvestment". So, you can happily advocate any amount of restrictive "adjustment" because the level of "bad investments" wasting resources is set.

Conversely, if you understand that what is or is not a good investment depends on economic conditions, then driving down income expectations does not "release" resources, it increases (potentially considerably) what becomes a non-returning investment. Such restrictive adjustment is a "cure" which is, in fact, more of the disease. Thus does poor analytical terminology leads to bad policy thinking.

Austrian or quasi-Austrian thinking is much stronger in American conservatism than British (or Oz) varieties, which may help explain differences in policy debates.

ADDENDA It appears that Swedish economist Gustav Cassell was way ahead of me (by about 80 years).

Monstrosities of nature

2011-08-16T20:10:00.003+10:00

Went to a paper at Melbourne University by Francois Soyer on Monstrosities of Nature: Demonic Possession, Ambiguous Gender and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Iberian World which, after putting the Inquisition in context, concentrated on the Portuguese Inquisition’s 1741-4 Maria Duran case.

Maria Duran was a runaway Catalan housewife (she left after her husband contracted syphilis) who went off and became a dragoon officer in the Spanish cavalry. She then turned up as a nun in a Portuguese convent where she had sex with various of the nuns. Her case was referred to the Inquisition. She was arrested in 1741, and interred for two years in solitary confinement. She was then questioned, tortured, tried (the trial record extends to 800 pages, one of the 47,000 trials carried out by the Portuguese Inquisition from its founding in 1536 to its abolition in 1820) and sentenced to 200 lashes and exile. After the sentence was duly carried out in a 1744 auto-de-fe, she disappears from the historical record.

There was witness testimony that she had been examined by a doctor, and found to be “a simple woman” but nuns and other women testified that she had a penis when she had sex with them—some of this recorded testimony was quite graphic. Given the lack of said penis when medically examined, the possibility of a demonic pact had been considered: it was all too hard for the local Church authorities, who referred the matter (and Maria) to the Inquisition. During the period of examination, she was re-examined by a doctor hired by the Inquisition and also made to stand naked in warm water to see if relaxing the muscles would make the alleged penis appear.

The Inquisition decided there was insufficient evidence to accept that any pact or demonic possession had occurred, that there was no sodomy—as no penis—but that she had told the nuns to not tell any confessor about what they had done: this was the crime she was found guilty of, publicly whipped and exiled. The actual details of her crime were not read out, this was felt to be too embarrassing.

Prior to going through the case, Francois Soyer took us through the origins, remit and operating procedures of the Inquisition. Both the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition were arms of the state (the king appointed the Inquisitor-Generals) staffed by men of the cloth who enforced Church doctrine. They arose out of the problem of the conversoes; determining whether the forced converts were true Christians or not (since, having publicly accepted Christianity, apostasy was not permitted, so there was no going back).

Sexual concerns (homosexuality, bigamy, bestiality, solicitation of sexual favours by priests in the confessional) developed after the 1545-63 Council of Trent. Homosexuality was “sodomy” or “the abominable sin” (so awful, it could not be named). It was part of a demonic plot to destroy Christendom itself, with the example of Sodom and Gomorrah providing warning of what God would do to a society that tolerated it.

The Inquisition used torture but, as it was staffed by men of the cloth, it was not supposed to draw blood, so used bloodless tortures (which included what is now known as ‘waterboarding’). There would also be a doctor present, to ensure the torture did not go too far. A person could only be tortured once, but that was got around by “suspending” torture sessions rather than officially ending them. The auto-de-fe, held annually, were grand spectacles meant to both terrorise and educate. The Inquisition did not actually carry out punishments themselves: the guilty person was “relayed to the secular arm” but it was Church doctrine that was being enforced.

Francois Soyer found striking that, in 350 years (the Spanish Inquisition ran from 1480-1834), the procedures do not change: inquisitors were asking the same questions in its beginnings as they were in its final days. This was a society and an institution where ‘novelty’ was a bad word. The operations of the Inquisition were highly codified. For example, three denunciations were required for arrest: but they could be years apart. The Inquisition had a network of agents to provide information. Charges read out to the arrested person would be stripped of identifying people and place and, once arrested, people would essentially have to prove their innocence. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of trials resulted in guilty verdicts (though not necessarily on all counts).

The Inquisition tended to be sceptical of accusations of demonic possession, it required proof. Exorcism was only likely after such evidence was accepted, particularly if the person renounced the alleged pact. Medical evidence also tended to trump witness statements. The Inquisition was also much less likely to find people guilty of witchcraft than other areas in Europe, such as East Anglia in the 1640s, or parts of the Holy Roman Empire. (Due its insistence on evidence.)

In its own terms, the Inquisition’s concern was for the prisoner’s welfare: their salvation. But it was their welfare not as they might conceive it, but as Church doctrine conceived it. So, the initial examination was put in terms of, having heard the charges, did the person having anything they wanted to unburden themselves over. Reconciliation with the Church was always the first option.

The Portuguese Inquisition recorded about 5,000 denunciations for homosexuality, leading to about 500 trials. Overwhelming, those denounced or tried were men, and generally foreigners. (Makes one wonder if local mores of masculinity was what was being enforced.)

Recolhimento were religious houses for women held to be vulnerable and in danger of falling into prostitution and where they could stay in hopes of reformation (marriage, employment as a domestic, going to a convent). Husbands leaving to go overseas could leave their wives there. Maria had spent some time in one.

‘Hermaphrodites’ (which covered a range of conditions) were accepted as part of nature: what one was supposed to do, however, was pick a gender and stick to it. Failure to do so would attract the attention of the Inquisition.

Francois Soyer’s reading of the evidence of the nuns and other women who had sex with Maria Duran is that they were confronted by having the sex—especially her (to put it mildly) “aggressive” mode of operation—with a woman and concluded she had to be a man (hence the penis) and the devil had to be involved. Maria Duran had previously attracted the attention of the Inquisition over passing as a man: the Spanish Inquisition had merely given her a strict warning not to do it again. But the Inquisition records included details about how she managed to pass as a man—binding her breasts, having a gourd full of water in her pants she would release against a wall, publicly fondling the breasts of women.

I enjoyed the presentation and subsequent discussion, though I was struck by the way the academics and graduate students present had difficulty talking about the gender, sexuality and natural law theological issues. It is not that they said anything silly or stupid, it was just a general diffidence and awkwardness. Admittedly, I have done a fair bit of reading in all three issues: still, it was striking. A useful reminder that, like the nuns confronted by Maria Duran’s sexual predation, dealing with things outside your normal framings can be difficult.

Cultural panic and the economics of riots

2011-08-14T12:38:00.004+10:00

Striking events such as the recent England riots provide opportunities for all sorts of attempts to “explain” the events (in this case riots) in terms of whatever “cultural panic” framings one finds congenial.

Fortunately, riot and civil unrest has been the subject of some quantitative social science, which allow us to develop analysis based on actual empirical evidence.

Economists Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth have produced a paper (pdf) on whether fiscal austerity (i.e. budget cuts) lead to social unrest, examining the European evidence from 1919 onwards. The short answer is they do find quite a strong connection between budget cuts and riots and other form of civil unrest. Tax increases have little connection to civil unrest, but budget cuts do, independent of other changes in GDP. They also find, unsurprisingly, that a propensity to civil unrest is associated with higher levels of public debt. Given other evidence that budget cuts have little association with loss of votes, their suggestion that expenditure is higher to buy social peace seems plausible.

There is, however, an interesting complication in that the effect disappears from the late 1980s onward: in other words, the period of the “Great Moderation” in economics and the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91. That they find that strongly democratic societies (where there are considerable restraints on the executive) show less propensity to riot and civil unrest give reasons why the latter might matter.

They also find that strong levels of media penetration are not associated with increased civil unrest. So, standard “cultural panic” explanations such as de-regulation/“neoliberalism”; high levels of welfare spending; mass media are all “contra-indicated”, as social analysts say. (A useful summary and short discussion of their findings is here.)

Also contra-indicated, it would appear, is the fiscal austerity explanation as the connection disappears from the late 1980s onwards. That, however, OECD countries generally have experienced the biggest collapse in nominal spending since the 1930s, a return to 1930s conditions might lead to a return to 1930s patterns, given that the authors find a strong connection between budget cuts and civil unrest across the rest of the period. Though fiscal austerity was clearly not the only (or even dominant) cause of civil unrest.

The Ponticelli and Voth paper seeks to answer the question: “what connection, if any, is there between fiscal austerity and civil unrest?” and deals only with European cases. A paper (pdf) covering a much wider range of cases, and testing standard economic explanations of riots, was produced in 1994 by economists Denise DiPasquale and Edward L. Glaesar (i.e. after the 1992 L.A. riots): Glaesar has a sensible opinion piece based on their findings here.

They find (completely unsurprisingly) that riots are urban phenomena associated with higher levels of urbanization. (In particular, bigger cities are at more risk.) They also find that ethnic diversity and high levels of unemployment are associated with riots while homeownership makes them less likely to occur but does not affect their intensity once they start.

Lacking a job or not owning a home obviously gives folk less to lose from rioting while concentrated populations are more likely to achieve the necessary "critical mass" of people who believe they can “get away with it”. The Ponticelli and Voth finding that budget cuts do have a connection to civil unrest, but tax increases do not, fits in with the DiPasquale and Glaesar findings concerning unemployment and homeownership. Basically, the sort of people not inclined to riot—employed homeowners—pay taxes while the sort of people much more inclined to riot—unemployed renters—receive government expenditure.

The ethnic diversity effect fits in with Robert Putnam’s findings that ethnic/cultural diversity lowers social trust. An effect likely to be particularly strong if ethnic group A is, in effect, policing ethnic group B (e.g. a predominantly white police force policing a black area): an incident of perceived police brutality is a classic riot-triggering event.

DiPasquale and Glaesar found that migration and poverty are not associated with rioting, though lower GDP per capita countries are more likely to have riots (presumably because there are more people with less to lose). Dictatorships are less likely to have riots: which suggests that the Ponticelli and Voth finding about fiscal austerity not leading to civil unrest in Europe since the late 1980s is less about the spread of democracy and more about general economic conditions. (There may also have been less funding and activist support for causing trouble in non-communist states.)

None of this “proves” why a particular set of riots happen. But they are highly suggestive. What they suggest is that the 2011 English riots are classic ethnic-diversity, unemployment and police failure riots: a combination which is easily enough on its own to explain why the riots occurred when and where they did.

The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences.

2011-08-13T15:27:00.004+10:00

How do you judge a political party? From their rhetoric? From their behaviour in legislatures? By their activists? By their voters? From their policies?

The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences edited by Andrew McIntyre seeks to analyse the Greens in terms of their published policies. The Greens are not a “Party of Government”, they are not seeking to get that nth marginal voter that will give them a Parliamentary majority. So that may make their policies less important (since they are not likely to be implemented) but more revealing (on the grounds that they more unreservedly express their “world view” uninhibited by the need to establish a very broad appeal). Conversely, precisely because the policies matter less, folk may be more willing to let “indulgences” of particular individuals or sub-groups through the internal selection system, which would make the content of policies less indicative of the Party as a whole.

The Greens are, however, a “Party of coalition” in that governments have relied on their votes in Parliaments to form effective governing majorities—as is the case of the current minority federal Labor Government. That makes their policies more important, if they actually drive what they seek in negotiations with the Governments they support.

So, policies are unlikely to be a basis for a definitive analysis of a political Party, but they are some sort of basis for analysis: if even only what sort of policy “discourse” is (at some level) acceptable within that political Party.

The Greens provides a series of critical analysis of different Green policies from people with a range of expertise and perspectives of broadly liberal-conservative outlook. As is normal with such anthologies, the quality varies somewhat (particularly the balance of irritation versus information). Still, the picture is not reassuring for anyone who has been following the serious policy debate over the last few decades. Indeed, the Greens policies come across as the losers in those debates getting together and assuring each other that, in a just world, they would have won. That the Greens apparently disregard historical experience is a recurring motif of critical comment by contributors.

According to their polices, the Greens love the UN, hate Israel, distrust (or worse) private sector provision and have complete confidence in public sector control and provision—particularly in education and media. Whether their policies will actually lead to better environmental outcomes may reasonably be doubted.

A stand-out contribution is David Price’s withering critique of their indigenous policies: “maximising past failure” is a pithy summary (Pp60-5). David F. Smith’s piece on farming is both informative and devastating (Pp83-8). But Jim Hoggett’s piece on logging (Pp89-95), Walter Starck’s piece on fishing (Pp96-101) and Alastair Watson on water policy (Pp102-7) all give further reasons to think that Green policies would either make environmental results worse, or otherwise be not worth the costs.

Another continuing theme is that, according to Green policies, ethics means (government) control. Garth Paltridge’s piece on science policy brings this concern out particularly strongly: their proposed policies would make it even easier to squeeze out inconvenient science (Pp122-6).

The analyses in this volume collectively give good reason to think that Green policies would not make Australia a better society, even in environmental management terms. Which leads back to the original question: how much can we judge a political Party by its published policies? Whatever the practical answer to that question, a political Party is surely inviting itself to be judged by the policies it publishes, which this volume does in an informative way.

One quibble: the Greens do not have a “controlling majority” in the Senate (p.1). They control the swing votes, but that only makes them powerful if Labor and Coalition vote differently. If either abstains, or if they vote together, the Greens have no power to determine the outcome of votes: always something to keep in mind when people complain about the power of third Parties.

Post-modern conservatism

2011-08-11T12:28:00.000+10:00

A friend who is a registered wizard (no, really) used the term “post modern conservatives”. The term niggled at me until I decided he was onto something. Which led to this post.

What do we mean by ‘conservative’? If it is to be more than just a “boo” word, then it surely means people who are in favour of conserving things. This makes it more a sentiment than an ideology. One sceptical of change, with an attachment and loyalty to already existing social patterns and structures. The intensity of scepticism, and of the attachment and loyalty, may vary but the general contours of conservatism are clear enough.

Which means conservatism is very much a matter of context. There is a huge difference between being a Soviet conservative c.1990, a conservative Muslim or an Anglosphere conservative; let alone the difference between being a continental European conservative in 1750, 1850 or 1950. A contemporary American conservative would be a raging (even radical) liberal across many contemporary societies, let alone past ones.

A conservative traditionally defends and resists. Defends what exists and resists attempts to seriously change it. Which leads to Hayek’s famous criticism of conservatism, that it lacks a vision of the future, that conservatives were doomed to being pulled along in an overall direction set by others.

But this is a peculiarly Western and modern criticism: the notion that society has a dynamic, a direction of change, is not one that would have occurred to most people in most times. It points to the fundamental dilemma of Western conservatism: that Western civilisation is, by far, the most dynamic of human civilisations. So, what does it mean to be a conservative in a civilisation whose most defining characteristic is its dynamism? What is seeking to conserve, what is one being conservative about?

The squabbling alliance
The dynamism of Western civilisation has deep roots. What became Western civilisation began in the squabbling alliance of Church and (mostly Germanic) warlords after the ruin of the Western Roman Empire. It rests on the triad of the preserved or rediscovered leavings of Graeco-Roman civilisation—the Classical heritage with which Western civilisation constantly re-engages; most dramatically in the Carolingian Renaissance, the Renaissance of the C12th, “The” Renaissance, and the Enlightenment—the Judaeo-Christian tradition of monotheist revelation and Germanic cultural notions, ultimately derived from the steppe origins of the Indo-Europeans, of contractual individualism (arising out of such cultural patterns as oath-bound warriors, patrons and clients bound in protection-and-service relations, binding rituals, common sagas, display and hospitality feasts, and guest-host connections).

Trying to make do in the ruins of a collapsed Empire and fading civilisation, Church and warlords experimented and adapted, creating a very new institutional framework. Latin Christendom was not a particularly inventive civilisation, in the technological sense. Genuine European inventions prior to c.1500 may well be restricted to the Archimedean screw, distilling and the camshaft/gearshaft. But they were highly adaptive; adopting and adapting any vaguely useful technique or technology that came their way.

Where they shone was creating and re-creating institutions: modern Western societies have far more institutional heritage from the medieval period than from the Classical. To take a simple example, bonds are an invention of Latin Christendom—specifically, the Serene Republic of Venice in 1171. The notion that the thousand years of medieval Europe was all a stagnant “Dark Age” is a profound nonsense: that one can look at the frozen, soaring motion of the cathedrals—the tallest human structures between the Great Pyramid and modern skyscrapers—and imagine this was a stagnant society is a case of not seeing what is in front of you.

Western civilisation is the transformational civilisation. Latin Christendom transformed the world twice over. It created global history by, for the first time, connecting all the continents to each other so that (albeit erratically and slowly) all parts of the globe became aware of each other. In the words of Adam Smith:

The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.

The profound cognitive shocks involved to Latin Christendom from what its adventurers, explorers, merchants and missionaries discovered helped spark the Scientific Revolution and turn Latin Christendom into Western Civilisation. It then transformed the world again, with the Industrial Revolution. It is not only a profoundly dynamic civilisation, it is one of increasing dynamism. So what does Western conservatism rest on?

The conservative dilemma
This history of dynamism means that the Western conservative dilemma is pervasive. For example, conservatives are typically concerned about protecting family life. But Western civilisation—due to the strong formal rights and obligations of the Classical heritage; Germanic notions of oath and other relations which can equal (or even trump) kin connections; and the Church’s highly restrictive consanguinity rules (at one stage, people could not marry anyone they shared great, great, great, great grandparents with: this made so many marriages notionally incestuous that the Lateran Council reduced it to sharing great, grandparents in Canon 50)—is the least family-and-kin oriented, the most formal-connection upholding, of civilisations; a major factor in its dynamism.

That Edmund Burke has become a conservative icon expresses nicely this dilemma of dynamism. For Burke was not a Tory, he was a Whig. Indeed, it is not clear in what sense he is a conservative. He (albeit somewhat reluctantly) supported the American Revolution; his impeachment of Warren Hastings was a manifested critique of exploitive imperialism; as a Whig, his was the politics of consent and social contract, not the Tory politics of tradition and order. Adam Smith commented that Edmund Burke was:

the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us

and Adam Smith is very much a figure in the classical liberal tradition.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawer. Also cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Voice, exit and virtue

2011-08-07T12:22:00.003+10:00

Political scientist Xavier Marquez has proposed a suggestive political triad building on Albert O. Hirschmann’s analysis of exit, voice and loyalty.

Marquez suggests that right-liberals (including libertarians) focus on exit as their preferred response to problems of domination, that left-liberals focus on voice while serious conservatives focus on ensuring any existing domination is a legitimate one.

So, right-liberals favour market solutions:

in great part because they think that whenever such markets work well, they enable some people to escape from particular relations of potential domination: to leave jobs, or to switch products, or to escape oppressive social conditions, etc. The competitive market functions here as an ideal of exit, even if actually existing markets do not always work as advertised. … Domination, from this point of view, is captivity, and freedom is primarily understood as the ability to exit a relationship.

Analyses of the power of competitive jurisdictions fit within this pattern.

Conversely:

left-liberals (and other people on the left, though not all) are often far more enamoured of democracy than the dinghy realities of actually-existing democracies would seem to warrant, with their refractory electorates, poor quality deliberations, capture by organized minorities, etc. This is not necessarily because they are blind to their failings, but because their default solution to the problem of domination is to increase voice – more consultation, more deliberation, more organized representation, and the like. They find voice itself desirable, and understand freedom partly in such terms: to be dominated is to have no means of affecting the direction of a relationship, to be voiceless, and to be free is to have input into the relationship, to have a say, which in turn legitimates a relationship. … Democracy is the normative ideal of voice, just as competitive markets are the normative ideal of exit.

Marquez notes that, as unrestricted exit tends to undermine voice, the partisans of voice are typically sceptical of exit solutions. Exit tends to undermine voice by undermining the incentive to use or organise for voice as well as the resources available to do so: particularly if the more articulate and better-resourced are disproportionately those who leave.

If folk on the left are partisans of voice, this helps explain why "left-liberals" often end up being so concerned to regulate speech either formally (anti-hate speech laws, speech codes, etc) or informally (denunciation): if "voice" is your preferred mechanism to change social outcomes, then it is a precious resource to be husbanded and used with maximum effect. It also likely, as Xavier Marquez suggests, to lead to strong concern about who has access to the mechanisms of voice and how it is used. This notion of the normative importance and power of voice can be taken further and become a view that changing the language can itself fundamentally transform human and social relations.

Either way, elevation of the power of voice segues into a demand that certain voices (or at least certain uses of voice) be ostracised or blocked. Voice-as-mechanism comes to trump voice-as-manifestation-of-autonomy. Reaction to such outlooks generates the various critiques attacking the intolerance of the ostentatiously tolerant and the ad hominem abusiveness of the conspicuously compassionate: the tendency to accusation parading as argument familiar from so many comment threads. (Charles Krauthammer amusingly characterised this tension as "conservatives think liberals are stupid, liberals think conservatives are evil". A nice example of criticising Keynesian economics being taken as a failure of moral character is cited here.)

Modernism, post-modernism
A tendency towards ad hominem abusiveness attacking the motives and moral character of those who disagree flows from further steps in the process of elevation of voice. Voice is a manifestation of belief: one typically uses voice in accord with one’s beliefs. So good and proper beliefs lead to “correct” uses of voice, those that promote social harmony (or whatever the designated goal is). Harmful or wrongful beliefs lead to "incorrect" or "wrongful" uses of voice, those that inhibit the designated goal or goals.

[Read the rest at Critical Thinking Applied.]