The shipping news

The IT explosion has led to a dramatic increase in the casual use of TLA's (three letter acronyms) and neologisms.  One of which is "shipping" -- postulating a relationship between two fictional characters (typically from a TV series) which is not an explicit part of the story. A lot of fanfic (fiction written by fans) is based on such "ships". It is connected to "slash" -- erotic stories based on imagined relationships between characters. For example, Kirk/Spock -- i.e. Kirk "slash" Spock.

All of which is a natural response to TV series which grab your imagination.  Long before I knew such things as slash existed, my hormone-racing, deeply closeted teenage self was imaging steamy sex scenes between Bodie and Doyle from The Professionals. Fan fiction is, after all, based on the proposition that the story doesn't stop until the fans say so.

Not that it is an entirely new phenomenon. As a medievalist friend of mine noted, a lot of medieval Arthurian stories were, in effect, medieval fanfic.

Making connections

A YouTube by the singing parody duo Not Literally Productions presents the shipping phenomenon rather sweetly. Their filk* includes the lyrics:

You're on the canon ground, I'm up in crack ship space
Let's start a shipping war, don't care if I get hate.
Don't like my pairings, well, then you can hit the bricks.
This is my OTP, I'll go down with this ship!

"Canon" is, of course, what actually happens in the show. Thus, ships are not canon, though fans may wish they had been (if the show has finished) or will be (if it has more episodes to come).

Ships have a strong tendency to be same-sex pairings. They have become so much a part of the experience of TV series that there have been competitions run on the most popular ships. (An amusing commentary on shipping becoming mainstream is here.) An annual shipping contest is run by Slashdot (the 2013 competition garnered over 7 million votes) and is limited to same-sex pairings. Of which there are many.

Two years running the Slashdot final has come down to Destiel versus Sterek. Ships are often named by conjunctions of the people involved. So, Destiel is Dean + Castiel, from Supernatural, while Sterek is Stiles + Derek, from TeenWolf. The other major contenders were Johnlock (John Watson + Sherlock from Sherlock) and Wincest (the Winchester brothers, Sam + Dean, also from Supernatural: a ship which has some winks and nods from the series). Not all ships have such names, but many do.

Shipping has become so mainstream, that actors Dylan O'Brien (Stiles) and Tyler Hoechlin (Derek Hale) did a YouTube deliberately playing into the Sterek ship to promote voting for TeenWolf in the Teen Choice awards. (For 2012, in which TeenWolf got two wins.)

And here is Not Literally commenting on The Game of Thrones character death toll:

Fan Joke: George R.R. Martin, Steven Moffat and Joss Whedon walk into a bar and every person you ever loved dies.

As part of the same shift in the cultural zeitgeist, within the realm of romance novels -- which are apparently dramatically increasing in sales due to e-readers: romances are cheap in e-book form and folk can read romance novels in public without exposing embarrassing covers -- there has been a surge in M/M romance. That is male-male romance, often written by women. Presumably on similar grounds as straight guys watch girl-girl porn -- no matter where you look, there is someone you are attracted to doing something intense.

Being wolfie

Indeed, there has been such an explosion in M/M romance that it has sub-genres -- such as the burgeoning sub-genre of male-male werewolf stories. A part of the larger shift in the role of werewolves from ravening predators destroying hearth and home to tragic outsiders seeking a place. A shift very nicely expressed in Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson and Alpha-and-Omega stories. Given most people nowadays live in large, anonymous cities, the combination of connection to nature, sense of power and sense of belonging (albeit to a pack) that werewolves can embody has clear resonance. Conversely, having the animals you rely on to live, or your children, taken by wolves is no longer an experienced fear.

As recently as the mid-C20th, fantasy worlds such as Narnia and Middle-Earth featured wolves as figures of threat and evil in keeping with longstanding Northern European tradition. But, by the early 1980s and the Belgariad, wolves have become rather more cute and fluffy. Or, rather, their connection to nature, power and belonging has become shorn of any sense of direct threat to you and yours.

The land of the lonely housewife

Boys doing it for the girls

Largely female-written and female-read male-male romance has a longer history in Japan, where shounen-ai (or "Pretty Boys in Pain" as Helen McCarthy describes it in a useful introductory essay in this essay collection) has been a recognised manga (comic) and anime (cartoon) genre for some decades. Given the still rather socially-constricted role for women in Japan, the desire for an emotionally engaging, yet distanced, form of romance makes a certain amount of sense. Japan's fertility rate fell below replacement in the early 1970s and has apparently plateaued at well below replacement. Given the way being married -- and, even more, married-with-children -- tends to put Japanese women into a box of financial dependence and social subservience, the persistent low fertility rate is not surprising.

Mind you, Western countries seem to be clumping into the Anglosphere/France/Scandinavia mode of fertility rates around 1.9 per woman and the Mediterranean (Italy/Spain/Greece), Germany and Japan mode of fertility rates around 1.4. (Basically, the countries where you can have children and work/have your own income and countries where, not so much.)

But the genre of M/M romance blossomed earlier in Japan, almost certainly because it is the first non-monotheist advanced industrial society. In the late C19th, Japan briefly banned anal sex to show how "modern" it was but, prior to that, Japan had long history of male-male sexuality and romantic attachment being an accepted part of the culture. Indeed, Buddhism was popularly credited with having "introduced" male-male sex and romance.

Missing the zeitgeist

The romanticising the queer, queering romance and queering TV series involved in M/M romance, slash and shipping is a sign of how the culture has evolved. Emotionally investing in queering one's favourite TV shows is a much more personal act than holding a torch for queer rights. Though each no doubt feeds into the other.

Which is why the conservative opposition to queer emancipation is a losing game. They are, literally, fighting the culture. An odd thing for conservatives to be doing, one might think.

Or, perhaps, not so much. The most distinctive feature of Western civilisation is precisely its dynamism. Which generates a perennial problem for Western conservatism -- what does being conservative about the most dynamic of human civilisations mean? Hence the importance of that prudential liberal Edmund Burke in Anglosphere conservatism. His meditations on managing change, on connecting the present to the past without imprisoning the future, provided something for conservatives to work with when de Maistre's throne-and-altar pessimism was a dead end.

The dynamism of Western civilisation produced the Emancipation Sequence -- abolishing the slave trade, then slavery, Catholic Emancipation, Jewish Emancipation, Female Emancipation, civil and indigenous rights, Queer Emancipation -- which conservatives are typically and recurrently on the wrong side of. Each step in the sequence being castigated as a threat to social order and then proving to be no such thing.

Sung China -- with its meritorious bureaucratic rule, its deliberately encouraged technology, its managed belief -- may have been the first modern society, but if the essence of modernity is expanding possibilities, then the Emancipation Sequence expresses modernity quite profoundly. Though expanding possibilities can seem frightening to those focused on the felt fragility of social order.

Particularly if they buy into lazy thinking about the legacy of history; as if oppression, privilege and exploitation are not also part of the selection processes of history. There was, for example, no "social learning" involved in the anathematisation of the queer; that was just the brutal imposition of religious doctrine against a highly vulnerable group. (Since queer folk grow up as isolated individuals in overwhelmingly straight families and social milieus.) Which made them ideal targets for outcasting, for expressing the power and authority of clerics as gatekeepers of righteousness.

Better even than Jews, for while it is possible to have a Judenfrei society (if one kills or expels all existing Jews) it is not possible to have a queerfrei society, because new ones are continually being born. Hence they offer an endless target as an endless "threat" to a religiously-conceived social order who make such great outcasts because they are so inherently vulnerable. No matter how socially powerless you are, you can always pick on the queers and feel effortlessly virtuous and entitled.

Committing to an endless war against human gender and sexual diversity is not about expanding possibilities, it is about closing them off, and closing them off for others. It is a war against both modernity and the dynamism of Western civilisation. Sacrificing understanding to a narrow (and, in the end, deeply ignorant) sense of order. Including the impoverished epistemology that goes with declaring that not everyone with a human face is "properly" human. Because then their experience does not count and provides no lessons and no understanding.

Romancing the feels

But what if queering the culture provides a very different sense of power and engagement? A way of taking what is offered and making it your own. Of feeling connected to others. Even of being part of a morally grander society and understanding experiences beyond your own.

And do shippers really want their OTP to become canon? Or is the fun of adding in, of imaging that extra, really the point? Of being not merely audience but, in a sense, also a creator? Particularly when they do fanvids as clever as this (warning: some of the dialogue has been shifted around to ship it better).

Likely so. I came to TeenWolf through Sterek, but I am not at all sure I really want Stiles and Derek to go there. Adding it in is part of the fun. But it is also a way of acknowledging the breadth and diversity of the human, even getting joy from it, rather than being hatefully afraid of it.

* NOTE ON FILK: Allegedly, the first filk was the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, performed by Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock) -- for example, here. (WARNING extreme Sixties camp.)  Mr Nimoy recites some of it in the Spock v Spock Audi ad (one of the greatest TV ads ever: though I also like the Hyundai toy boy ad). The stars of The Hobbit have done a reading.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

More on the reactionary effect of Marxism

Over at Skepticlawyer, I was challenged on my claim that

Leninism (or derivatives thereof) proved to be the only effective way to politically operationalise Marxism

The claim was a little over-stated; Leninism (or derivatives thereof) proved to be the only distinctive effective way to operationalise Marxism. Marxism did motivate the formation of trade unions and Social Democratic political parties (or, at least, providing the animating ideology). 

But, of course, there was nothing particularly distinctive about that in that proved to be entirely possible to have trade union movements and working class-based political parties without any significant Marxist element at all.  And, to the extent that there was a distinctively Marxian element, the effect also proved to be reactionary.

For the more identified with Marxist ideology the Socialist/Social Democratic Party was, the larger the Leninist offshoot after 1917. The larger the Leninist offshoot, the larger the countervailing Fascist/Nazi/Authoritarian movement was.

Moreover, the larger and more threatening the Leninist offshoot was, and the more identified with Marxist ideology the Socialist/Social Democratic Party was, the more ignored rural voters, particularly peasant smallholders, were and the more the Fascist/Nazi/Authoritarian Right movement was able to mobilise them as a voter and support base.

Moreover, Leninism provided Fascism and Nazism with a model of how to operationalise politics. This is most obvious with Mussolini--as he both wrote about it and came directly out of the same radical-Left socialist milieu as Lenin et al--but not much less so with Hitler. If Lenin was Marx + Robespierre -- as Lenin Jacobinised Marxism -- then Mussolini was Mazzini (or perhaps Garibaldi) + Robespierre while Hitler was Gobineau + Robespierre (with added anti-Semitism). And Lenin provided the model of how to operationalise total politics for whatever one's project was (national greatness in Mussolini's case, Aryan race-purity-and-dominance in Hitler's case).

Those Socialist/Social Democratic Parties that remained on the free side of the Iron Curtain effectively dropped the deadweight of Marxism, going on to prove how unnecessary Marxism was to have an effective Labour/Social Democratic/Socialist party and trade union movement. Even beneficial, since an official Marxist ideology got in the way of coalition-building, scared (some) voters while jettisoning it permitted a more effective electoral and policy pragmatism without the ideological blinkers.

The later Eurocommunist movement was attempt to distance the Parties involved from the the deadweight of revolutionary Marxism (i.e. Leninism), becoming more like the Parties that had Never Gone There or had effectively dropped Marxism. With precious little actual Marxism after that was done -- and the more there was, the less successful the Party tended to be in the longer term.

A for the involvement of Marxism in various progressive social movements, the history of the Emancipation Sequence in the Anglosphere (abolition of the slave trade, then slavery; Catholic Emancipation, Jewish Emancipation, Female Emancipation, the civil rights movement, indigenous emancipation, now queer emancipation) also demonstrates how unnecessary Marxism is and was for the sequence.

Certainly, Marxists got involved in the later movements, but that was a very mixed blessing. They tended to get in the way of the broader coalition building that allows such movements to succeed by making the movement seem more broadly dangerous, provided broader ideological baggage that diverted energies and focus that generally got in the way.

On balance, Marxism has been far more a destructive deadweight for progressive movements than a benefit. Not least for its tendency to give its adherent the belief that they know what people should want/need rather than what they actually want/need. 

It may not be a coincidence that the only surviving full Marxist regime is the most atavistic of the lot -- the quasi-religious dynastic theocracy of North Korea. By so thoroughly embracing the atavistic core of Marxism -- this notion of prophetic understanding of the direction of history far greater than other mortals not blessed with understanding of the true doctrines which will provide a salvation that will eliminate all alienation -- the Kim Family Regime has continued when elsewhere Marxism as an significant political force has collapsed, yet another casualty of the historical tsunami of modernity.

The reactionary effect of Marxism

Who make up the one group that humanities and social science academics typically feel entitled to analyse and pontificate about without actually studying them in any serious sense? Without talking to them, following them around, examining their letters, documents and memoirs, or reading the work of anyone who has.

That would be business folk.

(And it is slightly scary how many economists only don't fall into this category because they have read Ronald Coase's seminal 1937 article The Nature of the Firm [pdf].)

I was reminded of this recently when I started reading Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990 - 1992, which has become the modern classic analysis of European state formation. I can see good reasons why -- the book is clearly written, asks excellent questions, shows a nice sense of the diversity of European state development, seeks to balance economic and political analysis.

Doing the pander

Alas, I can also see bad reasons why it has been an academic success -- it panders to the apparently endless desire of humanities academics in particular to sneer at commerce and business folk. Such pandering can and has propelled far more mediocre efforts to academic prominence. A nice Australian example being Michael Pusey's Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-building State Changes Its Mind whose content and academic success in Australia is a triumph of pandering over understanding. (Economic rationalism is not a term used much nowadays, but Gregory Whitwell -- author of the excellent The Treasury Line -- provides a nice discussion of its meanings here.)

Reviews of Pusey's opus by Fred Argy (in Economic Papers), Richard Blandy (in The Australian Quarterly) and John Stone (in Quadrant) covered the failings of Pusey's analysis (using the term loosely) fairly thoroughly. A data-rich explanation of the shift in Oz public policy is provided here (pdf), including a side-swipe at Pusey; though the combination of Howard-Costello tax reforms and RBA stabilisation policy led to better outcomes than the paper implies.

An upside of Pusey's efforts is that it did help inspire William Coleman's magisterial Economics and Its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics.

Capital capers

Tilly seeks to create an analytical paralleling of capital and coercion. The former being the realm of "exploitation" and the latter of "domination".

Really?

So the more capital, the more "exploitation"? So an American worker is more "exploited" than a landless peasant on a latifundium in a capital-starved agrarian society? Do people who write this stuff -- and those who buy into it -- listen to themselves?

That increasing the level of capital in a society increases the return to labour -- since it increases the scarcity of labour compared to capital -- would seem to imply (in Tilly's analytical framework) that workers are the more exploited the more prosperous they are.  At which point one can only agree with Andre the Giant's Fezzik [Inigo Montoya]-- that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

One also wonders where, in this analytical universe, one puts slavery, serfdom and other forms of human bondage -- the point of which is precisely that they are the operation of coercive domination to deny labour its scarcity returns above that necessary for subsistence.

Furthermore, in Tilly's analytical universe, capital does not get created, it "accumulates". Capital -- the accumulated scum of economic exploitation.

Of course, if one uses the language of capital being created, then business folk become creators and, clearly, we can't have that!

Nor see commerce as a realm of consent, because that might generate a rather disturbing contrast with the realm of coercion. Though perhaps not as disturbing as all that -- one can talk of gains from order as well as gains from trade. And Tilly's analysis of the path of state formation does include a very important role for implicit or explicit social bargaining, while he never loses sight of the fact that the state is, at its core, always a coercive structure.

Tilly defines capital thusly:

Let us think of capital generously, including any tangible mobile resources, and enforceable claims on such resources. Capitalists, then, are people who specialise in the accumulation, purchase and sale of capital. They occupy the realm of exploitation, where the relations of production and exchange yield surpluses, and capitalists capture them (p.17).

Perhaps factories are also capital, even though they are not terribly mobile? And, if they are not capital, what are they?

Risky business

But leave that aside; Tilly buys into the perennial notion of surpluses as just being "yielded" by the processes of "production and exchange". Yet a driving factor in commerce is that there are no guarantees of such "surpluses". The risk of loss is a real one and much commercial activity is structured to deal with it; to deal with risks in general. A huge part of the story of the Commercial Revolution in Europe is precisely the secular drop in risks -- particularly as reflected in interest rates. A drop in risk levels from the interaction between technology and institutional change that is at the heart of the Commercial Revolution and which made the creation of capital strikingly easier over time.

European global dominance starts with the Commercial Revolution, though it was pushed along by the Scientific Revolution and sealed by the Industrial Revolution. Until, of course, the patterns thereof started to be exported elsewhere and the further consequences of the Industrial Revolution began to undermine imperial rule.

That Tilly does not really "get" commerce is particularly clear when he discusses the interaction between capital and cities -- he sees the development of cities as coming from the accumulation and concentration of capital, thereby paralleling the development of states from the accumulation and concentration of coercion. Since, in his analytical framework, capital "accumulates" rather than being created, the notion of cities as being good places to transact is obscured. By contrast, medieval lords were well aware that providing protection and ease of transaction could promote a new city as a node of trade and commerce -- the medieval notion of a (new) borough was strikingly similar to the modern notion of enterprise zone.  At times, capital in Tilly's analysis seems perilously close to an exogenous force that drives social phenomena.

Status games

In all this, Tilly is just part of the at least 2,500 year tradition of clerics, clerisies and intellectuals dating back at least to Plato, Aristotle and Kong Qiu despising commerce and merchants as vulgar and amoral. Though the tradition went into something of a regression from the mid C17th to the mid C19th -- from John to John; from John Locke to John Stuart Mill (plus a nod to the great C19th populariser of liberal political thought, Herbert Spencer). (A review of a book on this tradition is here [pdf].)

But the tradition resurged with a vengeance with the intellectual popularity of Marxism. To the extent that most academic writing about economics and commerce which is not explicitly based on various forms of economics is largely derivative from Marxism. An analysis which gets in the way of understanding actual commerce and the importance of gains from trade (why do people keep coming back?), transaction costs and risk management.

In its status-driven antipathy to business folk and commerce, Marxism has proved to be quite reactionary. Though, that is hardly the only way it turned out to be so. That Leninism (or derivatives thereof) proved to be the only effective way to politically operationalise Marxism led to elite politics of the most ruthless and entitled kind. With its reintroduction of slavery (in the labour camps), serfdom (the ban on leaving a workplace without its permission -- the essence of serfdom) and extremely controlling and hierarchical politics, Leninism was much more a very nasty throwback to the monumentalist labour service autocracies of Pharaonic Egypt or the Khmer Empire than to anything that can plausibly labelled "progressive".

Nor were Leninist states modernising in anything except the most banally technological sense. The essence of modernity is about expanding possibilities -- very much what Leninist states have not been about. Which is why they are mostly no longer with us. They may have been the political embodiment of high modernism, but actual modernity has proved to be too much for them. Apart from the bizarre North Korean dynastic theocracy -- the most atavistic of the lot -- the remaining notionally Leninist states are in the process of living the Eastern European joke. (What is socialism? The hardest and most difficult road from capitalism to capitalism.)

Honouring the divine ruling family

In reinvigorating the long tradition of status-driven sneering at commerce and merchants, Marxism proved to be deeply reactionary. Indeed, pervasively reactionary.

But dressing up old ideas in allegedly "cutting edge" language and declaring them progressive has continued to be a fun game for intellectuals. Consider post-moderism -- indeterminacy of meaning was a hot topic for Socrates and the boys. As it was in medieval discussions of the problems of translation. (One Orthodox theologian is supposed to have joked that he could not translate the doctrine of the Trinity from Greek to Latin without committing several heresies.)

They might also consider how "progressive" al-Ghazali's embracing of what we would now call Humean scepticism proved to be for Islamic science.

I understand the enduring status-appeal of sneering at commerce and merchants. But watching a first class mind trip over its analytical framework -- as in Tilly's Coercion, Capital and European States -- remains an unfortunate sight.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

What is it about money?

I was going to hold off blogging until the New Year, but irritation drove me to posting ...

In a recent article, Alan Kohler had this to say:

The real war is between monetary policy and the Digital Revolution – between the world of finance trying to reduce the value of money and therefore debt, and the world of technology pushing for greater efficiency and productivity, to drive prices lower and the value of money higher.

Why does money make perfectly sensible economists and economic commentators forget elementary economics? Money is a good. Fine, it is a special type of good, it is a transaction good--something used to facilitate transactions.  We use money, not because it has production or consumption utility--the paper or polymer notes we use as money has no interesting element of either--but because it has transaction utility (expected utility in future transactions).

Nevertheless, money is a good. The price of goods in a market is set by supply and demand. Sure, the price (in the sense of the swap value) of money is the inverse of the price for all other goods and services. That is, if P is the price level, the swap value of a unit of money is 1/P. (The money price of money is itself; i.e. the money price of x dollars in dollars is x dollars.)  Still, the price (swap value) of money is a supply-and-demand matter.

Since the supply of money need not be fixed--the joy of a token-money central bank is it can produce any amount of the tokens we use as money--there is no necessary effect for any amount of extra productivity to do anything to the price (i.e. swap value) of money. Productivity and output tell you nothing on their own about the swap value of money and thus the price level.

If you don't believe me, ask the Zimbabweans. Zimbabwe has no currency of its own any more (Wikipedia labels its currency as "various"), because its central bank under Governor Gideon Gono was so profligate in printing money that hyperinflation got to an estimated 6.5 sextillion % in November 2008. In January 2009, Zimbabweans were legally able to use other currencies and shortly thereafter the Zimbabwean government stopped issuing currency. Whatever was happening to Zimbabwean productivity was rather beside the point in the face of such currency profligacy.

Gold standard effects

Kohler cites the deflationary experience of the C19th as supporting his view of the deflationary consequences of higher productivity:

During the second half of the 19th century prices fell consistently – that is, there was deflation – because of the impact on productivity of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1870 and 1900 the purchasing power of the US dollar doubled as prices came down.

Yes, there was a prolonged deflationary period in the latter C19th. The US, Germany and France all went on the gold standard in 1873. Under the gold standard, the price of gold sets the the price of money since money has a set exchange of rate of money into gold. So, if output of goods and services rises faster than the stock of gold--as happened in the gold zone from 1873 to 1896--then there will be deflation.

Conversely, if gold production outstrips growth in output of goods and services--as happened from 1896 to 1914 due to the Kalgoorlie/Coolgardie and Klondike gold rushes coming on top of the earlier Witwatersrand gold rush--then there will be inflation.

The Industrial Revolution did not suddenly go into reverse in 1896. Just as the current plunge in the Greek price level is not due to surging Greek productivity.

Sure, rising output and increasing productivity put downward pressure on prices. But whether this will have deflationary consequences depends on what is happening (and expected to happen) with money. Kohler is breaking Sumner's dictum--never reason from a price change. (Or, in this case, a price level change). Price, it is a supply AND demand matter. Including for money. Money may be special, but it is not that special. The gold zone deflation followed by the gold zone inflation were a gold-production and goods-and-services-output story, not just a goods-and-services-output story.

Good and bad deflation

As it happens, I agree that rising output and productivity was an important part of the 1873-1896 story, but not quite the way Kohler tells it. It helps explain why the 1870s expansion of the gold standard was bad for Britain, provided one understands the different sorts of deflation. For deflation can be divided into the good, the bad and the ugly (pdf).

Germany was in the process of industrialising: it could import millions of peasants into its cities, and did. The US was also in the process of industrialising and incorporating its westward expansion into its economic system. It could import millions of migrants into is cities, and did. In other words, Germany and the US had lots of inputs to add to their industrialising economies. Germany also received the institutional and transaction cost benefits of unification while the US received the institutional benefits of establishing a stable post-Civil War constitutional regime with the Compromise of 1877. To a significant extent, Germany and the US experienced "good deflation" (the downward pressure on prices of expanding output due to expanding, and more efficient use of, inputs). In other words, their aggregate supply curves kept shifting rightwards (i.e. producing more for a given price level).

Rising productivity (good),
falling demand (bad),
collapsing incomes (ugly).

By the 1870s, Britain was already highly urbanised, highly industrialised and its institutions were about as economically efficient as was achievable without major political pain. There was not a lot of good deflation to be had. So, they experienced more "bad deflation" (downward pressure on nominal income/aggregate demand) due to growth in output of goods and services being higher than growth in the stock of gold. With income prospects therefore relatively poor in the UK, capital flowed out to the US, Germany and other places where returns were easier. (Throughout this post, income means money or nominal income.) Hence the UK falling behind the US and Germany in economic growth and industrial modernisation. (The US and UK had similar levels of per capita economic growth for much of the C19th: the US per capita growth rate only shifted above Britain's in the 1870s.)

The Euro is like an artificial gold standard. Just as entering the gold zone was about a pound sterling for everyone, so the Eurozone was a Deutschmark for everyone. And just as the initial expansion of the gold zone was bad for Britain, so too there was a similar adverse effect for Germany in the creation of the Eurozone. But Germany then went through a series of supply-side reforms (particularly labour market reforms) which put it in a much better position. German adjustment was helped by higher income growth in the Mediterranean countries; now it is the latter countries who need to do painful adjustments to make the Euro work, Germany is refusing to return the favour of accepting higher nominal income growth via higher inflation.

Inflation targeting

Applying the lessons of the 1873-1914 apotheosis of the gold standard, and grasping how simple inflation targeting is somewhat like the gold standard, enables us to see what is actually behind the phenomena Kohler is discussing.

Kohler writes that:

When the Industrial Revolution reduced costs, debt wasn’t an issue and prices could be allowed to fall. In fact, society’s most powerful were savers, not borrowers: for them deflation was a good thing so they made sure it happened.
This time around it’s different: borrowers are ascendant and central banks are working for them, not savers. In fact, savers are being plundered with super low interest in the name of promoting aggregate demand and maintaining inflation.

Pausing here, if it is all about rising productivity, how did savers "make sure" deflation happened? By insisting on a certain monetary policy regime perhaps?

The cross of gold.

But Kohler is right in that deflation is nastier for debtors. But so is any collapse in income expectations (and income), since debtors rely on expected income to remain solvent.

Of course, a collapse in income expectations and income also becomes rapidly a problem for creditors, as their debt-assets (one person's liability is another person's asset) become increasingly threatened the sharper and more sustained the collapse in income and income expectations is. The problem with the Great Depression was "ugly" deflation--a massive and sustained drop in prices leading to a massive and sustained drop in income (since income = price x quantity) leading to mass insolvencies and financial collapses and crises.

Why was there a massive drop in prices? Because central banks (led by the Bank of France) hoarded gold, driving up its price, and therefore the price of money--which was at fixed exchange rates to gold--therefore driving down the price level in the gold zone (since the price level is the reciprocal of the swap value of money). Which then drove down incomes.

With both the gold standard and simple inflation targeting, the central bank takes responsibility for the maintaing the "value" of the currency (either in gold or on a set rate of change of the price level) but no responsibility for income expectations. So, if income expectations crash, that's unfortunate but does not lead to any change in the policy regime. (Until, of course, it does--such as by abandoning the gold standard.)

Recovery from such a transactions crash requires that income expectations recover. Such as due to an expected sustained rise in the price level.

Which is clearly not part of current expectations. Inflation has been low because central banks are making keeping inflation down their central priority and are very credible on that point.

As it happens, there is a productivity price norm (pdf) which Hayek and Keynes almost agreed on (pdf) where productivity shifts drive monetary policy. Keynes was a firm supporter of a stable price level; Keynesianism may be associated in some quarters with inflationary policies but, in this matter, Keynes was clearly not a Keynesian. A case of Etienne Gilson's point that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple (who therefore fail to end up in quite the same place). But the productivity price norm is an explicit monetary policy regime, it is not some "natural" consequence of rising productivity.

The secular trend to low interest rates over recent decades are a product of rising incomes in China, India and most of Asia in between, leading to high savings rates. So saving has been "pushing on" investment, in a low inflation environment, hence low interest rates. Low interest rates are usually a sign that money has been relatively tight (i.e. the expected path of money is low compared to the expected path of output). So, once again we are back to supply and demand and the monetary policy regime.

Kohler's story of central banks heroically fighting the threat of rising productivity is fairy tale stuff. Worse, it is a fairy tale that allows central banks to evade responsibility for their actions. But ignoring the role of money and monetary policy in economic cycles does that. Acknowledging that supply and demand matter for money too--a point of elementary economics--would be a good start.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The distance of the recent past

Recently. I went on a bit of a Criminal Minds (2005- ) binge, watching the first 7 seasons. Still looking for some more profiling action, I then re-watched The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

The film holds up well. But what struck me, re-watching it, was how primitive the technology seemed. In Criminal Minds, it is all contemporary hi-tech--mobile phones, emails, digital screens, internet and database searches and, in the later seasons, tablets.

Those low-tech early 90s

In The Silence of the Lambs, there are no mobile phones, emails or internet. Clunky faxes are used and a "database search" is looking up old newspapers on microfiche. It seemed laughably low-tech. Yet we are talking about a contrast well within my own adulthood.

Low tech

Part of the contrast is the "boiling lobster" effect. While, in historical terms, 20-odd years is a mere eye-blink, we have experienced the IT revolution in waves, seeping through society. Seeing 20 years of difference in one hit is naturally much more striking. Particularly when the same activity is being engaged in, 20 years apart--inferring the characteristics and habits of the unknown serial offender from behaviour. Not only the same activity, but an information-heavy activity.

The contrast is striking, and the sense of recent tech "primitiveness" even more striking, though the effect somewhat undermines Alvin Toffler's famous "Future Shock" thesis. We have adjusted to--nay embraced--I-tech with remarkable ease, even enthusiasm. The recent past of The Silence of the Lambs seemed tech primitive, not restful or preferable. Most of us deal with commercialised I-tech, and commercialisation is about making things attractive, useable, accessible (to varying degrees of success).

Gender shifts

It is not commercialised technology the people generally find confronting or disorienting. The other "distance of the recent past effect" was the role of women in law enforcement. That Jodie Foster's FBI agent Clarice Starling has to deal with male presumptions of females as delicate flowers not up to the grit of law enforcement--even if located in the film as part of rural backwardness--is a theme notably absent from Criminal Minds. There, female law enforcement officers are just taken for granted. Bad-ass female law enforcement officers, indeed. This is a general phenomenon--is not Cote de Pablo's Ziva David in NCIS the deadliest law enforcement officer in TV? Of course, ex-Mossad assassin is not a common former career for such. (Jim Caviezel's John Reese in Person of Interest [2011- ] is more menacing, but not a law enforcement officer.)

Admittedly, this is fiction we are talking of.  Female sheriffs are way more common in police procedurals than in real life. Still, that female-law-enforcement-officers-being-somehow-remarkable is not even a significant theme in Criminal Minds and similar shows increases the "distance of the recent past" effect from re-watching The Silence of the Lambs.

Toffler's thesis may make more sense in other societies. Western societies and East Asia (or, for that matter, India), even Islam seem to be embracing technology with both hands. It is the last societies where (social) future shock seems more in evidence, particularly in Middle Eastern Islamic societies. But our status vis-a-vis other humans is a much more emotionally-laden thing than our interactions with cool new tech. (Tech and social relations have some interaction, but it is still the social relations which have the far more powerful emotional resonance.)

Fem techs 

One area where there is an amusing interaction between I-tech change and gender roles is how ubiquitous the feisty, genius-smart, female techie has become in TV shows. Prominent examples include Willow in Buffy (1997-2003) (the original?) and Abby in NCIS (2003- ). Criminal Minds (2005- ) has its own Penelope Garcia. Warehouse 13 (2009- ) has Claudia. Arrow (2012- ) has Felicity Smoak.

The smart, tech-savvy female character extends beyond actual techies. The X-Files's (1993-2002) Scully was very tech savvy and an actual gun-toting FBI agent--so, however tech savvy, not a techie. Similarly for Stargate's (1997-2007) Major (later Colonel) Carter. Who was a genius-smart, bad-ass fighter and later commander (of Atlantis). Amanda Tapping did so well at being the smartest and sexiest person in the room, she moved on to being the esoteric super-scientist lead in Sanctuary (2004-9). Chloe in Smallville (2001-2011) was the tech-smart friend and side-kick, so not really a techie. Amita in Numb3rs (2005-10) was the computer-smart fellow-mathematician girlfriend of child-prodigy mathematician Charlie Epps, so also not an actual techie, however tech-savvy.

Goth tech

Dr Temperance Brennan in Bones (2005- ) is a squint (technical expert) rather than a techie. And while IQ-wise she is the smartest person in the room, her Asperger's regularly makes her engagingly emotionally clueless. Though, in its own way, that is also operating against gender stereotypes. Lydia in Teen Wolf (2011- ) is also the smartest person in the room, but she is vast-reading and good-reasoning smart, not a techie as such.

The feisty techies have a range of roles with major characters.  Willow was Buffy's BFF. In NCIS, Jethro Gibbs and Abby have a very father-daughter relationship--part of the fun of the Gibbs character is that he seems to be such a strait-laced ex-Marine Gunnery Sergeant, yet is completely fine with Abby's in-your-face Gothiness. In Criminal Minds, Penelope and Derek Morgan have a flirt-outrageously pseudo-sibling friendship. In Warehouse 13, Claudia has a delinquent-daughter relationship with Artie and later a pseudo-sibling relationship, even  fag hag connection, with Steve Jinks. In Arrow, Felicity starts off as Oliver Queen's employee and then becomes tech side-kick.

As an aside, the phenomenon of TV series not only have quite long runs but increasing their ratings over time (as happened with NCIS, for example), may also be a consequence of I-tech. Nowadays, one can simply "catch up" with a series by buying or borrowing the DVDs, or downloading it. So one can be up-to-date with the story arcs and get all the nuances, as the new episodes air, even if you come late to a series.

The other advantage of watching via-DVD, especially for genre fans, is that you don't have to put up with the TV station screwing up the sequence of episodes. (Which Oz TV channels seem to do with truly remarkable regularity.)

We live in an age of ordinary wonders and the distance of the recent past effect is very much part of that.

[Also posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The unknown country

Which country is this?

• First nation in modern history to secure full unification without killing anyone.
• First major nation to have achieved independence and sovereignty without killing anyone.
• First nation in modern history to appoint a Jew as commander of its armed forces,
• Never had any form of slavery or serfdom.

The answer is below the cut.