Still disagreeing with Liberal Fascism

The May 2008 issue of Quadrant included a review essay by me on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, a book which has since been nominated by Amazon as the number one history book of 2008.

Jonah Goldberg responded at some length here and briefly here.

Goldberg has a similarly mixed reaction to the Quadrant review that I expressed about his book. On the positive side, Goldberg says:

there's much interesting stuff in the review, which is on the whole serious, thoughtful and in good faith, which is rare enough to be applauded.

On the critical side, Goldberg claims that in my review I am committed to fascism and communism being opposites referring to my:

obvious frustration and confusion is that he refuses to let go of the idea that fascism and communism are opposites.

This is clearly not true: my review analyses fascism as a "crossover" phenomenon that partakes of both Left and Right aspects. I do, however, insist that fascism and Leninism are different things even if I agree with Goldberg that they are both manifestations of the politics of secular salvation. Indeed, I discuss at some length just how much Mussolini and Hitler owed to Lenin’s example. As Victor Serge said of the former:

…this new variety of counter-revolution had taken the Russian Revolution as its schoolmaster in matters of repression and mass-manipulation through propaganda; further, it had succeeded in recruiting a host of disillusioned, power-hungry, ex-revolutionaries; consequently, its rule would last for years.

Leninism and fascism being significantly different from each other (let alone from modern American liberalism) is all that is required for it to be, as I suggested, “transparently silly” to make both fascist and communist parallels with US liberals.

It is Goldberg’s commitment to a political taxonomy of Right and Left as mutually exclusive opposites covering the entire political universe that I disagree with. Both because there is on the Right far more diversity in animating values than there is on the Left—a central reason why it makes rather more sense to talk of “the Left” than it does of “the Right” —and because it is central to my analysis of fascism that it partakes of both Left and Right features. Fascism’s own characterisation of itself as the “third way” was not empty.
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Goldberg wants to rescue the label “fascism” from being any more pejorative than socialism, for I apparently:

cannot let go of the word "fascist" as strictly pejorative. Obviously, the term can be pejorative. But I think it can be descriptive, too — and not just descriptive of "bad people." Yet, for so many of my reviewers, it can never, ever, ever, be descriptive about any good person. I anticipated this problem when writing the book (hence the blows for "political civility" Warby refers to), but I clearly failed to deal with it sufficiently, because even good faith readers of my book often can't let go of fascism-as-anathema.

In a democratic polity, fascism is always going to be more pejorative than socialism since there is no such thing as democratic fascism: open rejection of democracy is rather fundamental to fascism. It is one of the several ways it is simply not reasonable to tag the progressivist Left as "fascist".

Citing the MSI or Le Pen engaging in electoral politics would not be any more persuasive in defending a notion of "democratic" fascism than citing the PCF, KPD or, indeed NSDAP for democratic credentials. Moreover, the MSI and Le Pen’s National Front have personnel, institutional and ideological continuations which are so conspicuously absent from liberal Democrats.

But Goldberg is being deeply disingenuous here. Why bother labouring to apply the fascist label to those who would reject it? Consider the clever logo on the front of Goldberg’s book: the smiley face with the Hitler moustache. It is the moustache that creates the impact, subverting the smiley face, for reasons that are obvious and absolutely rely on the association with tyranny and mass murder. World War II is, after all, even to the Left, the Good War. The entire dramatic effect rests on the pejorative connation.

Goldberg also gets into a muddle over my review’s argument that to be Left is to be committed to change based on rejecting the past. Apparently, I did not express myself clearly enough. It is the rejecting the past that matters, not mere change. One can want lots of change yet not reject the past–precisely because, in some sense, you want to go back to it or because change is the only way you believe you can preserve the best bits. Which is pretty close to what Goldberg has to say in his second response post:

I do agree that the Left has serious problems with the importance and relevance of history, but history and "the past" are different things. The Left does not reject the past per se, it rejects the reigning tradition which they often treat as merely a creature of the past, an oppressive vestige of a "wrong turn" in human development etc.

To be Left is to be directed to the imagined future which is all the more glorious because it is not tainted by the sins of the past. That Mussolini and Hitler both saw themselves as being "revolutionaries" does not make them Left. For it depends on the nature of their intended revolution, as there are other dimensions on which one assesses political movements. George Watson’s point that revolutions can be conservative reminds us that being a revolutionary does not, in fact, make one “left wing”. After all, do we really want to claim that the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1989 anti-Soviet Revolutions are entirely the domain of the Left?

A point which also applies to Goldberg's comment that I would be:

consistent if he was willing to call black nationalists, feminists and economic populists "Rightwingers" but one doesn't get the sense he wants to go there.

And further that:

Black nationalists, feminists, environmentalists et al have all sorts of weird ideas about, and uses for, the past (as I discuss in the book).

So I am:

free to hold to his criteria, but he needs to then explain why black nationalists are rightwingers, not leftwingers

thereby again ignoring the review's multi-dimensional political taxonomy. Black nationalists, feminists and economic populists clearly reject the past and have a high degree of commitment to the use of political mechanisms; both of which are antipathetic to being right-wing. But I am happy to agree that economic populists often have Right and Left elements to their politics.

Moreover, as I pointed out, nationalism can be Left or Right depending on context. Since there is no virtuous American past that black nationalists wish to defend, but they do have great confidence in political mechanisms, they are not rightwing. That their commitment to equality is dubious makes their connection to the Left tenuous. But the central point of the review is that it is possible to have crossover political movements; that the political universe is not defined by only being Right or Left. As I noted in my review, Goldberg’s characterisation of black nationalists as fascist (or at least fascistic) has much to be said for it.

It is helpful to apply William Coleman’s take on political taxonomy in his Economics and its Enemies. Coleman divides Right and Left according to two axes: Right

defined as attraction to ‘order’. Order amounts, in the first place, to calm and stability, then shades off into structure and pattern, which shades off finally into inequality and hierarchy

and Left

defined as an aversion to order; and amounts at bottom to attraction to motion, change, and turbulence, that shades into fluidity and formlessness which shades finally into indistinctiveness and therefore equality.

The second axis is liberalism to anti-liberalism:

Liberalism is defined as an attraction to the prerogatives of the individual, freedom and ‘plurality’. The anti-liberal, by contrast, is attracted to the prerogative of the collective, ‘unity’.

So we have the liberal Right attracted to order and plurality (e.g. F.A.Hayek), the anti-liberal Right attracted to order and unity (e.g. Auguste Comte), the liberal Left to turbulence and plurality (e.g. John Stuart Mill) and the anti-liberal Left to turbulence and unity (e.g. Karl Marx). That Fascism (and particularly Nazism) was for order, unity and turbulence shows it cannot be simply captured for Left or Right even in Coleman’s political taxonomy.

Conservatism and change
In the second response, a reader emailed to Goldberg and says of my review:

He compares it to the "atavism" of the Right — which includes looking back to pre-Christian times.

Which completely misconstrues my point in the review that fascism (especially Nazism)’s atavism is a large part of what marks them as different from the mainstream Right. Mainstream conservatives are not atavistic because they see the past as embodied experience. To try and massively turn back the clock is to reject the experience built up in the meantime. Indeed, there is a liberal*-conservative critique of left-collectivism as being deeply primitivist in its rejection of such social learning.

(* The modern American use of the term ‘liberal’ to mean ‘politically cross-dressing social democrat’ is endlessly irritating and does great harm to anything even vaguely resembling consistency in using the term ‘liberal’ across place and time. I mean ‘liberal’ in the sense of pro-markets, private property and civil society while being sceptical about political action.)

Though being a conservative within Western civilisation is inherently a bit odd, as Western civilisation is by far the most dynamic of all human civilisations. Indeed, there is a strain of conservatism that is thoroughly confronted by the dynamism of Western civilisation, though that is more a feature of Continental conservatism than Anglosphere conservatism. One can generally pick a rough date (often about the time someone became at least vaguely politically conscious) and conservatives tend to be in favour of changes that happened prior to that time and be against those that have been advocated, or happened, since. So they tend to in favour of change after the fact—once they are used to it and we have had the experience of it—thereby often implicitly or explicitly disagreeing with previous generations of conservatives (and agreeing with previous generations of reformers or radicals).

The common feature of conservatives being “radicals after the fact”—the putting of brakes on movement in a direction that others have chosen—is why Hayek declared himself not to be a conservative. It is also why a prudent liberal*—Edmund Burke, a lifelong Whig—is a great intellectual icon of Anglosphere conservatism, for he was a powerful advocate for processes of change that connected one to the past and against ones that abruptly broke from it. Such connected change is what a conservative defender of Western civilisation is going end up defending, or face a deeper alienation from their own civilisation.

The willingness of American conservatives to continue to attack FDR and the New Deal is somewhat unusual compared to the “let’s move on” habits of conservatives in other Western countries. But between religion and the American Revolution, American conservatives are somewhat more programmatic (and so less subject to Hayek’s critique, though he still clearly meant to distinguish himself from American conservatives) than conservatives tend to be in the rest of the developed world.

About equality
Goldberg’s discussion of various conceptions of equality is much more interesting. He writes that I say:

the less you assert the primacy of equality the more of a rightwinger you are. I don't think this is really true in the Anglo-American tradition.

Anglo-American liberal-conservatism does have a rather more serious commitment to equality than Continental conservatism. As Goldberg says:

conservatives in America and Britain (and one hopes Australia) emphasize a very different kind of equality, one which recognizes equality in the eyes of God and the law, but has few or no objections to differences based on merit, wealth, creed etc

which is a very different conception of equality than Marxian notions, for example. But, of course, it is a serious commitment to equality along with a series of other values—rather my point. The rather subordinate conservative commitment to equality can also see from the persistent tendency for conservatives to be in favour of past equalities before the law but not new ones, as same-sex couples in our time are very well aware.

National Socialism was, as a reader Goldberg quotes on his Liberal Fascism blog correctly notes, markedly more egalitarian than Italian Fascism: in large part for the two reasons I noted in my review—that Italian Fascism involved a compromise with royal structures than Nazism did not and that Nazism had much grander ambitions that Italian Fascism so required much grander modernisation. That Nazism had to struggle longer in competition with other political parties before achieving power was also a factor, as were Hitler’s proletarian sympathies.

Goldberg hits on a key issue when he writes:

Leftwingers talk a good game about equality, but I don't think it's inaccurate to say they have a very narrow and constrained vision of what they mean by equality. Equality often means "justice for my kind." Equality often means "make the bad people pay." Even the equality of economic populists like John Edwards is not real equality, it's rhetoric to sell an agenda of "social justice" for the have-nots at the expense of the haves.

For there is a great tension between the end of equality and the means needed to reach it: and the more absolute the aimed for equality, the more that is so. The question of what sort of equality becomes central when Goldberg makes the point that Leninists do not believe in the basic equality of the right to life. No, indeed they do not.

Goldberg writes:

The Nazis were very much leftwing egalitarians when it came to Germans. Hitlerism is socialism for one race. Bolshevism was socialism for one class. That may sound like a redundancy, but I don't think it is. The Bolsheviks didn't believe in the first principle of equality: the right to life of others. Please tell the nearly hundred million murdered souls that Communism values the equality of all humanity.

Indeed so, they are not in favour of equality for all humanity. For that is precisely central to the evil of the Leninist vision: it is one of equality after the “human dross” has been brutally stripped away.

The brutality of utopianism
For the practice of utopianism must always be a brutal exercise. It rests on a vision of social perfection that must be deeply alienated from not only institutions as they are, but people as they are. Since the vision is the source of legitimacy, all contradictions to it have to be done away with. Tyranny and murder, often mass murder, are the necessary tools of utopianism’s war against human nature.

We can see a petit version of this in monotheism’s longstanding war against human sexual diversity that many American conservatives are committed to continuing indefinitely. Dealing with human nature not as it is (diverse in erotic orientation), but as they insist it ought to be, or is “properly” conceived to be, (uniform in such orientation). Their denigration (or, at best, disregarding) of the rejected human “dross” is well within wider utopian patterns. (With a record of brutality behind it.)

Equalitarian movements are another denial of human diversity, though far more complete ones. In order to achieve their vision of social equality, social life must be pervasively controlled to ensure no other outcome is permitted. Which means there has to be pervasive controllers, ever alert for any deviation from the legitimating aim. Between the knowing, equalising elite and those to be equalised there must be a profound—indeed deadly—inequality. Inequality of power, of status, of deemed understanding. The tendency for equalitarian movements to end up in tyranny and mass murder is not some denial of the aim of equality of outcome, but a natural consequence of it.

Since Goldberg is also a Joss Whedon fan—a definite sign of good judgement—I can do no better than quote The Master Himself on the vision underlying his wonderful SF movie Serenity of:

We have a right to be ourselves. And that is where the utopian vision stops. For whenever you create some kind of Utopia you find something ugly working underneath it being basically what this movie is about …

Different visions
Hitler’s criticism of Marxism of being too in thrall to the false ideals of democracy and equality sounds peculiar, until one realises that what he took from Leninism was its methods, whose nature he saw more clearly than many a Western academic.

The end state of fascism, particularly Nazism, is not, however, an equalitarian vision. The Nazi end state was a master race empire with surviving subject races working for the master race. At the end of their pile of corpses there is still intended to be a profoundly unequal society: one moreover flowing out of a glorification of an imagined past. This makes both Leninism and Nazism profoundly noxious political philosophies in their shared political totalism: in the unbounded nature of their ends, their notion of the scope of politics and the means they are willing to engage in to obtain them, a totalism Hitler took from Lenin either directly or mediated through Mussolini and Stalin. It also makes them different political philosophies.

It is also a long way away from the politics of liberal Democrats. Though not so far from the politics and practice of Hamas or Hezbollah. Describing jihadis as ‘Islamofascists’ does point to genuine historical resonances. As I wrote in my review essay:

For Hamas, Hezbollah and the jihadis are the contemporary analogues of fascism—modernising revolts against modernity (seen as alien, anti-religious and Western), preaching an atavistic (and anti-traditionalist) form of Islam, promoting a cult of death and violence, engaged in brutality and murder; the rhetoric of violence backed up by deeds of violence: in Hezbollah’s case with a uniformed paramilitary, straight-armed salute and all. (Osama bin Laden even has the war veteran mystique working for him that both Mussolini and Hitler did.)

To call the jihadis “Islamoliberals” or “IslamoDemocrats” would be beyond silly.

Goldberg's claim that I:

makes exactly this error my focusing on what Communists said but on what Nazis did. If you actually compare the rhetoric to the rhetoric and the actions to the actions, you find the similarities are far more significant than the differences

is clearly wrong. Even in terms of the review itself, not only do I make the point about fascism being a crossover political phenomenon, I also make the point that both Mussolini and Hitler adopted Lenin's political approach of totalist politics (politics unconstrained in means and ends) for their own political projects. As for mass murder, I wrote:

nationalism—if conceived according to a myth of common ancestors—was as apt as class politics to extermination by category: to the identification of categories of people who should not exist (at least, not within our borders).

Goldberg’s claim that they are all manifestations of the politics of secular salvation has the advantage of being true. As I wrote in my review:

That the overlap between the modern progressivist Left and fascism has increased is true: anti-globalisation, identity politics and deep green environmentalism are all forms of anti-Enlightenment romanticism, as is much anti-commercialism. Adding to the overlap is hostility to a Jewish entity (Israel). Their self-righteous parading of morally heroic purposes has affinities with the Will glorification of Fascism. There is much of Gleichschaltung in the progressivist Left’s constant treatment of dissent against its premises as malignancy, including rednecks-have-no-speech-rights jurisprudence. Particularly in the global warming panic, with the patent desire to forge a Volksgemeinschaft from decarbonisation. That does not make modern progressivists fascists, however. Not even in their penchant for rhetorical incivility. Overlap is not identity. The true root of George Monbiot finding deliberate drowning of airline executive “climate criminals” “strangely attractive” is not fascism (not even Nazi “Versailles criminals” accusatory rhetoric), it is Robespierre or Saint Just deeming all opposition to the virtuous common will to be wicked and malignant and thus worthy of the guillotine. That the jacobin impulse of redemptive politics keeps reinventing itself does not mean its various manifestations are the same manifestation.

If Goldberg had confined himself to tracing these congruences, he would have done a singular service. It is his trying to decouple ‘fascism’ from its historical moorings that I dispute. There is power to Tom Wolfe’s bon mot

How come fascism is always dawning in America but only ever arrives in Europe?

which Goldberg falsely subverts by turning ‘fascism’ into a term of such breadth as to be emptied of its connection to what happened. I continue to insist that the term ‘fascism’ be anchored in history: not let loose as a floating generic category to be wilfully applied to people and movements who—quite rightly—would strenuously reject it.

Apart from the issue of what one means by equality, Goldberg evades rather than responds to my review's critique.

The Origins of English Individualism

For years, people have been recommending that I read The Origins of English Individualism by Alan Macfarlane. Well, I finally did and yes, it is a classic study, well worth reading. Even though I was a little irritated at the beginning, with the tired academic squeamishness where Western sins are very real but Western achievements get the shudder-quote treatment.

The author was studying witchcraft trials in post-medieval England and came across some puzzling results – a lack of sexual and food-and-hunger motifs in the confessions (common in witchcraft trials elsewhere in Europe); the very individualistic outlook of suspects (also notably different from trials on the Continent); the lack of attacks on rising folk, rather those accused were slightly poorer folk making demands on their neighbours (i.e. witchcraft accusations reinforced economic differentiation rather than attacking it, a far more normal pattern). Then he turned to sexual and marital relations in the same period where he found the English seemed singularly unconcerned about incest. Indeed, compared to even Mediterranean societies in the same period, kinship didn’t seem very important, parents didn’t exert much control over marriage and relations between the sexes were unusually relaxed.

I love studies that start with an empirical puzzle.
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What he found is that post-medieval England lacked a classic peasantry – that is, multi-generation households farming household land under the direction of a patriarch. Instead, you had individual ownership of land, a highly mobile populace, children leaving home when teenagers (even eldest sons) and (a dead give-away) female ownership of ordinary land. There was also an active land market, an active rural labour market and personal wills disposing of land. These are unnecessary in a society where land is collectively owned by the household – there land is typically reassigned to balance household numbers, children and younger siblings provide the labour force and land is family-owned so not up for testamentory disposal.

If ‘capitalism’ is individual ownership with an active markets in capital (including land), then England was ‘capitalist’ well before the Industrial Revolution.

So, when did the English peasantry disappear?

Macfarlane examines the evidence carefully (England is one of the best historically-documented off all human societies, rivalled only by Japan and bits of Europe) right back to 1200. With some caveats for local variations, Macfarlane could find no evidence that England ever had a peasantry in the classic sense. As far back as he was able to go, he found individual ownership, active land and rural labour markets, mobile populations. England – the rural society without a peasantry.

Macfarlane can offer no explanation of English exceptionalism, though he does cite a passage from Tacitus about Germans having very individualist property arrangements. I was reminded of something I had read in The Year 1000:

Thirty wills survive today from the late Anglo-Saxon period and ten of those are the wills of women (p.164).

Fernand Braudel makes similar comments about trying to find when capitalism started in England and being unable to find a period when there weren’t strong capitalist elements.

MacFarlane also found period commentary on how the English were richer than people on the Continent, and more assertive and acquisitive, something which gels with other evidence about relative living standards and high levels of social mobility. (In fact, a lot of the period Continental commentary on the English sounds much like what one reads today about Americans, and there are certain similarities also between period English commentary on Continentals with some current-day American commentary on Europeans.) American exceptionalism starts with English exceptionalism. A great read.

Computer models and cognitive failure

[Note: as useful new links turn up, I will update this post.]

Even before computers, there were problems with models. A physicist's testimony to the US House of Representatives on climate change (pdf) provides a lovely historical example:

Modelers have been wrong before. One of the most famous modeling disputes involved the physicist William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, and the naturalist Charles Darwin. Lord Kelvin was a great believer in models and differential equations. Charles Darwin was not particularly facile with mathematics, but he took observations very seriously. For evolution to produce the variety of living and fossil species that Darwin had observed, the earth needed to have spent hundreds of millions of years with conditions not very different from now. With his mathematical models, Kelvin rather pompously demonstrated that the earth must have been a hellish ball of molten rock only a few tens of millions of years ago, and that the sun could not have been shining for more than about 30 million years. Kelvin was actually modeling what he thought was global and solar cooling. I am sorry to say that a majority of his fellow physicists supported Kelvin. Poor Darwin removed any reference to the age of the earth in later editions of the “Origin of the Species.” But Darwin was right the first time, and Kelvin was wrong. Kelvin thought he knew everything but he did not know about the atomic nucleus, radioactivity and nuclear reactions, all of which invalidated his elegant modeling calculations.

One of the more mordantly amusing aspects of the current credit crisis is the massive failure of relying on computer models for assessing risk. A failure that was quite comprehensive:

In fact, most Wall Street computer models radically underestimated the risk of the complex mortgage securities … The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough.

Paul Volker has been publicly scathing about such financial engineering. A make-believe universe where spreadsheets were oracles and bigger and better computer models bigger and better oracles.

Even worse, under Basel II computer models became part of the regulatory framework:

Instead of applying a uniform standard (such as a specific debt to equity ratio) to all financial institutions, Basel II contemplated that each regulated financial institution would develop its own individualized computer model that would generate risk estimates for the specific assets held by that institution and that these estimates would determine the level of capital necessary to protect that institution from insolvency. But in generating this model and crunching historical data to evaluate how risky its portfolio assets were, each investment bank gave itself a discretionary opportunity to justify higher leverage. Because each model was ad hoc, specifically fitted to a unique financial institution, no team of three SEC staffers was in a position to contest these individualized models or the historical data used by them. Thus, the real impact of the Basel II methodology was to shift the balance of power in favor of the management of the investment bank and to diminish the negotiating position of the SEC's staff. Basel II may offer a sophisticated tool, but it was one beyond the capacity of the SEC's largely legal staff to administer effectively.

Financial institutions used highly sophisticated computer models, put together by highly-paid people using masses of data based on what was taken to the most up-to-date understanding of how things work. All of which gave the output of the models huge credibility.

The problem was precisely that they had such credibility. In particular, their output was treated as empirical evidence: as telling people about the state of their risk exposure.

They did nothing of the kind. All they did—all computer models can ever do—is tell you the consequences of your premises, both empirical and analytical/causal. They do not tell you about how the world is. They tell you about how you think the world is. One can then test your thinking about the world by comparing what your model(s) churn out to how the world turns out to be.

But this is a distinction that is very, very easy to lose sight of. Particularly given the effort and analytical power put into creating the things and their “black box”—facts in one end, results out the other end—nature.
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A piece on why economists failed to predict the crash makes some very pertinent points about the problems in the use of computer models. First was the allure of new technology with the demands of the flashy new toys overwhelming empirical difficulties:

As computers have grown more powerful, academics have come to rely on mathematical models to figure how various economic forces will interact. But many of those models simply dispense with certain variables that stand in the way of clear conclusions, says Wharton management professor Sidney G. Winter. Commonly missing are hard-to-measure factors like human psychology and people's expectations about the future, he notes.

Which led to major problems, as a recent report has noted:

"The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold," they write. "In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in economics. We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession's insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real world markets."
The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.

The prevalence of the use of the flashy new tools led to their own problems:

When certain price and risk models came into widespread use, they led many players to place the same kinds of bets, the authors continue. The market thus lost the benefit of having many participants, since there was no longer a variety of views offsetting one another. The same effect, the authors say, occurs if one player becomes dominant in one aspect of the market. The problem is exacerbated by the "control illusion," an unjustified confidence based on the model's apparent mathematical precision, the authors say. This problem is especially acute among people who use models they have not developed themselves, as they may be unaware of the models' flaws, like reliance on uncertain assumptions.

But a model is based on judgments about what matters and what does not, which is why empirical testing is essential:

Much of the financial crisis can be blamed on an overreliance on ratings agencies, which gave complex securities a seal of approval, says Wharton finance professor Marshall E. Blume. "The ratings agencies, of course, use models" which "grossly underestimated" risks.
"Any model is an abstraction of the world," Blume adds. "The value of a model is to provide the essence of what is happening with a limited number of variables. If you think a variable is important, you include it, but you can't have every variable in the world.... The models may not have had the right variables."
The false security created by asset-pricing models led banks and hedge funds to use excessive leverage, borrowing money so they could make bigger bets, and laying the groundwork for bigger losses when bets went bad, according to the Dahlem report authors.

A piece on failures of bank stress testing (pdf) puts the problem of such computer models very clearly:

Of course, all models are wrong. The only model that is not wrong is reality and reality is not, by definition, a model. But risk management models have during this crisis proved themselves wrong in a more fundamental sense. They failed Keynes’ test – that it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. With hindsight, these models were both very precise and very wrong.

To repeat: computer models are a way of testing your assumptions (as one statistician said, no model is true but some are useful) by checking the results of such simulations against the evidence, they are not evidence of how the world is. At best, in engineering models for example, one can say this is a system we know very well, and a model which we have tested a lot, so based on its very well-established record of extreme accuracy, we have run this proposed new structure in the model and ... In such cases, we have a very useful—because it is much tested based on a vast array of cases and knowledge about cases—model. But our much-hyped climate models are nowhere near that stage. Nor, clearly, are financial or economic models.

There are good reasons to be sceptical of fiscal stimulus as an anti-recession tool. But the Obama Administration's offered support for its amazing fiscal proposals do provide a wonderful example of the (mis)use of computer models--the computer model as modern policy oracle tool:

The Administration's estimates (pdf) for the effect of a stimulus plan cite no new evidence and no theory at all for their large multipliers. The multipliers come ".. from a leading private forecasting firm and the Federal Reserve’s FRB/US model." (Appendix 1) Multipliers are hard-wired in these models by assumption, rather than summarizing any evidence on the effectiveness of fiscal policy, and the models reflect the three theoretical fallacies above. The multipliers in this report are not conditioned on "slack output" or something else -- they state that every dollar of government spending generates 1.57 dollars of output always! If you've got magic, why not 2 trillion dollars? Why not 10 trillion dollars? Why not 100 trillion, and we can all have private jets? If you don't believe that, why do you think it works for a trillion dollars? Their estimates of industry effects come from a blog post (p. 8)! Ok, they did their best in the day and a half or so they had in the rush to put the report together. But really, before spending a trillion dollars of our money, wouldn't it make sense to spend, say one tenth of one percent on figuring out if it will work at all? (That would be 100 million dollars, more than has ever been spent on economic research in the entire history of the world.)

Which really is the modern equivalent of consulting the sheep’s entrails. (But it must be science, they used a computer! And mathematics! Together!)

Many of the financial models have, as a reader pointed out in a private email, the worse problem

they made up their own [models], in secret and separate from each other (they contain confidential data that could provide competitive leverage to their opposites)

so lacked outside checkability. Such lack of outside ability to check makes things worse, but allowing it does not solve the inherent problems of computer models being models.

That computer models were apparently allowed to set regulatory standards is simply horrifying and shows the extent of the cognitive failure, the failure in basic understanding of what computer models are and what they can do. Even the above quote on the use of computer models in regulation under Basel II misunderstands the problem, treating it as the SEC being "outclassed" (no doubt true) rather than a completely inappropriate use of computer models based on a profound misunderstanding of what they can and can not do and in what circumstances.

Moving on from proprietary financial models, consider this rather good Economist article on general economic models. Which is, and has been, more intensively studied: how economies work or how the world's climate works? (Think Central Banks, Treasuries, Banks, Investment Houses, Faculties, Consultancies ...) Which has more financial and other returns people with money and power care about riding on getting things right? OK, so which models do you think generally perform better: general economic models or climate models? (If you answered “[whichever,] but it makes no difference”, go to the top of the class.) More to the point, have all these resources and cognitive effort poured into economic and financial models provided any guarantee of success? Even given there are reasons to think it is inherently harder to model human systems than physical ones and macroeconomics does not even have a common analytical language? In the words of recent testimony before the US Congress:

Using models within economics or within any other social science, is especially treacherous. That’s because social science involves a higher degree of complexity than the natural sciences. The reason why social science is so complex is that the basic unit in social science, which economists call agents, are strategic, whereas the basic unit of the natural sciences are not. Economics can be thought of the physics with strategic atoms, who keep trying to foil any efforts to understand them and bring them under control. Strategic agents complicate modeling enormously; they make it impossible to have a perfect model since they increase the number of calculations one would have to make in order to solve the model beyond the calculations the fastest computer one can hypothesize could process in a finite amount of time.
Put simply, the formal study of complex systems is really, really, hard. Inevitably, complex systems exhibit path dependence, nested systems, multiple speed variables, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and other non-linear dynamical properties. This means that at any moment in time, right when you thought you had a result, all hell can break loose.

Any analytical discipline that comes to rely on computer models is in deep, deep trouble: particularly if they are treated as providing empirical evidence. And the more there are things that matter in understanding some system that are poorly understood, the deeper the trouble.

In the case of the financial institutions, clearly the various financial instruments being modelled where not understood anywhere near as well as people thought. The modellers covered them, they just did not cover them accurately. So all the models ended up showing was (after fact) what their modellers did not understand: their “unknown unknowns” (i.e. they apparently did not know that they did not know). And a basic principle of modelling is, that if you do not understand it, you cannot model it.

The case is hardly better if one has known unknowns: things that you know that you do not know. Since one then has to put “patches” in one’s computer models to “guess” at their operation. Guesses that are unlikely to be accurate but which the existence of the computer model disguises them as being guesses. Indeed, it is expected that we will have the computing power to fully model a cup of coffee in about 10 years. Compare that level of difficulty in fluid dynamics to an entire climate.

Such as, for example:

... the oceans and their circulations are the thermal and inertial flywheels of the climate system; as the ocean circulation changes, the atmosphere and its climate respond. Our knowledge of subsurface ocean circulations and their variability is limited. Without this vital input, projections of future climate are tenuous at best.

Climate models vary quite a bit in their assumptions about carbon sensitivity but come up with much the same results:

The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2 to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Then there is "adjustment” of sea level data:

So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it's not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don't say what really happened. And they ans-wered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
That is terrible! As a matter of fact, it is a falsification of the data set. Why? Because they know the answer. And there you come to the point: They “know” the answer; the rest of us, we are searching for the answer. Because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don't find it!

The sort of thing that might make an IPCC expert reviewer a bit annoyed:

My main complaint with the IPCC is in the methods used to "evaluate" computer models. ... This has become so complex that many have failed to notice that it has no scientific basis, but is just an assembly of the "gut feelings" of self-styled "experts". It has been developed to a complex web of "likelihoods", all of which are assigned fake "probability" levels.

As Australian economist David Clark used to say of econometrics:

if the data is sufficiently tortured it will confess.

This is not to knock climate science, still less empirical results. But if one is going to be sceptical about economic models, fine. But don't then turn around and worship climate models. They still can't work out how to handle clouds. Though they are getting better. This without getting into some of the weird and wonderful economic forecasting assumptions built into prominent climate models. And it does not help that we still cannot model the Sun and its activity properly:

"It turns out that none of our models were totally correct," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's lead representative on the panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."

In the words of Freeman Dyson:

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

Modelling is a somewhat dodgy business. It does not become less dodgy simply because a "hard" scientist is modelling a really complex system. It may well be better to lean more on statistical extrapolation of a relatively simple and transparent sort than complex computer modelling. Particularly as the IPCC models do not do better than the "no-change" model:

The errors of the IPCC projection over the years 1992 to 2008 were little different from the errors from the no-change model, when compared to actual measured temperature changes. When the IPCC’s warming rate is applied to a historical period of exponential CO2 growth, from 1851 to 1975, the errors are more than seven times greater than errors from the no-change model.

A former NASA scientist is sceptical about anthropogenic global warming, in large part because he does not think climate models are worth much:

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit ... Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

Someone with a lot of background in forecasting is also unimpressed with climate models. While this annoyed scientist not impressed about almost anything about AGW including the modelling. Models are sensitive to which specifications for key processes or variables are used.

Even a supporter of the climate models can suggest that they have been somewhat oversold:

But perhaps the greatest danger is climate scientists blatantly overselling what we know. That could bring everything down and cost the world valuable time.
Overselling what we know could bring climate science down.

Or simply acknowledging how much they are still a work in progress:

"Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

There are plenty of voices concerned about the problems with computer models in their application to climate science. And it is so easy to have some fun with sub-prime metaphors. James Lovelock, he of the Gaia hypothesis, is also worried that computer modelling is undermining science:

Gradually the world of science has evolved to the dangerous point where model-building has precedence over observation and measurement, especially in Earth and life sciences. In certain ways, modelling by scientists has become a threat to the foundation on which science has stood: the acceptance that nature is always the final arbiter and that a hypothesis must always be tested by experiment and observation in the real world.

It is notoriously difficult to find geologists who support CAGW:

I do not know one geologist who believes that global warming is not taking place. I do not know a single geologist who believes that it is a man-made phenomenon.

Geologist Ian Plimer is certainly not one of them. He has some things to say about the use of computer models:

Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive".

More broadly, environmental “science” based on computer models has a track record – a poor one. (I was a bit annoyed to find that claims I had seen around a lot had been generated by computer models and I was not aware of that.) There are profound and inherent difficulties with modelling complex systems:

[p]erhaps the single most important reason that quantitative predictive mathematical models of natural processes on earth don't work and can't work has to do with ordering complexity. Interactions among the numerous components of a complex system occur in unpredictable and unexpected sequences.

Yet the models become talismans, impressive in their "power" and convenience:

environmental science finds itself caught in the grip of "politically correct modeling" (the authors' emphasis) in which there is enormous pressure on scientists, many of whom discover "that modeling results are easier to live with if they follow preconceived or politically correct notions." The models take on a life of their own, and become obstacles to conducting serious field studies that might strengthen our empirical grasp of ecosystem dynamics. "Applied mathematical modeling has become a science that has advanced without the usual broad-based, vigorous debate, criticism, and constant attempts at falsification that characterize good science ..."

Our climate models are not scientific predictions, still less projections. They are guesses, in the sense of conjectures rather than estimations. Partially informed, fairly sophisticated, guesses: but guesses. Guesses that them being computer models by clever people disguise being guesses. Exactly how many billions of dollars are such guesses worth the wager of? There may be a few folk on Wall St who can give you a heads up on that.

UPDATE See also this critique of models in general. Which is not the same as arguing that all models are known to be false.

Serenity

(I wrote this first part shortly after watching Serenity at the cinema.)

Finally got around to seeing Serenity. As seems the general consensus, enjoyed it lots. But reading an essay on culture wars at the box office which noted that:

a Christian Film and Television Commission study of the box-office receipts of the top 250 movies over the last three years found that films expressing a strong traditional moral message, whatever their ratings, earned four to seven times as much as movies pushing a left-wing cultural agenda

gave another angle on the cleverness of the film.

In Serenity, the enemy is the Alliance Parliament and their Operative who wants a world without sin. If you are on the cultural left, they are NaziBushHitlerReligiousFundamentalists. If you are on the cultural right, they are SocialEngineeringBigStateAuthoritarianCentralControllers. Which is to say, there are enough points for each point of view to pick up on without any that particularly exclude either. So the Boo!-factor works for both sides of the cultural divide.

The heroes are the crew of Serenity led by Captain Mal. If you are on the cultural left, they are EthnicallyGenderVariedMarginalfolk, if on the cultural right, they are StrugglingCanDoEntrepeneurialDealMakersWithGuns. Same deal: something for either side to pick up on, nothing to make them feel culturally excluded. So the Hurrah!-factor works for both sides too.

Which makes Joss Whedon a lot cleverer than Sir Ridley Scott:

Libertas’s Murty says that a publicist for Ridley Scott’s expensive 2005 flop about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, asked her and her filmmaker husband, Jason Apuzzo, for advice on marketing the film to conservatives and Christians. Invited to a press screening along with representatives of various Christian groups, the two watched in disbelief as the movie opened with a Catholic priest beheading a woman and stealing her rosary—and went on in that vein, while also presenting the Muslims as noble and wise. “Every single person directly associated with the Church in the movie is a murderer or a liar. They really thought this would appeal to Christians,” Murty recounts. “Some of these people live in this completely sealed world in West Hollywood and didn’t register how offensive the movie would be.”

Religion in Serenity is present as a matter of personal faith, but is neither endorsed nor sneered at.
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Kingdom of Heaven (note, I am commenting on the version released in Oz cinemas) had bigger problems than its Boo!Hiss! approach to orthodox Christianity (the Hospitaller Brother is portrayed sympathetically, but his good nature is linked to not being orthodox), but it was symptomatic. Kingdom simply wasn’t very clever, mainly because it was all about a set of tired orthodoxies that most folk don’t agree with (the film’s pretensions to elevating heroic dissent was the funniest thing about it). The one striking observation in the film – the Prophet tells people to submit, Christ asks them to choose – passes without any development. But sparkling film-making requires a level of self-awareness Kingdom patently lacked.

Serenity has the normal playing with genres one expects from Joss Whedon. The film and the series are a Western-in-Space, with all the themes of frontier life and dangers and all the mixed-tech elements of SciFi, right down to the CommunicationGeek. There is even in the before-the-events-history an analogue for the Civil War, with Captain Mal being an officer on the losing side (clearly the Confederacy without embarrassing slaves). I am not surprised that Orson Scott Card liked the film so much, since the vision of the Solar System is akin to the vision of America in the Alvin Maker series. Akin not only in frontier diversity, but also in a vision of morality as being personal, coming from character, not from designated social roles.

Serenity does, however, clearly take sides in the culture wars – encapsulated in the pivotal moment when Mal says of the Alliance’s aim to remake people I don’t hold with that. That is precisely the divide between the radical Enlightenment (the belief that human nature is malleable and the sinless society can be created by remaking humans into sinless beings) and the sceptical Enlightenment (human nature is how it is and we should use reason to make the best we can with that). The central crime the film is about is a crime precisely of such remaking: the ambition that has woven a brutal path through the history of the last two centuries from the slaughter of the Vendee to Pol Pot’s Year Zero and all the megacides in between.

But that is also clever film-making, since it makes the Alliance Parliament’s ambitions an assault on the core of being human. That such an aim justifies utter unscrupulousness (because the goal is so wonderful and noble that any means are justified), utter arrogance (because the anointed just know how things should be while any resistance just proves how benighted and inadequate such folk are) and complete control (since otherwise how is one going to be able to remake folk who, as inferior versions who fail to realise their own inferiority, obviously shouldn't get a say) while creating utter disaster has lots of history behind it and creates a coherent moral structure for the plot, with all those themes working out and driving the story.

This is, in terms of box-office numbers, the way to come down on that issue. Telling folk they are an inadequate lot who need to be replaced by a (forcibly) adjusted model of the human is likely to meet a certain buyer resistance. Portraying such ambitions as arrogant, tyrannical and disastrous is much more congenial: and entirely historically sound. The film about the future is much better anchored in human history than the film about the past.

And since self-awareness about such matters is not a noted feature of the cultural left, they can keep identifying with the Embattled Heroic Resisters of Oppression and not notice what the film is saying.

Of course, if the film was boringly didactic, none of this would matter much. But the characters are engagingly flawed, the dialogue sparkles along, and the action sequences are terrific (apart from some everything stops for intense emotion moments). The intelligent moral core of the film supports, rather than gets in the way of, character, dialogue and plot. It fits together very nicely. Great film.

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(I later wrote this in response to a comment demurring about my political take on the movie.)

The issue is not governments can behave poorly. That is a universal that has no ideological aspect to it.

It is a deeper claim that people can be changed so that, for example, collective ownership can be made to work really effectively. It's a divide that runs through the political left rather than between broad left and broad right (particularly given that not everyone on the political left is of the cultural left).

The difference is very clear in comparing the speeches of the American Revolutionaries with those of the French Revolutionaries. Even the most gung-ho American, such as Patrick Henry, still have at the core the idea that power is always dangerous and has to be contained because people are as people are.

Reading folk such as Robespierre or St Just, there is this notion that a Reign of Virtue can be created, where the inner nobility of folk shines through (just as soon as we've got rid of the tainted, evil folk).

(Eventually, I borrowed, then bought, the DVD, and had lots of fun with the special features.)

Joss Whedon's comment in one of the commentary bits on the DVD that the film explores

where the Utopian vision stops because whenever you create some kind of Utopia you find something ugly working underneath it being basically what this movie is about

I found distinctly cheering, since it rather supports my take on the film.

Whedon may be a conventional US liberal in his personal politics, but he is an emotionally honest writer. The actions have consequences, that the dark in the human soul is real, are two guiding principles of his art. (Hence his anti-utopianism). So an extremely talented, emotionally honest, actions-have-consequences, people-have-a-dark-side, anti-utopian liberal clearly steeped in Western culture is going to produce stuff that seems a bit, well, conservative and/or libertarian, or at least resonate to folk of such views. In Serenity he has created one of the great Science Fiction films.

Who Voted For Hitler

Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted for Hitler is a great example of how historical sociology should be done—open mindedly, based on careful examination of the evidence.

By carefully going through the evidence, Hamilton builds up a nuanced picture of voting support for the NSDAP. He makes it quite clear that the Nazis were building strength and support prior to the economic collapse of 1929 and were doing so due to a much more effective and energised organisational structure than rival political parties.

He includes a nice discussion of the distinction between Parties of notables, whereby socially prominent people band together, and Parties of integration, based on membership structures. He also understands how political movements are a way of acceptably expressing hostility (Pp 471-2).

Hamilton has a good sense of daily life. Thus, he traces life-cycle shifts in the history of activists and is well aware of business’s removed and utilitarian attitude to politics. (A nice change from the normal academic incomprehension of commercial life and pressures.)
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He includes an excellent discussion of paramilitaries as the normal response to traumatic demobilisation combined with defeat or military frustration, citing the cases of the Confederacy, Post WWI Italy & Germany and post-Algeria France (Pp 445ff). We can now add another case to his list, as an article on Iraq by Kanan Makiya shows:

Nor did I ever imagine that the conversion of the Iraqi army into a civil reconstruction force—which is what I and others called for in the run-up to 2003—would be translated into Paul Bremer’s order for the overnight firing, without pension, of half a million or so men. Certainly, I never imagined the breathtaking incompetence of the American occupation.

Michael Moore famously compared the insurgents of Iraq to minutemen: a better analogy would be the first Ku Klux Klan, but fighting for the retention of Sunni, rather than white, dominance and from a much more unfavourable demographic base.

Hamilton's analysis is enlivened by his nice turn of phrase, such as The left were sheep in wolves’ clothing (p.457).

Hamilton takes quiet delight in demolishing simple theories sadly incompatible with the evidence from the Marxist ("fascists as tool of big business") or simple class analysis ("working class did not vote fascist", "fascist support was lower middle class"). As he points out, the “lower middle class” hypothesis lacks actual evidence. The Nazis gained votes from all classes, including significant working class votes. Protestant rural areas were particularly fertile ground because the “politics of notables” could not compete in providing activists and the rival “parties of integration” scorned rural voters. This was not the case in Catholic areas, where the Zentrum remained an effective competitor. The SPD was blinkered by its ideology (unlike, for example, the Norwegian Labour Party) while the KPD had nothing to offer most rural voters.

It is one of the strengths of the book that Hamilton examines carefully the NSDAP’s competition as well as the NSDAP, thus building up a much more complete picture.

Hamilton seems to have a sense for how people can like their theory because it is their theory and marks them as a good person even in the face of contrary evidence. He also seems to have a sense of the analytically harmful separatedness of rather too many academics from ordinary life.

But the real strength of the book is the careful attention to the evidence. Who Voted for Hitler is an excellent study of electoral politics, an extremely useful text in understanding the appeal and success of Nazism.

The Wages of Destruction

Adam Tooze’s book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy is a superb example of how revealing and clarifying economic history can be.

It is a study of the economics behind the politics, and the politics behind the economics, that led to the rise of Hitler, the creation of the Nazi economy and its eventual destruction. Tooze brings out the sheer malign purposiveness of Hitler’s policy.

The book is blessedly free of economic jargon while the statistics—though plentiful—are made accessible and never get in the way of the narrative. The book could have done with an explanation of the ins and outs of the balance of payments, since shortage of foreign exchange was such a central problem for the regime.

Part I, Recovery, covers Hitler’s rise to power and the early years of the Nazi regime. Owing massive war reparations and largely disarmed, Germany’s choices were between Gustav Streseman’s policy of coordination of the US or one of breaking the Versailles system and achieving national goals by violence or threat of violence.

Tooze spells out the disastrous international effects of the Hoover and of the early Roosevelt Administrations—particularly the failure of coordination between the Western Powers of US, UK and France. The world has had the experience of a US significantly disengaged from world affairs, of a US not seriously committed to maintaining a liberal international economic order: indeed of a deeply illiberal international economic order. That experience was between the World Wars, particularly from 1929 onwards. It was a disastrous one.

The post-1945 structure of GATT-cum-WTO and an actively engaged US has been far better.

Between the death of Stresseman and the rise of Hitler, German policy drifted. The Bruning Government in particular engaged in a foreign policy which irritated and annoyed the Western powers and an economic policy that required their support: a disjunct that undermined both policies.

Once Hitler achieved power, the Nazi regime’s overwhelming focus from the beginning was on re-armament. The results involved real achievements, particularly due to the organising abilities of Hjalmar Schacht. Yet economic recovery never achieved the economic growth rate of Weimar Republic when it recovered from the 1923-24 downturn. (Just as Roosevelt presided over a poor recovery from a major economic downturn and the Soviet Union never achieved the overall economic growth rates of Tsarist Russia: though Stalin did achieve extraordinary growth rates in specific sectors.)

Tooze is very good at putting actions in their context: such as the recent German experience of great hungers (the result of war and bad policy). And the very uneven nature of the German economy Hitler inherited. Tooze is at pains to both show the rationality of Nazi policy—the genuine domestic and international basis for land-hunger, for example—and the Nazi regime’s fundamental commitment to military conquest. He also brings out how pragmatism dominated Nazi-business relations. Though the regime increasingly dominated the relationship.

A policy brutal all the way down
Nazi policy was one of economic ambition—the conquest of a vast new empire which would enable Germany to compete with the US—warring with economic constraints. The most immediate, recurring, constraint being the shortage of foreign exchange. (One chilling passage is where Hermann Goring, as economic czar, complaining about the loss of precious foreign exchange to pay for the windows broken in Krystallnacht.) A more profound constraint was that Germany was still significantly a peasant society. Nowhere as pervaded by technological and economic efficiency as the US or even, in many ways, the UK.

What Tooze brings out, again and again, is how much the spectre of American power haunted the Nazi strategic vision. The only way to make Germany as economically powerful as the US was to create a Greater Germany. The paradox of lebensraum was that, in the end, it pitted Germany against countries with far greater lebensraum than Germany possessed. But this gamble was understood, and was understood to be a gamble.

Tooze also makes it clear how central to Hitler’s worldview was his anti-Semitism. He really did see them as the enemy of all things Aryan: and a powerful enemy at that. To him, Roosevelt’s clear hostility to his regime was proof that Roosevelt was a tool of Jewish interests. Which, of course, made American power seem even more threatening. Even though, apart from the US Navy, that power was—in military terms—far more one of potentiality than reality. (In 1939, Rumania had a bigger army than the US.)

There was a sense in which the Nazi’s were running a loot economy. Each asset or land grab—dispossession of Jews, Austria, the Czech lands—netted economic booty for the Nazi state: especially foreign exchange.

With the defection of Stalin from the ranks of Hitler’s enemies—made possible by the Franco-British guarantee to Poland, which essentially meant the Western Allies were throwing themselves in front of the Soviet Union—there was, to Hitler’s mind, no economic or technological advantage to waiting. So on to war, the subject of Part II, War in Europe.

Which looked like an incredibly dangerous gamble—the French and British had more troops, more planes, far more ships, greater population, more economic power. The longer the war went, the better for them. Especially after the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet was gutted in the Norwegian campaign. Hence the Franco-British strategic passivity early in the war: time was on their side.

Then came the stunning success of the May 1940 offensive that knocked France out of the war. Hitler’s gamble had paid off hugely.

More or less. The problem was that, although Britain was expelled from the continent of Europe, Germany lacked the naval and air power to defeat the British Empire. One is so used to looking at the “Britain alone” period from June 1940 to June 1941 from the series-of-defeats British perspective it is quite bracing to look at it from the German. The British Empire was a vast store of potential power that was unreachable and in ever-tighter connection to the even vaster store of power of the US, which was frantically rearming. Yes, Germany now dominated the continent of Europe but it was still crucially dependent on imports from the Soviet Union. In the longer term, it would be an economic dependent of the Soviet Union.

Clearly this was unacceptable. So the even greater gamble was launched of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union. So we come to the third and last Part, World War.

Tooze’s analysis makes clear something that was a revelation to me, despite much reading on the history of the Second World War. This was Operation Hunger. German military planning for Barbarossa, throughout the Wehrmacht, took it for granted that the needed food supplies for Germany and its armies could not be garnered from the Ukrainian “breadbasket” if the existing population of the Ukraine (and Eastern Europe more generally) was also to be fed. The German battle plan presumed the systematic starvation of millions of people to ensure Germans did not go hungry.

This was the ultimate loot economy.

Failed analogy
Tooze argues that the lebensraum was essentially the last great colonial and grab: an anachronistic last hurrah of Edwardian imperialism. Yet, that is precisely what it was not. European colonialism came in two forms: thin layer of administrators over populations that remained overwhelmingly non-European (Asia—particularly India—most of Africa, Oceania) and settler societies (North America and the Antipodes) with some mixed cases (Latin America, Southern Africa). In no case did it involve the primary military effort of the European power and in no case did it involve sweeping away of industrialised populations. Indeed, it infrequently involved displacement of farming populations. Typically, European settlement was farmers displacing hunter-gatherers; a process that has been going on since farming was invented 10,000 years ago and which is still going on around the planet.

The pattern of farmers displacing hunter-gatherers was what made the neo-Europes happen, since the process was relatively low cost. And, in the New World and Antipodes, greatly aided by the effects of disease. In Alfred Crosby’s phrase, the Europeans brought with them a portmanteau biota, and where that biota “took”, people of European descent became the majority population: where it didn’t, they didn’t.

In the US and New Zealand, military action against the indigenous inhabitants involved, at most, battalion-sized actions. In Australia and Canada, it did not even require that. Local farmers supplemented by police could manage. What made the Anglo-settler societies so successful was, in part, precisely the ease of their occupation of land.

The conquest of lebensraum in Eastern Europe was bound to be an exercise orders of magnitude more costly and more risky. The use of the North American analogy may have been in the mind of the Nazi leadership but, if so, they fundamentally misunderstood the case they were using as a model. A misunderstanding Tooze (uncharacteristically) continues.

The closest historical analogy for the Nazi ambition is the Central Asian “range wars” where conquering pastoralists would sweep peasants (by fear and murder) off grazing land. Millions died in these “population displacements”. Leo Tolstoy’s fear (Genghis Khan with a telephone) that Trotsky said Stalin was, Hitler fitted even more precisely. But that analogy undermines Tooze’s analysis of the Nazi aim as anachronistic, not atavistic. Yet it was an analogy that Hitler apparently embraced: as in a reported speech at Obersalzberg, 22 August 1939, recorded at the Holocaust museum:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter, with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command, and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

But this misplaced analogy with Edwardian imperialism—even though Tooze periodically returns to it—is a minor blemish on a splendid work.

Grinding down to defeat
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union ultimately failed. The distances were too great, the Wehrmacht was not prepared for a Russian Winter, Stalin was sufficiently ruthless and the mobilisation of Soviet industry behind the Urals sufficiently effective to frustrate the German attack. The 1942 offensive failed in the Stalingrad disaster. But, Tooze argues, an economic turning point had already been reached in December 1941, indicated by the inability of the Wehrmacht to mount an offensive in 1942 anywhere near the size of Barbarossa.

After that, it was the slow grinding away at the Nazi Empire by greatly superior economic power. Tooze takes us through the ebbs and flows. He makes it clear that Albert Speer was no neutral technocrat, but clearly a committed Nazi, deeply involved in the use of slave labour. Tooze cuts Speer’s “armaments miracle” down to size, showing that many of the key decisions were made before Speer’s appointment as Armaments Minister.

He also shows that Germany employed women at a higher rate than Britian. But it simply did not have enough people, hence the importing of forced labour. The grim competing calculi of expropriating labour and exterminating "race enemies" is spelled out.

Severe resource constraints pervaded German choices. They simply did not have the resources to mount an effective version of the Manhattan Project, for example.

Tooze argues that strategic bombing was more economically effective than it is often given credit. Indeed, he argues that if British Bomber Command had kept pounding the Ruhr—at one stage, they had effectively cut it off from the rest of the Reich as a functioning economic unit—they could have greatly reduced German economic power. As it was, they switched to Berlin as prime target, a major strategic error.

Eventually, the Allies had reconquered sufficient territory that, apart from the last, futile gasp of the Ardennes Offensive—which presumed getting the necessary petrol from their opponents—the Nazi economy spiralled down to collapse.

Which left a devastated Germany and the triumph of the “flanking Powers”—the US and the Soviet Union. Britain was victorious but exhausted. In the aftermath of defeat and division, (West) German politics became all about economic recovery. Tooze concludes (p.676):

The most explosive issues of Weimar politics – the question of territorial integrity and the question of military parity – were removed, it seemed, for ever from the political agenda … Sixty years later, what else there might be to politics in Europe beyond the tiresome squabbles of discontented affluence remains an open question.

Tooze’s book is genuinely revelatory. The purposiveness of Nazi policy, the fears and aspirations that drove it, the limitations it laboured under are all made clear. Hitler was, from first to last, a wilful gambler who knew himself to be such. He was also a consummate political game player who attracted and used people of genuine talent for a purpose that was horrific. That the Nazi economy was a loot economy was not happenstance but the nature of the beast. Genghis Khan with a telephone indeed.

A monetary policy difficulty

Over at Scott Sumner's excellent blog, there is a lively debate on monetary policy going on. Monetary economics is not a field I am at all intellectually comfortable with. I did wonder, particularly after this post, whether one reason monetary policy is not being relied on more (apart from the fact that it generates deep and fundamental disagreements among economists) is simply that too many people in powerful or influential positions are, like me, just a bit too intellectually baffled by it.

Fiscal policy, on the other hand, seems much more straightforward.

Just a thought.

On using Wikipedia

I often to link to Wikipedia™ in my posts. It is not because I believe in the complete accuracy of Wikipedia, but because I find it a useful place to start. I do not want to assume that my readers have the same background knowledge as me, so adding a hyperlink to such a useful general reference is a simple way of providing easily accessible basic knowledge to my readers.

To acknowledge the limitations of Wikipedia is not to deny its utility, nor its worthiness as a project. So I will continue to link to it, as an aid to my readers.

The Third Reich: A New History

Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History is a wonderful single volume history of Nazi Germany.

Burleigh has a profound sense of the difficulties and responsibilities of running an advanced industrial country. His discussion of Weimar Germany shows, somewhat unusually among historians, considerable sympathy for the difficulties facing the SPD leadership.

He has a great eye for the practical and the revealing: such as explaining how “the dogmatism of the left about trivial matters” (p.41) got in the way of broadening support for the Weimar Republic. He explains how the continuing of intrusive wartime controls alienated farmers. And that democratic Socialists were a major conduit of information about the brutalities, tyrannies, slaughters and immiseration of the Bolsheviks (pp 38ff). Such comments are embedded in a deeply informative narrative about the disorientations of the collapse of the Kaiserreich and the politics of Weimar Germany.

More evidence is provided, if any was needed, of what a monster Lenin was and the mindset of Leninism. Such as the leader of the brief Bavarian Communist government saying of milk shortages:

What does it matter … Most of it goes to the children of the bourgeoisie anyway. We are not interested in keeping them alive. No harm if they die – they’d only grow into the enemies of the proletariat (p.40).

Exactly the language of Jacobin generals gloating over the slaughter of royalist men, women and children in the Vendee.
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With the example of Russia before them—and the Bavarian soviet regime’s very public execution of prominent hostages—conservative forces in Germany showed an effective, somewhat indiscriminate, ruthlessness and suppressed this brief revolutionary flourish at the cost of about 600 dead.

Burleigh casts an intelligently critical eye over all the political forces in Weimar Germany, well aware that the success of the Nazis was also the failure of their competitors. He also notes that the Nazi surge predated the Depression. Which put them in an already strengthening position when the Depression hit. Burleigh’s presentation of the oft told story of Hitler becoming Chancellor manages to be lively and engrossing. As is his analysis of the dynamics of the regime.

In Burleigh’s analysis, Nazi volkisch rhetoric about the unity of the (scattered) German peoples was both sincere and set up underlying pressure for war, regardless of opportunistic gestures on the way through. (The dynamic of the jihadis is similar.)

While it is done gently, the Jacobin nature and origins of Nazism as a political religion are clearly identified in Burleigh’s analysis. Both in the similarities with Leninism (the politicising corrosion of institutions was similar; just slower and for racial rather than class reasons) and in the struggle to subvert Christianity.

The Hitler cult was the central thing, not neo-pagan wanderings. A cult whose rhetoric often invoked God, but was rarely about Christ since Hitler was clearly the substitute, volkisch Saviour and Messiah.

Burleigh is deeply empirical in his analysis. He does not have to explain away embarrassing facts because of some overarching theory. He makes it clear, for example, that the one class Hitler seems to have genuinely admired and identified with (both in private speech and public rhetoric) was workers.

He tells the story of how, over time, the underlying logic of the regime was revealed. He uses the counterpoint of Leninism to how this revelation of an underlying logic was not some peculiar feature of Nazism.

The mind of the regime, and Hitler’s political conceptions, we see in word and actions. Hitler’s brutal and limited concept of the British Empire—as distinct from the complex reality—reminds one of modern progressivist historical fantasies about the same. The difference is for Hitler the limited and brutal fantasy was an aim, not something to ostentatiously reject.

Burleigh reminds us that megacide denial was an activity of mainstream members of the leftist intelligentsia—George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty; but also those fellow-travellers, the Webbs—long before it spread to fringes elsewhere. (And even such denial was disingenuous.)

Burleigh takes us through the steps to war and then the War itself, in all its horrors. Burleigh shows a wonderful use of vignettes, which humanises the story as it also informs and reveals. Connecting the particular with general to illustrate the latter. We see how within Germany the rhetoric of nation (or race) had included folk, the rhetoric of class excluded folk: crucial to the Nazis outpolling the Left. Outside of Germany, the rhetoric of nation or race excluded more than did the rhetoric of class. But it was more than just rhetoric: the PoW death tolls (very few Western prisoners: millions of Slavic ones) revealing the brutal logic.

Burleigh’s history is a study of the blinding effects of ideology and the brutal consequences of ideology—particularly a transformative ideology—in power. As he takes us through the horrors of the Eastern front, it is almost unbearable reading. Particularly as we see that it was a struggle between competing horrors. People were already brutalised by Soviet barbarity—with the process of social atomisation already underway—now suffered a barbarity even worse in its democidal intent.

Though Burleigh also shows that the difference between slaughtering people on the basis of race and slaughtering people on the basis of class cannot bear the moral weight often given to it—particularly as the Soviets also killed on the basis of ethnicity and the Nazis also killed on the basis of class.

Part of what makes this such a powerful book is we see both perpetrators and victims. Feeling oneself to be part of a power elite—whether racial or not—was clearly intoxicating. The book is so powerfully informative because we see the human costs of barbaric ideas and their implementation.

Burleigh’s final comment seems very apt:

Our lives may be more boring than those who lived in apocalyptic times, but being bored is greatly preferable to being prematurely dead because of some ideological fantasy (p.812).

If you only read one book on Nazi Germany, read this one.

Death of the Author

I finally got around to reading Roland Barthes’ essay Death of the Author.

Why do I do this to myself? (The essay is short and I should be doing something else ….?) Well, yes. But why do I bother with yet another fashionable modern French theorist, I’ve never found it a rewarding experience.

And I didn’t this time either.

The first paragraph tells us that narrative Voice is not to be equated with any particular person, corporeal or otherwise. Well, yes. I have read lots and lots of novels, enjoying them to varying degrees: a process of enjoyment that does not require knowing any biographical facts about any of the authors.

Literary critics can get all excited about that biographical stuff. It’s a living, I suppose. But us ordinary readers entirely understand that the narrative voice is, in all the senses relevant to us as mere readers, freestanding. We probably generally don’t think about it much, but the fact that we don’t feel the need to engage in biographical research to enjoy a novel can be taken as a fair indication that we are cool with the freestanding voice thing.
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Having portentously mentioned the bleeding obvious Barthes immediately wanders off into that look at me I’m so clever (death of the author indeed), this must be so profound because it’s obscure, rhetorical floridity that puts my teeth on edge:

... literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

I am not even going to bother wading through that.

Second paragraph, we are introduced to the death of the author. Freestanding narrative voice = slain author. My, if analysis is so easy, anyone can do it.

Particularly if one follows it up with crap such as:

The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the 'human person'.

Wow, so all those medievals writing commentaries on Aristotle had no concept of an author. Poor old Christine de Pisan or Marie de France didn’t know they were authors, and neither did anyone else. And when the demos at Athens cheered Aristophanes' latest play, they never yelled out the Hellenic equivalent of author, author!

But uttering such utter nonsense does allow Barthes to inform us (using the word ‘inform’ extremely loosely) that authorialness is a product of capitalist ideology. Ah, definitive proof that is it bad then. And Barthes is a sound chap. (“Death of the author” indeed: who’s he kidding? Lots of folk apparently.)

Third paragraph celebrates all those cutting edge attempts to dethrone this terrible tyrannical Author in favour of properly demotic Readership.

In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it.

Unlike all those lawyers who have been wrestling with when legislative intent is relevant, particularly in constitutional law, since, well, time immemorial probably. And how about those poor medievals, thinking law is custom and so thoroughly unauthored. Cutting edge theorists way before their time and they didn’t even know it …

It ends with another piece of florid it-is-obscure-so-must-be-profound intellectual rhetoric:

... linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person," end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language "work," that is, to exhaust it ...

Yes, a sentence can have meaning without being attached to any biographical details or characteristics of writer or reader. (Apart from language competence.) You’ve said that already.

Fourth paragraph, is about why It Really Matters To Understand This:

The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real "alienation:' the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself).

Well, actually, no. Either it is an inherent characteristic of texts that narrative voice is freestanding, and always has been, or it is not an inherent characteristic but has suddenly become one at some (unspecified) point. The first is true but boring, the second is dramatic but false. That’s the problem with trying to build profundity on the bleeding obvious: sooner or later, you have to make this move of transforming the trite-but-true into the striking-but-false.

But, hey, if Barthes has got you nodding along this far, getting you to intellectually jump the shark is no problem. You’re committed, after all. And will no doubt, if challenged, spend some effort "reading into" the text what is needed to protect it. Got to protect that intellectual capital, that you are sound and someone in good standing (and was never taken for a ride by an intellectual shyster).
Fourth paragraph, engage in the we are all such clever boys and girls, so we are smart enough to know … move:

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.

No, we don’t know that, for if it were so, language would be impossible.

Obviously, it is entirely possible for different folk to “see” different things in a text. Particularly if it is sufficiently obscure. But language is not a random activity. If there were not some predictable commonalities in the meanings evoked by particular uses of language, then communication would be impossible. Obscure texts can have very limited predictable commonalities. One reason we praise a writer for clarity of expression is precisely that they are communicating more effectively (and, typically, imposing less burden on the reader). But those predictable commonalities mean that being contested is not a universal characteristic of text.

The fifth paragraph builds a mountain of indeterminacy out of molehill of variable clarity and personal response. See above comment.

The last paragraph starts with the astonishing piece of “new” information that plays often contain things that are clear to the audience but understood to be obscure to the characters. Well, there wouldn’t be much comedy, drama or romance without that, now would there? Often much of the fun of being a reader or viewer is precisely that you know more than the characters. (Getting the reader to turn their common sense off seems to be required to make Barthes’ essay “work”. Indeed, to the extent of forgetting what it’s like to be a reader.)

Barthes’ ends with a paean of praise to the demise of author-tyranny and the new dawn of demotic reader power. To which I can only say, I hope Barthes’ never accepted any sort of invitation based on authorship of Death of the Author. After all, he is a mere reader, like the rest of us, with no extra standing …

Barthes’ position on text—that the only point of production is consumption—is very economist of him. The analogy works quite well: goods and services for sale have creators and owners but the utility of the consumer is paramount. Barthes’, of course, does not deny that there are authors, merely that there are God-Authors who “own” the meaning of texts. No labour theory of value for Barthes!

That narrative voice cannot be simply equated with any biological person and readers bring meaningful baggage to texts are both obviously true. If literary critics forget either of these things, they are being silly.

But before one gets all excited about any allegedly profound implications from either aforementioned truth, it is useful to ponder a few things. First, why do we have first person, second person and third person? Second, why do we have a distinction between fiction and non-fiction? Third, why do we have the concept of the lie, and of perjury? Fourth, why does language happen at all?

Barthes engages in various rhetorical tricks to get readers to think him a terribly clever person, to think themselves terribly clever folk by agreeing with him, and to not think in common sense terms about their own experience of language and texts. Barthes claims that readers are where the “power” over texts does and should lie. I entirely agree that Death of the Author is an essay to emancipate oneself from.