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Storm warnings

April 26, 2018

Image: Tom Gill, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“The test of science is its ability to predict”
— Richard Feynman

As if governed by some deterministic law, the current debates between economists and critics follow a predictable path. Critics begin by mentioning the failure of economists to predict or warn of the crisis. Howard Reed for example recently wrote in Prospect that ‘When the great crash hit a decade ago, the public realised that the economics profession was clueless.’

Thus provoked, economists then reply by pointing out that macroeconomic forecasting is only a small part of what economists do, that their models are based on mathematics and logical consistency, and that it is critics who don’t know what they are talking about – as in the riposte by Diane Coyle, which describes Reed’s piece as ‘lamentable’, a ‘caricature’ and an ‘ill-informed diatribe’ that furthermore ignores existing guidelines on what criticism is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (the former includes ‘The criticism is by an economist’ which doesn’t seem in the multidisciplinary spirit, and would rule out this piece since I am an applied mathematician).

In a similar debate last year in Times Higher Education, Steve Keen wrote that the global financial crisis caught ‘leading economists and policy bodies completely by surprise. A decade later, economics is a divided and lost discipline.’ Christopher Auld responded that ‘Criticism of economics that relegates the field to … failed “weather” forecasting is not just misguided, it is anti-intellectual and dangerous.’

Over in the Guardian, Larry Elliott wrote that ‘Neoclassical economics has become an unquestioned belief system and treats those challenging the creed as dangerous’. A group of economists from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) appeared to confirm the latter when they called the article ‘dangerous’ and ‘ill-informed expert bashing … Like most economists, we do not try to forecast the date of the next financial crisis, or any other such event. We are not astrologers, nor priests to the market gods. We analyse data.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1984 Is Not The Future

March 17, 2018

1984 Is Not The Future

Jacobello Alberegno The Beast of the Apocalypse 1360-90

The Guardian ran an article yesterday by one of its editors, David Shariatmadari, that both proves and disproves its own theme at the same time: “An Information Apocalypse Is Coming”. Now, I don’t fancy the term apocalypse in a setting like this, it feels too much like going for a cheap thrill, but since he used it, why not.

My first reaction to the headline, and the article, is: what do you mean it’s ‘coming’? Don’t you think we have such an apocalypse already, that we’re living it, we’re smack in the middle of such a thing? If you don’t think so, would that have anything to do with you working at a major newspaper? Or with your views of the world, political and other, that shape how you experience ‘information’?

Shariatmadari starts out convincingly and honestly enough with a description of a speech that JFK was supposed to give in Dallas right after he was murdered, a speech that has been ‘resurrected’ using technology that enables one to make it seem like he did deliver it.

An Information Apocalypse Is Coming. How Can We Protect Ourselves?

“In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality, and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”

John F Kennedy’s last speech reads like a warning from history, as relevant today as it was when it was delivered in 1963 at the Dallas Trade Mart. His rich, Boston Brahmin accent reassures us even as he delivers the uncomfortable message. The contrast between his eloquence and the swagger of Donald Trump is almost painful to hear.

Yes, Kennedy’s words are lofty ones, and they do possess at least some predictive qualities. But history does play a part too. Would we have read the same in them that we do now, had Kennedy not been shot right before he could deliver them? Hard to tell.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rethinking the balance between equality and hierarchy: 2) New insights into the evolution of hierarchy and inequality throughout the ages

March 16, 2018

Rethinking the balance between equality and hierarchy: 2) New insights into the evolution of hierarchy and inequality throughout the ages

This is a follow up on our earlier article on finding techniques for ‘reverse dominance’, i.e. avoiding the concentration of power.

More indications of how to restore a new balance towards egalitarian (or rather ‘equipotential’) outcomes come from David Graeber, who wrote a very important article summarizing the last 3 decades of findings from archaeology and anthropology, which have overturned many of our insights:

1) In the excerpt on Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures‎‎ he shows several examples of tribes and societies which combined more egalitarian and more hierarchical arrangements, according to context.

2) In the excerpt on the Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies‎‎, he shows that this was by no means a universal transition towards more hierarchy ; in fact, many agricultural societies and their cities had deep democratic structures (sometimes more egalitarian than their earlier tribal forms)

3) Finally in the last one, Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization, he gives several examples showing ‘size does not matter’

All this should give us hope, that the evolution towards the current hierarchical models are not written in stone, and that societies can be more flexible than they appear.

Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures

David Graeber: “From the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society

March 14, 2018

You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society

Our ancestors weren’t nice people. They kept slaves, looked forward to wars and sent people to concentration camps. It is easy to dismiss them as moral retards, but that would be setting the bar way too low. Slavery is bad, war is violence, and sending people to concentration camps isn’t very nice. Blacks, Jews, and foreigners are not ambiguous classes of people, and violence is unambiguously wrong.

It takes no particular sophistication to see how cruel our ancestors were. But it takesremarkable insight to see such cruelty hidden in plain sight today.

Libertarians are fairly good at seeing cruelty others miss. We see taxation as theft, war as murder and citizenship as slavery. We aren’t naïve enough to think everything will be fine if we have a good president at the helm.

But we make a huge, comparable mistake. We assume the market is a great restraining force against fraud and deception. Now it is true that certain forms of deception are checked by the market. But this is not true of many other forms of deception. There is a real sense in which the market values the ability to deceive. Libertarians are blind to this, at their own peril.

Politics in Business

When I dropped out of college and started working, I couldn’t help seeing that deception is the norm, even in private organizations. There was so much that could have beendone so much better, but wasn’t being done because of political reasons. In my experience, organizations reward prudent predation. What is going on?

Economist Robin Hanson answers such puzzles more satisfactorily than anybody else.In any large organization, there are coalitions which compete for limited resources. Coalition politics is vicious, and a major reason why firms are inefficient.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Can’t Keep Expecting the Federal Government to Fix Things

February 24, 2018

We Can’t Keep Expecting the Federal Government to Fix Things

Whatever your solution may be, the path to change a nation starts locally.

It’s happened again, another tragedy in America, and once more we hear the cries for systematic change echo from coast to coast. Instead of berating you with countless policy prescriptions in the aftermath, and whether or not they will deter these events in the future, I would like to offer a piece of advice to those seeking to come out of this with more than just “thoughts and prayers” that I think has been grossly overlooked and underutilized in society today. Rather than entrench ourselves in the emotional mudslinging within social media anytime an event like this occurs, we ought to turn inward, towards our own backyards and communities, and recognize that the path to political change starts locally, not nationally.

We need a new — or rather, old — approach regarding societal problems that have become deep-rooted today. Right now, the cultural norm, whether due to technological advances that put us in closer contact with one another or the process of political centralization, is to call for change on a federal level any time a problem is observed. This wasn’t always the case, and I rather believe this practice taking hold is a contributing factor in these tragedies.

Diversification and Innovation

Before social media allowed us to criticize the viewpoints of people on different continents from the comfort of our living room, and before politics became completely centered around what the federal government was doing, people aired their grievances in their local communities. If you noticed what you thought was an urgent problem within your child’s school, for example, you wouldn’t tweet at a senator in Washington, D.C., you’d go to your local school board meeting. And as it turns out, that’s still the most effective route.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beware The Smiling Face Of Establishment Politics

February 18, 2018

Beware The Smiling Face Of Establishment Politics

Image from official music video for “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden

The most damaging people you will ever meet in your life are not those who are overtly hostile to you, the obviously malicious individuals who openly pursue your harm. The people you will look back on as having had the most pernicious impact upon your life are those you allowed in close, those who presented a friendly, trustworthy face and then used the intimacy that you naively gave them to insidiously sabotage who you are as a person.

The exact same thing is true of politics. American TV screens blare away about the horrors of ISIS, Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons and white supremacist demonstrations, while US military drones have Middle Eastern children terrified of the sky. The man in the scary mask in a terrorist beheading video elicits a very clear, strong “NO!” from the audience, despite the fact that his faction has killed and terrorized far fewer people than the US war machine has, and despite the fact that he’s likely enjoying the benefits of US funding.

You see this dynamic everywhere. There’s no good reason Hillary Clinton voters shouldn’t be okay with President Trump, for example; all the evil stepshe’s taken on behalf of the US power establishment are no worse than all the many warmongering, racist, ecocidal and corrupt things her supporters insisted everyone look past because nobody’s perfect and purity is bad. The only difference is that his establishment politics have a slightly uglier face, usually expressed via his Twitter account. Clinton knew how to look into the camera and recite the right lines with the right Black Hole Sun grin plastered across her bloodthirsty neocon face, and Trump doesn’t.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Supersedure State

January 30, 2018

The Supersedure State

I said that I wanted to focus on the shape of possible agrarian, post-capitalist states of the future in my forthcoming writing, so I thought I’d anticipate that here by reproducing my article from the current issue of The Land magazine (Issue 22, 2018, pp.28-30). The editors of that august journal in their wisdom entitled it ‘The human hive’ (and accompanied it with some beautiful woodcut illustrations of an apian nature), but here it goes under my preferred title of ‘The supersedure state’. My next few posts are going to attend to various other items of business – though some of them do bear on this theme – but I thought I’d lay this out now as a kind of organising concept for the things I want to write about agrarian states, which I’ll try to fill out in more detail on this site shortly. So I’ll be coming back to this – but in the meantime, of course I’d welcome any comments. I’m not sure if this is exactly the same version as the one that appeared in The Land, but I think it’s close enough.

oOo

The tumult of recent political events in many western countries has brought a new word to the lips of political commentators – populism. Generally, populism and its personification in figures such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage has been presented in mainstream circles as a dangerous political turn, a threat to the established order of things, and not without good reason. But for those who’d like to replace the present global neoliberal economy with a more local, more equitable and more land-based or agrarian society there are overlaps with populism that raise a few questions – in particular, these three:

‘Populism’ means a politics of or for ‘the people’, which doesn’t sound like such a bad idea – so what’s the problem with it?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“The collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.” Really??

January 25, 2018

“The collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.” Really??

The cover article of New Scientist this week asks “Is Western civilization on the brink of collapse?” I’m glad they’re raising this question, but their discussion was extremely disappointing.

First, as George Monbiot points out in a follow-up article, the article fails to distinguish between Western and global civilization, conflating two very different issues: 1.) the recent historical dominance of the West over the rest of the world, and 2.) the unsustainable dynamics of our global civilization.

Worse, in their editorial, they argue that on the issues of climate breakdown and environmental collapse, those raising the alarm have “prematurely politicised the science and hence provoked pushback from people on the other side of the fence.” To me, that reads like saying that those who argue that the Earth orbits the Sun have prematurely provoked pushback from the Flat Earth Society by emphasizing the role of gravity. It’s the kind of thinking that grants false equivalency to climate deniers and leads to pseudo-scientists funded by the Koch brothers getting equal television time to real scientists representing 98% of scientific opinion.

Bill Nye and climate deniers — Arguing against “politicizing” civilizational collapse is the same mindset that leads to offering equal TV time to pseudo-scientific climate deniers

As I describe in my recent article, “What Will It Really Take to Avoid Collapse?“, the underlying drivers impelling our global civilization to the precipice are the economic structures of a global capitalist growth-based system driven by massive transnational corporations that are more powerful than individual nations. Since politics is, by definition, about the dynamics of power and governance, how is it possible either to diagnose the problem or suggest solutions without it being political?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Governments Try to Control Language to Hilarious Results

January 10, 2018

Governments Try to Control Language to Hilarious Results

In the region formerly known as Yugoslavia, everyone speaks the same basic language, despite the individual countries’ governments insisting that they don’t.

It is quite interesting to see how widespread some languages are, with some having over a billion speakers while others are spoken by a single tribe. Languages have evolved due to the need for people to communicate and have likewise undergone changes over time.

The differences between are as little as the differences between English in Britain and in the US.

There is a rather peculiar case of languages in the former Yugoslavia, where governments have created four supposedly different languages out of one single language. The people of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro all speak the same language, the Serbo-Croatian language, yet their respective governments claim that they speak Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. This would be the equivalent of Australians claiming that they speak Australian, Americans claiming that they speak American, and the British claiming that they speak British, despite all of them speaking English and perfectly understanding each other.

In reality, the differences between how people speak in the former Yugoslavia are as little as the differences between English in Britain and the United States. The only notable thing to mention is that Serbia and Montenegro have, in addition to the Latin alphabet, also the Cyrillic one, but apart from this, these four countries speak the same exact language. Nonetheless, their respective governments sought to courageously protect their people from not speaking a language named after their national identity.

The Origin Language and Its Subsequent Divisions

Serbo-Croatian was created in 1850 in Vienna by mutual agreement from several scholars.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s Not About Democracy: Control Fraud Is the Core of our Political System

January 4, 2018

It’s Not About Democracy: Control Fraud Is the Core of our Political System

The many are finally calling out the abusers of power because there’s no longer any need to pay the corrupting costs of centralization.

If we strip away the pretense of democracy, what is the core of our political System? Answer: control fraud, which I define as those with control/ power in centralized institutions enriching themselves at the expense of the citizenry by selectively modifying what’s permissible, and doing so in a fully legally compliant process, i.e. within the letter of the law if not the intent of the law.

I addressed control fraud a bit in The Hidden-in-Plain-Sight Mechanism of the Super-Wealthy: Money-Laundering 2.0 (December 29, 2017), in which I quoted Correspondent JD.

Here are JD’s additional comments on Money Laundering 2.0, control fraud and the political process:

Money Laundering 1.0: You make a bunch of dirty money and you have to find a way to make it legit. How can you turn a bunch of drug money into proper investments? This was a problem for bootleggers and persists into current times. With control fraud, you co-opt the legal machinery and use it to steal. The system protects the deceit. In 2008 we bailed the jerks out. The two are often used together.

I think Money Laundering 2.0 is the second part of this equation and the big global trend. With 2.0, the holder of wealth uses the wheels of the world system to offshore gains (legit or not) to safe places where they cannot be taxed or clawed back. The concept is simple, but the mechanisms are by nature complex to conceal the deal. Think Cayman Islands, Paradise Papers, shell companies, etc, etc. etc. Dump money into crazy cars, homes, etc. If physical goods aren’t easy, give to a key foundation or politician and you will be rewarded with complicity at a later date.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

I May Be a Radical, But I’m Definitely Not a Utopian

January 3, 2018

I May Be a Radical, But I’m Definitely Not a Utopian

I don’t have a grand, sweeping plan. I just want peace.

I become a very fun party guest when the topic turns to politics.

My Mundane Radicalism RE: Politics

I come at questions about policy from a different angle than most. I don’t believe in policy or politics at all. Specifically, I don’t believe that some humans (“rulers”) should get moral sanction to use violence against other people (“the ruled”) to get what they want.

If that doesn’t sound controversial to you, you either 1) agree with me or 2) aren’t paying close enough attention to how politics works.

If I have one ethical ideal for how human beings should relate to each other, it’s that – non-violence.

Force is the essence of all governments from top to bottom. Whether we’re talking about Louis XIV funding the palace of Versailles, George III raising an army to crush a revolt, Vladimir Lenin redistributing confiscated land, or your local police officer enforcing a drug law/tax law/business law (or else…), you’re talking about people who rely on violence or the threat of violence to get compliance for their plans. They ultimately do not ask or require your consent. Their authority ultimately rests on the implied threat that they will beat you up if you don’t do what they say.It’s a long story, but somehow we came to believe that this was a normal state of affairs.

I don’t believe in violence. If I have one ethical ideal for how human beings should relate to each other (“politics”), it’s that – non-violence. There’s a lot more to say about ethical societies and ethical human behavior, but when it comes to politics, I’m really not much more complicated than that. My views are actually pretty mundane.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics

December 28, 2017

If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics

If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why would those same people be trusted to make decisions for the rest of us?

“Ordinary people can’t be trusted to make the right decisions about what’s best for themselves and others. That’s why we need government to decide for them.”

“And who will we trust to decide who these government officials are?”

“Ordinary people, of course. It’s only fair.”

I hope you see the irony here.

I also hope you see the irony in expressing mistrust in human nature while also expressing faith in the idea that human nature will somehow become trustworthy when those humans work for the government. If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why would those same people be trusted to make decisions for the rest of us? This line of thinking has never made sense to me, and I hope it starts to make a little less sense to you.

Here’s one of my favorite clips where the economist Milton Friedman addresses this fallacy in response to Phil Donahue’s concerns about capitalistic greed:

The way we’re going to move forward in this world is not by finding a person who’s good enough to make bad systems work, but by investing in systems that incentivize even the bad person to make himself or herself accountable to creating value for others. And I know of no other system like that other than the free market.

If you’re interested in hearing me elaborate on this theme, check out this talk I gave at The Nassau Institute & The University of The Bahamas on the power of free markets and why we need to look beyond politics if we truly want to create a freer society:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Censorship Comes to Google

December 1, 2017

Censorship Comes to Google

Senator Feinstein rather boldly asked Google to take action to hamper RT’s ability to communicate its views to American audiences.

At Saturday’s Halifax International Security Forum, Eric Schmidt announced that Google will alter its search algorithm to “de-rank” results from Russia Today.

Why did Google do this? Perhaps they were concerned about Russia meddling in American elections or they thought their customers wished to see less of Russia Today. It matters not. Generally, Google has broad power to police its platform. We might not like the decision, but it is not ours to make.

Feinstein boldly asked Google to hamper RT’s ability to communicate with American audiences.

There is a second possibility. Government officials may have threatened Google to bring about this “de-ranking” of Russia Today. If so, the First Amendment poses questions for us. We need to answer such questions, however, only if government officials did, in fact, threaten Google.

Congressional Pressure on Google

Consider the following exchange between Sen. Feinstein and Google General Counsel Kent Walker from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian influence in the 2016 election:

Feinstein: Why didn’t Google take any action regarding RT after the intelligence community assessment came out in January of 2017.

Walker: … with regard to RT, we recognize the concerns that have been expressed about RT and concerns about its slanted coverage, this is of course a question that goes beyond the internet, RT is covered, its channel is on major cable television stations, on satellite television stations, its advertising appears in newspapers, magazines, airports, it’s run in hotels in pretty much every city in the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If Political Candidates Advocated Liberty

November 2, 2017

IF POLITICAL CANDIDATES ADVOCATED LIBERTY

In modern democracies, political cycles never end. As soon as one election is over, those in government office or aspiring to such an office are already running for the next election. Having recently attended a public forum of state-level candidates looking to the 2018 election, I wondered what a real friend of freedom might say if he was offering himself for such a political office.

At a luncheon event several candidates running in the forthcoming Republican Party primary in South Carolina made their pitch as to why they should be their party’s nominees for state legislative offices in the next general election. They answered questions submitted by attendees at the lunch and made opening and closing statements about who they were and what they stood for.

Liberty Rhetoric, But Interventionist Policies

Not too surprisingly they all, in their respective ways, said they were “pro-business,” advocated lower taxes, a freer enterprise market environment, and greater transparent accountability by those in power in the state capital.

Why did each say they were running for elected office? They all had been in business but now wanted to “give back” and “serve” their communities.

What were major themes in many of the questions directed at them? South Carolina is a growing state with international corporations opening more manufacturing facilities, and matching this is an increasing population as more people move to the Palmetto State.

Those who submitted questions wanted to know what the candidates would do, if elected, about improving and widening road infrastructure to reduce increasing congestion, and how they would “manage” growth in the state? And what they might do in terms of taxes? There were other topics and issues, but these especially stood out.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Is What a True Liberty-Loving Politician Would Look Like

October 27, 2017

This Is What a True Liberty-Loving Politician Would Look Like

What would a real friend of freedom say if he was offering himself for political office?

In modern democracies, political cycles never end. As soon as one election is over, those seeking office are already running for the next election. Having recently attended a public forum of state-level candidates looking to the 2018 election, I wondered what a real friend of freedom might say if he was offering himself for such a political office.

Liberty Rhetoric, But Interventionist Policies

They all clearly believed that growth needed to be harnessed within “reasonable” rules and regulations.

Not too surprisingly they all, in their respective ways, said they were “pro-business,” advocated lower taxes, a freer enterprise market environment, greater transparency, and more accountability for those in power in the state capital.

Why did each say they were running for elected office? They all had been in business but now wanted to “give back” and “serve” their communities.

What were major themes in many of the questions directed at them? South Carolina is a growing state where international corporations are opening more manufacturing facilities, and, as more people move to the Palmetto State, it has an increasing population to match. Those who submitted questions wanted to know what the candidates would do, if elected, to improve and widen road infrastructure to reduce increasing congestion, and how they would “manage” growth in the state?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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