Issue blogging again

[Update to last post]. No longer in the blog free job, I now have a new blog on things international development here: http://waylaiddialectic.wordpress.com/

Blog-gone

I'm changing jobs and the new one would appear to preclude political blogging. So, for the time being, this blog is going to have a breather.

I've got a new blog set up on Wordpress to talk travel, arthritis, hearts and random stuff. It is:

http://wandermythoughts.wordpress.com/

(note the word MY in there, an annoying concession to the fact that someone already thought of Wandering Thoughts).

Thanks to everyone who has read this blog and commented from time to time. Sorry to Matt who I owe a couple of posts.

For what it's worth, below are some of my favourite posts...

Development as Explained By 2 Cows in a Field
Turtles Can Fly - review
Why Treasury’s Got it Wrong on Tax Cuts
What’s the Matter with Libertarianism?
Raging Against Modernity
Trying to Muddle Through: Living (and Learning) with Disease
A Simple (but resilient) Definition of Power
An Ideological and Intellectual Wallace Line
My very own*, very succinct, definition of social capital
My very own, very succinct...
Gore's Law
Freedom of Speach and its Discontents

And, primarily because I still suffer from an addiction to Excel, here's some blog stats graphed (click on the graph to see it more clearly).

Development: what's the point?

Over the space of a couple of weeks in 1996 I travelled between two extremes of the public transport spectrum. At one end were the busses of rural Sumbawa – grumpy, diesel-spitting creatures that lurched their way around potholes taking interminable amounts of time to get anywhere, let alone their destination. As a means of transport they were inclusive though. Want to take your surfboard? no problem. Want to travel with freshly caught fish? fine. Want to move your goat – trussed up and still trying to kick? just pay your fare. And if the bus ever got full, you were invited to sit on the roof.

At the other end of the spectrum was the London Underground. Trains were frequent and – despite everyone’s complaints – mostly on time. You could only travel with surfboards off peak and, though I never tested the hypothesis, I suspect goats and fish were prohibited outright. Yet the tube got you where you wanted and it got you there quick. It was safe, efficient and no one ever asked you to ride on the roof. Compared to the bus riders of Sumbawa, all but the poorest travellers on the London Underground were wildly wealthy too. And healthy: no Malaria, nor cholera, nor typhoid; life expectancies in the mid 70s. Almost all of them were literate and many could expect to travel overseas. They got to elect their leaders (something denied to Indonesians during the Suharto years) and their human rights were reasonably well safeguarded.

And yet they were miserable. Or, at least, they appeared that way. Silent, pale, staring at their shoes. The Sumbawan bus travellers, on the other hand, were full of cheer. The bus rang loud with talk and laughter, and delays which would have driven Londoners to apoplexy were cheerfully dismissed.

For a long time contrast between these two scenes led me to question the very merits of development itself. If London was wealthy but glum and Sumbawa poor but happy, then maybe we should abandon development and all aim to live like the Sumbawanese. Over the years I engaged in plenty of this anti-development thinking. It’s common currency on the backpack trail and surprisingly prevalent amongst some sectors of the development community too.

It is also mistaken. My own error was to compare two snapshots of life that were both subtly different but also not representative. At least part of the boisterousness of the Sumbawan busses came from the fact that most everyone knew each other. On the Underground people are silent because they are among strangers. Of course, if Sumbawanese and Londoners lived their lives as they travelled (amongst companions in the case of the former; isolated and alone in the case of the later), this would be a real issue. And it is certainly easier to end up lonely in a large city than a small village, but London is hardly atomised – you only have to go into any bar, or restaurant, or football stadium to see people interacting amongst friends.

And, of course, a bus ride is not someone’s life. What I didn’t see on those buses were the dirt floors of people’s houses, or the absence of running water. Nor did I feel the anguish of loosing a child to Malaria, or the pangs of hunger at the end of the dry season, or the anxiety of living with only the barest social safety net. I didn’t feel the frustration of being unable to afford basic medicines or of having to deal with corrupt officials. On the other hand, much of what London has to offer – comfort, food, the NHS – I have had all my life. So I took it for granted.

None of this is to say, of course, that London is all good, or that village life in Sumbawa has no merits. All I’m saying is that the modern misery / happy poverty dichotomy, and its variants – views held by a considerable number of people – are wrong.

In other words, there is such a thing as Development, and it matters. Countries can be better or worse places to live and, taken as a whole, for the majority of their people, the best places to live aren’t those with per capita incomes of a few hundred dollars per year.

To say something exists and that it matters is not, of course, the same as saying that it is straight forwards or even that it can be easily defined. One has only to look at the many very real problems of London to realise that development can’t possibly be a nice linear journey from rural Sumbawa to the South-East of England.

So what is development? Let’s start with its purpose.

As a Utilitarian I believe that the purpose of politics – and, it follows, development – should be to increase happiness/wellbeing in a manner that is, ultimately, sustainable. Utilitarianism is far from a perfect political philosophy so I’m open to being dissuaded from it, but the very first question I would want answered from anyone trying to do this is, would your alternative end-goal for development really be worth holding if it made people’s lives more rather than less miserable? Personally, I can’t think of any principal I would want societies to cling to if it could be shown that it consistently, across time, made life less happy. You can argue that your alternative purpose won’t suffer this problem; that it won’t make people worse off. But by doing this you are tacitly admitting that your purpose is a second order one. That it is worthy for it what it might do for people’s wellbeing rather than for any intrinsic value of its own.

At a practical level, because suffering is so my easier to define and identify than wellbeing or happiness, it makes sense to me that the purpose of development (as practiced) should be to increase wellbeing by focusing on the reduction of suffering.

So if we know what we want from development, can we also paint a rough picture of its essential ingredients? Those things that with distinguish more developed countries and communities from less? Simon very wisely argues for some flexibility – good development will look different in different places. I think, though, that – despite the importance of context – we can lay down some universal ground rules.

The first being the protection of human rights. It might seem strange that a utilitarian would put human rights up front. After all, didn’t the founding utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, refer to the French revolutionaries’ talk of inalienable rights as ‘nonsense on stilts?’ (Surely, one of the best phrased insults in the history of political philosophy). Bentham’s critique though, at least as I understand it, of rights for rights sake – rights because they are given to us by god, or by virtue of us being human beings – and, even if wellbeing is your central concern, then rights remain important. Not because of some intrinsic worth of their own but simply because history has shown us time and time again that when they are grossly violated suffering ensues. Think Rwanda, or the Holocaust, or the Gulag. It follows then that countries that protect and promote their citizen’s rights will be less likely to experience suffering.

Suffering also clusters around extreme poverty. So the second essential ingredient of development is the reduction of extreme poverty, followed by the reduction in poverty in general. There’s not space here in this blog post to explain Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to poverty but I do want to emphasise that the reduction of poverty is not the same as merely increasing one’s wealth. Wealth is an important component, but it needs to be set amongst others, including increasing the meaningful choices that people have in their lives. We want to reduce poverty of opportunity as well as material poverty

The third essential ingredient for development will be the protection of the environment. Despite all the advances of technology we humans remain dependent on the world we live in – and if we destroy it suffering will follow. In saying this, I’m not arguing for extreme sustainability that prohibits any environmental destruction but rather that we don’t damage the environment in a way that either significantly harms us now or which bequeaths a mess to future generations. (As a tangential point, where it is in any way avoidable, I’m also against irreversible environmental damage such as species extinction).

Finally, development needs to provide space all those other, less-quantifiable things that matter to human beings – social interaction, opportunities to have fun, a sense of meaning in one’s life.

It all sounds so simple on paper doesn’t it? But that sad fact is that for the vast majority of people living on our planet at present, development remains a long way off. Even so-called developed countries have problems sufficient to suggest that the very term ‘developed country’ has arrived prematurely. All of which begs the question, why are we still so far away from living in a developed world? That, time permitting, is the subject of another post.

Paul Krugman

If you're interested (and I won't blame you if you're not) I have a review of Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal up at the Scoop Review of Books.

Pick Me! Pick Me! Me! Me! me me meme

Cool. Thanks to George, and the fact that my co-blogger Oliver is having an existential crisis at present, I get to answer my first ever internet meme.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Following my heart and living in Long Island

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world

I live in that world. I mean I really have to try to put on weight. So...chocolate cake , proper pizza, cheese cake, the first good nectarine of a summer, and fejoas!

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Launch a speculative raid on a the Rai. Mwah ha ha.

Or, if I wasn't feeling evil, I'd set up a trust to fund a decent left leaning New Zealand newspaper or magazine. And with the change, I would fund research and work on ways of improving governance, protecting human rights and reducing extreme poverty.

Three of my habits:

Worrying, not rinsing dishes, a powerful fear of telephones.

Five jobs that I have had:

NGO researcher, writer etc...
University Researcher
Writer (kind of)
Reporting analyst
Assistant public transport planner

Five places I have lived:

Long Island
London
Sydney
Madeira
Wellington

Five things to do today I did yesterday:

Rescued a weta from the shower (why do they always run off the paper and up your arm?)
Agonised over buying ties.
Drilled myself a very smart tie-holder.
Filled out a tax return.
Started another blog.

Five people I want to get to know more about:

Rawls, Tony Judt, Samantha Power, John Kenneth Galbraith and Jurgen Habermas (or, at least, I'd like to know more about what they know).

People to tag:

I'm pretty sure that (once you subtract George and Nikki, who have already responded to the meme) there aren't five people who actually read this blog...so I think I might be tagging into space.

Interesting

Failed states and reconstruction failures in their wake.

Simply Because

Simply because, like most everyone else who lives in the suburbs, I secretly long to be a cowboy...

Our leaders will save us...

...Johann Hari thinks not. (And I only partially agree, but that's the subject of another post).

Southerly Storm Blogging!

I have a soft spot for southerly storms. I grew up in Eastbourne, deep inside Wellington harbour, where for me and my teenage friends southerly storms were the main source of surf. Storms meant hail and blistering white-squalls but they also meant waves. And, as surf crazed kids, that was what mattered.

We would watch weather maps and hope. We would gaze south out of classroom windows and wait, our eyes scanning for the first clouds of the cold front. Anticipation would build all day with the rising gale.

We would talk loud on the bus home, everyone wondering why such miserable weather made us so happy. We would change into torn hand-me-down wetsuits in the shelter of battered Pohutukawa. And we wold run, jubilant, through the stinging sand into the sea.

I don't surf in storms so often now, but residual excitement remains. For this I'm lucky. What other emotion could better accompany days when the waves close Cook Strait, and snow starts to fall on the hills east and north of town?

And so, this evening, as dusk thickened the sky, tired and frustrated from a day of trying to write, I donned the raincoat I brought when I went to Greenland, and ventured out amongst it.

First I climbed to the top of the hill at the end of our road. On fine days it affords views across the south coast. But this evening I could hardly keep my feet let alone take in the view. I actually crawled to the summit such was my fear of being blown over. I then clasped onto the small trig that stands there and looked out to sea, my eyes stung by rain. Out in the Strait the wind tore white strips from the water. Waves met their end on the rocks, their explosions of spray mixing with the rain.

I didn't last long before retreating in an awkward gale-assisted stumble. From there I walked my regular road loop. Sheltered by houses for the most part I could hear the storm everywhere. Tormenting powerlines and coaxing trees into roaring song. As the daylight faded streetlights began to map out the suburbs.

By the time I got home the sky was dark, dark grey except for two pale strips in the western sky where the cloud was less thick and maybe the storm less intense.

I stopped for a moment breathing in the smell of smoke from someone's wood fire and then hurried in out of the rain.

Abortion

Maybe it's just because it gives the fundies another opportunity to exert their disproportionate influence in this country. Maybe it's simply the reminder of how misogynistic we still are. Maybe it's because rhetoric will quickly crowd out facts - again.

But the rekindling of the whole abortion debate just depresses me. And this is in spite of the fact that the most likely outcome, I think, will be that our law ends up more sensible - with a social clause along with the mental health one in the appropriate statute.

Anyhow, the issue was covered - fairly poorly? - in Insight on Radio National this morning (link to audio and will break eventually). Afterwards I send them the following email.

Dear Chris,

Absent from your discussion on abortion this morning was one key point.

A recent, comprehensive, survey conducted by the World Health Organisation and the Guttmacher Institute found that abortion rates vary little between parts of the world where the procedure is legal and those where it is not. It is surprising, given this fact, that those who see abortion as morally wrong do not do more to concentrate on non-legal and effective means, such as sexuality education and contraception, to reduce its incidence.

At the same time illegal and unsafe abortions lead to the deaths of over 70,000 women every year.

It surprises me that an organisation which calls itself Right to Life would want to bring this problem to New Zealand.

Kind Regards

Terence

On re-reading I was worried that this email would suggest that abortion is morally wrong and that my only quibble with Right to Life is how best to reduce its frequency.

So I thought I'd expand things here.

Like Deborah I'm sceptical of rights claims made in an absolute sense. I support human rights not because I think they are God-given or afforded to us simply by virtue of being human but rather because they provide us with a sound framework for reducing suffering and increasing wellbeing. I'm a (sortof) rule utilitarian who thinks that rights, when well-thought out, are very important rules.

Having said all this, much of my thinking (in other words: much of my muddling through within my own head) on abortion has been in terms of rights (rather than some sort of crude utilitarian calculus which is kind of what is going on in my email above). Which is fine, although to be consistent at some point of time I should pin these rights back to wellbeing, but that won't be today. So, in addition to my standard disclaimer (IANAPNAE - I am not a philosopher nor an economist - just someone who worries about things) I should add that my thinking here is incomplete.

But here goes...

Should abortion be legal?

In answering this I want to start with two positions which I think can't be correct. 1. That a woman has an unconstrained right to do what she wants with her body and 2. That, from the moment of conception, the fetus has a full set of human rights, equal to its mother's.

The first position flounders in the same way that libertarian arguments for absolute self-ownership do. I can't have absolute control of my body because in doing so I can violate your control over your body. Quite rightly our society prohibits me from using my body to do violence to others. Likewise it prohibits me from putting my body behind the wheel of a car and driving drunk. Obviously, despite this, I maintain considerable rights over what I may do with, and what may happen to my body, but they aren't absolute. To an extent, my rights are constrained by the impacts of my actions on the rights of others.

Which means that, if we can show that fetuses are entitled to full human rights we're going to want to do our best to eliminate abortion*. But should fetuses be entitled to full human rights (position 2 above)?

To me such a position seems acutely counter-intuitive. If you choose the moment of conception as the moment where a full set of rights are bestowed you are effectively granting equal rights to a collection of cells who may someday become a recognisable person, over the needs of an actual living woman. And these needs, when we consider the medical risks of pregnancy, not to mention the impact on the life of the woman in question are not insignificant.

Similarly, seeing as you have declared the fetus as having equal rights as its mother then, to be internally consistent, you must also ban abortions where there is a risk that the mother may die giving birth (certainty of the fetus's death versus probability of the mother's). All this despite the fact that what we are talking about here is a few cells that are in no way recognisably human. (True they may come to be recognisably human in time, but as you have decided to convey full human rights from conception you need to explain why they apply to the entity that exists the moment after conception).

If you want to see how ugly rights at conception are in practice have a read of the following article on El Salvador in the New York Times.

So if both the first position (that a woman has absolute rights) and the second (that a fetus has the exact same set of rights as a full human being) are wrong, then what is the alternative.

To me, at least, it makes sense to do the following.

1. Deal with the issue as one of competing rights sets. So a pregnant woman (like everyone else in society) does not a have absolute rights over her body and, in the case of abortion in particular, her rights need to be weighed up against those rights that we give to a fetus.

2. (And this is the important bit). The rights of an entity change as an entity changes across it's existence. There's no need to worry about 'big bang' moments such as when human-hood starts (which is going to be hard to pin down, I think). Just worry about when entity X has a sufficiently significant rights-set for these rights to restrict the actions of entity Y.

If it sounds strange for me to advise not getting caught up in when human-hood starts consider the following. Not all human beings have the same rights. This may seem appalling but it's just a statement of fact. We don't afford babies the right to vote, or children the right to choose where they live. We force teenagers to stay in school, but we don't force adults to stay in work. And so on... Of course we do afford all living human beings some core rights (not to be murdered, for example**) But the central point is that there is already a perfectly reasonable precedent set here - that people's rights sets change as they change.

And so what's left for us to decide is when does the developing fetus develop sufficient rights for these rights to prohibit its mother from having abortion? The short answer to this is never. Or, at least, its rights are never so significant that they should stop a woman from having an abortion when carrying the pregnancy to term would put her life in real danger. We don't legally oblige men to leap into burning buildings to save their children when doing so would be a risk to themselves (not even in El Salvador). Why should we compel women to take the same risks for a fetus? Of course we do compel parents to take due care of their children, when this doesn't involve risking their lives and, similarly, we are right, I think, prevent abortions in non-life threatening situations for a fetus close to term.

But we would be wrong to prohibit abortions in non-life threatening circumstances right from the moment of conception. We would be wrong in doing this because, even when we aren't talking about a life threatening pregnancy, having a baby is something that will have massive consequences for the woman involved and as an actual living individual her right to have control over something as significant as this takes precedence over those rights that the fetus has developed.

At some point in time this balance changes of course, and then the some of the fetus's rights (like the right to a chance at life) take precedence over some of hers (the choice about pregnancy in non-life threatening circumstances, in particular). For a variety of practical and biological reasons (the subject for another post maybe) sometime around viability seems like the best time for this switch.

For now though, I want to make one final point, this is that the whole idea of competing rights sets (and the idea that fetuses are in the process of acquiring rights) does mean that, while I support the legal provision of abortion, I have a strong preference for preventing unplanned pregnancies in the first place. And I would definitely prefer to live in a country that taxed its wealthy more and used the money to provide people with decent sexuality education and which did more to encourage contraceptive use and so on...

Ok - that was my first attempt to write down the product of an internal ongoing conversation I've been having about all this. I don't know if it worked, but I do know that I want to get outside and catch some Southerly Storm in Cook Strait. So enough for now.

_____________________________________________________________
*Which, of course, doesn't necessarily mean outlawing it as laws aren't always the best way to achieve societal ends.
** Except in cases of the death penalty which I oppose and self defence, which seems more reasonable.

Anti-Capitalism, Distopia and the Absense of the State

Once, in the days before this blog, I ended up in an email argument with an economics professor. My reward for daring to ponder the political impacts of trade liberalisation was a diagnosis. I suffered, I was told, from a latent hostility to capitalism. The only cure, apparently, was a regular dose of Hayek and Freidman.

Now I've spent a fair bit of time with doctors over the years and been told some pretty strange things about my auto-destructing body. So I'm well aware that it's natural, when on the receiving end of bad medical news, to think "no! that's not right! that's not me!" But, even taking this into account, I still think he was off the mark.

Certainly his prescription seemed unlikely to cure me of anything. Hayek and Freidman are very smart and Hayek not quite the libertarian his followers claim, but their utopian vision of unfettered markets strikes me now, as it did then, as completely unconvincing.

On the other hand, the social democracy of economists as diverse as Paul Krugman and John Kenneth Galbraith, seems like a capitalism that could and, indeed, almost does, work.

Krugman also has the best argument in capitalism's favour that I've read. This is simply a paraphrase of Churchill. Capitalism is "the worst system we've tried except every other system we've ever tried". Private property and markets, tempered by democracy and the welfare state aren't always pretty but we've lived through an awfully ugly century and maybe it's time to settle for second best.

And yet: "ever tried" and "might ever try" are two completely different things. So, at the same time time, I'm still interested in alternatives even if I'm not convinced that they exist.

In this fascinating paper on utopias and the left Erik Olin Wright provides an excellent system for evaluating leftwing alternatives to the status quo.

We should evaluate utopian projects he argues in terms of desirability, viability and achievablility.

Desirability - is the proposed world one we'd really want to live in an ethical sense?
Viability - could the proposed world ever actually work?
Achievability - could we get there from here?

One alternative to capitalism that has been proposed but never put into practice over long periods of time on a large scale (and which, therefore, emerges unscathed from the last 100 years) is Anarchism.

Anarchism certainly, I think, passes the desirability test; in an ethical sense a world free of coercion and held together by cooperation sounds beautiful, if it could work.

But could it? Is it, to use Wright's terms, viable? Maybe, if you believe in entirely altruistic human beings, but I don't. I don't believe in the opposite either (in the solely self-interested individuals of some economic theory). But surely there's enough self-interest in our psyches to necessitate some formalised coercion to prevent injustice? Maybe we could call this instrument of coercion something other than the state but that's what it would be.

One counter argument I've heard is that an anarchist world would also be a localist one. In it we would all live in units small enough that our impulse to care for our neighbours would be sufficient to hold society together. And maybe it would. But units that small, unless they traded heavily, would also be deprived of all the economic benefits scale and specialisation can bring. We might, in other words, be wealthy ethically, but materially we would be dirt poor. Maybe, then these communities could trade together? But who would regulate such trade? who would make sure it was fair? The state?

Finally, we have the issue of achievability. Even if such a world could work, could we ever create it from the one we have at present? This isn't an issue just for anarchism of course, but any major reforms, including plenty I am in favour of. And Wright's thoughts on achievability, and its relationship to viability are definitely worth reading.

Now in saying all this I am most definitely not attacking anarchists. All the anarchists I've met (admittedly a small sub group) have been kind, smart, committed people. I'm also aware in writing this that I'm no expert on anarchism so it may well be the case that I'm missing something. And I know my objections above aren't new, so maybe there are some good counter arguments. If this is the case I'd be really interested in reading about them.

Finally, I do think that there are some important insights in some anarchist thought, too. Particularly about the de-hierarchialisation of power. Insights which could provide all sorts of ideas for deepening democracy, if not actually replacing capitalism. Those thoughts, though, are for another post.

She'll be Right

They call him the Professor, although he's not an academic as far as I'm aware. In the world of Wellington surfing even something as simple as the ability to read a weather map can garner you a reputation for bookishness and a moniker to match.

He's a slightly portly, balding middle aged man who rides a boogie board and the first time we met we didn't get off to a great start. We were surfing my regular spot when a wave came through. In all fairness it was probably his, but I hadn't had a wave for a while so I tried to nab it off him. I was the regular, I figured it was mine. He figured it was his. And quite some grumpiness and nasty stares ensued.

Did I ever tell you that I can be a dork in the surf?

It could have been the beginning of an ongoing enmity - the sort that spoils numerous surfs - but the ocean had other plans for us. A few days later the two of us ended up surfing alone in very good waves at another nearby spot. Now I'm a dork but I'm not that much of one. Neither was he and, rather than wreck the best surf we were both going to have in a while pretending not to notice each other, to our credit we both did the sensible thing. We smiled and talked.

And since then, we've done our best to be cordial in and amongst the desperately scare resource that is good Wellington waves.

Sometime last year I was driving to my favourite local spot, when I saw him walking along the road. The last section of that drive is on private property and he took the "No Driving Beyond This Point" signs seriously. No one else did. I stopped and offered him a lift.

"Sure. Thanks"
"Looks like that wind's swung round to the north"
"Yeah, real clean. I think it was westerly earlier so we've got lucky"
"Swells a bit small though."
"But hey"
"There's waves."

By that stage we'd parked the car and were walking to the beach. And I thought I'd broaden the discussion. "So, how's things been otherwise", I asked.

"Oh, not so good, I've been diagnosed with cancer. I start chemo next week"
"Sh#t. That's not good. What's the prognosis?"
"There's about an 80% survival rate."

In my defense, it wasn't the sort of conversation I was planning on having that afternoon. And, really, I'm much wiser if I have a chance to jot down a few speech notes ahead of time. So my reply was pretty much stock standard.

"Oh well. 80 percent's pretty good. She be fine I'm sure mate."

At 80% the odds are in your favour. They're even better at 95%. And better still at 99%.

And it's these latter two numbers that are following me round at present. For someone young and fit like myself the risk of dieing in a simple aortic valve-replacement operation is probably under one in one hundred. If my aortic root needs to be replaced it's more like 5 in 100. The risk of a stroke or some sort of brain damage, or other unpleasant complications, is somewhat higher but the numbers are still on my side.

Which is good. But not good enough to stop me from feeling frightened. When it's you contemplating lying on the operating table, even a small risk of disaster starts to feel uncomfortably large.

Hhhhmmm...so what was my point? Oh, yeah, I figured I wanted to blog about open heart surgery honestly. And being honest - I have to admit I worry. And I suspect that, over the coming weeks, my ongoing battle with this worry will be unavoidable. Something I need to get on top of. And I imagine this is the case for most people in my situation.

And my other point: being on the other end of those stats now, I'm pretty sure that my "she'll be right mate" response to the Professor wasn't the right one." I've had people say the same to me, and I really appreciate them trying to be reassuring, but I think if I were in the same situation again I'd say something like "oh, how do you feel about that?"

And maybe I would have, that afternoon, with the Professor, if given more time. But right at that moment a particularly good wave came through. And we were both racing to get into our wetsuits and out into the water before the sun started to set behind the Kaikouras.

Internet Argument

Oh - could this be the best XKCD ever?

Internet Argument

hhhhhhmmmmmm...well the competition for 'best ever' is tough. But this cartoon rings true to me.

Not about everyone I've ever argued with, but for a certain type of internet adversary (hello Neal are you still out there?). These people infuriate you at first but, while you may never end up agreeing with them, at some point in time, through some mysterious mechanism, you end up realising that they're just another person like you. With different - mistaken! - beliefs, certainly. But also with their own fears and hopes, cruelnesses and kindnesses, and all those other shared things that get lost in between servers.

Once you realise this it's much harder to be ruder to someone online than you would be in person...

An interesting read

(no, really, it is!) a nice simple summary [PDF] of the political economy of taxation in Latin America.

Asymmetric Information

Sigh. Life would be easier as an agent in an economic model.

After my valve replacement surgery, assuming everything goes to plan, I'll be taking blood thinners for the rest of my life. Being on blood thinners doesn't mean that if I knick myself shaving I'll bleed to death. But it will increase the hassle of this activity. And, to be honest, it's a hassle enough as it is. So I'm thinking of buying an electric razor.

Easy enough.

Or not.

For a start I have no exact idea how much I'm willing to spend (or, to be more specific the worth of the extra utility I'll gain for it). But I'm guessing I'm aiming for something mid-range.

The main thing though, is that I want to buy something at least semi-decent. But, every different shaver I've seen makes that promise. The trouble is I have much less idea how true these promises are than the people who make them. I have, in other words, an asymmetric information issue.

I've tried to correct this by:

1. Consumer magazine: nothing on shavers.
2. Choice magazine: nothing on shavers since 2004 and even that was pretty crappy.
3. Which magazine. Something on shavers in 2007, which claimed that even quite cheap ones can do a good job. The problem is that I need a subscription to Which to find out any more. Which I'm willing to get except that the F'ing magazine only offers online payment options to people in the UK or Ireland.

So I still don't know what to get. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them...

[Update: sigh...no comments. Which might mean this blog has no readers. But I doubt it. I suspect something quite different.

Typical Laanta Reader]

The Butterfly Effect

If a butterfly hadn't flapped its wings on a warm autumn morning somewhere in New South Wales, then that small low pressure system floating in the Tasman might have never picked up extra water.

And if it hadn't picked up the water, maybe it wouldn't have rained so hard as it crossed the lower North Island.

And if it hadn't rained so hard. I mightn't have driven my car slushing over the melted gravel roads to a river mouth in southern Wairarapa hoping to catch waves at a spot that never breaks.

And if I hadn't found those waves, I might never have surfed in the gritty water around the bar as the storm run off mixed into the sea.

And if I hadn't surfed in that water I might have never picked up that ear infection.

And if I hadn't got the infection maybe my arthritis wouldn't have come back so bad.

And if it hadn't, maybe it wouldn't have damaged my aorta.

And if my valve wasn't damaged then I wouldn't be worrying about open heart surgery.

...

And if I ever find that butterfly, trust me, there are going to be some strong words.

Discounting

Were there any peeping Toms in Island Bay last Wednesday they would have been in for a shock. At 7.21pm, towards the eastern edge of the suburb, a man could have been spotted leaping from the bath, and running naked into the lounge shouting 'I've found it!'. Which was a bit of an undue claim, as it happens, as I hadn't found anything. I'd just finally got my head around the concept of discounting as it relates to climate change. All this was thanks to a very handy paper from Geoffrey Heal of Columbia University [pdf]. Heal's paper also explains how William Nordhaus is able to get such counter-intuitive results from his economic models as to whether or not we should do anything about climate change. Nordhaus, while admitting that climate change is real and serious, argues that the economics of the matter suggest that we do little. Nordhaus's models have been used by people like Bjorn Lomberg to suggest that we should turn a blind eye to the issue and by others to 'prove' that the Stern Review on climate change is wrong.

My recommendation is that you read Heal's paper yourself to get an understanding of all this. What follows is just my own attempt to crystalise my learning by trying to explain it. I may get it wrong.

Discounting is a tool that economists use to help us weigh costs and benefits across time.

There are several important components to any discounting equation.

The first of these is the pure rate of time preference, which is a function that reflects, in Heal's words, "the rate at which we discount the welfare of future people just because they are in
the future".

A rate of zero will mean that we discount their welfare not at all. Rates greater than zero will suggest that we place less value on their lives. Stern chose a pure rate of time preference slightly higher than zero to take into account the fact that there is a slight chance that there may be no future generations (if, for example, the Earth is hit by an asteroid). If you choose rates much higher than Stern's you are essentially saying that the lives of people living in the future are less valuable than those living at present. Discriminating across time in other words. Like all forms of discrimination, discrimination across time is hard to defend in any ethical sense. Yet a surprising number of people who call for little action on climate change on economic grounds are doing so because they make use of models with high pure rates of time preference. Their argument is, in effect, that, we shouldn't take action now because your grandchildren don't matter as much as you do. Seriously.

The next important component is simply the degree to which you think consumption will increase between now and the day of reckoning. This seems simple enough, yet as Heal points out most economic models of climate change are based on a simple consumption function that uses a single consumption good. In reality we consume many goods, and there are important ones of which our consumption may decrease, despite increasing overall consumption. Goods (services) related to natural capital may, in particular, decrease as a result of climate change. And these are some of the goods most important to our wellbeing. The models, in other words, are a bit fuzzy on the stuff that matters. They're also fuzzy on distributional issues (i.e. who does the consuming - rich or poor).

The third important component to our equation is the impact of consumption on utility (wellbeing). Perhaps one of the most sensible assumptions that one can make in economics is diminishing marginal utility. That is, the more we have, the less the next unit of consumption will contribute to our wellbeing. So when discounting a number is included into the equation to reflect the fact that future changes in consumption will be less important than current ones because we'll be richer then (and diminishing marginal utility would suggest that a change in consumption of value x will have an impact of y on wellbeing now but less than y in the future when x is greater). One thing to note is that Partha Dasgupta takes Stern to task for under assuming diminishing marginal utility. I'm not sure Dasgupta is right to do this but that's a post for another day. Another point to note is that there are also distributional issues at play. Most regimes for addressing climate change are structured so that wealthier nations bear the brunt of the costs. On the other hand if we do nothing it may be the poorest who are hit hardest - so therefore diminishing marginal utility could be inserted into a model in a manner opposite to the way it is used at present. Meaning that it would increase the case for action rather than decrease it.

Now, where was I? Oh, that's right, so what's the matter with Nordhaus's model. In a nutshell he calculates the pure rate of time preference from the observed rate of return on capital. Heal details all the problems with this but the most glaring one to me is simply that Nordhaus is confusing 'is' with 'ought'. Which is just so wrong in this instance it isn't funny. There are also all sorts of other problems including the way risk is managed and the assumptions needed to even consider deriving discounting from the rate of return to capital but you're better reading them from Heal's mouth than mine. I gotta run now...dinner needs to be cooked...but in the meantime remember this one thing:

Nordhaus's work like so much in economics brings with it the veneer of certainty that comes with numbers and maths. But underneath the surface is a much less clear world - one of philosophy. At the very least this ought undermine the tone of certainty with which people appeal to Nordhaus when they argue against action on climate change. But I also think it's worse than that. I think Nordhaus gets the philosophy horribly wrong. As far as dicsounting goes, we ought to discount Nordhaus.

[Update: added a bit more under diminishing marginal utility.]

Really smart religious person thingy

A common criticism of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that they only ever argue against a dumbed down version of religion, and that there are more subtle, sophisticated arguments out there which they have no answer for. As an agnostic I'm open to this line of attack; I've no dog, or god for that matter, in the race really, and I'm genuinely interested in whether a better case can be made for the various divine beings of the various holy books.

So I listened intently when Kim Hill interviewed respected religious philosopher William Lane Craig this morning (link to audio and will break after a few weeks unfortunately). To be fair to Mr Craig, Kim Hill, in between her rapid-fire thinking and interruptions, isn't the easiest sparring partner*, but I thought he was really, really weak. He had no satisfying answer to the problem of evil, nor the existence of other religions. And his 5 key arguments (or however many there were) were shot full of holes. At other times she just clobbered him with his own disingenuous debating points (like how he stays out of politics except on abortion which is an ethical issue, to which Ms Hill kindly pointed out that most people would consider at least some of the other stuff covered in politics ethical).

Really, if this is as good as the theists can do**, then the New Atheists do seem to be pitching their arguments at just the right level.

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*And, to also be fair to Kim Hill I should point out, for her faults, she's still pretty fab. I could do with out the how to cook duck stuff. And the interruptions every time the interviewee pauses for either breath or thought are infuriating if you're trying to actually understand the subject at hand. But, despite all this, she's smart, knows her stuff, and has covers some excellent subject matter.
** I had a hack at trying to make the case for a kind of Christianity here.

Fun

Two comics which made me laugh.

One

Two

Interesting

George Monbiot on the merits of small farms.

[Update: Paul Collier argues the opposite (more or less)]