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Dealing with complexity 1: Political Risk Analysis

July 3, 2022

I’ve been reading John C. Hulsman’s To Dare More Boldly: The audacious story of Political Risk (Princeton University Press 2018). I have no idea whether this is considered a good book or not but its interesting. He gives ten principles for political risk and, in so doing, points towards principles useful for dealing with complexity, as what could more complex than political behaviour between nations?

Today I’m going to consider the first principle, and show that while its good, he actually ignores it in favour of ‘received knowledge,’ ‘individualism,’ and apparently ‘meaningless words’….

“We are the risk”

The point here is that we tend to ignore our own possible failings, or the failings of the systems we like. We look elsewhere for the problems.

For example, the author attended a Council of Foreign Relations meeting, and he suggested that American “political sclerosis” (whatever that is) was one of the ten most significant political risks in the world today, he was told it was the rest of the world that was the problem, not the USA, which could be left out of the problem sphere (p.45).

This is pretty clearly not a useful form of analysis, as the USA interacts with everyone else (complexity) and therefore has an effect on the result – no matter how ‘healthy’ it might be.

Another way of looking at his point, is that civilisations which collapse under external attack first suffer an internal collapse that makes them vulnerable.

He suggests that 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon makes this kind of analysis in his Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or as he summarises:

Rome fell not primarily because of outside pressures but rather owing to an internal and gradual loss of civic virtue amongst its citizens

(P.43)

Now as an anthropologist I’m going to state that a decline in civic virtue, is not an explanation of anything. It is a statement of what might have happened. We may also need to ask, what caused this decline? What made the decline seem reasonable to people? What are the structures and processes involved? What are the complex interactions that lead to collapse, or slow phase out. I doubt that many individual people woke up one morning and said to themselves: “that’s it for civic virtue” and then Rome fell, or as Hulsman puts it

society atrophied as a result of personal failings that accumulated over time

(p 48).

If its personal failings there is nothing we can do, except blame others. However, if its shared personal failings or social dynamics then we can look around to find common causes and remedy them. Pretty obviously Rome in the East continued on for quite a long time (falling in 1453) so its a bit foolish to just focus on Rome in the West (476, almost a thousand years earlier), and we need to know what civic virtue (or personal failings) even are, and how they changed – not just assume they are immediately obvious, and obviously important because we like the idea and maybe think we are virtuous and have them.

Gibbon may have thought that Roman civic virtue was a matter of militarism.

The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine

Christians, while violent, did not support the military as such, and hence helped the downfall. However, Gibbon begins this passage by making an added point.

Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

The Roman Empire became too big, and to clumsy to control, and to respond properly to challenges, as well as Romans becoming less interested in constant military ventures which consumed even more energy away from making it work. It is doubtful that even a modern empire with internet, jets and satellite can expand forever and hold its conquered land, as its context of supply chains, identity failure and local resistances grow more and more complicated.

However the point is clear, as Hulsman says, Rome may have eventually fallen because of a failure “to recognise and combat [the] home grown problems” of its Empire. This is a form of societal suicide which he calls ‘decadence’ (nothing like having a word that already tells you something is bad to help your judgements, and think you mean something) which he defines as “a society’s loss of ability to deal with its problem, coupled over time with a long-term abdication of responsibility for them” (p44).

My personal guess is that a lot of Romans probably tried to take responsibility for the problems, by blaming other people for them – despised classes like passive people, lazy workers, prostitutes, gays, people reveling in Luxury, nouveau riche, freed-slaves, Christians and later pagan philosophers etc. and they probably felt quite proud of facing up to the faults of others and berating them (Juvenal for example). Our vocabulary for condemning decadence (not being the same as we once were) very likely comes from Romans condemning each other.

Anyway, the point is that the Empire grew to such a size that it had to use barbarians to make its legions – which might have lengthened the decline – after all it gave the Barbarians something to fight for that wasn’t the fall of Rome, and made them invested in the Empire itself to an extent – they could become Roman citizens. They lived dangerous lives and got paid for it.

However, it is possible that ordinary citizens no longer saw the Empire as a particular advantage for them and lost interest…. It solved problems which did not seem that relevant to them, or it created problems for them – such as finding work, finding land, not having political representation, being unable to make social change and so on. Sport, public murder, and religious dispute, was all they might have had left to make a meaning for life

Hulsman further discusses the dangers of the Praetorian guard who were meant to defend the Emperor and family, but became a force in themselves from quite early on. They slaughtered emperors they did not like, appointed new people to the throne, and demanded higher and higher payments for loyalty – because they were necessary. Obviously not a mechanism for stable government, but it did not immediately cause the collapse of Rome, as the Emperor Constantine disbanded them and destroyed their barracks when he invaded Rome in AD 312.

So the main take away is the problems may issue from us, from the way we approach the problems, or the way we organise ourselves – but it is not simple.

The ‘Perfidious French’

Rather oddly, instead of moving to look at his own society from this point of view, he moves to condemn the modern day French. Let’s charitably assume that this is because he thinks Europe is part of the US, or he will talk about the US later on….

He discusses the events of August 2003 when Paris suffered a heat wave and large numbers of people died. To quote wiki:

In France, 14,802 heat-related deaths (mostly among the elderly) occurred during the heat wave, according to the French National Institute of Health.[6][7] France does not commonly have very hot summers, particularly in the northern areas,[8] but eight consecutive days with temperatures of more than 40 °C (104 °F) were recorded in Auxerre, Yonne in early August 2003.[9]

Wiki 2003 European heat wave.

Houses in France are not generally built for heat waves. Hulsman alleges that the French government, and doctors (?), did nothing. The relevant ministers were on holiday and reluctant to come back to the heat. Many people who died where healthy people living alone, and the government blamed French Families for not taking care or elderly relatives.

Hulsman blames:

  • The sanctity of French summer Holidays (Lazy selfish people)
  • Worship of an unsustainable mode of living (not ecologically unsustainable, but unsustainable in terms of capitalist economics.)
  • Europe “rotting from within” with decadence.
  • People avoiding responsibility for their kin.
  • Growing older populations
  • People wanting too much from work.

His solution, is pretty obvious for a North American. Capitalism.

Lets not bother to look at whether the Capitalist system still works or not. Let’s not bother to ask whether something we like, or participate within, is a problem or not. Capitalism may be great for getting development going, but after its reached a point in which a very few of the people own nearly everything, and have bought the political system and taken it away from the people, is it still the solver of all problems? Or is it a generator of at least some significant problems? Is economic growth a solution or a problem? Not asking these questions is like avoiding American “political sclerosis.” It is violating the principle that “We are the risk”.

Let us assume he is correct and that capitalist markets in Europe are not allocating most people enough money for what they want to do, and that it will all crash down. Then how are you going to sell a project which means – YOU (other people) work harder, take home less pay, get less benefits, retire later, pay increased personal taxes if middle class, have pensions privatised and subject to risk and rip off, in return for an uncertain promise that allowing other people to earn more in half an hour than you do all year round, might fix the problem or might not. This sounds like a standard neoliberal solution in which austerity is for the poor and the middle classes. Indeed Austerity seems to be both the solution and the result.

The wider questions around Are we the problem?

Capitalism as a problem?

He may be correct that Euro-capitalism is dying, but is the only solution US style capitalism, which could also be said to be dying? Or could it be something new?

Do we need to abandon capitalism? I’m not suggesting we always do (although there are obvious problems with neoliberal capitalism and its theories which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but it needs to be examined if the Anglo-sphere is not just to rest on its claimed laurels.

Are people uninvolved because neoliberalism encourages a “selfish” individual focus?

Are people uninvolved because capitalism encourages obedience to bosses, and irrational managerial restructures in which no one affected is ever listened to?

Are people uninvolved, because all spiritual and psychological questions become reduced to purchases?

Are people uninvolved because capitalism reduces tradition to obstruction?

Are people uninvolved because capitalism:

has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. 

Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto

I don’t know, but they, and other questions, are questions worth asking.

We could also note that pro-corporate media is very keen on the idea that people who die of Covid, die with Covid, have existing conditions, or are old and useless and would die anyway. We repeatedly here how old people are a cost not a benefit, and so it is perhaps no wonder that people ignore the elderly and leave them to die. That they are solely a cost and burden, as they are retired, might even be an implicit message in his own arguments…

If people cannot labor, in relevant fields, or have no money to invest, do they have any value in capitalism?

That a form of capitalism worked well in the 60s to 70s in the Anglo-sphere to bring prosperity, social mobility, art, and education to all is not a guarantee that neoliberal capitalism will do the same, work now, or could not be modified with consultation. We could look at it as a potential cause of problems. Or do we have to protect capitalism from being considered even briefly a problem generator? There is plenty of degrowth economics around.

While it is cynical, we might find the answer to the question of why are these questions completely avoided in a chapter on not avoiding questions which implicate ourselves by reading the opening chapter and finding out that most political risk analysis is sold to corporations. Telling them capitalism might need to be changed is possibly limiting the market.

Climate

Lets look in a wider sphere, dragging in events or contexts he seems to be ignoring. Events only have meaning in context.

Can you publish a book on real political risk in 2018 without mentioning climate change and ecological decay. I don’t know yet, but I suspect you can. There is no entry for these problems in the index.

People did not normally die in late summer in Paris from heat. The contexts of events are changing. Climate change was already here in 2003. However at that time, probably no government or corporation on Earth recognised climate change as a current problem. There was little to no preparation for it. It was in the distant future, despite the warnings. So it is not surprising that few people were prepared. This was unusual. Nights in Paris are usually cool, but this time they were not. Houses did not cool over night.

Summer 2003 was the hottest in Europe since 1500, very likely due in part to anthropogenic climate change. The French experience confirms research establishing that heat waves are a major mortal risk, number one among so-called natural hazards in postindustrial societies. Yet France had no policy in place, as if dangerous climate were restricted to a distant or uncertain future of climate change, or to preindustrial countries. 

Marc Poumadère, Claire Mays, Sophie Le Mer, Russell Blong. The 2003 Heat Wave in France: Dangerous Climate Change Here and Now. Risk Analysis 25(6): 1327-1687

Let us remember the Australian Governments some 15 years later and their complete lack of interest in climate change, and complete lack of preparedness for the “black summer” bushfires and the huge floods a few years later. It is much harder to excuse these pro-market people for their failure, than the French; especially after all the warnings and the wild events around the world. However, people like Bjorn Lomborg are still trying to argue that heat is not as deadly as a cold people will be unlikely to suffer in France; indeed that heat saves lives [1], [2].

Capitalism, and pro-capitalist governments, have not been good at dealing with climate change, although they have been good at denying climate change and resisting social change to deal with it. Given this, it seems even more odd to argue that capitalism is a solution for either the problems of climate change in France, or the long-term problems of the French Economy.

Conclusions

It is worthwhile looking at the failures of our own system, or the systems we like, and not to protect them from questions, when we are considering the future. “We, and what we like, are (part of) the risk“.

It is also useful to look at the contexts of those system we live within, such as the global ecology and the global climate. These are changing and will challenge established systems which grew up within different systems and developed different expectations as a result.

Something which once worked ‘well-enough,’ may now no longer work, because it operates differently dues to internal changes, or the context it is working within is now different.

In terms of climate politics we might need to look at how our attempts to initiate lower emissions, renewable energy, ecological care and so on, are maladaptive, remembering again that: “We, and what we like, are part of the risk to our own success and to our own future.”

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Social Roots of Stupidity II

July 3, 2022

Misinformation grows quickly

It is easier and much quicker to lie, or to invent something that sounds right, or that people might want to believe, than it is to research a topic thoroughly, and check that everything you have read is correct and that your understanding (of everything involved) is accurate.

  • Note a source does not have to be deliberately lying. There is no difference between a lie and a mistake as far as misinformation is concerned.

If you release a lot of lies, and are like Trump and get a lot of coverage, then you can see which ones are taken up, and follow them up with more reinforcing fake news to fill in the gaps and help convince people that misinformation is real.

Misinformation evolves. That which appeals to its audience, will spread the furthest. Random misinformation allows the audience to choose what to spread on its own.

Social bias as a filter

In information society, there is always way too much information out there to evaluate it properly or test it for truth. Testing information takes time and dedication. Consequently, the main ways of judging information is:

  • By whether it harmonises with information, attitudes, cosmologies, religions or morals, you already have, or with actions you already take or would like to take.
  • By whether it is promoted by people who you consider to be be members of your group, or having a similar identity.
  • By whether it is promoted by high status people who you consider to be members of your group.
  • By whether it makes your groups virtuous and outgroups vicious, immoral or evil.
  • By whether it will cost you social status to accept or refuse to accept the information.
  • By how essential the information becomes for acting within your main groups.
  • By whether it promotes emotions that are righteous in your group.
  • If its promoted by people you dislike, and distrust, who contradict those in your groups, then its probably fake.

Information will be judged socially. Acceptance is geared towards survival in particular groups, with particular kind of identities, and maintaining hostility towards other groups.

The more you think your ‘opponents’ are lying, the more excuse there is to lie yourself.

The less identity groups are polarised, or separated, and the more they are included in a wider category (such as ‘fellow Australians’), then the more likely that information can be evaluated with accuracy.

Information as programming

Information tells people what is important in life and the world, what they should look for, and what counts as data. This is sometimes known as the “theory dependence of observation”.

Another way of describing this is via the slogans: “Perception involves interpretation,” “We put meaning onto the world.” “Our thoughts shape the world we perceive”.

This process is not an completely unbreakable loop, but it can be hard to break.

Humans tend to find what they are looking for, so if you program people with the right misinformation, then they will soon find their own misinformation and see connections that are not there. If those connections get taken up, then even more people will fall into the trap. Especially if agreeing with information becomes tied in with their membership of a group and of an identity – and people start indicating that the person is not a proper ‘X’ because they don’t accept the ‘truth’.

As suggested earlier, if authoritative people in the group start repeating the misinformation as true, and it points to the evils of an outgroup, then it is even more likely to be believed, and never to be challenged. The consequences are too high. More misinformation will be produced in order to make the misinformation, and the world it reveals, more believable.

Having their attention directed away from reality, and into confirmation bias and group loyalty, normally increases a person’s incapacity to interact with the world as that world is. Misinformation can increase stupidity, lower resilience, and lead to a bad end, as people ignore real problems and complexities in favour of imaginary problems and simplicities or complications.

Conclusion

Misinformation thrives because accuracy is hard, requires checking and is limited. Misinformation does not have to be checked to see if its accurate, and it can go anywhere that people take it. If information is tied into a group identity, that it becomes even harder to stop, because stopping it challenges group and individual identity and can be seen as an imposition on a person’s liberty.

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Social roots of stupidity

June 24, 2022

I’ve said this before but why not again?

In the 80s right wing parties, in much of the Western World, embraced neoliberalism. The official excuse was the oil shock and stagflation (inflation and stagnation together). The Keynesian compromise did not seem to be working.

Neoliberalism is essentially the public doctrine that the free market liberates creativity and solves all possible problems the best possible way, and brings liberty, as the government “gets out of your life”

The secret doctrine of neoliberalism, which is pretty open, is that the market rules, and makes the rules, and government should aim to protect successful players in the market, as they are the best possible people. Hierarchy in the market is god-given. and market leaders are chosen by the market for their virtues. Even monopoly in a market is competitive according to ‘Contestability theory’.

This policy aims to give more power and wealth to the established wealth elites, and takes money, power and working conditions from the poorer and the middle classes. As a result, the new Wealth Elites are amazingly more wealthy and powerful than even the ordinary wealthy.

You cannot honestly sell these policies to the electorate in a democracy.

  • So you need culture wars about nothing.
  • You need to encourage anger and hysteria in the populace to inhibit calm dispassion
  • You need to encourage fear of other news sources
  • You need to make scapegoats who can be used to explain ordinary peoples’ losses, and who cannot respond in kind.

Democracy and a well informed electorate is anathema – because informed, powerful people would take back their power and ‘interfere in the market’ – perhaps to protect their local environment, stop their children being poisoned or shot, get better working conditions or higher pay etc. They might act to lower profit or reduce the wealth hierarchy – and this is bad, this is what neoliberalism protects corporations from, and so it endlessly promotes helplessness, distraction and displacement.

When neoliberalism clashes with the best knowledge we have, then the best knowledge we have has to be destroyed. People have to be told that by not believing this best knowledge they are being independent thinkers, and standing up to the left wing establishment who are supposedly oppressing them by promoting this knowledge.

The only real knowledge that can be allowed are worldviews that support neoliberalism.

So a significant number of people start believing whatever is reassuring: Climate change is not real. Climate change is not a problem. Covid restrictions are tyranny. Covid is a mild flu that rarely hurts anyone. Covid is a global medical conspiracy to impose communism. The US election was stolen by Joe Biden. Free Markets deliver liberty. etc etc

People become accustomed to believing improbable things, without wondering if they are true or not, or only reading those who support the untruths, and that becomes stupidity. One you accept one or two overtly false axioms you can be lead to believe almost anything.

Stupidity is a political policy- engineered to support and encourage plutocracy.

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The Great Delay on Climate

June 22, 2022

We gave up on climate long ago. We have known since the 70s of last century what the result of burning fossil fuels would be, and…..

  • We have had decades of avoidance.
  • Decades of pretending it is not a problem.
  • We’ve had fossil fuel companies and corporate networks pushing against action.
  • Corporately owned and controlled media has pretended that there is a major divergence of opinion about climate change, and promoted the fossil fuel company line.
  • Various pro-corporate think tanks have spread false information, to delay action and keep the system going.
  • We’ve had governments trying to make sure its always someone else who acts first.
  • We’ve had pro-corporate political parties refusing to act at all.
  • We’ve had pro-corporate political parties claiming that climate change was politicized, as they went about politicizing it.
  • We’ve had governments sponsor and encourage fossil fuels with taxpayers’ money.
  • We’ve had confusion as in Germany where they increased emissions from lignite and locked in diesel while they almost went renewable.
  • We have had a reduction in emissions, accidentally due to Covid, but (in the last 30 years) we have never reduced the trend of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
  • We’ve had pro-corporate think tanks, media and parties shouting out that it will be the end of the world if we act to reduce pollution and environmental destruction.

As a result, the world will almost certainly will not act to achieve the Paris goals, and those goals will probably not have been steep enough to change the trajectory in any case.

We are gaining truly bizarre temperature levels in various places including the poles. We are getting almost global extreme flood and fire events. We are having collapses in animal and insect populations, that will disrupt the ecologies we depend upon for food.

It is logical to assume that as we reach tipping points, and the tundras release vast clouds of methane and we keep increasing the mining and burning of fossil fuels, that things will get much worse. This is only now the beginning.

And still we keep refusing to act.

It gets more difficult to act the more we wait, and the worse the conditions get.

However, we are learning the truth. Many corporations do not care whether your life and livelihood is threatened or whether their civilization is likely to collapse etc, as long as they can keep making an easy profit. Governments will rarely act against established corporate interests. We have also learnt that there are lots of people who will go along with them rather than face up to significant problems – and that they will think they are virtuous for acting that way.

The main problem hindering action on climate change remains politics and power relations, and there is little sign it is changing in the large scale. Governments and business will not do it for us. If we want action, we have to act ourselves and organize and act together.

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Capitalism and Ideology

June 17, 2022

Its hard to say what capitalism is or is not, but relatively easy to point out when you are reading a book which is driven by ideology driven rather than by wanting to discover the truth about how capitalism works.

1) Funding

If the authors are, or were, funded by corporate sponsored think tanks or just plain sponsorship, then they are likely bought. They were chosen for their ability to please their corporate customers and their desires, and it becomes part of their job. Accuracy is almost certainly less important than maintaining their income. Hence by capitalist logic, we should be suspicious of these people. This covers a fair number of ‘Austrian’ and ‘free market’ writers.

2) Naturalisation

If the author presents capitalism as purely natural, and conflates capitalism with other forms of economic activity such as trade, exchange, production or so on, then its ideological. Communist societies engaged in trade and so on. We would expect communism and capitalism to be economically different. The term ‘Capitalism’ has to be limited to specific set of economic and political organisations or the term is meaningless.

3) Capitalist hierarchy is good

If the author presents the wealth hierarchy in capitalism as a matter of hard work, genius or customer satisfaction alone, then the work is ideological. Capitalism involves a form of political organisation which allows and reinforces the concentration of wealth amongst certain people, and hence the building of fixed hierarchy and power differences are essential parts of capitalism, which need to be part of our analysis, not counted as accidents or benefits.

4) Without a past

An ideological person may present capitalism as being without a history, to bury the violence, dispossession and theft (or colonialism) that has been a dynamic part of capitalist history, and can still be seen today. They are suppressing the roots and routes of capitalist development to make it look better. They may even argue that capitalism is always peaceful, ignoring the enclosure of the commons, the conditions of the working class in 19th Century England, the East India Company or the Opium Wars and many other acts of violence which have benefitted and helped originate capitalism – we could even argue World War I was entirely about defending and establishing colonial and capitalist empires.

Capitalism does not have a peaceful past, and that is part of the way it works.

5) Uniquely generates moral goods like ‘liberty’

If the person says that something valuable, like liberty, is a fundamental part of capitalism, then they are likely being driven by ideology. Capitalists like liberty for themselves, most dominating classes do. The question is ‘was liberty for the people something that had to be fought for, against capitalists or not’. The historical answer seems to be that it had to be fought for. Furthermore most pro-capitalist ideologies act to remove that liberty, by putting the liberty of corporations first, or attempting to restrict the power of organised labor. Pro-capitalists also tend to oppose social movements for the liberty of those still suffering from oppressive histories (calling them SJW etc). Liberty is not a natural result of capitalism, although, as said previously, capitalists like liberty for themselves, or for their liberty to be immune from considerations of public health, functioning ecologies, good working conditions, wealth sharing. etc.

Sometimes ideological authors engage in argument by punning saying that free markets lead to freedom, or that free markets are freedom. In practice the ‘free market’ devolves into whatever is best for the wealth elite, and gives them the freedoms they need and can obtain.

  • [This does not mean that there can be no liberty in any form of Capitalism. This had happened to some degree and needs investigation – what causes it?
  • A real ideologue will respond to the idea that capitalism is not about liberty, by creating a false dichotomy. Either you support whatever their version of capitalism is, or you supposedly support tyranny. No, you can support a kind of democratic capitalism, of the type that they have in Scandinavia, or had in the 50s, 60s and 70s in the US, UK and Australia. that is easy.]

Capitalism generates what is ‘profitable,’ or extractive, to the system, and this may, or may not be, what people think is morally good. It may not even be self-sustaining, but destructive in the long term.

6) Removes power inequalities

The fundamental social relationship in capitalism is between employer and employee, master and servant, boss and worker. This is rarely a relationship of liberty, and more usually a relationship of punitive obedience – to survive most people will ‘need’ a boss.

There is no necessary harmony between the working class and the capitalist class. Even capitalist theory should realise that, in general, workers want good wages, freedoms and good working conditions, and that capitalists want high profits and low costs. Labour is purely a cost to capitalists and the freer it is to disobey, or live independently of capitalism, the more costly it is. Capitalists also want cheap pollution, and cheap extraction, those affected by pollution and extraction do not.

7) Opposed to the State

Ideologues frequently claim that capitalism is opposed to the State. However, no form of capitalism has ever existed without a State, to protect wealth inequalities, labour inequalities, contract and obligation, the social forms required by capitalism, and to satisfy the wealth elites desire for power and control. Laws in capitalism are often about defending the rights of particular sections of the capitalist class. Even if this wasn’t the case with some laws, then there is nothing to prevent it from happening if enough capitalists desire it.

Some corporations are large enough and wealthy enough to count as mobile States in their own right

The idea that capitalism is opposed to the State functions as a method of explaining away the problems in capitalism – “it was the State what done it!” not the dynamics of capitalism. Where capitalism exists, then the State is largely controlled by the capitalist class, who buy politicians, regulations laws, and subsidies to help themselves survive. Where capitalism exists the State is the Capitalist State. Capitalism and the State are not separable, and hence the State is part of the system, not opposed to it.

The function of being opposed to the State, is to destroy, or ‘roll back’, any part of the State which might constrain capitalists, or benefit workers and other people, and to make the State purely plutocratic. Paradoxically those who opposed the State never seem to make it smaller, perhaps because that is not their aim. Controlling and punishing non-wealth-elites can take a lot of effort and State mechanics, as can subsidising businesses which supply the military.

8) People are simple

If an author states that people are primarily competitive, then they are driven by ideology. People are both competitive and co-operative. Indeed without co-operation you could not have most forms of competition like wars, or even like corporations. Usually the reason for ignoring co-operation is to pretend that the wealth elites will not co-operate together to take over the State or to found a State, for their group advantage. It also obscures the idea that crony capitalism, and state capture, are normal forms of capitalism.

Co-operation amongst the wealth elites leads to plutocracy, suppression of liberty for others, and the end of open markets.

9) Economic Man

Any book which reduces people to rational profit driven machines, is ideological. People are irrational and complicated. Any view which reduces people to competitive rational profit seeking machines is almost certainly going to destroy the conditions for human contentment or satisfying human life.

John Stuart Mill made this assumption to make economics simple for himself, without pretending that this was true, but it became taken as true, as it helps justify and naturalize capitalism

10) Markets are perfect information processors

Ideologists insist that markets are the best form of information processors. However, the information available in capitalism, tends towards information that encourages purchase, profit, extraction and more capitalist power. It is not geared towards capitalists recognising the signals that they are doing something pathological, before the destruction happens. Hence business cycles, corporate crashes, stock market crashes, market bubbles, ecological failures such as over-fishing and so on.

The market is, however, part of the ecology, and the ecology can be thought of as an information processor, but the way that information is processed is through disruption of ecological equilibrium, leading to disruption or destruction, as a new equilibrium is found. These new equilibriums do not have to be beneficial to previously existing life forms. The drive for immediate profit in the market may not signal this information in ways which can be recognised until too late.

That appears to be what is happening now with ecological destruction and climate change. Despite the dangers being reasonably obvious to many people (especially scientists), most capitalists keep on profiteering and making the dangers worse.

Taking the market ‘out’ of the bigger ecology, or making the market more important than the bigger ecology, or into the main information processor, makes the market a completely useless information processor, filled with falsity and avoidance, and headed towards destruction on a grand scale.

Conclusion

If a book only considers an ideal capitalism, or an imagined capitalism, it is ideological. Any true consideration of capitalism must consider real forms of capitalism, their history and mess. We cannot do economics, or any other social science, in the abstract.

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Borders in the global world

May 27, 2022

National borders

First thing that has to be grasped. Fixed borders between countries seem to be a relatively recent development. In ‘olden days’ people would cross from one country, or duchy or whatever, to another as part of daily life, even when the law confined residence to a village. People on the border shifted around and generally ignored it. The borders where whatever could be held by the troops at the time – or when under challenge by other troops. The Roman and Chinese Empires did not have fixed borders as far as I can tell. Borders were fluid although often based on rough geographical features. Borders may be argued over, if they exist at all. In Hunter and Gatherer societies ‘borders’ are matters of respect, and occasionally of what you can defend – other people may wander into your territory all the time. Central sacred sites may be more important than the borders around. Lack of firm borders may not be a problem with the proper requests, or if you don’t meet each other. Borders may be marked by myths or pronounced geographical features. The land owns you, not vice versa.

In the modern world Borders can be so arbitrary they can even be lines on maps drawn on a latitude line, which is purely conceptual and does not correspond to any geographical, or mythical, features at all. These borders are not real other than in the sense that social conventions are real.

Even Islands like Australia do not have clear borders. We have had long term people movement and small trade between Australia, Indonesia, Papua Niugini and the Pacific Islands and this has not stopped, and will probably will not stop without local disruption. In the USA, large sectors of the economy seem to depend on fluid borders, and large parts of Mexico depend on income being sent home from the USA. Cutting that flow off completely may have unintended consequences for both countries.

Taking borders as real and fixed leads to problems, especially in the modern world which, whether we want it to be or not, is global. However, this does not mean that a country has no right to enforce its borders, just that this may be more complex and have more side effects than the people imposing those borders think.

Borders and Climate

Climate change is not local. It does not respect human borders. Our country’s pollution affects people as far away as India or Iceland. We are helping to cause temperatures to rise in Pakistan to 50 degrees C. (122 degrees F). Chinese decisions likewise affect us.

We need to not only work within our borders but across borders. If we make emissions worse, we make it worse for all, including ourselves. We are not safe from the emissions of the coal, gas and oil that we export when they are burnt in other countries – even if these emissions are not counted as being our emissions. Everything we do affects others and ourselves as we live on an interlinked Planet not just in a bordered country. What we do influences how others behave. If we set a bad example, then other people will excuse themselves as well, and that will affect us.

If governments do not understand this, then they have no hope of understanding climate change, or dealing with it.

Borders and Economy

We now live in a global economy. We probably have done so for a long time. However, it is now clear, that economic events in one country affect economic events in other countries. If Russia blocks exports of Ukrainian wheat, that affects the world. If banks in China collapse because of bad local loans, that affects the world. When financial companies in the US tried to defraud home loan owners in large enough quantities – that did affect the world. Money lost in one part of the world effects operations in other parts of the world. If companies go to where the labor is cheapest, and the pollution costs smallest, that affects everyone, and likely puts downward pressure on wages and environmental regulation in other places. If companies can find no tax zones that affects everyone, and lessens money for social spending. Economic crashes may not be confined within borders, especially when companies are not so confined. Inflation and depression are often cross-border events. Neither Biden nor Trump could keep inflation outside the borders of the USA.

Large corporations are commonly cross border institutions. They export something from one country and sell it in another. They make some parts in one country and use them in another. They may generally not be self-supporting in one country – they require many countries, and they ignore borders, except for the advantage that local regulation can give them. Exports and imports between countries can exist within the one company.

Companies have the wealth of small (and sometimes quite large) States, and push States around rather than vice versa. Corporations have the advantage of mobility, which States do not have. They can move from one place to another leaving destruction behind. Consequently, no country has complete control over its economy, and its economy depends on other economies. Economies do not respect borders. If you are going to understand and deal with economies you have to understand this.

Borders and the Military

Military threats also don’t respect borders. Never have. Civil wars are always destructive. It is now easy to smuggle incredibly destructive weapons into countries. The US is probably in as much, or more, danger from internal threats than from external threats. An Atom bomb set off by an internal terrorist is as physically dangerous as a bomb launched by a foreign power, and it is probably more psychologically dangerous. Putin’s Russia is facing a problem, not just because Ukraine is resisting far better than they expected, but also because the economy and resistance to the war is international, and does not respect the borders of the two warring countries. It is also forcing Russia to become dependent on China, and it seems unlikely the Chinese will be long term allies, or do not have some objective here that may not be in Russia’s interest. Ukraine used to be inside Russia’s borders, but it is not anymore. Powerful Russians seem to have thought Ukrainians thought of themselves as Russians, and as living within the Russian border, or within Russian influence, but it seems to have been wrong.

No country is immune to war because of its borders.

Borders and Fences

Borders are long and fragile. It is impossible to entirely fence off the USA from the rest of the world and stop people from crossing the fence, or to stop weather, ecology and climate from knocking the fence down. As plenty of other people have shown this is what has happened with Trump’s famous border wall/fence. It was easy to climb. It collapsed; blown over or swept away by rivers and floods. It stole private land. It was a waste of money and resources, and did not serve to protect the USA from climate problems, economic collapse, migration, or modern military challenges. At best it seems a distraction from the real problems…

Social Categories and Borders

It is generally assumed that social categories have firm borders, and people act as if this is correct, but it is often not correct. A few examples:

‘Racial’ categories, blend into each other. People breed with each other, sometimes by violence, but nevertheless they breed across cultural and racial groups People often seem to have ancestors from all over the world. People breed across borders and then inland from the borders, so the whole group is affected. It is unlikely that any country has ever been pure in ‘race’. Attempts to reinforce racial boundaries attack the reality of the mixtures.

Cultures borrow from each other, and separate from each other. They innovate and change – people are good at having new ideas. Attempts to reinforce cultural boundaries attack reality and creativity.

Class and caste borders are permeable – not only because we breed with each other, but because people do go up and down, people marry in – even in caste societies – wealth gets shared (although people can try and stop this). Attempts to reinforce class and caste borders attack reality and the distributions of talent and ability.

Male and female categories flow into each other, no matter how hard people try to police the boundaries, and punish ‘masculine’ women and ‘feminine’ men. Again, people have different abilities and it seems best if these competencies are recognised and allowed to flourish, so we can adapt to changes in reality.

More obviously, there is a tendency to treat people who identify with political parties, or positions, as if they are all the same, or at best, similar. Even a moments discussion should show people this is not true. Not all ‘right wingers’ think gays or lesbians should be exterminated or excluded. Not many ‘left wingers’ , think that people should be forced to be gay. Not all Conservatives are fans of free markets, or corporate power. Not all left wingers think capitalism and private property should be destroyed. The idea that people who support one thing, will support another is rarely correct. There is far more movement and room for alliance, than many influential people would be prepared to admit. The borders between parties are not as distant as is made out by people in power, and as was shown by the recent Australian election in which right wing candidates who firmly stated that they would promote action on climate change overthrew the established right wing who pretended that they were opposed to climate change. They attracted votes from all sides of politics (possible in the Australian voting system). The category borders appear to stop discussion, stop us from seeing what other people really think and stop the resolution of problems.

Borders

While they can be useful to mark differences, borders of all kinds are largely conceptual and conventional. They do not always solve real problems and may even make the problems worse. We need to avoid being distracted by them, or waste energy trying trying to enforce them, and reach across borders, to solve the world’s problems and to involve people in the process.

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More Information Mess: “This is generally bad, but this is an exception – and the exceptions do not add up…..”

May 27, 2022

The issue:

Just something obvious I’ve noticed recently – which suspect others will have noticed before me

People seem to be using a formulation of a rule which seems designed to discredit the rule it is supposed to be protecting. The formulation is of the form: “X is terrible and should be stopped. But any particular incidence of X can always be dismissed or excused.” These supposedly excusable cases are then claimed to not reinforce the problem of X.

The Heard Depp Dispute

I first noticed this as a regular thing, in a discussion about the Heard Depp trial. I’m not that interested in this trial, but I have noticed that it seems to be caught in a massive propaganda war, and that the ‘reporting’ I’ve seen seems to be overtly trying to influence my opinion on the subject and promote particular agendas and emotional reactions in its audience. Reporting seems to coagulate around two poles

  • a) women are hysterical liars who try to frame men by accusing them of rape and cruelty, when really the problem was the woman. Believe the man, castigate the woman. This is the position I have come across most often.

OR

  • b) Men are inherently violent and untrustworthy and women are constantly in danger all the time. Believe the woman, castigate the man.

I suspect that the divisions are likely to be based on gender and on Democrat and Republican political allegiance. It is also not surprising given the apparent aims of some of the reporting, that Heard claims she has received a torrent of abuse and death threats. The reporting would often seem to be aiming for that level of anger and interaction – perhaps apolitically, just to get eyeballs for advertising as the phrase goes.

To get back to the subject. In this charged atmosphere, I met someone who appeared to argue that he was opposed to Heard because she was ruining #Metoo for other women.

[I am not alleging anything about this particular person, this is a social phenomenon, not necessarily anything to do with individuals or their intentions.]

Anyway, in this case, the proposition mentioned above, appears to go:

“#Metoo is right for pointing out that women get beaten and raped by men regularly and that they then have their protests and charges casually and demeaningly dismissed as falsehoods, hysteria or malevolence.

“However in this particular case Heard is clearly hysterically and malevolently claiming to have suffered from threats and violence, and so her claims should be dismissed.

“This quick dismissal does not reinforce the difficulties that women face in coming forward.”

Given this dismissal, the death threats etc, she has likely received, can be ignored. It appears likely to me that after seeing what Heard has been through, even if she is proven to have lied, other women will feel inhibited about coming forward. Why, if they have been assaulted, should they suffer twice from the violence of the attack, and the violence of the manipulated (?) audience?

I have no idea of Heard or Depp’s real motives of course, or the real events that each interprets differently, or why it is obvious she (or he) is lying. I do know that a British judge thought that “the great majority of alleged assaults” on Heard by Depp had been “proved to the civil standard”. But this is largely ignored. The argument that the person is defending #Metoo does not seem to be neutral or encouraging women to stand up to violence and intimidation, but discouraging it.

This discouragement may be the argument’s intention, but it would seem to be its function.

In using the argument, the person can claim to be virtuous and recognising that violence against women is bad, at the same time as encouraging people to dismiss claims of violence by any particular woman, especially against men they like.

BLM

This argument strikes me as similar to many US based arguments I’ve heard over Black Lives Matter, in this case the formulation appears to be:

“Of course it is bad that so many people get shot by police (avoiding the race issue). We should protest against this and stop it. But in this particular case (whatever it is) when a black person was shot in a confrontation with police they were: a known criminal (even if they were not making threats or engaged in violence); they could have been on drugs; they are unsavory; the police thought they went for a weapon; they were not obeying the police; they were running away in terror; they shouted at the cops threatening them; they acted surprised and guilty when the police knocked down their door by mistake, and so on.”

Again while the person can concede that police shooting people is supposed to be bad, in practice they say this black person deserved it, or it was a sad mistake. The formulation suggests that there is nothing to worry about really. With each particular murder a person excuses, they can still claim to they are virtuous and opposing police violence. In reality, the formulation excuses the police violence it is supposed to be against.

Climate Change

This is a slight variant. The Australian government admits that climate change is bad, and that emissions are bad – but in any particular case of mining fossil fuels, the emissions or burning that result should be ignored, because one case cannot make any difference and is beneficial for someone (usually the mining company). No matter how much the ‘single cases’ add up to produce harm that is supposedly recognised by the arguer, any single case is fine, which eventually means no case should be stopped. Again the person can claim to be virtuous and recognise climate change is a problem, while still doing everything they can to make it worse.

Conclusion

The point of the formulation is that it is a way, the person seeks to establish their moral credibility on the issue (violence against women, police shooting unarmed or unresisting people, or avoiding climate change), while actually excusing the crime they are supposed to be condemning.

A constant use of special cases, undermines getting rid of the evil we are supposed to be condemning, and yet there may be occasions in which the exception is real: the woman is lying or the police responded appropriately. This is the deadly paradox, and its certainly possible and needs to be factored into trials.

However, in climate the special exception is probably more rarely justifiable, because the cumulative bad is inevitable, no matter the virtue of any particular mine or power station.

If the formulation is common, then we can be reasonably sure that people are using it to reassert the established ways of dismissing and denying the problem, while pretending to virtue. Becoming aware of this standard formulation, may help us become aware of it, so we can try and escape it, or argue against it – and remain more neutral during the trial whatever politics gathers around it.

If we were to identify something as “virtue signaling” then this would be a fine candidate. It signals virtue to the audience while allowing the condition to continue, and using the person’s signaled virtue to excuse the crime in this case, and possibly in every case. The exception functions to break the rule completely.

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Brandolini’s Law

May 19, 2022

The original

Brandolini’s Law, or the “bullshit asymmetry” principle is a really neat summation of things that are well-known, but hard to express simply

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Alberton Brandolini, twitter 11 Jan 2013

I’m going to slightly rephrase this as:

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is much greater than needed to produce it.

Not as neat, and its not going to supersede Brandolini’s formulation, but its a bit clearer for those without a science background.

Brandolini’s law is implied in a lot of the material I’ve written on disinformation and the mess of information, but I now have a phrase that summarises the problem, and sets out areas for future research, much better than anything I’ve written.

It is much easier to invent ‘facts’ that appeal to people’s biases, fears and already accepted truths, than it is to make a reasonably accurate statement about reality. An explanation for why someone is wrong is often lengthy, and sometimes impossible.

As an example of impossibility, say for example someone asserts that the President of Agleroa engages in the slave trade of children, and uses his power to hide this.

No one can disprove this. A disproof can simply be another example of his power in action, or “fake news”. How can I show an absence of children being traded etc? To make a disproof requires vast amounts of energy. If for example the bullshitter had made a claim that the President had traded kids on a particular date, and I could find no evidence for that, it does not disprove all the dates that such trades could have occurred, and it might be argued that I could not find anything because I’m operating in bad faith or that the data is hidden beyond my capacities to find it. Even if I succeed in convincing one person that the President is not trading children then, if there is a group of people devoted to slandering the President of Agleroa who find it profitable to spread this accusation, it will still keep surfacing. People may even disbelieve me if I try and show Agleroa is not a real place.

In a similar case a real President was repeatedly said to be fighting organised pedophilia. There was no evidence for this, and it was similarly hard to disprove, because we were told he was working in secret. He apparently didn’t even talk about it, so as not to alarm pedophiles, and this silence could be taken as proof. Those who could be bothered to disprove it, were probably trying to defend pedophiles and therefore not trustworthy.

These situations are like disproving climate change denial.

If a person assumes nearly all climate scientists are lying or conspiring so as to harm them, then there can be no disproof. A person who tries to participate in the disproving by pointing out ‘facts’, is either part of the conspiracy, or a dupe repeating these scientist’s false information. How do you disprove the assertion that nearly all climate change scientists are lying, to a person who accepts that proposition as more probable than they are not lying?

This energy needed to maintain a “true position” means that what I’ve called “information groups” that filter out information rejected by the group, condemn those outsiders who disagree, and which propagate the misinformation the group lives by, and identifies with, become even more important.

Other Formulations

My earliest formulation of a similar position was what I called Gresham’s law of information “Bad information drives out good”. This is partly because bad information is plentiful [is easy to manufacture], but people may want to hoard and hide good information to give themselves an advantage, or it gets lost in the ether [Entropy]. But this is nowhere near as elegant, or as explanatory, as Brandolini’s Law.

Earlier formulations include this from Jonathan Swift:

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

Quote investigator: ‘A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes”

The obvious point here being that human energy use always involves time. Information takes time to discover and test, and it needs to be present at the time it is needed. Misinformation can have its intended effect, and by the time it is satisfactorily refuted, it is too late. Again we can see this with climate change denial claims in which it now seems too late to do anything effective about climate change, so let’s not bother.

Slightly later we have George Holmes:

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.

Holmes “Letters on Infidelity” Leter VIII p146-7

Holmes points out another problem, which is even more common in the information age, disinformation never dies. The disinformation can be reprised with ease, in perhaps a slightly different form if necessary. And, in the unlikely even that the person who revitalises the disinformation wants to find something more accurate, it will take them a lot longer to locate and read the refutation (assuming the refutation is good in the first place :). The short punchy lie is much easier to grasp than the lengthy refutation, at any time.

Conclusions

Brandolini’s Law is a succinct and explanatory formulation that has great relevance for modern information society.

There are two big questions it raises:

  1. Given the huge (and probably increasing) amounts of energy that it takes to maintain a shared sense of the universe in a large society and keep people well informed about reality and responsive to events in reality, is it inevitable that such societies will fragment into factions pushing their own truths and ignoring what is happening, until they collapse? [this is a bit like
  2. What can we do to lessen the law’s effects, so we can resurface from being buried under disinformation and misinformation?

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Australian Election

May 19, 2022

Sorry local politics again, but final election summary of the real issues for the governing Coalition:

1) Climate. The coalition will do nothing except make the problems worse.

2) Energy Transition. More taxpayers’ money for more fossil fuels.

3) Disaster preparation. Terrible Coalition record. No sign they will change as climate change is not real, and its always someone else’s responsibility.

4) Corruption so ingrained the PM has never noticed any. Coalition apparently worried that people will start noticing corruption. So lets avoid any form of investigation.

5) Aged care. Possibly, the most incompetent minister in history. Absolutely (and literally) shit conditions in many places, ignored royal commission….

6) Persecution of people on disability, or unemployment. Should this continue?

7) Allow people who claim to be religious to persecute others and run the government because they are so righteous?

8 ) Completely ignore Covid, increasing Covid deaths and long Covid, because people like me will be told we died of existing conditions which were not previously likely to kill us.

9) Increasing the cost of housing. Well that’s what the Coalition appears to want.

10) Do nothing about banking, ignore the royal commission….

11) Ignore aboriginal people, in the hope they will go away. What deaths in custody?

12) Surreptitiously keep on winding back Medicare until it becomes non-functional.

13) Keep running down hospitals.

14) More tax cuts for the very wealthy and tax increases due for the middle class, because we all know that works to increase the wealth in the right places.

15) Massive funding increases for wealthy private schools as an education reform.

16) Increasing inequality – what a surprise. Obviously the will of God in action.

17) Ignoring women worried about sexual harassment at work – it is still absolutely right for the PM not to have spoken to them and to have said they should be grateful they were not shot at. But making up a problem about trans women in sport, without any sporting organisations complaining about ‘the problem’?

18) Helping the Chinese gain more influence in the Area, through subsidising the sale of Darwin’s port to China, and ignoring or insulting the Pacific Islands.

19) Throwing away money for subs, buying expensive fighter planes that won’t arrive for decades. Buying tanks we cannot use.

20) Lots of ex-coalition members saying don’t vote for this lot, because they are so bad….

21) If you vote against them you will upset the media, particularly the Murdoch Empire.

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Labor and the Carbon Tax

April 26, 2022

Yesterday right wing radio host Ray Hadley asked Anthony Albanese, the leader of the Australian Opposition repeat after him: “There will be no carbon tax, ever.”

Personally I would have preferred, he had not been sick and that he had said to Hadley:

“Sorry but I’m not going to allow Australian Policy to be dictated by a Radio host, no matter how popular or well intentioned. If we get into government, we will do what is best for Australia, not what you think is some gotcha moment. Besides, as Peta Credlin has admitted, we never had a Carbon Tax; we put a price on Carbon, and we redistributed the money back to the electorate so they would not be affected by price increases. All the price rises that Mr. Abbott predicted to come from the carbon price turned out to be complete rubbish, and emissions came down. It turned out to be an inexpensive remedy for a problem which was scrapped for no reason.

However, as you know we do not plan to install another Carbon Price of that sort – we will just use the same mechanism of pricing that the government has installed, but we will try to stop it being a tax-payer subsidy to companies who may never reduce their actual emissions.

If we cannot make the government’s policy mechanism of carbon pricing work, then we may have to reconsider. After all we have just been told by two Coalition members that the Government’s targets are not even targets – this may imply they know that the government’s pricing method may not be able to work.

The question Ray, is whether you want Australia to continue with the highest temperature increases in the world, massive bushfires, massive droughts, and floods. We live in one of the most fragile ecologies on the planet, and all the government can do is make the conditions worse, and fail to help people after they have suffered the consequences. I pledge that we will not only try and diminish climate change, move away from fossil fuels, but be ready to help communities that suffer from the climate change we have known about for over 30 years.”

Something like that would have been better… although it would have had the media screaming.

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