Remora
The Election.
LI, of course, hoped that the Republicans would not triumph at the polls. At the same time, LI did not much feel like voting himself. I did. I even voted for Democrats. But I did it with a rotten feeling inside, as though I�d compromised myself. In Texas, the two big dem candidates, Kirk and Sanchez, were nearly unbearable. Kirk ran at times to the right of his opponent, and spent much time attaching himself to Bush � a sort of disavowed, mutant twin to the Commander in Chief. I actually wanted to vote against Bush. I wanted, in other words, a second party to vote for.
Perhaps that is not going to happen in my life time. LI read, on the TAP Blog, a nasty little item about how the election might hinge on the guilty conscience of those who voted for Nader. This is just the kind of DC talk that makes one think of what Napoleon said of the monarchists: they have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. Or was it Tallyrand? In any case, while Republicans do, indeed, stand for things, the very awful Democratic party got a deserved drubbing for standing for nothing.
To stand for something means that you lose for something. This, of course, seems to elude the thinking of the governing classes. The governing classes, in fact, are convinced, and have been since the seventies, that you have to slip civilization past the yahoos. That is Democratic political thought in a nutshell. The goal of a party should be to generate a set of principles of some sort, so that you can generally predict how the party will act. The goal of the Democratic party, however, has been the opposite, at least for the last twenty five years. Instead, they have pursued the image of the majority. In the pursuit, they have lost their minds. Or rather, among the Democrats, the head long ago seceded from the body. It is a party that expects its grassroots partisans to work ardently for it during election years, so it can betray those partisans the rest of the time. What grassroot Democrat wanted Tom Daschle to roll over for Bush about Iraq? To do that, and then to expect people like Limited Inc to vote for this kind of thing, is rather like inviting one into an abusive marriage, in which years of being beaten up are supposed to be compensated for by flowers on the birthdays. After a while, you drift away. You divorce.
LI thinks that the Democrats have addicted themselves to a delusion that there is a majority. There isn�t. To take positions on an array of existential topics -- and then to figure out how to persuade others to support those positions � that is all there really is to politics. In particular, if your positions are strongly inflected by your sense of justice, the pursuit of the image of the majority is fatal. The leftist party of the future should pursue, instead, its own singularity. When Paul Wellstone paraphrased Barry Goldwater�s campaign autobiography title (The Conscience of a Conservative) for his own campaign autobiography (The Conscience of a Liberal), he was acting on this insight. The whole history of the Democratic Party, however, works against the idea of singularity. The accidental identification of progressive politics and Democrats comes out of the melding together of lefty forces and the Democrats urban and rural patchwork politics under Wilson. As late as 1928, the black vote � or that bit of it allowed through the iron bars of American apartheid � was strongly Republican. The Democrats have always had the managerial, urban view � the view of compromised labor leaders and school teachers � that the important thing is to form a committee and make resolutions. The important thing, that is, is to act in a minor way. To create a little program here, to purvey pills to the elderly. To create a little program there. The incremental mindset is wholly unprepared for the charismatic act � the politics of the acte gratuit. That Bush is not a charismatic man doesn�t matter � he understands, instinctively, the charismatic nature of the times. To oppose him � for let�s be clear, the man is a disaster � requires understanding that landscape. Requires, that is, understanding how to lose. When you stand for nothing, you lose for nothing. Last night, The Democrats lost for nothing.
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Remora
Mr. H. Pitt
Harvey Pitt just resigned. And LI would like to find the proper funereal words -- a send-off to this lost soul, whose last week was spent investigating himself, much like a Flann O'Brien character in one of the antsier novels.
Pitt should never have been the head of the SEC. He was not just sponsored by Bush, although the media, painting in black and white -- Whistler's colors -- has painted him as a stooge or crony of Bushism. Actually, he is a stooge or crony of the set of interlocking vested interests that briefly got a free ride in the 90s. The Wall Street brokerage houses, elevated bucket shops all; the banks, freed from the Glass Steagall act and acting, in consequence, like the suburban couples in some Updike novel that have just recieved news of the 'sexual revolution' -- i.e., fucking everyone; and the NY establishment, represented by the ever unbearable Democrat, Senator Schumer. Pitt started out as he was programmed to: the plan was to subvert regulation, as the plan had been since the glorious eighties. Alas, he ran into the brick wall of corporate malfeasance, and had to go against his character and present himself as an advocate for stricter regulation and concentrated enforcement. Pitt's conservative allies put up a fight for the man all through the summer. That Pitt's inclination was to go easy on the Street, to back the investment banks and the brokerages against their investors, was not a trait that could be changed in a political instant. LI is firmly on the side of greater transparency and more intervention in the banks vs. investors struggle -- but this is a hard issue to color, ideologically. After all, the investors are often what Marx called rentiers, not by and large a group with which LI has a lot of sympathy. In fact, the weird thing is that the Republicans have been complacently cutting the throats of their own constituency -- a tribal habit we thought more appropriate to Dems.
What counts, for us, is that the social composition of investor capital -- where it comes from -- has changed, significantly during the last twenty years. Investors include billionaires like Buffett and Pickens -- investors include all the old LBO guys, the Kerkorians and such. But investors also include the people with 401(k)s. If we have made a sullen and provisional peace with capitalism, it is always with the codicil that the mechanisms of enrichment common to large enterprises be fair. The SEC is a small part of making those mechanisms fair.
Pitt didn't see it that way.
So farewell. No doubt, we will see you again, being grilled by some greasy suit in Congress. Soon.
Mr. H. Pitt
Harvey Pitt just resigned. And LI would like to find the proper funereal words -- a send-off to this lost soul, whose last week was spent investigating himself, much like a Flann O'Brien character in one of the antsier novels.
Pitt should never have been the head of the SEC. He was not just sponsored by Bush, although the media, painting in black and white -- Whistler's colors -- has painted him as a stooge or crony of Bushism. Actually, he is a stooge or crony of the set of interlocking vested interests that briefly got a free ride in the 90s. The Wall Street brokerage houses, elevated bucket shops all; the banks, freed from the Glass Steagall act and acting, in consequence, like the suburban couples in some Updike novel that have just recieved news of the 'sexual revolution' -- i.e., fucking everyone; and the NY establishment, represented by the ever unbearable Democrat, Senator Schumer. Pitt started out as he was programmed to: the plan was to subvert regulation, as the plan had been since the glorious eighties. Alas, he ran into the brick wall of corporate malfeasance, and had to go against his character and present himself as an advocate for stricter regulation and concentrated enforcement. Pitt's conservative allies put up a fight for the man all through the summer. That Pitt's inclination was to go easy on the Street, to back the investment banks and the brokerages against their investors, was not a trait that could be changed in a political instant. LI is firmly on the side of greater transparency and more intervention in the banks vs. investors struggle -- but this is a hard issue to color, ideologically. After all, the investors are often what Marx called rentiers, not by and large a group with which LI has a lot of sympathy. In fact, the weird thing is that the Republicans have been complacently cutting the throats of their own constituency -- a tribal habit we thought more appropriate to Dems.
What counts, for us, is that the social composition of investor capital -- where it comes from -- has changed, significantly during the last twenty years. Investors include billionaires like Buffett and Pickens -- investors include all the old LBO guys, the Kerkorians and such. But investors also include the people with 401(k)s. If we have made a sullen and provisional peace with capitalism, it is always with the codicil that the mechanisms of enrichment common to large enterprises be fair. The SEC is a small part of making those mechanisms fair.
Pitt didn't see it that way.
So farewell. No doubt, we will see you again, being grilled by some greasy suit in Congress. Soon.
Monday, November 04, 2002
Remora
LAT's Megan K. Stack reports on Arizona killings Sunday. Here's the key graf:
(you will probably have to register at the LA Times -- which is no big deal).
"Eight migrants have been shot dead since March in a desolate patch of rattlesnake holes and scraggly paloverde trees where Interstate 10 rolls west out of Phoenix. Their hands were pulled back and bound with handcuffs, duct tape or the waistband of their own jockey shorts. They were shot at close range, their bodies left to mummify in the sun."
Last week, LI wrote a review, for the Christian Science Monitor, of journalist Charles Bowden's new book about casualties of the surface in the "drug war." We couldn't really say too much about the drug war itself -- because we had too much to say. One can't absolutely overrun a review with one's own ideas. You have to operate homeopathetically...
No such restraints bind me on this site. So let's get into it.
The migrants in Phoenix, the murder rate in Tucson, the border patrols and the shadow patrol of vigilantes -- these are the stray glass bits in the kaleidoscope. You can see an image, and then it is gone. You can see a system, you can see the breakdown of a system, and then it is gone, and it is time to go to work, bury the dead, or track down their names.
But the system is insane. The bodies in Phoenix are connected, by myriad threads, to the bodies in Medillin. Here's the NYT on the latest 'crackdown' in one of Medillin's poor quarters:
"...Colombia's new law-and-order president, �lvaro Uribe, has embarked on a pacification of Comuna 13 that officials say could become a model for other big cities hard hit by a 38-year-old conflict. The operation began on Oct. 16 when 3,000 troops, in what was called the largest urban offensive in Colombia's history, launched an assault that brought Comuna 13 under control in 48 hours.
"Days later, with guerrillas striking back with car bombs here and in Bogot�, the army raided poor neighborhoods in Bogot� and in the nation's third largest city, Cali. Similar raids, searching for guns, explosives and rebels melding into the civilian population, continued here this week with the help of paid informants. The United States-backed army, which is receiving training and intelligence information from American forces, is promising future operations."
The NYT editor tries to fit this into the standard law and order framework, ending the story with the kids playing soccer in the street -- as if they hadn't been doing that during the "bad" period previous to the military incursion. But, like a fly in the soup, or rather like the monster from the Black Lagoon, the system keeps popping up:
"The attack on Comuna 13 has also cast in doubt the state's commitment to fighting paramilitary groups. Most of Medell�n's slums are controlled by the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, illegal antiguerrilla groups that often work with rogue military commanders."This army operation was not evenhanded," said Nacho Arango of the Popular Institute for Capacitation, a human rights group here. "Everybody says everything is fine. We do not see it that way."
"Indeed, high-ranking paramilitary commanders from two different groups said in interviews that they welcomed the operation. The absence of the rebels could allow the paramilitaries to control drugs, extortion rackets and corrupt politicians in Comuna 13."
What is the idea behind the drug war? Bereft of its ideological disguises, the drug war is an attempt to suppress a market that generates 400 billion dollars world wide. It is an attempt to suppress, theoretically, the whole market -- the producers, middlemen, and consumers.
LI believes that this is an example of New Deal Liberalism gone mad. The premise of liberalism is that the state can successfully regulate the market to achieve a certain set of goals. That is, the inefficiencies that might be associated with regulation are compensated by the greater social good accomplished by the regulation. Although Chicago economists are always bitching about this, there are strong reasons to think that this is, actually, how regulation works -- that is, the compliance of the regulated, while grudging, doesn't require violence on the part of the state because the regulated believe the story of regulation too. Their arguments against this or that regulation aren't that regulation creates inefficiency per se, but that this or that regulation is unfair, or doesn't serve a good purpose. Often there is an indirect reference to the inefficiency argument -- namely, that the costs of regulation are going to be passed along to the customers -- but on the whole, the arguments are couched in terms of liberalism.
That liberalism isn't a matter of the state operating with unilateral coercive power -- contra the Chicago boy toy model of it. A good example of the state using its ultimate power -- that is, to ban a product -- is given in the story of the banning of DDT. The contrast between DDT and cocaine is instructive.
The story of DDT's invention and use is detailed in this fascinating article from Hyle: the journal of the philosophy of chemistry (and have you been keeping up your subscription, camper?) DDT and the Dynamics of Risk Knowledge Production, by Stefan B�schen takes the story from the publicity surrounding DDT during WWII -- when DDT solved a grave military problem in the Pacific and Asian wars by temporarily eliminating the anepheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria -- to its widespread use in agriculture, and the gradual awareness of the risk it posed. That awareness exploded into public view when Rachel Carson (one of LI's heros) published Silent Spring. Rachel Carson is still routinely savaged by right wing publications, for whom she is the devil.
What was wrong? Among the excellencies in Boschen's article is his firm rooting of the problems associated with the bioaccumulation of toxic material in research that paralleled the chemical research of the golden age of medical and agricultural chemicals -- the thirties to the sixties.
"With regard to these insights [into the potential human toxicity of pesticides] the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had to deal with certain regulatory problems, because action was only possible at a moment of proven damage to human well-being (White 1933, p. 623).
The FDA was founded in 1927, when the old Bureau of Chemistry in the USDA was reformed. By this reorganization on the level of Bureaus, the USDA wanted to channel the conflicts of interest between the insecticide industry and farmers lobby on the one hand and the interests of the consumers on the other. The FDA was responsible only for regulations concerning the Pure Food and Drug Act � therefore the spray residue problem was one of the firsts to be solved by the FDA. Paul Dunbar, later vice president of the FDA, wrote: "Soon after it began operations, the Food and Drug Administration became involved in the spray-residue project, an activity which in varying phases claimed major attention throughout the ensuing years. (...) The project was loaded with political dynamite" (Dunbar 1959, p. 128). Therefore, the FDA attracted a lot of public attention in its first years. However, people did not really discuss the spray-residue problem before the beginning of the New Deal.
During this time, the formation of a problem-centered community began. This type of community augmented the �scientific communities� in the context of risk debates by including political and decision-related aspects. Typically, a problem-centered community emerges to analyze the different unexpected side effects arising from the evolution of technology and systems. The debates in these social places are necessary to the development of problem-solving capacities (e.g., to fix thresholds) and are oriented towards certain aims of protection. They are scientific debates that accompany regulation processes. Thus, it is not surprising that the administration frequently instigates important initiatives that are then elaborated in its regulatory units (see B�schen 2000, p. 323). The problem-centered community �Pesticide Regulation� was confronted with a particular conflict of interest between the fruit farmers, their lobby in the Congress, and the USDA on the one hand and the FDA and some physicians on the other. Furthermore, and for the first time in history, there was a great public interest in a scientific and regulatory debate (Jackson 1970, p. 108). Finally, there was a reform of the legislative foundations by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938."
LI loves the Latourian beauty of "problem centered community." It expresses, exactly, the sense making mechanism that actually exists in most regulatory situations. What happened with DDT is that it suffered a drastic public relations change. From a miracle product, it became a killer. Carson documented the probable correlation of DDT use with the disappearance of a variegated bird population. From its deleterious effects on the laying of eggs, it wasn't far to go to its deleterious effects on the human body, especially as it persists with extraordinary stubborness in the human body.
"Under these conditions, the balance between the two discourses was adjusted anew. The ecological effects of DDT were now recognized as a serious problem, and new examples became part of the risk research program. Before the ban of DDT, the discourse on potential damage gained strength. At a summer school at MIT in 1970, scientists stated: "We recommend a drastic reduction in the use of DDT as soon as possible and that subsidies be furnished to developing countries to enable them to afford to use nonpersistent but more expensive pesticides as well as other pest control techniques" (SCEP 1970, p. 25; emphasis in the original). However, the more the discourse became politically influential, the more did it focus on selected research topics, with particular emphasis on cancer. Cancer research was widely compatible with many research strategies, like in molecular biology, and cancer was one of the main issues in the political arena. This reduced the problem field �chronic toxicity� in part to the issue of �cancer by pesticides�. That was also an outcome of the political debate after Silent Spring, because the topic was already dominant in Carson�s book (Marco et al. 1987, p. 195). Now the general public gained a significant impact on the definition of problems regarding environmental or health issues."
B�schen thus foregrounds William Ruckleshaus' decision in 1972 to ban DDT.
Now, the ban itself is interesting. Did the ban lead to huge illegal uses of DDT? Did the U.S. have to create a DDT Enforcement agency to fight DDT cartels world wide? In a word, no. The reason is that the problem centered community was firmly sited in the market. The makers of pesticides were not ultimately threatened by the ban because a., it at first included only the U.S., and more importantly, b., there were substitutes for DDT. DDT is an interesting pesticide because it has a rabid fan club. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as conservative groups like the American Council on Health and Science (an organization that is well quoted in right wing journals -- you can spot the ACHS speaker from the frequency of the phrase 'junk science,' which has achieved mystical authority in these venues)
are apt to write things like: the ban on DDT is equivalent to genocide. Seriously. Here's an excerpt from a Fox News transcript:
DDT Ban Is Genocidal
By Steven Milloloy
Fox News
December 1, 2000 DDT Ban Is Genocidal Friday, December 1, 2000 By Steven Milloy As First-World children eagerly anticipate the holiday season, millions of Third-World children are about to be condemned to certain death from malaria by international environmental elitists. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility and 250 other environmental groups will advocate the insecticide DDT be banned at next week's United Nations Environment Program meeting in Johannesburg. The meeting's aim is a treaty banning or restricting so-called persistent organic chemicals. Malaria control experts oppose a DDT ban, arguing that spraying DDT in houses is inexpensive and highly effective in controlling malaria � especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 1 in 20 children die from malaria. Unfortunately, the eco-elites have out-maneuvered and outgunned public health advocates.
Formally, LI's point is not that DDT should or shouldn't be banned. We should, however, make clear that the bizarre conservative crusade for DDT has a tendency to concentrate around phrases like "malaria control experts." That malaria control experts have found better malaria fighting processes goes unreported (nor the fact that more money is spent researching cures for male pattern baldness than for malaria -- one of the epiphenomena of world wealth inequality). Ann Platt McGinn, in an article in this summer's World Watch, (which can't, alas, be accessed on the Net) presents a reasonable case for banning DDT in most cases, although reserving it as a possible pesticide in emergency situations. The Milloloys of the world have no patience for real science, or they would consider the reasons that DDT was abandoned in the late sixties and early seventies outside of the US as the major pesticide in the struggle against malaria carrying mosquitoes. Here is what McGinn says about the first stages of the Global Malaria Eradication Project:
"The malaria eradication strategy was not to kill every single mosquito, but to suppress their populations and shorten the lifespans of any survivors, so that the parasite would not have time to develop within them. If the mosquitoes could be kept down long enough, the parasites would eventually disappear from the human population. In any particular area, the process was expected to take three years-time enough for all infected people either to recover or die. After that, a resurgence of mosquitoes would be merely an annoyance, rather than a threat. And initially, the strategy seemed to be working. It proved especially effective on islands-relatively small areas insulated from reinfestation. Taiwan, Jamaica, and Sardinia were soon declared malaria-free and have remained so to this day. By 1961, arguably the year at which the program had peak momentum, malaria had been eliminated or dramatically reduced in 37 countries."
So why not, on balance, keep using the DDT? Well, the ban in the US happened in 1973. Between 61 and 73, what happened was that DDT produced resistance in the mosquito:
"With the miseries of malaria in full view, the managers of the eradication campaign didn't worry much about the toxicity of DDT, but they were greatly concerned about another aspect of the pesticide's effects: resistance. Continual exposure to an insecticide tends to "breed" insect populations that are at least partially immune to the poison. Resistance to DDT had been reported as early as 1946. The campaign managers knew that in mosquitoes, regular exposure to DDT tended to produce widespread resistance in four to seven years. Since it took three years to clear malaria from a human population, that didn't leave a lot of leeway for the eradication effort. As it turned out, the logistics simply couldn't be made to work in large, heavily infested areas with high human populations, poor housing and roads, and generally minimal infrastructure. In 1969, the campaign was abandoned. Today, DDT resistance is widespread in Anopheles, as is resistance to many more recent pesticides."
That doesn't mean that DDT is completely worthless. What has prompted the recent spate of headlines about the pesticide is that it is a UN treaty, POP, which schedules a worldwide ban on the substance. As McGinn writes, there are much more successful strategies against malaria:
"And yet Africa is not a lost cause-it's simply that the key to progress does not lie in the general suppression of mosquito populations. Instead of spraying, the most promising African programs rely primarily on "bednets"-mosquito netting that is treated with an insecticide, usually a pyrethroid, and that is suspended over a person's bed. Bednets can't eliminate malaria, but they can "deflect" much of the burden. Because Anopheles species generally feed in the evening and at night, a bednet can radically reduce the number of infective bites a person receives. Such a person would probably still be infected from time to time, but would usually be able to lead a normal life.
In effect, therefore, bednets can substantially reduce the disease. Trials in the use of bednets for children have shown a decline in malaria-induced mortality by 25 to 40 percent. Infection levels and the incidence of severe anemia also declined. In Kenya, a recent study has shown that pregnant women who use bednets tend to give birth to healthier babies. In parts of Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, bednets are becoming standard household items. In the tiny west African nation of The Gambia, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the population has bednets."
LI could go on -- we've written about evolutionary medicine before, in the Austin Chronicle. Go to our site on the Auschron in the archives and look up the article, Surreal Science. The point, however, is that POP, unlike the treaties banning narcotics, will do a fair job of eliminating DDT. That is because the market has internal inducements to cooperate. The problem centered community makes sure of that. The makers of DDT, and its users, were not imprisoned, for one thing. That is, the level of regulatory enforcement was elevated above the police. This is crucial -- the police are the regulators of the last resort. They are the most ineffective regulators, for a number of reasons we won't list here.
Second, the makers, dealers and users all had a system of substitutes they could use.
Now, in effect, this is partly true with narcotics. But because the desired physiological effects of these substances are substantially different, the substitutions have never really diverted users. They won't, of course, divert hardcore users at all.
Finally, resistance to the ban was taken seriously. DDTs banning, in other words, achieved critical mass outside the problem centered community. The pro-DDT element in that community was never able to acquire the political power to counter the ban. And that element acceded to that failure -- they had no incentive to start a black market in DDT. While the Steve Milloloys of the world talk of genocide, they don't, of course, mean it -- that is, LI doubts, seriously, that Milloloy is going to finance a covert DDT making factory.
The paradox of the ban on narcotics is that it has created an unregulated market in narcotics. LI thinks this is very interesting, and relevant to the real limits of government power -- which, contrary to libertarian ideology, have no natural scale. That is, small government isn't best -- nor is large government. The scale of governmental power can't be determined beforehand, for simple, devilishly Hayeckian reasons. We will go into that in some future post.
LAT's Megan K. Stack reports on Arizona killings Sunday. Here's the key graf:
(you will probably have to register at the LA Times -- which is no big deal).
"Eight migrants have been shot dead since March in a desolate patch of rattlesnake holes and scraggly paloverde trees where Interstate 10 rolls west out of Phoenix. Their hands were pulled back and bound with handcuffs, duct tape or the waistband of their own jockey shorts. They were shot at close range, their bodies left to mummify in the sun."
Last week, LI wrote a review, for the Christian Science Monitor, of journalist Charles Bowden's new book about casualties of the surface in the "drug war." We couldn't really say too much about the drug war itself -- because we had too much to say. One can't absolutely overrun a review with one's own ideas. You have to operate homeopathetically...
No such restraints bind me on this site. So let's get into it.
The migrants in Phoenix, the murder rate in Tucson, the border patrols and the shadow patrol of vigilantes -- these are the stray glass bits in the kaleidoscope. You can see an image, and then it is gone. You can see a system, you can see the breakdown of a system, and then it is gone, and it is time to go to work, bury the dead, or track down their names.
But the system is insane. The bodies in Phoenix are connected, by myriad threads, to the bodies in Medillin. Here's the NYT on the latest 'crackdown' in one of Medillin's poor quarters:
"...Colombia's new law-and-order president, �lvaro Uribe, has embarked on a pacification of Comuna 13 that officials say could become a model for other big cities hard hit by a 38-year-old conflict. The operation began on Oct. 16 when 3,000 troops, in what was called the largest urban offensive in Colombia's history, launched an assault that brought Comuna 13 under control in 48 hours.
"Days later, with guerrillas striking back with car bombs here and in Bogot�, the army raided poor neighborhoods in Bogot� and in the nation's third largest city, Cali. Similar raids, searching for guns, explosives and rebels melding into the civilian population, continued here this week with the help of paid informants. The United States-backed army, which is receiving training and intelligence information from American forces, is promising future operations."
The NYT editor tries to fit this into the standard law and order framework, ending the story with the kids playing soccer in the street -- as if they hadn't been doing that during the "bad" period previous to the military incursion. But, like a fly in the soup, or rather like the monster from the Black Lagoon, the system keeps popping up:
"The attack on Comuna 13 has also cast in doubt the state's commitment to fighting paramilitary groups. Most of Medell�n's slums are controlled by the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, illegal antiguerrilla groups that often work with rogue military commanders."This army operation was not evenhanded," said Nacho Arango of the Popular Institute for Capacitation, a human rights group here. "Everybody says everything is fine. We do not see it that way."
"Indeed, high-ranking paramilitary commanders from two different groups said in interviews that they welcomed the operation. The absence of the rebels could allow the paramilitaries to control drugs, extortion rackets and corrupt politicians in Comuna 13."
What is the idea behind the drug war? Bereft of its ideological disguises, the drug war is an attempt to suppress a market that generates 400 billion dollars world wide. It is an attempt to suppress, theoretically, the whole market -- the producers, middlemen, and consumers.
LI believes that this is an example of New Deal Liberalism gone mad. The premise of liberalism is that the state can successfully regulate the market to achieve a certain set of goals. That is, the inefficiencies that might be associated with regulation are compensated by the greater social good accomplished by the regulation. Although Chicago economists are always bitching about this, there are strong reasons to think that this is, actually, how regulation works -- that is, the compliance of the regulated, while grudging, doesn't require violence on the part of the state because the regulated believe the story of regulation too. Their arguments against this or that regulation aren't that regulation creates inefficiency per se, but that this or that regulation is unfair, or doesn't serve a good purpose. Often there is an indirect reference to the inefficiency argument -- namely, that the costs of regulation are going to be passed along to the customers -- but on the whole, the arguments are couched in terms of liberalism.
That liberalism isn't a matter of the state operating with unilateral coercive power -- contra the Chicago boy toy model of it. A good example of the state using its ultimate power -- that is, to ban a product -- is given in the story of the banning of DDT. The contrast between DDT and cocaine is instructive.
The story of DDT's invention and use is detailed in this fascinating article from Hyle: the journal of the philosophy of chemistry (and have you been keeping up your subscription, camper?) DDT and the Dynamics of Risk Knowledge Production, by Stefan B�schen takes the story from the publicity surrounding DDT during WWII -- when DDT solved a grave military problem in the Pacific and Asian wars by temporarily eliminating the anepheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria -- to its widespread use in agriculture, and the gradual awareness of the risk it posed. That awareness exploded into public view when Rachel Carson (one of LI's heros) published Silent Spring. Rachel Carson is still routinely savaged by right wing publications, for whom she is the devil.
What was wrong? Among the excellencies in Boschen's article is his firm rooting of the problems associated with the bioaccumulation of toxic material in research that paralleled the chemical research of the golden age of medical and agricultural chemicals -- the thirties to the sixties.
"With regard to these insights [into the potential human toxicity of pesticides] the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had to deal with certain regulatory problems, because action was only possible at a moment of proven damage to human well-being (White 1933, p. 623).
The FDA was founded in 1927, when the old Bureau of Chemistry in the USDA was reformed. By this reorganization on the level of Bureaus, the USDA wanted to channel the conflicts of interest between the insecticide industry and farmers lobby on the one hand and the interests of the consumers on the other. The FDA was responsible only for regulations concerning the Pure Food and Drug Act � therefore the spray residue problem was one of the firsts to be solved by the FDA. Paul Dunbar, later vice president of the FDA, wrote: "Soon after it began operations, the Food and Drug Administration became involved in the spray-residue project, an activity which in varying phases claimed major attention throughout the ensuing years. (...) The project was loaded with political dynamite" (Dunbar 1959, p. 128). Therefore, the FDA attracted a lot of public attention in its first years. However, people did not really discuss the spray-residue problem before the beginning of the New Deal.
During this time, the formation of a problem-centered community began. This type of community augmented the �scientific communities� in the context of risk debates by including political and decision-related aspects. Typically, a problem-centered community emerges to analyze the different unexpected side effects arising from the evolution of technology and systems. The debates in these social places are necessary to the development of problem-solving capacities (e.g., to fix thresholds) and are oriented towards certain aims of protection. They are scientific debates that accompany regulation processes. Thus, it is not surprising that the administration frequently instigates important initiatives that are then elaborated in its regulatory units (see B�schen 2000, p. 323). The problem-centered community �Pesticide Regulation� was confronted with a particular conflict of interest between the fruit farmers, their lobby in the Congress, and the USDA on the one hand and the FDA and some physicians on the other. Furthermore, and for the first time in history, there was a great public interest in a scientific and regulatory debate (Jackson 1970, p. 108). Finally, there was a reform of the legislative foundations by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938."
LI loves the Latourian beauty of "problem centered community." It expresses, exactly, the sense making mechanism that actually exists in most regulatory situations. What happened with DDT is that it suffered a drastic public relations change. From a miracle product, it became a killer. Carson documented the probable correlation of DDT use with the disappearance of a variegated bird population. From its deleterious effects on the laying of eggs, it wasn't far to go to its deleterious effects on the human body, especially as it persists with extraordinary stubborness in the human body.
"Under these conditions, the balance between the two discourses was adjusted anew. The ecological effects of DDT were now recognized as a serious problem, and new examples became part of the risk research program. Before the ban of DDT, the discourse on potential damage gained strength. At a summer school at MIT in 1970, scientists stated: "We recommend a drastic reduction in the use of DDT as soon as possible and that subsidies be furnished to developing countries to enable them to afford to use nonpersistent but more expensive pesticides as well as other pest control techniques" (SCEP 1970, p. 25; emphasis in the original). However, the more the discourse became politically influential, the more did it focus on selected research topics, with particular emphasis on cancer. Cancer research was widely compatible with many research strategies, like in molecular biology, and cancer was one of the main issues in the political arena. This reduced the problem field �chronic toxicity� in part to the issue of �cancer by pesticides�. That was also an outcome of the political debate after Silent Spring, because the topic was already dominant in Carson�s book (Marco et al. 1987, p. 195). Now the general public gained a significant impact on the definition of problems regarding environmental or health issues."
B�schen thus foregrounds William Ruckleshaus' decision in 1972 to ban DDT.
Now, the ban itself is interesting. Did the ban lead to huge illegal uses of DDT? Did the U.S. have to create a DDT Enforcement agency to fight DDT cartels world wide? In a word, no. The reason is that the problem centered community was firmly sited in the market. The makers of pesticides were not ultimately threatened by the ban because a., it at first included only the U.S., and more importantly, b., there were substitutes for DDT. DDT is an interesting pesticide because it has a rabid fan club. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as conservative groups like the American Council on Health and Science (an organization that is well quoted in right wing journals -- you can spot the ACHS speaker from the frequency of the phrase 'junk science,' which has achieved mystical authority in these venues)
are apt to write things like: the ban on DDT is equivalent to genocide. Seriously. Here's an excerpt from a Fox News transcript:
DDT Ban Is Genocidal
By Steven Milloloy
Fox News
December 1, 2000 DDT Ban Is Genocidal Friday, December 1, 2000 By Steven Milloy As First-World children eagerly anticipate the holiday season, millions of Third-World children are about to be condemned to certain death from malaria by international environmental elitists. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility and 250 other environmental groups will advocate the insecticide DDT be banned at next week's United Nations Environment Program meeting in Johannesburg. The meeting's aim is a treaty banning or restricting so-called persistent organic chemicals. Malaria control experts oppose a DDT ban, arguing that spraying DDT in houses is inexpensive and highly effective in controlling malaria � especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 1 in 20 children die from malaria. Unfortunately, the eco-elites have out-maneuvered and outgunned public health advocates.
Formally, LI's point is not that DDT should or shouldn't be banned. We should, however, make clear that the bizarre conservative crusade for DDT has a tendency to concentrate around phrases like "malaria control experts." That malaria control experts have found better malaria fighting processes goes unreported (nor the fact that more money is spent researching cures for male pattern baldness than for malaria -- one of the epiphenomena of world wealth inequality). Ann Platt McGinn, in an article in this summer's World Watch, (which can't, alas, be accessed on the Net) presents a reasonable case for banning DDT in most cases, although reserving it as a possible pesticide in emergency situations. The Milloloys of the world have no patience for real science, or they would consider the reasons that DDT was abandoned in the late sixties and early seventies outside of the US as the major pesticide in the struggle against malaria carrying mosquitoes. Here is what McGinn says about the first stages of the Global Malaria Eradication Project:
"The malaria eradication strategy was not to kill every single mosquito, but to suppress their populations and shorten the lifespans of any survivors, so that the parasite would not have time to develop within them. If the mosquitoes could be kept down long enough, the parasites would eventually disappear from the human population. In any particular area, the process was expected to take three years-time enough for all infected people either to recover or die. After that, a resurgence of mosquitoes would be merely an annoyance, rather than a threat. And initially, the strategy seemed to be working. It proved especially effective on islands-relatively small areas insulated from reinfestation. Taiwan, Jamaica, and Sardinia were soon declared malaria-free and have remained so to this day. By 1961, arguably the year at which the program had peak momentum, malaria had been eliminated or dramatically reduced in 37 countries."
So why not, on balance, keep using the DDT? Well, the ban in the US happened in 1973. Between 61 and 73, what happened was that DDT produced resistance in the mosquito:
"With the miseries of malaria in full view, the managers of the eradication campaign didn't worry much about the toxicity of DDT, but they were greatly concerned about another aspect of the pesticide's effects: resistance. Continual exposure to an insecticide tends to "breed" insect populations that are at least partially immune to the poison. Resistance to DDT had been reported as early as 1946. The campaign managers knew that in mosquitoes, regular exposure to DDT tended to produce widespread resistance in four to seven years. Since it took three years to clear malaria from a human population, that didn't leave a lot of leeway for the eradication effort. As it turned out, the logistics simply couldn't be made to work in large, heavily infested areas with high human populations, poor housing and roads, and generally minimal infrastructure. In 1969, the campaign was abandoned. Today, DDT resistance is widespread in Anopheles, as is resistance to many more recent pesticides."
That doesn't mean that DDT is completely worthless. What has prompted the recent spate of headlines about the pesticide is that it is a UN treaty, POP, which schedules a worldwide ban on the substance. As McGinn writes, there are much more successful strategies against malaria:
"And yet Africa is not a lost cause-it's simply that the key to progress does not lie in the general suppression of mosquito populations. Instead of spraying, the most promising African programs rely primarily on "bednets"-mosquito netting that is treated with an insecticide, usually a pyrethroid, and that is suspended over a person's bed. Bednets can't eliminate malaria, but they can "deflect" much of the burden. Because Anopheles species generally feed in the evening and at night, a bednet can radically reduce the number of infective bites a person receives. Such a person would probably still be infected from time to time, but would usually be able to lead a normal life.
In effect, therefore, bednets can substantially reduce the disease. Trials in the use of bednets for children have shown a decline in malaria-induced mortality by 25 to 40 percent. Infection levels and the incidence of severe anemia also declined. In Kenya, a recent study has shown that pregnant women who use bednets tend to give birth to healthier babies. In parts of Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, bednets are becoming standard household items. In the tiny west African nation of The Gambia, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the population has bednets."
LI could go on -- we've written about evolutionary medicine before, in the Austin Chronicle. Go to our site on the Auschron in the archives and look up the article, Surreal Science. The point, however, is that POP, unlike the treaties banning narcotics, will do a fair job of eliminating DDT. That is because the market has internal inducements to cooperate. The problem centered community makes sure of that. The makers of DDT, and its users, were not imprisoned, for one thing. That is, the level of regulatory enforcement was elevated above the police. This is crucial -- the police are the regulators of the last resort. They are the most ineffective regulators, for a number of reasons we won't list here.
Second, the makers, dealers and users all had a system of substitutes they could use.
Now, in effect, this is partly true with narcotics. But because the desired physiological effects of these substances are substantially different, the substitutions have never really diverted users. They won't, of course, divert hardcore users at all.
Finally, resistance to the ban was taken seriously. DDTs banning, in other words, achieved critical mass outside the problem centered community. The pro-DDT element in that community was never able to acquire the political power to counter the ban. And that element acceded to that failure -- they had no incentive to start a black market in DDT. While the Steve Milloloys of the world talk of genocide, they don't, of course, mean it -- that is, LI doubts, seriously, that Milloloy is going to finance a covert DDT making factory.
The paradox of the ban on narcotics is that it has created an unregulated market in narcotics. LI thinks this is very interesting, and relevant to the real limits of government power -- which, contrary to libertarian ideology, have no natural scale. That is, small government isn't best -- nor is large government. The scale of governmental power can't be determined beforehand, for simple, devilishly Hayeckian reasons. We will go into that in some future post.
Saturday, November 02, 2002
Remora
LI rather trailed off on our post before the last post -- as you might have noticed, LI is an incorrigible meanderer. This is, we suppose, a vice, but surely one of the salient differences between weblogging and real commentary, such as is published in a newspaper, is that the endings aren't so neat. The topics, too, are a bit more variegated. For instance, I imagine the local rag would not publish an op ed piece that begins with a consideration of Bishop Butler's Analogy. Yes, they are warned about such things by the marketing department.
In any case, we were talking about Diane Coyle's exhibition of the deficiencies of common sense and the excellencies of economics -- which exhibition, we claimed, was marred by a severe misconstrual of categories, and a parochial vision of economics. (Coyle's comments, on the Financial Times website, has now been closed off to non-subscribers). Ms. Coyle is a great one for tearing down tariffs and promoting the benefits of free trade. It is, in fact, her grand solution to the chronic problem of poverty. She explains this in an essay in the Guardian, the premise of which is that the anti-globalizers have it all wrong. Protestors should be out there demanding more free trade, liberalization on an international scale, rather than supporting the multitudinous corruptions of protectionism.
"If the moral outrage at the extent of poverty, hunger and disease in the world, and the political momentum for change generated by the campaign movement of recent years, are to achieve anything worthwhile, outrage will need to be informed by evidence on the economic effects of globalization. In many developing countries the best response to the problems that emerge because of globalization is hardly ever a retreat from global integration.
On the contrary, this would often harm growth and make the problems of poverty harder to solve.In our report we address the charges that command widespread support among anti-globalization protestors. A commonly held belief is that globalization has caused extensive poverty. While it is true that 1.3 billion people currently live on less than $1 a day, this number has not changed much since 1950 and has actually fallen sharply as proportion of the world population to 24% from 55%. The recent era of rapid globalization has improved the living standards of many of the poorest, not worsened it."
There are many things to say about the above paragraph. One of them is to ask about the absolute fetishization of the $1 a day standard. This is not a good standard for what the world population could live on. It skews the conversation about poverty and inequality to the cases on the bottom, and their miserable, incremental improvements, rather than to the cases on the top, and their baroque, excessive expropriation of resources.
But leaving that aside, we should note that that all the measures of world poverty are subject, at the moment, to heated debate, which tends to get very technical. The International Monetary Fund hosted a debate on the question of whether world inegality is rising between the left, middle and right which has been posted here. The neutral observer's first reaction to it is that much of the debate degenerates into much mumbo jumbo about methodologies. The right wing is represented by an Indian economist, Surjit Bhalla. Bhalla will surely be touted by rightwingers the way Bjorn Limborg achieved celebrity. Bhalla says, at one point, that the issue of inequality is basically driven by envy. This is the essence of the right wing polemical position. It is rather stupid, since the essence of the right wing polemical position about capitalism is that greed is good. The latter is a position that goes back a long way, in economic literature, to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees -- our individual vices are woven, by the mysterious work of the Invisible Hand, into public goods. Well, envy is as good an individual vice as any. More seriously, Bhalla contends that all around the world -- except for Sub-Saharan Africa -- the figures point to this conclusion:
"Essentially, regarding growth, what we find is that the developing countries grew at about one percentage point lower than the developed countries during 1960 to 1980, and the numbers are 2.1 and 3.3, respectively. But during 1980 to 2000, the developing countries far exceeded the growth rate of the industrialized West and grew at 3.6 percent rather than 2 percent for the West.So first piece of evidence, and these are national accounts data, which is what the World Bank uses, the IMF uses, the countries themselves use, that growth rates of the poor countries far exceeded the growth rates of the West during the so-called globalization period. So that's evidence number one.
"Number two, what happened to inequality? I find that inequality has been on a steady decline�world inequality has been on a steady decline, reversing almost a 200-year trend, peaking in the mid-1970s, and today inequality in the world is at its lowest level for possibly 100 years.What is the counter-evidence to that? There are two or three sets of studies, one which states that basically inequality flattened out during the last 30, 40 years, and another one from the World Bank which states that inequality increased at an absolutely unprecedented pace between 1988 and 1993. I find, as I said, just the opposite. "
Basically, Bhalla is claiming that the golden Keynsian era was a bad time for developing countries, whereas since the mid 70s -- since, that is, the beginning of the conservative rejection of Keynsian liberalism -- developing countries have been catching up. Partly, of course, as you can see from his figures, this stems from the developed countries slowing down -- the 2 percent growth rate for the West is much lower than it was in the 50s.
The transcript of the IMF debate is lively, but often veers off into incomprehensible disagreements about survey results and purchasing power comparisons. LI wants to make a simpler point about what Ms. Coyle has called living standard. I think the living standard, if properly fleshed out, gives us a sense of what is wrong with that version of globalization that emphasizes privitization and tearing down barriers to trade and capital flows.
If you will recall the post before last, we started with a quote from Adam Smith. Smith's idea has been a powerful one in economics. Here it is again:
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements." This is, by the way, from Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in Part IV, Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation
As Aristotle might put it, there's a sense in which Smith is correct, and there is a sense in which he is incorrect. What Smith meant was that dwelling in a costly pile was merely a highly ornamental way of keeping out of the rain. You can keep out of the rain, as King Lear learned, in a hovel for less cost. Similarly eating peacock's eyes and eating chicken eggs is eating; clothing yourself in silk, or in flannel, is clothing; etc.
However, this absolute way of looking at consumption was suspect even in Smith's day. From, say, the point of view of energy use, the rich consume vastly more than the poor. Smith felt that this was covered by the fact that the consumption of the rich is the employment of the poor -- which still doesn't make his precept true. What made Smith's general point plausible, however, is that, in a relatively technologically primitive society -- and the eighteenth century was still that -- the fine differences between rich and poor are evened out by the gross similarities. The rich in their Georgian mansions were apt to be as bothered by dampness and drafts as the poor in their hovels. They were apt to die of untreatable illnesses, like the poor, with only the advantage that their money hired the best chirugeons and doctors to torture them before that blessed terminal event. The food the nabob ate and the water he drank -- on those rare occasions when gin wasn't available -- was apt to be as contaminated as the beverages and victuals of the poor.
This is no longer the case. Ah, but I am going on and on, here. LI will continue this at some future point.
LI rather trailed off on our post before the last post -- as you might have noticed, LI is an incorrigible meanderer. This is, we suppose, a vice, but surely one of the salient differences between weblogging and real commentary, such as is published in a newspaper, is that the endings aren't so neat. The topics, too, are a bit more variegated. For instance, I imagine the local rag would not publish an op ed piece that begins with a consideration of Bishop Butler's Analogy. Yes, they are warned about such things by the marketing department.
In any case, we were talking about Diane Coyle's exhibition of the deficiencies of common sense and the excellencies of economics -- which exhibition, we claimed, was marred by a severe misconstrual of categories, and a parochial vision of economics. (Coyle's comments, on the Financial Times website, has now been closed off to non-subscribers). Ms. Coyle is a great one for tearing down tariffs and promoting the benefits of free trade. It is, in fact, her grand solution to the chronic problem of poverty. She explains this in an essay in the Guardian, the premise of which is that the anti-globalizers have it all wrong. Protestors should be out there demanding more free trade, liberalization on an international scale, rather than supporting the multitudinous corruptions of protectionism.
"If the moral outrage at the extent of poverty, hunger and disease in the world, and the political momentum for change generated by the campaign movement of recent years, are to achieve anything worthwhile, outrage will need to be informed by evidence on the economic effects of globalization. In many developing countries the best response to the problems that emerge because of globalization is hardly ever a retreat from global integration.
On the contrary, this would often harm growth and make the problems of poverty harder to solve.In our report we address the charges that command widespread support among anti-globalization protestors. A commonly held belief is that globalization has caused extensive poverty. While it is true that 1.3 billion people currently live on less than $1 a day, this number has not changed much since 1950 and has actually fallen sharply as proportion of the world population to 24% from 55%. The recent era of rapid globalization has improved the living standards of many of the poorest, not worsened it."
There are many things to say about the above paragraph. One of them is to ask about the absolute fetishization of the $1 a day standard. This is not a good standard for what the world population could live on. It skews the conversation about poverty and inequality to the cases on the bottom, and their miserable, incremental improvements, rather than to the cases on the top, and their baroque, excessive expropriation of resources.
But leaving that aside, we should note that that all the measures of world poverty are subject, at the moment, to heated debate, which tends to get very technical. The International Monetary Fund hosted a debate on the question of whether world inegality is rising between the left, middle and right which has been posted here. The neutral observer's first reaction to it is that much of the debate degenerates into much mumbo jumbo about methodologies. The right wing is represented by an Indian economist, Surjit Bhalla. Bhalla will surely be touted by rightwingers the way Bjorn Limborg achieved celebrity. Bhalla says, at one point, that the issue of inequality is basically driven by envy. This is the essence of the right wing polemical position. It is rather stupid, since the essence of the right wing polemical position about capitalism is that greed is good. The latter is a position that goes back a long way, in economic literature, to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees -- our individual vices are woven, by the mysterious work of the Invisible Hand, into public goods. Well, envy is as good an individual vice as any. More seriously, Bhalla contends that all around the world -- except for Sub-Saharan Africa -- the figures point to this conclusion:
"Essentially, regarding growth, what we find is that the developing countries grew at about one percentage point lower than the developed countries during 1960 to 1980, and the numbers are 2.1 and 3.3, respectively. But during 1980 to 2000, the developing countries far exceeded the growth rate of the industrialized West and grew at 3.6 percent rather than 2 percent for the West.So first piece of evidence, and these are national accounts data, which is what the World Bank uses, the IMF uses, the countries themselves use, that growth rates of the poor countries far exceeded the growth rates of the West during the so-called globalization period. So that's evidence number one.
"Number two, what happened to inequality? I find that inequality has been on a steady decline�world inequality has been on a steady decline, reversing almost a 200-year trend, peaking in the mid-1970s, and today inequality in the world is at its lowest level for possibly 100 years.What is the counter-evidence to that? There are two or three sets of studies, one which states that basically inequality flattened out during the last 30, 40 years, and another one from the World Bank which states that inequality increased at an absolutely unprecedented pace between 1988 and 1993. I find, as I said, just the opposite. "
Basically, Bhalla is claiming that the golden Keynsian era was a bad time for developing countries, whereas since the mid 70s -- since, that is, the beginning of the conservative rejection of Keynsian liberalism -- developing countries have been catching up. Partly, of course, as you can see from his figures, this stems from the developed countries slowing down -- the 2 percent growth rate for the West is much lower than it was in the 50s.
The transcript of the IMF debate is lively, but often veers off into incomprehensible disagreements about survey results and purchasing power comparisons. LI wants to make a simpler point about what Ms. Coyle has called living standard. I think the living standard, if properly fleshed out, gives us a sense of what is wrong with that version of globalization that emphasizes privitization and tearing down barriers to trade and capital flows.
If you will recall the post before last, we started with a quote from Adam Smith. Smith's idea has been a powerful one in economics. Here it is again:
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements." This is, by the way, from Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in Part IV, Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation
As Aristotle might put it, there's a sense in which Smith is correct, and there is a sense in which he is incorrect. What Smith meant was that dwelling in a costly pile was merely a highly ornamental way of keeping out of the rain. You can keep out of the rain, as King Lear learned, in a hovel for less cost. Similarly eating peacock's eyes and eating chicken eggs is eating; clothing yourself in silk, or in flannel, is clothing; etc.
However, this absolute way of looking at consumption was suspect even in Smith's day. From, say, the point of view of energy use, the rich consume vastly more than the poor. Smith felt that this was covered by the fact that the consumption of the rich is the employment of the poor -- which still doesn't make his precept true. What made Smith's general point plausible, however, is that, in a relatively technologically primitive society -- and the eighteenth century was still that -- the fine differences between rich and poor are evened out by the gross similarities. The rich in their Georgian mansions were apt to be as bothered by dampness and drafts as the poor in their hovels. They were apt to die of untreatable illnesses, like the poor, with only the advantage that their money hired the best chirugeons and doctors to torture them before that blessed terminal event. The food the nabob ate and the water he drank -- on those rare occasions when gin wasn't available -- was apt to be as contaminated as the beverages and victuals of the poor.
This is no longer the case. Ah, but I am going on and on, here. LI will continue this at some future point.
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Dope
Last night, LI's friend S. came to the door with two pumpkins. S., I think, likes the ritual of carving the pumpkin because of it seems so American to her -- and thus, slightly outlandish, the way American names are outlandish -- all those first names that don't mean anything, unlike Turkish names. It is an American habit to assume that our rituals are self-explanatory, whereas in other cultures the rituals are often all about explanation, are occasions in which memory is culturally ritualized. For Americans, a memory that is transmitted by ritual is, by its very nature, inauthentic. We mourn the lack of the individual rememberer -- we want experience to be located, and we think that location is in the individual.
For LI, carving a jack o lantern is the kind of thing associated with childhood's clumsy arts and crafts -- fitting stubby fingers into dull scissors and snipping out circles from orange construction paper (ah, the feel of construction paper! its distinct roughness, its graininess, the crayon box colors it comes in, the way tiny, curved bits of it would escape from the scissors and float down to the linoleum tile floor; the way it would darken around a drop of glue, a dab of paste; the way you sprinkled it with glitter to enliven its stubborn drabness; the way it dominated all other media of art until about the sixth grade! LI, a childless bachelor, alas, wonders if construction paper still exists, somewhere -- if, yesterday, there were third grade classrooms where boys and girls were hunched over their orange and brown and black and red paper, inexpertly scalpeling out the outline of witch's hats and broomsticks and cats and ghosts, some teacher -- there were so many for whom LI's heart, at that age, throbbed, Miss Eberhardt, Miss Smith -- making her way down the aisles, the slight smell of her perfume as she bent over you, commenting on your childish assemblage -- but LI digresses).
So, after fortifying ourselves with margaritas at a Mexican restaurant we returned to my place and fortified our fortifications with vodka, then commenced to serious surgery on the pumpkins with the four knives I was able to round up. LI created one of his wobbly eyed jacks, with a big honker nose, the jumbled mouth, and a few artistic touches -- this year, we tried to inscribe something that looked like a skull and crossbones on a cheek, as though the jack had tatooed himself. S., working on more classic lines (plenty of triangles, well wrought), made a more traditional jack. We named our pumpkins, lit candles and put them inside, and turned out the lights. S. had put on the Moulin Rouge CD, so we toasted our little creations and then sang along to the tango version of Roxanne.
And thus we ushered in another Halloween.
Last night, LI's friend S. came to the door with two pumpkins. S., I think, likes the ritual of carving the pumpkin because of it seems so American to her -- and thus, slightly outlandish, the way American names are outlandish -- all those first names that don't mean anything, unlike Turkish names. It is an American habit to assume that our rituals are self-explanatory, whereas in other cultures the rituals are often all about explanation, are occasions in which memory is culturally ritualized. For Americans, a memory that is transmitted by ritual is, by its very nature, inauthentic. We mourn the lack of the individual rememberer -- we want experience to be located, and we think that location is in the individual.
For LI, carving a jack o lantern is the kind of thing associated with childhood's clumsy arts and crafts -- fitting stubby fingers into dull scissors and snipping out circles from orange construction paper (ah, the feel of construction paper! its distinct roughness, its graininess, the crayon box colors it comes in, the way tiny, curved bits of it would escape from the scissors and float down to the linoleum tile floor; the way it would darken around a drop of glue, a dab of paste; the way you sprinkled it with glitter to enliven its stubborn drabness; the way it dominated all other media of art until about the sixth grade! LI, a childless bachelor, alas, wonders if construction paper still exists, somewhere -- if, yesterday, there were third grade classrooms where boys and girls were hunched over their orange and brown and black and red paper, inexpertly scalpeling out the outline of witch's hats and broomsticks and cats and ghosts, some teacher -- there were so many for whom LI's heart, at that age, throbbed, Miss Eberhardt, Miss Smith -- making her way down the aisles, the slight smell of her perfume as she bent over you, commenting on your childish assemblage -- but LI digresses).
So, after fortifying ourselves with margaritas at a Mexican restaurant we returned to my place and fortified our fortifications with vodka, then commenced to serious surgery on the pumpkins with the four knives I was able to round up. LI created one of his wobbly eyed jacks, with a big honker nose, the jumbled mouth, and a few artistic touches -- this year, we tried to inscribe something that looked like a skull and crossbones on a cheek, as though the jack had tatooed himself. S., working on more classic lines (plenty of triangles, well wrought), made a more traditional jack. We named our pumpkins, lit candles and put them inside, and turned out the lights. S. had put on the Moulin Rouge CD, so we toasted our little creations and then sang along to the tango version of Roxanne.
And thus we ushered in another Halloween.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
Remora
First, a note. LI begged the Enigmatic Mermaid to post about the Lula election. She did so. In Brazil, we believe, the feuilleton is called the cronica. It is a form known to Americans from the translation of Clarice Lispector's cronicas, of which a review is here. Well, we don't want to flatter the mermaid (well, maybe we do, a little), but while we sometimes find Lispector's cronicas a little, shall we say too caught up in their own sentimental intelligence? a bit too self appreciative? we feel that E.M. would rather buy a used Che Guevara bikini than aphorize hollowly.
Although perhaps we are being unfair to Lispector. Someday we are going to do a post about the influence of Jules Renard's writing, especially the journals, on the cronica/personal essay format.
And now for our feature presentation.
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." -- Adam Smith
LI was agreeably surprised to see the Arts and Letters website back on-line, thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education. We've taken a lot of links from that site.
The one we are taking today is to Diane Coyle's column in the Financial Times, which presents a skewed and problematic defense of economics as a science. LI uses problematic in the sense that someone might say, the verticality of the Tower of Pisa is problematic. Or, the election of President Bush is problematic. There�s a telling strain, in other words, between semantics and reality. Coyle�s defense is flawed both in the main line of its attack and in its examples.
As in, primero: Coyle is defending economics against common sense. This is much like a biologist defending biology against the amorous habits of the toad. Common sense, whether deluded or not, shapes organized social behavior. This is, in fact, the whole import behind the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which we have been discussing lately. The resistance to experimental work in economics is quite hard to root out. It isn�t resistance to economics � it is the data to which economics must attend. This is how Coyle puts the issue:
First, a note. LI begged the Enigmatic Mermaid to post about the Lula election. She did so. In Brazil, we believe, the feuilleton is called the cronica. It is a form known to Americans from the translation of Clarice Lispector's cronicas, of which a review is here. Well, we don't want to flatter the mermaid (well, maybe we do, a little), but while we sometimes find Lispector's cronicas a little, shall we say too caught up in their own sentimental intelligence? a bit too self appreciative? we feel that E.M. would rather buy a used Che Guevara bikini than aphorize hollowly.
Although perhaps we are being unfair to Lispector. Someday we are going to do a post about the influence of Jules Renard's writing, especially the journals, on the cronica/personal essay format.
And now for our feature presentation.
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." -- Adam Smith
LI was agreeably surprised to see the Arts and Letters website back on-line, thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education. We've taken a lot of links from that site.
The one we are taking today is to Diane Coyle's column in the Financial Times, which presents a skewed and problematic defense of economics as a science. LI uses problematic in the sense that someone might say, the verticality of the Tower of Pisa is problematic. Or, the election of President Bush is problematic. There�s a telling strain, in other words, between semantics and reality. Coyle�s defense is flawed both in the main line of its attack and in its examples.
As in, primero: Coyle is defending economics against common sense. This is much like a biologist defending biology against the amorous habits of the toad. Common sense, whether deluded or not, shapes organized social behavior. This is, in fact, the whole import behind the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which we have been discussing lately. The resistance to experimental work in economics is quite hard to root out. It isn�t resistance to economics � it is the data to which economics must attend. This is how Coyle puts the issue:
"The trouble with this chasm between the economist and the ordinary person is that when economics and common sense conflict, common sense is almost always wrong. This signals a profound failure in the typical education. Most people - even, I daresay, some readers of the Financial Times - are economic illiterates. Education authorities would do a great service to future generations if they ditched woolly lessons in citizenship or even worthy ones such as geography in favour of economics."
Now, that first sentence is a disaster from every point of view. What Coyle probably means is that conventional assessments of the economic situation at various points in the business cycle are usually wrong -- or at least that is how LI read it, at first. But of course those assessments drive the expectations that create economic activity. Economists are notoriously bad predictors. The Economist annually summarizes the correctness, or lack of it, of the collective predictions of economists, and what they find, usually, is that those predictions are pretty startlingly off. It is for this reason that economics is not considered a real science by, say, your usual physicist. It has the trappings of a science -- that is, it can produce thoroughly mathematized models -- but it can't seem to produce a good model of the real system that it supposedly studies. It is as if we had a science of water that couldn�t explain ice.
However, LI's first reading of Coyle's paragraph was wrong � it isn�t the economic errors of businessmen to which Coyle is pointing, but to the opponents of free trade between nations. Let�s grant Coyle this much: there are reasons to think that this is the core of economics -- after all, Adam Smith's book was about the wealth of "nations" -- but Coyle's example shows a peculiar blindness to variability of models. It is, in fact, an excellent proof that economics, divorced from common sense, is blind.
"Take one area where common sense and economics often clash: international trade. To the economist, the point of trade is imports. The more of them, the cheaper they are, the better for the nation's welfare. Exports are simply what the country has to do to pay for imports, just as work is what the individual has to do to pay for food and clothes. Thus unilaterally reducing tariffs on imports, even if no other country reciprocates, can be a sensible policy.
To the earthling, though, the point of trade is exports: national strength rather than the welfare of citizens. As Paul Krugman has so often and so eloquently pointed out, most discussions of trade policy even fail to acknowledge that the balance of payments has to balance (so that one country cannot be simultaneously swamped with cheap imports and exporting its jobs to sweatshops abroad)."
Well, yes, reducing tariffs can be a good policy. But Coyle's argument is, I think, fundamentally flawed for a common-sensical reason -- she assumes that the economic constitution of nations is scale invariant. In other words, what works for the United States should, pari passu, work for Argentina. This simply isn't true, as any objective survey of nations would show you. No other nation could maintain both a crushing trade deficit and a high currency as the U.S. does -- and the reason for that is that the US economy is of a much larger scale than the Argentine economy, for instance. General laws still apply -- eventually, the dollar will crash in value, all things being equal -- but because general laws apply more slowly in the case of the dollar, it is always possible that the US can leverage its scale to prevent an abrupt crash of the value of the dollar, or even pre-empt it. It is hard to see how any other country at the present time could do that.
These are the factors that make the unilateral decision to drop trade barriers at all times in all places (or, its equivalent, the decision to cancel governmental supports of national industries and agriculture) a bad policy. It can lead to a quick boom and a deep 'recession" -- as we now call what we used to call, with more sense, a depression. Argentina is a wonderful example of how liberalizing an economy can lead to disaster. You will notice that no economist is urging the Argentine government to run a deficit in order to get out of its current horrible situation. You will also notice that economists of both the left and right are urging the U.S. to run a deficit in order to get out of its current pretty bad situation. The reality is, IMF strictures on the American economy, if structured along the lines of Coyle�s scale invariant model, would lead to a global depression.
So, are there positive reason to have tariffs, or to have the government support industries and agriculture? Yes, there are. The reason is similar to the reason governments allow inventors to monopolize an idea for a certain period of time. Tariffs allow indigenous industries, and agriculture, a zone of inefficiency within which they can innovate, in the same way that monopoly allows inventors a zone of inefficiency in which they can get a fair return on their investment. One has to remember that all economic events happen along some time-line. Argentina, by liberalizing the economy in the way the hotshot, neo-liberal ministers did, ignored the patterns endemic to that time-line � that is, the unavailability of deficit spending in times of business retraction, which is, after all, inevitable. Economists from America, always on hand to advise governments to privatize, consistently ignore the time-line, and the conditions inhering on small scale national economies in times of recession. In fact, they are like gamblers who think they have devised a system that will guarantee a permanent lucky streak. Which is why a pattern has been established that seems to have escaped Ms. Coyle�s attention: advisor from Harvard or MIT or Chicago goes to Third World Country x; advisor gets president of x to liberalize the economy; a boom follows liberalization, greatly increasing spending power of the top ten percent of the population; a devaluation of the currency follows, as the boom proves to be shallow and unsustainable; advisor, from tenured position at Harvard, et. al., writes op ed in Business Week or Forbes listing reasons liberalization didn�t go far enough, and blames collapse on these reasons.
Differences in scale also lead to deviations between the measure of income inequality and the measure of inequality in real purchasing power. Tomorrow, LI is going to expand on this little thought with regards to Coyle�s remarks in the Guardian.
Monday, October 28, 2002
Remora
There's an election day coming up -- which fills LI with about as much enthusiasm as an arachnophobe contemplating a new species of tarantula. The election process this year has been particularly grim, seemingly run by the utterly braindead for the utterly braindead, and processed by the utterly smarmy. In the meantime, the electorate is completely left out. DC decides what is important -- the war with Iraq, for instance --and decides how people should feel about it, and then gets all surprised when they don't feel that way. Wellstone, before he died, was pulling ahead of his opponent partly because of the war issue -- Wellstone voted against it. Now, to you and me, that might mean he'd tapped into ambiguity, to say the least, about the upcoming war. But not for the press. No, that was about Wellstone being kinkily independent, and people voting for him expressing himself, in spite of their own limitless enthusiasm for what DC decided about Iraq. For the DC line is that the war is wildly popular. Any evidence to the contrary is, well, a problem with the country. Just as the country had this wierd problem with impeaching Clinton -- DC decided this was just the thing to do, and just the thing to obsess about, and the country, for some reason, had other problems.
On the smarmy front, we have William Saletan -- the man who proclaimed Bush "toast' in the last election. Impeturbably pompous, a man who has the cleverness of that college room-mate that freshmen learn to dread -- you know, the one who just talks on and on, mostly about his own magnificent accomplishments -- this is the man is gracing Arkansas this week for Slate. Of course, it is an effort for a man of Saletan's rare sensibilities to have to encounter the gross flesh of Arkansas. He discovers a man missing teeth in a diner, as well as a man who is unshaven. He goes to hear Hutcheson, the Republican incumbent, make a speech:
"I do want to introduce my wife Randi. She's right over here," he says. With a giant whoosh, every head in the room turns. This is no ordinary political wife. This is the former staffer Hutchinson married a year after divorcing his wife in 1999. Around the room, dozens of people stare at the new Mrs. Hutchinson and mentally subtract 50 rosaries from the senator's penance. She isn't the bimbo they expected. She's pale and bulky with a weak chin. She's wearing almost as much makeup as the Fox News correspondent. She looks older than her age. "How old was his first wife?" one reporter asks. "Older," says another."
Wearing too much makeup, is she? Bulky, is she? Ah, not up to the exacting standards of our ace reporter! Poor Saletan, who sees the stye in his neighbor's eye, but doesn't see the redwod tree sized log in his own!
LI is reminded of what George Bernanos's says about imbeciles in Les Grands Cimetieres sous la lune, the book in which he decisively broke with the far right over the Spanish Civil War. It is 1937, and Bernanos had been very close to Action Francais, the proto-fascist group. But as he watched the right drift into supporting Mussolini and Hitler, he begins to rethink his position -- which was always based on a very Pascalian Christianity. He remarks that, in a previous book, he had vowed to move the reader, "to anger or to affection, I didn't care." Now, he says, moving the reader, at least to anger, tires him out:
"The anger of imbeciles has always filled me with sadness, but now it fills me with horror. The whole world echoes with this anger. What else? They like nothing better than understand nothing at all, and they will even gather themselves in groups to do that, for the last thing man is capable of is being stupid and mean all alone, a mysterious condition reserved, no doubt, for the damned. Understanding nothing they assemble together, sorted not by their particular affinities, which are feeble, but after the modest function they hold from birth or chance, which entirely absorbs their little life. For the middle classes are the only ones to furnish forth the imbecile; the superior classes monopolize the fop, a genre of useless stupidity, while the inferior classes only suceed in manufacturing sketches of a gross and sometimes even admirable animality."
Yes, Saletan is an exemplar of this imbecility, right down to the faux Mencken attitude. Multiply this attitude by his cohorts and fellow travellers -- the media, the political consultants, the politicians themselves -- and you have a perfect machine for destroying the motive to vote. To vote is a contract, a way of sealing a pact with the nation. It is, after all, our nation -- that is the story. But the idea that the average voter is a species of dog to whom galvanic shocks are administered every six years, via tv ads, to get him to salivate in the voting booth -- this is the entire attitude of DC. Look at the funny dental work! Look at the makeup! Am I funny now?
Disgust, disgust, disgust -- the great enemy of vision. The Saletans of the world really do fill me with horror.
There's an election day coming up -- which fills LI with about as much enthusiasm as an arachnophobe contemplating a new species of tarantula. The election process this year has been particularly grim, seemingly run by the utterly braindead for the utterly braindead, and processed by the utterly smarmy. In the meantime, the electorate is completely left out. DC decides what is important -- the war with Iraq, for instance --and decides how people should feel about it, and then gets all surprised when they don't feel that way. Wellstone, before he died, was pulling ahead of his opponent partly because of the war issue -- Wellstone voted against it. Now, to you and me, that might mean he'd tapped into ambiguity, to say the least, about the upcoming war. But not for the press. No, that was about Wellstone being kinkily independent, and people voting for him expressing himself, in spite of their own limitless enthusiasm for what DC decided about Iraq. For the DC line is that the war is wildly popular. Any evidence to the contrary is, well, a problem with the country. Just as the country had this wierd problem with impeaching Clinton -- DC decided this was just the thing to do, and just the thing to obsess about, and the country, for some reason, had other problems.
On the smarmy front, we have William Saletan -- the man who proclaimed Bush "toast' in the last election. Impeturbably pompous, a man who has the cleverness of that college room-mate that freshmen learn to dread -- you know, the one who just talks on and on, mostly about his own magnificent accomplishments -- this is the man is gracing Arkansas this week for Slate. Of course, it is an effort for a man of Saletan's rare sensibilities to have to encounter the gross flesh of Arkansas. He discovers a man missing teeth in a diner, as well as a man who is unshaven. He goes to hear Hutcheson, the Republican incumbent, make a speech:
"I do want to introduce my wife Randi. She's right over here," he says. With a giant whoosh, every head in the room turns. This is no ordinary political wife. This is the former staffer Hutchinson married a year after divorcing his wife in 1999. Around the room, dozens of people stare at the new Mrs. Hutchinson and mentally subtract 50 rosaries from the senator's penance. She isn't the bimbo they expected. She's pale and bulky with a weak chin. She's wearing almost as much makeup as the Fox News correspondent. She looks older than her age. "How old was his first wife?" one reporter asks. "Older," says another."
Wearing too much makeup, is she? Bulky, is she? Ah, not up to the exacting standards of our ace reporter! Poor Saletan, who sees the stye in his neighbor's eye, but doesn't see the redwod tree sized log in his own!
LI is reminded of what George Bernanos's says about imbeciles in Les Grands Cimetieres sous la lune, the book in which he decisively broke with the far right over the Spanish Civil War. It is 1937, and Bernanos had been very close to Action Francais, the proto-fascist group. But as he watched the right drift into supporting Mussolini and Hitler, he begins to rethink his position -- which was always based on a very Pascalian Christianity. He remarks that, in a previous book, he had vowed to move the reader, "to anger or to affection, I didn't care." Now, he says, moving the reader, at least to anger, tires him out:
"The anger of imbeciles has always filled me with sadness, but now it fills me with horror. The whole world echoes with this anger. What else? They like nothing better than understand nothing at all, and they will even gather themselves in groups to do that, for the last thing man is capable of is being stupid and mean all alone, a mysterious condition reserved, no doubt, for the damned. Understanding nothing they assemble together, sorted not by their particular affinities, which are feeble, but after the modest function they hold from birth or chance, which entirely absorbs their little life. For the middle classes are the only ones to furnish forth the imbecile; the superior classes monopolize the fop, a genre of useless stupidity, while the inferior classes only suceed in manufacturing sketches of a gross and sometimes even admirable animality."
Yes, Saletan is an exemplar of this imbecility, right down to the faux Mencken attitude. Multiply this attitude by his cohorts and fellow travellers -- the media, the political consultants, the politicians themselves -- and you have a perfect machine for destroying the motive to vote. To vote is a contract, a way of sealing a pact with the nation. It is, after all, our nation -- that is the story. But the idea that the average voter is a species of dog to whom galvanic shocks are administered every six years, via tv ads, to get him to salivate in the voting booth -- this is the entire attitude of DC. Look at the funny dental work! Look at the makeup! Am I funny now?
Disgust, disgust, disgust -- the great enemy of vision. The Saletans of the world really do fill me with horror.
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