Category Archives: Political issues

West Point trolleyology

Posted on by
3

I blogged about the doctrine of double effect at the beginning of last year. It comes up just about any time there’s mention of the morality of warfare, and here it is in a piece by David Edmonds, writing for Prospect, on the popularity of trolley problems. Edmonds reports that West Point cadets engage in tutored discussions on ethics (this is actually something I’d heard about before). Double effect and trolley problems come up in these discussions. The cadets interviewed by Edmonds are unanimous in saying that it’s wrong to push the fat man off the bridge but OK to switch the trolley onto the spur. This – the cadets say – is because pushing the fat man intends the death of the fat man, whereas switching the trolley involves no intention to kill the lone person tied to the track of the spur. Likewise – according to the cadets – it’s wrong to intentionally target civilians (like Al Qaeda does) but OK to carry out a bombing in which civilians might be killed as – yes – collateral damage.

I’m not going to attempt to dissect double effect again. It does, though, disturb me that trolley problems seem to have carved out some sort of justificatory pattern in the minds of West Point cadets. Double effect considerations might explain why certain people give certain answers to certain trolley problems (apparently most people think it’s OK to switch the trolley onto the spur). Trolley problems as a set of thought experiments might help to explain why we make the ethical decisions that we do in fact make. However, I don’t see that worked out answers to trolley problems are therefore adequate guides to action. If you’re a military person tasked with dropping bombs on targets of opportunity, the plane you’re piloting (or directing) is not a trolley and there isn’t anyone tied to the track; there is no track. Trolley problems are highly stipulated; real life usually presents additional options. Likewise with many double effect characterisations. We’re not required to operate as though the use of JDAMs were an institution, such that the only moral problem concerns targetting. This is part of what I was trying to get at before.

Update: More – much more – on trolley problems here and here.

Promotion to prison

Posted on by
16

Cameron:

If you can work and if you’re offered a job and you don’t take it, you cannot continue to claim benefits. It will be extremely tough.

This statement has a partner. David could have gone on to say:

If you’re able to hire, and if you define a role for someone and you don’t offer minimally decent wages and conditions, you cannot expect to prosper through recruitment. It will be extremely tough.

State benefits aren’t just a signal to workers, they also send a message to employers: treat your people at least as well as this, or they’ll tend to prefer living on benefits. It shouldn’t always be the case that you’re better off working: in fact, one way to guarantee that work makes a person better off involves putting slackers in jail. It’s been tried.* For those who don’t want that sort of country (or something closer to it than we currently are) discussion of benefits can’t just be about the unemployed. More balance in the rhetoric please, Tories, or we’ll assume you don’t understand this.

* If you think that coming up with an actual example involves confirming Godwin’s Law, well, you’d be wrong. Apparently the Swiss had an arbeitsscheu policy of their own up until the early 1980s.

Leaking Oil Well Rocked By Massive Explosion

Posted on by
10

So they capped the leaking oil well in the end. What about the other one? Not so much.

Back before the summer break, we’d just had the eruption of the “microparties”, and Nicolas Sarkozy had discovered that it was suddenly imperative to lock up gypsies. Everyone knew very well that the scandal would take the summer off, getting out of Paris to the sea as if it was itself a character in the story. And now, it’s back. There’s been a certain amount of fallout about the Roma, by the way; this week’s leak reveals that Brice Hortefeux’s original circular to all prefects did indeed mention them by name as an ethnic group, which isn’t meant to be something that the Republic believes in. In fact, that’s precisely what Immigration Minister Eric Besson has been saying in public – so he’s been left to protest that he didn’t get the e-mail.

This is, however, now a side issue, one with the passing summer, even though the European Commission is officially displeased. As August came to an end, a few new tarballs began to wash up on the beaches. Eric Woerth turned out to have intervened to get Patrice de Maistre, Liliane Bettencourt’s financial adviser and his wife’s employer, a Légion d’Honneur. He’d initially denied this. Then, Le Canard Enchainé ran a slightly gnomic story mentioning that one David Sénat, an official on Justice Minister Michéle Alliot-Marie’s staff, had been forced to resign.

The significance of this has just become more obvious than it perhaps was.

Le Monde opened this week by announcing on the front page that the newspaper was about to bring criminal charges alleging that persons unknown had been spying on communications between one of its reporters and a source. Communications between journalists and their sources are legally privileged in France under a measure introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy. The source, it turns out, is none other than David Sénat, and in practice, the persons unknown can only have been agents of the state.

Wham! It’s a gusher!

The UMP, through its general secretary Xavier Bertrand, responded immediately:

Pourquoi un journal comme Le Monde se permet d’accuser sans preuve, pourquoi une telle agressivité du journal Le Monde?

He also blamed the Socialists and the Communists and claimed there was no proof of anything in the story. This may not have been the best decision ever, as within the day, the Director General of the National Police confirmed in an interview with the same newspaper that the DCRI – Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, the reorganised counter-intelligence agency – had indeed carried out an investigation into leaks to the press in which they had monitored Sénat’s office phone. To sum up: Le Monde alleged that the DCRI had been ordered to find out who was communicating with the press, had “examined” Sénat’s phone, had demanded communications data from a mobile operator, and had identified Sénat. Bertrand denied all this.

The DGPN Director then confirmed that the DCRI had been ordered to find out who was communicating with the press, had examined the phone, had demanded data from the operator, and had identified Sénat. Xavier Bertrand would therefore appear to be in a certain amount of trouble.

The only difference in their accounts is that the DGPN Director denies that they intercepted Sénat’s phone calls, only that they retrieved the call-detail records showing who he had been telephoning, when, and for how long (and also possibly from where and under which billing codes). He seems to be relying on this distinction to claim that this exercise was legal. Le Monde‘s sources, whose PGP keys are presumably getting a workout, claim that they also obtained geolocation data.

Keen and agile minds will recall that this is precisely the argument the US National Security Agency asserted in the case of STELLAR WIND, its mammoth and illegal Bush-era surveillance operation which also relied on the analysis of CDRs rather than on the interception of calls. It is a telecomms industry truth that the real business is all about signalling and billing and operations support – telephony itself is a relatively small part of the machine. This is never more true than in surveillance cases.

It does not seem to be the strongest argument ever that journalistic sources are protected as to the content of their communications but not as to the fact of being a source, but that’s a matter for the courts. The police have also claimed that they ran the idea by the national commission for the supervision of surveillance, which unfortunately denies this as well, and it seems to be confirmed that the leaks in question were ones about the Woerth-Bettencourt affair.

Who is David Sénat, anyway? A judge by training, he’s been working for MAM for years, at the ministries of Defence, the Interior, and now Justice, and also in her capacity as head of the RPR in its shadow existence as part of the UMP.

MAM considered running for president in 2007, during the period when it appeared that the traditional Gaullist wing of politics and the circle around Jacques Chirac might stand a spoiler candidate to derail the Sarkozy campaign. Not surprisingly, she’s considered much more of a conservative conservative than Sarko, and a potential future presidential candidate. Even her microparty seems designed to contrast with either Sarko’s Rolex-and-yacht look or the IT-director professionalism of someone like Francois Fillon – it’s called Le Chêne, The Oak. Feel the Burkean traditions on that. So the fact that…someone…called the spooks on her office implies a certain tension, to say the least.

Meanwhile, the “someone”? Who he? Well, the President did have the DCRI investigate the source of rumours about his wife. So he’s got form for making use of the intelligence services personally. She’s in the news as well, by the way:

..avoids charity work, held up filming on Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and had three former lovers as houseguests when Nicolas Sarkozy first visited her Mediterranean villa.

Who was it who said that the cavalry lent tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl?

Anyway, it’s hard to overstate and understate the importance of this story. Imagine if the Bush administration had been spying on the New York Times‘s phone calls to, say, Valerie Plame – not perhaps the biggest leap of fantasy ever undertaken – and the Times both detected this somehow, and called the FBI to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, under a source-protection law introduced by the same administration. On the other hand, the weirder any political scandal gets, the greater the pressure to find some sort of amicable resolution. (See the quote above.) The system, after all, must preserve itself. But the exit strategy from here is very far from obvious.

Rent-seeking, again

Posted on by
24

A bit more on rent-seeking, to see if I can draw out what I’ve been trying to get at. There’s the claim that any person who petitions government is acting, at least in part, out of self-interest. A tendency to rent-seek, it’s said, may simply be a fact about people generally; hence everyone who approaches government should be regarded as a would be rent-seeker. (Rob made this position clearer in comments on the last post on this.) A person holding this view may go on to say that if there’s a normative evaluation to be carried out, that evaluation should take into account not the petitioner’s motive but the petitioner’s situation.

Consistent with this is the view that any legislator may be party to a rent-seeking transaction. The way it goes is, a person petitions government, looking for some special benefit; the self-interested legislator replies (he’s only human): sure, but what are you going to do for me?

I think what’s missing here is an acknowledgement that some forms of petition are desirable and some aren’t. It’s not OK to offer a bribe; it’s not OK for a legislator to take a bribe. Naturally, we may have laws that forbid bribery.

Conversely, it’s not only OK to vote, it’s considered desirable; it’s also considered desirable for legislators to campaign for votes, to write manifestos, etc. Some countries even have laws that mandate voting.

Our designs for our institutions can only anticipate certain cases; any framework of laws will have a normative underpinning. We may think that it’s wrong for a legislator to accept favours from big business after he or she retires as a legislator, even though no law forbids it. We may also think that it’s wrong for an organisation to invent a new incentive along those lines. Conversely, we encourage people who want to go into politics to first acquire an education, experience in business, etc., even if no law requires it. We also like it when voters are well informed. There’s a gradient of desirability, from immoral graft to virtuous example-setting.

If you bundle up all of these activities into something called ‘rent-seeking’ – choosing from then on to look at the situation of petitioners to the exclusion of the character of their petition – you close the door on something important. There may be a difference between a defence contractor petitioner and a homeless person petitioner that isn’t to do with their relative advantages. Not all vote getting is vote grubbing. To approach government and ask for something isn’t to rent-seek.

You misuser, you

Posted on by
20

In my recent post on the WSJ’s review of Mokyr’s book about the industrial revolution, I said that I’d never come across the definition of ‘rent-seeking’ as “the use of political power to redistribute … wealth”. Of course, right now I’m seeing that definition everywhere. Josef Joffe, in his review of (the late) Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, says:

… the more the state distributes and regulates, the more it tempts its citizens to outflank the market and manipulate public power for private gain.

And there it is again, more or less. Government: a force for bad.

Let’s consider some minimal state which is constituted only of its own citizens (as citizens) and which has authority to enforce only that which has been agreed on by citizens. Now let’s consider two statements:

(1) The citizens have grouped together to enact legislation to achieve what each of them considers to be a mutually advantageous settlement.

(2) The citizens have ‘outflanked the market and manipulated public power for private gain’.

You don’t have to widen the scopes of the constituent terms much to get to a point where these two statements are as good as indistinguishable. That is, to say one is to say the other. (I’d argue (1) is more precise, but not to the extent that it matters.)

Joffe says that the consequence of ‘outflanking’ is that even a good-intentioned government will go wrong. He adds:

The founding fathers grasped this hard truth, and hence they hemmed in government. Even the most moderate of social democrats tend to ignore this insight, and so does Tony Judt.

The problem is that beyond the platitude that power corrupts, no insight is available. Instead, Joffe’s rhetoric suggests, implicitly, that there might be some perfect end state where ‘the playing field is level’ and government … well, we’ll just not need to worry about that particular runaway monster any more. We’ll have ‘reined it in’ once and for all; it can no longer “weaken society” or “render … trust moot”. This is a hope, not an insight. And unless you are a bit more precise about what you mean by your terms – and Joffe isn’t – you’ll find that your call for an end to ‘manipulation of public power for private gain’ is a call for an end to government. Most people recognise, I think, that the inequality of power entailed by government (by definition, the government is always more powerful than any of its citizens, however grouped) is both motivated and justified by the existence of naturally arising inequalities. The spread of these is broad enough to include cases I think even Joffe would have to acknowledge, if pushed. Government is our response; the beast from the depths is the fact that circumstance and personal attributes vary, and hence some are already disadvantaged. There are and will be special interests from here on out. To acknowledge such an interest is not to automatically produce a state-corrupting ‘client’: good government is possible.

Update: It’s OK, everyone, I think I’ve discovered the source of the trouble:

The [author's] extended methodological digression on the function of orthodox economic theory in application to the private economy is designed to provide some assistance in discussing the analogous role of theory as extended to the public economy, to the demand for and the supply of public as opposed to private goods. At base, the economist must begin from the same set of conditional hypotheses. He deals with the same individuals as decision-making units in both public and private choice, and, initially at least, he should proceed on the assumption that their fundamental laws of behavior are the same under the two sets of institutions.

- Buchanan, J., The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, 1968. (My emphasis.)

That sounds very scientific and cautious and all, but if you stop to think about it I think you’ll agree that it’s not.

Just What Is The Economist Up To In It’s Seeming Crusade Against Catalunya?

Posted on by
20

Well, this is certainly not the first time I have had cause to complain about the quality of the journalism and economic reporting served up over at the Economist, and I’m damn sure it won’t be the last. But this latest example of shoddy (I would almost even go so far as to use the word “gutter”) journalism certainly takes the biscuit. Catalunya, the august magazine informs its readers is the “Land of the Ban” – “First the burqa, now the bullfight. What will Catalonia outlaw next?” Evidently the author of the article is entitled to his opinion, but could it be that the long-standing practice of incorporating unsigned opinion pieces may now have lost its earlier justification, and may it not somehow have inadvertently converted itself into a rather cowardly way of expressing otherwise hard to justify opinions behind the safe shield of anonymity. Or would our author really like to show us that valour is, at least in this case, the better part of discretion, and enter the arena in persona in order to face the wrath of the Catalan bull?

“The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word,” wrote Hemingway in his classic treatise Death in the Afternoon, “that is, it is not an equal contest, or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather, it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved, and in which there is danger for the man, but certain death for the animal.”

Continue reading →

Well, we’re all good at something

Posted on by
6

Chris says he doesn’t like hierarchies:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated hierarchies. I didn’t like school, for example, until I entered the less hierarchical sixth-form. One reason I wouldn’t want to be an academic or a civil servant is that I’d be uncomfortable with their endless gradations of status.

Discussion follows, in which a fair few people have a go at Chris for wanting to differentiate himself as an inventive blogger: i.e., he’s just as status-seeking as anyone else.

Chris’s original intent, though, was to get a bit of traction on an argument that’s come out both against The Spirit Level and against the leftish commentary that’s gone along with it. This is the argument that status differentiation is inevitable; it’s a natural extension of our heterogeneity. We are diverse to begin with – each of us is a different mix – and status is built on that, in various corresponding ways. This isn’t a particularly new story. Howard Roark isn’t the only hero of The Fountainhead; there are others, themselves to be admired for what they do. The hotelier Kent Lansing, for instance:

I want a good hotel, and I have certain standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I want. And when I fight for you, I’m doing – on my side of it – just what you’re doing when you design a building. Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? … Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Ian Fleming extends the range of ideas somewhat:

Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavour … except crime!

Auric Goldfinger strives non-virtuously and revels in it, hence the humour. But the each-to-his-own-field-of-excellence sentiment – as diffused into contemporary society – takes a where’s the harm? tack. It goes: so what if some people are wealthy? There are some really cool skateboard kids in Pasadena; you might envy my wealth, but money just happens to be what I do. Actually, I envy the skateboarders. It’s self-consciously and defensively earnest, and I reckon it owes quite a bit to the Rand version.

Anyway, the distinction I want to remind everyone of is that between hierarchies with consequence and hierarchies without consequence. It’s not an absolute distinction, but it’s there.

For example, when it comes to golf, I’m at the bottom of the heap and I know it. Almost everyone is better than me. I hate golf, come to that, and never play. But the cause of my hatred isn’t that my options in golf (or in anything else, more or less) are constrained by other golfers (as golfers). In fact my options are almost wholly unconstrained by other golfers. Perhaps I couldn’t enter any tournament I wanted to, but I still get to have a go at just about anything else golf-related that I might fancy. It’s ‘no skin off my nose’ that other golfers are better than me.

Contrast with the hierarchy of wealth. Not the same. Your wealth – as part and parcel of our social arrangements generally – is made a condition of many, many activities. Including access to golf courses, as you may have muttered to yourself when reading the paragraph above. It’s a commonplace that other wealth-holders do tend to constrain your options; typically, they constrain you in that they outbid you in seeking something scarce. The hierarchy of wealth is a hierarchy with consequence; it is skin off your nose, it’s a hierarchy that often matters, and this is why it’ll tend to get brought into any discussion of social inequality. And perhaps this is only something odd about me, but I tend to think that if a person is constrained almost every which way he or she turns, then that person will start to feel just a little bit beaten down.

As a part-aside; apparently Nero’s palace in Rome got to be so big that other Romans had to take huge detours in order to get from one side of the city to the other. In the end, the lawful resident of the Domus Aurea pissed off other Romans so much that they did him in. Just saying.

Kizuna West

Posted on by
10

A bit more on the Big Society. I mentioned that Rory Stewart wants faster broadband for his constituents in rural Cumbria. Now Rory is a decent guy – I knew him at school – but I don’t think he’s on to anything much with his play to relate the issue of rural broadband provision to Cameron’s Big Society. We might eventually end up with better broadband in Cumbria, but we’ll have gotten there by the hard road: the plan doesn’t do much for the idea of little platoons. The Guardian has a bit more about how Stewart describes his project. Apparently there are three components to it:

1) The government part. The government is going to open up its public infrastructure. It is going to allow us into the fibre optics thick pipes that run to the schools. It is going to put pressure on Network Rail to let us into the thick pipes that run along the Carlisle Settle line.

2) We, as communities, will get a very small government subsidy equivalent to what they would have given us in terms of their universal service commitment. You roll out a parish pump which is to say you go into that thick pipe at your school or on the railway and you bring out a little fibre optic cabinet. Then, and this is the key point, the parish comes and puts together its own plan to get the stuff from the parish pump into their home.
Many of our communities will want to go for fibre optics to the home so they can have super fast stuff. Others will be content to put a wireless hub on top of the pump that will give them two megabytes.

3) The final government support for the community is to provide a loan. If it costs a £1,000 to put broadband into your house, if you have a soft loan over 15 to 20 years that is only costing you £50 a year.

Now there’s not quite enough technical detail here to comment on viability. What we can do, though, is make a quick comparison with the way Japan has set about solving the same problem. In 2008, JAXA launched a satellite – Kizuna – which allows any rural Japanese household to connect to the internet at 155 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload. That’s the domestic transmission rate. Small businesses get 1.2 Gbps download. Compare this with the default 2 Mbps rate mentioned in the Cumbrian plan. Note, that’s megabits. Rural Japanese already get between 75 to 600 times the data rate planned for Cumbria, once the parish meetings are held, and the thousand small disagreements about what to do have gotten thrashed out.

In terms of subscriber requirements, the Japanese subscribers only need to install a satellite dish (45 cm at the lower data rate) to get connected. The Cumbrians are expected to raise loans to get cables laid to their houses (note: wouldn’t line of sight microwave be better in some cases?).

In terms of scope and timescale: Kizuna gave coverage to the whole country from launch day onwards. The Eden Valley Big Society plan, once implemented, will cover part of one county of England.

The talk of parish pumps and railway lines is charming, but I think it’s a shame to be literally parochial about something like this. There are situations where a society needs to amass all of its resources to be effective. Communications infrastructure is one of those situations. What’s more, investment in satellites, specifically, is consistent with fiscal stimulus as generally understood (there are British satellite manufacturers). The Big Society talk is surely better saved for the human-to-human stuff, if we’re going to hear about it at all.

Anway, what do Fistful readers suggest vis-a-vis rural broadband. How has this been solved elsewhere?

Our organisation does not tolerate failure?

Posted on by
3

Re my earlier post, in case you were wondering if there were any actual cases of politicians making ambiguous calls for market reassurance, well, here’s a nice example from the G20 Toronto Summit Declaration:

There is a risk that synchronized fiscal adjustment across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery. There is also a risk that the failure to implement consolidation where necessary would undermine confidence and hamper growth. Reflecting this balance, advanced economies have committed to fiscal plans that will at least halve deficits by 2013 and stabilize or reduce government debt-to-GDP ratios by 2016.

Whose confidence? And (fiscal) consolidation is necessary where? Halving deficits by 2013 is no small aim. It’s also a highly political aim – affecting many people in many constituencies – and so it seems to me that explicit justification is needed; not hand waving and vague talk of ‘confidence’.

Incidentally, the G20 organisation seems to talk quite a bit about ‘taking steps’ and ‘delivering concrete outcomes’. What, if anything, gives them legitimacy to even attempt to ‘take steps’? Many national constitutions require governments to ratify international treaties as and when they’re negotiated. Shouldn’t the G20 ‘steps’ count as treaties? My question here is only partly facetious. Shouldn’t they?