Archive for the ‘Theoretical musings’ Category

23 Apr

Stoppard’s The Real Thing – and the importance of barriers to entry

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Theoretical musings. Tagged: , .

We went to see The Real Thing last night at the Old Vic (me excitedly refreshing the liveblogging of the debate through the interval). I thought it brilliant, very raw, funny of course, thought provoking.

What tends to wind me up about the Stoppards I’ve seen – and writers like Iris Murdoch – is that they never seem to escape their own little world.  “I wonder what a philandering playwright married to an actress would think at this point” does not seem to be raising the bar much.  Ditto for Oxford philosophers and old Iris.  But the thoughts they have – and their language – make the failing seem trivial.

My favourite scene was the one with the cricket bat, where Stoppard/Henry makes a powerful case for, well, intellectual snobbery and entry barriers  stopping just anyone from being able to get published.  He compares perfect writing to the bat:

This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel …

But what I actually loved most was  the accurate viciousness with which he mocks Brodie’s earnest, right-on, lefty diatribe of a play:

Because it’s balls. Mary’s part is the least of it – it’s merely ham-fisted. But when he gets into his stride, or rather his lurch, announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific – war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft… It’s all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons… You can’t fool Brodie – patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism… Pages and pages of it. It’s like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the india rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea…

Nowadays, of course, Brodie would have a blog.  How many words has Stoppard written in 50 years?  How many do we put down in a year? I ought to end this post with a plaintive cry for restraint, but I am already hypocrite enough.

15 Apr

My question isn’t about Media Repression

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Theoretical musings. Tagged: , .

Hat Tip to Paul S for pointing me to this dispute on Stumbling and Mumbling.  I tend to be on his side here about the supposed wickedness of Syrup in how he interviewed this character.  You enter this sphere, you have to face its rules.   Any other party.  Etc Etc

But my question is more basic.  Again, hattiping Paul for finding it: why on earth was and is Devil’s Kitchen So Popular?  Why is foulmouthed ranting about Libertarianism - a creed for those who find complicated messy life too difficult for their tiny brains – such a hit in the Blogosphere?  Who is reading this cr*p?  Why do they find it so attractive to read schoolboy abuse hurled at strangers they don’t like?

Which of you are responsible for this witless abuse being so high in the Wikio stats?  I know I’m a prissy mother’s boy who 1′s his sh1ts and so on, but is the right wing internet readership really so populated by immature, um, pr1cks?

I don’t dispute the right to publish how he likes.  I am just amazed from a blogreaders’ perspective.

23 Mar

The Internet is back. I’m reswamped.

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Economics, Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , , .

I had a semiWebFree day yesterday.  Some would hope this would be liberating, but of course we know it is not so; the stuff just accumulates unseen and unsorted.   I tend to feel very like Andrew in this excellent post here: simultaneously energised and stressed by having so much to want to read.

Were our forefathers really less informed, because they could not access public lectures, random blogthoughts, 78 newschannels and instant copies of Bank speeches from their desks?  I tend to think not.

Today I hope to read: two more Bank speeches; the Policy Exchange Tax document (ignoring their annoying insistence that the deficit crisis was caused by a sudden spending explosion, not the way budgeted revenues fell by about £120bn… it is bound to be an interesting piece), Greenspan’s Brooking’s Institute piece (he writes beautifully, does Alan), plus all the many things I have starred in my Google Reader about the Budget. And I promise not to load too much of this into Andrew’s must read pile.

Unless it is really essential of course.

In the meantime, stuff I find of note.  Brian Groom here seems to support some limited industrial intervention, even though he calls it Brown’s Strategic Re-election Fund:

Last week it was an £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters for a 15,000-tonne press to make nuclear reactor parts, a £20.7m grant for Nissan to build the Leaf electric car in Sunderland and a £360m loan guarantee for Ford to develop green engines … There you have it: 1970s redux, even if the interventions are aimed at the industries of the future.It chimes with the post-crisis mood but horrifies non-interventionists. My former colleague John Willman, in a Policy Exchange report, accused Lord Mandelson of slipping into “policies prevalent in continental Europe that have failed Britain in the past” … I suspect these sums, similar to traditional inward investment grants, are too small to cause serious market distortions, and Lord Mandelson has a point about unlocking investments that might otherwise not be made. The UK, he says, must learn from France, Germany, South Korea and Singapore.

Ed Conway highlights a radical idea that the Tories have been leading with – changing the way debt is taxed.  It is in Policy Exchange’s document.

Aditya thinks Britain has been led down a panda-style culdesac.  As Tim Worstall has observed, how very Austrian of the Guardian.  It is a profoundly worrying thought, and one I tend to disagree with.  I think the UK does mostly the right things.  We are not in the 1970s, trying to do stuff that globalisation is inexorably pulling the rug from.

On Free Exchange, it is reported that Joe Gagnon wants another $2 trillion of QE in the US, which he thinks has so far lowered long rates by 60bps.  Ryan Avent summarises my views in a nutshell:

Mr Gagnon hints at an important point. There are risks to stimulative actions by the government (debt concerns) and the Fed (inflation), and there is a risk to inaction (continued high unemployment, and consequent debt concerns). Of all the potential threats, inflation appears to be the most dormant and least troublesome.

This will delight you all: Simon Ward thinks UK bank profits may surpass their peak level soon.

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen continue their gentle and seemingly inadvertent destruction of Blond’s Red Toryism:

I have harbored two critiques of Blond. The first is that his economic theories were too vague, and potentially too protectionist. … The second critique is that Blond has been too hard on modernity and too Utopian in his prescriptions.

Blond and other critics of modernity and/or liberalism must also realize that to some degree no matter what change they achieve in society, it will not be a clean break with modernity, but rather a sort of fusion of these ideas with our now ingrained sense of liberalism and individualism and the like. In other words, the critique must go far beyond the political and infuse itself somehow into the culture itself. How on earth to do this in Britain where so few share Blond’s faith?


5 Feb

What broken society?

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Politics, Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , .

I always find the miserabilist claim that Britain has a broken society rather insulting to those millions of people who make up this society.  So all praise the Economist for giving this idea a thorough kicking.

I feel nervous about raising this issue with the good people of The Skeptical Doctor; for those of you new to this site, we have had a gentlemanly discussion since October when I reported back on the reaction of a left-leaning crowd at the Conservative conference to the miserabilist claims of Theodore Dalrymple, the striking, eloquent but overly-depressing-about-Britain writer and doctor. Look up any post with the word “miserabilist/ism” in it, or tagged that way.

Much of the stuff covered in the article – such as declining crime stats – was no doubt covered in previous posts.  In brief, when confronted with falling Crime stats, the dissenters say they are made up, in some way or another, and in such a way that they are more made up now, so that we have had a decline.  I doubt we will ever agree.  If anything, the Right seem to be doing more manipulating of stats, including my own MP.

Interestingly, the New Statesman has tried to do some forward thinking miserabilism of their own – premised on the ideas: “Cameron will get in – he will cut public spending – all the good things in life like a strong BBC and unpotholed roads stem from high public spending – we’re doomed”.   I object to this just as much.  Fiscal consolidations can be good times – witness the mid 1990s creation of the Internet.  Perhaps, people are willing to see the worst in the world – be miserabilist – so long as they have a political oppponent in charge to blame for it.

Oh, how sophisticated our political writers are.

28 Jan

ClimateHate

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , , , .

I thank LeftOutside for introducing me to this topic.

I think the following is clearly true:

  • For a great proportion of our scientific beliefs, we have to rely on a long-established consensus.  For example, I ‘believe’ that a hydrogen atom has a proton and an electron because I have been told by a huge consensus, it sort of makes sense, and I trust the consensus.   I have perceived and reasoned in no way that is connected to the proposition being true. For views on evolution, the Holocaust, whether transfats cause cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming, no single person can themselves compile enough evidence.  You need to rely on scientists who themselves rely on more scientists.
  • Conspiracy theorists seldom or never have enough data for their views, but rely on a profound belief in the bad faith of their opponents.  This is a sort of heroic arrogance – ‘I alone in my living room have worked out how misled thousands of others are’. 99% of the time, they are wrong; 1%, we are talking Galileo
  • However, people often form opinions, or choose which ‘consensus’ to trust, on the basis of feelings.  This works particularly well in a negative way; if you really hate X and X believes something important, then proclaiming it as untrue gives enormous pleasure.  This happens whether X is some braying redfaced foxhunter or sanctimonious good for nothing leftie student.

No-one can have a native ‘feeling’ about climate change.  I can’t feel how hot it is in the atmosphere around the planet, although if I were a spectacular idiot I might make inferences from London’s weather this January.  I can’t have a feel for the heat stored in the oceans, and even if I could tell through my T-shirt that things were warmer, worldwide, I would still lack the ability to determine causes.  I would need a huge apparatus of scientific expertise and equipment even to come close, as well as similarly large body of theory.

So my belief that it is happening is based upon trust. Trust that the vast scientific consensus is not either (a) incompetent in an amazing synchronized way or (b) somehow corrupted so that they have a huge incentive to conspire and lie about something so important.  Trust, too, that politicians with mostly far greater access to the science than I are not totally ****ing mad and determined to crater the economy for 40 years just for the fun of it.

[And when the deniers offer actual reasons, they seem laughably easy to dismiss.   In just one hour this non-expert could dismantle the nonsense that one of Iain Dale's readers impressed him with].

But some of my opinions come from the last bullet point, above – hatred of the others.  The deniers – individually and in a group – seem obnoxious, selfish and wrong (read any commenter to a Janet Daley blogpost).   At the same time, the deniers are clearly motivated by a similar hatred themselves.  Their antagonists are sometimes eager haters of capitalism, sanctimonious,  and plain irritating.

In the latest outburst of ClimateHate, James Delingpole gives the game away – he loves winding up Guardianistas.  He writes:

And frankly as Islamists love death and Americans love Coca Cola so I thrive on the hatred of Guardian readers.

This is admirably honest.  If temperatures rose 5 degrees, Mont Blanc sprouted palm trees and Simon Heffer joined the Green party, Delingpole would still be doing what he’s doing, because Guardianistas obligingly hate him for it, and that is his motivation.  Moreover, the controversy helps him sell books and remain on the Telegraph payroll.   Come on- it’s not because he has access to superior theory, superior evidence, or insight into the motivations of his antagonists.

So, too, to some degree, does George Monbiot.  If by some freak the scientific consensus was wrong, and the Maldives froze over, Monbiot would no doubt stick to his guns  for an indecent long time, freezing all the way.  Getting under the skins of the angry Range Rover driving trolls must motivate him.  He’s human too.  But he also has far more science and a decent understanding of conspiracy theoriesthan Delingpole.

Once such a division has been created, it turns into something like the Liliputians arguing about which end of the egg to break – insoluble, driven by passion and resentment. This is clearly very bad news, because the amount at stake here is far greater.   Amongst the Conservatives, climate denialism is no doubt becoming a way of solidifying the tribal vote.  The letter-writing campaign organised to squeeze out such views is not going to make them unpopular. Scorning lefties, like riding horses over hunt protesters, is becoming a badge of honour.

The oddest thing  is that those of us who believe in AGW are left hoping it is true, so as to satisfy our need to scorn our enemies.  Don’t some of you hope for a really hot 2010, to stick one up the Delingpoles of this world?  ClimateHate gone mad – because given what a catastrophe global warming (probably) is, no-one should be hoping for it.

15 Jan

If you ever wanted proof that luxury goods are about display and not intrinsic worth . . .

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Economics, Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , , .

. . . then read this from Jonathan Margolis’ fascinating story about the Wenzhou in China – the birthplace of capitalism, for them. The folk there have got very rich:

They have a particular thing about France here, which also dictates that there are more than 100 fine wine stores. The irony is that Chinese people don’t much like wine. Millions of bottles of Margaux, Château Lafite and that ilk circulate in Wenzhou as gifts – or are knocked back by the litre, made palatable with sugar or green tea.

The price of ‘fine’ items – like Hirst artwork, say – is driven by demand, not supply or quality.  If there are rich people, who have a deep need to demonstrate that they are men of wealth and taste, then the price of the items that are conventionally linked to such qualities are bound to rise – hence the existence of How to Spend It magazine.

The Chinese of Wenzhou have just proven it – they clearly increase the price of such wines, making them look even more like products of extremely high quality, while destroying any possible quality the moment they are consumed.

PS.  Am I wasting my time here?  Are all you people just hoping for defaced posters of David Cameron, and going away disappointed?

UPDATE: If you want to know what Paul and I are arguing about below, the launch of Tax Justice Focus produced some debate on his blog about the rights and obligations of corporations – - check it out

12 Jan

Most heartening quote, and most surprising ‘fact’, of the day

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Economics, Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , , , , .

The quote, from Matthew Freud, son in law of Rupert Murdoch:

Freud told the New York Times he was “ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to”.

Though Murdoch does not agree, apparently.

The most surprising fact comes from Roy Hattersley, who had the bruising experience of negotiating against Icelanders in 1975-6:

There are Viking tombstones in the Great Wall of China. Reasonable men would not have sailed open boats to the other side of the world.

Really?  How the **** did they get that far? I want more proof. Though having read this hugely entertaining piece by Michael Lewis about Iceland in Vanity Fair, I am not all that surprised about their unreasonableness.   They barge you, a lot.

Most surprising instance of a policy U-turn: Tories thinking of modifying marriage proposals.  But if this is about kids, not marriage, why not go after with child-centred benefits?

The least surprising academic finding is this: bank lending shocks are important for economic fluctuations:

We find that a negative bank lending shock causes output to contract. The signi cance of bank lending shocks seems evident as they explain a substantial share of output gap variability. This suggests that the banking sector is an important source of shocks.

Well, it may seem obvious.  But some die-hards like Tim Congdon still maintain that to give a fig about bank lending is a gross mistake – ‘creditism’.   I disagree.

The least surprising list is this long one of people who dismissed the US housing boom.

10 Jan

Could the plot-shambles be good for Labour?

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Economics, Politics, Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , , , .

Well, probably not.  But there may have been a useful side effect: Brown seems to have come under pressure from the Cabinet to change his style, listen to more than just Ed Balls, and accept that spending cuts will happen.   Both the BBC and Times report on Alistair Darling’s newly vocal toughness on spending cuts.  From the Times:

Although Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has been urging Mr Brown to contrast Labour investment in public services with Tory spending cuts, the Chancellor and the Business Secretary have been urging a more candid line. “Many departments will have less money in the next few years,” he said. “[The cuts] are utterly totally non-negotiable … We had a very constructive meeting on Wednesday about what we needed to do and wanted to do in the Budget. I have always been clear you have to level with people. We are talking about something like a £57 billion reduction in the deficit through tax increases and spending cuts. It is a change of direction.”

At one point on Wednesday, the price on Brown being gone by April had climbed from 16% to 35%.   It was a good time to have a meeting with him.  I for one felt that continued self- and other-deception about the obvious implications of our deficits – cutting is coming, if not now, then soon – was doing Labour’s credibility no good.

On a lighter note, I am really pleased Nick Clegg has had a pop at Gina Ford. People buy Ford when at their most neurotic about kids. I suspect it does not get many customers from those with more than one.  To the newly-sprogged, the idea of a bible telling you every minute’s obligations is really tempting and comforting.  Unfortunately, our kids come out all different.  Sure, routine matters.  But if there was ever a definition of an anti-liberal approach to parenting, this was it.

Final one: it is hard not to support LeftFootForward and the campaign to prevent the Indy taking on Liddle.  A more obnoxious less funny version of Clarkson, from the albeit limited evidence I have subjected myself to.  But surely it is up to whoever owns the Indy?  I have not read the paper for years; in fact, it barely deserves the name.   The Beaver at the LSE seemed to have more substance at times.  If it did not exist, no-one would invent it.

10 Jan

Quote of the day 10 Jan

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Theoretical musings. Tagged: , .

“The worst officer was stupid and industrious. Stupidity makes them do ridiculous things, and industriousness makes them do lots of ridiculous things”.

Stewart Brand, Weekend FT, 9th January.

28 Dec

What were your favourite blog posts of the year?

Posted by freethinkingeconomist in Theoretical musings. Tagged: , , .

[Brief personal history: before doing my decade on a financial bucket house dealing desk, I had fancied myself some sort of wordsmith, on account of my being an Oxford graduate who, um, liked reading books (the pretension of the young still amazes me).   So I worked unpaid at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, learned that 90% of the 20,000 attendees thought they had a novel in them - adding to the 5000 published yearly, 99% of which would be rubbish; had a year editing reference books in Aylesbury*; realised that almost any career in the world is more creative than publishing; became a secretarial temp in London; almost starved, grabbed the job on the dealing floor (a far more creative career); abandoned the notion of reading as a career, wisely.

But the stint in publishing and amongst supposedly well-read Oxbridgians had left me with reading paranoia - a feeling that everyone else has read more than me. I would put down the weekend Review sections - each book review being intended to display the reviewer's own erudition, of course -  with a gloomy sigh.  During my largely solitary time in Aylesbury, I worked my way through the Western Canon, guided by the Harold Bloom book of the same name.  Hence Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, Dickens, Elliot, Austen, Hardy and even a little Montaigne were devoured.

I only learned later that most people read far less than you suspect.   Oxbridge graduates, in particular, have seldom done the primary texts, and learn more about bluffing than wisdom.   A useful preparation for life, I grant you.

Anyway, when I earned the chance to study at the LSE (2006-7) and read Global History (motto: all the world, for all of time), I leapt at the chance, hoping to conquer finally this paranoia.  After 12 years of tough 'real' work, I was also convinced that a proper adult could read WAY more than a soupy undergrad, and tried to measure exactly how much.  So I wrote down what I read, each day on Excel.

It turned out that it depends.  Novels, 100's of pages a day no problem.  Journal of Economic History - 20-30 pages per hour, and you often need to reread.  And after 5-6 hours, the brain goes fuzzy, particularly if it is addicted to short term dealing desk thrills.  I'd stop for 20 minutes to gamble on the FTSE. Nevertheless, the 15 months surrounding that time and subsequent underemployment utterly sated the urge - for now.  See below for a list.***]

This year has been far less fertile, in terms of Proper Books – as you can see from the list to the right, which covers since June.   The Internet and Google Reader have overtaken old technology.  I don’t regret this – the best blogging is like being able to to eavesdrop upon the thoughts of great professors.  It is like spending casual time with them, rather than just their once-a-decade Tomes. This has hugely enriched my learning.  Above all, an the subject of the financial crisis, books are way too late, and even newspapers too leadenfooted.  Only blogs will do.

As it is the end of the year, I found myself wondering what I thought was the best blog post of the year**. There have no doubt been plenty of Important Posts like Mark Reckons’ work on expenses, and the tabloid news-breaking tittletattle of the likes of Guido and Iain Dale.  I found Tabarrok’s TED talk on the future of economic growth hugely inspiring for an Optimistic Liberal. But most blogs are not meant to stand alone and be remembered.

It is evolving arguments that have mattered for me. So, personally, the most important posts were those that launched me on the road to what ended up being A Balancing Act. Around the start of the year, some of the best Economics professors in the US started tearing into each other on the subject of fiscal stimulus.    Thousands of posts flew about.  I found myself filing them under “Stimulus Piece”. I thought the best were by Brad De Long, Andy Harless, Paul Krugman, in particular in their attack on what seemed like a mad approach from Eugene Fama, a contender for the Nobel Prize.  Here are some:

Harless on Fama: Is he Serious?

DeLong on ‘The intellectual train wreck that is the Chicago School“.  Great comments.

DeLong on Fama: Are there ever wrong answers in Economics?

Paul Krugman’s “Dark Age of Macroeconomics“

I will add more when kids and domestic duties allow. These posts, and all those linked to,  indicated all that is best in the blogosphere, in my view; ferociously intelligent people arguing passionately about things that really really matter, and trying to influence the debate.  It is still going on – read this by BDL, this from Krugman worrying about when the stimulus ends, oh, and this from Mankiw, of all people, explaining why exploding monetary base does NOT mean hyperinflation.

*which I understand is AngloSaxon for ‘armpit’.  Or should be

**20 years ago, there would have been more books in my list. My favourite book of the year?  Nigel Lawson, The View from Number 11.  Followed closely by Denis Healey’s autobiography.

*** I was so nerdishly interested in trying to boost my studying productivity that the measuring became a sort of mania.   The final result: over June 2006-Sep 2007, about 33000 pages, or about 120 per working day, including some novels and rubbish like Bob Woodward.  This is clearly pretty slow: look at Marginal Revolution, and search “What I’ve been reading”, Tyler Cowen’s regular (fortnightly?) account of what he thinks is good.  As far as I can see, he get through 100+ serious books per year, two per week, on top of writing and teaching, and who knows how much electronic stuff.   I know when I’m beat.

This is the stuff over 150 pages:

100 myths about the middle east, The Rise of the Western World, Max Weber Protestant Ethic, Introduction to Political Philosophy, Book on Marx by Wheen, Sheldon, C. D. 1953. The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1868: An Introductory Survey. New York : Augustin., * Brewer, J. (1994): The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783, London (Routledge). DA480 B84, The lever of Riches, Globalizing Capital, Over to you Mr Brown, European financial control in the Ottoman empire; a study of the establishment, activities, and significance of the administration of the Ottoman public debt by Blaisdell, Growth Recurring – Jones, manias panics and crashes , Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, The Rise of Financial Capitalism, The Long 20th Century, Caveat by Alexander Haig, Globalization in World History, Grand Slave Emporium, Totman, C. 1981. Japan before Perry, A Short History. Berkeley: University of California Press., Epstein Freedom and Growth, Economy of Europe in an age of Crisis, History World 6 Glasses, The worldly philosophers, China History, States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy, The Great Divergence, History Middle East, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, European Miracle, Suite francaise, novel, One Percent Doctrine, terrorist by John Updike, White Man’s Burden, Patrick Obrian, Time of Gifts, CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS, A concise history of world population, Lords of the Horizons, reOrient, The Age of Capital, Cromwell, The premodern Chinese economy, Christopher Clay Gold for the Sultan, The Cash Nexus by Niall Ferguson, The City of London by David Kynaston, Blanchard Macroeconomics, State of Denial, The Birth of the Modern World, Diane Purkiss on the Civil War, Classical world, Nixon in the White House, campbell diaries, Braudel Mediterranean, dombey and son, plus countless small articles.

I wish I had learned speed reading!

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