June 13, 2011
2 Stuffs
Announcement 1: I will be speaking at the Balliol Left Caucus this coming Thursday. If you’re in Oxford, consider coming along.
I intend to talk for about 15 minutes, and then open things up to discussion. Which will hopefully be less boring, for all concerned. The topic I’ll introduce I’ve entitled: “The Conservative Left? – Predicaments and Prospects for Thinking Leftists in a Globalised World”. Tony Judt can get you thinking:
“The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly. Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, education reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.”
8pm onwards, in the Bajpai Room, Balliol College, Oxford.
Announcement 2: As recently noted, not much is happening around here at the moment. However, things are happening elswhere. Two recommendations from Fenland Poly-based writers.
Louisa Loveluck at the almost eponymous Leloveluck, where she thinks and writes about middle east politics. Highly recommended if you want an informed perspective on a region where most western reporting appears to be chronically ignorant. (Posting appears to have been suspended due to exams, but no doubt will resumt soon. I hope.)
Dana Smith at the not at all eponymous, but vocationally-inspired, Brain Study. Applying the insights of experimental psychology to issues of public interest and importance. Again, highly recommended for those who want to read opinions by people who actually know what they are talking about (for example).
March 31, 2011
Fight Back!
Last December and January a group of extremely dedicated bloggers and activists assembled an e-reader – Fight Back! - collecting some of the best writings related to the student protests.
Dan Hancox did huge amounts of spadework, but Laurie Penny, Guy Aitchison, Siraj Datoo, Cailean Gallagher, Aaron Peters, Anthony Barnett and Niki Seth-Smith all made huge contributions too.
I – on the other hand – was mostly useless, dealing rather badly with a relationship breakdown whilst engaging in some hardcore academic navel gazing. Nonetheless, the others were kind enough to put my name on the cover, which I didn’t really deserve at all.
The original e-reader ran to 350 pages with contributions from 43 authors (one of them being myself, where I did actually contribute something semi-useful in the form of a chapter). It picked up a staggering 13,000 downloads in its first four weeks. Thanks to this enormous demand, Fight Back! is now being launched as a proper book.
Here’s the press release, for your information.
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Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest
Tasha Bell, 16, describes her experience in a kettle: “The police have pushed us from the top of the road to the bottom, using their thick lines, their horses and their batons. The crowd has thickened, and now I’m not on the front line anymore I’m deep in the middle. I have no control. I can feel my phone vibrating and I’m trying to move my arm to get it but I can’t.”
Joanna Biggs (LRB) describes the UCL occupation: “I hear words like ‘alert’, ‘critique’, ‘offensive’ and even ‘Marxism’. At the edges of the room students sit around circular tables hunched over their laptops, as if they knew how much they look like the photogenic Harvard students of The Social Network.”
Laurie Penny in “You Say You Want a Revolution”: “There can be no question that the conditions are right for a youth movement. The young people of Britain are suffering brutal, insulting socio-economic oppression. There are over a million young people of working age not in education, employment or training, which is a polite way of saying “up shit creek without a giro”.
For review copies, interviews, or for details of the London launch event on 6 April, contact the publishing team on fightback@opendemocracy.net // 07824 807 142 // 07552 569 196
March 29, 2011
Disrespect and the Media
Reading Stuart White’s Next Left piece on the media’s disrespectful coverage of minority violence, I’m left unsatisfied. Whilst the article – written with typical intellectual incision, accuracy and the parsimony – has been well received by almost all I know, I just don’t buy it.
I have to be careful here. Whereas I generally don’t care if I annoy people on the internet, Stuart is very much an exception. I greatly respect him not only as a blogger and political activist, but as an intellectual and an extremely talented political philosopher.* But in this instance I think he’s quite seriously off target, and it’s worth spelling out the (rather depressing, though these are hardly Stuart’s fault) reasons why.
Stuart wants to make two central claims, both captured in this paragraph:
“But let’s stop and consider ‘the media’. Nothing forces the media to focus, as much as it does, on the violent behaviour of a tiny minority. This is a choice. And in dealing with the media – for example, in launching a complaint to Sky or the BBC – we need to insist on what a profoundly disrespectful choice it is.”
The first claim is that the media is choosing to focus on activist violence, and moreover (and most importantly) that this choice is relatively free and (by implication) could easily be substituted for a more palatable alternative. The second claim (pursued in the rest of Stuart’s article) is that the media can be induced to switch from its unwelcome focus on minority violence to a more welcome focus on wider peaceful events, and this can be achieved specifically by emphasising how “disrespectful” its behaviour is to non-violent protestors and ordinary people generally.
Unfortunately, Stuart’s first claim is untenable when properly examined. The second claim rests upon the tenability of the first. Insofar as the first claim fails, so must the second. We see this as follows.
Stuart says that “Nothing forces the media to focus, as much as it does, on the violent behaviour of a tiny minority”. In a certain, very narrow, sense, this is true. Nobody holds a gun to “the media’s” head and says “focus on the violence”, or anything of that sort. But to set things up that way is to rule out far too much, far too quickly. Instead we must look at the environment within which the modern media operates, in particular the economic circumstances of the modern news industry.
Mass media organisations are almost all profit-seeking firms in a fiercely competitive industry threatened by obsolescence. The Guardian is a partial exception with its basis in the Scott Trust – but if it doesn’t find a way to make revenue soon, then like its competitors it’s headed for the toaster. The BBC is also a partial exception – but then in order to justify its license fee it must be able to show big numbers. So in a very real sense, it necessarily plays the numbers game too (competing especially with Sky News, who are always happy to scrape the bottom of the barrel).
How does a major media outlet secure numbers? By focusing on and pushing news stories that grab attention. What grabs more attention: thousands of people plodding along listening to some rather dull speeches, or face-covered anarchists smashing windows and lighting fires? QED.
Certainly it would be nice if individual editors took a bold stand. But then their superiors higher up the food chain would quickly come knocking. The same goes for the guys on the ground feeding in reports. “You don’t like it? No problem, the doors over there – somebody else will gladly do it for us. Oh, and how’s your pension fund?”
The media isn’t “forced”, in any simplistic sense, to focus so dogmatically on violent outbursts amidst otherwise peaceful mass demonstration. But to assume it does so for trivial, petty, vindictive or any easily escapable reasons is a mistake.
You really want to know why the mainstream media focuses on violence and unrest so excessively? Look in the mirror, meet your neighbours, and speak to your colleagues, all whilst considering the crisis of news reporting against the backdrop of early 21st century information technology capitalism. This is the media’s iron cage, and your friends and family are some of its bars.
I completely agree with Stuart that what the media does is disrespectful. But when we get clear on why it is so disrespectful it seems to me a hopeless pipedream to suppose that pointing out the fact of disrespect is likely to change anything at all. Respect may be part of the currency of egalitarian justice, but it doesn’t keep copy rolling.**
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* I can honestly remember reading his work as an undergraduate, and feeling proud to be at the same institution he worked at.
** That’s a cynical little joke for Oxford-trained political philosophers.
February 6, 2011
Notice to Serve
If there’s one thing more boring than blogging, it’s blogging about blogging. Nonetheless, I will try and say something interesting.
*
My self-imposed blogging sabbatical is not entirely due to a lack of time. I’ve been busy in the past, and that has never stopped me before. There are two, more fundamental reasons I’ve opted to cut back – or perhaps, two facets of one more fundamental problem.
Firstly, blogging about politics – for that is what this website has been dedicated to for over two years – increasingly bores me. At one level, this is because daily politics – and the bulk of blogging reaction to it – is boring.
Each day and week brings a superficially fresh piece of outrage perpetrated by the Conservative Party/the DailyMail/some idiot celebrity/the Government/some idiot rightwing blogger or commentator/the police/whatever [substitute leftwing alternatives to suit preference]. On the surface at least, the issue prompting comment is usually in some way different to whatever happened the week before (“selling off the woodlands”/ “destroying the NHS”/ “being a horrible bigot” / “lying and abusing positions of power”). But the game of political blogging is tiresomely repetitive.
The predictable daily reaction is to get into an outraged indignant lather of denunciation. Or to sarcastically mock with varying degrees of cynicism. Or to dissect at tedious length in predictable detail why The Enemy is wrong (and usually evil). All these reactions share a common feature: total practical impotence and wider irrelevance. No doubt, for a couple of years this has sustained me, and I’ve found it interesting to watch others do the same. Increasingly I feel I’m living in electronic groundhog day.
What I’m really complaining about is quite simply most political bloggers’ hobby. People go on and on, expressing the same outrage and indignation at the Daily Mail/Tory Party/Richard Liddle-Phillips [substitute left-wing alternatives to suite preference] day-in-day out, because they enjoy it. Rather like many people enjoy campaigning for a political party, or going to big political conferences. It’s about tribalism, and the fun of political group-think and purported engagement. But it bores me more and more with each passing day.
Quite self-consciously, this blog has attempted to do something a bit different for at least the past 18 months. Namely, to analyse political events through the filter of an academic training I’m lucky enough to still be receiving. For a while this has served at least two purposes. One, it helped me get clearer on my own ideas by applying them. Two, I liked to think of it as public-service pedagogy; the dissemination of interesting ideas for those who might be interested in them but who lack my privileged background.
But I only have so much in my repertoire, and the last few months have seen me falling into the trap of repetition. This bores me, to the point whereby it outweighs the appeal of offering any free pedagogical service. Not least because I have to question the extent to which this is really about sharing interesting ideas. Or about wanting people to think I’m clever, whilst advancing my career in various ways.
Which brings me to the second set of general considerations.
*
I’ve also decided to cut back blogging because it has begun to feel like a duty, an obligation. Rather than writing just for pleasure, or to share ideas, or seek critical reaction, I increasingly write to secure my “status”, as an ever-more-popular blogger [see the sidebar]. That, and because I’ve been trying to build this blog as a personal tool of complementary professional development for so long that to abandon it feels like a major wasted investment.
And I really don’t like this situation. I am extremely adverse to the role of duty and obligation in most human life, in what philosophers narrowly define as “moral theory” and beyond. For most of the good outcomes secured by imposing duties on people can be achieved by alternative means: for example, by encouraging dispositions in people such that they want to do some action from their own volition, rather than feeling they must do so because they are beholden to some external power, sanction, condemnation or failure.
Duty is an unhealthy concept to be beholden to, a sort of moral pathology. Things should be done because they are in themselves good things to do, not because they are your “duty”. The concept and experience of duty creates and fosters a psyche of meekness, dependency, constraint and subjection to overbearing command. It also opens the door for the extraction of fulfilment. This can be done by others: those who perceive your failure of “duty” and coercively extract compliance, or inflict “justified” punishment. Or it can be done by your own self: the mechanisms of repression, guilt and self-loathing so easily generated in complex human animals. Nietzsche saw something very profound when he noted that Kant’s categorical imperative “stinks of cruelty”.
Morality and life is, of course, about other people. But morality and life is also about yourself. The criterion of how to live might be primarily ordered around the question “what is good for others?” – but the question “what is healthy for me?” should never leave the picture. And if we can secure the first by healthier means with regard to the second, then that ought to be done. It may be a fact about us that we cannot do without duty entirely. But that is no reason not to do without duty as much as possible.
To retreat from philosophy and come back to the manner at hand; for this blog – which started as a source of pleasure and enjoyment – to transmutate into a source of duty and obligation is something I’ve decided not to continue tolerating. Perhaps this will mean I’ve wasted two years of investment. But as they say to smokers, it’s never too late to quit.
*
Not, actually, that I’m going to stop blogging. For despite the above, regular writing has a particularly important function in my life: it is a form of exercise.
I’ve decided I’m going to try and live off of my brain. And being ambitious, I’ve decided I’m going to go as far as that can possibly take me. So my brain needs exercise. You wouldn’t try and become a top athlete without regular training; the same goes for anyone serious about thinking.
Of course, most serious thinkers simply keep their written thoughts to themselves. And there’s much to be said for that – not least the face it saves. But I enjoy and benefit from (some of) the critical engagement frequent public writing receives. I also think there’s something interesting in the possibility of a fairly open and visible process of intellectual development, insofar as not many people have tried (or for contingent historical reasons, been able to try) this. And anyway, my amour propre outweighs my sense of shame; so why not see what happens?
What I need is a change of direction. If blogging about politics – or at least, blogging about politics in the way I and many others have been doing for the past couple of years – bores me, then I should blog about something else, or in a different way. Obviously, I won’t stop writing about politics tout court. But it’s time to see what else I can do.
The new status badges added to the side of this website indicate a statement of intent. I’ll mostly be trying to read things in those three domains, and to write accordingly. Of course, I wasn’t lying when I said I was busy. And I’m still on sabbatical for the foreseeable future. But let’s just see what happens, even if that turns out to be a healthy nothing.
January 13, 2011
2 Things
Thing 1
There’s a new book out by Nick Shaxson: Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.
Back in 2009, I did a bunch of archival research for Nick, some of which has made it into this volume. Whatever you think about the moral (and legal) status of tax havenry, the research I did is independently interesting insofar as it shows the Whitehall complicity in the growth of offshore finance in the late 1960s. I haven’t read the rest of the book yet, but early reviews look very good.
For tasters, see the serialised extracts (here and here) in The Guardian. The dedicated website is here. There’s also a documentary being made, scheduled for release next year.
Satisfying stuff.
Thing 2
I want to catalogue blogs (and more generally, websites) that are explicitly aimed at educated, thinking readers and which carry a political/current events angle combined with analytic reflection.
These don’t need to be “academic” blogs (I consider Stumbling and Mumbling very much a thinking person’s page, for example). They just need to be starting out from a basis of (semi-)specialised knowledge, aimed at intelligent and intellectually curious people, and running the sort of content that idiots will be too confused by to dominate comment threads.
So on the list at present would be the likes of:
Crooked Timber
Normblog
Virtual Stoa
US Intellectual History
Ntabwo ni twa Muzungu
Consider Phlebas
Bad Science
A Don’s Life
Leiter Reports
Balkinization
…and so forth.
Links in comments, please.
January 9, 2011
Rooting out the Nets
There’s a glaring logical fallacy at the heart of the rationale behind Saturday’s Netroots UK event, and Jacob knows what it is:
“the ‘new social media’ activist movement has found itself today in Congress House having an old-fashioned face-to-face discussion, with face-to-face networking at the Netroots UK event. The fact that you had to already be connected with these people on twitter, or if you’re lucky facebook, or be a reader of quite specific blogs, to know about this event adds to the irony of a movement that is claiming to be horizontal in a manner that avoids elites.”
If the importance of social media is that it allows people to connect and organise online, why the need for an enormous offline meet up?
With a somewhat relieving touch of realism, we’re reminded that Netroots’s purpose wasn’t to bring down the government, only to share strategy and experience. But again: why not do that online, if the New Technology Revolution is all it’s cracked up to be?
Fine, confession time: I didn’t go to Netroots UK. For various reasons.
Firstly, it was the 3rd Round of the FA Cup. Secondly, the train fare. Thirdly, I have better ways to spend my Saturdays than listening to people declare that we Need A Strategy and must Build Coalition Movements and Mobilise, without any actual concrete resolutions, or practical pay-out, in sight.
What actually happens over the coming year is going to be determined by individuals and groups taking specific, concrete actions to attempt to secure outcomes and goals. Such actions will happen when they happen, but are unlikely to be significantly shaped by large-scale group conversation and rhetorical grandstanding one Saturday in January.
Personally, I’ll turn up when things start actually happening. I have no particular use for big talking shops where people gesture vaguely at the inevitability of some undetermined actions. It may be different for serious organisers and activists (amongst which I do not class myself). But still, why not just do it online, or in the pub?
Of course I could have heard some nice tit-bits from various contributors. But then, I can just find out about them by, er, reading blog summaries. And the added bonus of staying at home is that I avoid interminable panel debates of “experts”, who actually don’t know very much at all. Hopi Sen, on the money:
“Dislike of panel q&a’s is based on fact when I’m in audience panel seem to know less than me, so if on panel, know audience thinking same… Also no-one in history of panel q&a’s has ever said ‘sorry, i don’t know’ then shut up. This would reduce bulls**t quantities tremendously.”
And it doesn’t placate me that apparently audience “experts” were invited to spew forth. At these sorts of events, the few insightful contributions are usually out-weighed by floor-hoggers riding tedious hobby horses until their inner thighs bleed red raw.
So I stayed at home.
You, of course, may have felt otherwise. You may have enjoyed the prospect of meeting up with like-minded lefties. You may have found the panel debates interesting and insightful. You may, in short, have decided that listening to lots of people talk about politics was the way you most preferred to spend your Saturday.
And that’s fine. It takes all sorts. You’re free to get your kicks however you like. But here’s the rub, and where I get on people’s nerves.
Does the enjoyability of Netroots UK retain its sheen if we accept that it was, effectively, just a massive talking shop at which people cold enjoy their Saturday afternoon? I suspect not, because surely the appeal of these events is, precisely, the sense that you didn’t just hang out with your (e-)mates and hear people chat about politics, You Did Something Important With Your Weekend.
Yet if we admit that the political efficacy of Netroots UK was effectively zero, it’s difficult to see how the last bit can be sustained. Correspondingly – and somewhat ironically – if people were a bit more honest about the reasons and motivations for attending these sorts of events, they might in turn see such hootenannies as somewhat less purposeful.
But then, I can only speak for myself. And believe me, the Arsenal-Leeds game was terrific.
November 29, 2010
The Revolution Will Be Tweeted
Until very recently I was deeply sceptical about the role of “social media” in real-world activism. If anything, I thought the option of typing self-indulgently into Twitter, Facebook or WordPress was likely to be harmful to activist causes. Because by shouting into the web, people experienced the sensation of involvement and action without achieving anything of substance.
The past week has changed my mind completely, as I’ve watched social media play an enormous part in organising, sustaining and strengthening student protest against Government cuts and education fee rises.
Last Thursday, a thousand-strong march took place in Cambridge alone, organised mostly via Facebook. With relatively little effort and expenditure on behalf of those spreading the word, lecturers, graduates, undergraduates, sixth-formers and sympathetic members of the public converged to voice collective discontent.
On Friday, a small group of Cambridge students occupied the 500-year old Senate House building, the nerve-centre of the University administration. Although the original occupation was begun by around just 20 people, within hours dozens more arrived after being contacted or alerted via Facebook, Twitter, text and email. Over the past three nights, at least 60-80 students have self-organised to occupy Senate House continuously, whilst numbers in the daytime are steady between 150-200.
Blogging platforms have allowed students in the occupation to set-up instant bases of information and communication. Email petitions and mailing lists were up and running within hours. Facebook is an easy-access source of information, communication and encouragement, as everybody participating logs-on to spread the word.
Indeed encouragement is key. Rather than feeling isolated, the Cambridge occupation has been able to communicate easily with demonstrations taking place in universities all across the country. As well as messages of solidarity, information is exchanged on how to co-ordinate occupations and keep them going, as well as to offering advice, experience and legal tips. The sense of being connected to a national – even global – movement is a huge boost to everybody involved. Indeed, the ease of modern communication enables occupiers to even bring in performing artists and bands, turning occupations into a protest-cum-parties, with spirits kept high and positive.
Via Twitter, email and Facebook, the Cambridge Occupation was rapidly endorsed by over 150 academics at the University, adding their support in a co-ordinated letter in a matter of hours. The letter is today being presented to the Vice Chancellor of the University. Similarly, an international petition was quickly set-up which attracted over 350 signatures. The morale-boost of hearing that Noam Chomsky had pledged his support was (unsurprisingly) considerable.
Email and Facebook have enabled occupiers to bring-in visiting lecturers and speakers. Use of Skype meant the occupation could host a discussion with Dr. Priyamvada Gopal (who has organised the academic support) even though she is currently away from Cambridge. Twitter kept people around the country updated on what was happening, whilst YouTube enabled recordings of lectures to be shared instantly.
Of course, social media will never replace feet on the ground; it can only be a means to an end. But this past week has shown that it can be a very effective means indeed. Whilst earlier predictions of “Twitter revolutions” in non-democratic states have patently failed to materialise (mostly because repressive state authorities quickly exploit the mine of information freely supplied by dissenters), the story is very different in western countries. For my generation and the next, the use of the internet is second nature. As the Coalition’s cuts politicise ever more young people, the role of social media in organising their resistance will become ever more prominent.
November 26, 2010
Netroots UK
Netroots UK: A one day event to network and inspire progressive activists working on the web. Saturday 8 January, Congress House, Central London, WC1B 3LS.
Bloggers, tweeters and online campaigners from around the UK will be coming together face to face in London on Saturday 8 January for Netroots UK, a day of strategy, training and networking for grassroots activists.
The event comes as leading left wing bloggers look to be winning the popularity war with the more established right wing blogs, and as pressure grows across the progressive movement in response to the government’s programme of harsh spending cuts.
Five hundred online activists will attend a day of workshops and presentations, ranging from hands-on training in digital communications, to sharing good practice from other campaigns, as well as wider debates on the best strategies for progressive digital activism.
Sessions will cover topics such as building campaigns against local spending cuts, engaging effectively online with MPs, producing videos for the web, and using satire to spread campaign messages.
Linking together activists from the worlds of progressive politics, economic justice, international development, trade unions, community groups and more, the event is a first step towards a more connected and effective progressive movement online, echoing the groundbreaking work of the annual Netroots Nation conference in the US.
Start Date: Jan 08, 2011
Start Time: 09:00 AM
End Time: 17:00 AM
Price: £5.00 — Tickets to the event will include refreshments during the day, and a brown bag lunch.
November 22, 2010
“Jaw-Droppingly Rude”
Book Review: Chasing Rainbows – How the Green Agenda Defeats its Aims by Tim Worstall
Tim Worstall – scourge of leftist bloggers, and bane of all those he takes to be stupid (which in practice means: almost everyone he disagrees with) – has written a book. Or has he? For Chasing Rainbows: How The Green Agenda Defeats its Aims (Stacey International, £8.99) is above all the paper version of timworstall.com. And the effect, unfortunately, is frequently unsatisfying. Flippant sentences which might work as part of a 200-word blog entry often read as convoluted and clumsy in the midst of a chapter running to several thousand words. Paragraphs of assertion, or wink-wink allusion, are much less workable when there’s no hyperlink to enlarge the issue.
But attempting to put aside the big niggle – “is this actually a researched and long-pondered book I’m reading, or a collection of brief musings dashed to the printers”? – it’s helpful to consider Worstall’s core strategy. Namely, to apply a set of basic economic concepts (of the sort known to any competent A-Level student) – like opportunity cost, comparative advantage, specialisation, growth, cost-benefit analysis, etc – to a set of issues raised by the environmentalist movement. Or as the book’s title puts it, by the (far more sinister-sounding) “green agenda”. An “agenda” that Worstall does not deny is important, but simply claims to be misguided because of its lack of basic economic understanding.
At times the strategy works remarkably well, paying-off in conceptual clarity and useful illustration. Worstall’s chapter on recycling, for example, is very good. It is a clear exposition of how to think logically and sensibly about a given problem. And his solution is an eminently sensible one: that if the aim is to get more stuff recycled (and Worstall is quite right that the “if” in this situation is a live one, because recycling may not always be the most sensible thing to do), then paying professionals to sort out the stuff in question is likely to yield better results than expecting households to do it in their own leisure time. Hence, if the “green agenda” is serious about recycling, it should take a cost-benefit analysis seriously, and adhere to its outcomes.
Similarly, Worstall’s discussion of population growth is sharp. He (correctly) points out that not only is economic growth properly understood a good thing insofar as it drastically improves the lives of the worst off, he also explains clearly why (paradoxically) improving living standards and increasing life expectancy in developing countries leads to population control over time. (Quickly: because if you and your kids are more likely to survive, it’s less of a gamble raising sprogs, so you can have fewer of them, invest heavily in them, and not offset the chances they’ll die by having more to act as potential replacements). Unfortunately however – and this is a recurring problem in the book – Worstall fails to draw the explicit connection between why controlling population growth through raising living standards is something the “green agenda” misunderstands, thus “defeats” its own “aims”. Rather, the discussion of population growth becomes a self-contained unit, sharply addressing that particular issue but not linking-up to the book’s implied promise of skewering self-defeating greens.
I say implied, because this has to be pretty much imputed from the front cover alone. Worstall’s “introduction” is really just chapter 1, and there’s no serious attempt to lay-out what it is the “green agenda” thinks, and to explain systematically why it is “self defeating”. Rather, separate chapters treat separate topics, which (one either assumes, or knows from experience) have something to do with various claims made by environmentalists. Worstall then applies his basic economics to these topics, in order to show how he thinks about them and believes we should too. Sometimes (as with recycling) the pay-off is fairly clear. Other times, however, it’s hard to see why exactly Worstall thinks he’s exposed something “self-defeating”. The lack of a serious attempt to connect chapters together (and there’s no conclusion to the book at all, just the end of the final self-contained chapter on tax, and cap-and-trade) reinforces this problem – as well as the impression that one is reading a series of collected blog posts, not a book.
Worstall’s effort is, however, downright frustrating at times. Take, for example, his discussion of economic growth. The basic strategy here is to explain – again, correctly – that economic growth need not be predicated upon a necessity of resource consumption. Accordingly, environmentalists are making a mistake if they construe growth and resource-consumption as a necessary relationship, and in turn are mistaken if they think growth is necessarily the antithesis of environmental sustainability. We can in many instances achieve economic growth without chewing up the planet, so growth can be good from an environmental point of view – especially if it leads to (say) improved standards of living, lower child mortality, and thereby population control (which environmentalists allegedly want to see). This from Worstall is all fine (although I’ve drawn the argument more explicitly than he does in his chapter, and that’s not to his credit, as the point of his growth-can-be-compatible-with-environmentalism claim is largely lost accordingly). What’s not fine is acting as though the action stops there. Because clearly it doesn’t.
We can all agree that growth and environmental protection need not necessarily be in opposition. But the point environmentalists make is that at present they are, and that it seems like they will be for the foreseeable future, and hence this could have disastrous consequences. That is where the action is – and Worstall even acknowledges this to be the case at the outset of a later chapter – but the action is basically left un-addressed. Which is a problem, because Worstall has sketched the beginning of an argument, not the conclusion of one.
A similar problem occurs at the outset of the book, and I’ll dwell on it to illustrate the wider problem at play. Worstall deploys the concept of opportunity cost – i.e. whatever option was foregone so that what was actually chosen could be had – to ridicule environmentalists who tout the higher-levels of job creation associated with renewable energy production as a benefit. Worstall argues that this is wrong-headed; that having to employ more people is a cost not a benefit of a scheme, because if we have to employ 20 people to get X amount of energy, that’s 20 people not producing anything else. If only 2 people are needed, then the other 18 can go off and produce other things, making everyone better-off as we get more out of limited resources (in this case, labour). More people employed on one thing is thus a bad outcome, not a good one.
Now this is all fine as things stand; in a basic situation like the one Worstall illustrates his criticisms with job-creation is a cost not a benefit. But things get much trickier when we translate up to the national political level where the “green jobs” argument is typically being made in actuality. For there, we may not have the full employment background assumption that allows Worstall to run his ridiculing line. For imagine that there are, as at present, 2.5million people sitting on the dole. In this case, an energy-production method that employed a million people more than other alternatives might look like it provided a very real benefit – not just jobs, but jobs for a million people who would otherwise be doing nothing else with their labour at all (thus there is no opportunity cost problem of the sort Worstall’s simplistic model brings out). Indeed, things get more interesting if one brings in macroeconomic thoughts derived from Keynes. Let’s say we have 2.5million unemployed because the national economy is in the midst of a recession. Keynes-friendly economists will greet the job-creation scheme as very welcome if it has the effect of stimulating demand and thus kick-starting the economy. In turn, politicians – and the environmentalists that Worstall attacks over job-creation claims typically are politicians – are in a specific situation whereby there are all sorts of political advantages to touting job-creation as a benefit of renewable energy schemes. Suddenly, things look a lot more complicated than Worstall’s “yah-boo aren’t they all so thick because they don’t understand opportunity cost” shtick. Not least because by touting job-creation as a political move (rather than a narrow economic one of the sort Worstall myopically focuses on) then the “green agenda” does not “defeat” its aims but may well in a political context advance them quite considerably. That this is against the economic truth as seen by Worstall really is quite besides the point, if the aim of the book is supposed to be about how environmentalism is self-defeating.
My point here – and I should stress this clearly – is not that Worstall cannot reply to the above arguments. I’m absolutely sure that he can and would. As somebody who rejects Keynesian economics (for example), Worstall will have all sorts of reasons for dismissing much of the above as fatuous and false. My point here is to draw attention to the fact that he doesn’t bother to make any of the difficult arguments in his book, or to treat his opponents as anything other than simpletons who haven’t grasped economics 101. This occurs again and again, with the partial exception of the final chapter where a more sophisticated argument regarding Pigou taxes is considered – though as usual serious intellectual replies are basically absent from any discussion.
Now this tendency to resort to basic economic concepts and exposition might not be terribly objectionable in and of itself. If Worstall’s sole aim was to delineate some basic economic concepts for the good of the masses, then there could be little cause for complaint that he doesn’t engage with the more complicated side of economic reply, mixed-up with the complexities of real-world-distorting politics, next to which all real economic decisions end up being made. Similarly, if he reserved his ire for genuine economic maniacs and imbeciles like the new economics foundation alone, his lashing tongue could be fairly easily forgiven. What rapidly becomes tiring is Worstall’s scorn and caprice being directed at very clever people who cannot reasonably be lambasted for failing to grasp economics 101.
Whatever Worstall thinks of Alistair Darling (and the answer is clearly “not much”), it is fatuous and facile to treat the former Chancellor of the Exchequer as a simpleton who does not understand the basic concept of opportunity cost, and as though he was not making his economic decisions and pronouncements in the middle of extremely difficult and sensitive political contexts. I have no particular love for (say) Caroline Lucas or even George Monbiot, both of whom receive Worstall ire a-plenty, but it’s quite a different thing to casually dismiss Karl Marx’s ideas as “barking mad”. Whatever one thinks of the Labour Theory of Value – and it is true that few now hold it to be tenable – it is tedious to find Worstall lambasting one of the greatest and most innovative minds of the past several hundred years as though he were a garden-variety nincompoop. Marx may have got his labour theory wrong (derived as it was from a complex reading of Adam Smith and Ricardo, as well as drawing upon long-standing themes regarding exploitation and justice stretching way back into the pre-Smithean natural law tradition), but there’s something particularly unpleasant about Worstall’s sneering in a book that is itself so utterly superficial in much of its analysis.
Indeed, just to reinforce that point, Worstall deploys the snark against politicians of all stripes ad nauseam by reiterating how stupid and destructive he thinks they all are. Whilst this may be true of some particular cases (John Prescott isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and Nicholas Soames is clearly a pratt), Worstall shows no sensitivity to the difficulties of institutional decision-making in constrained representative democracies against the background of interest-managing, wherein politics can never be the straightforward application of basic economic logic (least of all, economic logic solely as Worstall conceives it). The result is a tired, boring and uninsightful mantra of how awful and thick politicians are – as presumably contrasted with the wise author, who sees things so much more clearly than the stupids he is constantly insulting in his long-established play to the gallery.
You may think that the above is all, therefore, a very long-winded way of complaining that Worstall has written a book that isn’t for me, or for people like me. After all, the book is pursuing what has proven to be a very successful strategy elsewhere. Timworstall.com makes, by all accounts, a decent sum for its author, and has led to many opportunities (not least this book). Clearly there is a demand for what Worstall does, and Worstall admittedly does it very well. If the book is therefore a success amidst its target audience, can I reasonably be complaining about anything other than that I didn’t get a book for me?
I think I can, because I see this book as a frustrating missed opportunity. Part of the reason Worstall is hated by so much of the left is precisely because he is sharp. He sees how arguments fit together, he spots other people’s fallacies, and he points them out in devastating ways (and whilst the rudeness is a source of considerable friction, it is made infuriating precisely by the fact there’s often an actual intellectual point being made too). What I was hoping for from this book, however, was the next level: Worstall taking himself seriously as a thinker and constructing something that goes beyond the “yah boo sucks you’re all stoopid” formula of his website. I wanted to see what Worstall really had to show. Instead, we’ve been given a book that clearly isn’t about serious engagement. If it was, it wouldn’t be published by a group that is clearly in the business of climate “scepticism”*, and written in an obnoxious self-congratulatory tone that is guaranteed to irritate most environmentalists beyond the point where meaningful interaction will be possible.
Tim Worstall has written a book that will please his target audience – the people who read timworstall.com already. Worstall has thus elected to stay in his comfort zone, and stick to what he knows. His book thus has very little to say to those of us who sincerely want to push things further.Or who want to see if Worstall is as clever as he keeps telling us he is; as clever as he ultimately needs to be if he’s to get away with being (as one reviewer on the dust-jacket puts it) so “jaw-droppingly rude”.
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*Other titles from other authors include The Hockey Stick Illusion, The Wind Farm Scam and Climate: the Great Delusion all published under the indicative banner “Independent Minds”
October 15, 2010
Slamming the Beeb?
Sunny at Pickled Politics draws attention to the latest risible claims of right-wing loon tank Migration Watch.
Apparently, the UK loses £4.6bn educating the children of migrants. Except that figure looks rather shaky when you learn it includes as immigrants anybody who happened to have a foreign-born parent. (So despite having British citizenship, because my mum is French MW count my vast and on-going British education as a pay-out to immigrant families!) As if that method wasn’t bad enough, the Office of National Statistics claims not to know how MW obtained any figures on parent birth place to begin with. Further demolition can be found here.
I admit: different day, same risible nonsense from MW. What actually animates me this morning is Sunny’s gunning for the BBC over its failures to report the MW nonsense as such. Certainly, the BBC’s reporting in this instance is lamentable. And Sunny has long been drawing attention to its failures over climate change denial and its tendency to give equal space to “sceptics” when the evidence is all one way traffic in the other direction.
But I feel Sunny is too one-dimensional in his condemnation of the BBC, and picks poor strategy in response.
I’m not denying that the BBC should do better when reporting on nonsense from MW and their ilk. But let’s think about why the Beeb might fail to properly scrutinize right-wing immigration gibberish in particular. Namely, that it is currently having the squeeze put on it by the Tory party, and the threat of that squeeze has been on-going for several years. Indeed it arguably started under Labour, when accusations that Blair and Alistair Campbell had “sexed up” the Iraq War dossier landed the Beeb in serious hot water with Number 10, with the temperature turned up by the Mail and News International.
With a ferocious Murdoch clamouring for privatisation, and a Tory party whose MPs and grass-roots broadly believe the BBC is a base-camp of socialist revolution, you can see why the news wing of the BBC might be predisposed to attempt to appease its opponents by sometimes channelling their political agendas, even if only by laziness.
Now, I think this is a bad idea. The agenda against the BBC is so deep-running that nothing will ever be good enough to halt it except full-scale demolition. My point is that the real blame lies not only, or simply, with poor journalism and poor editorial oversight, but with the entire situation in which the BBC finds itself.
Correspondingly, I find Sunny’s outraged condemnations – “The BBC’s reporting has become a joke”; “you wouldn’t get the BBC report pointing that out either, because they can’t actually be bothered to ask some basic questions.” – frustrating. All the blame is laid at the BBC’s door, and they are correspondingly slammed from the left as well as the right. (I won’t even get into Sunny’s long-running claim that the BBC is a “right wing” media institution, a claim I find to be based on the mirror-image cognitive bias which motivates right-wing criticism that the Beeb is a communist bastion).
I just can’t see this strategy of slamming the Beeb as incompetent being helpful. When institutions – like people – come under attack, they tend to hunker down, take cover and put up the defences. Reform often does not follow, because self-protection takes priority.
Whatever its failings, the BBC is still a far better news and broadcast institution than anything that will replace it should the free-market Murdochites get their way. It would be much better if leftists put their energy into exposing the hypocrisies of other far more scurrilous media outlets, and of the risible “think” tanks like MW (and puppet campaign groups like The Tax Payers’ Alliance) than slamming the BBC, without thinking about why the BBC ends up making the bad calls it sometimes does.
