The Icarus Syndrome

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Jim Manzi calls it the Icarus Syndrome:

Successful modern economies create unprecedented wealth and material ease, but they also tend to generate characteristic anxieties. One of them is the recurring belief that the whole thing is a house of cards. Psychologically, this is the fear that there is some hidden danger that will cause modern society to collapse, and that we would have been better off if we had stayed lower to the ground and not tried to build such an overwhelming success. The most compelling of these stories often involve problems that the modern system has supposedly created itself.

An earlier example is the British Coal Panic:

William Ewart Gladstone, in his 1866 budget speech, warned that Britain faced the prospect of exhausting its domestic coal within a century and had poor prospects of finding sufficient alternative energy sources. This was not an idiosyncratic point of view. The year before, the economist William Stanley Jevons’s influential book The Coal Question had made the same prediction and proposed a set of policies to conserve coal for the inevitable lean times. John Stuart Mill supported both the thesis and Jevons’s proposals. Newspapers took up the “Coal Panic,” and a Royal Commission on Coal was created. Eventually the issue fizzled, and Britain moved on to other, more pressing, concerns.

It was true that British coal production could not grow indefinitely, and it did not. The essential points that Jevons missed, however, were the feasibility of displacing coal with petroleum as a source of energy and the decreasing centrality of low-cost coal to the industries that were to lead Britain in the 20th century. But then again, as the great physicist Niels Bohr reportedly said, “Prediction is hard, especially concerning the future.”

The obvious modern analog is Peak Oil:

The peak oil theory usually proceeds from the correct prediction in 1956 by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert that oil production in the United States would hit its high sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Advocates, however, much more rarely note that in 1974 Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak in about 1995. Whoops. It turns out that it’s more feasible to predict peak production in very well-understood geography, such as the United States, than for the world as a whole.
[...]
Caruso identified 36 academic forecasts for peak oil published between 1972 and 2004. There is an obvious pattern in the data. Roughly speaking, academic forecasts indicate that we are about 20 years from peak oil today, just as such forecasts generally indicated that we were about 20 years from peak oil throughout the 1970s and 1980s. What if we had reacted to these earlier, incorrect predictions of resource exhaustion with, as many advocated at the time, government coercion to force a decrease in petroleum use and to limit growth? We very likely would not have found ourselves on the other side of one of the greatest periods of wealth creation in American history, and therefore would probably not be in the happy position of paying, even at 2008 prices, a smaller share of GDP for oil than we did in 1980.

There is a finite amount of oil in the world, so we will eventually reach a production maximum. We have, however, a very poor track record in predicting when this will happen, and the world’s leading experts will provide only the most general guidance that it looks like we probably have several decades of production growth in front of us. Much like the British looking forward from the 1860s, we don’t have a very good idea of what the technology landscape, and much else besides, will be when or if this occurs. Almost certainly, the best course of action is the simplest: Let markets integrate this information into prices for oil and alternative energy sources, and then let entrepreneurs use this information to guide the deployment of resources through markets.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

The Economic Problems of the Future

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

We may be preoccupied with the current recession, Gregory Clark says, but the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about “something more nettlesome” — people with no marketable skills:

For much of the past 200 years, unskilled workers benefited greatly from capitalism. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, skilled construction workers earned 50 to 100 percent more than unskilled laborers; today, that premium has fallen to 33 percent in the United States. The era of the two world wars, 1914 to 1945, was one of particularly sharp gains for the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the rest.

Why have the unskilled fared so well? After all, machines — whether steam engines, internal combustion engines or electric motors — have replaced people as deliverers of brute force. But even today they cannot replace many of people’s manipulative abilities, language skills and social awareness. The hamburger you eat at McDonald’s is still put together and delivered to you by human hands; even a fast-food “associate” deploys an astonishing repertoire of spatial and language skills.

But in more recent decades, when average U.S. incomes roughly doubled, there has been little gain in the real earnings of the unskilled. And, more darkly, computer advances suggest these redoubts of human skill will sooner or later fall to machines. We may have already reached the historical peak in the earning power of low-skilled workers, and may look back on the mid-20th century as the great era of the common man.

I recently carried out a complicated phone transaction with United Airlines but never once spoke to a human; my mechanical interlocutor seemed no less capable than the Indian call-center operatives it replaced. Outsourcing to India and China may be only a brief historical interlude before the great outsourcing yet to come — to machines. And as machines expand their domain, basic wages could easily fall so low that families cannot support themselves without public assistance.

With the march of technology, the size of a future American underclass dependent on public support for part of its livelihood is hard to predict: 10 million, 20 million, 100 million? We could imagine cities where entire neighborhoods are populated by people on state support. In France, generous welfare has already produced huge suburban housing estates, les banlieues, populated with a substantially unemployed and immigrant population, parts of which have periodically burst into violent protest.

So, how do we operate a society in which a large share of the population is socially needy but economically redundant? There is only one answer. You tax the winners — those with the still uniquely human skills, and those owning the capital and land — to provide for the losers.

I can’t say I’m particularly fond of that “solution” — but how people see the rift between rich and poor will shape policy:

Modern society seems comfortable with the rich and poor living in vastly different housing, eating disparate qualities of food and facing radically dissimilar crime risks. No one pickets four-star restaurants because they feed only the rich, or the Waldorf Astoria because only the wealthy can afford to sleep there. But when it comes to medical care, Americans display strong ethical resistance to having the poor receive a substantially inferior product. (Just recall the outrage a few years ago when news reports emerged of Los Angeles hospitals discharging poor patients onto city sidewalks.)

Rising health spending — from 5 percent of U.S. annual income in 1960 to 16 percent today — is no tragedy. Thanks to such spending, we can all live longer. But as medical advances allow us to live far beyond our working years, with the average American adult living to 78, the burden on the public purse will rise. Of the 47 million currently uninsured Americans, most will need public assistance to get adequate care.

Adult-onset diabetes, for example, estimated to afflict more than 21 million Americans, is a chronic condition associated with a lifestyle occurring at high rates among lower-income people. Modern medicine allows the average person diagnosed with diabetes to live more than 15 additional years, but at a cost typically exceeding $100,000. (Twenty-one million times $100,000 is $2.1 trillion, and that’s just one disease.)

You have to love the roundabout description of diabetes as “associated with a lifestyle occurring at high rates among lower-income people”.

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Laser Weapons

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Science-fiction fan Rick Robinson runs the numbers on laser weapons:

So an ideal diffraction-limited laser zapping in the near IR, with a wavelength of 1000 nanometers firing through a 2-meter telescope, has a spot size of 12.2 cm at a range of 100 km.

If your laser has an average power output of 1 megawatt, each square centimeter is getting hit with about 8.5 kilowatts — about 850,000 times the intensity of sunlight at Earth’s surface. The target surface will get very hot, very quickly.

The most refractory material we currently know of, graphite, requires some 50 MJ to vaporize 1 kg — roughly the energy of 12 kg of TNT — and has a density of about 2.2 g/cm3. Cutting to the chase, our beam will burn through it at not quite a millimeter per second. Most metals are much less resistant to heat, so the laser will burn through metal hulls way faster. But if you substitute a 5 meter mirror — or a 400 nanometer beam, at the short end of the visible spectrum — you’ll burn a smaller hole at half a centimeter per second. Or it will have the same spot size and burn rate at 250 km.

Lesson: For a given beam power, the bigger the mirror and shorter the wavelength, the greater the effective range. And lasers cannons, at least in the classical IR-visible-UV band, probably won’t look much like guns, but perhaps more like a TV satellite dish.

The consequences:

If you can see it, you can zap it, and vice versa. As noted above, laser spot size is closely related to telescope resolution. If you can focus the beam to a couple of dozen centimeters, that is also the resolution your sensors can gain, simply by looking through the telescope between pulses. Which means that lasers of this precision don’t just score random hits like World War I battleships; they fire at specific points on the target surface. (If mechanical or thermal limits preclude this precision, you won’t get the penetrating burn-throughs described above, just scars burned along the hull surface.)

Thus the objective won’t just be to blast an enemy ship but to mission kill it by zeroing in on critical systems — such as armament. In a laser battle, if you can hit the other guy effectively at all you can shoot the gun out his hand. But it gets better. What happens when two lasers are zapping each other? Their targeting optics are pointing straight at each other — so the optics concentrate the incoming beam right onto the laser itself. I have no idea what the effect is, but it could easily be dramatic. Laser engagements lend themselves to a mutual eyeball frying contest. Whoever zaps first, probably wins.

But there is another and even more curious implication of laser combat. So far I’ve been talking about beams concentrated down to blowtorch intensity, kilowatts or metawatts per square centimeter, able to burn right through refractory materials by heating the surface to thousands of degrees K. But what about mere scorch intensity? Say, the 50 watts/cm2 that causes primary thermal burns to humans and sets paper on fire. This won’t burn through armor, but it will likely burn out delicate components such as sensor elements, or at any rate saturate and ‘dazzle’ them.

Thus laser weapons can blind the enemy, temporarily or permanently, at much greater range than they can do serious physical damage to structures.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

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But how much electricity does it use?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

GM is loudly touting the fact that their new Chevy Volt should get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. But how much electricity does it use?

Applying EPA’s methodology, GM expects the Volt to consume as little as 25 kilowatt hours per 100 miles in city driving. At the U.S. average cost of electricity (approximately 11 cents per kWh), a typical Volt driver would pay about $2.75 for electricity to travel 100 miles, or less than 3 cents per mile.

A typical car might burn five gallons of gas to go 100 miles. At $3 per gallon, that would come to $15.

The Volt looks like it will use 25 kWh in electricity and 0.43 gallons of gas, for roughly $2.75 plus $1.29, or $4.04 — so the cost of electricity is tiny, but it’s still more than the cost of gas.

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The Grauniad

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Anomaly UK informs me that The Guardian — originally the Manchester Guardian — was not founded to support radicals, like those at the Peterloo Massacre. It has always been a centre-left publication, in favor of liberal causes, but against direct action.

I also was also unaware of its nickname — The Grauniad — which goes back to an apocryphal typo in its own masthead.

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The Volt’s Battery

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

The Volt’s battery is big — far bigger than it needs to be:

The anticipated energy capacity of the Volt’s 375 lb (170 kg) 220-cell lithium-ion battery pack is estimated at 16 kWh, but is only charged to 85% full when charged up, and is discharged to 30% SoC approximately, before the engine cuts in and maintains the charge at around this level. When the vehicle is plugged into a charger the battery SoC is restored to 85%. Hence the battery has an effective capacity in use of 8.8 kWh.

A recent Carnegie Mellon University study indicates that a PHEV-40 [plug-in hybrid vehicle with 40 miles of battery capacity] will be less cost effective than a HEV [Prius-style hybrid-electric vehicle] or a PHEV-7 [plug-in with just 7 miles' capacity] in all of the scenarios considered, due to the cost and weight of the battery. Jon Lauckner, a Vice President at GM, responded that the study did not consider the inconvenience of a 7-mile electric range and that the study’s cost estimate for the Volt’s battery pack was “many hundreds of dollars per kWh higher” than what it costs to make today.

The weight of the battery pack in the Volt which finally comes to market will reportedly be approximately 375 lb (170 kg),[71] primarily because the Volt will use lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries while the EV1 used heavier lead-acid and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. Li-ion batteries are expected to become cheaper to manufacture, as economies of scale take effect.

Electric motors are very, very efficient, but electric batteries are not; they’re both heavy and expensive for the amount of energy they store. Gasoline engines are not efficient, but gasoline is; it stores a tremendous amount of energy in a light and still remarkably cheap form. Complicating this is the fact that electricity off the grid, especially at night, is extremely cheap, even if carting it around in batteries isn’t.

An extended-range electric vehicle, like the Volt, stores some energy in its electric batteries and some energy in its gas tank. (It’s on-board gasoline engine is a generator. It’s not hooked up to the wheels through a mechanical transmission.) The trick is to balance expensive and heavy batteries, which use cheap electricity from the grid, with fairly cheap and light gasoline from the gas station — and it looks like 40 miles of battery capacity is too much.

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Born to Run

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

James McCormick is a miserable runner, he says, but he enjoyed Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen:

In Born to Run, magazine writer McDougall has managed to bring together a tale of endurance running, sports capitalism, evolutionary biology, and Mexican ethnography to create a compelling reading experience. Maybe, just maybe, it’s an insight into who we were.

A chance reading of a Spanish language magazine article on the exceptional running achievements of the Tarahumara Indians led the author on a multi-year quest to confirm what seemed counter-intuitive. A tribe of people (men and women) who could run incredible distances well into old age, without exotic diets, footwear, training regimes, warm-ups, etc. etc. Like the !Kung, they were reputed to run down deer through sheer stamina. As an oft-injured runner himself, McDougall simply couldn’t believe it. The Copper Canyon area of Mexico, where the Tarahumara live, is a remote, rugged, but increasingly dangerous part of Mexico where drug gangs, dope growers, and resource extraction compete to make life miserable for the natives. The author took considerable risks on his first journey to visit these people, only to discover that a white man had been living, and running, among them for many years — The White Horse — Caballo Blanco.

The story thread running through Born to Run is Caballo Blanco’s efforts to assemble a small group of America’s elite ultradistance runners to compete in a race through the mountains of Mexico with the best runners of the Tarahumara. Included in the mix are one of the leading American advocates of barefoot running, and the author himself, attempting to recover from years of running injuries by altering his training to mirror Tarahumara methods. In providing a back story for this race, McDougall notes that the Tarahumara once made a huge splash in the running world in the 1990s by twice dominating a brutal high-altitude race in Colorado, the Leadville 100. Then they “disappeared.” By weaving the biographical details of the Western participants in the 2006 race, with the ethnographic literature of the Tarahumara, the author sets the scene for the friendly showdown, a “middle of nowhere” mountain race out of sight of cameras and the world’s attention. At the same time, McDougall gets a chance to make his case for the negative effects of high-tech running shoes on runner health and performance … and for the evolutionary forces that apparently shaped the human frame for endurance running even before our species made tools or used fire.

It’s a possibility that our ancestors ran down their prey for tens of thousands of years without leaving a single trace in the archaeological record. Selective forces slowly altered their physiology (large head, springy Achilles tendon, hairless skin, upright posture) in ways that made it simply impossible for game animals to out-run humans. I must admit, I was shocked when the author outlined the limitations of four-legged creatures when it comes to running. For sprints, no problem. For long distances, however, the humans win. When added to the advanced cognition required for tracking and predicting game movement (proposed by South African scholar, Louis Liebenberg), one school of scholars now firmly proposes the “Running Man” theory of human evolution — that we are literally born to run down animals. That is our niche in the world.

So this book is a skillful mix of adventure tale, archival research, plus interviews with running coaches, physiologists, race directors, and evolutionary biologists … culminating in that “secret” race in Mexico in 2006.

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Who will preserve American civilization?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

When the Roman empire fell, the Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. When the US eventually falls, who will preserve American civilization?

Edward Gibbon argued that the introduction of Christianity doomed Rome: “[T]he last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister.” There’s a stronger case to be made that the Christians kept Rome from being erased from our collective memory — that the Catholic Church was the one entity that maintained Roman hierarchies, Roman thought, and the Latin language as the rest of the continent descended into illiteracy.

A religion is also a good candidate to keep America alive. The history of Catholicism shows that religious movements can outlast the political systems in which they arose. Our idealized conception of what America stands for has its origins in religious belief as well: the Puritans’ values of industry and self-reliance, and their desire for the nation to be a “city upon a hill.”

What religion might serve as America’s preservationist? In the 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. imagines a group of monks playing the same role as their European forebears, preserving knowledge in a post-apocalyptic America. Considering this country’s microscopic monk supply, it’s hard to imagine monasteries banding together to combat data rot. Evangelical Christians seem like a more logical contender: Around 100 million Americans identify as evangelicals, and the idea of the United States as a promised land is pervasive in evangelical thought. But while they’re often thought of as a homogeneous bloc, evangelicals are really a diverse and fragmented lot. That makes the movement resilient and adaptable but not exactly the best vessel for preserving a culture. The early Catholic Church, in contrast, was more disciplined and hierarchical, a far better candidate both to survive a collapse and to carry forward societal traditions.

A better candidate to serve as America’s time capsule: the Mormons. In an aside in 2007′s Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy posits that Salt Lake City could become “the Vatican of the third millennium,” with the Mormon Church “propagating a particular, canonical version of America.” Orson Scott Card, the Mormon science-fiction writer, lays out a similar premise in the 1989 short-story collection The Folk of the Fringe. In “West,” a group of Mormons sets out for Utah after a societal collapse brought on by nuclear war, biological warfare, and climate change. Despite finding that Temple Square is about to be submerged by rising waters, the travelers manage to keep the world alive by sticking together even as “places without Mormons were dying or dead.”

Why does Card think the Mormons will live through a disaster? He explains via e-mail that Mormon culture “has strengths and weaknesses, but it has almost all the attributes of a civilizational winner. … We have organizational practices and ideological elements that make it highly likely that wherever we are, we will outlast the collapse of governments and civilizations.” As far as organizational practices go, a 2007 church pamphlet recommends that families put together “a [three-month] supply of food that is part of your normal, daily diet” as well as stores of wheat, white rice, and beans for “longer-term needs.” (Seventy-two-hour preparedness kits will suffice in a pinch.) The church, practicing what it preaches, owns a silo in Salt Lake City filled with 19 million pounds of wheat. The Mormons’ ideological preparations for the end of America include the widely held belief that the United States will not endure — and that when the Constitution “hangs by a thread,” Mormons will be there to save it.

Mormonism is an American religion. It was birthed in this country, and the church’s missionary work has made the religion one of the most-recognizable American institutions around the world. If the U.S. government dissolves or the continent gets submerged by rising seas, the Mormons have more reason than most to stick around. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds that the framers of the Constitution were divinely inspired, that American Indians are partly descended from an ancient Israelite tribe called the Lamanites, and that upon his return, Jesus Christ will rule both in the old Jerusalem and on American soil.
[...]
The Latter-day Saints’ oscillation between contemporary society and their pioneer days makes them the perfect time capsule: They will always retain a piece of the American character, yet they have enough of a toehold in the past — and enough grain in the silo — to resume their pre-modern ways.
If the Mormon Church does someday become a proxy for the United States, what parts of American civilization will survive? “Things that used to be American — motherhood and apple pie — would be restored to primacy,” Orson Scott Card says.
[...]
Orson Scott Card emphasizes that post-collapse Mormons would be organized but open to others: “If we did not approach things that way, we would fail, because our very survival as an organized group would frighten others who saw us as a threat,” he writes, adding that Mormons “learned that one the hard way” during the polygamy years. In the event of the American end times, Card continues, the church would likely continue to “regard the Constitution of the United States as a divinely ordered document—including a reasonable separation of church and state. There would be no Mormon Taliban, no Mormon equivalent of sharia imposed on non-Mormons.”

In The Folk of the Fringe, Card writes that “civilization lives on among those folk whose bonds of faith, tribe, and language are strong.”

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No More Perks

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Coffee shops are saying no more perks to laptop users:

A sign at Naidre’s, a small neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., begins warmly: “Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day…”

But, it continues, “…people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit.” At Naidre’s in Park Slope and its second location in nearby Carroll Gardens, Wi-Fi is free. But since the spring of 2008, no laptops have been allowed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekends, unless the customer is eating and typing at the same time.

I think most people would agree that that policy makes perfect sense. Other coffee shops seem ham-handed in their reactions:

At Espresso 77 in Jackson Heights, Queens, owners covered three of five electric outlets six months ago after its loosely enforced laptop-use restrictions failed to encourage turnover. At two of three Café Grumpy locations — one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood — laptops are never welcome.

It doesn’t matter how long a patron sips a single cup of coffee if there are still seats available for other patrons.

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NASA is shooting marbles at 16,000 mph

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

NASA is shooting marbles at 16,000 mph to simulate meteoroid impacts with the lunar surface:

“We measure the flash so we can figure out how much of the kinetic energy goes into light,” he explained. “Once we know this luminous efficiency, as we call it, we can apply it to real meteoroids when they strike the Moon.” High-speed cameras and a photometer (light meter) record the results.

The Ames Vertical Gun Range was built in the 1960s to support Project Apollo, America’s first human missions to the lunar surface. The Ames gun can fire a variety of shapes and materials, even clusters of particles, at speeds from 0.5 to 7 km/s. The target chamber usually is pumped down to a vacuum, and can be partially refilled to simulate atmospheres on other worlds or comets.
[...]
Cooke’s experiments are being run in two rounds. The first set of 12 shots in October 2006 fired Pyrex glass balls into dust made from pumice, a volcanic rock, at up to 7 km/s. Follow-up experiments will use JSC-1a lunar simulant, one of the “true fakes” developed from terrestrial ingredients to mimic the qualities of moon soil.

Knowing the speed and mass of the projectile will let Cooke to scale the flash and estimate the energies of the softball-size meteoroids that hit the Moon at up to 72 km/s, more than six times the speed of the Ames gun. But luminous efficiency is just part of the question. A lot of the impact energy goes into shattering and melting the projectile — the main reason for using glass rather than metal — and then spraying debris everywhere.

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230 MPG

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

GM’s new Volt should get 230 MPG in city driving:

The Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles. The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.

GM came up with the 230-mile figure in early tests using draft guidelines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for calculating the mileage of extended range electric vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, GM’s vehicle line director for the Volt.

If the figure is confirmed by the EPA, which does the tests for the mileage posted on new car door stickers, the Volt would be the first car to exceed triple-digit gas mileage, Posawatz said.

The downside? The car will cost close to $40,000. How much will gas have to cost for a Volt to make sense? A lot.

First, realize that the familiar miles-per-gallon metric is upside-down. What you want to know is gallons per mile — or gallons per 100 miles. If you travel 10,000 miles per year in a 10-mpg clunker, you use 1,000 gallons of gas per year. At $4 per gallon, that’s $4,000 per year on gas.

If you upgrade to a decent 20-mpg car, you’ll use 500 gallons of gas per year — saving yourself $2,000 per year.

If you upgrade a 20-mpg car to a super-efficient 50-mpg car, you’ll use just 200 gallons of gas per year — which may be impressive, but it only saves you an additional $1,200 per year.

In fact, upgrading a 20-mpg car to a 230-mpg Volt cuts annual gas consumption from 500 gallons to 43.5 gallons — which, again, seems impressive, but it only saves $1,826 per year.

Even a pure electric vehicle using no gas — getting infinite miles per gallon — could only save you $4,000 per year; you can’t spend less than zero on gas.

Miles per Gallon Gallons per 100 Miles Gallons per Year (10,000 Miles) Dollars Saved per Year (@$4 per Gallon)
10 10 1000 $0
20 5 500 2000
50 2 200 3200
230 0.43 43 3826
Infinite 0 0 4000

That said, I love the technology under the Volt’s hood. It isn’t a Prius-style hybrid; it’s an electric vehicle with a gas generator for extended range. That means no transmission.

They’d probably have a more sensible vehicle if they halved the size of the battery pack. That would dramatically reduce the cost of the vehicle, it would significantly reduce the weight of vehicle, and it would only ever-so-slightly increase the gas consumption of the vehicle.

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The Rights of the Mob

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Anomaly UK considers the rights of the mob, spurred by a BBC4 programme about the Miners’ Strike:

From a legalistic viewpoint, the violent clashes of 1984 were very clear. The government has the duty of keeping the roads open — that has been the case for as long as there have been governments and roads. If a group illegally blocks the road, they must be removed, without more force than necessary, but with as much force as is necessary. If that means charges of mounted police, then send in the horses. If it means tanks, send in tanks. If it means machine-guns, load them up. It is out of the question that the law can be openly defied by violence.

Clearly, that’s not the situation — nobody saw it that way. The horses were controversial, tanks and guns would have been out of the question, while giving up and allowing the strikers to block the road was a real possibility. Nor was the restraint on the government’s actions some irrational daintiness on the part of Lady Thatcher — to have employed sufficient force to make victory in the field certain would have torn the country apart. The Police and Army would have run real risk of mutiny, workers in other industries would have sided with the miners — these were real dangers which put the outcome of the overall dispute in doubt.

Any model of where real power lies in the country, such as I have been attempting to create, is incomplete unless it can explain what rights a mob is understood to have, to form and to break the law without facing any greater force than lightly-armed police.

The limitation of the power of the state is simply that it can’t shoot everybody — it requires a level of voluntary cooperation from the population in general in order to function. But that only pushes the question back — why would rolling armoured cars through picket lines have forfeited that cooperation? It breaks some unwritten rules, but where did they come from?

I wrote in the context of more recent disturbances that rights are acquired by violent precedent — that if a group has won a conflict in the past, they will be assumed to win again, so that conflict is avoided. But that does not cover the case — what is the precedent for the use of military levels of violence against mobs in England not being successful? The chief candidate that comes to mind is the Peterloo Massacre, but that was not really unsuccessful, in that a revolt was averted. 1972′s Bloody Sunday would seem more relevant, being both recent and a case where lethal force used by the government did backfire politically, but I get the feeling that at the time Northern Ireland was seen as more of a special case, being at that time a conflict between two groups in the population rather than one group against the government.

My impression is that Peterloo is the key precedent, and the reason it counts as a defeat for the government is because the British regime in its entirety — from the TUC to Margaret Thatcher herself — is descended not from the government of 1819 but from the protesters of 1819. They won in the end and the measures that the ancien regime used against them are now out of bounds.

Americans might be left asking, Peterloo Massacre?

The Peterloo Massacre (or Battle of Peterloo) occurred at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 gathered at a meeting to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had resulted in periods of famine and chronic unemployment, exacerbated by the introduction of the first of the Corn Laws. By the beginning of 1819 the pressure generated by poor economic conditions, coupled with the lack of suffrage in northern England, had enhanced the appeal of political Radicalism. In response, the Manchester Patriotic Union, a group agitating for parliamentary reform, organised a demonstration to be addressed by the well-known radical orator Henry Hunt.

Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the military authorities to arrest Hunt and several others on the hustings with him, and to disperse the crowd. Cavalry charged into the crowd with sabres drawn, and in the ensuing confusion, 15 people were killed and 400–700 were injured. The massacre was given the name Peterloo in ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years earlier.

Historian Robert Poole has called the Peterloo Massacre one of the defining moments of its age. In its own time, the London and national papers shared the horror felt in the Manchester region, but Peterloo’s immediate effect was to cause the government to crack down on reform, with the passing of what became known as the Six Acts. It also led directly to the foundation of The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian), but had little other effect on the pace of reform.

Well, that explains The Guardian…

Addendum: Or does it?

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What is Real Freedom?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Will Wilkinson prefers seasteads to charter cities, because he prefers real freedom:

What the example of Hong Kong communicates is that authoritarian, illiberal, undemocratic regimes need not feel threatened by semi-independent city states with working “liberal” market institutions. It says to rulers that their countries can get rich without granting their subjects real freedom.

This leads Arnold Kling to ask, what is real freedom?

Consider the following definition of freedom: the absence of monopoly.

The absence of monopoly means that you can exercise exit, even if you cannot exercise voice. The presence of monopoly means that, at most, you can exercise voice.

Neither my local supermarket nor any of its suppliers has a way for me to exercise voice. They don’t hold elections. They don’t have town-hall meetings where they explain their plans for what will be in the store. By democratic standards, I am powerless in the supermarket.

And yet, I feel much freer in the supermarket than I do with respect to my county, state, or federal government. For each item in the supermarket, I can choose whether to put it into my cart and pay for it or leave it on the shelf. I can walk out of the supermarket at any time and go to a competing grocery.

The exercise of voice, including the right to vote, is not the ultimate expression of freedom. Rather, it is the last refuge of those who suffer under a monopoly. If we take it as given that the political jurisdiction where I reside is a monopoly, then perhaps I will have more influence over that monopoly if I have a right to vote and a right to organize opposition than if I do not. However, as my forthcoming Unchecked and Unbalanced argues, the reality is that the amount of influence I have is shrinking while the scope of the monopolist is growing.

The idea of charter cities (or seasteading) will be a success to the extent that it creates a viable exit option vis-a-vis government. Suppose that the Chinese government loses its monopoly power, because it becomes easy for people residing in China to choose to live under alternative governments. In that hypothetical case, I would argue that those residents are free, even if those who choose the Chinese government are not allowed to vote in contested elections or to freely criticize their government. If you lived in North Korea, which would you rather have–the right to vote or the right to leave?

In fact, if we had real competitive government, then we would be no more interested in elections and speaking out to government officials than we are in holding elections and town-hall meetings at the supermarket. I repeat: real freedom is the absence of monopoly.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Bruno Leoni vs. Paul Romer

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Arnold Kling pits Bruno Leoni vs. Paul Romer. First, Leoni:

In reality, the law is something which is not pre-fabricated in some specially-designated place, by some specially-designated producer and with some pre-established technique. In much the same way, no followers of the artificial languages such as Esperanto and Volapuk have yet succeeded in finding a substitute for the language that we speak every day, which also is not pre-fabricated. The law is in the last analysis something which everyone makes every day with his behavior, his spontaneous acceptance and observance of the rules that everyone helps to establish, and finally, even if it seems paradoxical, with the disagreements themselves which eventually arise among the various individuals on the observance of these rules.

Then he summarizes Romer:

Paul Romer, in presenting his idea for charter cities, makes it sound as though we can take rules “manufactured” in, say, Canada, and export them anywhere in the world. Leoni would say that instead most law is embedded in social customs In fact, my daughter who just spent the summer in Tanzania, says that the custom of seeing law as something that ought to be obeyed is not nearly as natural there as it is here.

I suspect there’s a difference between exporting Canadian rules to Tanzania and exporting Canadian rules to a city-state along the coast of Tanzania, full of Canadian merchants and self-selected Tanzanians looking to work for and with those Canadians.

Will Chamberlain seems to agree:

Romer seems quite cognizant of the fact that you can’t just take Senegal’s legal code, replace it with Canada’s, and expect things to be peachy. If you’ve watched Romer’s TED talk, you’ll recall the image of those African students, all of whom probably have cell phones, studying under streetlights. The reason these students don’t have power in their homes is because of price controls that disincentivize power companies from supplying more people with power . And Romer notes that the political class in these countries is aware that these laws suck, but can’t change them because there are existing, entrenched interests that benefit from the existence of these laws.

Deng Xiaoping was facing the same situation. He went to places like Singapore, and saw that Communism didn’t work. But rather than replace communism with another system in one fell swoop, he created special economic zones where people could self-select to try a new system, and over time, there was incremental reform throughout the country in the direction of more economic freedom and respect for private property. Customs may not interchangeable, but they can evolve over time.

Romer wants charter cities to be built on uninhabited land for a number of very good reasons. One of them is that he sees them as a kind of intentional community – a city in which people self-select to try and live under a new set of rules. It’s because laws cannot be easily exported that Romer is trying to create new jurisdictions to experiment with new laws, rather than trying to convince leaders in established jurisdictions to adopt better laws.

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The Poorest Place in America

Monday, August 10th, 2009

The poorest place in America, Eamon Moynihan points out, is New York — once you adjust for the cost of living there:

Based on data from C2ER, a company that has been producing cost-of-living estimates for years, someone earning $50,798 in Chicago or $62,741 in Washington, D.C. enjoys the same standard of living as someone earning $100,000 in New York City. Not surprisingly, housing is the biggest factor. In Chicago, the cost of housing is 69 percent lower than in New York. In Washington, D.C., it’s 46 percent lower. Utility costs are also lower — 29 percent in Chicago and 39 percent in Washington. So are groceries, by 28 percent in both cities. The result is that New York City residents have far less purchasing power than anyone seems to realize. (What applies to New York City also applies to its suburbs. A person earning $76,256 in Chicago has the same standard of living as someone earning $100,000 in New York’s Nassau County. Once again, housing is the main reason: its cost is 42 percent lower in Chicago than in Nassau.)

The next step is to apply these cost-of-living differentials to the most recent census estimates for per-capita income. This calculation yields a measurement of each city’s average standard of living. Once you crunch the numbers, you find that the real standard of living in Washington, D.C. is 118 percent higher than in New York City. In Chicago, it’s 75 percent higher.

It’s not just the city either:

One somewhat older estimate was produced by the Taubman Center at Harvard University in 2000. It calculated that based on 1999 data, the cost of living in New York State was the fourth-highest in the nation. But the state ranked 28th in terms of per-capita income as measured by purchasing power. And if you use median household income instead of per-capita income — a fair statistical maneuver, since New York has a disproportionate number of extraordinarily rich people — you find that New York ranked 38th in the U.S. in 1999 in purchasing power.

The Taubman data help corroborate more recent estimates by Bettina Aten, a leading expert on purchasing power at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington, D.C. According to her estimates, the cost of living in New York State in 2006 was 31.8 percent above the national average, second only to Hawaii, which, of course, is an island in the middle of the ocean. Once you apply that cost of living to 2006 estimates of median household income, you realize that New York State ranked last in the nation in purchasing power. The adjusted figure for New York was $38,986; for Mississippi, it was $42,984. Aten herself doesn’t include certain items, such as government transfer payments, and that raises New York’s adjusted income to $42,743 and lowers Mississippi’s to $39,649. But either way, it’s a dismal performance for the Empire State.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

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