Social stability results from the establishment of a middle class

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Social stability results from the establishment of a middle class, Robert Kaplan argues:

Not democracies but authoritarian systems, including monarchies, create middle classes — which, having achieved a certain size and self-confidence, revolt against the very dictators who generated their prosperity. This is the pattern today in the Pacific Rim and the southern cone of South America, but not in other parts of Latin America, southern Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa. A place like the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), where the per capita gross national product is less than $200 a year and the average person is either a rural peasant or an urban peasant; where there is little infrastructure of roads, sewers, and so on; and where reliable bureaucratic institutions are lacking, needs a leader like Bismarck or Jerry Rawlings — the Ghanaian ruler who stabilized his country through dictatorship and then had himself elected democratically — in place for years before he is safe from an undisciplined soldiery.

Foreign correspondents in sub-Saharan Africa who equate democracy with progress miss this point, ignoring both history and centuries of political philosophy. They seem to think that the choice is between dictators and democrats. But for many places the only choice is between bad dictators and slightly better ones. To force elections on such places may give us some instant gratification. But after a few months or years a bunch of soldiers with grenades will get bored and greedy, and will easily topple their fledgling democracy. As likely as not, the democratic government will be composed of corrupt, bickering, ineffectual politicians whose weak rule never had an institutional base to start with: modern bureaucracies generally require high literacy rates over several generations.

From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).

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Foreign Aid Keeps Autocrats in Power

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

External aid often promotes longevity in office for autocratic leaders who are otherwise at risk of being deposed, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita explains, because it helps them patronize their core group of supporters:

In such cases, aid not only fails to promote economic growth, but it also diminishes the odds that the political system will evolve in a more inclusive, democratic and growth-oriented direction.

This may seem too large a claim to some observers. After all, external aid generally comprises only a small component of a nation’s total economy. Since 1975, for instance, international aid has averaged only about $7 or $8 per citizen. Such numbers imply that foreign assistance is not significant enough to reshape economic prospects and barely enough to provide relief to the world’s poorest people. This assumption, however, misses the fundamental benefit that aid provides to autocratic leaders, and again, the data illustrate it. Autocrats in countries with below-average growth rates who do not get aid have a 25 percent chance of staying in office for five years. If they receive economic assistance, that survival time rises to seven years, a 40 percent increase. A few dollars of aid per capita is small in terms of any impact on the national economy, but it is huge with respect to helping autocrats enrich their small coterie of supporters.

On average, every dollar of per capita foreign aid improves an incumbent autocrat’s chance of surviving in office another year by about 4 percent (even after taking into account the independent effects on political survival exerted by such factors as the country’s economic growth rate, black market exchange rate premium, national debt, and its geographic situation). Since the average autocracy gets about $8 per capita in aid, foreign assistance may boost the survival prospects of poorly performing leaders by 30 percent or more.

Posted in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Dam the Bering Strait

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

You can control the climate of the entire Arctic if you just build a dam across the Bering Strait:

Back in the cold, icy 1950s and 1960s, Soviet climatologists were told to devise a plan for melting the Arctic ice cap. They came up with several ideas, including damming the Bering Strait and pumping cold Arctic water out into the Pacific, drawing warm Atlantic water into the Arctic.

But now in the 21st century, climatologists are oriented toward preserving the Arctic ice cap and the Greenland ice sheets. Here is a proposal involving the damming of the Bering Strait, in order to save the Arctic ice cap (see PDF report at bottom). (via Global Warming)

A recent modeling study at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) supports the idea that the Bering Strait has been at the center of significant climate changes — most recently at the end of the last glaciation.

The computer simulations showed that North America and Eurasia warmed significantly during the times when the Bering Strait was open, with the tropical and subtropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as Antarctica, warming slightly.

Remember that at least twice during the most recent glaciation, sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge across the Bering Strait. This allowed the migration of Siberian tribesmen (and perhaps other groups) across the strait from Asia into North America. Here is a scientific examination of the effect of the Bering Strait — open vs. closed — on the Arctic climate.

This reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s alternative history classic, The Man in the High Castle, in which the victorious Nazis dam and drain the Mediterranean, using atomic power. It’s the kind of thing that seemed perfectly within our grasp during the Atoms for Peace era — certainly easier than landing a man on the moon and returning him safely.

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Part Animal, Part Plant

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

The green sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, is part animal, part plant:

Pierce emphasized that this green slug goes far beyond animals such as corals that host live-in microbes that share the bounties of their photosynthesis. Most of those hosts tuck in the partner cells whole in crevices or pockets among host cells. Pierce’s slug, however, takes just parts of cells, the little green photosynthetic organelles called chloroplasts, from the algae it eats. The slug’s highly branched gut network engulfs these stolen bits and holds them inside slug cells.

Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe.

But the chloroplasts need a continuous supply of chlorophyll and other compounds that get used up during photosynthesis. Back in their native algal cells, chloroplasts depended on algal cell nuclei for the fresh supplies. To function so long in exile, “chloroplasts might have taken a go-cup with them when they left the algae,” Pierce said.

There have been previous hints, however, that the chloroplasts in the slug don’t run on stored-up supplies alone. Starting in 2007, Pierce and his colleagues, as well as another team, found several photosynthesis-related genes in the slugs apparently lifted directly from the algae. Even unhatched sea slugs, which have never encountered algae, carry “algal” photosynthetic genes.

At the meeting, Pierce described finding more borrowed algal genes in the slug genome for enzymes in a chlorophyll-synthesizing pathway. Assembling the whole compound requires some 16 enzymes and the cooperation of multiple cell components. To see whether the slug could actually make new chlorophyll a to resupply the chloroplasts, Pierce and his colleagues turned to slugs that hadn’t fed for at least five months and had stopped releasing any digestive waste. The slugs still contained chloroplasts stripped from the algae, but any other part of the hairy algal mats should have been long digested, he said.

After giving the slugs an amino acid labeled with radioactive carbon, Pierce and his colleagues identified a radioactive product as chlorophyll a. The radioactively tagged compound appeared after a session of slug sunbathing but not after letting slugs sit in the dark.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

European-Americans vs. Europeans

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Paul Krugman recently made this facile argument for European-style socialism:

For those Americans who have visited Paris: did it look poor and backward? What about Frankfurt or London? You should always bear in mind that when the question is which to believe — official economic statistics or your own lying eyes — the eyes have it.

You don’t need a whole lot of economic insight to spot the problem there: Paris, Frankfurt, and London are three of the riches places in Europe. They’re not at all representative.

But Tino Sanandaji makes an even more interesting point. European-Americans produce far more than their European cousins:

The GDP per capita for Americans from EU.15 is $53,000, compared to $33,500 for EU.15 itself. Those of European descent in America on average produce 58.6% more than they do in Europe.

(Hat tip to Steve Sailer.)

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States have never been formed by elections

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

States have never been formed by elections, Robert Kaplan notes:

Geography, settlement patterns, the rise of literate bourgeoisie, and, tragically, ethnic cleansing have formed states. Greece, for instance, is a stable democracy partly because earlier in the century it carried out a relatively benign form of ethnic cleansing — in the form of refugee transfers — which created a monoethnic society. Nonetheless, it took several decades of economic development for Greece finally to put its coups behind it.

Democracy often weakens states by necessitating ineffectual compromises and fragile coalition governments in societies where bureaucratic institutions never functioned well to begin with. Because democracy neither forms states nor strengthens them initially, multi-party systems are best suited to nations that already have efficient bureaucracies and a middle class that pays income tax, and where primary issues such as borders and power-sharing have already been resolved, leaving politicians free to bicker about the budget and other secondary matters.

From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).

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The Straw Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Annotated Christmas Carol by Charles DickensI haven’t read much Dickens, and I hadn’t read any in years — decades, really — but I recently finished reading a beautifully annotated version of A Christmas Carol that I received as a gift.

Now, even as a kid in school I understood that Dickens was a social reformer — which was presented as an unalloyed good, by the way — but reading A Christmas Carol as an adult, I can’t help but dwell on the fact that the whole thing is a transparent effort to prop up a conservative straw man and to knock him back down again — and light him on fire, too, I suppose.

Scrooge is a miser and a misanthrope, and Dickens makes every effort to associate miserliness and misanthropy with conservatives like Edmund Burke, with economists like Thomas Malthus, and with anyone else who might dare to suggest that the world does not run on wishful thinking.

It does not take long for him to get down to it. In the second paragraph of the first chapter — Stave 1, in Dickens’ “carol in prose” — he makes a sarcastic reference to the wisdom of our ancestors. That’s a not-so-subtle jab at Edmund Burke‘s Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies:

I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other.

Apparently Dickens had a series of fake books made up for his own Wisdom of Our Ancestors library shelf: Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, etc.

When Scrooge’s nephew invites him to dinner, Scrooge says that he will indeed come to see him — in Hell. This is censored, of course, but you get the idea:

Scrooge said that he would see him — yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

This is all just a set-up though:

But why? cried Scrooge’s nephew. Why?

Why did you get married? said Scrooge.

Because I fell in love.

Because you fell in love! growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. Good afternoon!

In an era before modern contraception — and “loose” morals — not getting married was birth-control, and “sensible” people understood that a man should not marry until he could support a family.

But that kind of cold, economical thinking gets ascribed to a man who tells his nephew to go to Hell for inviting him to Christmas dinner.

We’re just getting warmed up though for the visit from the warm-hearted souls collecting charity for the poor:

At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, said the gentleman, taking up a pen, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.

Are there no prisons? asked Scrooge.

Plenty of prisons, said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

And the Union workhouses? demanded Scrooge. Are they still in operation?

They are. Still, returned the gentleman, I wish I could say they were not.

The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then? said Scrooge.

Both very busy, sir.

Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course, said Scrooge. I’m very glad to hear it.

Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude, returned the gentleman, a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?

Nothing! Scrooge replied.

You wish to be anonymous?

I wish to be left alone, said Scrooge. Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.

Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.

If they would rather die, said Scrooge, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.

But you might know it, observed the gentleman.

It’s not my business, Scrooge returned. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!

Dickens seems to feel that the poor are innocent victims and that there’s nothing to be gained by punishing them for being poor — which is interesting in light of his own early life experience:

John Dickens’s tenuous prosperity as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded a few years of private education of the young Charles at William Giles’s School, in Chatham.

This period came to an abrupt end after John Dickens had spent beyond his means in entertaining and otherwise maintaining his social position, and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison. [...] Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Doritt.

Just before his father’s arrest, 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs. Roylance and helped support his family.

Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was “a reduced old lady, long known to our family”, and whom he eventually immortalized, “with a few alterations and embellishments”, as “Mrs. Pipchin”, in Dombey & Son. Later, lodgings were found for him in a “back-attic…at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in The Borough…he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.

The mostly unregulated, strenuous — and often cruel — work conditions of the factory employees (especially children) made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.

More than anything, he seems bitter that he went from studying to be a little gentleman to working as a common labourer — when it wasn’t his fault.

Anyway, the whole “carol” recoils at the conclusions of Malthus, while nonetheless centering on a family without the means to support its many children. Bob Cratchit apparently has no better options than to work for Scrooge — which seems odd, for a finance clerk working in London — and Scrooge does not pay him enough to feed and clothe his family. At his current salary, he cannot afford to keep all six children, including the crippled Tiny Tim, alive and well. Thus, Tiny Tim is destined to die — despite asking God to bless us, every one — until Scrooge has his change of heart and increases Cratchit’s pay.

I guess we’re not supposed to ask, What if the Cratchits had waited a year or two to get married?, as Scrooge must certainly have suggested. Then they would have had five children, not six, all well fed and well clothed, and we wouldn’t have had to wipe away the tears thinking about poor Tiny Tim.

But I guess it’s better to feel bad, gloriously bad, about the Poor, than to avoid the problem in the first place. Avoiding the problem is heartless and cruel.

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

The economic logic of autocracy

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita explains the economic logic of autocracy:

Just as we naturally consider successful those leaders who foster economic growth and prosperity for their citizens, we expect that leaders who produce famine, poverty and misery will earn a rapid retirement. But the data show that leaders who produce poverty and misery through the systematic corruption that is characteristic of autocracy keep their jobs much longer than do those who enrich their countries. Indeed, the eight countries consistently rated the most corrupt in the world — Congo, Iraq, Myanmar, Sudan, Indonesia, Syria, Pakistan and Burundi — are those in which political leadership has been most secure, measured by the longevity of its tenure. (Only countries that have experienced a complete breakdown in social order can rival an entrenched autocracy in generating extreme levels of corruption.)

With rare exception, only autocrats — leaders who are unresponsive to the popular will and who exercise power unchecked either by law or other institutions — hold on to power for a long time. Over the past century, the only leaders who have remained in office for forty years or more have been autocrats. By contrast, nearly half of all democratic leaders — leaders who hold power at the pleasure of the voters or an elected legislature — are out of office within about one year of coming to power. Such a short tenure is true of only about one-third of autocrats, a remarkable difference in survivability. Virtually no democrats — but one-quarter of autocrats — stay in office for more than eight years, even though few democratic leaders are subject to term limits.

The reverse is true for those who rule at the pleasure of a small, exclusive group. Exclusive leaders who rely on black-market corruption have a better chance of staying in power than those who engender high rates of growth, staying in office, on average, 25 percent longer. Indeed, at all periods during their tenure in office, these leaders do much better at retaining their jobs if they promote black marketeering, corruption and cronyism — distorting the economy — than if they promote economic policies that lead to growth and prosperity.

Why does this perverse outcome occur? As suggested above, leaders who would keep their jobs must produce what their supporters want; when those supporters are unrepresentative of the country, autocrats will not pursue policies that encourage the creation of healthy, educated, prosperous citizens.

Autocrats not only retain power by maintaining the loyalty of a relatively small group of supporters–which usually include those who control the military, the civil service, the communications and information infrastructure, as well as key economic levers — but they also have an interest in keeping that core group as small as possible. In a poor country, an autocrat faces personal political risks if he implements policies that dissipate resources away from the few upon whom he relies to those who have little say in ensuring his political survival. It is therefore politically irrational to implement transparent economic policies aimed at protecting and promoting property rights, rule of law, a broadly educated population, low taxes and free trade, if they enable challenges to the incumbent. It is not in an autocrat’s interest that people have ways to enrich themselves that he does not control.

This is why autocrats face their highest risk of being deposed in their first year in office; they have not yet identified their most loyal backers and have not yet fully secured their ability to transfer benefits to them. With time and experience, they get better at identifying those on whose support they really rely. They discover that excluding “the many” from sharing in the wealth of the country is the best way to reward a small clique of supporters.

Posted in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Jimmy Fallon and The Muppets Sing "12 Days of Christmas"

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

For his Christmas episode, Jimmy Fallon sang “12 Days of Christmas” with the Muppets (and the Roots):

The “original” version featured John Denver and appeared on the album A Christmas Together and on the 1979 TV special A Christmas Together with John Denver and The Muppets — which does not appear to be available on DVD. Sigh.

I miss Jim Henson’s voice, of course, but I must admit that I like Pepe the Prawn and Rizzo the Rat.

The song has a number of variations:

It has been suggested by a number of sources over the years that the pear tree is in fact supposed to be perdrix, French for partridge and pronounced per-dree, and was simply copied down incorrectly when the oral version of the game was transcribed. The original line would have been: “A partridge, une perdrix.”

Some misinterpretations have crept into the English-language version over the years. The fourth day’s gift is often stated as four calling birds but originally was four colly birds, using another word for a blackbird.

The fifth day’s gift of gold rings refers not to jewellery but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant. When these errors are corrected, the pattern of the first seven gifts all being birds is restored. There is a version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” that is still sung in Sussex in which the four colly birds are replaced by canaries.

A minor variant includes the singing of “golden” rather than “gold” rings, to avoid having to stretch “gold” into two syllables (“go-old”).

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Biology and Justice

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

An anonymous liberal biorealist — yes, it’s hard to imagine — takes a first cut at biology and justice — and Mencius Moldbug offers his advice:

Your project is ambitious, original, invigorating. I hope something comes of it. I would love to see your real identity disclosed one day in the Times Book Review. Keep it up.

That said, here is the basic problem I see: you are trying to reason your way outside the many logical and factual contradictions of 19th and 20th-century Anglo-American liberal democratic thought, more or less from Bentham to Rawls, using only your own philosophical muscles.

Well, you have no shortage of those! A strong man can wrestle an alligator and win. A marathoner can outrun a horse at distance.

Still, if I have to wrestle an alligator, I’d rather have my .45. If I have to race a horse, I’ll make sure I bring my BMW. That is — if my goal is victory, rather than entertainment.

The BMW or .45 in this case is the enormous corpus of pre-liberal and non-liberal thought, ten times as old and at least as massive. (Despite all the subsidized logorrhea of the 20th.) Denied this corpus, you are struggling with great energy to reconstruct it on your own. You would like to see farther, but without standing on any giants — whose existence, in fact, you deny.

So far as I can discern, your only reason for eschewing pre-liberal thought is that its believers were defeated politically and militarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is therefore no longer studied or at least officially sponsored.

This is an excuse, not a reason. Let’s take this .45 and see what it does to your alligator.

For instance: you start with the highly contentious (really almost Orwellian) Rawlsian definition of “justice” — ie, fairness, assuming a basically Christian concept of charity.

Now the word “justice,” of course, is Latin. Predating all this Jesus stuff. And the classical and Continental authorities (originally Ulpian, I believe) give us a two-word definition of “justice” that satisfies me perfectly: suum cuique, “to each his own.” If this two-word formula strikes you as too much the tautology, there’s an equivalent three-word chestnut — pacta sunt servanda — “promises are to be kept.”

Going down this path gives us a definition of “justice” which is not moral, but legal. Of course this is in keeping with the actual origin and meaning of the term, which is why I feel free to regard the Rawlsian redefinition as contentious at best, Orwellian at worst.

Note also that this formal definition strikes us as intuitively correct, as can be seen when we consider its negation. If promises are not kept, if each does not receive his own, we recognize this instantly as a case of injustice. Moreover, in what way can we find injustice, when each receives his own, when all promises are kept?

Here is the .45. Now, let’s shoot that alligator.

You and Rawls are wrestling with the charitable responsibilities of the State. Under your moral definition of “justice,” this is a knotty problem indeed.

The fundamental question is: does the State owe payment X to recipient Y? (The State may also deliver services, but substituting monetary payments is a Pareto optimization.)

The answer is: has the State promised payment X to recipient Y? If so, then X is Y’s own; promises must be kept; failure to pay would be an injustice. If not, no payment is owed; payment is an injustice, a robbery of the State.

Now, we can separate State payments into two categories. One is payments that are fundamentally debts, ie, promises of future payment exchanged for present value. For instance, I would put Social Security in this category, although the Supreme Court disagrees. Insurance claims, of course, are also financial debts. Is it just for the State to pay its debts? Of course it is just.

There is another class of promise and payment, however, which represents a condition of paternal dependency between State and citizen. As non-liberal authorities from Aristotle to George Fitzhugh will tell you, this relationship is fundamentally analogous to that between (a) parent and child, and (b) master and slave.

Thus, it is just for me to buy milk for my daughter, because I have accepted the obligation of caring for her as a dependent. In return, dependency always implies authority: because I feed my daughter, I get to tell her what to do.

Historically, you will find it another of your human universals that dependency without responsible authority leads directly to moral degradation, often literally dehumanizing. Of course we see this everywhere in the 20th-century welfare state, unique in history as a charitable system utterly unconcerned with the well-known degrading impact of dependency.

Thus, under the cold light of Ulpian, we see that all payments of the welfare state resolve into two categories: debt payments, and paternal dependency. Both of these are entirely just, because they are promises fulfilled.

The English word for an adult unrelated dependent is “slave.” The transfer of the bulk of the African-American population from the control and responsibility of private masters, to the State, is not a freeing of the slaves. It is a nationalizing of the slaves. (With a brief window of actual independence, not coincidentally the golden age of African-American civilization, between the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Great Society.)

Moreover, in “welfare reform,” we actually see a recognition of this fact. Even liberals realized: since we have nationalized the slaves, we have to make them work. Otherwise, their human condition becomes unmentionable. Fact. Somewhere, Carlyle laughs.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy, Science | No Comments »

We retreat to moral arguments

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The fact that we retreat to moral arguments — and often moral arguments only — to justify democracy, Robert Kaplans says, indicates that for many parts of the world the historical and social arguments supporting democracy are just not there:

Realism has come not from us but from, for example, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, an enlightened Hobbesian despot whose country has posted impressive annual economic growth rates — 10 percent recently — despite tribal struggles in the country’s north. In 1986 Museveni’s army captured the Ugandan capital of Kampala without looting a single shop; Museveni postponed elections and saw that they took place in a manner that ensured his victory.

“I happen to be one of those people who do not believe in multi-party democracy,” Museveni has written. “In fact, I am totally opposed to it as far as Africa today is concerned…. If one forms a multi-party system in Uganda, a party cannot win elections unless it finds a way of dividing the ninety-four percent of the electorate [that consists of peasants], and this is where the main problem comes up: tribalism, religion, or regionalism becomes the basis for intense partisanship.” In other words, in a society that has not reached the level of development Toqueville described, a multi-party system merely hardens and institutionalizes established ethnic and regional divisions.

From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan | No Comments »

An Offensive Weapon

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Britain staggers even further toward anarcho-tyranny as TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass is warned by police for brandishing a kitchen knife to deter intruders outside her window at night:

Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.

Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal.

In other news, a Sikh man in a London suburb was stabbed and killed trying to stop a mugger from running off with a woman’s purse:

Detective Inspector John Sandlin said: “This is a tragic death of a man who was killed for attempting to stop others committing crime, and our thoughts are with Sukhwinder’s family. However, I would also to reassure the wider community that tragic events such as these are very rare.

“What Mr Singh did was obviously very brave but I would not encourage that members of the public do that. What I would encourage the public to do is contact us immediately.”

Apparently contacting the police immediately stops crime:

The attack comes weeks after Home Office figures indicated that 375,000 people were mugged in England and Wales last year – the equivalent of one every 90 seconds.
[...]
The charity Witness Confident reported recently that nine out of 10 muggers escaped justice last year, and warned that the public were so disillusioned with the police and criminal justice system that only 153,750 of the crimes estimated to have taken place – about 40% – were reported.

East London remains a “hotspot” for knife crime, with weapon carrying a problem, particularly among gang members. Days before Christmas an 18-year-old was found lying in a Bow street after being attacked with a knife. Salum Kombo died after suffering multiple stab wounds in an attack just yards from his home.

The government recently called for tougher sentences for knife crime, while last week a court heard how a man carried out a casual knife-point mugging in the hope he would be deported back to his war-torn African homeland because he hated life in Britain.

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Sacrificing the permanent interests of the country to the immediate advantages of the proletariate

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Macaulay, the celebrated English historian, thanked the American author of A Biography of Jefferson for sending him a copy of his book — in a letter dated 1857 and included in Edmond Scherer’s Democracy and France (1884) — and included his thoughts on democracy sacrificing the permanent interests of the country to the immediate advantages of the proletariate:

I am certain that I never wrote a line, and that I never, in parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings,—a place where it is the fashion to court the populace,—uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be entrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.
[...]
But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as Old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and your Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artizans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.

Distress everywhere makes the labourer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators, who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million, while another cannot get a full meal. In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting; but it matters little, for here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select, of an educated class, of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order.

Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly but gently restrained The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful, wages rise, and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described. Through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them?

I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority, for with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.

The day will come when in the state of New York, a multitude of people, not one of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children crying for more bread?

I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

John Stossel’s Show on Atlas Shrugged

Monday, January 11th, 2010

I find it difficult to watch popular commentary shows, even in the rare case, like John Stossel’s show on Atlas Shrugged, where I don’t despise both sides of the debate:

If you’re going to make the case for Rand’s ideas, to a popular audience feeling betrayed by Wall Street, I think you need to clarify that the heroes of Atlas Shrugged aren’t “the rich” — the Paris Hiltons of the world — but the productive. The villains of the work are wealthy businessmen too — businessmen who use government to their own ends.

Posted in Business, Media, Policy | No Comments »

Credit Checks vs. Security Checks

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Contrast these three situations, Cringely suggests:

  1. you are sitting in a hotel bar in Mongolia and want to use your Visa card to buy a round of drinks for your friends, and;

  2. your Mom is at the check-out counter at a Sears store when the clerk asks her if she wants to apply for a Sears credit card and save 10 percent on her order, and

  3. a possible terrorist with a dubious travel record and suspected al-Qaeda connections is standing in line at a European airport waiting to board a flight to the U.S. that leaves in an hour.

What happens in each of these cases?

In Mongolia the bartender takes your card and authorizes it in seconds across a 12,000-mile round-trip. At the Sears store the transaction is not only authorized in less than a minute, but a new account is created and both your Mom’s identity and her creditworthiness are established and calculated on the spot, along with her discount. Meanwhile the airline, airport, local security, European police, Interpol, Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Customs Service, FBI, CIA, and NSA can’t between them figure out in an hour whether this guy standing in line in Holland should be allowed on the plane or not.

Cringely has previously noted how the U. S. Government has no idea how many illegal aliens there are in America, but the big credit reporting agencies know exactly how many:

The credit reporting agencies have a handle on total numbers and have a lot of information on specific individuals. So members of the gray economy are, for the most part, not invisible at all, just difficult to identify as individuals. But thanks to data mining down at the credit bureau, it is getting harder and harder to hide.

A lot of this sleuthing comes down to a surprising artifact, the Social Security number. One would think that surprising for an economic class of people best known for not having Social Security numbers. Ah, but they do have Social Security numbers, just not their own. You need a Social Security number to sign up for utility services, for example. No Social Security number, no electricity, gas, phone, or satellite TV. So what’s a poor alien to do? They go down to some local hangout and buy a Social Security number to give to the utility. This has to be a legitimate number or it won’t fly with utility computer systems, but does it have to be the customer’s own number? Good question.

Here’s where we have an interesting business ethics issue. Say you are the electric company and someone tries to set up service using a Social Security number that already exists in your database and is clearly borrowed, bought, or stolen. What do you do? Most utilities go ahead and set up the account, because to them what counts is whether the new customer will actually pay that bill and it turns out that people operating on such borrowed numbers are more reliable bill payers than the rest of us. They can’t afford to get in trouble with the electric company because that would draw attention to them. So there is a tacit agreement between the parties that a Social Security number must be provided because that’s the rule, but if it happens to be someone else’s Social Security number, well that’s okay.

The funny thing about this is the impact it has to have on the person who was originally assigned that Social Security number by the U. S. government. Rather than hurt their credit it actually helps because there is so much evidence that they are good at paying their bills!

Of course the credit bureau notices something and that’s why they are so able to estimate numbers in the first place. They know what Social Security numbers are being overused and can probably even trace the genealogy of that number as it makes its way across the country. Here’s an amazing fact: some individual Social Security numbers are in use right now by up to 3,000 people and it isn’t at all unusual for a borrowed number to be used by 200–1,000 people at the same time.

Cringely got a phone call about this from the U. S. Department of Homeland Security:

“The credit bureaus can really do that?” Mr. Homeland Security asked. “Do they really have that kind of data? Who can tell us more about this?”

I am not making this up.

That was in 2007 — six years after 9/11 and the people who had already spent billions of dollars making us safer by gathering information had no idea at all what kind of information was already being gathered.

I don’t know what happened after that but I can make a good guess. My guess is that the folks at Homeland Security if they actually bothered to follow-up on the contacts I gave them probably decided they needed to spend more billions and build a similar information system for their own use — yet another fiefdom — and that system will be operational sometime this decade.

Cringely’s “better” idea? Outsource the whole screening process to the credit agencies. What’s the worst that could happen?

Posted in Business, Policy, War | No Comments »

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