New Report: 85% of Daily Life Now Beyond Satire
May 6th, 2008
Views: 27
Posted in: environment, political, usa
Estimates as to the exact date when the Onionization of American life began vary. However, there is no doubt that the process is by now very far advanced indeed:
“Last week, this station was 3.51 dollars. Now it’s practically 3.60. So it’s gone up nine cents in one week,” Twyman said as he pumped five dollars’ worth of gas into his thirsty American car.“Someone’s making a lot of money and it’s really, really wrong,” added Twyman, who founded the Prayer at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven’t.
The half-dozen activists — Twyman, a former Miss Washington DC, the owner of a small construction company and two volunteers at a local soup kitchen — joined hands, bowed their heads and intoned a heartfelt prayer.
“Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices,” Twyman said to a chorus of “amens”.
Lord, please come down with a whole mighty passel o’ divine intervention because we, who already have our greasy mitts on the hog’s share of the earth’s resources and wealth, are desperate to keep hold of it for just a little while longer. Not exactly Matthew 19:21, is it?
Precaution & Democracy
May 1st, 2008
Views: 44
Posted in: environment, europe, pol. phil., political, responsibility & future
In writing this post, I definitely allowed the urge to make a quick’n'dirty jibe override the better angels of my nature. In fact, I did so to the extent that I ended up by placing myself in the same camp as yer standard critics of the precautionary principle (PP). Reason being that by suggesting (with tongue in cheek) the PP had implicitly been adopted by the US Administration as a policy tool after 11/9, I implicitly identified precautionary action as taking place whenever diffuse fears about worst-case scenarios coming true in the near future are used as justification for “preventive” action. The standard objection to the PP concerns the irrationality of the way it allegedly gives more evidential weight to fear than to science, and the way it’s constructed to appeal emotionally to the “common sense” argument that it’s better, mutatis mutandis, to be safe than sorry. This is undoubtedly the kind of “precaution” that is represented by Cheney’s “one percent doctrine”.
On this kind of understanding, the PP is therefore castigated as a blanket injunction against novelty that paralyses innovation (the Furedi gambit). It’s charged with reducing complex situations of choice to bivalent either-ors (no-risk or uncertain risk), as in this article, in which Professor Don Aitkin is quoted comparing the PP with Pascal’s Wager:
Pascal argued that it made good sense to believe in God: if God existed, you could gain an eternity of bliss, and if he didn’t exist, you were no worse off. Alas, Pascal didn’t allow for the possibility that God was in fact Allah, and you had opted for belief in the wrong religion.”
. Or alternatively, it is accused of not assisting in decision making, as the journalist Dan Gardner, who writes on risk issues, argues here: here:
Many people have looked at this situation and decided that some or all pesticides should be banned. The science isn’t settled. And the harm — if it exists — would be severe and irreversible. Surely the precautionary principle applies. But what would happen if some or all pesticides were banned? Crop yields would decline. Fruits and vegetables would become more expensive and people would eat less of them. And since there is considerable evidence that eating fruits and vegetables in sufficient quantities protects against cancer, it is very likely that more people would get cancer. So there are risks on both sides. What does the precautionary principle tell us about resolving a dilemma like that? Nothing.
All three of these objections are entirely wrong, and telling you why should hopefully gain me some absolution for having played fast and loose for the sake of a dig at Mr Cheney.
First, the PP has not to date clogged up the wheels of applied scientific research, despite being adopted by the EU as a central plank of public policy. It tends to be applied in piecemeal fashion in focusing on the regulation of new technologies, and is most often used as a way of refocusing research on questions which have not entered the frame of scientific risk assessments due perhaps to financial and time constraints, or other limiting factors. Its implementation to date reveals a central aspect of its original inspiration, that it would be a countervailing influence which could be called on to temper the pro-risk behaviour of hi-tech producers, and get them to think a little more about what they were trying to do.
Secondly, operating (as it tends to) as a pause in the process by which products come to market, it is designed to allow policy makers to think about the multiple alternative solutions which could be applied to a particular problem, and perhaps choose between alternative technical responses - or expand the terms of the choice to include socio-economic responses alongside new technologies in order to avoid plumping for “magic bullets”. In other words, the PP is not about an illusory choice between no-risk and uncertain risk. Rather, it seeks to balance the economic power of private producers to impose risks on society with the right of society to give informed consent to these risks, through a process of scrutiny which is not limited to the terms of the risk assessments to which the producers choose to submit their products.
Finally, the PP, being simply a demand to halt for a moment and think more widely about the potential effects of a product, does not itself provide a solution to a problem; rather, it invites us to consider whether the “problem” (how we make decisions under uncertainty”) has been adequately posed when it comes to product X. Traditional risk assessment methodologies tend to focus on formality, standardisation and repeatability, with the goal being to come up with universally-applicable algorithms into which data about severity of consequences and expectation values can be fed. However, if we lose the capacity to ask wider questions about just how applicable an off-the-shelf method is in a given case, then we have simply assumed that the problem we want to solve is amenable to the kinds of solutions some of us (i.e. large technology companies) tend to prefer.
The PP is not itself a decision procedure - it’s a caveat that is meant to prevent producers from dictating the pace at which new technologies are put on the market and adopted, thus allowing a broader weighing of benefits and harms, bringing in angles which would otherwise not be represented in the decision to allow a product to be sold.
Now the problems with the PP are many, it’s true. But these have to do with how far the three central motivations behind it that I’ve explored here are not expressed in practice. Given that the PP is, at bottom, a mechanism designed to stimulate the search on the part of government for informed consent to the use of new technologies, it demands ultimately a more democratic oversight over how socially-available knowledge is used in the production of technologies. As oversight, in the EU, is basically down to what the relevant regulatory bodies decide is worthy of notice, we’re therefore hardly significantly better off just because the PP guides EU regulatory policy. The PP is not, for example, available to EU citizens as a means of bringing legal challenges.
Which suggests the inevitable conclusion: a genuinely effective implementation of the PP would ultimately mean democratic control over the means of production and the social purposes for which they’re used.
Happy May Day!
The Successful Exploitation of New Ideas
April 28th, 2008
Views: 56
Posted in: environment, nanotechnology
Risk-taking and innovation. They’re right there at the centre of everything that makes our way of life so goddamn unbeatable. They foster the efficient allocation of resources, spur technological development that improves our everyday lives, and generally result in lots more toys for us to play with.
The toys and the distraction of playing with them are a particularly valuable benefit, especially given what happens when risks get “taken”. Taking large financial risks is generally a luxury that comes with economic power, as adding to the vast uncertainties with which human lives are hedged about is not something most people feel inclined to do. Further, if risks are “taken”, this generally means they don’t just get picked up, they get carried around for a while before before being dropped somewhere else, with the aid of a variety of implements. Take, for example, the complex investment instruments used by corporations. These spread risk so far around the network of global financial institutions that by the time the ruinous effects of bad guesses reverberate back through the wires to you, you’ve probably had time to offset them with another round of spread betting. Unfortunate for all those who happen to hold rather marginal mortgages, work in industry, or depend on next year’s food crop, but them’s the breaks.
Alternatively, you can simply cut the costs of innovation as far as possible by letting someone else pick up the tab somewhere downstream by living with your pollution, unexpected side-effects of undertested pharmaceuticals, or whatever. Even better, you could make sure that the main bearer of your risks is nature, in which case maybe you’ll get to hang on to the profit margins for a bit longer until the message comes back from the network telling you you’ve gone too far, and you suddenly find yourself needing to build the costs of terraforming another planet into your forecasts for next year.
But as a risk-taker, you of course recognise that with great power comes great responsibility. Which means that you feel obligated to soberly weigh up the benefits of your new product, or rather, what your marketing department imagines people might potentially believe are its benefits (based only on 30 seconds of sexualised imagery poking away at their insecurities), against all those complicated internal and external costs that are so hard to guess at.
All this needs to be done before you decide whether you should demiurgically depress the big red button marked “Innovate!”, and settle back to watching the Wheels of Creation start to turn. Who knows what new wonders will spring forth to exalt the dignity and boundless imagination of humanity?
And that’s how we just ended up with another nine brands of toothpaste on the market, only this time they contain largely untested free nanoparticles.
Parish Notices
April 23rd, 2008
Views: 71
Posted in: environment
The quote of the year so far:
It does take resolve to prevail in an epic clash of civilizations, granted, but it also takes resolve to nail your dick to a tree. Telling yourself that you’re nailing it to the Tree of Liberty with the Hammer of Freedom is a logical way to proceed, but that may not be enough, in itself, to protect you from the equally logical consequences.
After last week’s IAAST report, which argued that GM food cannot help solve global food shortages by raising crop yields (and that the problem isn’t a lack of food anyway, but the inefficiencies of liberalised global trade), a study conducted at the University of Kansas suggests that GM soya actually produces lower yields than non-GM. Monsanto reacted immediately by pointing out that actually-existing GM isn’t true GM, and that the hyper-productive version is - once again - just a little further ahead along the highway of inevitable progress - presumably having lunch in a motorway service station with nuclear fusion, molecular assemblers and “stable growth”.
Critics doubt whether the company will achieve this, saying that it requires more complex modification. And Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington – and who was one of the first to predict the current food crisis – said that the physiology of plants was now reaching the limits of the productivity that could be achieved.
Free Exchange
April 16th, 2008
Views: 84
Posted in: environment, political
It seems that Peter Foster, writing for the Canadian version of the WSJ, thinks that “sustainability” is on the way out. It appears that sometimes a “sustainable” initiative can lead to “unsustainable” results, as in the case of biofuels. This will naturally have epoch-ending results for what Foster sees as a kind of ideological colossus, about to be brought inevitably crashing down by its own internal contradictions.
It was inevitable, however, that, just as the old socialism imploded because it simply didn’t work (except for its rulers and their hangers on) so the new socialism would also grind to a halt.
Always amazing how freemarketarians are keen to play around with the language of vulgar Marxism when the slightest opportunity presents itself, the kick from taking a ride on the back of a historical Absolute obviously too juicy to resist. But what’s interesting here is how Foster’s use of traditional anti-capitalist tropes goes further than this, to the point where he effectively lambasts all manner of institutions for greenwashing.
Criticizing the more or less random application of the word “sustainable” to anything which isn’t intended to automatically self-destruct the day after tomorrow means that Foster is on the same page as, for example, Wolfgang Sachs. Whether “sustainability” itself as a goal is incoherent (in the terms of the Brundtland Commission’s definition - which Foster fails to fully quote - ensuring that present needs are met without preventing the fulfilment of future needs, a statement which doesn’t appear to involve an obvious performative contradiction) is not something we’ll discover from reading Foster, who only manages to revert to that other well-established status-quo defender’s tic, trying to connect a concept one doesn’t agree with to some kind of mental disorder.
Meanwhile, a report is released which notes that food production is currently sufficient to feed the population of the world (so no need for yield-raising technical fixes, then - no wonder the US, Canada and Australia, champions of GM, are annoyed at its publication), but that trade liberalisation is responsible for making sure that ruinous inequalities of distribution persist.
Opening national markets to international competition can offer economic benefits but can lead to long term negative effects on poverty alleviation, food security and the environment without basic national institutions and infrastructure being place.
Hmmm, shades of Karl Polanyi.
Foster offers as a reason for the attractiveness of sustainability-language the “counterintuitiveness” of free-market economics. This it has in common with post-Newtonian natural science, of course. However, the difference is that some predictions made by post-Newtonian natural science have been, on occasion, verified.
Lim Li Chung, of Third World Network in Malaysia, said: “It clearly shows that small-scale farmers and the environment lose under trade liberalisation. Developing countries must exercise their right to stop the flood of cheap subsidised products from the north.”
Believing in the World
April 15th, 2008
Views: 61
Posted in: environment
To the National Museum of Wales’ Artes Mundi show. This year’s iteration received a jaded near-total dismissal from Adrian Searle earlier this month. OK, some of the pieces are undoubtedly the kind of art that is instantly neutralised by the nu-language/unlanguage of its accompanying catalogue entry. Sure, occasionally you come across something entirely glib - name names? OK: Mircea Cantor’s film of the deer and wolf, and his glass corncob. But there’s also Dalziel and Scullion’s works Source and More than Us. The former, filmed on the island of Mull, tracks the immersion of a young boy in landscapes and waterscapes from the tiny to the vast. The patterns created by lichens on rocks, the distribution of young trees across a hillside, the flows of rock strata through a cliff are accompanied by their own soundworlds, which make possible skilful and rhythmic shifts between different scales on the one hand, and different compositions of fore- and backgrounds on the other.
Some of D& S’s other work tends to focus on the impersonality of nature, contrasting the rhythms of the human world with geological time and so on. But Source seems to want to get beyond the opposition between feeble humanity on the one hand and the cosmos sub specie aeternitatis on the other, by employing the figure of the boy as a reference point within nature without, as Searle tritely insists, reducing the natural world that surrounds him to a monocentric plane of tragic human concerns (with a bit of the old in-out, in-out added for good measure).
Instead, the piece reminded me of Winnicott, or Bachelard’s childhood-evoking idea of intimate immensity, giving us a vulnerable human figure who was yet entirely at home within the sensory worlds afforded him by his environment. It seemed very brave as a consequence, and an affirmation of faith in the non-human.
Nuke Enthusiasm?
April 15th, 2008
Views: 59
Posted in: environment, nuclear power, political, uk
Looks like there may be some interest in Brown’s bold nuclear future after all.
Britain’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said on Monday it had received proposals from over 30 parties interested in land surrounding 18 nuclear sites — all potential locations for new power stations.
There’s a big conditional rising up within this story, of course. Nuclear power is proof that not all new technologies ride in on a big wave of uncertainty before, after a while, becoming part of the accepted backdrop, delivering a modest set of benefits and occasionally visiting marginal harms. Rather, as time goes on the benefits become less and less certain, against a background of unpredictable decommissioning costs, undealt-with high-level waste, and unsafe mining operations overseas.
So, energy companies making sure they have the option to build in no way indicates that, by the early 2020s, we’ll be looking at a brand new herd of shiny white elephants. Even a determined assault on democracy through the ‘reform’ of the planning laws might not magic a comfortable investment environment out of nowhere.
National Grid: More Damning Evidence
April 14th, 2008
Views: 109
Posted in: environment, gas
When we last looked at the situation surrounding the South Wales Gas Pipeline, it appeared that not only had National Grid’s wayward approach to public consultation and risk assessment succeeded in scuppering their plans to build a major piece of industrial infrastructure, but their equally wobbly implementation of international engineering standards was about to be heavily scrutinised by a committee of MEPs in Brussels.
Via correspondence, I’m informed of some of the choicer titbits amongst the evidence given to the MEPs to peruse. When I first wrote on this topic back in August 2006, I noted that the chosen specifications for the pipeline brought into play questions of scientific uncertainty as well as risk - where said uncertainty implies that possible outcomes of a particular action are reasonably well-understood, but that specific probabilities are not available. The decision by National Grid to have a larger- than-normal-bore pipeline bearing gas at pressures of 94bar meant that they were employing a technology which, whilst certainly not being subject to the exotic uncertainties of novelties like nanotechnology or synthetic biology, still implied some factors which could not be included into standard risk assessments as they could not strictly be quantified, due to a lack of empirical evidence. Often in the face of these kinds of uncertainties, invalid extrapolations are made from another body of available evidence. From the evidence presented to the MEPs, it seems that taking this shortcut is exactly what National Grid has done.
As part of demonstrating that the specifications of the pipeline were adequate from a safety point of view, NG had to come up with an adequate testing regime, which they based on the exclusive use of hydrostatic testing (in which a vessel is filled with a liquid and then examined for deformations). However, in doing so, they justified their conclusion with reference to tests done on smaller-bore pipelines made of different steels (as they had no experience themselves of pipelines with a diameter comparable to that of the South Wales pipe). Not only is the South Wales pipeline larger than usual, it is constructed from steel which (the evidence also alleges) is thinner than it should be. As a result, the use of high-pressure hydrostatic testing could have resulted in serious deformations - and all this as a consequence of the safety testing regime itself, before the pipe even became operational (which of course it still is not, as the construction of the LNG terminals at Milford Haven is still running behind schedule).
The problems extend to some known risks as well, however - which NG appears to have failed to take fully into account in its headlong haste to get the pipeline finished before opposition could really get organised. For example, at some points along its length, the pipe has been laid close to high tension overhead electrical lines, for several miles. It was discovered in 1998 that laying steel pipelines close to overhead power lines can result in AC-current-induced corrosion - at a pipeline laid in the North of England in this manner, investigations showed that the thickness of the steel had been reduced by 40% in places, due to the rapid onset of corrosion.
The main thrust of the evidence is that the claims by NG that its contractors have constructed the pipeline in accordance with the relevant international engineering standard for gas pipelines, IGE/TD1, are very much to be doubted. Over a hundred photographs have been produced to show that this standard has been breached multiple times during the hasty laying of the pipeline, and that the charges laid in this report [PDF, 104Kb] concerning the mishandling of pipes during construction, the laying of pipes in unsuitable ground, and (given the choice of route) the possibly unsafe use of tunnels, are demonstrably true.
UPDATE: Hello once again to the guys & gals visiting from National Grid over in Coventry, and their friends from NG USA’s subsidiary, Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., over in Frankline, Mass.
Perverting the Course of Justice with Blair & Bandar
April 10th, 2008
Views: 73
Excellent news regarding the Serious Fraud Office’s decision to stop asking questions about BAE’s dealings with Saudi Arabia. The High Court has ruled that the decision was unlawful:
In an often scathing judgement, Lord Justice Moses and Justice Sullivan rejected the SFO’s argument that it was powerless to resist the Saudi threats. “So bleak a picture of the impotence of the law invites at least dismay, if not outrage,” they said. “Had such a threat been made by one who was subject to the criminal law of this country, he would risk being charged with an attempt to pervert the course of justice.”
Wonderful result for CAAT. Looked at more broadly, this marks an excellent precedent: in future, it’s going to be harder for the Government to overturn due process by simply asserting that we all must recognise that we now live in an age of unprecedented existential threats, posed by shadowy all-powerful conspiracies.
UPDATE: Or maybe not. Lord Avebury and Susan Hawley of Corner House on how the Government has already provided itself with some legislative insurance:
Just two weeks before the judgment was delivered, the government mounted an attempt to preserve its powers. In a breathtakingly cynical move, it introduced draft legislation creating a power for the attorney general to halt prosecutions on national security. The bill concentrates power for making such decisions in the hands of the executive and makes a judicial review of a decision virtually impossible.Under the proposed law, the attorney general will not have to provide information to parliament that impacts on national security or international relations. If anyone questions that decision, the attorney general will merely have to get a minister to provide a certificate stating it is to be considered “conclusive evidence of act”.
One of Gordon Brown’s first acts on taking over from Blair was to launch a major series of consultations on constitutional renewal. It was seen as an attempt to distance himself from what were regarded as the worst excesses of Blair’s rule. By letting these new powers for the attorney slip into the draft bill, Gordon Brown has shown himself to be no different to his predecessor.
Dick Cheney and the Precautionary Principle
April 10th, 2008
Views: 134
Posted in: ethics, pol. phil., political, responsibility & future, usa
The USA has officially been highly resistant to the use of the precautionary principle, unlike the European Union, in regulating technologies like GM. The differences in approach have had serious consequences – they led to the WTO identifying precaution with protectionism, for example, and mean that the US gets to dump largely untested technologies on world markets with impunity.
Explanations for the difference generally descend to the level of ropey cultural psychoanalysis quite rapidly: frontier culture of innovation versus sclerotic mire of Old Europe, etc. etc. But as Jeremy Waldron points out, the precautionary principle has actually been at the heart of American politics since Dick Cheney first became president back in 2000. Cheney’s ‘One Percent Doctrine’ (the subject of Ron Suskind’s book of the same name) – the idea that, if a sufficiently serious threat to US security could be judged a real possibility, no matter how remote, then it deserved the full attention of the security and military apparatus – represents the most serious attempt so far to make the precautionary principle into a policy tool.
Not Exactly Lying, But…
April 4th, 2008
Views: 95
Posted in: environment
An interesting point made sometimes in the literature on the ethics of risk is how the use of quantitative measures in risk assessment is a very useful way of clamping down on a troublesome policy debate by glossing over genuine uncertainties in favour of an entirely spurious level of certainty.
A nice example of this appeared in Wednesday’s Commons debate on the proposed third runway at Heathrow, which quickly became dominated by arguments over the extent to which the Liberal Democrats, who drafted the Early Day Motion that formed the centrepiece of the debate, had managed to substantially bugger up writing the thing, to the point where no-one felt able to vote for it.
Still, the debacle was notable for showcasing the efforts of Justine Greening MP to obtain documentary evidence of just how BAA helped the Government remove problematic data from the documents prepared for the public consultation, leaving only information favourable to the case for expansion. But the example I referred to above came about thanks to Ruth Kelly’s habitual ripe disingenousness
I may be out by a pound or two, but I think that the price that we are putting on carbon is about £25 per tonne of CO2, increasing by 2 per cent. in real terms year on year. As Nicholas Stern pointed out, there is a range of carbon prices that could be used, but when he was asked on the “Today” programme whether we could view our current policy on aviation expansion and road building as compatible with meeting our CO2 targets, he said, “I believe we can”. Not only that, the figures that we have put forward are robust to different scenarios for the shadow price of carbon.
Nanotechnology: Who Asked You?
April 2nd, 2008
Views: 130
Posted in: environment, nanotechnology, political, uk, usa
Returning to one of our recurrent themes here at SW, via a new Friends of the Earth report [PDF, 2.95MB]on the use of unregulated nanoscale particles in foods. Nanotechnology is built on the promise that compounds of less than around 300-1000nm (depending on who you talk to) in length often gain enhanced versions of the properties of their bulk counterparts, or even entirely new properties. However, this promise of novelty is also the source of a great deal of concern. For experience has shown that the ensemble of a particular compound’s properties is by no means predictable, and that the full range of properties (including ones which are vitally important for risk assessment, such as environmental and physiological persistence) are by no means easy to characterise using current modes of in vivo, in vitro and computer-modelled testing.
The thing about novelty, however, is that it is also a powerful economic asset. Having a novum on which to hang your product (anything from increased rates of drug uptake to molecular self-assembly) means that, should you be a company engaged in an appropriate form of research, you can gain a comparative advantage over your competitors via imaginative marketing and the simple expedient of marketising your magic pixie dust in as diverse an array of forms as possible.
This is even more the case when the regulatory environment in which your new products are deposited to sink or swim is one where the obstacles to ‘innovation’ are at a minimum. Such is the case with nanotech: despite the widespread recognition among scientists (exemplified by the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineers’ 2004 report [PDF, 3.5MB]) that the potential of novel nano-properties mandates a precautionary approach and treating them as novel substances, rather than as ‘substantially equivalent’ modifications of familiar bulk products, there is still no specific regulation of nano-materials anywhere in the world, or at the international level. So, as long as you’re a company big enough to bear the risks of operating in a regulation-free environment (far from regulation stifling risk-taking here, a lack of regulation makes risk-taking a luxury only the big boys can indulge in), there’s a lot of money to be made. This is particular so in the US, where regulation of toxic substances is hampered by the assumption that an absence of evidence of harm is evidence of absence of harm.
Friends of the Earth should be praised for having produced an inventory of internationally-traded products (other existing inventories, such as that produced by the Woodrow Wilson Institute, largely restrict themselves to national territories) which claim to use nanoscale compounds of one sort or another – typically, variants of nano-titanium dioxide, silver, zinc and zinc oxide, and silicon dioxide, all of which have been associated, within the small but growing body of scientific literature on nanoparticle toxicity, with various pathological effects demonstrated in vitro and in vivo tests.
Governments and industry have colluded, once again, in producing an inequitable distribution of risks for which no consent has been sought (especially in the US, land of choice, where commercial confidentiality rules have been used to prevent consumers from being able to choose not to buy nano-products). But there is also the question of what wider social dynamics the current ways in which nanotechnology is being pursued will support and promote. The other merit of the FOE report is that it draws our attention to several of these – from the possibility that the use of nano-compound coatings in packaging to extend shelf life will result in more long-range shipping of foodstuffs, through the further loss of everyday expertise in dealing with food, to the devastation of small businesses and community farms. What nanotech offers us is another reason to demand more participation in decision making about how technology is developed and used, because without the possibility of exerting influence over the direction of the flood of commodities, the social (and extra-social) relationships that sustain us will be changed in irreversible ways to which we will not have consented.
Peaks and Preferences
April 1st, 2008
Views: 161
Posted in: ethics, philosophische, time
Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, this is an interesting example of how economists typically misunderstand preferences. Their misunderstanding derives from the fundamentally mistaken idea that we should view belief and action as grounded on subjective states and expected utility. Demand, the post concludes, often includes an irrational component, based on our capacity to misremember unpleasant episodes of an experience, so long as the end of the experience was not as bad as its worst passages (the ‘peak-end’ theory).
The key question this raises is naturally whether the meaning for an individual of such an episode (e.g. a holiday) and its import for future action can be successfully reduced to something like a series of subjective states the holiday brought about and how the individual rates them on a scale of positive and negative magnitudes of ‘utility’. The answer to this question is that this is not possible. Consider the following example from John O’Neill:
A. A newly married couple, couple A, go on a two week honeymoon. The holiday begins disastrously: they each discover much in the other which they had not noticed before, and they dislike what they find. The first two days are spent in an almighty row. However, while they argue continuously over the next seven days, they begin to resolve their differences and come to a deeper appreciation of each other. Over the last five days of the holiday they are much happier and both feel that they have realised a relationship that is better than that which they had before their argument. The holiday ends happily. Sadly, on their return journey, the plane that carries them explodes and they die.
Obviously, this holiday could have gone better, or at least ended better. But now compare with this alternative scenario:
B. A newly married couple, couple B, go on honeymoon. The first twelve days proceed wonderfully. On the thirteenth day their relationship deteriorates badly as each begins to notice and dislike in the other a character trait which they had not noticed before, at the same time realising that the other had a quite mistaken view of themselves. On the last day of the holiday they have a terrible row, and sit on opposite ends of the plane on the return journey. They both die in an explosion on the plane.
Not a good denouement either, but let’s ignore the final bit of each story for a moment. Now, based on a quantitative estimate of subjective utility (and ignoring for a moment the peak-end theory Chris employs), the second scenario obviously goes much better, just because there are thirteen days of general wonderfulness, as opposed to the five days of happiness (relative, subjectively speaking, to the nine days of arguing) for the first couple. So the overall sum of positive utility is obviously greater for couple B. Yet the first scenario is obviously more satisfying – even given how it ultimately ends. Now, is this because of the peak-end theory? Obviously the penultimate stage of A is better than the worst part of the holiday, just as the penultimate stage of B is a lot worse than its best bits. But what makes the experience of the holiday in A better is the experience of development, closeness and mutual understanding that it contains, one which derives from a fundamental conflict and its ultimate successful working-through. This has nothing to do with the hedonic values of each part of the holiday, but rather the meaning of the whole as a narrative, which derives in part from its relationship to the couple’s past and how it promises new perspectives on their future together. Importantly, this narrative is not just subjective, but intersubjective – a product of a mutual process of compromise, careful judgement, and renewed emotional intimacy and commitment. Compared to this, the unpleasantness of having to fly from Stansted or whatever is entirely insignificant – not in the sense that it is outweighed by the expected utility benefits, but perhaps because to give up the holiday because of these sorts of considerations would be to lose an important dimension (the commemoration, the ritual) of what makes the relationship meaningful.
Therefore, there is nothing at all irrational about this couple wanting to take a holiday together each year. Whether as an annual celebration of this first holiday or as a kind of ritual whereby they take themselves out of the everyday in order to rediscover each other anew within a different environment, the value of holidaying has nothing do with the expected subjective payoffs, and everything to do with the objective (=intersubjective) meaning of the experience of holidaying within their relationship.
As well as its misuses of mathematics, economics still has to recover from its long history of overindulging in the hedonic calculus.
Uptime
March 27th, 2008
Views: 85
Posted in: any other business?
So, one trip to the seaside and several hours of CPanel-mediated fannying about later, we now have a shiny new Wordpress 2.3.3 installation, and single posts are once again displaying as they should.
Just started a new job, so probably won’t be posting for a couple of days.
Downtime
March 15th, 2008
Views: 61
Posted in: any other business?
OK, the clan and I are away to the seaside for a few days. Back at Easter (when hopefully I’ll figure out why single posts are not displaying properly).
Ciao….
Supply versus Demand
March 13th, 2008
Views: 68
Posted in: environment, gas, political, uk
The Times last Sunday demonstrated another reason why the kind of confidence with which government representatives typically present the conclusions of their latest piece of futurology should be replaced with thoroughgoing scepticism.
When the South Wales gas pipeline was being touted as an absolute necessity for keeping sweet li’l old ladies right across the UK from freezing to death, one of the key arguments supporting this view was a long-term forecast (provided by National Grid, the Government’s key source of information on gas markets and also of course one of the main beneficiaries of any rise in gas demand) of rising gas demand over the next decade and a half. The demand forecasting methodology employed by National Grid is, like the methodology used by the Government experts who forecasted a continuing growth in air traffic, based on the assumption that, all things being equal, future trends can be unproblematically extrapolated from previous data. However, the danger of such forecasts is the ‘all things being equal’ bit, given that unforeseen events beyond the controlled ‘environment’ one is modelling have a habit of intruding on the simplifications built into the forecast model.
Just as political action over climate change, and the rising cost of fuel, might be about to severely dent the reliability of the air traffic forecasts, changes in worldwide gas prices are about to wreck National Grid’s assurances about the upward trends in UK gas demand. What is not going to remain equal, it seems, is supply. Some analysts saw the Grid’s analysis as seriously flawed, viewing the medium term picture in relation to political and other developments and judging that it was likely that the UK would suffer from overcapacity, rather than from a need for massive new infrastructure to meet demand. It seems that these analysts are about to be proved right. Global gas demand is increasing to the point where higher prices elsewhere are beginning to divert LNG from the UK market.
“We saw UK gas prices come under pressure a bit last year,” said Frank Harris, head of LNG at Wood Mackenzie, the energy consultancy. “There was a view that as the terminals in Wales come on stream and the capacity at Grain increases that prices would crash. That was based on the simple economics of supply and demand. But the way the global fundamentals are moving mean that nothing like the volumes of LNG that could potentially flow through the UK are actually going to arrive.”
In trying to justify the continuing building of more LNG infrastructure regardless of the many arguments that have been marshalled against it, the Grid and the Government will now have to demonstrate how one can maintain that demand is going to increase linearly, mutatis mutandis, alongside the huge rise in gas prices that would be necessary in order to get hold of the gas in the first place. In such an environment, it may begin to look more and more like the confident forecast of increased demand is based on a simplification and selection of variables that serves the interests of the Government’s chief advisor on gas markets at the expense of everyone else’s.
The Heathrow Consultation and Democracy
March 6th, 2008
Views: 132
Posted in: aviation, environment, pol. phil., political, uk
My last post addressed what I see as one of the key problems that resonates throughout contemporary societies - namely, how power seeks to govern and regulate our collective relationship with an uncertain future.
Staying with this theme, the Heathrow Consultation ended last week. The Government had invited responses from the public before the end of February on the expected environmental effects of a third runway at Heathrow. As campaigners against this expansion of capacity at the airport have pointed out, the Government had therefore invited the public to a highly constrained town hall meeting, where questions about whether or not there should be a third runway at all would not be admitted, as the FAQs on the DFT’s website made clear, in circular language that avoided giving any reason for this decision:
The Air Transport White Paper stated the Government’s support for the further development of Heathrow, including a third runway and additional terminal capacity subject to stringent local environmental limits being met. It also said that scope for making greater use of the two existing runways should be explored, subject to the same environmental limits. The consultation presents the outcome of our assessment of these options and invites views.
The justification for the Government’s restriction of the consultation to questions concerning how the impact of a third runway might best be mitigated, compensated for, and so on, lies deep in the transport policy background, you’ll be thrilled to hear. This includes the Eddington Report (2006) and and the Air Transport White Paper of 2003. What is actually interesting about this justification, in the present context, is how it represents an attempt to negotiate between what we know of the present and the uncertain future, and how this undermines the possibility of democratic politics. The tools that are used to produce it represent a way of mediating between the known and the unknown that raises many vital political questions, which arguably form the background to the various campaigns for a genuine consultation on Heathrow.
Invest Yourself
February 29th, 2008
Views: 351
Posted in: pol. phil., political, uk
It’s very tempting to get sucked into the trap of interpreting the NuLabour government as knee-jerk managerialists, constitutionally prone to respond to problems with ill-thought-out authoritarian ‘headline initiatives’ that soon die off as their absurdity becomes apparent, and from there it’s equally easy to find that the only response left open is to splutter about the irrationality of it all.
It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that there remains a definite logic behind all this, and one which makes it possible to separate out the true cases of reactarian stupidity (e.g. Blair’s infamous idea of marching people off to ATMs to pay on-the-spot fines) from the consistent approach to policy that underlies other proposals, and which itself rests on entirely determinate presuppositions.
Take the latest proposals to tie drug users’ benefit entitlements to their willingness to enrol on drug treatment programmes. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith:
“If somebody is on work-related benefits or incapacity benefit and what is stopping them from getting back into work is their drug problem, what we are saying is that we will expect people as a minimum to come and have an appointment - a meeting - with a specialist drug treatment adviser,” she told Radio 4’s Today programme.
Or alternatively - and even more egregiously - Caroline Flint:
Flint, who switched from employment minister in the mini-reshuffle after Peter Hain stepped down, said: “It would be a big change of culture from the time when the council handed someone the keys and forgot about them for 30 years. The question that we should ask of new tenants is what commitment they will make to improve their skills, find work, and take the support that is available.”
One of the letters to the Guardian today which express bemusement and anger at the proposals on drug users expresses concisely the problem with the Government’s way of understanding individual agency that requires such an approach to policy.
I was stunned by the crass simplicity of the government’s proposal to withdraw benefits from drug users who drop out of treatment.
The ’simplicity’ of the proposals is indeed the issue. But this doesn’t derive from irrationality or incompetence. Perhaps we’ve become over-used to the idea that the Government is composed of pragmatists who are in favour of ‘what works’ above all to recognise what is at work here. The ’simplicity’ of these proposals - which was even more clearly characteristic of Flint’s - derives however from a set of ideological commitments that have gradually coalesced over the last eleven years, and which place NuLabour entirely at odds with all the principles that formed its historical commitments up until the mid-to-late 1980s. It’s not a Kinnock-style sell-out in favour of vanilla promises to ditch the ideals and just get things running, it’s a wholesale (and radical) ideological conversion.
These commitments have to do with a particular model of how people make decisions and understand their interests, one based very firmly on a body of presuppositions about what constitutes rational - and therefore morally praiseworthy - thought and action. These assumptions reverberate throughout NuLabour policy on education, health, employment and housing. Essentially, they picture people as (to use the Foucauldian phrase employed by the sociologists Colin Gordon and Nikolas Rose, among others) ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. Going back to the 80s, the introduction of cheap personal credit turned anyone who was able to get hold of it into a capitalist of sorts. It did this by encouraging them to view the main focus of their economic lives as how to get access to financial tools for extracting value from the future in order to extend their ability to change their present conditions of life.
Since that time, the assumptions behind public policy have gradually drifted away from the traditional ‘rational actor model’ of game theory and public choice theory, to see the individual, in all his or her capacities, as a mechanism for investing energy in securing present and future opportunities for increased self-transformation (with the goal simply being maximum ‘flexibility’, the power to take advantage of whatever chances for maximising one’s utility happen to come along in a precarious world). In other words, policy is no longer about the social satisfaction of needs (as under Welfare State consensus models of the relation between State and society), but concerns the means by which people can be disciplined into managing themselves as respositories of human capital. This resource must be invested wisely in order to maximise the possibilty of gain, as with financial capital, and the investment routes used by the individual should be subjected to strict audit.
The policies that keep being proposed by the Government are not therefore entirely irrational, as they manifest a high degree of consistency with the assumptions on which they rest. The question is how far this now deeply-entrenched ideology is itself entirely at odds with reality, and whether we are prepared to ask what wider interests it serves. Their inability to truly ask these questions is the reason why NuLabour’s critics on the right cannot advance beyond reactarian bleating about jerking knees on the one hand and 19th century-vintage jibes about ‘Statism’ on the other. Rather, the issue is an understanding of morality and agency which leads to a massive and almost total extension of the logic of capitalism into more and more areas of what liberals used to call private life.
Killed Bill
February 28th, 2008
Views: 101
Another sad loss.
With brilliant mind and Brobdingnagian vocabulary, his spine stiff and jaw locked, William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history to reinvigorate America’s right.
And a double-edged epitaph. Buckley stood ‘athwart’, always ‘athwart’. No common man can stand ‘athwart’, just as only colossusses can ‘bestride’ things. Although ‘athwart’ is also the stance that would be taken by a jock pissing on a debagged nerd, of course. In addition, Buckley apparently suffered from an unexplained form of partial paralysis (conservatism, presumably).
But overall, it’s a piece that reminds you why, instead of being about remembering, political obituaries are more often forms of forgetting, tools for smoothing out within allowable public discourse the carnage that the venerated corpse inflicted during his or her lifetime. Sure, maybe the old bastard said some unfortunate things, but, boy, could he salsa!
The form of presentation you adopt, can, if it becomes part of your media ‘brand’, ultimately absolve you of anything. All you have to do is deposit a few memorable traits in the media’s memory, and the judgement of history is guaranteed. Buckley gets forgiven his racism and segregationism on account of his book-larning and his ‘civility’. Thatcher was forgiven her violence against the working class because of her ‘conviction’.
And the great thing about this understanding of the virtues of great men and women is that it helps people deal with the carnage they’re experiencing in the here and now, to the point where, as Mark Steel said of Boris Johnson, so long as it’s done with a mop-top and buffoonish grin, you won’t even mind if you’re being corralled into a football stadium to be shot en masse.
(Via Lenin)
What is Solidarity (2)?
February 25th, 2008
Views: 127
Posted in: hegel, philosophische, pol. phil., responsibility & future, time
As well as being a follow-up to this post, the following is a response to the latest evocations of the tedious and stupid myth [restricted access, university logon probably required] that the only thing separating ‘the greens’ from the Nazis is that the latter were nicely turned out.
