Compromise and Conceit

Let’s Play Greek Oracles!!

January 23, 2015
This Sunday Greece is holding a general election in a very tense and fraught environment. It looks likely that the “radical” left wing group Syriza will win, with the threat that they will default on Greece’s debts and possibly lead it out of the Euro, back to the Drachma. Meanwhile Golden Dawn remain a real menace to migrants on the streets of Greece, and there are rumours that they have connections with what is sometimes called the “Deep State,” internal security and police who hold a secret longing for a return to the days of dictatorship and a deep hatred of the left. The London Review of Books published a good and very disturbing account of the behaviour of Golden Dawn and its links to this alleged Deep State, written by a journalist who managed to get some way into the organization. Meanwhile the European Central Bank has announced a new run of quantitative easing, perhaps intended to send a message to the Greek electorate that they might expect some support in their austerity plans, but the austerity program the Greek electorate is facing is shockingly tight and extremely disruptive.

Given this environment, and being safely ensconced far away from the trouble, I have thought of a few possible outcomes of the election, and have a few questions about what might happen. Even though I think asking a question and answering it yourself is the first mark of a dickhead, here are some of my questions with my thoughts on the possible answers.
- Will Syriza win? The polls seem to give them an edge but maybe the possibility of a real default will lead Greeks to return to the status quo
- How will Golden Dawn react? It seems to me that there is a very real possibility they will try and instigate some kind of communal violence, and the state doesn’t seem interested in confronting Golden Dawn
- Will the Deep State act to preserve the interests of the elite? Assuming this Deep State is even a thing, will it react to a communist victory by moving to interfere in the functionings of democracy? If it is true that a large minority of powerful people still hanker after the era of the Generals, will they move to act on this?
- Will Syriza back down on default and exit? Some are suggesting Syriza have been mellowing their rhetoric on default and exit as the election looms, but this could just be a campaigning tactic. Even if they really are starting to feel the heat, backing down on key parts of their platform will probably break them apart and bring about more instability. It seems to me they’re going to be hard-pressed not to follow through on core policies
- What will the effect of this be on other countries, especially the UK? The UK is slated for a referendum on EU membership if the Torie win in 2017. If Greece exits and it is not a catastrophe for Greece or the EU, this will potentially influence that referendum, since the pro-exit people will be able to point to Greece as an example. Likewise if exit is disastrous for Greece. If Greece starts a chain of exits by highly-indebted or highly anti-EU countries it could spell tough times for the EU. Will the much-maligned Greek left be the trigger for a conservative rebellion in the UK?
I don’t have an opinion on what Greeks or Syriza should do, being too far away and too ignorant to have strong views, and although I think much of the narrative on Greece and its economic problems is shallow and ideologically driven, and I’m generally not in favour of the Euro, I can’t say what I think is right or wrong about the whole sorry mess. If Syriza win I hope the transition to radical left leadership happens without neo-fascist street violence, and if Greece exits I hope they are able to solve their economic problems quickly and with minimum fuss. If a Greek exit begins a chain reaction that sees the EU scaled back a bit and maybe made more fiscally flexible I think that would be a good thing, though it won’t change British angst about the EU so long as the free movement of people remains at the heart of the project. But I really really hope that if Syriza win, their victory doesn’t lead to a long period of instability that turns Greece into the neo-fascist cradle for all of Europe. That would spell trouble far beyond Greece’s borders, and well beyond this election, and I hope the Greek people are able to avert such a disaster regardless of how they vote this weekend.
Cyberpunk 6: Big Trouble in Little Boston

January 23, 2015

Let’s enjoy killing Americans together!

Date: 5th October 2177

Weather: Rainy

Mood: Frustrated and exhausted. Who knew killing Americans was this tough?

Outfit: My shiny new combat armour, that I bought with the proceeds from icing Lima. It’s snug and super tough at vulnerable points where other armour fails. Not very breathable and the peripherals on the helmet are a bit weak, plus I get limited movement on my shoulders, but you know you’ve made a wise fashion investment when you can lie still in the hail of a full magazine and just get a bit bruised. That was a good buy!

News: Some corporations are arguing again, which isn’t exactly shocking news in New Horizon, but I heard that Arasaka have signed a contract with one of the big genetech companies and are going to be re-entering New Horizon as “security.” I guess they need the money after they messed up in the Indo zone, but it’s really bad news for me. They’re gonna have a presence in District 68 – my home! – but they have a contract out on me. I can’t see that working out well for me – or for the first 10 or so Arasaka dudes who come to get me.

Back when I was doing corporate wet work there was this guy in our team that everyone called Builder Barry, who had an obsession with American history and used to talk about it a lot. He knew everything about Oil Age American military hardware, what he called the “Golden Age of Military Aestheticism,” and he also knew a lot about American history, though our team wiseguy called him a “tinpot Imperialist philosopher” and accused him of wearing “Budweiser goggles,” which are apparently some sort of super cool American tech that makes everything look pretty or something. Builder Barry didn’t have any actual goggles (he had a really sophisticated set of light-adaptive shift-tacts), and most of his hardware was Asian issue standard, but he did have a big old American pistol that he said he kept “for emergencies” because it never jammed and did a lot of damage. He said every bullet was charged with the “weight of history” or something, though as far as I can tell they were just lead, not even depleted uranium. Still, I guess that weight of history was heavy enough in some parts of the world, because after Builder Barry left our team he went with Arasaka to fight in the Indo zone, got caught by some dudes in what used to be Afghanistan, and as soon as they saw his gun they thought he was an American spy and shot him there on the spot. Is that irony (Pops is always telling me I confuse irony and karma)? The way Builder Barry tells it, everyone used to take America really seriously, and America was really important in the world, and because white people thought they were so perfect everyone also took Europe seriously (can you believe that?!), and everyone worried what Europeans and Americans thought of them. Although from the amount of wars he says they were always fighting, it doesn’t sound like they were very popular.

They certainly aren’t popular with me, after today’s little farce! We have decided to go topside on a mission for Alt, but that means getting passports which means dealing with some dude that Pops knows, who wants us to ice this guy called Blue who, coincidentally, is the guy who seems to want to kill our hacker Ghost. But before we can get to Blue we thought we should get his hacker, Rice, who might know useful stuff (hackers usually do). Ghost managed to find out where Rice lives (maybe all hackers put their address on the internet like Ghost did?) so we went to get him. A pretty simple job really – go into this apartment complex in the American sector, lock all the doors so the hacker can’t get out and the local thugs can’t get in, then grab Rice and offer him a range of enhanced interrogation options. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything, that’s what. For starters we planned on electronically locking down the doors of all the apartments on Rice’s level, because everyone knows Americans are insane and if they see a bunch of heavily armed people entering their apartment complex their first thought will be “let’s go kill them and rob them of their expensive and deadly guns,” so we wanted to make sure they couldn’t get to us. Only many of these cheap American sector apartments turn out not to have doors, so when we turned up there were lots of people coming out to get us. Also there was a riot going on outside the apartment when we arrived, because Americans love cheap beer and rioting. The riot was no problem at first but we had to leave Ghost unguarded in the van to do his hacking, which it turns out is a big mistake in a riot.

So we went inside and straight away there were people coming to get us, these two dudes with nunchakus who charged us when we were trying to shoot Rice’s bodyguards. I just ignored the nunchaku dude while I picked off the bodyguards, but Coyote didn’t kill him fast enough and so he grabbed me and threw me to the ground and started trying to take my helmet off like some kind of pervert. Coyote killed him for me but by the time that job was done more bodyguards had turned up and one laid down a blistering rain of fire on our doorway. Coyote managed to duck aside but I was trapped under the body of the dude who he had just chainsawed to death, and as I rolled out I took five bullets, I can tell it’s five because I have a big nasty bruise for each and every one. Fortunately my pretty new armour took the worst of it and I was able to do keep fighting. Coyote ran around them and we were able to take them out, but things weren’t going so well. Pops was down on the stairwell fighting off this horde of American barbarians who were coming up to get us so they could steal our gear, and an AV was hovering outside Rice’s window, while he smashed the window and prepared to jump out. Ghost was meant to be hacking that AV and making it fall to the ground, but because we left him unguarded some hobos broke into the van and started whaling on him. We knew he was in trouble when we lost our feed, so we decided to withdraw and save the van and the hacker without getting our target.

Unfortunately withdrawing wasn’t such an easy deal. Pops had to hold off those guys from below, and while we were moving up the stairs some second-rate corporate security outfit landed at the top of the stairs in an AV, and started firing down the stairwell. Coyote managed to drop a flashbang on the guys Pops was holding off, which convinced them to leave, and then got a grenade right in the mouth of the AV to very impressive effect, but somehow one of those armored corps made it through alive and dropped a grenade on me. My armor was good but apparently not good enough and I went down from the shock. While all this was going on Ghost was in some kind of gunfight with two hobos, trying to get back our van, and managed to lose his assault rifle and also Tail, who fell out of the van somewhere – we didn’t even know he had come with us the useless little runt. Anyway we took a different exit out of the building when we discovered the corps had a machine gun mounted in their AV, and we got control of the van again. By then Rice had fled in his AV, so we have to follow it and track him down.

In all I killed three guys and injured maybe five more, Coyote took down maybe 6 guys. As per a la usual, it was only Yours Truly who got hurt, but I was in the thick of it so whatever. Also I think I need to improve my grappling, because these roughhouse suburban type criminals like to drag you down and rip your helmet off so they can stab you in the neck, which is really icky. I think we under-estimated the Americans and if we hadn’t been working well as a team we’d all be dead. Next time we need to hire backup and get a bit more protection for our hacker. But none of us are dead and we have a bead on Rice’s AV so we can still follow him and get the job done. Stay tuned for some enhanced interrogation!
Parsing the Australian GP Rebate Debacle

January 14, 2015

Strange things are happening in Australian politics at the moment. The Federal government appears to be shooting itself in the foot with rocket launchers, and doing everything it can to become that rarest of entities, a one-term Federal government. There are many examples of the government’s reckless desire to consign itself to the dustbin of history, but most of them are beyond my ken. However, one that touches on an issue I’m vaguely familiar with – health – stands out as a particularly egregious example of policy-making stupidity, in which the government squandered a chance to implement a potentially important policy that would have improved the budget bottom line, then doubled down on an incredibly bad policy that is guaranteed to annoy essentially everyone. In an electorate with compulsory preferential voting and consistently high electoral turnout, this really is a recipe for electoral disaster – and completely avoidable.

The policy in question is the General Practice co-payment, and although it’s a politically tricky task – better governments have floundered over it – it has a sound public policy basis and with the right political guidance a new government riding high on popularity should be able to get this sort of thing introduced. That’s what first term governments in Australia do. So what went wrong?

A brief primer on Australian health financing

Very briefly, Australia’s health system is managed primarily through General Practitioners (GPs), family doctors in the USA, who are the first port of call for health concerns. In theory every time you visit you pay the GP and present the invoice to the government-run single payer health insurer, Medicare, who reimburse you a fixed rate depending on the type of service you received (this is called a rebate). Your GP can choose to charge you more than this rebate, in which case you have to wear the difference as a co-payment. Many GPs opt to provide a service called bulk billing, in which they don’t take cash from their patients but bill the government directly for only the rebate. This makes the service essentially free at the point of care for the patient, but reduces the amount of money the GP can make; it does however reduce the overhead for the GP, since they don’t need to manage a cash system in their office. GPs in Australia are essentially private health providers, claiming fees from a government single payer, and the system is deregulated sufficiently that many large international and national healthcare providers run large, multi-doctor and very modern clinics (often with allied health services attached), all charging the patient essentially nothing. Crucially for the health financing debate in Australia, hospitals are funded by State governments, while GP rebates through Medicare are funded federally. Note that Medicare is not like the US version (only for elderly people); in Australia it is the name of the universal health coverage scheme that all legally resident Australians can access.

One big problem with Medicare is that the essentially free nature of bulk billing services (and many non-bulk billing services, if GPs don’t increase their fees) is that patients are not discouraged from attending GPs for essentially irrelevant medical problems, have no incentive to wrap their problems into one visit, and have no incentive not to visit a GP for problems (like common colds) that the GP essentially can’t treat. This can lead to over-servicing, which causes congestion and reduces the efficiency of GPs as a service. It should be noted that compared to British GPs – who essentially run a poor-quality outpatient referral service – Australian GPs provide a wide range of services up to and including medical imaging, management of chronic and potentially fatal illnesses like cancer and HIV, and even minor surgery. They genuinely are the workhorses of the system, with a lot of responsibilities, and over-servicing is a serious issue. One solution often proposed for over-servicing is a mandatory co-payment that would force all patients to pay a nominal upfront fee to discourage frivolous GP attendance.

The Abbott government’s co-payment proposal and its aftermath

Into this policy issue stepped the new, first term government, run by Tony Abbott, a conservative ideologue who is probably better described as radical than conservative (as many conservatives are). Abbott won government on a platform of trust, promising “no surprises,” and certainly didn’t promise a major health financing change that I can recall (I can find no evidence either way that isn’t blatantly political, with a quick search). Immediately after the election Tony Abbott identified the classic “Budget shortfall” (every government since Fraser, except for Gillard, has done this it seems, and Gillard only didn’t do it because she was replacing her own party leader…) and started identifying “savings” that could reduce the deficit, which was in “crisis.” One proposed measure was the GP co-payment, which would be a $7 co-payment for all patients visiting a doctor. This unannounced and unsupported policy change attracted uproar, since it would fundamentally change the way that health financing worked, and no one was expecting it. After a long period of anger and clear messages from the Senate that the measure wouldn’t pass, the government relented and reduced this co-payment to $5, apparently voluntary. That’s right, the government was going to seriously go out on a limb for a policy that would give GPs the choice to become tax collectors for the government. Would you trust your doctor if they had volunteered to collect extra tax for the government?

Once this proposal had been sufficiently ridiculed the government canned that too, and introduced a nasty and cunning administrative change that will see the rebate for a 6-10 minute doctor’s visit reduced from $37 to $17. Obviously doctor’s costs won’t change, and so for a large proportion of their consultations they will face the choice of a $20 reduction in payment, or passing on all or part of that payment to patients. This is going to represent a huge increase in cost to patients, well above the $7 co-payment. Imagine, for example, that you are seeing a decent private doctor who charges you $50 for your service. Under the old system you pay the $50 and get a $37 rebate from Medicare; you end up paying $13, a fair whack of cash but no big deal. Under the co-payment system this would have increased to $20; under the new rebate revision, unless the doctor decides to carry the extra costs, you will now only be reimbursed $17, so your new fee is $33 – a more than 100% increase! Crucially, this move doesn’t need to go through parliament, so the government can effectively charge a rebate without getting senate approval. This is a hugely unpleasant change, and without huge numbers of concessions (for e.g. the elderly and those with chronic illness) it will lead to a huge increase in GP costs. If, for example, you’re taking statins for high cholesterol, your GP is your primary source of management and your management will probably require one of these 6-10 minute sessions every three months – so your medical bills will increase by $80 a year. This is actually a lot of money to some people.

The result of this should be obvious. While the $7 co-payment would discourage needless medical visits without necessarily significantly increasing costs for patients, the huge rebate change will destroy the bulk billing system, causing many poor people to drop out of GP service and shift to Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments in hospitals. GPs will attempt not to change their cost structure, and so will double the time they spent with each patient, massively increasing waiting times – except that their poorest patients will have disappeared to the A&E. This will mean that in the end GPs will see less patients who they charge more, and A&Es will become congested with patients attending for unnecessary minor complaints. With GPs charging more per visit for less visits, total medicare revenue won’t change – but less people will be seeing their doctor on time. The budget hole will not change in the slightest, waiting times won’t change at GPs, and A&Es will see an increase in pressure.

A&Es, as I mentioned above, are funded by state governments, not the Federal government.

So the government tried to implement a potentially important but unpopular policy, and when this failed switched to implementing a completely counter productive and unpopular policy that will seriously affect everyone through increased health care costs. They showed no policy sense and no leadership. Brilliant.

What does this tell us about this government’s policy approach?

As I mentioned above, getting a co-payment through Australian politics is a tough ask, and takes political skills, but it has two major policy benefits: it raises more money for Medicare, which is generally accepted to be underfunded, and it reduces unnecessary service use, which is a major problem in free or nearly-free health systems. With Australia’s growing burden of non-communicable disease and preventable health problems it’s probably a good idea, and $5 or $7 is not horrifically punitive, though for the very poorest in Australian society it’s tough. Australians in general are wealthy though and $7 is the price of a piece of cake – it’s really not the end of the world. Nevertheless, it represents a major shift in policy approach away from the bulk billing philosophy, and steering that policy through requires a nuanced debate in which the government prepares the public, then debates with the public, then compromises. It’s also potentially the kind of policy that involves expending a lot of political capital for not much gain – the co-payment is a good idea but not necessarily the best way to solve the problems it is intended to fix, and may not be worth any government expending political capital on. Instead, this government introduced it soon after an election, in an environment where it is accused of multiple broken promises, without any preparation or debate. It even managed to anger the Australian Medical Association, historically a very pro-conservative organization (one of its ex-presidents was a Liberal leadership contender, and an ex-Liberal health minister moved on to become one of its directors, I think). But then, having angered everyone who cares, the government dropped the plan in exchange for an even more punitive and vicious policy that will obviously fail to achieve any of the stated goals of the previous policy, and probably won’t raise any extra money but will put more pressure on Australian hospitals.

Is this not the very model of political naivete? To me this is an example of a government that has no policy framework at all. They were simply looking for ways to raise money and tried to cloak them in a policy goal that they didn’t really understand or care about, and when their mistakes were pointed out to them instead of backing down and finding a better solution, they simply dropped the cloak of policy rationality and turned vindictive. And this seems to be what they have been doing for much of their policy “development” since they won office. This is no recipe for sensible government, and the GP co-payment debacle is a classic example of how mean-spirited this government is, as well as its complete lack of interest in any real policy goals.

If this is how they go about all their policy development, the sooner they become a one-term government the better.
Dark Heresy 1: Heresy in the Hive Desoleum

January 11, 2015
Inquisition reporter: Suleiman the Lost

Report date: 40874.413 Imperial Standard

Report location: Infield, shuttle Emissary of Wrath 743; cogitate encode level 4714

Report Status: Heresy unresolved; external action unwarranted; maintain extermination recall watch

The Emperor protects, and we in service to the Inquisition extend his protection to all those who toil for his glory. Our team has been sent on the battle cruiser the Emperor’s Divine Wrath to the Hive World Desoleum in service to our Holy Mother the Inquisitor Bellane Volksman, may the Emperor’s grace always shine upon her. 300 billion souls toil on the Hive Desoleum in dutiful service to the Emperor’s noble plan, but there are rumours that the petty nobles of this teeming planet have been trading in Xenos artifacts, to the detriment of their souls and the souls of all who reside in Hive Desoleum. We are to determine the truth of these rumours, to identify and contain the Xenos artifacts, to bring those trading in them to justice, and if necessary to burn the planet in order to save it.

Our team are four:
- Myself, Suleiman the Lost, voidborn seeker
- Siri of Apple, unsanctioned psyker elevated from the feral world of Apple to the Inquisition by our Holy Mother in order to work where sanctioned psykers cannot
- Zariel, another feral worlder elevated to the Imperial Guard and brought to our team as an assassin
- Lazarus, a Tech-Priest assigned to the Inquisition by the Order Mechanicum. Evidently machine spirits too can harbour heresies, and they too must be burnt
The Inquisition authorizes us to destroy this planet and all its souls if the chancre has spread too deep, but our Holy Mother rewards subtlety over brutality, and so we arrived on Hive Desoleum disguised as a rich off-world merchant seeking business. Before our insertion Lazarus spread rumours that Siri of Apple was a collector of rarities, a nihilistic feral worlder with new money. As soon as we arrived on the Hive and had been shown to our Guest Mansion we arranged a party, that the local nobles could meet Siri of Apple and learn of her interest in collectibles and her disdain for imperial law.

Our briefing informed us that recently minor nobles had been dying horribly, and Xenos artifacts were implicated in these deaths. We were told to seek a petty noble called Lanz Goolajan, from a fading house (House Hessantans) who had recently begun behaving erratically. At the party we learnt he had spent all his family’s money, begun appearing unkempt in public, even visiting the deepest levels of the Hive!, and that his family was considering disowning him soon; he had in turn refused to attend the party for unspecified reasons, and refused to make business meetings of any kind with Siri of Apple despite rumours of her fabulous wealth. The condition of his heresy seeming already far gone, the following morning we made haste to his mansion to impress upon him the need for urgent business. Our cover as merchants worked here; having previously suggested we had a special interest in his silicate reserves, we presented at his gates demanding admission to talk about an urgent injection of cash into his business, before his silicate fields were sold off and broken up. His servant believed our deception and allowed us in, but at this point we were stymied. We were forced to stand in the hallway of his mansion like mendicants while his spidery-limbed servant ferried messages back and forth, and his sole bodyguard spied on us from the balcony. Such a greeting should earn a brutal penance for a heretic of this kind, but our Holy Mother demands subtlety, so we played his silver-tongued game. However, soon we heard a scream of horror, and the bodyguard ran towards his lord’s room. We followed, fearing the worst, and we found a grim sight. Lanz Goolajan was sprawled on the floor of his study, his clothes ripped and ragged, his face scored with deep cuts, both his eyes lying on the floor in a pool of blood next to a letter opener, with which he had obviously plucked them out. On his desk sat a small and malevolent-feeling dark orb, obviously some Xenos abomination, and he crouched there in his own blood and aqueous fluid, screaming incoherently at it.

It shames me to speak of my team so in a holy missive to the Emperor’s servants, but here they failed the honour of our Emperor. Zariel, who has fought Xenos on a thousand worlds, panicked at this horrid sight and involuntarily fired a shot of his laspistol at me, though it was mere reaction and he missed me; Lazarus screamed and fled to the gardens of the Mansion, calling upon the Omnissiah for mercy. I, Suleiman the Lost, who saw my entire orbital exterminated brutally by demons that crawled forth from the fabric of the warp like wasp larvae, was unfazed by the sight of a mere pair of eyeballs. I scooped them up onto a piece of paper and had Lanz’s bodyguard restrain him and transfer him to his bedroom. He went meekly, muttering about the things he could not unsee. A terrible fate awaits him, and the loss of his sight in such a gory way will soon seem to him as a sweet memory compared to that which awaits him in the loving but merciless arms of the Inquisition.

While Lazarus ran screaming about the grounds, invoking the Omnissiah for reassurance, Siri and I set about investigating the Orb. We transferred it to a case and secured it while we waited for Lazarus to return; eventually, shaken, she did, and we had her tend to the quivering heretic, little use though his flesh serves him now that his soul is to be given over to the Inquisition’s scourging. We then ordered the bodyguard to prevent him leaving while we searched the remainder of the Mansion. We uncovered several more artifacts, less deadly than that orb but no less steeped in guilt and sin for being harmless. We gathered these and returned to take the heretic, but he had died of his terrors while we searched the house. Though all of us suspected the bodyguard, there was no evidence that this weak-willed and hedonistic lordling had not simply expired of his own fears, so we burnt the body and returned to our shuttle, the Emissary of Wrath 743, to secure the Xenos artifacts and read Lanz Goolajan’s diaries. These confirmed the information I had found on a slip of paper beneath Goolajan’s desk when I searched around the orb: he had purchased his artifacts from a group of dissolute nobles who regularly gather in a bar at the very base of the Hive, called the Screaming Wheel.

We immediately visited The Screaming Wheel, which was deep in the Hive. Here we found a group of drunken and foolish noblemen bullying a worker of the Hive, who was pleading for more time to pay them for some small loan. We watched in horror as they killed this poor drudge brutally. We were angered by their actions, so we burnt them. Specifically, Lazarus unleashed her flamer upon them, and Siri used her psychic powers to hurl one through a wall, bursting his skull as if it were one of the apples of her homeland under a hammer. While the others burnt I used my flak coat to extinguish the flames on their leader, and we held him and another for questioning. These men were not heretics, simply middle men for a trader known as Zac Haltaine. Still, they have touched tainted work. We judged them worthy of mercy, and burnt them.

Thus ends my first report on the case of heresy in the Hive Desoleum. With the Emperor’s grace, we will soon find this Haltaine and identify the depths of his evil, and the extent of his infernal allegiances. Lanz Goolajan spoke of invisible lost cities, and a great power residing therein. If we sense that this world hosts a deep evil that cannot be contained, we will call back the Emperor’s Divine Wrath, and expunge it. But first we must find the source of the heresy, and put it to the question.

We stand ready to do the Emperor’s work, or perish dying. The Emperor protects, and we serve!
Is it Time to Ban Carbon Fuel Prospecting?

January 11, 2015

Nature has just published an assessment of the location and accessibility of all the world’s known carbon fuel reserves (coal, oil and gas), and its conclusion is striking: 80% of coal, 50% of oil and 33% of gas need to be classified as unburnable if the earth is to remain within the 2C “guard rail” of global warming identified by the IPCC and major governments. The Guardian has some nice graphics summarizing the implications, which are dire: 90% of Australian coal and 85% of Canadian oil needs to stay in the ground, for example. These country-specific estimates are based on the assumption that the cheapest material will be extracted first, and uses information on the specific carbon cost of each source. For example the Nature press release states that:

Canada holds the world’s single largest share of unburnable oil because most of that reserve comes in the form of tar sands, a mix of bitumen and sand that requires burning natural gas to transform it into usable petroleum products

and explains that this extra carbon cost makes the tar sands essentially inaccessible. Meanwhile, at the Conversation, John Quiggin has written an article suggesting that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a non-starter, indicating that we can’t rely on sequestration to take out the excess carbon we are producing. Which means that the only option for dealing with this carbon becomes a blacklist, with severe implications for the future of the fossil fuel industry: and if 80% of the stuff needs to stay in the ground then that means fossil fuel companies have to essentially write off 80% of their balance sheet. There is no solution to this stranded asset problem that will see our planet remain a livable place, but no government and not many economists are taking this seriously.

So what can be done to solve this apparently unsolvable problem? A lot of economists attempting to tackle the policy response to global warming seem to think that a carbon tax or a carbon price is the most efficient way to reduce carbon use, but they don’t usually take into account this budgeting problem: they talk about reducing flux, but not about the hard ceiling of the carbon budget. At best, advocates of a carbon price seem to think that the price alone will spur creativity and new investment that will lead to a solution to the budget problem, but when challenged (as I have done repeatedly at for example John Quiggin’s blog) the only answer they seem to have is some vague promise of future technological improvements, or tree planting. As I have observed previously on this blog, even an extremely high and strict carbon tax will likely be insufficient to force even the rapid reductions in carbon consumption we need now, let alone to force developed nations to zero carbon. It is increasingly obvious that a carbon tax is a minimum response to the challenge of global warming, and that on top of that specific policy and legislative interventions are needed to rapidly decarbonize those elements of the economy that can be. If 80% of the world’s coal needs to remain unburned, then we need to be reserving that coal for long-term use in an industry that cannot operate without it: steel-making. Given it is essential for steel production, coal should not be used for anything else. Similarly, oil should be reserved for jet travel and any maritime uses where it cannot be exchanged for something else. Using it for heating or private transport is an incredibly wasteful use of a resource which is far more valuable than its available reserves suggest. Even under an aggressive and probably fascistic level of tree planting, we won’t be able to get to a world of negative carbon emission for a very long time, and until we do reach that state we need to recognize that the only carbon we should be emitting should be from industries that absolutely cannot be switched.

We also need to recognize that the continued prospecting for new coal, oil and gas is madness. There is no social value to be had from this prospecting. $670 billion a year is spent on prospecting for material that can never be used, contributing to a growing carbon bubble that could have serious economic consequences. That money should be spent on developing new zero carbon industrial and energy production processes, and given the efforts that the resource companies have made to get us into this mess, it hardly seems a big deal to me if they were forced to spend their prospecting money for the social good. But in any case one thing should definitely be done immediately: all new prospecting should be banned. It’s not just a waste of money, it’s counterproductive: the more reserves there are, the greater the future environmental risk and the harder it is to downsize this industry.

As I have said often on this blog, it’s time the world got serious about climate change. This means more than just minor tax changes with a vague promise of innovation in the future; it means a concrete set of policy proposals for the elimination of carbon emission from our economy, with a concrete goal for every sector of industrial and social life. Sectors that can’t go zero carbon need to be identified and strategies put in place to first minimize and ultimately offset those sectors’ emissions, and coal and oil resources need to be prioritized for only those sectors. If we start now and implement policies rapidly across many countries, we can probably do this with minimal economic disruption, but if we don’t start soon and act aggressively, the future is going to be very dark: we will enter a world of extremely fascist and restrictive responses to growing environmental problems, coupled probably with potentially catastrophic and untested geoengineering.

It’s now or never!
Different Attitudes to Genetically Modified Organisms in Japan and the Anglosphere

January 5, 2015

It was the salmon mousse!

Tonight I was having dinner at kushi no kura in Shinjuku with a friend, and we noticed the mysterious oddity of shinshu salmon on the menu. For those of you unfamiliar with the vagaries of Japanese food culture [1], shinshu is an area of inland Japan roughly encompassing the Prefecture of Nagano, and its snowy mountains. I have previously visited Matsumoto in the shinshu region, and reported on the Kaichi school, an interesting museum about Japanese education, but I don’t have any particular sense of what does or does not constitute food from the region, but I naturally assumed it would be sansai, vegetables from the mountains.

So my friend and I were a little confused by shinshu salmon. How can a mountainous inland region have salmon? That doesn’t make any sense! Looking around the restaurant we saw a poster for chicken from the area, and for the salmon, with a picture of … a salmon. Are they laying claim to fish that swim to shinshu from the sea? And surely they can’t do that in January, those salmon rock up in July or something. What’s going on?

Naturally I googled it, and discovered that shinshu salmon has its own webpage (in Japanese) and is basically a genetically engineered food. It is bred from rainbow trout and brown trout, which when combined produce a sterile offspring called shinshu salmon that is apparently great in a ceasar salad (you may doubt; I know enough about how good Japanese chefs are to recognize the genius of this idea). This fish has been around for 10 years or so, and is a kind of famous food of the shinshu area. It has its own FAQ, which features a young woman asking a much older scientist questions about his invention (Frankenstein would have gotten the same treatment if he’d been invented by a Japanese dude). The second question – which the woman, who is wearing an apron to indicate she is a serious housewife, asks while reading a very serious book – is “since it’s artificial life does it risk damage to the natural environment?” to which of course the answer is no since it’s sterile. What could possibly go wrong?!

This is an example of how Japanese people have a very different attitude towards science to westerners. They’re concerned about the environment, much more so I think than westerners, so they check in on that, but they just aren’t able to get mystical about scientific risk, and they really aren’t concerned about GMOs. What restaurant in the west would broadcast that it has genetically modified meat on the menu? It’s the kind of thing that you need to slip by your customers in the west whereas in Japan it’s a selling point. Japanese people are in general very concerned about global warming, the health of bees, pollution and recycling, rubbish rules here are very strict, and things that might affect the environment are taken very seriously – but there is no magical thinking about genetics. OH! Someone designed a new fish! Let’s eat it! It’s as if, if someone could convince a kangaroo to fuck a whale, there’d be a restaurant in Tokyo selling Kangawhale[1] (deliciously cooked no doubt). I think this also explains Japanese peoples’ much more sanguine approach to nuclear power; they’re more comfortable with scientific assessments of risk than westerners are.

This isn’t to say there aren’t anti-GMO folks in Japan, there are (I live in a suburb that is probably over-represented in this regard), but I think it doesn’t have the same salience as it does in the west. Which is interesting, because Japan has a very protected rice industry and despite this openness to science it’s my guess that Japanese people are much less likely to eat GMO rice than are the rest of the world[2], due to the protected nature of the Japanese industry. This is pure surmise, however.

I am not opposed to GMO per se, though I have previously posted about how I think GMOs are over-rated as a solution to world hunger or specific nutritional deficiencies, and I think GMO’s boosters tend to ignore practical issues that dilute the importance of GMOs in the world food system; I also don’t believe for a moment that GMOs will solve “world hunger”, and I find the silence of GMO’s supporters on this issue very disturbing. I think shinshu salmon is an example of this issue in practice: it’s not solving any food security or health issues, it’s just some dudes in Nagano decided to create a new industry to take advantage of Japan’s hunger for “local” foods[3]. This is what I think happens with a lot of GMOs, that some biotech company decides it has an interest in a new product purely for profit, and when it runs up against seemingly nonsensical local opposition it post-dates some broader justification for the food based on food security or something. But basically there is no difference between roundup ready corn and shinshu salmon: it’s food designed for profit. The difference is that whoever designed shinshu salmon had the good taste to advertise it as a luxury food product, rather than pretending they’re solving world hunger. And in Japan no one cares, because a cartoon science dude says it’s okay.

If only things could be so simple in the west …

—

fn1: There is a huge whale restaurant in Shibuya actually, it has a big sign out front warning foreigners in English that it sells whale; recently I passed it and saw through the window a group of white foreigners eating whale. When I was in Iceland I noticed all the whale restaurants have English signs saying they serve whale. English-speakers may make a big fuss about non-English speakers eating whale, but they’re more than happy to tuck in when they’re overseas. Racist do-gooding? You be the judge.

fn2: This is obviously a somewhat false distinction, since all rice is hugely genetically modified; but I assume that my readers understand “GMO” applies to sudden, rapid, laboratory-induced genetic advances, as opposed to those achieved slowly through crop breeding, and we all understand that this is simultaneously an arbitrary but important difference.

fn3: Japan’s “local” foods are an interesting issue. Generally Japanese people seem to assume that every town has its own specialty and that this specialty is built on ancient tradition, but it’s my suspicion that these “specialties” were invented to take advantage of the post-war tourism boom that saw Japanese travelling internally back in the 1970s when getting a passport was really tough. It’s a modern, completely invented tradition, built on some kind of previously-existing and real notion of regional difference in food cultures. Originally there were a few broad, regional food cultures but in the cut throat tourist market of the 1970s every town started making its own specialty. My suspicion is that economic necessity drove the creation of “traditional” food cultures to attract tourism.

—

fn1: you losers! You are missing out on one of the world’s great cuisines!
Heavy Metal, Transgressive Masculinity and the English Enlightenment

January 4, 2015

Channelling the Ancients in a frilly vest…

Tonight I watched live videos of Led Zeppelin at their peak, and the official video for Deep Purple’s Child in Time. It’s interesting to watch Robert Plant’s stage persona because it is simultaneously powerfully masculine and sexual, but also coquettishly feminine and camp. For those of us who grew up after the ’70s it’s hard I think to understand how deeply transgressive metal presentations of masculinity were, though the Deep Purple video gives some hint as to the shocked response of ordinary society at the time. The men in these early bands were constructing a new vision for themselves and men generally, and a new ideal of a social order, one which I think in retrospect needs to be seen as much more than just spandex-and-weed nihilism, but as a real (and largely unconscious) attempt to drag the sexual, religious and political radicalism of the English enlightenment into the modern world. I think the only band who actually realized and understood this visionary ideal were Iron Maiden, who are the conscious and willful inheritors of William Blake, but I think the other bands of that era – primarily the British masters, but in their footsteps the American and European legends – were setting about the same project, though sometimes doing it more from a classically romantic rather than strictly enlightenment vision. In amongst the drugs, the sex and the trashed hotel rooms it’s easy to lose sight of the fundamental vision that these men were trying to put forward to the world, a vision of peace, personal religious mysticism and sexual freedom that the world was not ready for, just as it was not ready for and ultimately failed to realize these exact same goals when they were put forward 200 years earlier by Blake and his contemporaries.

I have read that the English Enlightenment is often overlooked by scholars, and that many people don’t even realize there was a separate enlightenment happening in England, but that it had some of the most radical and visionary ideals of any of the enlightenment thinkers. Certainly William Blake was a powerful spokesperson for sexual liberty and political and religious freedom, and it was through the ideals of people like Blake and Wollstonecraft that the Romantics got their chance to rewrite the cultural landscape. I’ve said before on this blog that I think heavy metal is a part of Britain’s mainstream cultural tradition, but in this post I want to go further and say that metal was not just grounded in and drawing upon British cultural history, but was a direct continuation – through Victorian figures like Swinburne – of the radical ideas of the English enlightenment. This is why we find Bruce Dickinson singing Jerusalem at Canterbury Cathedral, and Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven rich with lyrics referencing the faerie and pagan dreams of Chaucer, Blake and Keats. It’s no coincidence that these men were also challenging masculine ideals of the time, wearing their hair long and singing and acting like women, because the redefinition of sexual liberty and sexual roles was an important part of the English enlightenment. I think it’s also no coincidence that the foremost bands, like Deep Purple and Metallica, lent themselves so easily to classical music, because they were themselves drawing on a musical tradition grounded in opium highs and romanticism that they could be easily adapted back to, and have shown themselves very amenable to.

Amongst all the modern strands of music, I think heavy metal is simultaneously the most conservative, because it fails to stray outside of the parameters set down by the classical musicians of 200 years ago, though it may sound radically different to them. It also confines itself to noble themes and the grandiose and political, studiously avoiding the personal and local themes of folk, hip hop, rock and pop; while they focus on talking about themselves and their relationships metal insists on regurgitating the age-old constants of religion, death and war. But it simultaneously describes new modes of sexual liberty, presents masculinity in a new and very camp style, sneers at the madness of modern politics and does the whole thing while hurtling through a classic opium-induced haze. Rather than being seen as the decline and fall of modern civilization, I think metal needs to be seen as the periodic revitalization and restoration of enlightenment values, a powerful and radical push back against the stultifying sameness of modernity and the growing conservatism of post-war art. Metal is also a sign that the enlightenment was not a phase the west went through, but is a constant spirit of restoration and reinvigoration that has been running through western culture for the last 500 years. And what better flag bearer for that spirit of restless change than Iron Maiden, Megadeth and Slayer??
Some Hard-won Lessons on Modeling in WinBUGS and OpenBUGS

December 30, 2014

I’ve recently been building a fairly complex series of Bayesian spatial regression models in BUGS, and thought I’d share some tips based on hard won experience with the models. The various BUGS packages have the most cryptic and incoherent error messages of any stats software I have ever worked with, and although various Bayesian boosters claim that their modeling approach is intuitive, in my opinion it is the exact opposite of intuitive, and it is extremely hard to configure data for use in the packages. Furthermore, online help is hard to find – google an error message and you will find multiple websites with people asking questions that have never been answered, which is rare in the modern world. I take this as a sign that most people don’t understand the error message, and indeed the BUGS manual includes a list of errors with “possible interpretations” that reads more like the I Ching than a software guide. But Confucius say Enlightenment is not to be found in Black Box Pascal, so here is my experience of BUGS.

The models I’m running are complex, with nested conditional autoregressive structures and the higher level having more than 1000 areas with complex neighbour relationships, and millions of observations. I originally ran them on a completely hideous Hewlett Packard laptop, with 4 cores and 8Gb of RAM. I subsequently upgraded to a Dell Workstation (joy in comparison to HP’s clunky root-kitted horror) with 8 cores and 16Gb of RAM; I’m not sure that hardware is the main barrier to performance here though …

The HP machine had a secret administrator account (arseholes!) so I couldn’t install winBUGS[1], so I started off running OpenBUGS called through R’s R2OpenBUGS package running in RStudio. I use R to set up the data and initial values, because I can’t think of any other way to load millions of observations into a text file without going stir crazy. But when I call OpenBUGS it just hangs … no error messages or any other kind of indication of what is going on. I also can’t tell if it is happening at the data loading or compiling or inits stage.

Some digging around online and I found an old post by Andrew Gelman, observing that BUGS does not work well with “large datasets, multivariate structures, and regression coefficients.”

i.e. pretty much every statistical problem worth doing. Gelman also notes that “efficiently-programmed models can get really long, ugly, and bug-prone,” which seems like a contradiction in terms.

Anyway, noting that my data was large, with multivariate structures and regression coefficients, I thought maybe I should tone it down a bit so I tried using a higher level of spatial heirarchy, which reduces the adjacency matrix by an order of magnitude. Still no dice. It was at this point that I upgraded to the bigger computer.

On the bigger computer the smaller model actually worked! But it didn’t work in the sense that anything meaningful came out of it … It worked in the sense that it reported a completely incomprehensible bug, something like a node having an invalid value. I tried multiple different values and nothing worked, but somewhere on the internet I found someone hinting that you should try running BUGS directly rather than calling through R, so I tried this … having created the data in R, I killed OpenBUGS then opened the OpenBUGS interface directly and input the model, then the data, using the text files created by R[2].

When I did this I could step through the process – model was syntatically correct, then model failed to compile! Given that loading inits comes after compilation, an error telling me that I had the wrong initial value seems a bit misleading… in fact I had an “index out of range” error, and when I investigated I found I had made a mistake preparing one part of the data. So where the actual error was “the model can’t compile because you have provided the wrong data,” when called through R the problem was “you have the wrong initial values” (even though I haven’t actually loaded initial values yet).

WTF?! But let’s step back and look at this process for a moment, because it is seven shades of wrong. When you run R2OpenBUGS in R, it first turns the data and inits into a form that OpenBUGS can read; then it dumps these into a directory; then it opens OpenBUGS and gets OpenBUGS to access those files in a stepwise process – at least, that’s what I see R doing. If I decide to do the model directly in the OpenBUGS graphical interface, then what I do is I get R to make the data, then I use the task manager to kill OpenBUGS, then I call OpenBUGS directly, and get OpenBUGS to access the files R made in a stepwise process. i.e. I do exactly the same thing that R does, but I get completely different error messages.

There are various places on the internet where you might stumble on this advice, but I want to stress it: you get different error messages in OpenBUGS run natively than you do in OpenBUGS called through R. Those error messages are so different that you will get a completely different idea of what is wrong with your program.

Anyway, I fixed the index but then I ran into problems after I tried to load my initial values. Nothing seemed to work, and the errors were really cryptic. “Invalid initial value” is not very useful. But further digging on the internet showed me that OpenBUGS and WinBUGS have different approaches to initial values, and winBUGS is not as strict about the values that it accepts. Hmmm … so I installed winBUGS, and reran the model… and it worked! OpenBUGS apparently has some kind of condition on certain variables that they must sum to 0, while winBUGS doesn’t check that condition. A free tip for beginners: setting your initial values so they sum to 0 doesn’t help, but running the same model, unchanged, in winBUGS, works.

So either OpenBUGS is too strict, or winBUGS lets through a whole bunch of dodgy stuff. I am inclined to believe the former, because initial values shouldn’t be a major obstacle to a good model, but as others[3] have observed, BUGS is programmed in a completely opaque system so no one knows what it is doing.

So, multiple misleading errors, and a complex weirdness about calling external software through R, and I have a functioning model. Today I expanded that model back to the original order of magnitude of small areas, and it also worked, though there was an interesting weirdness here. When I tried to compile the model it took about three hours, and produced a Trap. But the weird thing is the Trap contained no warnings about BUGS at all, they were all warnings about windows (something called Windows.AddInteger or similar), and after I killed the Trap my model updated fine. So I think the compile problems I previously experienced may have had something to do with memory problems in Windows (I had no problems with badly designed adjacency matrices in the larger model), but OpenBUGS just doesn’t tell you what’s going on, so you have no idea …

I should also add, for intrepid readers who have got this far, that this dude provides an excellent catalogue of OpenBUGS errors with his plain English explanations of what they actually meant. He’s like this mystical interpreter of the I Ching for Bayesian spatial regressives. Also I want to add that I think the CAR spatial correlation model is super dodgy. I found this article (pdf) by Melanie Wall from the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference (what a read!) that shows that the way we construct the spatial adjacency matrix is the primary determinant of the correlation structure, and that the correlation structure determined by this adjacency matrix is nothing like what we think we are getting. Today on my whiteboard and with the help of R I imagined a simple industrial process where each stage in the process is correlated with the one before and after it, and I showed very easily based on Wall’s work that the adjacency matrix required to describe this process is completely different to the one that you would naively set up under the framework described for CAR modeling. So I think most of the “spatial correlation” structures described using CAR models have no relationship to what the programmer thinks they’re entering into the model. But I have no proof of this, so I guess like everyone else I’ll just press on, using the adjacency matrix I think works …

So there you have it. Next time you see an opinion formed on the basis of a spatial regression model built in BUGS, remember the problems I had getting to the output, and ask yourself – do you trust that model? Really?

—

fn1: Well, I could copy winBUGS into the program files folder but I couldn’t patch it or install the immortality key, which, wtf? When I bought Time Series Modelling and Forecasting by Brockwell and Davis, ITSM came as a free disk with the book. When I buy the BUGS book I get to install software that comes with a big message telling me to get stuffed, and years later they finally provide a key that enables you to use it for free …

fn2: If you aren’t aware of how this works, basically when you call OpenBUGS in R, providing data from inside R, R first dumps the data into text files in the directory of your choosing, then OpenBUGS opens those files. So if you aren’t comfortable preparing data for BUGS yourself, use the list and structure commands in R, then kill OpenBUGS and go to OpenBUGS directly … the text files will remain in the directory you chose.

fn3: Barry Rowlingson does a pretty good job of showing how interesting and useful spatial analysis can be: see e.g. his post on mapping the Zaatari refugee camp in Syria.
Who’s Afraid of the Deflation Bugbear?

December 26, 2014
Standard economic orthodoxy seems to be that deflation is a terrible thing that all economies should avoid. Most central banks now seem to have an inflation target that is greater than 0%, and move their interest rates to try and keep inflation inside this target; inflation numbers are eagerly anticipated economic indicators, with anything below 2% or so greeted with horror; and one of the core goals of Abenomics is getting Japan out of its deflationary situation. Indeed, one of the central criticisms of Japan’s economy is that it has long been deflationary, which is supposed to be terrible.

Recently Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money observed in a somewhat surprised tone that deflation has been the norm for a large part of American history, and before world war 2 inflation often only accompanied major economic shocks and war. He writes:

(1) Overall prices in the American economy were about the same at the beginning of FDR’s presidency as they had been at the end of George Washington’s second term.

(2) Prices were nearly 25% lower in 1900 than they were in 1800 — that is, on net the 19th century was deflationary.

(3) Prior to the middle of the 20th century, significant inflation, rather than being seen as a normal thing, was very closely associated with, and clearly caused by, war. Indeed, prices would have been very strongly deflationary over a 200-year period if not for bouts of severe inflation during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I.

(4) If we consider American economic history from colonial times to the present, the last 75 years have been an almost freakish exception to the normal course of events, in which prices are as apt to fall as they are to rise.

The tone of his blog post is mild surprise, and it includes a request for a recommendation for a cultural history of inflation. He notes that until recently American economists could compare average prices in nominal terms over very long periods, because prices would be relatively similar even over 200 year periods, though in the short term they might not be stable. His observations about the history of inflation in America surprised me as well.

It’s obviously difficult to compare economies across 100 years, and the economic fundamentals of expansionary, colonialist America with a gold standard currency were obviously very different to modern America or Japan, but it should be obvious I hope that for large periods of time during these deflationary eras the US economy was both growing, something of a miracle around the world, and also generally working to enrich and improve the lives of its residents. So what is going on with this deflation thing? Why is it so terrible?

This question bugs me a lot because I live in Japan, and for a country that is supposedly suffering under deflation it seems to be doing pretty well. It’s difficult to say people aren’t consuming, for starters, and indeed the same newspapers that will decry the dampening effect of deflation on the Japanese economy will also carry stories stereotyping Japanese as brand-obssessed hyper consumers. I certainly don’t notice a lack of consumer effort in this country, and in just the last year in my suburb three new department stores have been built. Economists often tell you that the problem with deflation is that it discourages people from buying things today because they know they will be cheaper tomorrow. If that is the case then in Japan it is probably working as a very useful dampener on economic activity – if Japanese people consumed any more than they do, everyone in Japan would have to work without sleep just to deliver the goods. It certainly doesn’t appear to be stopping people from consuming, and furthermore life in Japan is excellent, the standard of living is high and it is a peaceful, functioning society with excellent quality consumer goods and (comparatively) low rents … So why are economists so worried about deflation, and why do they constantly criticize Japan for its deflationary situation?

My theory is that deflation is viewed by most mainstream economists (and especially economic commentators) through the same narrow, biased lens as inflation and printing money. There are several aspects of Japan’s deflationary economy that most economic commentators completely ignore, because they would mean taking into account the whole nature of the economy and the behavior of individuals and institutions in it, rather than reciting a simple mantra. These aspects are:
- Japan’s population is aging and older people consume less goods from many sectors, so reduction in consumption is to be expected as part of population realignment
- Japan has a long history of infrastructure growth and investment, and still does, and as population growth stalls this historical infrastructure has to do less and less work, so maybe prices don’t have to rise
- When you can’t compete on lower prices because everyone expects prices to fall anyway, you have to compete on quality, which is why Japanese services are such high quality
- For a long period of time Japanese companies have been avoiding raising prices by giving more work to the same number of people, making their workers work longer hours without hiring new people, and I think this is an inevitable aspect of an economy with very low unemployment
- The bubble saw prices rise way too high, and a long period of deflation has been necessary to reset these prices to a more reasonable international standard, so here deflation is at least partly a correction to a historically stupid mistake
None of these things (except the overwork thing) are necessarily bad, and fixing the overwork problem would require that Japanese institutions find a way to employ the last 3-5% of the population who aren’t working but want to work, or employ more women, and there are lots of reasons why this can’t happen. You would think that with Japan’s labour economy bumping up against structural unemployment limits, prices would rise under labour constraints, but I think this is balanced by the aging of the population and reduction in consumption in many areas of social life, plus automation, and it all just ends up balancing out.

It is sometimes said that inflation is the friend of the poor and the working class, because in chewing away at the value of money it prevents the rich from getting richer. I think this is very far from a universal truth, because whether inflation works in this way depends on what prices are inflating and why, and what the balance of interest rates and inflation are. If interest rates have to be raised to keep inflation in check, there may be long periods of time when prices are growing as fast as wages but interest (and therefore accumulated wealth) is growing faster. Or the opposite may occur. The same applies with deflation – it’s the friend of the working class if it arises because access to infrastructure and land is falling in value (which may have happened for long periods of time in US history as it opened the interior), but the enemy of the working class if it is arising because of economic collapse that leads to labour instability and loss of work. Looking at the history of the USA as presented at Lawyers, Guns and Money it appears that inflation was the enemy of the working class before world war 2, when it was associated with instability and job losses; perhaps deflation was largely irrelevant to them.

What is the real story now? Is deflation to be universally feared, or is it just one more partial indicator of the quality of the total economy?

Update: Subsequently to writing this post I discovered a chart of historical inflation at Eli Rabett’s, which shows the step change in 1950, with his opinion about what this means for discount rates and future costs of climate change.
The Battle of Five Armies: The Final Hobbit is Great Fun, but Too Gorgeous

December 24, 2014

Galadriel goes to market

One of the English loan-words that Japanese people misuse slightly in a really cute way is gorgeous (ゴージャス). In Japanese gorgeous refers not to something really nice, but to something that is overdone or just a bit too much – not necessarily unappealing or unattractive, but just a bit too much. I’ve heard the word applied to appearance, food and even writing (e.g. scientific writing should not be gorgeous). It’s often associated with the stylistic choices of young women of a certain social class, and also with hostesses. It’s not necessarily a marker of class or taste, and not deployed in a particularly judgmental way, but it suggests a certain immaturity or inelegance in taste, something that’s acceptable in young women but not for example something one would respect in an adult[1].

The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies is the cinematic showcase for this word. It’s too long, the battle scenes especially are unnecessarily embellished, and the heroism is over the top and over-frequent. Almost every moment of it is also great fun. These battle scenes are the kind of battles where you can imagine seven impossible maneouvres before breakfast, where enormous and terrifying trolls are killed with a single knife stroke, and where a war pig can be more terrifying than a giant. There are even sand worms! As battles go it’s a tour de force, the entire movie is basically one long series of battles, with maybe two brief pauses to discuss the importance of family and tasteless jewellery. The centerpiece battles – between the Uruk Hai and the dwarven heroes – are masterfully done and very enjoyable, but they’re so over the top as to be ridiculous. They’re also good examples of exactly what gorgeous means: for example, Legolas’s prancing up the collapsing tower is precisely how I imagine an elf to be able to move against the laws of nature, it’s the right thing to be in this kind of movie, but it is dropped into the middle of such a long-running series of epic-level feats that instead of being stunning and impressive, it’s just another blister of impossibilities on the back of your retina.

In this regard the movie can be contrasted very effectively with other works from the same series. The final battle between the fellowship and the Uruk Hai in The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, is a masterclass in how to turn a classic role-playing battle into believable cinema. It depicts a group of high-level characters at the peak of their power pulling themselves out of what is basically a lethal ambush by overwhelming numbers, with minimal losses. They do things we know are physically impossible, but they aren’t so far from impossible that we are lifted out of the feeling of the battle by them, and they aren’t so fast-flowing that they become overwhelming in their fantasticality. That battle is heroic fantasy at its finest, patently unrealistic but completely believable in the context of the world, and really engaging. The battles in the Battle of Five Armies are so full of over-the-top heroics and impossibilities that they become less an exercise in story-telling and heroic fantasy and more of an exercise in braggadocio by everyone involved. Yes, I want to see my fantasy heroes do impossible things; I want to see victories against overwhelming odds; I want to know that these people are not normal, not like me, doing things I can’t do. I don’t want this experience to be transformed into marveling at the ingenuity of the movie’s creator’s rather than its characters.

Just as a young hostess’s style can be so gorgeous that it becomes a self-evident performance of beauty rather than beauty itself, so this movie has turned heroic fantasy into a performance of itself, rather than a performance for its fans.

And don’t get me mistaken, I am a fan. The Hobbit is not a particularly interesting or enjoyable book, and Peter Jackson had pretty thin gruel to work with in making this part of the epic; he also had to please a group of tantrum-prone true-believers with an immature and shallow approach to the work. Given how dark and grim the later Lord of the Rings movies turned, he also had to find a way to leaven the silly boys-own-adventure style of the main plot with some kind of nod to the growing shadows. By choosing to work in the unwritten parts of the original story – Gandalf’s exploration of Mirkwood and the battle with the necromancer, for example – I think he has made the story more engrossing and enjoyable. He has also managed to present us with a breathtaking and splendid vision of Middle Earth, carved out of New Zealand, that has been more or less consistent across six diverse movies, and has stuck very closely to the aesthetic vision of Tolkien’s main visual interpreters. He managed to lift the dwarves from their shallow representation in the book and Snow White-style triviality in popular culture into serious, adult figures without falling on the cheap Jewish or Scottish stereotypes that often get attached to them, and for this all Tolkien fans should be eternally grateful. The dwarves are excellent, and as dwarves should be – dour, hard working, tough, narrow-minded and loyal. They look like adults and adventurers, and unlike Gimli (or Dwain in this movie) they don’t get turned into comedy sideshows. The Hobbit would have been an utter disaster if it had been made by someone trying to be loyal to the original book and the needs of the fans, it would have been a single stupid movie involving 12 characterless technicolor idiots and a dude in a pointy hat, cocking up everything they do.

Furthermore, The Hobbit is a rare example of a movie that manages to make a dragon a central part of it without cocking it up monumentally, which every other movie except Dragonslayer and Reign of Fire has managed to do. Smaug is an evil, cunning, wily and deeply sinister monster of terrifying power, and as soon as he is let loose on Dale you can see why armies of dwarves would fall before one of these things. His supreme arrogance, coupled with his incredible power and complete disregard for mortals and their feeble efforts, is a joy to behold. This is how a dragon should be! But even here we see Jackson falling for the gorgeous: the simple tale of Smaug’s death gets padded out with an unnecessary piece of sentimentality and impossibility, and a spot of slightly out of place (but nonetheless enjoyable) humour. Nothing in this movie just jumps, or just climbs, or just dies. Not even Smaug.

Still, I didn’t sign up for the last instalment in this epic so I could see a handful of orcs get their arses kicked by some woodland sprites and a few technicolor stereotypes in a backwoods scrap. I signed up for a monumental battle between the noble forces of good and the deepest evil ever conceived, and that’s what I got – in spades. The Orc leaders and Uruk Hai champions were awesome, the dwarven and elven battle scenes were spectacular, the troll stormtroopers impressive and exciting (though like every other stormtrooper, remarkably easy to kill …), the desperation of the human defenders grim and hopeless. This is a two-plus hour rollercoaster of well-deserved death and slaughter, and though you will at times find yourself thinking “what were they thinking?” and marvelling more at the movie-makers’ ingenuity than the actual traits of the people on the screen, you’ll still love every minute of it.

But it is too gorgeous.

—

fn1: Remembering that in modern Japan the word “adult” is increasingly coming to mean a person over 30, and there is even a growing fashion trend for otona (大人) that is specifically aimed at offering classy but still pretty and sexy clothes to women aged in their 30s and 40s. This style is largely the opposite of gorgeous.

recent posts

about