Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Envisaging Agricultural Collapse

    I thought it was blue ...
    I thought it was blue …

    Despite the bleating in the Guardian, I think it is still the case that there is a surprising dearth of global warming-related science fiction. This lack of effort by sci-fi writers is despite the fact that the changes are fast approaching, and most surprisingly one of the changes expected to take longest – arctic ice loss – is happening at an incredible pace before our very eyes, with potentially huge effects. We have already seen major crop losses in the UK due to flooding, and I am convinced that the flooding in the UK is due to arctic sea ice loss (or I will be convinced, I should say, if it is a regular phenomenon in the next few years). So, I’m wondering if the world faces the possibility of a major, generalized agricultural failure in our lifetime, and what that will look like. Let’s have a go at imagining it, but first let’s look at what it might be and how it might happen.

    Describing a generalized agricultural failure

    Only a small number of countries provide a large amount of food for the majority of the world. Wheat, for example, is primarily produced in China, the USA, EU, Australia and Canada; rice is clustered in a small number of Asian countries and is highly dependent on monsoonal weather and water supplies. A generalized agricultural failure would easily occur if just a couple of countries experienced a simultaneous loss of productive capacity. Particularly, crop failures in the USA, China, the EU and Australia would seriously disrupt the balance of food supply. Furthermore, there are a lot of countries that due to either economic decisions or environment are heavily dependent on imports of food. Middle eastern countries with large areas of non-arable land and African nations that are heavily committed to cash cropping are examples of this. Many of these countries are also low- or middle-income nations with very limited emergency food supplies, which makes them very vulnerable to disruptions in international trade. Finally, some major high-income economies with serious military power – such as Japan and the UK – do not have food security, and are currently heavily dependent on international food markets. Collapses in supply for these countries would make them extremely itchy about guaranteeing overseas trade supplies.

    Much of the world’s food is devoted to supplying cattle, and a lot of arable land is currently devoted to biofuels or other “non-essential” supplies (such as sugar cane or oil-producing crops). However, food is not an immediately replaceable good – being dependent on seasonal patterns, it can take a year to switch crops, but societies with poor food reserves can’t go a year while they wait. Also some crops that might be replaced in that year have a huge investment in infrastructure that their owners might not want to reverse in times of national emergency: cork, olives, vineyards and all forms of orchards can take 10 or 15 years to bring to productive capacity, so ploughing them under to grow essential foods means a potentially quite long-term reduction in food diversity. The global agricultural system is not nimble in the way that a manufacturing system might be, and is also often heavily subsidized and protected.

    So a general agricultural failure would involve failure of crops in a couple of independent producers for a couple of different food types all in the same year – possibly after a couple of years of build up in which reserves were strained – and in both the northern and southern hemispheres. For maximum effect it would need to occur in some high- and some low- or middle-income countries, disrupting not just the production of food but consumption and export patterns. It would have to affect a couple of exporters to have a truly global impact, and it would have to affect foods that are used for human as well as animal consumption.

    How would agricultural failure happen?

    In the short- to medium-term, a generalized agricultural collapse is only going to happen if it combines some global-warming-related phenomena with some bad luck. The only global-warming-related phenomenon that seems to be reliably weird at the moment is the arctic, but this is having fairly large effects and they can probably be expected to grow more extreme. They seem to be particularly affecting the food producers in the EU and North America, so a viable near-term scenario for agricultural failure would probably be:

    • serious flooding in Autumn in the EU and/or UK: due to the arctic sea ice loss increasing rainfall over northern europe
    • crop failure due to late spring and severe winters in Canada and northern/western europe: due to weakening jetstreams around the poles allowing cold air to flow further south and disrupting the Atlantic climate
    • a massive el nino causing drought and crop failure in Australia and latin America: obviously this is completely unrelated to global warming but the chances of a switch to el nino over any 5-10 year period are very high, and in a warming world the next el nino is going to be associated with some very unpleasant high temperatures
    • a random failure of monsoon or rainy season in east or southeast Asia: also (probably) not global warming related, but for example this year Japan’s rainy season – important for its rice crop – is already late and showing no signs of starting

    In combination, these effects could lead to a huge loss of wheat, rice and corn crops in several major food producing nations. The likelihood is that the full global implications of the failure would not be understood until after the northern hemisphere harvest, by which time (maybe) the crops for the following season would already be laid down in the southern hemisphere. Even if governments were quick thinking enough to see the risk for the following year and mandate changes in crops, this would mean the southern hemisphere would have wasted a lot of arable land on non-essential plantings. Of course, the chances that governments would respond in time to the crisis to be able to mandate planting of only essential crops are pretty small, and although price signals might encourage some farmers to switch to essential crops, it is likely that this would take more than a year to happen – especially given the highly protected nature of agriculture in most parts of the world. So after the initial food collapse shock it is likely that there would be a second year of weak harvests, even if the weather turned good. Collapses in wheat and corn crops would be followed by a glut of cheap meat as farmers killed off unprofitable herds; the following year would see a spike in meat prices (I think this happened this year, actually).

    What would a generalized agricultural collapse look like?

    The collapse would likely be seen in the most vulnerable nations first, most likely those countries with limited food security and heavy subsidization of food prices. I think a lot of these countries are in the middle east and there have already been suggestions that the Arab spring was related to food markets. Jared Diamond famously blamed the Rwanda massacre on pressure for farmland, and other historians have suggested an economic imperative driving the holocaust. Even where it is not obvious, pressure over food and food prices can lead to political instability, upheaval and chaos, and this will likely be the first symptom of the collapse, as prices rise and food importers in the middle east respond rapidly to the collapse of stocks. Unfortunately, market liberalization doesn’t happen quickly and in any case, in the face of a general loss of supply there will be no solution for these countries: they will fall into an increasingly desperate round of riots and political upheaval, and possibly also major population movements.

    Following internal tensions in the most food insecure nations, international tensions will begin to develop between major traders and their clients. Faced with generalized crop failures in major wheat trading partners, countries will try to find new markets, but some of these (such as Australia) will also be facing lost supplies, and will likely restrict trade to ensure security of domestic supply. This would lead to tensions between trading partners, followed by a desperate scramble as countries like the UK and Japan rushed to secure supplies. The first casualty of these efforts would be the poorest nations, who would suddenly find food suppliers deserting them for lucrative western markets. At its worst this could lead to riots, seizure of property, and expulsion of businesses and representatives from high-income nations. Emergency food aid would also collapse as countries conserved resources, and this would lead to famine and disaster in countries like North Korea and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as countries newly thrown into food insecurity – especially poorer middle eastern countries like Yemen and Iraq.

    Finally, as food reserves dwindled, tensions would rise between high income nations as they competed with each other for food supplies. Particularly, the EU, Japan and China would run into conflict as they sought to outbid each other for the remaining food supplies from the Russian breadbasket areas and the Americas. In southeast Asia, piracy would become commonplace, as it also would around the horn of Africa, and the second-tier powers would probably finance or trade with pirates as an alternative to direct conflict with the major powers. To protect these sea lanes countries with traditional rivalries – such as Iran and Iraq in the Gulf, and China and Japan in Asia – would have to send expeditionary forces. Although Japan currently has the ability to defeat China on the high seas, a war over something as fundamental as food is one of the few situations where China might be willing to deploy its nuclear arsenal. Imagine also what would happen if America suffered a general crop failure due to widespread drought, but Canada’s crop failure was only partial…

    Small countries with the ability to protect their borders and a smart farming community or government could stand to benefit from these changes, however. For example, a small country with no bad weather that responded rapidly to food collapse by switching from cash crops to high-intensity farming of a particular food supply could feed its own community and potentially make huge amounts of money selling to major trading partners; in such a case, for a developing nation, centrally mandated rationing and calorie restriction could enable a huge accumulation of wealth through trade that could completely change the country’s future. On the other hand, countries in such a situation who are near a major regional power might suddenly find themselves annexed and subject to strict rationing as the regional power confiscated the fruits of their clever planning.

    In the broad, we would see major famines across much of Africa and the middle east, and for the first time in perhaps 50 years we would see generalized famines outside of a small region of Africa, including potentially on other continents. Political upheaval and chaos in the middle east and parts of southeast Asia would bring down governments and lead to major population movements. Piracy and low-level national conflicts, as well as breakup of unstable nations, would lead to violence and conflict on a large scale through complex regions like southeast Asia or East Africa. Finally, there would be the risk of major conflict between the high-income nations, ending in nuclear attacks if the collapse was broad enough.

    I think this would be quite a good campaign setting … but let’s hope it stays in the realm of the imagination …

  • Inequality in British State Schools: A Completely Avoidable Situation?

    Figure 1: Absenteeism by level of deprivation, UK, 2004
    Figure 1: Absenteeism by level of deprivation, England, 2004

    The Guardian today reports that Britain’s top 50 state-funded comprehensive schools and academies have become more unequal over recent years, and are not reflective of the social composition of their surrounding areas, or of the remainder of the schools in England. Those of us from more equal societies might think this is not a big deal but the research is quite stark in showing very large differences between the schools and their surrounding communities. Of course, inequality in educational outcomes in the UK is stark and scary compared to other OECD nations, and to help digest this I’ve provided two figures. Figure 1 above shows rates of authorized (i.e. with parental request) and total absenteeism (i.e. including truancy) for small areas in the UK, by the level of poverty of the area; the further left you go, the poorer the community becomes. Figure 2 below shows GCSE achievement on the same scale. In this case, “deprivation” is measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which I think is the scale for measuring poverty that is favoured by the UK Office of National Statistics.

    Figure 2: GCSE Scores by level of deprivation, England, 2004
    Figure 2: GCSE Scores by level of deprivation, England, 2004

    School outcomes in the UK are obviously heavily determined by wealth. The Guardian report suggests that amongst state-funded schools this effect is most obvious in the elite schools, the comprehensives and academies. This, it suggests, is due to increasing income inequality in the UK, and because of the power of house prices. Basically, middle class families in the UK are able to buy houses in the catchment areas of the best schools, ensuring their children can access those schools. This in turn has the effect of pushing up property prices in those areas, forcing out poorer people and preserving the schools for the wealthier incomers. It appears that some of these schools have a policy of guaranteeing access not just on the basis of catchment area but on distance from the school, which guarantees that people with better purchasing power can push out poorer people.

    The statistics about differences between school socioeconomics and that of the surrounding communities are pretty stark. They report that

    uptake of free school meals – which is most often linked to parents receiving low-income benefits – was lower than half the national average: 7.6% in the 500 leading schools compared with 16.5% in almost 3,000 state secondary schools in England.

    Just putting aside the fact that this suggests 16.5% of British families are too poor to provide their children with lunch, we can see that the communities served by these schools are, on average, wealthier than the rest of the country. They are also wealthier than the communities they are embedded in. Measured in terms of whether the schools enrol equal or higher numbers of students on free school meals as are present in the local community, the report found

    only 25 also exceeded their local average, and they were well outnumbered by the 106 schools that had fewer than 3% of their pupils eligible.

    Most of these elite state-funded schools were somehow managing to recruit on income, even though they are ostensibly open for all. This isn’t inevitable, and some schools have shown that it is possible both to recruit above-average numbers of poorer children and to have good academic results. For example, Chesterton community sports college in Staffordshire:

    Chesterton college in Newcastle-under-Lyme has 22% of its pupils on free school meals, compared with its local authority average of just 9.8%. In 2012, 72% of its pupils achieved five good grades at GCSE, well above the national and Staffordshire local authority average of 59%.

    This shows that in a good school, poverty is neither a barrier to access nor to success. So what’s going on? This Guardian article is citing a report by the Sutton Trust, which recommends some interesting solutions to the problem, including the use of lotteries or banding (basically, stratified random sampling) to ensure equal access (or, at least, better access). These are interesting ideas for short term solutions, but they don’t address the basic problem: massive inequality in British society somehow ensures that even with free-to-access services (like health and education), those with the assets manage to seize the advantage. The report makes this clear through one simple stark claim: some proportion of this elitism in state-funded schools is only possible because some parents are willing and able to move houses to be in the catchment area (and to push others out of that catchment area). People are required and willing to move homes just to get these superior education services. Should a good high school education be worth that much? Why are people moving homes to secure education outcomes? And should they have to?

    I think this problem is driven by two factors: 1) investment in the majority of British state-funded education is so poor that people are willing to move homes to ensure their kids don’t have to go to some schools; and 2) the middle class in Britain now see their situation as so precarious that they are willing to make major asset purchase decisions (home purchase) simply to guarantee their children continued membership of the class they grew up in.  It seems to me that neither of these things should be necessary, and that there are alternative ways to manage society that would prevent these two situations – in my opinion, in a way that benefits everyone.

    Increase investment in the worst schools

    Looking at the two charts above, and considering the success reported by some of these elite academies, it’s pretty obvious that there must be some terrible schools in the UK, and some schools in serious need of extra investment. This won’t work by itself, since a lot of these areas need major cultural and economic change of their own, but better schools, and better teachers in those schools, supported in their work and properly able to deal with challenging students, will make a difference to the outcomes at those schools. It won’t completely change the phenomenon of rich and middle class parents fleeing to the state-funded comprehensives, but it will reduce the incentive as parents realize that attending a completely ordinary local school won’t kill their child’s future. I’m willing to bet as well that part of the reason poor schools in poor areas do so badly is a lack of educational diversity – no high achieving children, no historic record of achievement to inspire subsequent generations of students, and no reward for teachers to encourage them. If all these teachers have to look forward to is another year full of future criminals and children whose parents make no effort, then they will soon give up. And parents with any desire for their children to achieve will see that and move on. I’m also suspicious that the worst schools in Britain aren’t just educationally tatty: their facilities are, I’m willing to bet, also terrible, and the entire community lack pride in them. That can be fixed.

    Increase attention on negative outcomes

    Figure 1 shows rates of absenteeism in the poorest schools, but unauthorized absenteeism is something that police and social services can intervene in. Why don’t they? Because they’re dealing with other pressing problems. I think a lot of people in politics in the UK don’t realize just how pressing those problems are, or how much they degrade poor communities and depress the people living in them. Better attention on those problems, and greater efforts to ensure that the community in which children live is supportive of the learning needs of children, will in time lead to reductions in inequalities in behavior related to childhood delinquency – less absenteeism, less casual violence, less malicious fires, less vandalism. But there is no easy way to achieve this except through more funding: more funding for social services, police, teachers, council beautification programs, and activities for children. I don’t think any political party in the UK sees these things as essential state services anymore, and instead of funding these services they’re squeezing them, at the same time as they squeeze the general education budget and the welfare budget. While that happens, sensible people will take their children out of poor areas, making those areas more intense areas of community dislocation, reducing the likelihood that the existing social services will be successful in fighting the problems, and creating a vicious circle of social exclusion. I don’t see this vicious circle being stopped without concerted community effort.

    Reduce the social mobility hard scrabble

    Why is an education in Britain so crucial that parents will buy a new house in a new area just to ensure it? I think it’s because the middle class in the UK and US has become precarious, and a lot of people in that class are aware that their children risk falling out of it. Securing a position in that class is becoming a desperate struggle, with increasing numbers of losers who are falling out the bottom end of the class and into the increasing pool of poor and socially excluded. This is Ed Milliband’s “squeezed middle,” the middle class who in America and the UK have increasingly turned to debt and the housing “ladder” ponzi scheme to stay ahead of the Joneses. This race has to end, and there is a very simple way to end it: shift from a society focused on social mobility to one focused on social sustainability. I’ve written about this on my blog before: social mobility is a false promise of wealth and advancement, and a better alternative is to find ways to ensure that all jobs are socially sustainable. That is, find ways to ensure that even people at the “bottom” of the ladder can raise a family and live a halfway decent life, rather than having to scrabble up. In such a society education is still important, but because there is less urgency to achieve a ticket to success – because all careers are sufficient to support a happy life – education is not commoditized. Such societies exist, in Northern Europe and Japan, and to a certain extent Australia and Canada; and in these societies, people do not have to fight their neighbours to push them out of a precious school place. And if they do, the people pushed out will still grow up to a functioning life. The UK needs to move away from its competitive, inequalitarian social model towards these models.

    Engage corporate power

    A society built on social sustainability can only be built in two ways[3]: through a powerful system of taxes and transfers, or through a system in which corporations agree to some kind of social contract. Of course, in reality most such societies see a little of both, but I think a lot of thinkers in the anglosphere see social sustainability as only possible through the former, and I think they see it this way because they think corporations will not give up their wealth for a greater good, but need to be coerced into it. This is, I think, fundamentally defeatist. An alternative to a punitive system of taxes and transfers is a Japanese style system of shared corporate responsibility, in which companies pay their lowest staff a living wage, and don’t pay their highest staff stellar wages. Just because corporations won’t do these things of their own volition doesn’t mean they have to be forced to at gunpoint, but I think the natural assumption in the UK is that no one will give up anything without being forced to. That needs to change. In this respect I think Britain could learn a huge amount from Japan, which has a very strong social contract based around individual and corporate responsibility – something which I think a lot of British people don’t believe is possible.

    I think Britain’s inequality is heading into a very bad place, and it’s not going to be an option to ignore it for much longer. It’s cruel, counter-productive and embarrassing. The huge inequalities developing in education can’t be solved just by throwing money at the poorest schools, though this is an essential minimum: changes need to be made in the way that the government tackles social disunity in poor areas, and also in the way that British society views “upward mobility,” competition and social sustainability. But with proper attention on improving schools in the short term, and a shift in social and economic priorities in the long term, Britain can reverse its inexorable slide into a failed state. Can they do it? I’m not hopeful, but I think it can be done.

    —

    fn3: that I can see. I think a third option is colonialism and theft of other nations resources, but let’s put that side for now.

  • Hypocrisy, Idiocy and Online Porn

    Friday’s Guardian editorial featured a spit-flecked rant against internet pornography, starting and finishing with a demand to ban all of it. At the same time, the Daily Mail was putting up a strident demand for more efforts to police child porn. These articles are both profoundly wrong on facts and science, and breath-takingly hypocritical, not to mention steeped in conservative morality.

    These articles are inaccurate in both their description of the content of internet pornography (and pornography generally), and the science of its effects. In its first incarnation, the Guardian editorial claimed that all internet pornography was abusive and violent, a claim it updated within hours on the same day to reduce the focus of the article to “violent pornography.” Internet pornography covers a very, very wide gamut and is not necessarily violent or abusive at all, and characterizing it as such is ignorant at best, misleading at worst. The Daily Mail claimed that

    Experts say Google can combat abuse by paedophiles by simply popping up messages when users type in search terms such as ‘teen sex’ or ‘barely legal’, warning them that they may be about to access illegal material.

    There is almost zero chance of finding kiddy porn by those search terms, just a huge number of sites with young adults pretending to be teenagers, and any “expert” who thinks targeting these search terms is going to stop child porn is a fool. I note that the Daily Mail doesn’t bother identifying these so-called “experts.”

    These opinion pieces are even more misleading and disingenuous when they talk about the science of porn’s supposed effects. The Guardian provides a range of links to its claim that the science is under dispute and there may be good effects to porn, but is strangely lacking links to any evidence when it makes the ludicrous claim that

    there is strong evidence that at the very least it is addictive, can normalise violence, and at the same time diminishes sympathy for its victims

    The Daily Mail at least tries to give some science, when it cites a British scientist and says

    He pointed to a British study from 2007, which found a ‘substantial minority’ of those who watch child porn go on to attack children.

    David Middleton, of De Montfort University, analysed 213 online offenders and 191 paedophiles who had physically abused children.

    ‘The majority of people [who watch child porn] don’t appear to escalate their behaviour. But a substantial minority do,’ Professor Middleton said.

    ‘Various studies have looked at this and put it somewhere between one in six and one in ten.

    The problem with drawing the conclusion in the first line from the findings of this study is that it runs afoul of Bayes’s theorem. Unless the prevalence of child abuse is very high, the probability of abusing children after watching child porn is much, much lower than the one in six found in the study of child abusers, and the link can’t be properly described until we know how many people view child porn – a figure that is never going to be known, despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail to suggest that watching “barely legal” videos is somehow the same thing.

    The big problem with claims that internet porn or child porn desensitize criminals to their victims or encourage crime is that we don’t know the causal order. We know that Mark Bridger had a violent rape scene from a slasher film on loop the night before he went and abducted April Jones. But was this the cause, or the symptom, of his violent disorder? This is a thorny scientific question, and one that will be very hard to answer because of the difficulty of collecting data (and the woeful state of scientific research).

    The thing about these articles that really flabbergasts me though, and makes me angry, is their rank hypocrisy. They complain that internet porn is a big business and people have vested interests against stopping it, and that this needs to be fought, but on the morning that I read the Guardian article the newspaper was saturated with adverts for a Thai dating website that featured an upskirt shot of a barely legal Thai girl in pigtails and semi school uniform. What’s that trying to tell readers about the content of the women on that site? And isn’t the Guardian a strong anti-trafficking campaigner? What’s the subtext of Thai dating websites in the UK, if not trafficking? So the Guardian can demand action against internet porn on moral grounds, at the same time as it is broadcasting adverts with barely legal girls showing their crotch? Meanwhile, read any article on the Daily Mail website and you will see the disgustingly named “Femail” sidebar, that contains links to hundreds of articles salivating over young women’s bodies. Yesterday when I read the article on child porn there was a link to an article about a barely legal starlet which started with the words “no daddy’s girl anymore!” And isn’t this the newspaper that, more than any other, reduced the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister to an arse? A crime that all the British media participated in.

    The Daily Mail has a heavy investment in salivating over barely dressed women, putting up pictures of wardrobe malfunctions (i.e. upskirts and nipple shots), and reducing “it” girls to a collection of body parts. This is the moral equivalent of porn, just dressed up enough to escape the moral outrage associated with page 3 girls. Make no mistake: the Daily Mail is up to its eyeballs in fetishization of “barely legal” girls; and if the Guardian want to protect “vulnerable women” by banning things, they can start with the advertising on their own website.

    It’s also not clear what the Daily Mail hopes to gain by hounding google about child porn, which is already highly illegal and hard to get. The implication of the article is that there is lots of child porn out there, just a google search away. I think the only such “child porn” that anyone will find is actually legal pictures of legal age women pretending to be 16. Is that what the Daily Mail wants to ban? And why can’t they say so?

    The reality is that we have no evidence that porn is addictive, desensitizing or dangerous, and porn has been around a lot longer than the internet. There are strong reasons to be uncomfortable with the messages that modern children are getting from online porn, and to think that child porn is linked to child abuse, but the causal nature of these links is far from established. Also, let’s look at some things that are absent from the discussion of children’s safety and causative agents in these articles: there is no mention anywhere of parental supervision, of educating children about sexuality (rather than just sex education), or of ways of “protecting” children other than by banning porn. There is also no mention, anywhere, of the fact that Mark Bridger – who killed April Jones horribly and probably sexually abused her – had spent years working in abbatoirs, killing and dismembering animals. The evidence that cruelty to animals is linked with cruelty to adult women is just as strong as the evidence on child porn (i.e. weak and subject to huge assumptions) and banning abbatoirs is very easy to do. Why are we hearing no calls for this? Or at least, for careful monitoring of and intervention in abbatoir workers? Could it be, to quote the Guardian article, because the meat industry “is a global business” and one that the Guardian supports? Would that be hypocrisy?

    Like attacks on sex workers, calls to ban porn are one of the easiest and most successful moral scares for small-minded people to drum up. But they aren’t going to protect women and children, and certainly are going to be of very limited effect compared to the huge benefits to be derived from careful police work tracing and capturing child pornographers. Furthermore, there is almost no link between the mainstream porn industry and child porn, and targeting the former is simply going to divert resources from the latter. The British tabloid media are eager to show that they are strongly against child porn – so long as you don’t look too closely at the barely legal smut they’re peddling in their sidebars. Are these articles a distraction from the real issues in media representation of women? I’m sure they wouldn’t like you to ask …

  • The Moral Hazard of Near-system Space Colonization

    Imagine our planet sends out a colony ship, to colonize some distant planet. It’s flying at near light speed, but the journey is still expected to take about 300 years; time dilation effects on the ship mean shipboard it’s only, say, 150 years – 5 or 6 generations. While the ship is speeding to its destination, development continues on earth, and about 100 years after launch they discover faster-than-light travel. By the time the colony ship reaches its destination the planet has already been colonized, populated, developed and matured. The colonists arrive to a huge party, to discover their mission was pointless.

    If you were one of the middle-aged residents of that colony ship, would you be happy with the society that sent your great-grandparents out into the dark? You spent your entire youth and young adulthood in a tin can, for nothing except the promise that soon – in your lifetime – you would arrive at a new world and have the chance to make a unique contribution to human history. Instead, some bunch of cosseted earth-siders got their first, because they had the good fortune to be born 200 years later. Your contribution becomes a footnote, for which you waited 40 years in the freezing dark, drinking your own piss.

    Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion about the viability of colonizing interstellar space, started from one of John Quiggin’s economists’ assumptions. In amongst all the technical jiggery-pokery about giga-joules and the Great Filter, a few people have pointed out the moral bankruptcy of colony ships, based on the simple and obvious fact that the children are being born into a tin can, and have no way out. Thinking about this at the gym (which, presumably for weight purposes, a colony-ship wouldn’t have), it occurred to me that the moral issues associated with colonization are getting a lot more real than those discussed in the Crooked Timber post, and that we need to be aware of a serious risk of moral hazard, and of serious ethical challenges, in our lifetime. I speak, of course, of the Mars One private mission to Mars.

    Mars One and moral hazard

    Mars One aims to settle up to 40 humans on Mars by 2025, on a one way mission. The mission will be financed by some kind of Big Brother style TV show documenting the (no doubt fascinating) process of colonizing Mars. The settlement is intended to slowly develop, even to ultimately be able to expand using local materials – hopefully to even build a dome of some kind large enough to grow trees. But it is likely that for the foreseeable future it will be dependent on supplies from Earth, and that these supplies will be coming through the parent company – which is financing itself through the sale of research opportunities and the TV options. For a few years this seems like a pretty viable source of income, but people will get bored of the Mars TV, and anyway we don’t know what will happen to that parent company. This all raises the very real possibility that the company will fail, at which point those people on Mars are ostensibly going to be cut off from their supplies. There is also the possibility that they will breed out there in the Red, and that their children won’t be happy about their birth situation. Which raises two scenarios demanding attention from the people of earth:

    1. The company goes bust, and suddenly the task of supplying those 40+ people (80 if the adults have been breeding efficiently) falls on … who? A government will have to step in and bail out those people, because no one on Earth is going to tolerate the possibility that 40 or more people in the world’s first ever interstellar colony will starve to death because of a corporate bankruptcy. This project is too hope-y to fail. Once the company gets those shmucks onto Mars, the rest of the world is going to be basically strong-armed by morality and sentiment into backing the project no matter what. And given that currently there are only three groups – NASA, ESA and Russia – capable of getting stuff to Mars, this means it will be Europe, the USA and Russia that foot the bill if anything goes wrong. This is classic moral hazard, banker bailouts on an interstellar scale (if not financial magnitude): the private company raises a couple of billion bucks to sink into a stupid high-risk project and then, when it collapses, for reasons not predicted by the regulatory authorities, it can’t be allowed to go down.
    2. The company continues, and the settlement is a success, but the Children of Mars decide they would like to swim in the sea. They point out to their earthbound cousins that they didn’t ask to be born in a Mars colony and they would like to go home. If the original company is gone under this problem will be even more pronounced: not only is the ESA and NASA supplying the adults, but now the kids point out (quite reasonably) that they want out of their squalid little collection of domes. But nobody has the means to get them out. That wasn’t planned for. To get them out, space agencies will have to send the component parts for a rocket, then the fuel, and the folks on Mars will have to assemble that rocket, and with no option for test flights, the kids will hop on and come back to Earth. That’s a hideously expensive project, but someone on Earth is going to have to foot the bill and it’s going to be very hard to deny that responsibility. Of course, once the kids start going back, the adults will demand the same right. Which means that Earth has to either tell them – we’ll keep supplying you till you die, in a society with no children (who’s going to care for you?), or “sure, you made this decision 20 years ago when you were young and stupid, but we’ll bail you out now.” That’s classic moral hazard.

    You can see the way this will play out on earth, but in case 2) it is possible that the original inventors of the project will be dead. No one will even be around to be angry at. And, in a really visceral way, no one is going to be able to say no. Of course one can imagine other scenarios: imagine that the first settlement was made by the USA under Kennedy, and they were willing to spend 2% of their GDP on it; 40 years and a couple of financial crises later, with an increasingly oligarchical and corrupt government, suddenly Americans have a huge public debt and a weird resistance to growing more, their economy is declining, economic power is shifting east – but they still have to commit to sending supplies to That Stupid Colony. The kids of the new era might think they had been shackled with an unreasonable burden (“we could spend that money on Obamacare”) but of course, their choices about it are restricted to either abandoning the colony to starve, or paying some fantabulous amount of money to bring them back. This is hardly a fair choice to saddle your grandkids with. And of course, the original colonists are the people who made the stupid choice to go there, but even if you made them pay they wouldn’t be able to – no human being can work off a debt that size.

    Note also the costs of supply will escalate if there are unforeseen medical problems associated with low gravity: then money will have to be sunk into solving the problem, and not by the company that sent them up there. And who is going to educate the kids? That is usually a state responsibility, but no one is going to be setting up a school on Mars. A solution will have to be found based on some kind of school of the air.

    But there are other, unpleasant moral issues that will arise in the future of such a colony.

    The morality of forced interstellar stardom

    Mars One aim to pay for their project through some kind of television project, that will start from 2025. No doubt for a short time this will be hugely popular, but after a few years of watching people wandering around in a couple of inflatable domes the viewers are going to get tired. Revenues will decline. The company will have growing costs though, as the colony needs supplies to feed more members. What will the company do? It might be able to make up the shortfall in research services (“you want to investigate that crater? We’ll send a rover”) but there will be a limit to this, and of course as they try to sell more research services the price will go down. So then, naturally, they will begin to try to make the TV show more appealing. And how are they going to do that?

    Zero-G porn.

    Of course, for starters they’ll use the usual run of Big Brother-style offerings: stupid game shows, conflict, diary-room confessions, titillating shower scenes (well, maybe not, on Mars). But this will pale after a few years, and we all know what will happen next. Pressure will be brought to bear. Things will be done. People’s relationships will be laid bare. The failing relationships will be filmed; the young couples getting together; people’s most private moments. And the colonists will face an unpleasant choice: the person who supplies your water is telling you you need to make your tv show more “appealing” by doing X. Will you refuse? Probably not. And then, of course, there will be children in all this. Will they even be told about the cameras? At some point they will realize that all their earliest years of development were being filmed against their will by some arseholes a billion kms away, and watched by a million more arseholes. When they come of age, into their tiny domed town of 100 people, they’re probably going to have some righteous wrath saved up.

    What will they do? What should we do about what they’re going to do, what has been done to them? When these kids, who have never been to a prom (but have seen prom-date movies), who have never been to a nightclub (but have watched music videos), who have a choice of, like, 6 partners (but have watched a thousand rom-coms) demand to return to a land with trees and standing water, what are the people on earth going to say to them? “We enjoyed watching you grow up on a strange planet, but we can’t afford to have you back”?

    What does a riot look like, in a domed city made of plastic on a world with no atmosphere?

    There is also, of course, the endless possibility for horror in this settlement. Suppose a dome blows, and the usual emergency systems don’t work properly: the colony loses its farm section, and no matter how hard we try we can’t get the food to them in time because it’s physically impossible. There’ll be no eating grass roots and insects and watching children with swollen bellies but knowing a precious few will survive, like Ethiopia in the 1980s. Everyone will have the certain knowledge that they will die. Will we be forced to watch as they turn to cannibalism? Who will turn off the tv feed? What if they have a broadcast installation? Then the videos will be going up on youtube no matter what the company does, and anyone with a dish will be able to see the sordid terrible end of our first stellar mission. We can all imagine hundreds of similar scenarios, and all of them on film by design.

    Preparing for the moral hazard of Mars One

    It’s not looking likely that anyone is going to ban Mars One, but it seems to me that as a society we need to come up with a plan for what will happen as a result of it. This isn’t Jonestown or even Greenland in the 15th century: whether we as individuals agree with the project, once it is in place on Mars we will all be watching it and cheering it on. Which means that we need to recognize that there is a risk that things will go wrong, and future generations – or us, in 30 years time – will have to bail out at enormous cost a project which was marginal from the beginning. I think governments need to find a way to prepare for that, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the first step in that preparation is to make Mars One think about the future. At the very least, some of the capital they raise needs to be put aside against eventualities. Some possible uses for a Mars wealth fund include:

    1. Simple investment, to ensure that by the time things go wrong there is a stock of money available to finance special projects
    2. Trust funds for the kids. They’re going to want stuff, and we’re going to need to provide it, so we should prepare
    3. Funding directly to government-run space research projects, especially projects for deep space propulsion and Mars exploration. If the funds are used to develop alternative ways of getting to and living on Mars, it improves the options for those people in the future
    4. Contingency funds for if the Mars population grows too fast
    5. Profits could be invested in sending extra supplies to Mars, to build redundancy and stockpiles

    With mechanisms like this in place, bailouts will be less costly, and there will be insurance against risk.

    Laws also need to be passed. Governments need to look very carefully at the contracts these colonists are signing, and add clauses about the rights of colonists to refuse new entertainment demands, and the way that those contracts might extend (or be inferred to extend) to children. Anything involving porn or cam-girl type stuff needs to be carefully discussed. Some kind of dispute resolution system is going to be necessary, possibly even independent oversight. Imagine, for example, that a Mars colonist is being pressured to do some semi-nude stuff, but doesn’t want to: what options does he have to resolve that? What if the company refuses him access to a workplace rights lawyer? The company at the very least should be forced to establish an independent communications system, guaranteed by government, so that people on Mars can have a reliable and independent way to contact friends, relatives and conciliation bodies. Otherwise they will essentially be slaves.

    I don’t think any of this has been considered.

    Are Mars One taking the piss?

    I’m noting that there is an application fee of between $5 and $75 for potential Martians, and they are hoping to recruit a million applicants. If the Mars One people are planning to fold before the project is initiated they will make a lot of money. It seems like a lot of aspects of this project are going to run on a very tight deadline, and haven’t been thought through. Is it possible that the whole thing is a get-rich-quick scheme that is never going to see reality? It seems very possible to me. But if not, we as a society need to be thinking very carefully about what we want to tolerate up there, and how we’re going to manage the ethical challenges and moral hazards of a private initiative to colonize Mars.

  • The Strange Economy of Misogyny in “Grimdark” Fantasy: Richard Morgan’s Steel Remains

    Every girl wants some ...
    Every girl wants some …

    While I was in Greece working for two weeks I had no internet access, something of a catastrophe for my millions of fans but a strange chance to chill out for me[1]. Fortunately I had downloaded a couple of books to my kindle before I left[2] so I had plenty to occupy me, and first on my list was the Richard Morgan series The Steel Remains and The Cold Commands. In this post I will give a brief review of the two books, but what I’m really interested in with these books is the subtext, and the underlying implications of the world structure of the sub-genre they are derived from.

    I have previously read and reviewed Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk/space opera cross-over novels, Altered Carbon and Woken Furies, both of which I really enjoyed for dubious reasons. Richard Morgan’s two new novels are fantasies rather than science fiction, and are also a departure from his previous style in that they are clearly intended to be “grimdark,” that new style of fantasy realism that embraces violence, rape and brutality but, most especially, rape. In his sci fi, Morgan kept the sexual violence repressed and simmering on the edge of the story: sure, there were snuff movie makers and some nasty criminal undergrounds, but they were just that – some kind of tiny minority who traded cruelty to a tiny minority. In The Steel Remains series, Morgan has moved the sexual violence to the centre of the story, along with a heavy dose of brutality, and embraced all the lowest aspects of grimdark. I have previously commented critically on his justification for doing this, and also on the general trend towards misogyny and violence in stories like A Game of Thrones, so I entered these two novels with very mixed views on what to expect.

    First of all, I enjoyed these books for all the same reasons I enjoyed his previous works. In their broad outline they haven’t really deviated much from the basic themes of Altered Carbon. The story features on some elite soldiers who are veterans of a great war to save civilization. The war was brutal and they are scarred from it; but even more by the the cruelties they were forced to commit when they were deployed to put down civil revolts near the end of the war. They have emerged as scarred survivors with a very short fuse and a strong drive to hurt bullies and criminals, largely to try and rectify their own past complicity in horrible crimes. This means we get to see a healthy dose of bully-smashing, which I always find thoroughly enjoyable: child rapists, murderers, slavers, torturers and bastards get all manner of cruel and just desserts in this story, and it’s really hard to feel any pity for them. The world they’re in shows no shortage of such people, and in fact if our heroes were to set out on a mission to do in every bully and cruel bastard on the planet, they would end up very lonely. The world is divided into two main countries, a northern and southern empire that are basically equivalent to Europe and Asia Minor: the southern continent is clearly meant to be Muslim. One of our heroes is a gay son of a very privileged family, in a world where homosexuality is a deep sin; another is an outlander from horse tribes generally seen as barbarians. The main character (the gay man) is a picture in repressed rage, basically a shirt-lifting version of Kovacs from Altered Carbon. There’s a lot to like in watching these two men dispense with anyone who offends their sense of rightness which is, in general, the same as the reader’s. I think this means they are relatively (for fantasy) deep and complex characters, and generally in the right in a degraded and mediaeval kind of way. Unfortunately the story is not as tight as in his previous works: there are parts that don’t make sense and at times it feels like I missed a book, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Some sections, particularly those set in the faerie world, just don’t make any sense to me. There’s also a strong deus ex machina running through the whole latter part of the story, with one of the characters basically getting out of any situation through his role as vessel for some ancient darkness, the role of which is not explained. That aspect of the novels is pretty shit, actually, and I was disappointed with those elements of the story. So, although the novels retain some aspects of Richard Morgan’s best works, they represent both a structural and moral degeneration from his previous highs.

    Which brings us to the issue of the grimdark. If the moral universe in which our heroes operate were to be characterized in two easy themes, it would be: every man rapes, and the strong can kill with impunity. This is grimdark, you see. At the time the story is set, the northern kingdom has instituted a new system of debt slavery, in which basically anyone who cannot pay a debt can be sold, along with their family, into permanent and brutal slavery. That is, if your neighbour goes underwater on their mortgage, you can buy them, and then rape them with impunity – and even pay for them to be sent to a special training school which will somehow (probably, the implication is, through rape and violence) turn them into willing sex slaves.

    Furthermore, as far as I could tell in this world, free women seem to be divided into only two types of person: noblewomen and sex workers (who of course are routinely referred to as “whores,” a noun which in this story basically replaces “woman” in the narrative flow). The men could fill more roles, but no matter what they did, unless they were very very high in society, our heroes could murder them in the street without paying any penalty. It appears that in this world of grimdark, slaughtering people who spill your beer is pretty standard practice. I guess beer is expensive.

    The implications of these setting elements are obvious and abhorrent. What kind of world can pass a law to enslave ordinary people’s neighbours? How is that going to work? Sure, one of our heroes is employed to rescue a girl from his extended family who is sold into this situation, but we’re somehow meant to believe that they are the first and only family to decide to take independent action against slavery, and that the rest of the world is just going along with it. This seems hardly credible. There is not, in general, any particular group targeted for exclusion and enslavement, and no sense that “it won’t happen to me.” Just ordinary families getting swept up in slavery because they went into debt. This scenario is just impossible to credit, even in a mediaeval dictatorship. Who would tolerate this? How long would it last before people started rebelling? Especially in a world where heroes can kill ordinary men with impunity, it seems pretty likely that a village would scrape up the money to pay a few mercenaries to go and liberate their enslaved members. It seems far less likely that they would buy those enslaved members and then subject them to the full cruelties of lifelong slavery. “Hi Bob, yes, I always enjoyed chatting with you at the pub, but from now on I own your family because you didn’t pay the beer tab, so I’m going to rape your wife and daughter every day.” Doesn’t figure, does it? But the society of these novels seems to just go along with it, as if they had a missing moral bone … which they certainly seem to lack when it comes to prostitution and murder.

    There are prostitutes – sorry, “whores” – everywhere in this story. In one notable scene, our hero is stalking through some random street and hears a prostitute – sorry, a “whore” – busily sucking off a sailor in an alley, then notices a whole queue of sailors waiting for her services. This is … phenomenally weird. Everywhere we turn there are “whores,” but these men have to queue up; or is it the case that demand outstrips supply? In which case how can these sailors afford a blow job, and why are there “whores” everywhere we look? In this story “whores” serve as a kind of scenery or background the way trees, birds and carriages might be in a more standard story. Whereas in the Belgariad our heroes would be leaning against a wall and an ale cart or a bird seller might walk by, in this world it’s always a perfumed “whore,” who trails behind her (in a particularly odious moment of poor writing) “the smell of used woman.” Scanning the world Morgan lays out for us, there seem to be no female shop-keepers, apiarists, porters or grocers: just noblewoman and “whores.” And there are an awful lot of them, too. Also, just as in A Game of Thrones, these “whores” appear to be completely expendable, so if you have ever wondered what it’s like to kill a girl, you just hire one of those expendable “whore” things that are on every street corner, and no one will care if you do her in horribly. How does such a world come about, especially when there is a huge stock of slaves available to be used however one sees fit? The only way I can see this working is if there is a massive gender imbalance, but the female majority hasn’t yet figured out it can gang up and take over just from sheer weight of numbers. It’s just economically and politically weird. It seems, for example, that men care about their daughters – so how are they tolerating a world where every second daughter grows up to become an expendable “whore”? The observable nature of the world seems to run repeatedly up against the moral framework, in a way that ultimately cannot be reconciled.

    The same applies with the weird phenomenon of people being able to murder each other with impunity, and also the cold-blooded way that men routinely dispose of all injured opponents by killing them. No world that works this way would stay civilized, and typically these kinds of extra-legal killings have only been possible in special places or at special times. The degree of casual murder on display in this story would be out of place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria or modern Afghanistan (as, for that matter, would the degree of misogynist violence). Those places were devastated war-zones under occupation; we’re meant to believe that this world is a functioning and stable society, bar a little bit of war recovery.

    There is no place and time in history that has managed to stay civilized and maintain this degree of sexual and non-sexual violence. The setting is impossible, unless we are to imagine that the obviously basically human societies being portrayed are fundamentally amoral and alien, which they’re clearly not meant to be. It’s as if Morgan wanted to portray the moral exigencies of men trapped in total war (which is certainly the implication of his self-exculpatory musings linked to above) but couldn’t be bothered stepping outside the standard fantasy setting – as if it was too much effort to create the physical backdrop for the moral story. And who would want to write this moral story anyway?

    I think this is a problem with “grimdark” generally: they want to write a world where men have unparalleled rights over and access to women, but they want to imagine a world where women can still walk the streets freely; they want men to be able to kill bullies without punishment, but they want a world where men still drink together with strangers in pubs. The reality is that these worlds don’t coincide, and the failure of the grimdark authors to realize this makes me think that they’re actually just using a cheap, knock-off fantasy setting to work through their unresolved adolescent issues: they want to get back at all the women who rejected them and all the men who bullied them, but they haven’t the imagination to construct a setting where this is possible; so they just dial our assumptions about the barbarity of mediaeval worlds up to 11, and get to work on the non-consensual sex. To me, this is lazy and weak world creation, and yet another example of how over the past 30 years the fantasy genre has consistently failed to live up to its transformative and speculative potential[3]. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that, as the nerds of the 80s grow into the peak of their spending power, and also start to experience their mid-life crises, their fiction will begin to be dominated by stories that appeal to their unresolved adolescent angst. But if it’s going to do that, I would prefer that it would at least do so in a slightly more mature and creative way than “grimdark” has so far managed to present me with. I guess I was hoping for too much …

    —
    fn1: That’s a lie actually, I was very angry about it.
    fn2: Kindles are worth their weight in gold when you are travelling

    fn3: Actually the soft-porn bdsm series Gor from the 70s(?) did this. In that story the author constructed a moral framework in which women fundamentally want to be used by men, and are turned on by male power. Although superficially based on capture and forced enslavement, willing were actually consenting to their own slavery, thus didn’t rebel and could be turned into willing sex slaves. Whether or not you think this is horrible (I don’t; I think it’s just porn) it is, at least, an attempt to make the moral underpinnings of the story match the actions of the protagonists. It’s an attempt to explore what the world would be like (from a pornographic perspective) if humans were morally different to how we actually are. Grimdark doesn’t bother with this speculation: it just rapes people[4].

    fn4: that sentence sounds clumsy if it ends with the word “women,” but let’s be clear about this: by and large, grimdark doesn’t rape men (or if it does, they are generally deserving of it). It rapes women. Over and over again.

  • Athenian Punk Rockers Meet 300!

    Outside the city ...
    Outside the city …

    I am finally away from my Greek Island and the “five star” resort with no internet access, so I am able to resume blogging. Yesterday evening I arrived in Athens for a three day stay, and as is my wont in a new city, the first thing I did was go out for a wander. My hotel has a rooftop bar with a view direct to the acropolis, which is pretty amazing, and is on the temple slopes so it’s a short walk to the old town. Walking through the old town one can catch regular glimpses of the acropolis from the streets, and also experience the pleasures of a summer night in the city. The streets were heaving with people, all out to enjoy the evening air. All the restaurants in Greece seem to be open to the sky, and alfresco dining is the norm, so everywhere you look people are enjoying eating under the stars. I passed a Suleimanese punch-and-judy show, where the puppets are dressed in Persian-style pantaloons and curled hats (but still beating each other) and the horde of gathered children scream at the villain in Greek. I passed a concert being held in an old temple ruin, all lit up with red spotlights. Every square was full of people sitting chatting and drinking; the main square was absolutely heaving with young people in groups just enjoying the night air. The weather was dry and warm, the temperature perfect, the sky a million miles away and clear and the whole balmy evening cupped within the bowl of the distant mountains, with the Acropolis the gleaming jewel set in the middle of that frame, seen occasionally between buildings and lit up against the night sky.

    I found a stylish open restaurant in the old town, that served excellent food and had a massively camp Swiss host. They serve a chicken cooked whole inside a loaf of bread and cut up on your plate for you, and an exquisite lemon-flavoured pumpkin soup garnished with little cthulhu-esque octopuslets. I didn’t have my camera with me so didn’t order the cockerel; I may return to experience this strangeness this evening. I have to say, the way Greek people use lemons in their cooking – and the predominance of citrus throughout their cuisine – is excellent and commendable.

    After dinner I wandered a little more, enjoying the chaos and light-heartedness of the city. I found myself in the area just west of the Syntagma square, which is supposedy full of bars and night clubs, and in front of a rock bar called Six Dogs. They were hosting an American band called The Shrine, some sort of classic heavy rock outfit that I’ve never heard of, so in I went, for my first experience of Greek punk/metal fans.

    What is on your playlist, Archilokos?
    What is on your playlist, Archilokos?

    The band was average, I have to say, and somewhat hamstrung by the fact that their singer has exactly the same accent as the weird zoo-owner from the Mighty Boosh. They were a pacey, hard rocking classic metal outfit with a bit of skate-punk overtone, so pretty likeable overall. The crowd, however, were fascinating. First of all they were really lively and cheerful, bouncing around with way more energy than the band deserved, and managing to do spontaneous crowd-surfing efforts even though there were only about 50 of them. This meant that whenever one of their number wanted to go up, he had to get the others to lift him, and then a group of 10 or 15 fans would go charging around the room in a little chaotic loop, carrying the surfer aloft, and then drop him. It’s not quite lollapalooza, is it? But they were really into it. But the best thing about them was the way they looked so … classical.

    I think every second rocker in the crowd was basically a classical Greek stereotype, come to life then covered in tattoos and stuffed into a pair of skate-punk shorts and a band t-shirt. They all had the broad shoulders and narrow waste of the classic Greek pottery or statues, and that particular style of Greek beard that you see in the classic pictures: the one that is cropped close to the skin along the jaw and near the ears, but extends to a block or point out from the chin, and merges in a perfect gradient with short-cropped hair. It works perfectly with the classical Greek profile of aquiline nose and strong jaw. The rockers also had the same classical hair style, that is neatly cropped at the back but then a little unruly or longer and forward-pointing near the front.

    It was like moshing with the guys from 300, if they had bothered to put on t-shirts. It was one of those classic moments, like when a French waiter pulls a 110% expressive face, or a German man says very precisely about one of his most memorable experiences, “it was in general perfect” with German precision, or a Japanese person bows on the phone – one of those moments where the person you are talking to is subconsciously channelling a million years of cultural history and to the rest of the world they’re a stereotype of fantastic proportions, but to them it is so completely normal that they would never realize they were doing it, even if you could play them a video of the moment. So it was that these Greek rockers were moshing not to the tune of an ordinary Venice Beach band, but to a couple of thousand years of classical Greek history. The Pelopennese war through hardcore, or something. I think I will dub this style of Greek counter-culture “300-core.” I hope to see more of it as I wander this city of romance and history!

  • Rhodes, Beppu, Tourism and Decline

    Yesterday I arrived in Rhodes, Greece on a two week work-related trip. Rhodes is a very nice spot, and Greece generally excellent, after a day here I can recommend it to anyone looking for a warm, pleasant and friendly place to spend a little time. And really, what could be a better way to spend two weeks of work time than on a Greek island? However, as soon as I arrived in Rhodes I was struck by a hint of something going wrong in Greece, something which I think may not be the fault of ordinary Greek people, and which maybe serves as a harbinger of all of Europe’s fate. I thought I’d blog on my first impressions of Greece, with perhaps a little added opinionating about how Greece’s economic problems are presented by the pro-austerity gang who are in the ascendant in America and Europe. I’ve only been here a day so nothing I say is even worth of elevation to the level of considered opinion; it’s just idle musings on my first impressions of one (very rural) part of Greece.

    Before I came I had visions of the islands from Porco Rosso, and pretty much everything else I knew about Greece I got from Gerald Durrell and sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, so I think it’s safe to say that I was arriving here with a pretty blank slate as far as cultural expectations go. However, Greece has been in the news a bit recently, with its economic woes being seen as a barometer for the trouble spreading over all of Europe. So I was interested, given my limited knowledge of life in Greece, to see how the land of capricious gods compares with the scary stories and hype that are broadcast across the western print media.

    The first thing that I have to say is that everyone I have met (except the scary tattooed guy on the plane) has been friendly and warm, and embarrassingly multilingual. The food is excellent and the weather perfect – the only noticeable drawback of May weather in Greece appears to be that it is bone dry, and I really don’t know where the water for the hotel pool is coming from – I have seen precious little evidence of any water that isn’t in the sea. And there is a lot of sea, cobalt blue and amazingly pure. But then, I am on an Island… and the sea wasn’t very kind to me. Within minutes of dipping my toe in, I was stung by something.

    However, as soon as I arrived in Greece I noticed a kind of neglect and decay that I really wasn’t expecting from a European nation. I don’t think it’s new either, and I have a suspicion that what I see hereabouts has very little to do with the global financial crisis and its effects on Greece. I think it’s part of an older, deeper malaise that is moving through all of Europe and just happens to have affected Greece first. Amongst the countries I’m familiar with, I think it will hit Britain next (or already has). What I see in Greece makes me think of many of the things I see in Britain, only without the patina of aggressive British defensiveness, and with sunshine.

    This decay was obvious at the airport, which is a kind of cute but crumbling 70s relic, with holes in the ceiling through which the wiring can be seen, those low and oppressive ceilings so common in 70s public architecture, and a barely functioning arrivals lounge – there is no passport control, but it hardly matters anyway because the doors for non-EU passport holders are broken and don’t open. Once you’re outside that and out into the sunshine, you’re greeted immediately by a site that is quite rare in most of the rest of Western Europe and certainly very rare in Japan or Australia: a horde of extremely old passenger cars. They’re tiny, dusty relics from before the era of pollution controls – 80s and early 90s vehicles mostly, and battered, obviously heavily used. The taxis are all new Mercedes, but ordinary passenger vehicles are often much older than I am used to seeing in Europe. The city bus is also very old and battered, the seats obviously replaced many times and the shell battered and scuffed.

    The next thing I noticed, once in my taxi, was how overgrown and neglected the countryside looks. Thick, wild shrub and grasses that were obviously untended reached right up to the roads (which are also in quite bad shape), and there was rubbish everywhere. It doesn’t appear that any effort has been made to maintain the unused land near roads and public facilities, and it’s turned into a kind of wasteland. I don’t think this the Greek government, local city authorities, or residents intend to let the countryside go wild, and in a dry and fire-prone area like Greece it’s probably not a very good idea to allow wild shrub to encroach on roads to the extent that they do here. I think this is neglect, and this sense is only enhanced by the state of the buildings I saw on my journeys through Rhodes.

    Rhodes is littered with abandoned, half-finished buildings, and also with the deserted shells of abandoned businesses – especially hotels. Many of these buildings are obviously in the early stages of construction, and obviously no one is coming back to them. Some appear to have been abandoned a long time ago, not as far as I can tell during Greece’s most recent economic problems. This reminded me of Beppu, which is also a town undergoing a collapse in tourism revenue, and also has abandoned hotels and pachinko parlours scattered across the urban landscape – as well as areas of overgrown landscape that should be (and probably once was) carefully tended. It’s as if the Greek municipal authorities don’t really care about the impression that their town gives when people first arrive, or don’t have the money to do anything about it, or both.

    We hear much about the infamous Greek government’s “profligate” spending and taxing policies, but looking around Rhodes I don’t see much evidence that ordinary Greek tax-payers are getting much bang for their buck. Whatever municipal services Greece provides don’t seem to be showing up in the most obvious and immediate way – rubbish disposal and parks management. I suspect that there are many Greeks who observe the same thing, and wonder why they’re suddenly having to tighten their belts when they don’t get much in the way of visible public services to start with.

    I think Rhodes has in common with Beppu a long-term collapse in its main industry – tourism. This isn’t a novel, post-GFC phenomenon, but is a long-term, sustained trend that isn’t going away and reflects a brutal reality for peripheral tourism towns in developed nations. These towns grew during the boom eras of population growth and tourism, before globalizaion, and in the period when the working class of the developed world had relative purchasing power and free time. These factors combined meant that it was easy for these towns to sustain a huge tourist industry, and areas like Beppu or Rhodes grew rapidly on tourist money. But after the purchasing power of the working and middle classes began to decline, and as Asia developed, I think these tourist towns began to run into trouble. They had to compete with Asian countries for tourists, but comparatively they aren’t a great deal cheaper – travelling to Beppu, for example, costs a Japanese worker only half as much as a trip to Thailand or Cambodia, but hotels cost more. I suspect the same is true for Europeans, who now have options in Eastern Europe (places like Latvia and Croatia) for short trips, and Asia for longer trips. In such a situation, former tourist towns have to either adapt and find new industries, or they will become fading remnants. Beppu may adapt or may fade, depending on the success of its new university; but Beppu has easy road and rail connections with population centres like Kokura and Fukuoka that have huge industrial bases and thriving economies. Rhodes is an island in a country that doesn’t have a large industrial base to start with. What is it going to do?

    This is another example of how the GFC may be a symptom of a bigger economic shift, and of western nations’ inability to find a solution to that shift. Industry and economic growth is heading East, and with the development of the East huge sections of traditional western economic activity are being hollowed out. In response to this the west has tried to sustain its economic growth through bubbles, and each successive collapse has simply destroyed more jobs. Greece’s economic problems aren’t solely caused by the GFC, which is simply a symptom of the desperate measures western economic policy-makers have taken to try to deal with the loss of real economic power. The result of this long-term economic decline in Rhodes is a countryside festooned with abandoned, half-finished buildings and sad, empty hotels. The same phenomenon is hitting the UK now, but instead of too many buildings unfinished, the UK has too few buildings, and too many ordinary people up to their eyeballs in debt trying to keep hold of the home they have. They do have the empty businesses though, as whole towns lose their retail sectors and corporate lending dries up.

    I’ve got no idea what western policy-makers should do to stave off this change. I don’t know if they can, but I think that “wait for Asia to collapse” is not a policy option, and neither is it wise to seek new and innovative ways to reinflate the housing bubble. I think that maybe they need to revitalize industry policy: pick things they’re good at and make them work. Spend taxpayer money on finding ways to make stuff again. Industry policy is what made Japan, Korea and Thailand successful, and the fruit of that policy can be seen in their theft of western business. But fighting off Asia is going to mean a return to deficit spending, an acceptance of government debt, and a recognition that the market doesn’t just pick winners: it strangles losers. And currently, Europe and the USA are looking like the losers. Rhodes is the sign of things to come, and I think the UK is next if they can’t begin to reflect on the underlying causes of the GFC, and the best way of coming to terms with the new world order.

  • In Praise of Excel

    Recently a major economics paper was found to contain basic excel errors, among other problems, and an amusing storm of controversy is growing around the paper. The controversy arises because the paper was apparently quite influential in promoting the most recent round of austerity politics in the western world, and the authors themselves used it actively in this way. The authors even managed to find a magic number – 90% – at which government debt (as a proportion of GDP) throttles growth, a threshold that many small government activists and “sustainable deficit” types have been seeking for years. It’s like manna from heaven!

    There’s been a lot of hilarity arising from this, about how woeful the economics field is and about how vulnerable policy-makers on crucial issues like government spending can be to even quite terrible research that supports their agenda. But there has also been some criticism on statistics and academic blogs about the use of excel for advanced analysis, and what a bad idea it is. Andrew Gelman has a thread debating how terrible excel is as a computational tool, and Crooked Timber has a post (with excellent graphic!) expressing incredulity that anyone would do advanced stats in excel. While I agree in general, I feel an urgent need to jump to the defense of MS Excel.

    MS Excel is great. It’s much, much more convenient than a calculator, and it can be used to do quite complex calculations (as in sums and multiplications) in multiple directions that would take ages on a calculator. On most computers now the calculator is buried or, if you’re a windows user, crap, and if you need anything more than addition it’s much more convenient to drag out excel. Sure it takes a moment to load compared to your calculator function, but it is so much easier to compare numbers, to calculate exponents and logs, and to present simple results in excel than in a calculator. As a simple case in point: if you get regression coefficients from Stata you can copy and paste them into excel and exponentiate to get relative risks, etc.; then you copy the formulas below, run a new regression model (with, e.g. random effects that weren’t in the previous one) and paste the results to enable you to compare between models quickly and easily. Similarly, if you’re checking a paper to see if they calculated odds ratios or relative risks, you can chuck those numbers into excel and do the comparisons with the contingency table right there in front of you. It offers a simple, graphically convenient way to visualize numbers. This is especially useful when the task you’re approaching is conceptually very simple (like a contingency table) but takes a bit of time to do on a hand calculator, and takes a bit of time to convert to the file formats required in Stata or R. In the time it takes me to think about how to structure the problem, input four lines of data to R, and then write the code to calculate the odds ratios, I can do the whole thing in excel, have the contingency table in front of me to check I’ve made no transcription errors from the paper, and fiddle quickly with changing numbers.

    If you’re doing cost-effectiveness analysis in TreeAge (shudder) or R, excel is a really useful tool both for outputting results to something that is vaguely attractive to use, and for doing ballpark calculations to check that your models are behaving reasonably. This is especially useful if you’re doing stochastic Markov models, that can take hours or days to run in TreeAge, because you can’t trust software like that to give you the correct answer if you try to treat your stochastic model as a simple decision tree (because of the way that TreeAge faffs around with probability distributions, which is non-intuitive). Make a few simple assumptions, and you can do approximate calculations yourself in excel, and fiddle with key numbers – cohort size or a few different parameters – and see what effect they have.

    Recently I was helping someone with survival analysis and she was concerned that her definition of time to drop out was affecting her results. She conducted a sensitivity analysis in Stata to see what effect it was having, and although with correct programming she could have produced all the material she needed in Stata, the time it takes to do this and debug your code can be time-consuming if you aren’t a natural. It’s much easier with modern machines to just run the regression 10 times with different values of drop-out time and plot the output hazard ratios in excel.

    So, I think excel is a very useful tool for advanced modeling, precisely because of its ease of use and its natural, intuitive feel – the properties that recent excel bashers claim make it such a terrible device. While I definitely think it should not be used for advanced models themselves, I find it a hugely valuable addition to the model-building process. Reproducible code and standardized tools are essential for publishable work, but unless you are one of those people who never does any fiddling in the background to work out what’s going on in your model, excel will turn out to be your go-to tool for a wide range of support tasks.

    In any case, the bigger problem with Rogoff and Reinhart’s work was not the excel error. Even if they had got the excel code right, their results would still have been wrong because their modeling method was absolutely appalling, and should never have seen the light of day, even at a conference. The main flaws in their work were twofold:

    • They binned years together, essentially giving different years different weights in the final model
    • They stripped the years out of their time series context, so crucial information contained in the time ordering of deficits and growth was lost

    I think the second flaw is the most specifically terrible. By using this method they essentially guaranteed that they would be unable to show that Keynesian policies work, and they stripped the cause-effect relationship from all data collected in the Keynesian era (which lasted from the start of their data series to about 1970). In the Keynesian era, we would expect to see a sequence in which deficit increases follow negative growth, so unless the negative growth periods are very short and random, Reinhart and Rogoff’s method guarantees that this looks like an association between negative growth and higher deficits. If Keynesian policies actually work, then we would subsequently see an increase in growth and a reduction in deficits – something that by design in Reinhart and Rogoff’s model would be used to drive the conclusion that higher debt causes lower growth.

    In short, no matter what package they used, and no matter how sophisticated and reproducible their methods, Reinhart and Rogoff’s study was designed[1] to show the effect it did. The correct way to analyze this data was through the presentation of time series data, probably analyzing using generalized least squares with a random effect for country, or something similar. Using annual data I think it would probably be impossible to show the relationship between debt and growth clearly, because recessions can happen within a year. But you could probably achieve better, more robust results in excel using proper time series data than you could get in R from Reinhart and Rogoff’s original method.

    The problem here was the operator, not the machine – something which should always be remembered in statistics!

    —-

    fn1: I use the term “was designed” here without any intention to imply malfeasance on the part of the authors. It’s a passive “was designed”.

  • Top of the Lake: Crime and Secrets at the Edge of the World

    Going feral at the ends of the earth
    Going feral at the ends of the earth

    Top of the Lake is a seven part television series about misogyny and violence, set at the southern tip of New Zealand. It was directed by Jane Campion, director of the Piano, another movie about misogyny and violence in New Zealand that was very well received when it was released. In her return to New Zealand for this show, Campion has moved her setting from the lush fern forests of the North Island to the desolate peaks and wilderness of the far South Island, and has skipped in time from the colonial era to the modern – though looking at the behavior of the protagonists in this movie, it’s hard to find much of a civilizing influence of modernity.

    The basic story of Top of the Lake is an apparently straightforward investigation of child abuse. A 12 year old girl called Tui (pictured) is pregnant and a cop from Sydney called Robin is brought in to investigate the case. The story is set in the fictitious town of Laketop, near Queenstown. Robin grew up in this town but moved to Australia to work, and has returned to Laketop temporarily because her mother has cancer, so she’s ideally placed to investigate the crime. Unfortunately, things don’t proceed simply: Tui is the daughter of a singularly malicious and nasty man, Matt Mitcham, who is a Scottish migrant and the dodgiest thug you’ve ever seen (well, at least until you meet some of his associates in episode 5). He is singularly unhelpful in the case, and Tui is also being very unhelpful – it’s not clear if she even understands what has happened to her, and soon after the show starts she disappears. Furthermore, Robin has her own dark history in Laketop, and pretty much every other person you meet is entangled in something dark and horrible: wherever you turn you see a suspect or their conspirator, and it’s really hard to believe that this town is not deeply enmired in misogyny, sexual violence and repression. Through all of this, Robin is trying to find and help Tui, and the rest of the town are taking a singularly colonial-era and feral approach to Tui’s problems, with almost no one seeming to be aware that it’s dangerous for a 12 year old girl to be pregnant, and dangerous for her rapist to be at large.

    Campion’s exploration of the setting really helps to give this impression of a town that hasn’t worked out what modernity is, or updated its attitudes towards women accordingly. Queenstown is a famous tourist town and playground of the rich and famous, but we never see that side of the area: as far as we can tell, Laketop is a rundown and wild place in the middle of nowhere, a little cluster of huts hanging off of freezing, windy mountains and staring out at nothing. The children are wild, playing in canoes and on horses, keeping bones in their homes and wandering wild over the hills and forests, and Tui herself is feral to the point of being fey. The adults are also wild, but in a much nastier and ferocious way. Matt Mitcham, his family and associates cast a long shadow over the town, and he is a violent, sinister presence, completely unreformed and often more like a force of nature than a human. His direct children are ill-mannered, stupid thugs; another of his sons lives in a tent by the lake and spent eight years in a Thai prison; Tui is his daughter by a different woman, and there are children in his house who he doesn’t even really seem to know. The people of the town ride horses and hunt, and Mitcham’s associates use severed deer’s heads on poles as an emblem. The police in the town have a very vague understanding of what crime is or what their purpose is as police. The chief of the police, Al – played with incredible subtlety by David Wenham – alternates between being an urbane and intelligent modern policeman and a quietly dangerous, selfish and very sinister figure. The only apparently “normal” people in this show are a group of women from America and Australia who have formed a commune by the side of the lake, but these women are just as touched as the rest of the place: they live in shipping containers on the edge of the lake, they’re all deeply damaged in some way, and their guru GJ is a remote, harsh and judgmental woman who doesn’t appear to have any kind feelings for her charges at all – and these women also don’t seem to have any conception of the importance of protecting Tui or finding out who raped her. All these people are presented against the backdrop of a wild, silent and unforgiving landscape, cold and windy and desolate but stunningly beautiful, that acts as a perfect counterpoise for the wild, strange character of the people we meet.

    Just as in The Piano, Campion uses the landscape to stunning effect as a backdrop to the story. It is beautifully filmed and presented, and in our various excursions to the top of the lake and the mountains beyond it we lose all sense that we are in the modern era. Watching the show makes you feel a kind of sympathetic chill as if you were experiencing the wind and rain and cold of the South Island yourself, but it’s impossible not to be amazed by the harsh beauty of the place. In The Piano, the wilderness offered a lush and sensual backdrop to the corrupted sexuality of the main protagonists; in Top of the Lake the chill, serene lake and cold, distant mountains reflect perfectly the sinister secrets of the town and the impenetrable wildness of the town’s main victim, Tui.

    The acting in this television series is also exemplary. Robin is played with fine skill by Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men, who does a brilliant job of portraying her human vulnerability and professional strength, as well as her bravery in the face of a town that seems determined to destroy her. Her slow unraveling over the course of the story is brilliantly done. David Wenham gives a master class in his potrayal of the chief policeman, Al, whose motives and allegiances are extremely suspicious, and the other major characters – Johnno and Matt Mitcham and his daughter Tui – are all perfectly cast.

    The story is fairly simple and well told, without a real twist but with just enough red herrings and dead ends in its development that you aren’t sure you are right about the key points until the very end, and even then a few things are not fully resolved. It’s essentially a story about corruption and the extent to which a few evil men’s influence can completely corrupt a small community, and although it comes to the resolution one would hope for once one knew the facts, it remains deeply disturbing. It’s even more disturbing if anywhere in New Zealand is actually like the place depicted. My main complaint about the plot is that the commune by the lake plays a big role in the show, but is largely irrelevant to the plot and seems like a kind of boutique side story that Campion put in just to please herself. I think this commune should have been given a different, more satisfying role in the plot or should have been dropped, and I can’t work out exactly why it was important. But aside from that, the story is well told and has that feeling of completeness where nothing stood out as wrong or confusing, and the only unresolved parts were unresolved because the characters couldn’t know the answers, not because there were no answers or because of some plot incoherency. Quite a lot happens for just seven episodes, and it’s an impressively tightly coiled story.

    I was surprisingly deeply affected by this show. It’s beautiful, the acting is powerful, the story is disturbing and the characters are amazingly engaging. It also tells a story about a side of New Zealand that maybe doesn’t really get shown much internationally in amongst all the Hobbitons and Rivendells that have emanated from there recently. It’s not always easy going, though it’s not openly brutal, and at times it is breathlessly tense, but in an enjoyable rather than an overly terrifying way. This is a good show to watch for anyone who is interested in crime stories, thrillers and mysteries – especially if you’re interested in seeing those stories unfold in a very unique and almost magical setting.

  • What Kind of Spellcaster was Margaret Thatcher

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    A Facebook campaign running in England at the moment is driving the song Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead up the charts, in celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s death. This has the right-wing media up in arms, and has led to an open case of attempted censorship of the BBC. But old school role-players should also be up in arms with outrage at this attack on the legacy of the ’80s: although Margaret Thatcher is clearly a spellcaster of some kind, the Witch was not an authorized character class in the 1980s role-playing canon! Nothing is more frustrating than to see important aspects of the original system mis-used in the popular press, and so in the interests of accuracy, I think we should tackle the question of what kind of spellcaster Margaret Thatcher actually was. Being an ’80s phenomenon, Margaret Thatcher has to be fitted into the character class options of the old school canon: that is, she has to be either a magic-user, druid, cleric, paladin or ranger.

    First of all, we know that “the lady’s not for turning,” so she can’t be a cleric or paladin. She doesn’t seem to have been very out-doorsy, and I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t true neutral, so druid is out. And by examining her history of spell-casting, we can rule out ranger.

    So what spells did Maggie cast? First and most obvious is Mass Hypnosis, a fairly high level spell. Many northern newspapers claim that she destroyed whole areas of industry in the north, so maybe she could cast Earthquake as well. Along with Ronald Reagan (who was surely a Paladin!) she could use Detect Evil – before they joined to cast that spell, no one (no one!) knew that the Soviet Union was an evil dictatorship. It’s also fairly clear that she regularly used the Domination spell on members of her cabinet, and her resistance to assassination attempts suggests the use of Contingency and possibly also Resist Fire. From this list we can see that she had access to spells that were outside the ranger list. Thus we can conclude that she must have been a magic-user.

    Finally, however, there is one additional power she had that suggests the ’80s was being run as a house-ruled boutique campaign. Many editorialists are claiming that Margaret Thatcher created Tony Blair; but Tony Blair is clearly a Vampire, and as far as I know there is no spell that can be used to create Vampires. So either she was so powerful that the GM had to create a whole new set of spells for her, 1980s Britain was being run based on an obscure supplement of Dragon magazine, or the entire industrial and economic wasteland that was the UK from 1978 to 1990 was being run on a unique set of house rules.

    So, based on the available evidence, Margaret Thatcher was an extremely high level magic-user character being run in a homebrew post-apocalyptic UK campaign. And definitely not a witch.