Diagnosing America

I see that the erudite Peter Whiteford has re-tweeted about the Niskanen Centre, indicating that he agrees that it's a good site for "bleeding heart" libertarianism.  I have looked at something there before, some time ago, but can't remember what, and thought it looked OK.  I think it was on climate change, now that I think of it.   But it does call itself "libertarian", so I'm sure it's objectionable in one way or another.

Anyway, another specific link to it by Whiteford is to a lengthy piece by Will Wilkinson looking at the various explanations for social and political division in America at the moment.  I think it's not bad, but I have some reservations.  The best paragraphs are these:

It has become conventional wisdom in some circles that “the elites” and “the people” are divided by cultural and informational “bubbles” that offer incompatible perspectives on the facts of the world and the nature of a good society, and thus regard each other with mutual distrust and contempt. All this demographic complexity aside, the conventional wisdom that there is a widening cultural gap between “the people” and “the elites,” and that the rise of populist nationalism is due to backlash against “the establishment,” contains more than a grain of truth. But we need to get much clearer about what exactly that truth is. 
 
Because “the establishment” (including the Republican political establishment) is relatively cosmopolitan and liberal (in the broad sense), an outpouring of populist anti-establishment sentiment is going to assume a nationalistic, illiberal form more or less by default. The good news is that anti-elite anybody-but-Hillary-ism doesn’t really imply serious public appetite for anything like alt-right authoritarianism. The bad news is that the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state and the so-called “neoliberal” global order is far and away the best humanity has ever done, and we’ve taken it for granted. We could very well trash it in a fit of pique, and wind up a middle-income kleptocracy boiling with civil strife and/or destabilize the global order in a way that ends in utter horror.

It is very important to keep this from happening!

Further down in the article, Wilkinson relies a lot on the Cato Freedom index (which actually ranks Australia very highly internationally - take that, whining Australian libertarian types); but to be honest, I don't know how reliable that index really is.   I tend not to trust anything from Cato.

Wilkinson also looks briefly at rising inequality in America, and he seems to have a somewhat more nuanced view than the average libertarian (who doesn't give a toss) in that he says that rising inequality per se is not a problem, as long as poverty is being lifted by deliberate policy action at the same time.  (I think that's where he differs from other libertarians, who may argue that the rising tide lifts all boats anyway.  Wilkinson seems realistic enough to not trust that unfettered capitalism works that way - government policy is needed too.)

That seems to be his position, as he links back to an 2009 piece he wrote which says:

There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and rule by the rich. The unequal political voice of the poor can be addressed only through policies that actually work to fight poverty and improve education. Income inequality is a dangerous distraction from the real problems: poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and systemic injustice.

 What I don't see there is reference to social mobility:  that was supposed to be the deal with America, wasn't it? - they have a system with pathetic minimum wages, for example, but everyone knew that they were just the first stepping stone that people used to build up to a comfortable life income.   But as been noted recently, this isn't happening so much in the US any more.  In The Atlantic:

It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”

 And here's another article from The Atlantic in 2015:

America Is Even Less Socially Mobile Than Most Economists Thought

Maybe Wilkinson has written about social mobility before (and I admit, I haven't read his 2009 article.)  But unless he does, I'll be a bit skeptical about his thoughts on inequality.  

Finally, one graphic in the Wilkinson article is really good, I think.  It shows economic output according to regions.  Here it is:

Interesting how the highest economic output is clearly from such Democrat dominated regions.  The highlight of Republican low tax, low regulation policies seems to come down pretty much to only Texas.   The importance of Republican policy to regional (and national) economic health looks particularly weak, when you look at it that way...

Prisma shows its feelings about Trump

The effect is rather "David Icke", no? Feels true to his inner character, though...

The Chinese threat

...to the big mobile phone manufacturers, that is.

The Australian had a bit of a puff piece this week about the increasing success of a few Chinese mobile phone makers - Oppo, Huawei and ZTE.   I'm interested in Oppo, because I brought my daughter an Optus F1s at Christmas (for $249 - they cost $318 unlocked) and she is very happy with it.  I can barely pry it out of her hands, but from what I can see, it is good, especially at the price. 

Here's what the article said:

Having topped China’s smartphone market for the first time in mid-2016, Oppo rides high. The Shenzhen-headquartered phone maker launched here in late 2014, selling a paltry 3000 units. In 2015 it sold 30,000, and last year more than 150,000. It’s small when compared to Apple, but Oppo sees the momentum working for it. It says its Australian market share last year had climbed to 1.7 per cent, up from 0.3 per cent in 2015.

As long as you don't mind the Chinese government listening in on all of your calls (I'm joking), their phones are going to continue increasing market share, I think.

As for my allegiance to Samsung - I am still finding my TabS from a couple of years ago to be flawless, and it makes all other screens look pretty pathetic, even on their newer cheaper Tab A's that they sell as an entry tablet.  But in mobile phones, they really do seem to be bringing out too many models, if you ask me. 

More For the Record

Comes from here:

It really shows up Tillerson's "we don't really know what models we can rely on - they predict different things" line as being a pure lukewarmer avoidance tactic. (Even though he does say that Exxon had decided there was a serious risk.)

Neat graphic

I just saw this on twitter - don't know who created it; don't know if it's true.  But I'll take the risk on this one:

How many liberals are feeling today...

Climate change and tobacco, again

Remember back in September I posted about a famous statistician who went to his grave arguing against the (then recent) medical conclusion that smoking caused lung cancer?   No?  - well you should go read it.

I noted at the end how Fisher's story reflected very much what had happened with climate change:  

A science consensus emerges and is widely publicised - a mere handful of credible scientists (well, I assume Fisher might have had some supporters) spend the end of their careers arguing that everybody else is wrong; it's not proved; it could be something else no one else has conclusively ruled out, etc.   Then cranky contrarians die, and everybody else gets on with what was always correct.

Which leads me to a lengthy blog post that talks about the criteria the tobacco researchers used to conclude that smoking really was the cause, not just a co-relation, of lung cancer.

I don't recognize the name of the author - Seth Miller - but he tells a really convincing story here:

What climate skeptics taught me about global warming.   Do read.

Of course, as usual, I expect that the people who most need to read it will not.   

About China

I've stumbled across a few different articles about China today:

*  a review of a book (by a Chinese author who stumbled across the story) recently translated into English  about one appalling (and little known) massacre during the Cultural Revolution: 

For several weeks in August and September 1967, more than nine thousand people were murdered in this region. The epicenter of the killings was Dao County (Daoxian), which the Xiao River bisects on its way north. About half the victims were killed in this district of four hundred thousand people, some clubbed to death and thrown into limestone pits, others tossed into cellars full of sweet potatoes where they suffocated. Many were tied together in bundles around a charge of quarry explosives. These victims were called “homemade airplanes” because their body parts flew over the fields. But most victims were simply bludgeoned to death with agricultural tools—hoes, carrying poles, and rakes—and then tossed into the waterways that flow into the Xiao.

In the county seat of Daozhou, observers on the shoreline counted one hundred corpses flowing past per hour. Children danced along the banks competing to find the most bodies. Some were bound together with wire strung through their collarbones, their swollen carcasses swirling in daisy chains downstream, their eyes and lips already eaten away by fish. Eventually the cadavers’ progress was halted by the Shuangpai dam where they clogged the hydropower generators. It took half a year to clear the turbines and two years before locals would eat fish again.

For decades, these murders have been a little-known event in China. When mentioned at all, they tended to be explained away as individual actions that spun out of control during the heat of the Cultural Revolution—the decade-long campaign launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to destroy enemies and achieve a utopia. Dao County was portrayed as remote, backward, and poor. The presence of the non-Chinese Yao minority there was also sometimes mentioned as a racist way of explaining what happened: those minorities, some Han Chinese say, are only half civilized anyway, and who knows what they might do when the authorities aren’t looking?

All of these explanations are wrong. Dao County is a center of Chinese civilization, the birthplace of great philosophers and calligraphers. The killers were almost all Chinese who murdered other Chinese. And the killings were not random: instead they were acts of genocide aimed at eliminating a class of people declared to be subhuman. That class consisted of make-believe landlords, nonexistent spies, and invented insurrectionists. Far from being the work of frenzied peasants, the killings were organized by committees of Communist Party cadres in the region’s towns, who ordered the murders to be carried out in remote areas. To make sure revenge would be difficult, officials ordered the slaughter of entire families, including infants.

* An interview with the author of the book indicates he has had his eyes open about the nature of the Chinese communism:

To speak frankly, in the past I didn’t really understand the Communist Party and its peasant revolution. It was like a blockage in my thinking. But suddenly in a short period of time my thinking became clear.

What triggered this understanding?
I’d kept asking one question: Had any one of the 9,000 people killed in the region been planning a counterrevolutionary event or said something unlawful? In the end the answer was: No.

Not one?
Not one. There wasn’t one who was counter-revolutionary in thoughts or deeds. Not one said anything against the revolution. They found a lot of cases of “counterrevolutionaries” and they killed them all, but they were all fake. When I understood this, I was heartbroken. I began to realize that the Party had a history of violence. Already in 1928 it organized violent peasant revolts that killed masses of people. And land reform [shortly after the Party took power in 1949] was incredibly violent. It was one mass killing after another. All of a sudden it became clear. There was no justification for what happened. It was just terror. 
So I felt that situation really needed me. I had to write it. All those people [survivors, family members, and reform-minded government officials] who gave me information, I had pledged to them that I wasn’t taking this for personal gain, but for our children and grandchildren’s descendants—so that a massacre wouldn’t happen again.

....

The killers were all young. You wrote that most were in their twenties. Were they brainwashed by the Maoist propaganda?
Yes. The young people kept talking about exploitation by the landlord class. But for all this talk, all the exploitation was by the same four landlords: Huang Shiren, Zhou Bapi, Liu Wencai, Nan Batian. [Four landlords whose alleged crimes were constantly repeated by Communist Party propaganda across the nation in movies, posters, and textbooks.] And it turned out that their crimes were all fake. But this is all they knew and they thought that anyone who owned any land in China was a horrible landlord who deserved to die. In fact, the people who owned land were mostly just the country’s middle class. Especially in Hunan, big landlords were very rare. But they were all classified as landlords. They were declared to be subhuman, and when the orders came down, people found it easy to kill them. They had been conditioned to think of them as not human.

But this is all half a century ago. Things have changed.
No. It is rooted in this soil. Around the time of the [1989] Tiananmen Square massacre I raved about this at a meeting and put it like this: I said that according to my research the Communists were triumphant not because the Nationalists [their opponents in the civil war] were backward; it was because the Communists were even more backward. Their brutality and backwardness allowed them to succeed. The Nationalists still had a few enlightened ideas so they lost.

*  Finally, a philosophy professor talks about Confucianism's rejection and its partial revival in China:

In China, Confucianism was devastated by the Cultural Revolution, which was very much anti-Confucian, even though now they try to restore some Confucian values. I don’t think xiao [filial piety] is included in socialist core values. But it is coming back in civil society in terms of parental relationships.

In your view then, it’s not a case of Orientalist thinking to attribute Chinese behavior to Confucianism?
If we look at the world in terms of value orientations, then not only China but also the rest of that region has been characterized as the Confucian world. Although in Japan, the idea of loyalty is much more pronounced than that of filial piety.

Precisely because China was obsessed with the idea of being overwhelmed by Japan aggressiveness, China wanted to become wealthy and powerful, and many believed that getting rid of Confucian tradition was a precondition for becoming powerful. The discourse was that Confucianism is incompatible with modern ideas of ethics or the dignity of individuals. And the revolutionary Red Guards attacked Confucianism time and time again, though it continued to be developed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Korea. But this has all changed now, and we’re entering a new era where many of the positive Confucian values can be underscored. Right now, there’s this new view that China is going through a kind of Confucian revival. A revival is a double-edged sword that can very easily be politicized by the government as a method of political control, but it also has much broader implications as well.

Why do some people think Confucianism is incompatible with progress?
That is a tradition that started in 1919, with the New Cultural Movement, and what I call all these Enlightenment values of the West, even though there’s a lot of debate about the abusive use of some of these values. We have Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Confucian values, and the argument was that religious forms are not compatible. But I think that phase is already over, and people today have more sophisticated ideas about human development, that it’s not just a matter of having a higher GDP. So right now in China, very few insist that the Confucian tradition is incompatible with progress. As properly understood and properly practiced, Confucian values become even more congenial to human development. Some narrow and nationalistic ideas have also surfaced based on this. My view is that Confucianism must adapt itself to human values, and that the abusive use of power by neoliberal economies could be corrected by a much broader vision of human flourishing. Issues of proper governance, moral order, and the financial regulatory system are all a part of the story. The role of government, for example, the role of leadership, all these are relevant issues.

Population increase

Hey monty - I see you have a new baby.  Just like my family - a son and a daughter a couple of years apart. 

Congratulations - the second one is easier, too.

Re-calculation requested

With the figures for 2016 in, I am reminded - I don't think that Sinclair Davidson has done the "Phil Jones" test on global warming since 2013 on his climate change denial site Catallaxy.  

Not that the test was ever important - it was always a clear cherry pick latched onto by climate change denialists - but it would indicate a degree of honesty if the good Professor would update us on the exercise that he used for propaganda purposes for (I think) several years...

Or would it throw him out of the Catallaxy culture club to do so?  (Yes, it would.)  

Yes, wealth disparities are pretty big

I haven't paid too much attention to the Oxfam claims about wealth distribution (you know, that 8 men control the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the world), but Peter Whiteford has looked at the criticisms of the methodology and notes this:

Critics of these figures point to two main issues. Firstly, the Credit Suisse figures calculate wealth as assets minus debts, so the bottom 1 per cent of the world wealth distribution actually have a negative net worth.

But people with negative net worth can include students, with student debts but who are about to enter a high paying job and people who have just purchased a house and whose equity is less than the mortgage outstanding. Should these people be counted as impoverished?

Oxfam directly addresses this issue, pointing out that if you take out net debt then the wealth of the bottom 50 per cent rises from around US$400 billion to US$1.5 trillion. This means the wealth of the bottom half is roughly equal to the richest 56 individuals in the world.

While this figure is not as dramatic as focusing only on the richest eight people, it still shows enormous disparities in wealth.

Update:  The Onion makes this contribution to the story:

For the record

 

You know it's true...

Yeah, I need lessons...

 

Update:  Here's a second attempt:

 

Wig heists in history

An amusing read here about a theft problem of C18th England - those stupid wigs of the era were the target of thieves.

Worse than Nixon

Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean says the coming Trump presidency has literally been giving him nightmares:

He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves. “I’m not somebody who remembers the details of dreams,” he told me in a recent phone call from his home in Los Angeles. “I just know that they were so bad that I’d force myself awake and out of bed just to get away from them.”

He thinks Trump will be much worse than Nixon:

Dean’s near-panicked take on the incoming president is shaped in large part by his years in the Nixon White House. In Trump, Dean says he has observed many of his former boss’s most dangerous traits—obsessive vengefulness, reflexive dishonesty, all-consuming ambition—but none of Nixon’s redeeming qualities.

“I used to have one-on-one conversations with [Nixon] where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean unmolested by any such struggle.

He also puts up a case to be pessimistic about  Trump being brought down by impeachment:

Those hoping Trump’s presidency will end in a Watergate-style meltdown point to the litany of scandals-in-waiting that will follow him into office—from his alleged ties to Russia, to the potential conflicts of interest lurking in his vast business network. Dean agrees that “he’s carrying loads of potential problems into the White House with him,” and goes even further in his assessment: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”

Yet, he’s profoundly pessimistic about the prospect of Trump facing any true accountability while in office. In the four decades since Nixon resigned, Dean says, the institutions that are meant to keep a president’s power in check—the press, Congress, even the courts—have been rendered increasingly weak and ineffectual by a sort of creeping partisan paralysis. (Imagine, if you dare, the Breitbart headlines that would follow Woodward and Bernstein’s first scoop if they were breaking their story today.)

He may have a point there.  The problem being that hoping for impeachment relies on the American Right not being nuts.   There's not much sign of that at the moment.

Logic in history

I've never been that interested in logic as a topic per se, and this article on the rise and fall of logic in history helps explain why. 

It's a good read, although my impression was that such a survey should include a reference to Wittgenstein towards the end...

Opposite conclusions about renewables

There was a really good explanation on Radio National's breakfast show this morning about how the complicated effect of renewable energy on Australia's electricity costs is capable of being interpreted completely differently by the Right and the Left. 

Unfortunately, there is no transcript, you have to listen to the interview.  Well worth it, though.

For economics graphs lovers

I think I spotted this on Twitter - Piketty and others have launched a the World Wealth & Income Database which lets you look at, and fiddle with, lots of graphs, such as these:

The graphs for Australia, unfortunately, currently don't seem to allow for the same comparisons.

But those US graphs are pretty startling...

About cava

I've taken to trying the cheap-ish Spanish cava available at our run-of-the-mill liquor outlets, and I have to say, it compares very favourably to cheap Australian sparking wines, and might even be more enjoyable than your standard, cheaper genuine champagnes.

(And by the way, the sequence in Travel Man when they have a cava tasting session in Barcelona, is a very funny bit of television.  In fact, the whole episode is one of the funniest in the series.) 

Just wanted to pass that on...

A tricky issue

Well, this is a tricky issue to deal with.

Is watching porn in public properly viewed as harassment?  

I am sympathetic to the feminist view expressed here that it virtually is, yet at the same time, it seems to me that a nation that tolerated the page 3 topless model in its national daily press for so long only has itself to blame.  

But yes, lines have to (or should) be drawn somewhere, for the sake of civil society, and moving up to watching sex on public transport, within proximity of any other passenger, does deserve a special offence of its own, as a form of public nuisance, I reckon.   Perhaps the first step ought to be the right to require them to leave the public space, but if that fails, the back up of potential prosecution is warranted.  I think.