Tony Blair and the Media

AP, I agree with you (1:54AM) about the tone of some of the comments, even while agreeing with much of the underlying philosophy of those comments (resistance to ever-greater limitation of personal freedom). I wouldn’t criticize comparisons of current approaches in British politics with historical and cultural alternatives (“he who does not learn the lessons of history” etc), but there are ways of making that comparison. Some of this sounds, however accurate and well-intentioned, just plain reactionary.

But there appears to be an internal contradiction in your post. You seem to endorse Portillo’s view that the Conservative Party should decide its policies according to what will attract voters in the centre-ground, but then say you wish Portillo were still part of the “higher echelon” of the party, because you “prefer those with an ideology”. Political triangulation is a funny sort of ideology. It is the ideology of naked power-seeking for power’s sake. Not an attractive ideology in my book. I hesitate to suggest the historical analogies….

Your philosophical point in the brief, second post (1:58AM) goes to the nub of it. Your first sentence is, of course, true as far as it goes, unless one takes the anarchist perspective. But that does not tell us anything about the appropriate bounds of those constraints. The unreconstructed democrat takes the view that the appropriate bounds are whatever the majority decides. But deeper thinkers had recognized the shallowness of this philosophy long before J.S.Mill coined the phrase “the tyranny of the majority”:

“Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” (Thomas Jefferson)

“That the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of the history of the whole world.” (John Adams)

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” (Ben Franklin)

Classical liberals argue from first principles (whether utilitarian, a-al-Mises, or natural-law, a-la-Rothbard) that the appropriate bounds of those constraints are very limited. With all the political triangulation going on nowadays, this view is not represented by any mainstream party.

That is a pity, not only for practical and democratic reasons, but also because it represents a significant thread in British political philosophy, and (I suggest) in the British psyche. The marginalization of this philosophy is illustrative of the increased Europeanization of the British political debate. One can contrast the British, Lockean, common-law tradition of rights being inherent in man and being delegated to a limited extent to Government, with the continental, Rousseauian, Napoleonic-law tradition of rights being surrendered en masse to the state as the embodiment of society, from which a limited number of rights are then returned to individuals. The former approach is fundamental to what it means to me to be British.

If Europe can accommodate both traditions (or better still, adopt the British model), then I say fine, let’s work together as closely as possible. If Britain falls in-line with the continental philosophy, either because the structure of the EU demands it, or because our national politicians and pundits fail to appreciate the importance of the British tradition, then Britain is lost to me. It will be time to look for somewhere where that tradition is still part of the mainstream. With the emergence of big-government conservatism in America, it is getting ever-harder to think where that might be.

This abandonment by the political mainstream may explain the increasingly depressed, angry or frustrated tones of those who believe in small government. I also notice the wide sense of malaise in the country, noted in other posts above. I would like to think that it stems, at least in part, from a sense that no mainstream party is standing full-square for what many (perhaps most) intuitively understand is the British tradition of limited government.

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I meant to add an illustration of the Europeanization of the political debate. Jeremy Paxman introduced an item on Newsnight last week by posing the question whether we have the right to walk multiple dogs. To someone to whom no rights exist unless provided by government, that question is intelligible. But from a classical-liberal perspective, that question is upside down; it should be “should the government circumscribe our right to walk more than one dog at a time?” Put that way, the question sounds considerably more absurd than put from Paxman’s unintentionally European perspective. What worries me is that his way of viewing the question of rights is becoming commonplace, perhaps even subconsciously-ingrained, particularly amongst the media and the political classes.

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I am confused. The same article about the media was in the Telegraph word for word as it is here. I think I must have got lost in translation somewhere. [Ed: yes, this is the weekly column reproduced here]
Sally

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One can contrast the British, Lockean, common-law tradition of rights being inherent in man and being delegated to a limited extent to Government, with the continental, Rousseauian, Napoleonic-law tradition of rights being surrendered en masse to the state as the embodiment of society, from which a limited number of rights are then returned to individuals. The former approach is fundamental to what it means to me to be British. (bgp)

I broadly agree. But I think that this approach is something that is absorbed into one’s identity simply by living in Britain, rather than learned through, say, reading Locke. Exactly the same happens if one is born into a Catholic or Protestant culture. One acquires the set of values that are implicit in them, almost by a process of osmosis.

And perhaps the differing political doctrines you describe are rooted in these older religious doctrines. After all, both Locke and Rousseau were writing in the 18th century, which is more or less yesterday. What you call the continental, Rousseauian tradition might equally be described as the top-down authoritarian Roman Catholic tradition of absolute power being invested in the Church, with indulgences (rights) dispensed by its supreme pontiff. And what you call the British Lockean tradition might equally be described as that of a bottom-up liberal Protestantism which clawed back that power to the individual, and set out to restrict the powers of Church/state authority. Both Locke and Rousseau might be said to simply reflect their different traditions – which they simply absorbed, re-articulated, and perhaps refined.

Indeed, the whole matter may be perhaps taken all the way back to the conflict between the centralised Roman state and its Roman laws (from which Napoleonic law is derived) and its often-rebellious colonies.

Furthermore, one might even cast the dispute between Blair and Brown in the same terms, as that of the (allegedly soon-to-be-Roman-Catholic) Blair against the Protestant Brown. Blair centralised power in the Prime Ministerial office, and on his own initiative took Britain into the disastrous Iraq war (a Roman imperial venture now looking like another Varian disaster). This centralisation of power is also expressed by the top-down imposition of strange theological doctrines (global warming, passive smoking) on a sceptical and increasingly restive native population.

My own English peasant views, on both global warming and passive smoking, amount to a standard bottom-up British protest against top-down centralised church/state power. It’s an angry individual protest that’s as old as our history. And I’m fuming, both literally and metaphorically.

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idlex, I agree that the differences are subconscious and not generally learned through study of Locke and Rousseau. I suggested them as examples not progenitors of the different traditions. (Locke was more 17th than 18th century, by the way.)

Ultimately, the existence of those fundamental differences is more important than their origins. I think we agree that the differences matter. What follows is mere polemic.

There may be something in what you say about Catholic vs Protestant, but Catholic countries have produced great exponents of liberalism (Turgot, Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, etc) and Protestant countries the reverse. It raises the question of how one categorizes those countries, like Germany, that are a mixture of both. I’m not sure I could ascribe the progress of liberalism in Germany upto the mid-nineteenth century, and Humboldt’s conception of the state, to the advance of Protestantism, and its decline thereafter to a Catholic resurgence. Protestant Prussia was prominent in that decline.

Nor could one date the growth of individualism in Britain to the establishment of the Church of England. Puritan rule under Cromwell seemed to offer just a different form of authoritarianism. Some of that resistance to despotic authority may be deeply ingrained (e.g. Magna Carta), but there seems to have been a gradual hardening of that individualism during the modern period, particularly during the Enlightenment. There are probably some Catholic vs Protestant tensions mixed up in there, but it is hardly the whole or even the main story.

There is a similarity between your theory and that of Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic…). I find Murray Rothbard’s arguments against Weber and in defence of a Catholic tradition of individualism quite persuasive.

There is something more complicated than religious or ethnic origins going on, though they are probably a part of it. There was an evolution in different directions during the modern era, whose course was differentiated as much by events, individuals and institutions as by religious or ethnic differences.

Where I disagree with you most strongly is in your attempt to fit Blair and Brown into your Catholic/Protestant mould. It is wishful thinking to imagine that Blair is the great controller and centralizer of the two. Anyone around the Government for the past ten years could tell you which one is the great control-freak and micro-manager.

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Jeremy Paxman introduced an item on Newsnight last week by posing the question whether we have the right to walk multiple dogs. To someone to whom no rights exist unless provided by government, that question is intelligible. But from a classical-liberal perspective, that question is upside down; it should be “should the government circumscribe our right to walk more than one dog at a time?” (bgp)

I agree. Except that I’m not sure there is any need to invoke any notion of rights, except in denying them. I am able to walk as many dogs as I wish, and the government has no right to intervene to stop me.

The only business of government is to maintain its citizens in the highest degree of freedom possible. That is what we elect governments to do. We elect them to, among other things, keep foreign tyrants at bay. We do not elect them to tyrannise us instead.

A government, in this view, is essentially no different from a butcher or a baker. It provides a service to its customers. And when I visit my local butcher or baker, I tell them what I want of them. They don’t tell me what they want of me. It would be an oppressive and despotic baker that tells me that – in his opinion, and for my own good – I must eat black bread when I want white.

And what applies to bakers applies equally to governments.

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Where I disagree with you most strongly is in your attempt to fit Blair and Brown into your Catholic/Protestant mould. It is wishful thinking to imagine that Blair is the great controller and centralizer of the two. Anyone around the Government for the past ten years could tell you which one is the great control-freak and micro-manager.

Yes, I thought I was probably pushing it a bit to try to shoehorn those two into my scheme.

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bgp: The issue we are discussing is the relation of the individual to the state.

I have just argued that a government is no different from a butcher or a baker. I could butcher my own sheep, bake my own bread, and keep a shotgun by my bed. But instead it’s generally easier to subcontract these chores to people who know how to do them better, quicker, and more cheaply.

But in return for these various services, I must pay a price. In times of economic plenty, various different butchers and bakers may compete for my custom, offering me the widest diversity of choices and driving down their prices. But in times of scarcity, the numbers of competing butchers and bakers is likely to decrease, and the prices of their products to rise. I may even end up with just one baker, who sells just one kind of very high-priced loaf.

So also with governments. In times of economic plenty, several rival political parties compete for my vote, offering the widest variety of policies, and competing to drive down their prices (which I pay in taxes). But in times of economic scarcity, I may well end up with one party, with only one policy, which comes at a very high price (e.g. conscription into the army). The former corresponds to freedom within the most liberal democracy, the latter subjection under dictatorship or tyranny.

In this vision of things, it is the underlying economic prosperity of a country that determines its political structure. If Europe once lived under kings and popes, it is because it was economically poor. But with gradually rising economic prosperity, due to trade and technological innovation, there gradually emerged a wider political choice, in Britain first for powerful barons, and then for landed commoners, and so on. Centralised political (and religious) power gradually diffused outwards into society.

But economic prosperity can fall as well as rise, and when it does, the whole process of outward diffusion of power goes into reverse. For example, times of war are times of low prosperity, and defeat in war brings even lower prosperity. If in the last century first Russia, and then Germany, fell under one-party rule, it may have been in large part because they had both just lost wars. The same might be suggested of the rise of the Taliban in war-ravaged Afghanistan.

According to this vision of things, furthermore, you can’t ‘export democracy’, like bananas, to countries that don’t have it. If the Middle East is largely run by despots, it is because it is not sufficiently prosperous to support the relative luxury of democracy. There was never any way in which America could ‘bring democracy’ to Iraq. And if George W Bush’s America seems to more and more resemble a dictatorship, it suggests a decline in US prosperity which has perhaps been exacerbated by failed military interventions. The same may also be true of Britain.

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Oh, and to hook that up with my Catholic/Protestant argument, I’d simply suggest that the rising economic prosperity which brings greater political freedom also brings greater religious (or moral) freedom or autonomy.

Just as people gain greater political control over their destiny as they unseat kings, so they also gain greater moral autonomy when they unseat moral authorities like the pope. If Protestantism fractured into ever greater numbers of different sects, it is simply the continuation of the same process of overthrowing moral authority. Having rebelled against the Pope, people then proceeded to rebel against Luther and Calvin as well.

And if church-going in Europe has declined, this also is simply the continuation of the same process, whereby the splinter sects divide and dwindle in size until each individual is effectively their own church, and their own primary moral authority.

Again, if economic prosperity falls rather than rises, religious sects expand rather than contract in size, as such personal moral autonomy is lost, and ceded to others, welding them into growing cults or sects. If so, the recent proliferation of new cults such as Scientologists, Moonies, and the like (particularly in America) again suggests a decline in economic prosperity.

Much the same thing seems to have accompanied the political decline of Rome from republic into empire at the time of Augustus – which happened at roughly the time the empire stopped growing. Once the empire stopped growing, economic decline began. The old religious customs of Rome gradually became replaced by growing new cults – Mithraism, Christianity, etc – which finally were all amalgamated under Constantine into a single religion (which contains elements of all of its components).

Anyway, this is just another way of looking at it all…

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idlex, This is a chicken and egg problem. I agree with your connection of freedom and prosperity. And I agree that freedom is threatened whenever prosperity is threatened. But to continue to argue the toss, I suggest that freedom is, on the whole, the leading indicator. In other words, freedom is more likely to lead to prosperity than prosperity is to freedom. Indeed, the first-world at the moment seems to be going through one of those bouts of self-flagellation where, out of apparent guilt for its success, it gradually whittles down the freedoms of its citizens in the name of society, equality, security, health & safety, etc. If there are cycles in economic history, I suggest that the “wetness” brought on by prosperity and the “dryness” brought on by poverty are partly responsible.

I can think of plenty of examples where prosperity resulted in a loss of freedom. I struggle to think of many examples where freedom resulted in a loss of prosperity. Post-communist Russia, maybe, but its circumstances are peculiar (e.g. the weakness of the institutions necessary to protect freedom) and it looks like a temporary reversal. Post-Yeltsin Russia, of course, is an example of prosperity being accompanied by a loss of freedom. Now they have a little prosperity that is worth protecting, they are prepared (eager, even) to sacrifice liberty for security, forgetting Franklin’s warning that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.

Of course, this does not imply the reverse. Just because prosperity can lead to a loss of freedom, it does not imply that a surrender of freedom will lead to prosperity. The causal relationships would seem to be:

Increasing freedom -> Increasing prosperity
Increasing prosperity -> Increasing or decreasing freedom
Decreasing freedom -> Decreasing prosperity
Decreasing prosperity -> Increasing or decreasing freedom

The choice is whether to have freedom, not whether to have prosperity. The absence of that choice (as per our current lack of political choices) is a clear indicator that economic decline is round the corner.

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I agree that you can’t export democracy. But not on the basis that you have to be rich enough for democracy to work. As I said in my previous post, it’s rather the other way round (you have to be free enough for your economy to work).

The reason that you can’t export democracy is that people must first cherish freedom and individuality before democracy can work. Otherwise it simply becomes a device for the assertion of the tyranny of the majority. Once people cherish freedom sufficiently, they will demand democracy (and equally important, property rights and the rule of impartial law). They will not need it imposed on them. The important task is not to impose institutions, but to educate the populace on the importance of freedom (a task in which the International Policy Network is leading the way).

It is this that makes me pessimistic about the compatibility of Islam (in the broad sense, not just the views we label “extremist”) with our western model. I cannot see that there is much scope for freedom and individuality within any interpretation of the Quran. The only hope for progress in Moslem countries, and integration of Moslems in Western countries, is secularization of their politics, along the somewhat fragile Turkish model. That is why I support Boris’s strong (but I suspect hopeless) stance on Turkey and the EU. There cannot be anything more important than supporting the only serious secular, democratic Moslem state. If Europe won’t do it, I reckon the anglophone countries should form an economic association into which Turkey is welcome if it accepts secular restrictions.

For the same reason, all this soft stuff that the Government has been coming out with about modernising Islamic studies is just moving the deckchairs. The key is to educate in the values of freedom and individuality, not to look for a softer version of their values.

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This is a chicken and egg problem. I agree with your connection of freedom and prosperity. And I agree that freedom is threatened whenever prosperity is threatened. But to continue to argue the toss, I suggest that freedom is, on the whole, the leading indicator.

I think I can see what you mean. But I’m not entirely sure.

One of the problems with using words like ‘prosperity’ and ‘freedom’ is that they are really rather vague terms. They mean different things to different people. And so any discussion involving such terms very easily gets nowhere rather fast, as people only vaguely understand each other, if at all.

And if any attempt is made to define these terms, it is usually through using other vague terms. And the result is the same vagueness.

Even a word like ‘work’, for example, is a vast amorphous fuzzy sort of word, which may conjure up all sorts of notions of what is meant by it.

However, in physics, the meaning of the word ‘work’ has a well-defined, mathematical meaning. Work is force times distance, where all three terms are represented by numbers. It is, more poetically, the effort it takes to push some resistant object – like a refridgerator – a few inches across a floor.

The result of this precise definition of the meaning of the word ‘work’ is that in physics people know exactly what they are talking about when they use this word. Its meaning isn’t at all vague. And so the result is that discussions about physics tend to get a lot further than equally earnest discussions about ethics or politics, where the terms are not so precisely defined.

In fact, it seems to me that this is largely the reason why physics is so wonderfully well developed, and ethics and politics and so forth seem to never get anywhere.

And so the only way that I can see to have a really productive discussion of ‘prosperity’ is to first define it precisely using the already precise terminology of physics.

So, maybe in my next posting here, I’ll perhaps try and provide a precise definition of ‘prosperity’. And I’ll see if I can do it without actually employing any physics. This may prove well nigh impossible.

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Idlex. Just a small comment about Physics. When I was at school I loved the subject until I got to A Level. They then seemed to be speaking in a foreign language. I left it alone for years and came back to it when I read the Bill Bryson ‘Brief History’ book. Sorry nothing to do with your post but just a vote for Physics. My real love is ethics and politics because people might not KNOW I am talking rubbish.
Sally

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Even Blair probably regrets the ‘feral’ speech. Not one of his most inspired/in touch.

Blair has gone. Let the Conservative office learn.

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idlex, Before you waste too much time trying to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the study of the human sciences, try Ludwig von Mises’s Theory and History for the necessary differences in one’s methodological approach.

I agree definitions are awkward, though, and “freedom” in particular is a vague and subjective term. I’d put a link to the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom as an illustration, but I believe a second link would get me moderated again, so I’ll leave those who are interested to google it – it’s a provocative, libertarian assessment.

The truth is, rigorous definitions and analysis are possible, but require more space and time than is feasible for blog comments. One can only hope that one’s generalizations chime with others’ views. The only practical way to get past the generalizations is to defer to literature where this has been set out in the necessary detail. I therefore refer you to the varied works of Prof. Mises for a full explanation of the perspective I have been trying to expound.

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I’ve been reading this discussion quietly and with interest. Are you, Idlex and bgp, falling into the same trap as the global warming priests? A major criticism of their climate prediction models is their failure to take account of factors other than those on which they are fixated, in particular the effects of CO2. Water vapour is one such.

And so your freedom/prosperity equation may well be flawed by its failure to allow for emerging dimensions to society for which there is no historical precedent. For example, instant communication is such a powerful force that it skews historical evidence to the point where little can be learnt from it. The “global village” is an entirely new phenomenon where politicians can not only apply each other’s ideas within days but share the approbation of the global political community for doing so, building itself a kind of global oligarchy from which we feel isolated and powerless.

Have you noticed how the smoking bans and global warming bandwagons rolled at such a fierce pace? And I was wondering where this idea of a drink-sail limit suddenly came from. Have a quick Google – lo and behold, it’s spreading like the pox in the litigation-crazy USA. What a wonderful new initiative for NuLab ministers like Ladyman who are bereft of ideas while under orders to look busy.

Technology itself is distorting the freedom/prosperity balance. You can be rich in remote controls yet extremely poor in personal well-being, enslaved by the entertainment industry’s idea of what will make you happy. Idlex is right – these terms need to be defined before you can draw any more conclusions.

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idlex, Before you waste too much time trying to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the study of the human sciences, try Ludwig von Mises’s Theory and History for the necessary differences in one’s methodological approach.

I think I’ve already wasted far too much time on it to abort the enterprise now. I will go ahead and post my physical definition of ‘prosperity’ anyway. I think that moragmac will be able to understand it. Heck, after all, I was hopeless at A-level chemistry. (O-level too, if the awful truth be told).

As for Ludwig von Mises, I haven’t checked out your link yet, but I well remember ploughing through about 6 chapters of Human Action about 30 years ago, bewildered by the repeated attacks on socialism that littered it. Years later I met an economics lecturer, and remarked on these interruptions, and he said: “But they were the whole point!!” Poor me, I’d been thinking Mises actually had something substantive to say between his repeated attacks on socialism…

Anyway, perhaps you could yourself explain why you think the methods of the natural sciences are inapplicable to the human sciences? Humans are, after all, physical objects that have mass, length, velocity, etc. So why not treat them as part of natural science?

I know the reason why natural scientists won’t try it. And it is because they’ve never managed to get around David Hume’s 250-year-old objection that you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Scientists regularly pop up and say something like, “We can only describe what is the case, not what ought to be the case.”

But I think Hume’s just still got ‘em fooled.

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I’ve been reading this discussion quietly and with interest. Are you, Idlex and bgp, falling into the same trap as the global warming priests? A major criticism of their climate prediction models is their failure to take account of factors other than those on which they are fixated, in particular the effects of CO2. Water vapour is one such. (PaulD)

Have we become fixated on anything so soon? This discussion has only been going for a day or so.

It’s a bit of a relief to forget about global warming that long.

And so your freedom/prosperity equation may well be flawed by its failure to allow for emerging dimensions to society for which there is no historical precedent. For example, instant communication is such a powerful force that it skews historical evidence to the point where little can be learnt from it.

There isn’t any freedom/prosperity equation. At least, not yet. But I’m working on it right now.

And we don’t have instant communication. And we never will. All this started happening with the invention of the printing press in 1066 or whatever, and we’re just going a little bit faster, that’s all. The internet may be Gutenberg squared, but it’s still not a very big number.

And I simply don’t understand how this increasing speed of communication ’skews historical evidence’. Are you bringing in some relativistic idea here?

Finally, I would like to say that, if we were all sitting together in some smoky pub, the rate of communication would be a darn sight faster than it is here!! There’s a good argument I can see that the internet, far from speeding up communication, actually slows it down.

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As a self confessed ‘not very good at Physics’ I was interested in your comment (PaulD) on global warming. I attend daytime lectures at our University and we had a lecture on Climate Change from an 82 year old Physicist. He was scathing about Global warming and convinced us. I was quite chuffed that I understood him. Actually I am putting myself down as I am a Biochemist!!

Sally

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I have to say this Idlex, I would love to sit around in a pub but up here in Scotland there is no chance it would be smoky!.

Sally

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Sally said:

I think you should put her [Beryl's] name forward for woman of the year…

Seriously it is time more notice was taken of the majority of very kind people who just get on with life and look after others that come their way.

Where is this cafe? We could all come and visit.

Great idea, Sally. Beryl deserves to be woman of the year far more than some plastic millionairess. You’re right about the other unsung heroes too, they all deserve recognition.

I’m not sure if I should reveal where Beryl’s cafe is without her agreement – in case the council’s anti-smoking stasi target Beryl, photograph her having her ciggie break on the steps in the yard and fine her £80.

An £80 fine would be about half a week’s pay for Beryl.

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Though I’m joking when I refer to the government’s secret, anti-smoking squads with their hidden cameras as the stasi, that’s not far from the truth, is it?

What sort of government, what sort of people, would require local authorities to set up squads of secret smoking control police with hidden cameras, just to hound ordinary, hard working people like Beryl? It beggars belief.

One of the many hypocritical and disgraceful aspects of these new anti-smoking regulations is the absurd incongruities they create or ignore.

The steps in the yard where Beryl takes her cigarette breaks are directly in front of double doors leading onto a filthy and rubbish strewn hell hole of a delivery/parking area. It’s the local fly tip. There, every day, lorries and vans belch out fumes 1000 times more noxious than those from Beryl’s cigarettes.

That’s where Beryl blows her cigarette smoke, out into that, literally rat infested, fume filled unloading area and rubbish tip.

The whole area reeks with the smell of ancient curries, greasy burgers and burning cooking oil too – though not from Beryl’s cooking, I hasten to add! I’ve seen drug addicts inject themselves out there and lager louts, stinking of booze, stumbling out of the local pub to spill out into that area in the evenings.

How anyone could possibly claim that the fumes from Beryl’s cigarette in any sense offend more than that is beyond me.

If only one of our politicians would look into the lunatic incongruities these ill conceived regulations will lead to and expose the, largely pointless, control freakery for its own sake that’s behind them.

Isn’t there a politician anywhere who cares about hard working Beryl and the 13 million others just like her?

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Agent Provocateur said:

So NuLab are Stalinist/Islamist airheads, are the Tories then top-hatted greedy exploiters? Grow up children. I don’t like NuLab and I do like the new Tory leadership, but the way you talk you can only aid Brown’s electoral prospects as people realise what paranoic exaggerated nonsense this is.

Do you not get out much, Agent Provocateur? Among the majority of the ordinary working people with whom I spend much of my working day, classing nulabour as tin pot Hitlers and worse is commonplace. Isn’t that why even Brown is forced to try to provide the antidote to his poisonous reputation by telling jokes about Stalin now?

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… we don’t have instant communication…. And I simply don’t understand how this increasing speed of communication ’skews historical evidence’ (Idlex)

Take another look at Blair’s speech, quoted above:

In the 1960s the government would sometimes, on a serious issue, have a Cabinet lasting two days. It would be laughable to think you could do that now without the heavens falling in before lunch on the first day.

That is just one example of how instant (OK, very fast) communication has altered the dynamic of politics. Decisions are made in haste, with an increasing whiff of autocracy, to satisfy an audience braying for immediate answers. That’s not only the media but others in high authority, maybe in Europe or the WHO.

Email can be a wicked master, incomparable with Caxton’s leisurely methods.

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PaulD, The climate-change models take significant account of water vapour, but the scale of the feedback mechanisms influencing atmospheric humidity, and the impacts of that humidity in the form of clouds are uncertain and subject to disagreement. But that’s bye the bye.

With regard to the “freedom/prosperity equation”, as you put it, I am sure we are ignoring many significant factors. But that is not the same thing as saying that the factors under consideration do not count. Are you proposing that freedom is an insignificant factor in the growth of prosperity? To that, you may well answer, “it depends what you mean by freedom”. You and idlex both ask for definitions. Fair enough. I take Hayek’s definition of freedom (or liberty): “that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society”. Do you doubt that freedom defined in those terms is essential (not the only factor, but a sine qua non) to the growth of prosperity?

I suppose you will carp that I have still not defined prosperity. This seems to me a less contentious word than freedom, but for the avoidance of confusion, I use the word in the sense of “material wellbeing”. There is a hint towards the end of your post that you would take a broader definition – including other forms of wellbeing besides the material form. I could argue about the merits of one or other definition, but it would just be semantics. There are two distinct concepts here, and I don’t very much mind what labels we attach to them. For the sake of argument, let’s call them “narrow prosperity” (mine) and “broad prosperity” (yours). Do you doubt that freedom in its Hayekian sense is essential to the growth of prosperity in its narrow sense?

Whilst I am happy to consider also a notion of prosperity defined in your broader sense, I do not recognize your picture of the person impoverished and enslaved by the modern entertainment industry. Not because there aren’t plenty of braindead viewers and listeners, but because your description implies a passive rather than an active role for those consumers. No one holds a gun to my head and tells me to listen to or watch their latest productions. If I don’t like them, I should turn them off. The fact that I could imagine being richer in quality media offerings does not make me poor. If I choose to succumb to the ephemeral attractions of junk TV, I am not enslaved by that choice. By virtue of being my choice, it is an act of freedom, however much I may hate myself for taking it, and the media for offering it.

So I agree with you and Blair (and disagree with idlex) that instant communications have a distorting effect, but that distortion is the result of our preferences, not an imposition from above. It may be that the speed of communications is only relative, as idlex suggests, and that it may get quicker yet, but it is already sufficiently quick that careful consideration is made very much more difficult than previously. For example, I find it hard keeping up with the pace of this blog, which is likely to lead to mistakes, inaccuracies, misunderstandings and false conclusions on my part. It takes a very great effort, perhaps disproportionate to the value and certainly unsustainable in the long-term, to try to avoid those mistakes.

When you say that the speed of modern communications skews historical evidence, I think we need to be careful about the context. I cannot see that the speed of current communications can skew very easily the historical evidence of past events. I think you mean the empirical evidence – the relating of policy and philosophy to current real experiences. The speed of communications does not prevent historical analysis of the current empirical evidence in the same way as would have occurred previously – provided that historians still allow themselves time to investigate and consider. The threat to our historical picture of today, viewed from tomorrow, would come if people were foolish enough to imagine that the polaroid snap of instant media-reporting were a full and accurate record. That is a real possibility, but it is a matter of individual choice and therefore not inevitable. It will become inevitable if people are not wise to the limitations of instant media, which is why I (like you, I think) believe Blair was commenting on something significant, however much it may stick in the craw that it was he that said it. Boris thinks people are wise to those limitations, but I think Boris, as a journo, is being disingenuous, or (more charitably) optimistic.

The problem (and the solution) lies with us – the individuals who choose to demand instant satisfaction. The implication of Blair’s warning (and where I differ strongly from his conlusion) is not, for me, that something needs to be done about the media, but that people need to wake up and start demanding something better. The media will provide it if enough people demand it.

Christ knows, this could do with more careful re-reading, but I have to get up again in under four hours (following three hours sleep last night), so it will have to do. Still, I shall make my contribution to the resistance against instant communication by holding off from replying to the other messages until I have more time to give them proper consideration.

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The freedom based argument citing Locke as contrasted to the European centralised tradition certainly would seem preferable to the histrionic accusations of ‘Stalinist’ that I described as ‘paranoic exaggeration’. The atrocious mode of ruling by dictat, along with many other things, has to be countered. I look in on Guido’s and I find his totally deregulated libertarian stance interesting, but those who shout so simplistically in the comments loose credibility. They think they’re a pack that’s scented blood, but they sound more like a pack of rabid feral dogs, and you shoot them on sight in the aussie bush (hey Bliar … I can do the ‘feral’ bit too!). It’s OK as comments over on G’s, but I don’t think it’s the language Boris and the boys should be using. I regard the smoking inspectors with cameras as evidence that they are mad … suggest immediate reverse psychology tactic of taking pictures of them and posting them on those kind of sites the kids hang out on and such like. Locke is considerably less utilitarian than tends to be believed.

Now Rousseau could string a good line together, “Man is born free (unless his mum’s in BUPA), and everywhere he is in debt.” But if we see ‘obedience’ in more modern terms of self discipline/social responsiblity etc, I think Pestalozzi hit close to the mark when he said, “Truth is not a one-sided thing, Liberty is a boon, and obedience likewise. We must join what Rousseau sundered.” Kant described Rousseau’s philosophy as ‘barbarism’, I’ve no idea where, I once noted it down in a totally non-relevant place because it made me laugh.

[How can Gorgon Broon be 'Stalin', he ain't even got a moustache, Josef had a big beautiful moustache, even Hitler had a moustache, but only an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny pathetic little one, nothing like Uncle Josef's. McBroon don't even have one at all?]

I would disagree with the comment on ‘anarchy’, whilst what is stated is the view of the kids who wear the ‘A’ in the ‘O’, most of whom don’t know what it means (‘Anarchy is Order’), it would scarcely describe anarchism as a political philosophy. I have great regard for Kropotkin’s ‘Mutual Aid’ and his attack on social Darwinism, pointing out that the specie is at it’s weakest when the evolutionary change has taken place, they’ve only just survived, and is at it’s healthiest and strongest when there’s plenty for all. He also suggests that we have both induividual competitive drives and that amazing human altruism and the formation of those ‘mutual aid’ groups, socialist ideals (if there are any ’socialists’ with ‘ideals’ left) in some ways growing out of this. The problem is that they compete for dominance, we need to integrate them. I pointed out recently elsewhere the error of equating ‘people’s courts’ and ‘vigilante committes’ to ‘mob rule’, many of those who advocate mob rule would fall victim to such institutions if they existed, not that I’m advocting it, you understand? Some years ago a hacked Rand Corporation document advised the US Army to become more ‘anarchic’ in its approach to the internet. That made me laugh too.

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PS: ‘Enslaved by the modern entertainments industry’, sounds like the Frankfurt School ….. ‘the media is the opium of the people’ ….. “but NuLab sell ya a bum deal.”

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To that, you may well answer, “it depends what you mean by freedom”. You and idlex both ask for definitions. Fair enough. I take Hayek’s definition of freedom (or liberty): “that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society”. Do you doubt that freedom defined in those terms is essential (not the only factor, but a sine qua non) to the growth of prosperity?

Hmmmm. In my planned physical definition of prosperity (which may need to be posted in the forum rather than on this ephemeral thread), I intend to measure the prosperity of a lone individual, a sort of Robinson Crusoe washed up on a deserted island. He will, by the very definition of his circumstances, not be subject to coercion by others. But will his solitude render him a free man? Is freedom something that can only be taken away by other people? “Hell is other people,” wrote Sartre. Does hell begin only when Man Friday shows up?

I suppose you will carp that I have still not defined prosperity. This seems to me a less contentious word than freedom, but for the avoidance of confusion, I use the word in the sense of “material wellbeing”.

‘Material’ implies some sort of physical matter, and so ‘material wellbeing’ suggests some sort of physical state of being, like being healthy, warm, comfortable, and well fed.

For me the word ‘prosperity’ seems to gesture more towards some large house with sweeping gardens, its tables laden with sumptuous food, its cellars stocked with wine, its walls decorated with old masters, its rooms warmed by glowing fires, its chairs upholstered, its beds soft. And a house of which one has just become the proud owner, and in which one stands, in one’s Saville Row suit, adjusting one’s Old Etonian tie, before glancing at the Rolex on one’s wrist, and noting that Madonna will be arriving in a few minutes, and then Sting, and finally Paul Macartney. “Ah, prosperity at last!” one says out loud to oneself.

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The word ‘prosperity’ is of Latin origin. Sperare means ‘to hope’, and pro means ‘for’. So prosperity is simply whatever one hopes for.

Which might be absolutely anything. One prospers when one’s dreams come true, whatever those dreams might be.

That large house with sweeping lawns might not be what one hoped for. Nor those guests either.

Perhaps we should stop using Latin words whose meaning we have forgotten, or never knew in the first place. Rather than speak of a prosperous man, we should speak of a man who got what he wanted.

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Might I suggest, as a starting point for a definition of prosperity, visiting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

You could say that prosperity is acheved when the first two elements are fulfilled – that’s biological and physical needs (air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep), and safety needs (protection, security, order, law, limits, stability).

Prosperity can exist in the absence of the higher elements (belongingness, esteem and self-actualisation). Indeed a great many people who by any measure would be counted as “prosperous” lead miserable lives because one or more of these is missing. And this is where it starts to get complicated.

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Up at the other end of the scale from Beryl, I read in the Spectator a week or two back the resignation letter of Andrei Navrozov from Brook’s Club.

The chairman had sent out a letter to its members setting out the new rules. “We shall be allowed to designate bedrooms as smoking bedrooms where the occupant, but no one else, may smoke.” And it went on to say that, “It is likely that the roof is the only practical option for smokers,” although if no smoking is allowed within some distance from a building, not even this would be permitted. “There will be a direct telephone line from which anyone may make a call to complain to the bureaucracy charged with enforcement of the legislation if smoking takes place.” So snitching will be encouraged. It ends, “We shall have a final dinner to honour tobacco before its use in the Club slips into oblivion. Snuff will be available in the bar on a trial basis.”

So it will be as bad at Brook’s Club as it will be in Beryl’s Bar. There is at least a dismal uniformity to it.

But I wonder whether Beryl’s going to go out for a bash to ‘honour tobacco’ before its use ’slips into oblivion’? It smacks of an abject defeatism. As Nazi panzers motored up to London from Brighton, would the members of Brook’s have held a final valedictory dinner to ‘honour English liberty’ before it slipped into oblivion – or armed themselves to fight the enemy at their gates?

Navrozov accuses the chairman of being a bureaucrat, a hypocrite, and a coward. He hadn’t even called an extraordinary committee meeting. Nor temporised, nor even written to the Times.

I bet if Beryl were chairman of Brook’s, she’d have been screaming blue murder, and pulling every string she could.

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In respect of words like ‘freedom’ and ‘prosperity’, perhaps we simply have to recognise that they are imprecise, and live with it. English serves our purposes well enough for most things in life – the things we see and touch and hear. It’s just not very good at expressing abstract ideas or feelings. Perhaps only poets can ever manage to get our grounded, nuts-and-bolts language to fly.

A friend of mine once said that expressing ideas with language was like throwing darts at a dartboard: you never could quite say exactly what you meant. But after three or so tries, you might manage a fairly good approximation.

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Marx said that the freedom from want was the prerequisite for all other freedoms. I find Maslow somewhat Business School/Adult Ed/technicist Penguine psychology iffy. Freddy said, “… the ‘old maids’ of scholarship and the technicist ‘breadwinners’ may belong to different regiments, but it is the same army.”

I suspect that we’re still wild Anglo-Saxons, as opposed to the more ‘regimented’ Germans, and we’re spiced and infused with Celt which influences our perceptions, no matter what our racial origin and no matter how we try to intellectually validate it. As a nation we don’t like being told what to do. In many ways it’s as simple as that. We are both ‘a nation of small shopkeepers’ and a ‘nation of pirates and poets’ at the same time, whatever skew may or may not occur in an age of text that could potentially change while you’re reading it.

Weber started out attempting to refute Marx, he ended up much closer to agreement with him.

I disagree over Portillo. I only spoke to him once on the phone and we exchanged a few letters, but I don’t go with the ‘power’ slur. As I pointed out to a local NuLab zombie who said he was a Thatcher minister, as if that warranted Nuremberg, he abstained on several key issues. It’s his intellect and historical analysis that I would like to see evident. I thought Letwin was good on Newsnight.

That ‘only in the bedrooms’ bit makes smoking sound like sex. Will it be Colombian ’snuff’ that’s freely available on the bars of gentlemen’s clubs? I suppose if the Dutch approach were adopted all smokers could smoke super-skunk instead, as long as there was no tobacco with it.

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You could say that prosperity is acheved when the first two elements are fulfilled – that’s biological and physical needs (air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep), and safety needs (protection, security, order, law, limits, stability). (PaulD)

I think I can use this to introduce a physical measure of prosperity. But I’ll start off by simplifying these needs down to just two – food and drink -, and assume that all the other needs are already met.

I’ll consider a man whose only needs are of food and drink, and who lives under a tree upon which their grows a fruit – a breadfruit or a coconut or something – which provides both the food and drink that he needs. Let us say that he needs to eat just one of these fruit to live for another day.

Now, let us further suppose that these fruit do not just fall off the tree for him to collect at the bottom, but that he has to climb the tree to pluck and eat the fruit from its branches. And let us also suppose that he climbs the tree every day to pluck and eat one of the fruit before descending again to sit beneath the tree, or do whatever he likes, for the remainder of the day.

But how long is the remainder of the day? Well, that all depends how long it takes him to climb up the tree, pluck and eat the fruit, and climb back down. Now it may take only a minute of two for him to climb up, another couple of minutes to wolf down the ripe soft fruit, and another minute to climb down. In which case the remainder of the day is pretty much the whole day.

However, it might take a lot longer for him to climb the tree. The tree may be very tall, and its branches a dense thicket. And it might be difficult for him to find a fruit in its dense foliage. It might take him half a day to climb up and eat and climb down again. It might even take almost the entire day. In which case, the remainder of the day may be a few short minutes. The most time he can spend up the tree is all day. If he needs to spend longer, he’s in trouble.

In the first case, the fraction of the day that he spends sitting at the bottom of the tree is nearly equal to 1. And in the second case, the same fraction of the day is nearly equal to 0. And so this fraction, which I’ll call F for now, can range from 0 to 1. It gives the fraction of his time that he can devote to sitting at the bottom of the tree, or whatever else he feels like doing. And the other fraction, 1 – F, gives the fraction of his time that he is busy finding and eating fruit.

Now the value of F, I suggest, is an important measure of how life is going for him.. Let’s imagine that one day he injures himself slightly, such that it takes him twice as long to climb up and down the tree. Now if F was 0.8 before he was injured, then he spent 0.2 of a day up the tree, and this would increase after the injury to 0.4 of a day, and so F would fall to 0.6. But if his initial F was 0.2, and he spent 0.8 of a day up the tree, then this would increase to 1.6 of a day. He’d have to spend over one and a half days per day up the tree finding fruit to eat. But the maximum time he can spend up the tree is only one day per day, i.e. all day, and F must be 0. If it takes him longer than a day to find the fruit he needs to survive for another day, he’ll slowly starve and die. So F = 0 is death’s door. So, regardless of anything else, he is safer from death the higher the value of F. So F is a measure of safety or security.

Also, if F falls, he finds he’s spending more and more of his time doing just one thing – climbing up and down the tree, finding and eating fruit. But as F rises, he finds himself spending more and more time sitting at the bottom of the tree, or doing whatever if wants to do. So the higher the value of F, the more time he spends doing what he wants, rather than what he must to survive. When F = 0, he can never do what he wants or likes to do. When F = 1, he always does as he wishes. And since, in one plausible Latin meaning, to prosper is to do as one wishes or hopes, then F is a measure of prosperity.

This is a simple imaginary circumstance. Real life is obviously far more complex. But it’s a start. And F can be described in terms of physics, of work and power and energy.

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Mindblowing analysis Idlex.

It’s coming to the end of the day and F=0 …

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Ha! Nice one, Melissa.

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This is indeed a good article by Boris and the highlight of enfeebled Tony Blair clinging to his office like a drowning man clutching at a straw for the last time is most certainly rewarding.

What a pity though that Chairman Gordon and the rest of the creeping fascist brigade, namely Nu-Labour, aren’t going along with him. I sincerely hope that Cameron is not going to follow in footsteps which could in any way be described as similar. I am no longer prepared to tolerate the continuing erosion of our liberties and if it means civil disobedience, then so be it. Bring it on!

I should also hope that if the Tories come into power that they will privatise that running dog of PC politics called the BBC. I resent deeply paying a licence fee for a corporation that is supposed to be about serious quality broadcasting and yet ends up as nothing more than a PC/Nu-Labour/Middle Class Pinko mouthpiece. “Pravda” someone called it on another string and how right they are: it is an appropriate title for a media organ that has sold out quality for a narrow minded audience of puritans, finger wagging moralists and the prissy sections of the middle class. To think it represented the voice of freedom during World War II. Now look at it!

With regard to the smoking ban issue, this is a government that has failed in so many ways to improve the quality of our lives and instead turned the UK into something rapidly approaching a prison camp. Hardly surprising then that it should waste so much time and money on something so unimportant. Second hand smoke, in the quantities in which we normally experience it, has never be shown to kill anyone and, moreover, this government and its cronies in ASH and public health have failed to achieve one of one of the most civilised acts a society can undertake, that being, the identification of the dead. In addition, the so called charity ASH acts ultra vires (beyond its powers) and should not be involved in politics to the extent that it is and nor should it have been permitted to wield the power over our lives that it now exercises. It is one of the most mendacious organisations on the planet and it should be investigated by the Charity Commissioners and its wings severely clipped. Better still, disband it!

Set the people of Britain free for we are not children but adults and rightfully deserve autonomy over our own lives, choices and decision making!

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AP said:

Marx said that the freedom from want was the prerequisite for all other freedoms.

Marx also said that wealth and profit were derived from the unpaid labour of the workers. Then disproved that theory by living off his Capitalist pal, Engels.

Marx didn’t seem to apply the freedom from want theory to the servant of his he got pregnant. He didn’t appear to apply it to his wife and children either, since, after a brief spell as a journalist when young, he never appears to have been motivated to find work.

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…this is a government that has failed in so many ways to improve the quality of our lives and instead turned the UK into something rapidly approaching a prison camp. Hardly surprising then that it should waste so much time and money on something so unimportant. Second hand smoke, in the quantities in which we normally experience it, has never be shown to kill anyone…

So neatly put, Twinkles.

As for you, Idlex, aren’t you supposed to do workings-out in the margin?

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As for you, Idlex, aren’t you supposed to do workings-out in the margin?

What? Do you want me to post equations???

I can do it if you want. But I don’t think you need me to. After all, Melissa doesn’t.

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Re: Use of ‘Latin words’. As far as I’m aware the bulk of the Latin in our language is that introduced by the legal and medical professions long after Rome had departed our shores. What romance language there is has been filtered through Norman French before it collided head-on with Anglo-Saxon. Notions over Latin originate from Oxbridge scholars who tried to force English grammar into the Latin mold despite the fact that it doesn’t fit, English grammar would appear to have more of the Jute about it than anything else. Does anyone still regard grammar as the ‘rules of the language’? I love shooting at that one.

Re: Maslow. Who did the moral censorship job on his brain?

Right-on over much of Karl-baby Liberty, though his living off Engles doesn’t disprove his theories over wealth creation and exploitation, it simply demonstrates the wisdom of having rich friends rather than working for a living (why do you think I’m cultivating this cyber relationship with Boris?). Yes, Marx always knew where his next meal was coming from, usually Engles. He was also a bit of a parliamentarian when all is said and done, as Bakunin pointed out.

I don’t really care what things are called anymore, there’s ample evidence to demonstrate the economic and societal advantages to involving workers in production both economically and in team-tasking, from Waitrose to Volvo. Anyway, I’d rather fly a Spitfire with Beryl than attempt even comic algebra (with a very serious point) when I’m still trying to wake up.

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Now the value of F, I suggest, is an important measure of how life is going for him….So F is a measure of safety or security.

Crusoe managed to get so good at climbing trees and picking fruit that he managed to get F up to 0.95, though he was never sure whether he was better off than when F was only 0.75. But sadly, because he thought his life was going well and that he was relatively secure, he was killed by a wild animal, or froze to death on a winter night. Or if he survived, he spent the rest of his life on that island sitting under that tree, because he valued only enough food and water to survive, and not improvements in his lot (building shelter, collecting firewood, fishing, hunting, searching for other fruits, perhaps cultivating some of them, making hunting, fishing and farming implements, constructing a means to escape the island or to attract the attention of passing ships, etc).

Is it really a measure of security or of how life is going? Is it a meaningful measure, and if so, is it measuring those things (which are not the same, and I doubt have identical values in all circumstances)?

1. Is F ordinal or cardinal? You assume that F=0.4 is twice as secure or good as F=0.2, and F=0.8 is twice as secure or good as F=0.4. Is it really possible to say more than that F=0.8 is better than F=0.4, which is better than F=0.2? Is it meaningful to transpose “time left after carrying out one essential task” into a mathematical value for more amorphous concepts?

2. Is F subjective? I get bored sitting around. I would rather be working. If the only useful task I carry out is climbing up the tree, I may feel that a lower value of F is better than a higher value, upto a point. The obvious answer is that a higher value of F does not mean that you sit around, but that you have more time to do other things. But then you have admitted that you are measuring the wrong thing. Because what matters is not how long it takes you to carry out one task, but how much satisfaction (or “utility” as economists would call it, of which security will be a part) you can gain from a variety of activities given limited resources (of which time is one example). You are back to Lionel Robbins’ definition of economics – “The science which studies human behavior as a relationship between given ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”

3. Is F capable of interpersonal comparison? Let’s say that you had invented a useful measure of security or quality-of-life for Crusoe. Would you be able to compare Crusoe’s F with Man Friday’s F in a useful way? Could you aggregate them and talk of their combined or average security or quality-of-life? If Crusoe’s F was 0.6 and Man Friday’s F was 0.9, and Crusoe then increases his F to 0.9 while Man Friday’s F falls to 0.8, are they more or less secure, better or worse off? Crusoe economics is only worthwhile if you can find a useful way to expand from the singular to the plural.

I’m sorry guys, but this is old stuff. You are reinventing the square wheel. They were trying to work this sort of thing out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is one of the many culs-de-sac up which mainstream economics trudged during the last century, that era of intellectual and cultural dead-ends. If you want a particularly full exposition of it, try Arthur Pigou’s tome The Economics of Welfare, published in 1920 (and then tell me whether you think Human Action is hard work in comparison). And if you want to understand why this is a cul-de-sac, try Murray Rothbard’s 1956 article Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics.

And by the way, what you are defining as “prosperity”, economists generally refer to as “welfare”, to distinguish the broader notion of wellbeing or quality-of-life from the narrower material requirements of life. One can have prosperity but a low quality-of-life (think Britney Spears or the Queen), or have little fortune or property and yet have a high quality-of-life (think Mother Theresa). It depends what you value and whether you have enough of it.

“What people value” is in the spiritual and subjective realms, about which government and policy can do little. All that government and policy can do is try to create the conditions in which people can most effectively pursue the things they value and satisfy their wants. A free society, with as little government-intervention and -cost as is consistent with the protection of those freedoms, and where social cooperation is coordinated voluntarily through markets, is the best way to achieve that end. Hence freedom -> prosperity.

There are so many outstanding points to deal with, but this is badly reducing my F. Or is it? Maybe this is my favourite fruit.

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idlex, Before you waste too much time trying to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the study of the human sciences, try Ludwig von Mises’s Theory and History for the necessary differences in one’s methodological approach. (bgp)

Now that I’ve Gorn & Dunnit, as they say, I guess I should now find out why it was thoughtcrime.

I suppose the best thing to be done with cannibals is to give them a book like Eating People Is Wrong.

I shall be interested to find out what was wrong with my methodology by reading Theory and History. It looks a bit long though. Can anyone summarise it in one paragraph?

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idlex, Is that (Eating People is Wrong) a deliberate reference to a marvellous Flanders & Swann sketch, or just serendipity?

If it were possible to summarize a book in one paragraph, I guess it wouldn’t have made much of a book. But you could start with this paragraph from the Introduction:

Epistemologically the distinctive mark of what we call nature is to be seen in the ascertainable and inevitable regularity in the concatenation and sequence of phenomena. On the other hand the distinctive mark of what we call the human sphere or history or, better, the realm of human action is the absence of such a universally prevailing regularity. Under identical conditions stones always react to the same stimuli in the same way; we can learn something about these regular patterns of reacting, and we can make use of this knowledge in directing our actions toward definite goals. Our classification of natural objects and our assigning names to these classes is an outcome of this cognition. A stone is a thing that reacts in a definite way. Men react to the same stimuli in different ways, and the same man at different instants of time may react in ways different from his previous or later conduct. It is impossible to group men into classes whose members always react in the same way.

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Whoops! I spoke two minutes too soon. I may not have to trudge through Theory and History after all.

But sadly, because he thought his life was going well and that he was relatively secure, he was killed by a wild animal, or froze to death on a winter night.

I thought I’d made it clear that ‘all other needs were met’. This Crusoe’s island was an imaginary island, free of wild animals (except perhaps brilliantly-coloured and highly talkative parrots)and of an equable temperature. In thought-experiments, one begins with simple cases.

However, since you have introduced a wild animal onto the island, Crusoe will obviously have to defend himself. Instead of just sitting under the tree F of the day, he spends this time constructing a protective cage around its base, using branches from the tree. Since construction and maintenance of the cage requires physical work, just like climbing the tree, and the cage is essential for his survival, he now has to not only work to maintain himself but also his protective cage. So F will fall. This is exactly the same as if he was injured. If F was high before this animal showed up, he’ll be able to build the protective cage quickly. If F was low, it will be slow going, and he may well find himself being eaten. The higher his F, the greater his ability to defend himself.

Or if he survived, he spent the rest of his life on that island sitting under that tree, because he valued only enough food and water to survive, and not improvements in his lot (building shelter, collecting firewood, fishing, hunting, searching for other fruits…

It’s not that he valued only enough food and water to survive, but that is all he needed to survive. Crusoe expends a certain amount of energy each day. And that is what he needs to replace by eating fruit, and maintain an equilibrium energy store. If he doesn’t eat enough, his internal energy store will dwindle, and he’ll get thinner. If he eats too much, he gets fat.

And in what way does it improve Crusoe’s lot, as measured by F, to hunt and fish and search for other fruits? He’ll only get fat.

1. Is F ordinal or cardinal?

I really don’t know. F is a number between 0 and 1. We know that F=0 is death’s door. Should F ever become 1, Crusoe is (possibly) immortal. So F=1 must be heaven’s gate. But achieving F=1 is probably impossible, a bit like reaching the speed of light.

2. Is F subjective?

No. Of course, Crusoe may get bored sitting F of his time under the tree, and can wander off and talk to the parrots, or perhaps contemplate his circumstances, wondering what life is all about. Why, he might even use F to read Mises’ Theory and History, looking for the bit that says that the methods of the natural sciences are inapplicable to those of the human sciences.

Since F is the measure of his prosperity, the only useful thing he can do is increase F. And since F has just decreased since the arrival of that feral animal, he would do well to kill it before it kills him. For with its death, F would go back up to its previous level.

3. Is F capable of interpersonal comparison?

Yes. In principle at least. If Man Friday shows up, he will have his own value of F.

But for them to find and compare their actual values of F, they need clocks to measure time. Fortunately, they live inside a clock. The stars and sun revolve above them like the hands of a clock. (though it would be more accurate to say that the hands of a clock revolve like those of the celestial stars).

You are reinventing the square wheel.

And proud I am of it. You have to start somewhere. But I think that as the corners get knocked off, it will gradually become perfectly circular.

And I’ve never seen anybody trudge up the particular cul-de-sac that I am. In English a cul-de-sac means a dead end street. In French it means the arse of a bed. i.e. the way out.

The real difference between the approach I am taking and that of neoclassical economics is that I am only concerned with the physics of what is happening when people work, and neoclassical economics is concerned with psychological states like ‘happiness’, ‘pleasure’,and ’satisfaction’. Or, to put it another way, neoclassical economics regularly assumes that F=1, and Crusoe is always free to do whatever he likes, and so what he does or does not like – his psychological state – is the only thing that matters.

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idlex,

And so this fraction, which I’ll call F for now, can range from 0 to 1. It gives the fraction of his time that he can devote to sitting at the bottom of the tree, or whatever else he feels like doing.

Should F ever become 1, Crusoe is (possibly) immortal.

Have you noticed that, according to this definition and conclusion, the unemployed and the retired are immortal?

And in what way does it improve Crusoe’s lot, as measured by F, to hunt and fish and search for other fruits? He’ll only get fat.

Either you’ve just demonstrated my point that F is not a meaningful value, or you really believe that variety cannot improve Crusoe’s lot. In that case, let’s have a communist system, because we need consider only those things that are objectively necessary to sustain life, and not people’s subjective preferences. Can I get off the island first, though?

Since F is the measure of his prosperity, the only useful thing he can do is increase F.

Do you not feel that this is just a little circular?

We are trying to establish whether F is a meaningful measure of security or quality-of-life. And your defence of F is that, as you have defined it as a measure of security or quality-of-life, increasing F is “the only useful thing he can do”. What if your definition is wrong? You cannot use the assumption that it is right to support the assertion that it is right.

This is similar to this Government’s attitude to targets. “We define average exam grades as the measure of educational standards”, they say. So by definition, educational standards must be rising if average grades are improving. Never mind whether that was a realistic definition.

If I were Crusoe, I would not be trying to maximize F. I would be using the time available to me to do what I could to satisfy my wants and improve my lot (F=0). I might allow myself a little free time every day (F=0.1). But I would not regard an increase in that free time (say F=0.5) as an improvement in my security or quality-of-life. Indeed, if I were sitting around or talking to the parrots or reading Theory & History for too much of the day, when I could be improving my diet or defences or chances of escaping, I would be very nervous and regard both my security and quality-of-life as diminished, relative to a lower value of F. You may well feel differently, but that is the point. Not all Crusoes are the same. This is subjective.

Measurement implies objectivity and cardinality. A universal or standard measure of security or quality-of-life is an oxymoron.

But I think that as the corners get knocked off, it will gradually become perfectly circular.

It will be more useful as a doorstop.

And I’ve never seen anybody trudge up the particular cul-de-sac that I am.

There are lots of places I have never been and things I have never seen. Doesn’t mean nobody has been there or seen them.

The real difference between the approach I am taking and that of neoclassical economics is that I am only concerned with the physics of what is happening when people work, and neoclassical economics is concerned with psychological states like ‘happiness’, ‘pleasure’,and ’satisfaction’.

I throw definitions right back at yer. Define what you mean by “physics” in this context. What is the relationship between physics and security and quality-of-life? I haven’t noticed much physics, as I understand it, so far. A bit of maths (e.g. proportion of time spent climbing trees). Perhaps a little chemistry and biology (how much of the various nutrients are required to sustain life, though you have provided only a proxy measure and a bunch of assumptions for these factors). But not much physics.

Neo-classicals would hotly deny that they are primarily “concerned with psychological states”. Indeed, “psychological economics” was a term used in the early twentieth century to try to disparage and differentiate Austrian economics (whose exponents would themselves deny the validity of the appellation) from the neo-classical and Marxist alternatives. My Oxford Dictionary of Economics defines “neoclassical economics” as “The approach in economics of analysing how individuals and firms should behave to maximize their own objective functions, assuming that activities are coordinated by the price mechanism, and that markets clear so that the economy is in equilibrium at all times.” You are closer to the neo-classicals than you imagine. Both you and they think that one can derive “objective functions” to describe, categorize, measure (etc) human behaviour, when in reality you cannot escape subjectivity in human action.

Or, to put it another way, neoclassical economics regularly assumes that F=1, and Crusoe is always free to do whatever he likes, and so what he does or does not like – his psychological state – is the only thing that matters.

I don’t have much time for neo-classical economics, but I would defend them from this false characterization. Can you give me an example of a neo-classical economist assuming that F=1?

Remember, that is not the same thing as assuming that Crusoe pursues his desires. You seem to be dividing Crusoe’s activities into (a) fulfilling his physical requirements, and (b) fulfilling his desires, as though his physical requirements are not part of his desires. It seems to me fairly self-evident that we all desire the fulfillment of our physical requirements. This is not two distinct sets. One is a subset of the other. They have not assumed that (a) is zero just because they treat (b) as a whole.

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bgp, I knew of the book, although I’ve never read it. It floated into mind because in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe there were cannibals.

Epistemologically the distinctive mark of what we call nature is to be seen in the ascertainable and inevitable regularity in the concatenation and sequence of phenomena. On the other hand the distinctive mark of what we call the human sphere or history or, better, the realm of human action is the absence of such a universally prevailing regularity. (Mises)

One can sort of tell from this passage that Mises was no physicist, or at least knew little or nothing of the history of physics.

The “ascertainable and inevitable regularity” of nature was only discovered after hundreds – nay, thousands – of years of close examination of it, under the presupposition that there was an order underlying it. We humans have only slowly constructed the natural sciences to their present state, and we’re still working at it. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the discovery that the natural world behaved in regular ways. Mises is simply taking science for granted. He also seems to be unaware of a probabilistic quantum mechanics in which the outcomes are uncertain. As Rutherford once put it, “Once every few million years, a kettle on an unlit stove will boil.” Or at least that’s the gist of what he said. If it was him.

Human beings are also part of the natural world, to the best of my knowledge. They are very complicated and mysterious, much like the weather. But if it is possible to discover an order in the natural world, and humans are part of that natural world, then in principle it ought to be possible to discover the order underlying human nature. The ‘absence’ of such a regularity to human nature really only signifies that we still don’t know what it is – not that there really isn’t any.

Put another way, the absence of scientific understanding of the natural world through the bulk of human history resulted in the natural world being regarded as being as capricious and fey as the human world.

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Wow! And to think that I thought the ‘F’ stood for the same as on Gordon Ramsey.

The human psyche? Layers of an onion I reckon.

Wasn’t it the Bud who taught something like … ‘all human life is suffering, suffering is created by desire, if you want to free your life of suffering first rid yourself of desire’?

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Before I continue, I’ll set out some of the physics underlying F.

Crusoe has a resting basal metabolic rate b watts, and when he sets to work to climb up and down the tree he performs work at an extra rate b watts, and while he is working he gains energy from the fruit he eats at the rate c watts. (This is a slight approximation, given that I’ve located all the food energy in one single fruit. It would be true if Crusoe eats small berries as he climbs up and down the tree.)

Crusoe’s day is divided into climbing and plucking and eating Tc, and resting at the base of the tree Tr, where Tc + Tr = 1 day.

At equilibrium, where the net energy gain in one day is equal to the net energy expenditure, we can write

b + a.Tc = c.Tc

so Tc = b / (c – a)

F is resting time per day, and given Tr = 1 -Tc

F = 1 – b / (c – a) (1)

Assuming b is always going to be some value >1 for a living thing, and c cannot be infinite, F can never equal 1. Given that F can only range from 0 to 1, any value of F less than zero indicates a non-viable life. Strictly speaking death is F=0, death itself is F<0.

If someone doesn't have to do any extra physical work to get food energy, and their metabolic rate doesn't rise when they acquire food energy, then a = 0, and

F = 1 – b / c (2)

I hope I didn’t get anything wrong there.

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Yup, of course I did.

When he sets to work to climb up and down the tree he performs work at an extra rate a watts, not b watts.

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I presume that the Bud would have meditated under the tree and the fruit would have fallen to him. The ‘F’ factor would have then been directed up through his chakras, thus achieving the criteria for both stances without moving.

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bgp,

Have you noticed that, according to this definition and conclusion, the unemployed and the retired are immortal?

I know you want to get off the island, and stop considering Crusoe on his own, and think of the actual society in which we live. But that’s a bit like saying “Can we leave off all these definitions of work and energy and power, and the laws of motion and gravity, and please get on to doing real rocket science?”

The unemployed and the retired are part of a society, which will have its own average F, in which other people are working to feed them.

or you really believe that variety cannot improve Crusoe’s lot

F determines how much variety there can be in Crusoe’s life. If F=0, he is working to stay alive the whole time, and can’t do anything else. Or at least, if he does, he pays for it with his life. It’s only his resting time (or leisure time) that he can do what he likes, which may include adding variety in any way he likes. I have no objection to variety. It is, as they say, the spice of life. But he can only have any variety to the extent he has any F.

We are trying to establish whether F is a meaningful measure of security or quality-of-life. And your defence of F is that, as you have defined it as a measure of security or quality-of-life, increasing F is “the only useful thing he can do”.

F might be regarded as a kind of ‘degree of freedom’ that someone has. F=0 is no degree of freedom at all, and F=1 is the most complete degree of freedom. When F=0, Crusoe spends all his time working to find food, and has no freedom. When F=1, Crusoe can do exactly what he likes all the time, and has complete freedom. The only ‘useful’ thing that Crusoe can do to increase his degree of freedom is to increase F. Which he might do by installing a rope ladder to get up and down the tree quicker. I agree that that Crusoe can add variety to his life in his resting or leisure time, and there may be some ‘utility’ to this. It depends how you define utility.

If I were Crusoe, I would not be trying to maximize F. I would be using the time available to me to do what I could to satisfy my wants and improve my lot (F=0). I might allow myself a little free time every day (F=0.1).

You really haven’t quite understood Crusoe’s awful predicament. The only ‘time available’ to Crusoe is F.

Can you give me an example of a neo-classical economist assuming that F=1?

They all do, to the best of my knowledge. For a start, they don’t know anything about F, because economists don’t think using the terms of physics, and so you’ll never find equation (1) in my previous post in any economics textbooks. No, they regard time just like you do, as “the time available to me” which just sort of arrives every day automatically. And then they wonder how to dispose of this time between leisure and work. One example dragged off the web:

This can be shown in a diagram (below) that illustrates the trade-off between allocating your time between leisure activities and income generating activities. The linear constraint line indicates that there are only 24 hours in a day, and individuals must choose how much of this time to allocate to leisure activities and how much to working. (Wikipedia Labour economics -Neoclassical microeconomic model — Supply) .

I can only understand the above if F=1, and people can choose how to allocate this free time as they like, satisfying their wants. If people can really choose how to allocate their time between work and leisure, then an economy is simply a game we all play, making and trading things we like, and which we can drop out of whenever we like. If the economy is just a jolly great game, much like football or something, then in the terms I’m using (which economists have never heard of: show me one who has if you think there are any), then F=1, or F is assumed to be 1.

Crusoe would dearly love to choose to ‘allocate his time’ between leisure and fruit-income-generating activities, but he has no choice in the matter. Crusoe’s time is already allocated by F. It is only during the relatively brief F of resting or free time that Crusoe gets each day that he can choose how to allocate his time, the rest of the time (1-F) he must spend finding fruit – or die.

You seem to be dividing Crusoe’s activities into (a) fulfilling his physical requirements, and (b) fulfilling his desires, as though his physical requirements are not part of his desires.

I’m certainly dividing Crusoe’s activities into two parts, Tc and Tr. And in Tc he is fulfilling his physical or biological requirements, which he has to do whether he likes it or not, on pain of death (remember, there’s nobody else on the island to look after Crusoe). And in Tr he does whatever he likes. During Tc, he is constrained to a single activity. During Tr he is unconstrained to any one single activity.

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bgp, in many ways all I’m saying is that humans have to work to survive. They may have to work a lot, or only a little. F measures that amount. After we’ve done this inescapable, necessary work that we can do as we like – rather than as we must – in the remaining time left.

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Complicated but more interesting then S. Rushdie. I’ve bookmarked it for when I’m on holiday.

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What if ‘Crusoe’ likes climbing trees? I like climbing trees.

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idlex (5:34PM),

1. This is maths, not physics. There is nothing empirical here, nor much about the properties of matter. This is pure deductive reasoning from logical identities. That’s not a criticism – logical deduction is a more appropriate approach to what you are trying to do. But we shouldn’t annoint this with the false legitimacy of scientism.

2. Your formula F = 1 – b/(c – a) is true as far as it goes, but what is that telling us? We already knew that viable existence lies in the range 0 < F < 1, by definition (in other words, you can't spend less than 0 hours per day sustaining your existence, and if you need more than 24 hours per day to carry out the activities necessary to sustain your existence, you are in trouble). I'm not sure I see how the special case where it takes no extra effort to sustain life (F = 1 – b/c) is going to lead us to greater insights. Nor do I see what you are going to do with the more general case. I’ll be interested to see if this leads to something useful. So far, all we seem to have is

(a) You’d better consume more energy than you use each day, or you’re in trouble, and

(b) The amount of time you have left after gathering food each day is dependent on (i) your inactive metabolic rate, (ii) the increase in your metabolic rate from food-gathering, and (iii) how quickly you can consume calories while gathering food.

I don’t feel that I am closer to a measure of freedom, prosperity, security or quality-of-life with these statements. How exactly are we supposed to use this?

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