Any takers?

Published by Bristol University Press

Beer and Racism
How Beer Became White, Why It Matters, and the Movements to Change It

Only £18.39 in paperback.

Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature

My son borrowed this from the school library and I have started reading it.

It's a splendid book. It's basically a really detailed and expanded version of one chapter of "Guns, Germs and Steel", but with more charts, statistics, tables and illustrations.

My favourite bit so far:

It's not that any early state was (as Hobbes theorized) a commonwealth vested with power by a social contract that had been negotiated by its citizens. Early states were more like protection rackets, in which powerful Mafiosi extorted resources from the locals and offered them safety from their neighbours and each other.

Any ensuing reduction in violence benefited the overlords as much as the protectees. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settle scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss.

I don't think much as changed so far.

The Classics

From the TES

Education secretary Nicky Morgan is to ask publishers to cut the prices of classic English novels for secondary schools, in a bid to ensure more teenagers have access to the books.

Ms Morgan is expected to make the request as part of a “rallying cry” to improve literacy, in a speech at Charles Dickens Primary School in Southwark, South London, today.

She will say that all children should have access to “our nation’s vast literary heritage” and that cheaper access to novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë would encourage schools to buy in more of the texts.

Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte are already available for a low cost. If you've got an e-reader or computer, you can get them for nothing. Their works entered the public domain long ago, and you can get them from places like Project Gutenberg, or sometimes Amazon, for £0.

If you want a paperback, it's about £2 a book, which is basically production and a little profit. And it's "little profit" because anyone can print and sell these books. There's no monopoly publisher. So, competition drives down the price. I doubt that this government scheme will be much cheaper.

This does then raise the thorny question of whether kids would want to read Dickens rather than The Hunger Games or Discworld books.

Can anybody else spot the obvious flaw in their strategy?

From The Mirror:

A “jokey” comic book strip called Hipster Hitler which portrays the Nazi leader as a trendy geek has been slammed by Jewish activists.

The group have pledged to shred all copies of the book that shows the murderous dictator wearing black-rimmed glasses and cardigan...

Fellow member Ilana Katz said: "If we can't get shops to stop selling copies we'll buy and shred them all. Since when was it okay to promote Hitler as a cool person?"

And technically, it would have been funnier had the activists pledged to burn all the copies of the book rather than shred them.

"Helen Fielding modelled grumpy shop keeper on real-life grumpy shop keeper"

From The Daily Mail:

Bridget Jones fans indifferent to learn that Mark Darcy is dead have a new anti-hero in the latest instalment: taciturn corner shop owner Mr Patel.

And, even better for those who prefer their supporting characters to be two-dimensional, Mr Patel, from whom Bridget Jones buys a pint of milk and a packet of Marlboro Lights in the third Bridget Jones' Diary, is based on a real-life shop keeper who runs Fags'N'Mags on the high street near her London home.

In a move destined to embarrass Mr Patel's family but give the small, local retailer worldwide kudos, the bit part player in Mad About The Boy shares the same name as his real-life counterpart.

Both the real and the fictional shop keepers are married with several adult children and both, says the author, are of Indian appearance.

"Stephen Hawking 'nervous' about reaction to Shining sequel"

From The BBC:

Stephen Hawking has admitted he is nervous about the reaction to his forthcoming sequel to Stephen King's novel The Shining. The Cambridge physicist told the BBC he expects 95% of the reviews for Doctor Sleep to be a comparison with A Brief History Of Time.

"You are faced with that comparison and that has got to make you nervous", he said, "because there is a lot of water under the bridge. I'm a different man".

He admitted visiting literary websites to see what fans were saying about the book ahead of its publication. Now aged 71, the veteran cosmologist said he thinks the quality of his writing has improved since he wrote A Brief History Of Time at the age of 45.

"What a lot of people are saying is, 'Well okay, I will probably read this book but it cannot be as good as either A Brief History Of Time or The Shining'. But I am obviously an optimist and I want them to say when they get done with it, that it was as good. But what I really want them to say is that it is better than both."

Veteran American author, Stephen King, now 65, is currently finalising A Beginner's Guide To Gravitational Singularity Theorems. As usual, there's a scary bit right at the end when the whole of time and space collapses into a black void, taking all of humanity with it.

Yeah, but has anybody ever read one of his books?

"Legendary author, playwright and hair stylist Vidal dies, aged 85"

From The Daily Mail and The Daily Mail:

The acerbic Vidal was known for creating the ‘wedge’ style haircut in the 1960s as well as best-selling novels such as Burr and Myra Breckenridge, the play The Best Man, and was the first stylist to allow his name to be used on products and salons.

In the 1960s and 70s he was a fixture on talk shows and other television programmes and feuded openly with Norman Mailer, Mia Farrow, Michael Caine and others. He also worked on screenplays and appeared in several beauty salons, including Bob Roberts and With Honors.

Along with such contemporaries as Mary Quant and Truman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers and hair stylists who were also genuine celebrities, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who had not read their books or had their hair cut by them knew who they were.

Celebrity stylist and New York columnist Oscar Blandi said Sassoon made him fall in love with the hair business and showed him the 'true art of writing'.

"He truly changed the world of hair and beauty," Blandi wrote. "He was definitely the most innovative person ever to enter the industry. And his books were real page turners."

Detecting autism in six-month old babies

As widely reported last week, for example in NHS News:

... a study... assessed the brain activity of 104 infants aged 6-10 months as they watched an image of an adult’s face whose eyes moved from looking away from them, to directly at the infant, then away again. Researchers called these eye movements ‘dynamic eye-gaze shifts’.

They then assessed whether differences in brain activity in response to the eye-gaze shifts were related to autism developing in the same children at three years. Children who did not develop autism showed large spikes in brain activity when they saw the ‘gaze shifts’. Much smaller spikes in brain activity were detected in the infants who went on to develop autism, raising the prospect that autism could be identified earlier than is currently clinically possible.

However, this test was not 100% accurate...

Well of course it's not 100% accurate, as autism is not a yes/no condition, there is an infinitum spectrum between 'completely shut off and irresponsive to other humans' and 'completely with it most of the time', but none of this surprises me.

As I have pointed out before*, for some reason intelligent creatures, most noticeably small babies, like staring you straight in the eyes and appreciate it when you reciprocate. Therefore, by reverse logic, there must be something a bit wrong with small babies who don't do this, or more to the point, who don't find it unusual if you don't look them straight in the eyes.

On a related topic, I'm sure that I read a science fiction book as a kid where the aliens/clones control people's minds by looking them in the eye, and the children make their alien/clone teacher's head explode by focussing on a spot six inches to the left of the teacher's face.** My fellow conspirators and I have tried this technique in Pointless Team Meetings and it does genuinely make the speaker very flustered. The technique is certainly up their there with Bullshit Bingo.***

* As it turns out, my observation that small children don't blink is an accepted fact, explanation here.

** Was that The Midwich Cuckoos? In which case swap round children/teacher.

*** If nobody wants to play, my other fall back is counting all the squares in the carpet, all the tiles in the ceiling or all the panes in the windows - not counting the rows and columns and multiplying, but counting them one by one and starting again if I lose count. When it's finally over, I am usually pleased to establish that I genuinely can't remember a word anybody said and don't have a clue what the meeting was about.

"Should unfinished works be left untouched?"

From the BBC:

A new adaptation of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was given an ending. But should unfinished works be left untouched, asks Sarah Barclay.

It's infuriating that of all the works he could have left unfinished, Dickens managed to

"From egalitarianism to kleptocracy"

There's a fine Chapter in Guns, Germs And Steel which sketches out how and why we developed from smaller bands of hunter-gatherers, via tribes and chiefdoms to large, modern states. Everybody will have his own thoughts on the hows and whys, but his are more coherent than most, to pick a few key paragraphs:

Over the past 13,000 years, the predominant trend in human society has been the replacement of smaller, less complex units by larger, more complex ones... By now, it should be obvious that chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed non-egalitarian societies [what to do with the surplus they generate]. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis [his examples are irrigation ditches, in the modern context this is motorways, sewers, the national grid etc]. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes.

These noble and selfish functions are inextricably linked, although some governments emphasise much more of one function that of the other. The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute [his term for rents and taxes] extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.

We consider President Mobutu of Zaire a kleptocrat because he keeps too much tribute (the equivalent of billions of dollars) and redistributes too little (no functioning telephone system in Zaire). We consider George Washington a statesman because he spent tax money on widely admired programs and did not enrich himself as president. Nevertheless, George Washington was born into wealth, which is much more unequally distributed in the United States than in New Guinea.

For any ranked society, whether chiefdom or state, one has this to ask: why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question, raised by political theorists from Plato to Marx, is raised anew by voters in every modern election...

What should an elite do to gain popular support while still maintaining a more comfortable lifestyle than commoners? Kleptocrats throughout the ages have resorted to a mixture of four solutions:

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite. That's much easier in these days of high-tech weaponry, produced only in industrial plants and easily monopolized by an elite, than in ancient times of spears and clubs easily made at home.

2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways. The principle was as valid for Hawaiian chiefs as it is for American politicians today.

3. Use monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. This is potentially a big and under-appreciated advantage of centralized societies over non-centralized ones... Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death [gives examples] Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and contributed to the acceptance of of centralized authority as tribal societies grew larger.

4. The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion [For these purposes, Nazism in Germany or Communism in the USSR were religions in exactly the same way as Christianity or Islam were to mediæval states - most Islamic states are still mediæval for these purposes]

Other points that he makes is that hunter-gatherer tribes have no concept of land ownership or rents; or that more complex societies enable more wealth to be created, partly because of 3. above, but also because more complex societies with more people allow more specialisation and more complex societies with more people need to form themselves into states, it's all very chicken-and-egg.
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What he doesn't say expressly, so I'll say it myself, is that states and land ownership go hand in hand; economies organised within the framework of states tend to create a bigger surplus than smaller, less organised ones (and bureaucracies and national armies are only affordable IF the underlying economy produces a surplus); and to the extent that the surplus is not collected in (public) taxes, it is collected in (private) rents instead.

Perhaps this is how the misunderstanding arose, the entirely erroneous belief that the land 'owners' themselves created and hence deserve to collect privately such a large part of the surplus? It is of course the concept of 'exclusive possession of land under the protective hand of the state or society as a whole' which is important and not land 'ownership' in the modern sense; and it is certainly not the actual individuals benefitting from such exclusive possession from time to time who matter. If those particular individuals hadn't benefitted, then somebody else, somebody who lost out would have benefitted.

This overlaps with 4. above, of course. In the UK, land owners are afforded semi-divine status, the typical tourist guide for a country house or castle will say, in suitably reverent and hushed tones that "The land has been in the family for ... generations" as if somehow the longer that a family has been collecting rents from the same location makes them higher beings than the grubby factory owner or film star who has snapped up a few acres with his own hard earned money and built his own castle, or the grubby investment fund which buys up land and buildings, or Heaven forfend, builds new buildings.

And in the UK context, he misses off method 5.

In some states they have "bread and circuses" but in a Home-Owner-Ist society, all the landed kleptocracy needs to do to co-opt the support of the masses is to generously allow a majority of them to buy tiny plots of land at inflated prices and then to trick them into believing that they too belong to The Hallowed Land Owning Class, all of which merely shoves the burden elsewhere - it pits owner-occupiers against tenants and would be first time buyer (i.e. NIMBYism) and in any event, most owner-occupiers are being robbed of far more via their taxes and the inflated land prices they have to pay off than they can ever earn back as rent.

I nearly stopped on reading on the very second page...

I was sent a copy of Beyond The Corporation to review. To cut a long story short, having read to the very end (which took me over a week - I'm a fast reader but it's a slow read in equal and opposite measure) and understood what he trying to say (even though he never really says it), I agree with his argument, but he gets off to a bad start on pages 1 and 2:

My ancestor's achievement made him very rich, and also be brought a lot of wealth to his descendants. People who own paper mills are well off, and during my childhood we did not lack for money. If you own the mill, you ad your children and your children's children will receive all the wealth created by the endless hard work of the employees.

You don't have to do anything: it is simply given to you, it is yours by legal right, even if you have nothing to do with the mill and have never contributed anything to its success, and even if for generations your family has invested no new money in the business, other than some of what the business itself generates through the work of the employees.

Woah! What does he overlook here?

1. The owners of the mill are subject to all the rules and regulations and are e.g. at the mercy of some EU Directive which might be brought in to prevent 'intensive water use' in the same way as they have shut down a lot of 'carbon intensive' heavy industry.

2. The employees do get a lot of the 'wealth' generated by the business, as they are paid market wages (and I fail to see how wages can be anything other than market rates, or else they'd go elsewhere) which are usually about three-quarters of the net profits of the business after about half of the total income is lost in taxation.

3. What the owners/shareholders actually get is not "all the wealth", it's about a quarter of post-tax income, and is a mixture of:
a) rents (whether on the land and buildings the business owns or on patents etc);
b) return on capital invested (in the sense of 'the money tied up in all the machinery') and
c) the 'super profits' generated from 'economies of scale' or 'synergies' or 'good will' or a 'dominant market position'.

a) can easily be removed from the equation by taxing it (whether you call it Business Rates or Land Value Tax or charging for the special protection given to the owners of patents). The ridiculous salaries which CEOs pay themselves come out of (a) and (c) of course, they are not robbing from the employees so much as robbing from the shareholders.

b) everything has to be financed somehow, and in the book he explains that there is no harm in the providers of finance for the physical or intellectual investment being paid interest (he explains that the a lot of employee buy-outs are financed by bank loans if the employees themselves don't have enough spare cash).
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So really, it's only item (c) that we need to think about.

To answer the question of to whom these really belong we have to ask "Who creates them?" and that is the tricky bit - no individual can really be said to create them but they are there, and as a rule 'everything has to belong to somebody'.

4. One person on his own cannot just become a shelf-stacker in a supermarket, the supermarket has to be there first. And this shelf-stacker is paid a market wage of £12,000 a year, but by combining and co-ordinating the efforts of all the drivers, shelf-stackers, check out girls, cleaners, product designers and store managers, the 'supermarket' (as an abstract entity) generates profits well in excess of all these salaries.

The way I understand it, his argument is that the economy works far better if those 'super profits' are shared firstly between the providers of the actual money invested (as interest) and the remainder between all the employees. Over time, any well run business is self-financing, so over time, an employee-owned business would generate sufficient 'super profits' to repay any loans it has taken out to buy the business (see 3 b) above) and it becomes 100% employee-owned.

5. So the shelf-stacker would end up being paid his £12,000 basic wage for work done and would receive a few thousand pounds extra as 'profit share'. For example, Tesco's profit after tax divided by the number of employees appears to be about £5,000. In the later chapters, where the book gets very technical (my favourite chapters), he explains that employees could/should be encouraged to roll up this profit share within the business, as a quasi-cash account earning interest, as insurance against unemployment and for their retirement.

6. This would leave the shareholders with nothing, of course - but who are those shareholders? By and large they will be people working for other shareholder-owned businesses, who have spare cash left over after paying off their mortgages and who are saving up for their retirement by buying shares in other shareholder-owned businesses and hoping to keep some of the £5,000 'super profits' generated by employees elsewhere.

7. So the whole 'capital market discipline' is actually a hugely expensive and inefficient way of churning money round (with plenty being creamed off by 'the City') with everybody trying to enslave everybody else. He points out that even though all the individuals working for a supermarket might not know much about the bigger picture of running a supermarket, they certainly know a lot more about it than small shareholders, pension fund trustees, investment managers and the like, so by and large, employee-owned businesses are run far better than ones owned by people with no involvement in the business.

8. "Aha!", I hear the audience shout, "If this were true, how come so few businesses are owned by their employees? Why don't they spontaneously come into existence?"

That's the sad bit of the story and where you have to un-learn a lot of what you have previously been taught as Gospel, and to which I will return over the next few days and weeks. To give you a clue, it's got to do with the confusion between current wealth created by a business in the year (which is fairly stable) and the net present value of all the 'super profits' to be created in future, i.e. the market capitalisation (which can fluctuate wildly).

Guns, Germs and Steel (2)

As recommended (yes you), I ordered this book, which arrived on Friday and I have now finished reading. It's all very interesting, or least useful background info, and for a modest £6 or something at Amazon the sort of book which everybody ought to have read.

It does make me wonder what possessed people from south east Asia (via New Guinea) to island hop all the way as far as Hawaii in little canoes, presumably by trial and error without even knowing whether there was a destination, let alone in which direction it might be. For every single person who made it to Hawaii, how many just ran out of food/water at some random place in the Pacific? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? According to the book populating "virtually every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific" only took about two thousand years from start to finish

And in the epilogue, he says what I have always said: that history is a science like anything else, in that if you look at the grander sweep of things you can recognise definite patterns; and if you can recognise patterns you can predict future events. (Isn't that what economists do all the time? The problem being that economists are on the whole so stupid (or corrupt) that they can't recognise what's going right now, e.g. few of them called the land price or credit bubbles).

Isaac Asimov referred to this as 'psychohistory' in the Foundation Trilogy - ignore the later additions, they were crap. When I read the original trilogy, I assumed that The Foundation was an allegory for Japan (very developed scientifically, but on a distant planet with very few raw materials so that the tides of history would force them to become a successful and hence powerful trading planet), only it turned out that the books were written in the early 1950s, long before Gen Douglas MacArthur's Georgist reforms had turned Japan into the success it was for a few decades (until they turned their back on Georgism again, of course).

Yasmin Alibi-Brown on VAT

Oh, the sheer and unadulterated Righteouness of it all:

“Zero-rated items, such as food (1), books (2) and children's clothing (3), shouldn't have VAT applied to them as it would hit the most vulnerable members of society the hardest."

Wot? Of course, we 'shouldn't' have VAT on anything, but let's look at those three items in turn:

1) We would get an average household's food bill down by hundreds of pounds a year if we left the EU.

2) Books? What is she talking about? Has she never heard of public libraries or second hand book or charity shops? I'm not aware that that the ultimate - and as yet undefined - victim group, 'the most vulnerable' would be 'hardest hit' if the price of a new book went up by a quid.

3) Children's clothes are stupendously cheap, cheaper than they have ever been. In any event, has she never heard of hand-me-downs, charity shops etc? Or is she thinking more of Nike trainers? And don't we have Child Benefit (or, G-d forbid, Child Tax Credits) to part-pay the cost of children's clothes?

Problem is of course, it wasn't the Yazzmonster (TM JuliaM) who said that, it was Stephen Robertson, Director General of the British Retail Consortium.

Scared To Death

Today I have been mainly lazing around and reading Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth.

It is a most awesome book, incredibly well researched etc. Warmly recommended.