The Harvest

Rising US - recovering Ireland?

2012-02-08T10:55:00.000-08:00

There has been some positive economic news from the US lately, falling unemployment in January for example. This is probably good news for Ireland, because Ireland is a major trading partner of the US.

The United States International Trade Commission ranks the trading partners in the US by the value of their combined exports and imports. Ireland comes 17th, which is pretty remarkable for a tiny country. The US trades more with Ireland than it does with Russia, Australia or Indonesia.

The great bulk of that trade is in exports from Ireland to the US, exports worth nearly $34 billion in 2010. Ireland exports more to the US than Italy or India.

Ireland's imports from the US are relatively much smaller, only $6.5 billion. So Ireland's trade surplus with the US is huge, around $27.3 billion.

This is actually gigantic for such a small country. Of 233 listed trading partners with the US Ireland has the 6th biggest trade surplus! Only Canada ($69.6 billion), China ($278.3 billion), Mexico ($97.2 billion), Japan ($64.2 billion) and Germany ($36.5 billion) have trade surpluses with the US larger than Ireland's. Considering that the least populous of those is Canada, and that has a population over 8 times bigger than Ireland (and shares a border with the US nearly 9,000km long, while Ireland is separated from it by a huge ocean), this is quite a surplus! Ireland even exports more than many of the oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

So all this gives me some hope that a recovery in the US could cause rising demand for exports from Ireland.

As to what Ireland exports to the US, there is this breakdown of 98 categories of trade, topped by 'organic chemicals' and 'pharmaceutical products'.

Too much pessimism over East Asia

2012-02-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

BBC reports that the Indonesian economy grew at its fastest pace in 15 years last year: 6.5%.

Great. What a success for Indonesia, and for anyone who cares about poverty.

There is not enough acknowledgement of the really great economic improvements in many Asian countries. When the rich Western countries are growing fast I see complaints about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Now that most Western countries are nearly stagnant and many Asian countries are booming, there is alarmist pessimism and complaints that the global centre of power is shifting east.

Will there never been a celebration of the rise of Asian economies? These are drastic reduction in poverty enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people. Sure the rise of China might provoke strategic fears, but anyone who cares about poverty should surely be delighted to see vast numbers of Chinese people climbing out of it. Good for them.

Why is there order?

2012-02-04T16:29:00.002-08:00

I've touched on this before, but it's still a puzzle to me. Why is there order in society? Why so little rioting? Why the predictable elections? Why is the peaceful transfer of power seen as unremarkable?

Some people seem surprised when I take this view, and challenge my pessimism about human nature. But it's not all humans I'm worried about, just the unscrupulous and impulsive section that I presume exists in all societies. Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test features psychologists who argue that a significant minority (a bit less than 1%) of people are psychopaths, incapable of empathy and content to manipulate and terrorise others for their own gain. In my own teenage years I saw enough low-level cruelty and disorder to learn that some section of a population will loot, steal or destroy for pleasure if they don't see consequences.

I'm prompted in this post now because of two things that have brought it back to mind. First is Mike Duncan's excellent podcast series The History of Rome, which explains how the old Roman Republic (which had never been democratic in the modern sense of equal and universal suffrage, but which did at least spread power amongst a few instead of centralising it under one man) had gradually fallen towards autocracy. A common theme was of political taboos being broached, and finally laws simply ignored.

The consulship, for example, was a powerful office to which two men were elected by the republican Senate for just one year. Reelection was not allowed for a further decade (and at some stage reelection was outlawed completely), so these rulers had little time to establish a tyranny. I don't remember which consul first broke with the tradition, but Gaius Marius certainly did.
Taking advantage of wide popular support and fear of Germanic invasion, Marius won elections to the consulship seven times. The way Duncan tells it, this was the breaking of a legal and cultural taboo, which delegitimised the system, showed that it was not sacred, that it could be challenged successfully.

Marius's populist reforms eventually brought him into conflict with Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a brilliant conservative general and politician who eventually seized power by marching his own army on Rome itself.
Sulla wanted to defend the Republic from populist tyrants, but his march on Rome was another taboo broken, another indication that the system could not defend itself, that rules could be bent or ignored. Corruption.

Another charismatic general was reported to have considered Sulla's march on Rome with the words: 'Sulla potuit, cur non ego?' If Sulla could do it, why can't I? That observer was Pompey the Great, who would break more rules, like becoming consul without being a senator and essentially diving the Republic between himself, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and Julius Caesar. Today we talk about a point of no return as 'crossing the Rubicon'. The Rubicon was a river in Italy over which generals were forbidden from marching their armies, and which Julius Caesar did indeed cross it with his soldiers, prompting a civil war which he would win, kicking another scaffold away from the republican edifice. The Senators murdered Caesar but they were too late to save the Republic. From then on, power went to whoever could kill or bribe their way to it.
At least the Empire occasionally enjoyed competent leaders like Trajan and Hadrian, though these were interspersed with sadistic brutes like Nero and Caligula, who pissed away Rome's wealth on luxuries and games. By the 3rd century new emperors rose every few years, sometimes every few months, as conspirators killed into power and died at the knife of their replacements. Assassination or civil war were normal ways to determine the throne.

The emperor's bodyguard, the Praetorian Guard, grew increasingly destructive. Conspirators needed the Guard's aid to murder the emperor, so promised them great raises and gifts on taking power. Having bribed them thus, the new emperor was forced to keep buying off the Guard lest some other conspirator promise them the same. The Praetorian Guard was complicit in many murders when emperors failed to satisfy them. In one case the Guard confronted the new emperor Pertinax, who, after 86 days in power, was declining to raise their wages because there simply wasn't enough money to go around in the near-bankrupt Empire. A guard lashed out and killed the new emperor on the spot. The disgraced Praetorian Guard then auctioned off the position of Roman Emperor to the city's rich, rewarding Didius Julianus eventually with the position. Julianus was dead within three months.

The armies were no less corrupt and demanding. Emperors bribed them for loyalty with pay increases. When the pay hikes ceased, the armies hailed their generals as a new emperor and marched on Rome. How do we build an army to protect the interests of the state and not a state to protect the interests of the army? Whenever a new emperor bribed the Praetorian Guard or army for support against the old emperor, he was destroying whatever taboos survived about leadership. Now anyone with enough weapons and wealth could seize control, so long as they kept taxing ordinary people to feed the parasitical military.

Duncan remarks in one podcast that while many people ponder the fall of Rome, the real surprise is that it survived the 3rd century at all. Yet when I look around Ireland today, I see strong, strong surviving taboos. Electoral democracy is alive and well. Crimes are detected and punished. Murderous conspiracies are unknown. Even now, in a rough economic climate, there are not riots and chaos and assassinations. Why?

The second inspiration was this jarring article from n+1 magazine, alleging the abandonment by the American political system of the huge imprisoned criminal population. I was prompted by this remark on the Detroit riots:

In 1967, riots broke out after city police arrested eighty-four revelers at a party given for a pair of African American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson sent in an army division to pacify the city, resulting in forty-three deaths and the destruction of 2,000 buildings.

What! 43 deaths to stop a riot in a modern, developed country! Yet again I think (like Pompey) if then, why not now?
It's this sense of wonder at the order and stability of today that informs my uneasiness over civil disobedience and mass resistance in liberal democracies. I was disturbed when I saw Irish socialists suggesting that we should follow the lead of rebelling Egyptians, even rioting Greeks. I argued that we simply didn't need to, since we already had a representative democracy and, unlike the Egyptians under Mubarak, would be peacefully booting out the government in the election last spring anyway.

But I was also worried about breaking taboos there too. If a mass-movement of angry citizens did manage to overthrow the government, could an active radical minority do so too? If they don't have to wait for election day I worry there would be rising after rising by rival factions, looting by opportunistic thugs during the disorder, economic chaos, a downward spiral. I think we should protect order by keeping the legal taboos that have given us our modern peace and stability.

The only fair concern I can think of is if mass-disobedience is necessary to prevent the corruption of the political system from within. When Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty in a referendum, the government just ran another referendum, as they did with the Lisbon Treaty, worrying some people that governments might side-step the will of the people by forcing on referenda until the people caved and gave the required response. There was a lot of rage about crazy decisions made by the previous government which saddled us with a gigantic national debt, too.

Still, though. I don't see any greater hope amongst enraged mobs destroying the law, so I want my change to happen within the legal framework. I'm not a historian so I hope I'm wrong about this, but when I do read history I see nearly every form of government ever tried as incompetent, cruel, unstable, exploitative and violent. What we have in modern liberal democracies is Utopian by comparison. Let's not throw it away lightly. No marches on Dublin, please.

Nice right-wingers

2012-02-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

Chatting with a friend last weekend, he remarked that he could forgive and understand communists even if communism fared poorly in practice, because at least they were acting out of a good impulse. They saw poverty and injustice and wanted to improve it. But he saw no redeeming features for right-wingers who seemed, he said, 'just mean'.

I have come across those 'mean' right-wingers over the years. Some were proud hybrids of Ayn Rand and Ebeneezer Scrooge, who presumed the worst in all others and thought any charitable act was a cynical bid for attention. These were suspicious people who feared outsiders and were eager to resort to war as an early response to every international challenge. Aggressive, rude and cruel: mean.

But they were a minority and lots of the right-wingers I would come across held subtle and complex perspectives. Many were polite, friendly and introspective, some more willing to admit uncertainty and reconsider their opinions than their left-wing equivalents. The very first blog post on The Harvest explored some of those right-wing perspectives, especially paleoconservatism and libertarianism.

So here I'll say something about the nice and well-intentioned libertarians I've come across, their views and attitudes.

On War
Here is libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, arguing against war. Not any specific war, all war. Caplan believes that even 'defensive' war is morally unjustifiable, and he defends this argument on pragmatic grounds:

1) The immediate costs of war are clearly awful.
2) The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain.
3) For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs.

Caplan is a pacifist. He thinks war is never acceptable. And here he is, strongly supporting the arguments of the 'far left' on Christopher Colombus, who he denounces as 'a brutal slaver' and 'a pioneer of slavery'. He sounds like a hippie.

Am I cheating with Caplan? Surely this is a half-hearted right-winger, still keen on public health and welfare for the poor? Absolutely not, Caplan is about as far to the right as possible, deeply opposed to any government interventions to help the poor.

On Poverty
Sometimes right-wingers are seen as lacking in compassion for the poor, blaming them for their own poverty and making little of that poverty. Caplan seems guilty here:

It may seem strange, but when leftist social scientists actually talk to and observe the poor, they confirm the stereotypes of the harshest Victorian. Poverty isn't about money; it's a state of mind. That state of mind is low conscientiousness.

Mean! Caplan blaming the poor for their own poverty! Well yes, he does explain some modern First World poverty by looking at the behaviour of the poor, and he uses the controversial concept of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor:

If I sound harsh, notice: by my standards, many of the poor are clearly deserving: low-skilled workers in the Third World, children of poor or irresponsible parents, the severely handicapped.... Starving Haitian children really do deserve your help more than almost any American.

On Immigration
But Caplan isn't without compassion for those deserving poor. He thinks the government has a role to help them, not in what it should do, but what it shouldn't. Governments shouldn't control immigration:

The Third World contains hundreds of millions of deserving poor: desperate people who would love to work as a janitor for $25,000 a year. If we owe charity to anyone, we owe it to people who struggle to earn a dollar a day. But when First World governments hand out charity, the deserving poor in the Third World get next to nothing. Foreign aid's about 1% of the budget. Indeed, First World governments actively prevent the world's deserving poor from helping themselves: They make it illegal for them to move to the First World and accept a job from a willing employer. Even if we owe charity to no one, the least we can do is stop kicking the world's deserving poor while they're down.

Not mean! Caplan wants open borders, to give the absolute poor of the world the same chance at climbing out of material poverty that people in the First World enjoy already.

It's about freedom
So why the collage of judgement and compassion? How do we make sense of this? At the heart of it is the libertarian belief that taxation, because it is involuntary, is oppressive. Some argue that taxation is simply armed robbery, even if the tax-collector is empowered by a democratic state. The state in this narrative becomes a Mafia gang, offering 'protection' to its people and sending aggressive agents (police) out to anyone who refuses to buy into the racket. So there are libertarians (and some other right-wingers) who think that forcing other people to give up their money is unacceptable. There is no generosity in putting a gun to one's neighbour's head and demanding that they surrender some of their income to help someone else.

So taxation is out. Wealth redistribution is out. No social welfare, no housing projects, no public health or public schools.

But giving, voluntarily, is good. Caplan's colleague at Econlog, Arnold Kling, explains:

From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people's money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.... But being libertarian does not mean you have to have a cold heart. You can be a bleeding heart, but you show it by what you do, not what you advocate forcing other people to do.

Are the libertarians correct in this moral opposition to taxation? I don't know, but at least see that for many of them their opposition to social welfare systems isn't about cold, cruel hardness, but about gentle opposition to coersion.

This is a very simple beginning. There are other shades of right, with other justifications and explanations of their views, pragmatic or principled. Plenty of them are nice, caring people who worry about poverty and the environment and fairness. Some have argued passionately with me that free market capitalism is better at reducing poverty than other economic systems, and that government regulations and welfare that is intended to help the poor only creates economic drag and hurts them in the long run.

There are a few real dickheads, sure. But there are dickhead hypocrites in any movement, like the occasional socialist I see publicly wringing hands over the poverty of the working classes and privately complaining about scumbags and skangers, and deriding the popular culture of the people they claim to represent. Not all the right-wingers are mean. They're just not always very good at pointing that out.

Thanks!

2012-02-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

I'm glad to see that page views for The Harvest are still gradually heading up - thanks readers. I'm really not sure how many of these page views result in people following through to actually read the posts. Some of the more popular posts are heavy in images, which makes me think that people stumbled across them by accident through a browser image search.

Anyway for those who do pop in to read, thanks for your time, always feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or email :)

Sexist Sex

2012-01-29T11:20:00.000-08:00

Pay two boxers to beat one another to a pulp for the pleasure of the paying audience audience. They risk broken ribs, blindness, brain damage - 'over 80 per cent of professional boxers have serious brain scarring on MRI scans' - sometimes death. After taking dreadful beatings before the braying crowd, the boxers are celebrated and cheered, widely admired. Here is the great Irish boxer Katie Taylor hailed as the 'Role Model of the Week' for feminist blog Feminist.ie.

In the narrative of many feminists, though, prostitutes - regardless of how great or little the risks to their health, or how much they earn - are presumed victims.

I got into a discussion about this in the comments section of the Antiroom blog last year, when I was surprised to read this statement in an article on prostitution:

Taking the stance that prostitution and the social and cultural attitudes which sustain it are deeply rooted in gender inequality and social marginalisation, Ruhama unequivocally affirms that prostitution represents violence against women and a violation of human rights.

This was confusing on two counts that I mentioned in the comments:

How do they explain prostitution by men? Are male prostitutes also suffering gender inequality?

I have doubts that prostitution must inherently violate anyone’s rights. SuperFreakonomics features a “high end” prostitute who earned over $200,000 a year. It seems bizarre to step between her and her clients and insist that actually she is a victim.

Later, less composed, I said:

But the idea that “prostitution represents violence against women” is nonsensical! If both parties agree to it then it’s, by definition, not violent. It’s just another commercial transaction.

The beatings, robberies, enslavement, rapes, etc. that accompany some kinds of prostitution are acts of violence, but consensual paid sex is certainly not, so I’d question that part of their perspective. Hopefully that doesn’t take from the good aspects of their charity work.

Well that did not go down well! Other readers made several points to me. You can read their arguments on the link above; the general gist is as follows:

- Prostitutes are all vulnerable
- They are miserable
- Prostitution 'represents' violence against those selling sex
- The consensuality of the sex act is a 'technicality' only
- How would I feel if a female family member became a prostitute, 'making a career decision to invite thousands of strange men into her vagina'?
- Most prostitutes are poorly paid, most of their income goes to male pimps
- The transfer of money creates a power imbalance in favour of the buyer

In response to the question put to me about whether I'd like a family member to become a prostitute I replied:

First, supposing a woman close to me chose to have lots of recreational sex with men, “inviting thousands of strange men into her vagina”. I might not think it particularly wise, but I would maintain that this is her decision. Neither she nor those males are comitting acts of violence with consensual sex.

Prostitution is that, plus the exchange of money. This absolutely is just another job, if usually a miserable one. That “career decision” is hers (or his) to make.

And finally, one last observation of my own:

Sexually objectifying someone is considered a terrible evil, even while other kinds of objectification are cheerfully enjoyed. We can pay boxers to beat one another close to death. We can pay strangers for a massage to stimulate every part of the body except the sexual organs. But when sexual arousal is involved, it strangely becomes outrageous, and willing participants are presumed victims.

And thinking about this, a light went on. There just seems to be something about sex that makes many people unwilling to accept it as a commercial transaction. Sure, many of us feel that sex is best in an intimate and loving relationship, but others do not. I don't see the feminists denouncing or offering to rescue the men or women who choose consensual recreational sex with strangers. A woman may have sex for free with dozens of men and have the support of the feminists. Get paid for it and she is deemed a victim of violence.

I mulled over all of this for a long time, a bit bothered and confused by it all. Some time later I was reading an article on the Freakonomics blog about the huge sex imbalance growing in some Asian countries as female foetuses are aborted by parents hoping to have sons. The imbalance means that the proportion of females to males is falling, and some observers worry that millions of unmarried men will spark political chaos, rebellion, mass-sexual trafficking, rape and so on. Freakonomics invited readers to ask questions to a researcher working on the issue, and I noticed that the very last comment (just after my own question) was from someone called Dr Laura Agustin, who linked to an article on her website, where she wrote:

In order to draw only dire conclusions about the now famous disparity in numbers between males and females in Asia, you need to view girls and women as inferior yourself. If the data showed there to be fewer males, you can be sure they would be seen to be in an advantageous position: able to pick and choose amongst prospective spouses, enjoying gender power. Instead, a surfeit of men is imagined to cause sex trafficking and bride-buying, the assumption being that when women become required, men will traffick them. Why not think women will migrate to places where they are lacking, take on traditionally female jobs and enjoy an advantage in the local marriage market or selling sex?

Here was a radically different view from that of the feminists on the Antiroom blog. Agustin saw women selling sex as empowered business people, not victims. Her Wikipedia page calls her a sociologist, though her website is called The Naked Anthropologist, and it is fascinating.

Agustin just does not see sex-workers as victims. She views those feminists who push for prohibitions like the Swedish system (where selling sex is legal but buying it is illegal) with some irritation, calling them 'State Feminists' who:

recreate women as always already unempowered victims rather than protagonists of their own lives who opt for one or another of the limited alternatives available...

Her website includes this Youtube video of Agustin discussing her views. One incredible comment:

So here's this huge zeitgeist in Europe that's about sexuality as this - we're progressing somewhere, we're going to know everything about ourselves and it's some deep knowledge, but there's one thing you can't do. You can't take money for it. Why!

This is exactly what I had been wondering above. Why, in a society of great sexual liberty, is paying for it alone still considered taboo? Far from empowering women the prohibitionist feminists seemed to be infantalising women, treating them as weak and helpless victims who are not capable of deciding the courses of their own lives.

One woman commenting on Agustin's blog calls herself Furry Girl. She is a sex-worker who runs a blog called Feminisnt, and I wrote about her here before. Furry Girl takes Agustin's renunciation of 'State Feminism' a step further by rejecting feminism completely. (Or at least 'the feminisms of Western, industrialized nations - the sort spouted by shrill, irritating people with too much time on their hands and a bizarre desire to feel oppressed by everything'.) Her explanation:

feminism is commonly embraced by people whose underlying beliefs are that women are stupid, feeble creatures who need to be controlled and saved; feminism these days focuses way too much on imaginary first-world problems like women who choose to feel badly about themselves because they think they're not pretty enough; some feminist leaders are obsessed with fanning and exploiting insecurities in women in order to indoctrinate them to their style of victim feminism, rather than being positive and helping women see that they can be strong and powerful. Last but not least: it's REALLY FUCKING DIFFICULT to spend your entire life being picked on by girls and women for various reasons, then swallow the idea that women are your true sisters and that men are the cruel enemy that oppresses you. Bitches be crazy, yo.

Finally I discovered Maggie McNeill, the pseudonym for a 'retired call girl' who writes at The Honest Courtesan blog. McNeill has a subtle perspective on prostitution that is influenced by her belief that men and women have biologically determined behavioural differences brought about by evolution. Here she explains that that prostitution does not suit everyone:

The majority of women who directly take money for sex once or a few times simply decide it’s not for them (for whatever reason) and find some other way to make a living. But there are a small number who should never have even tried it in the first place, yet are driven by necessity, desperation or actual coercion to practice it for weeks, months or even years; such women are among the worst enemies our profession ever had. Because they hate the work, they tend to see and remember only the negative aspects. And because many of them are emotionally damaged even before entering prostitution (due to whatever trauma caused them to hate men and/or sex), and virtually all of them became even more damaged by having to endure what for them was a loathsome existence, they either become fanatics on their own or are easily driven to fanaticism by the prohibitionists. These are the women who call themselves “survivors” and learn to “reframe their experiences” (i.e. lie to make their stories more lurid and to more closely conform to anti-whore rhetoric). They are the mainstays of “john schools” and provide ammunition to prohibitionists who represent their highly-embroidered claims as typical of sex work and even multiply the accounts by changing small details so as to make them sound like different-but-similar tales rather than one repeated ad nauseum. The very worst of them (as typified by Somaly Mam) are so obsessed with their own darkness that they are willing to utterly destroy the lives of any real human beings who get in the way of their quixotic crusades against private behavior that is literally impossible to eradicate as long as humans remain human.

In a world where individuals were allowed control over their own bodies and the decisions of adults (however strange those choices might seem to others) were always respected by the “authorities”, fanatics who were harmed through ill-fortune or harmed themselves through their own poor choices would have no power over other, less damaged individuals. But unfortunately we do not yet live in such a world; even in jurisdictions which have legalized prostitution to one degree or another, governments believe they have the authority to abrogate the rights of individuals for whatever excuse strikes their collective fancy (provided they can convince the masses to lie still for it).

McNeill is deeply opposed to any form of prohibitionism, and sees prostitution as not only inevitable and natural but even desirable: 'I think it’s fantastic news that more women are choosing to do sex work'.

A great deal of prohibitionism is fueled by the myth that all whores are monsters, criminals, defectives or victims rather than what we actually are: women using our natural abilities to make a living, just as men use their natural abilities to do so without anyone as much as batting an eyelash.

She places the prohibitionist feminists (who she calls 'neofeminists') in the context of wider illiberal policies and attitudes; I wish I had read her responses to common criticisms of prostitution before arguing in the Antiroom comments. I am relieved to see that at least some researchers and actual sex workers broadly share my thoughts on sex work, even if I can't vouch for everything they say.

Those who find the idea of commercial sex repugnant should not enforce their tastes on others. How odd to see feminists who denounce patriarchy, calling for the male-dominated government and justice system to force women out of prostitution. Who better to weigh up the risks and benefits of prostitution than the individual women and men who choose to do it? The idea that female prostitutes must be so ruined and vulnerable as to be treated as children seems sexist and backward.

Those people who really are enslaved should have their liberty restored and protected by the state, and the slave-traders brought to justice. But willing adult participants should surely be left alone. Trapped between conservative moralists and feminists, female prostitutes are depicted as corrupt seductresses or infantile victims. Why not just treat them as adults, business people, making rational decisions to better their own lives like anyone else?

What if the Irish had not been able to emigrate?

2012-01-26T15:19:00.000-08:00

I was chatting online with an Indian friend yesterday about the role of Irish people in the histories of surprising countries: Chile, Papua New Guinea, Argentina and so on. Then our conversation went like this:

R: pretty interesting that there are far more irish people outside ireland than in ireland itself

Shane: big time, yes
the two-step plan back in the 19th century
Step 1: Leave these sorrowful shores
Step 2: Mate repeatedly!

R: what would have happened to ireland though without these mass immigrations?

Shane: hmm
massive population growth
more famine
i guess
lots of fighting with british
general chaos and poverty

R: hmm

Hmm indeed. This got me immediately thinking about modern migration controls.

Emigration played a deeply significant role in Irish history, so important and traumatic that we were generally taught about it in terms of the Irish families losing their sons and daughters to the US and Britain. This was a powerful narrative here in Ireland, especially in the rural west where I grew up, and it informed even fiction, like the Brian Friel play Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), which I studied in school. That play depicts a young man in a small western town, weighing up his love for his home and for his uptight, silent father, with his frustration at the economic and cultural stagnation:

I’ve stuck around this hole far too long. I’m telling you, it’s a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end! And everybody in it goes crazy sooner or later! Everybody!

Millions of Irish people fled the country, mostly to the US, Britain, and Australia. The population of Ireland, which had been rising fast in the 19th century, collapsed during the Great Famine of the 1840s and continued to sink from mass-emigration for well over a century. This is how Ireland's population would look in time:

The fall, after the famine, was mainly affected by the vast scale of emigration. I told my Indian friend that when I was growing up we could expect every child in the local school would have cousins in the US. The American branch of the family was a near-total phenomenon.

The emigration drained the countryside of houses, emptying villages, leaving the land dotted with crumbling stone cottages, which I explored and played in when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.

So, again, where on earth would all those people have gone if the US and Britain had sealed their borders to the Irish? Would there have been another catastrophic famine after a few years as the population recovered after the 1840s? My friend pointed out that Britain has far higher population density as Ireland, but Ireland was deeply underindustrialised, its Catholic population still recovering from a long period of sectarian persecution in which Catholics had been forbidden to educate their children. Could Ireland's cities have absorbed millions of desperate peasants? How would the country have developed without the millions of diaspora sending dollars and shillings to the desperate Irish family back home?

And if British and American sealed borders really would have sunk Ireland into a deeper demographic and economic disaster, what does it tell us about our responsibilities to poor migrants in developing countries today?

I see dead people. I mean, bell curves.

2012-01-25T01:58:00.000-08:00

Those familiar with football (soccer to my North American friends) will know that most matches end with relatively low scores: 1-0, 2-1, 0-0. Usually the stronger team wins as expected.

Sometimes, though, things just go strangely, the scores mount up and up, the weaker team squeezes in impossible goals, the stronger team screws up easy shots. Such matches are rare and commentators get excited trying to explain why events had turned out so weirdly.

So I wondered, do football results have a normal distribution?

A normal distribution means that when measured for some variable, like height, weight, income, most of what is being measured clusters around the middle and ever-decreasing numbers spread out at the fringes. It produces a curve like this below, supplied by Qwfp and Pbroks13 on Wikipedia, the bell curve. Height, for a particular age group, is a common example: most people have fairly average, ordinary height, a few are very tall or very small, and tiny numbers are giants or dwarfs.

So out of curiosity, I looked at every result Manchester United got in the 2010-11 season, in all competitive matches. I subtracted the score of the opposing team from United's score for each match, giving me a goal difference for every match of plus or minus a number of goals. I then plotted this onto a graph.

A normal distribution! More or less: the goal difference clusters around the centre, with dwindling numbers towards the fringes.

Mode = 1. That is, the most common result for a Manchester United match in the 2010-11 season was to win by one goal, be it a 1-0 win, or 2-1, 3-2, etc. United being a strong team, they tend to win.

Median = 1

Mean = 3.78

The mean is higher than the median because, while United were most likely to win by one goal, they also won quite often by two goals (5 times), three goals (5 times) and five goals (3 times), while they were much less likely to lose by more than one goal (down 3 only once, and down 5 also only once).

Those strange results I mentioned in the beginning fit at the edges in this graph. In 2011 United won a bizarre 8-2 victory against Arsenal, giving us their solitary 6-goal lead. They were also hammered by Manchester City 6-1, giving the 5-goal loss.

This is a small sample, and I would really need to look through hundreds or thousands of matches to see if the distribution remains roughly normal. I suspect it would. So while commentators try to figure out what went wrong or right in individual matches, a probabilistic approach might say that if you play enough matches sooner or later you will start supplying those freak upsets. Far from being impossible for Manchester United to lose 6-1, it is highly likely - but only if you get them to play a sufficiently high number of games.

Dirty racist Australians

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I was surprised to see uproar on discussion forums with lots of Indians complaining about Australia racism. There had been a number of high-profile criminal attacks on Indian students studying in Australia, and these were considered indicative of a wider Australian racism towards Indians.

I was surprised first because the Australians were being criticised for being racist specifically against Indians. When I lived for a few months in Sydney I was close to the Chinatown; Sydney is very cosmopolitan but the Chinese were by far the most visible non-white minority. If the Australians were attacking ethnic minorities I would expect there to be a big uproar on behalf of the Chinese as well as the Indians: it was difficult to imagine ignorant Australian racists about to attack an Asian student and then: 'No, wait! He's Chinese, let him go.'

For this reason, I was a bit unconvinced by the hype. Meanwhile the anti-Australian rhetoric was rising; I even saw a few Indians arguing that Australians were descended from convicts and thus racist aggression is in their blood. (I'm no cricket fan, but I gather there was irritation about some poor sportsmanship by Australian cricketers around the time too, and Australians were getting a reputation for boorish and aggressive behaviour.) When Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland claimed that Australia was safer for Indian students than India was, he was greeted (understandably: his comments came a week after an Indian student called Nitin Garg was murdered in Victoria) with astonished irritation and rage.

The narrative stirred up a lot of negative interest about Australia in India; here is a Google Insights for Search graph showing the frequency of 'racist Australia' searches in India since 2004:

So what was happening? There were certainly attacks on Indian students in Australia, but there were attacks on non-Indians too.

In 2011 the Australian Institute of Criminology produced a 191-page report called Crimes against international students in Australia: 2005–09, in an attempt to shed some light on the issue. Some results:

Overall, international students from the five source countries generally experienced incidents of physical assault at significantly lower rates than in the general population in each state/territory jurisdiction in 2009. This was true for most nationalities in most jurisdictions and was a generally consistent finding for each year since 2005. In some cases, comparisons between students from different countries showed that for some years, in some jurisdictions, Indian students had experienced higher rates of assault than students from China, Korea, Malaysia and the United States.

First: foreign students are at a lower risk of attack than others. Second: despite my scoffing earlier, Indians are at a uniquely high risk amongst international students.

The nature of assaults (day of week, time of day and location) experienced by international students was generally consistent between students of different nationalities and the reference Australian populations. The notable exception was that a greater proportion of male Indian students were assaulted in commercial (retail) locations and in, or near, public transport facilities.

Regarding robbery:

In 2009, the rate of robbery victimisation among male Indian students in some jurisdictions was higher than the corresponding state average for the reference Australian population—a finding that was consistent for most years since 2005. Chinese male students were also at higher risk of victimisation compared with state averages in some jurisdictions, as were Indian female students.

And theft:

There was little difference in the rates of other theft both among the international student groups and between the five student groups and the general Australian population (unweighted Australian comparisons) in most states since 2005. The exception was for Indian male students who had higher rates of other theft than students from China, Korea and the United States in some jurisdictions.

The authors then added that the report's available data isn't enough to understand the motivation of attacks. The slightly disproportionate victimisation of Indian males might have been because of some strangely specific anti-Indian racism, or...

The types of employment, areas of residence and evening activities (including both shift work and use of public transport) are specific areas of risk for international students that appear to explain some of the incidence of robbery for Indian students, in particular....

Indian students in particular, are known to have a greater proficiency in English and, as such, appear much more likely than students from east Asian countries to find employment in the service sector. This includes service stations, convenience stores, taxi drivers and other employment that typically involves working late night shifts alone and come with an increased risk of crime, either at the workplace or while travelling to and from work.

Further, the limited availability of on-campus accommodation for higher education students, and the lack of on-campus accommodation for vocational students, have led many to secure private rentals in inner urban areas as well as to rely on public transport in areas with higher concentrations of crime. Together with their over-representation as employees in the hospitality and services sector, students are therefore faced with multiple risk factors that increase their probability of victimisation irrespective of their racial appearance. The finding that there was a substantial over-representation of Indian students in retail/commercial robberies lends support to this view.

So victimisation may be deliberately racist, or simply opportunistic. The authors added that a mixture of the two could sometimes happen, saying that the carrying of electronic goods by Indians along with a perception of Indians as 'soft' targets were cited as motivations. (I'm reminded of the 'Barbarians' gang in France who abducted, tortured, and murdered a young Jewish man because, they said, Jews were 'loaded'.)

What we're left with is that most international students experience unusually low rates of criminal victimisation, while male Indian students experience rates similar to the wider Australian population. There are a range of possible reasons for the latter discrepancy, including complex and subtle issues to do with the locality and behaviour of the Indian student subgroup. There might have been some racist motivation, in some cases.

But the report turns the angry media narrative on its head. Life for Indian students in Australia was no more dangerous than it was for regular Australians. There was little or no issue; Indian students are just people and people get attacked. The murderer of young student Nitin Garg turned out to be a 15-year-old who remarked to a friend that 'that bloke's phone looks nice' when they saw Garg walking through a park on the way to work at 9:30pm. He stabbed Garg in an opportunistic robbery attempt.

Today the excitement has largely passed but some rumours and blanket denunciations of Australian society continue. From The Herald Sun, just days ago:

Melbourne was gripped by a wave of racist assaults on Indian students in 2009, which has been blamed for a drop in the number of students from that country enrolling here this year.

A wave of racist assaults? What wave? When did it start? Has it passed?

How many children are in the US sex trade? Just guess.

2012-01-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

Joel Best, in his Damned Lies and Statistics; Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists, explains that activists sometimes estimate quite big numbers for the social problem they want to address. When their target social issue is poorly-understood to start with, as is often true for illicit activities like drug use or prostitution, the true numbers are unknown and the estimate may go unchallenged. The large estimate of the activists is then repeated, misinterpreted and further exaggerated.

...Like this, perhaps. Maggie McNeill is a prostitute who writes The Honest Courtesan blog. She is firmly opposed to the prohibition of prostitution. In this blog post from last year, McNeill complains that some of the figures being discussed in American media estimating the number of children in the sex trade are grossly exaggerated:

The biggest danger of such rhetoric is that it plays fast and loose with the facts and the tale grows in the telling. Girls who can’t be told from legal adults become “children”, hiring for a service becomes “buying for sex” as though they were carried home in a plain brown wrapper and stored in a drawer in the nightstand, and a rare event (only about 3.54% of all prostitutes are underage) becomes a “hidden epidemic” and normal, decent men are accused en masse. But we’ve seen all that before; what makes this article unique is that it affords us the rare opportunity to catch a lie in the actual process of growth. The author says “according to the Daily Beast, 100,000 – 300,000 children between the ages of 12 and 14 years old are victims of the child sex trade in this country” and helpfully provides us a link. But if you click on that link you’ll find that’s not what the article says at all; the actual quote is “Between 100,000 and 300,000 children—primarily girls between the ages of 12 and 14—are victims of the sex trade right here in the United States.” The new claim drops “primarily” and represents all of them as being in that age range.

The “300,000 trafficked children” fantasy grew by exactly such misquotes. Its original source was a 2001 study by Richard Estes and Neil Weiner of the University of Pennsylvania which guesstimated (by questionable methodology) that “as many as 100,000-300,000 children and youth [of both sexes] are at risk for sexual exploitation” of one kind or another. Note that even if we accept the shaky methodology, this guess is for BOTH sexes, for “children and youth” (not just children), and most importantly represents those at risk of some form of “exploitation”, not currently involved in one specific form (sex trafficking). The paper is very revealing; if you peruse it you will see that Estes and Weiner rank types of “exploitation” by frequency, and that domestic and international “sex trafficking” are second and third from the bottom.

I can't vouch for McNeill's own numbers but she does make an interesting case. This looks just like an example Best would find familiar: numbers that are estimates to start with, misunderstood, simplified, and gradually exaggerated beyond their original purpose. McNeill has further issues with the definition of 'exploitation' used by the researchers, and the full article is worth a read. Very interesting indeed.

She mentions some confusion over the description of victims as being 'children', as 'child' is sometimes used in place of 'minor', meaning anyone under 18 years. I'm reminded of Professor Philip Jenkins, who has written about child abuse by Catholic clergy and media treatment of this issue. In 2010 I contacted Prof Jenkins for an article on the biological and psychological causes of paedophilia. In an email exchange Jenkins pointed out the very same confusion:

let me distinguish between pedophilia and improper sexual conduct with minors.,The age is everything in such matters. Homosexuality is not linked to pedophilia (see below). However a man who has sex with a male of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years is not a pedophile. What is he? Is he a homosexual? A pederast? English is lacking in terms for such behavior.

Further, Jenkins pointed me towards an article he had just written for The American Conservative, where he discussed a fascinating study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004, looking at all allegations and convictions of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy from 1950 to 2002:

A couple of points leap out about the allegations, particularly about the image of the “pedophile priest” pursuing his decades-long career of crime under the de facto protection of the Church. The John Jay study concluded that in this period, perhaps 4 percent of all U.S. priests had been plausibly accused of at least one act of sexual misconduct with a minor. But of the 4,392 accused priests, almost 56 percent faced only one misconduct allegation, and at least some of these would certainly vanish under detailed scrutiny.

Very few of the accused priests were pedophiles, in the sense of having abused a minor under the age of puberty, say 12 or 13 for a boy. In the U.S. at least, the great majority of cases of sexual misconduct by priests involve older boys, often aged between 15 and 17, or even older. This behavior is illegal, harmful, and sinful, but it is not pedophilia.

(My emphasis added.) I've heard social researchers refer to under-18 minors as children but this seems like risky language to use when most of us imagine tiny little pre-pubescent kids. In fact I can remember a member of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children who gave us classes when I was 15-16 in school, also referring to us as 'children'. We were not amused! By 16 we might have lacked the vote, and a lot of sense, but we were no longer children.

Anyway Jenkins's article is also worth a read. His and McNeill's points are good warning lights for misleading statistics. Like I said, I love statistics in social research, but one needs to be very, very careful.

Democracy the dandelion: tough, resiliant, and spreading

2012-01-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

Paul Pillar writes in The National Interest that Hungary's present government, with its allegedly undemocratic tendencies, shows how vulnerable democracy is.

This affair shows how even a country where liberal democratic principles seem to have been firmly established (and in this case a country that until now has been a member in good standing of the club of advanced democracies known as the European Union) may back away from consistent application of those principles. Democratization and liberalization are not necessarily one-way processes. To realize this goes against the tendency to think of them as a one-way process.

I see quite a bit of this concern about weakening democracy; remember Naomi Klein's 10 steps towards fascism, which she claimed George Bush's administration had well under way in 2007.

But I'm quite optimistic, because history seems to show that democratisation really has been a mostly one-way process. A century ago universal suffrage in democracies was almost unknown: only a handful of countries held elections and fewer allowed access to women. Today there are scores of such countries including billions of enfranchised people. Almost all of Europe, North America and South America have been democratised. In Asia great populous democracies like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea hold regular elections. The Economist says that between 1960 and 1991 only one African country 'witnessed any leader or ruling party being peacefully voted out of office' while, since 1991, 'no less than 30 ruling parties or leaders have been ousted by voters'.

Some of these are unstable, repressive, or rigged democracies. But perhaps the important thing here is that they are young; democracy hasn't yet had time to dominate and establish its legitimacy. When Fianna Fáil won the Irish general election in 1932, becoming the first opposition party to oust the dominant Cumann na nGaedheal, some of their members carried guns in their pockets into parliament for fear that Cumann na nGaedheal would refuse to surrender power. This was the insecurity of young Irish democracy, only a decade after the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Today such an act would seem hilarious or mad. Generations have been raised under democracy and now no alternative is discussed. Democracy in parts of Africa, Latin America, Asia (and even Eastern Europe, much of which lurched from monarchy to communism with little experience of democracy until the 1990s) is new. If it survives the first few turbulent decades then I expect it to strengthen.

There are countries like Pakistan, Turkey or Thailand that bob back and forth between democracy and dictatorship. I guess that as long as overthrowing the government with force is in people's memories it might seem a legitimate option. A few generations of continuous democracy might delegitimise other systems of government. The new democracies of North Africa are shaky and vulnerable now, but if they survive a few decades I expect them to succeed.

I can think of dozens of examples of old, long-established monarchies which changed into democracies. But old, long-established democracies which lapsed back into totalitarianism? No.

Democracy could worsen in quality, but I don't see any abandonment of elections and parliaments in established democracies. If I was a king or dictator, I would be deeply worried about the modern world with the very rapid expansion of democracy over the last century. Imagine how nervous the Chinese government must be with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, and to some extent or other, Russia and Pakistan all adhering to forms of democracy. It is ascendent and in countries where it is long-established it is stable. World leaders whose power relies on unrepresentative forms of government should be nervous.

Reject statistics to protect prejudice

2012-01-19T04:07:00.001-08:00

Nearing the end now of Joel Best's Damned Lies and Statistics and he divides people into four groups:

1) Awestruck: totally uncritically accepting any statistic, simply blown away by big numbers.
2) Naive: 'slightly more sophisticated' than Awestruck, but still accepting. Sincere, and generally assume the sincerity of those who create statistics.
3) Cynical: refusing to believe any statistics, think the numbers are too easily manipulated.
4) Critical: thoughtful, trying to evaluate the numbers and distinguish between good and bad statistics.

Best says that the Naive are the biggest group, but lately I've been coming across a lot of the Cynics. Discussing some social problem, I introduce statistics that challenge or support some argument, and the other person immediately dismisses them as useless, biased, even part of a conspiracy to make the government look good. I like Best's description:

Because the Cynical suspect that "you can prove anything with statistics," they can justify ignoring all the numbers - particularly those that challenge their beliefs.... They may be surprisingly sophisticated when pointing out the flaws in numbers they don't like, although they rarely examine their own side's figures with the same critical eye.

I find this too - the cynics replace statistical evidence with prejudice. Instead of rejecting statistics in favour of having no opinion, they reject it in favour of retaining their old, unsupported assumptions.

To me, statistics is exciting because it can help me to get past my own personal experiences, and therefore my own prejudices. The discovery that we are not stuck with our own personal experiences or, at most, the perspectives of scores or hundreds of authors we read, is a liberating one. With statistics we can view millions of data points, even billions, and track great global trends. Is Ireland a dangerous place? Person A visits Ireland and is immediately mugged. Person B visits and finds it safe and cordial. Only statistics, pulling back for a wider view, can say which is the more representative experience.

"Crack babies" and Death

2012-01-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

Continuing Joel Best's Damned Lies and Statistics; Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists today. He makes an interesting observation about a moral panic that struck the US in the late 1980s over 'crack babies' - children born to mothers who were addicted to crack cocaine and who were believed to be badly disturbed, physically retarded and mentally deficient.

I immediately thought of Living Monstrosity, a 1990 track by American death metal pioneers Death. The lyrics of Living Monstrosity had always puzzled me:

The guilty one, innocent she now cries
A life of hell, better off to die
Born without eyes, hands, and a half a brain
Being born addicted to cocaine

Living monstrosity
A freak for life they'll always be
Never knowing love or hate
Only pain the drug creates

This is a typical grimy tone for death metal but I had never heard before the idea that drug-addicted mothers would give birth to severely, monstrously deformed children for whom death would be better than life. In this case Death's singer saw the act as a grave crime by the mother: 'An example we should make out of theses creators of misfortune'.

But Joel Best explains that the crack babies terror was unfounded. While 1980s advocates warned that 375,000 such children were being born each year, at a cost to the US of '$500 million or $3 billion or $20 billion annually', in reality the number was only around 30-50,000 and:

...crack babies did not exhibit the kinds of unique, permanent damage that had been predicted.... Because mothers addicted to crack tended to be impoverished, they often had poor nutrition and inadequate medical care during their pregnancies, and their babies faced considerable disadvantages. But children born addicted to crack did not have more severe problems than other, nonaddicted children born in similar circumstances.

So Death needn't have panicked and demanded justice. In our own time we have other scares based on exaggerated threats: child abduction, bird flu, ecstacy, paedophile priests and the like. It's fascinating to see these old, forgotten panics, a good reminder that the fashionable scares of today should be viewed critically. Plus I managed to squeeze a death metal reference into a post on statistics and media scares, and that pleases me.

The 35 trillion murdered children statistics

2012-01-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

Years of debating on online discussion forums familiarised me with some of the more popular fallacies associated with various ideologies (often because others were quick to point them out when I made them myself). In online debates between diverse participants if someone makes a claim another will demand evidence, or supply counter evidence. Thus I've learned that Mein Kampf is not banned in 'the West', the world's poorer countries for the most part aren't getting poorer, and crime rates in developed countries aren't spiralling out of control. With my bullshit detector upgraded thus, I am quicker to sense nonsensical claims and hopefully less likely now to make them myself. (Feel free to point them out, when I do, however.)

At its most simple, if I hear something that sounds really shocking and disgraceful, little alarm bells ring and I quickly double-check to see if it is indeed true. If someone says the EU health and safety regulators are forcing tightrope walkers to wear hard hats, have a quick check and expose the nonsense for what it is.

I'm studying statistics for social science now so I'm getting a bit more aware of these kinds of myths in statistics, and of the mistakes I've made in interpreting statistics in the past too. My errors and the mad claims I've come across online pale, however, by comparison with this wonderful example in Joel Best's Damned Lies and Statistics; Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists. Best was reading a dissertation prospectus by a student who was proposing a Ph.D. research project and read this:

'Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled.'

Clearly Best's bullshit detector starting jingling like mad:

I assumed the Student had made an error in copying it. I went to the library and looked up the article the Student had cited. There, in the journal's 1995 volume, was exactly the same sentence: 'Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled.'

This quotation is my nomination for a dubious distinction: I think it may be the worst - that is, the most inaccurate - social statistic ever.

Best explains the madness of this claim by suggesting we imagine that in 1950 only one child was shot. In 1951 there would be double: two children. 1952: four children shot.

1953: 8
1954: 16
1955: 32
1956: 64
1957: 128
1958: 256
1959: 512
1960: 1,024
1961: 2,048
1962: 4,096
1963: 8,192
1964: 16,384
1965: 32,768 (Best writes: 'in 1965 the FBI identified only 9,960 criminal homicides in the entire country, including adult as well as child victims'.
1966: 65,536
1967: 131,072
1968: 262,144
1969: 524,288
1970: 1,048,576
1971: 2,097,152
1972: 4,194,304
1973: 8,388,608
1974: 16,777,216
1975: 33,554,432
1976: 67,108,864
1977: 134,217,728
1978: 268,435,456
1979: 536,870,912
1980: 1,073,741,824
1981: 2,147,836,648
1982: 4,294,967,296
1983: 8,589,934,592 ('about twice the Earth's population at the time'.)

Another milestone would have been passed in 1987, when the number of gunned-down American children (137 billion) would have surpassed the best estimates for the total human population through history (110 billion). By 1995, when the article was published, the annual number of victims would have been over 35 trillion...

Best was intrigued that a journal was claiming that more children were shot in the United States in the 1980s than all the humans who had ever lived, so he contacted the author who pointed to the original source, from the Children's Defense Fund which wrote in 1994: 'The number of American children killed each year by guns has doubled since 1950.' Doubled since 1950, not doubled every year since 1950!

Probing a little deeper, Best realised:

This is not quite as dramatic an increase as it might seem. Remember that the U.S. population also rose throughout this period; in fact, it grew about 73 percent - or nearly double. Therefore, we might expect all sorts of things - including the number of child gunshot deaths - to increase, to nearly double just because the population grew. Before we can decide whether twice as many deaths indicates that things are getting worse, we'd have to know more.

This observation fits in Best's introduction so I'm looking forward to reading the rest. Already in class my lecturer has pointed out common errors which I'm guilty of, some of them on this blog, sorry! I'm interested in using statistics to understand how societies work and I do not accept the claim I occasionally encounter that statistics are so easily manipulated that they 'can say anything'. We simply need the skills to tell apart the nonsense from the truth, the little alarm bells that chimed in Joel Best's mind when he realised his student was claiming that the entire global population was shot dead in 1982. Readers who agree might like this 16-page guide for journalists on using statistics, written by the British Straight Statistics team.

The economic right's God and Nation thing

2012-01-14T03:24:00.000-08:00

Why are so many of those who call for smaller governments and freer markets also religious, socially conservative, and nationalist? There are exceptions, but we often see all-encompassing political identities developing very broadly along the following lines:

Right
For free market capitalism
For aggressive foreign policies
For strict immigration control
For assertive nationalism
For drug prohibition
For prostitution/pornography prohibition
For religious education
Against gay marriage
Against abortion
Against sex education

Left
For more subtle or compromising foreign policy
For looser immigration control
For legalised abortion
For sex education
Against free markets, for government regulation and redistribution
Against aggressive nationalism
Against drug prohibition
Against prostitution/pornography prohibition
Against religious education

It always struck me that this was a rather arbitrary dichotomy. Could not one be in favour of free markets and secularism, sexual liberalism? Well one could and some people do. But the dichotomy persists, either side absorbing these apparently randomly-assigned attitudes to their identities.

Then I read this, economist Bryan Caplan discussing Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman was explaining that when people are faced with a difficult question which they cannot easily or immediately answer, they tend to substitute the difficult target question with a simpler 'heuristic' question. Kahneman's examples include:

Target question 1
How much would you contribute to save an endangered species?

Heuristic substitution 1
How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?

Target question 2
How should financial advisers who prey on the elderly be punished?

Heuristic question 2
How much anger do I feel when I think of financial predators?

Do we all behave like this? I certainly think that I do. For example, see the difficult and complex question: 'Should foreign countries intervene when a government, like Syria right now, is violently oppressing its people?' There is a great maze of further questions to answer here. Is it legal under international law to intervene? Will the intervention succeed? Will there be unintended negative consequences? Will hands-off neutrality encourage oppression by tyrants elsewhere? Without the answers to all these questions I guess I simply translate it into the heuristic alternative: 'how do I feel about war?' The answer to that is immediate and easy: I don't feel good about it at all! So while I might rationalise my answer ('no, don't get involved') with a set of reasons, the core motivating reason for my reply is an emotional and deeply held value. I have discussed this inner irrational attitude towards war, and how it informs my stances on current events, on this blog before.

Anyway Caplan is excited by Kahneman's idea, and creates his own list of target questions and heuristic substitute questions. Caplan is a libertarian, favouring minimal government regulation or redistribution either in the economy or personal matters - just to warn you of the perspective he's coming from.

Target question 1
Does the minimum wage help low-skill workers?

Heuristic substitution 1
Would I be happy if employers gave low-skilled workers a raise?

Target question 2
Do anti-firing laws help workers in the long-run?

Heuristic substitution 2
Is it bad to be fired?

The target questions here are tricky. Maybe minimum wage laws do help low-skilled workers, and maybe they make them more likely to be made unemployed. Without great economics knowledge most people won't know the answer. But the heuristic replacement is simple. Do I want low-skilled workers to be protected from poverty? Of course, so to a minimum wage law: yes.

Remember that Caplan's perspective is that regulations like minimum wage or anti-firing laws are bad things which harm the economy as a whole and ultimately hurt the interests of low-skilled or vulnerable workers. He may be right or wrong, I'm not an economist so I can't argue either way. But for him, the left-leaning interventionist perspective seems easier for ordinary people to grasp, more pleasing to the heuristic substituted questions.

On another blog post Caplan argued that most Americans are actually social democrats who want government regulation and redistribution:

First, Americans only seem staunchly pro-market at the most abstract and symbolic level. On most specific policy issues, the pattern reverses. Americans favor as much or more government spending on almost everything. Only 41% of Americans are against or strongly against "control of prices by legislation." (GSS variable identifier SETPRICE) Only 21.3% are against or strongly against "supporting declining industries to protect jobs." (GSS variable identifier SAVEJOBS) Just 15.7% disagree or strongly disagree with the view that "America should limit the import of foreign products in order to protect its national economy."

Right, so this got me wondering. Suppose Caplan is correct that left-wing economic arguments are more pleasing and easier to grasp than right-wing arguments. The left, after all, can say: 'vote for us and we will give you free housing, education, healthcare and unemployment benefits if you lose your job'. The right-wingers are stuck saying: 'vote for us and we won't give you free housing, education, healthcare or unemployment benefits, but - trust us - you'll be better off without them'.

Perhaps the right-wingers are stuck with a more difficult justification of their policies, when the left-wing policies promise immediate and direct benefits. The right can argue that big wealth redistribution is harmful to the economy and will hurt the poor, but this wades into complex economics which most of us don't understand. The left have an easier time: give money and support to the poor. So long as they make it clear that the majority of voters are going to directly benefit, they seem to have a more powerful simple argument.

Then I thought, perhaps this is why so many right-wing movements are also associated with powerful, simplistic ideas in other areas. If the right cannot compete with the left in economic debates, they need some other powerful symbol to rally around. Religion, national identity, even the abstract notion of 'freedom' - these might be the simpler concepts that many voters have emotional connections with. So the right can create a new list of heuristic substituted questions for the more difficult ones. The following are my own:

Target question 1
Do you want universal healthcare?

Heuristic question 1
Do you prefer socialism or freedom?

Target question 2
Do you think the state should provide free education for all?

Heuristic question 2
Should the godless socialist government control what your child learns?

Target question 3
Should we cut spending on health and increase it on defence?

Heuristic question 3
Are you a patriot?

So my guess is that some on the right latch on to these simplistic ideas because their more complex economic views are not easy to defend. Far easier for American Republicans to denounce the Democrats as socialist Muslim hippie traitors than to actually go through Democrat economic programmes with a fine tooth comb and pick out complex concerns or apparent risks. The flag-waving and God-mentioning and name-calling might give the right the emotional edge that they lack with their economic ideas.

"Turkish rice" or "Why we should care about Nagasaki"

2012-01-13T03:19:00.000-08:00

When I told friends that I was moving to Nagasaki back in 2007, some wondered aloud if I would be exposing myself to nuclear radiation from the atomic bombing of the city in 1945. In fact 80% of the residual radiation released after the bombing was exhausted within 24 hours; within a week the strength of radiation was one millionth that of the initial burst. Today Nagasaki and Hiroshima have radiation levels no greater than any other cities in the world, but they still carry an irritating legacy; the most famous thing about either city is that they were nuked.

It really shouldn't be so. Nagasaki played a pivotal role in Japanese history, as a Japanese friend just reminded me by remarking that she wanted トルコライス - a weird Japanese dish called toruko rice: Turkish rice.

Cooking Christians
By the 16th century Japan had collapsed into a network of warring kingdoms with no central power. The Emperor lived, but by this time his role was largely symbolic and religious, the real power lay with local samurai lords. One such lord, Oda Nobunaga, began the violent reunification of Japan through conquest, a campaign that led to a strange kind of alliance with the ascendent powers of the day, the Portuguese and Spanish Christians.

Nobunaga had been locked in a bitter struggle against Buddhist sectarians, so he was content to let Iberian Jesuits preach Christianity in a bid to undermine them. He was a pragmatist, and was eager to learn from the Iberians, especially valuing their advanced firearms technology. While Nobunaga was rising, Christianity flourished and the Iberians rose with him.

Then Nobunaga died, and the unification of Japan was completed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who became suspicious of the foreign Christian presence. Gradually Hideyoshi and his successors clamped down on Christianity. A good many of the Christians, and a good deal of the repression, happened around Nagasaki. In 1597 Hideyoshi had 26 Christians crucified in Nagasaki city. In the town of Unzen, just a few miles from the coastal town of Obama where I lived and taught, Christians were tossed into the screaming volcanic vents to boil alive in the sulphurous water. A modern visitor centre in Unzen has an image of the horror:

And it is remembered in the stained glass windows of the Catholic church in another local town, Shimabara.

Shimabara would give its name to a violent rebellion by overtaxed farmers and Christians around Nagasaki, in 1637. Led by a charismatic teenager, thousands of Christians and locals laid siege to castles in the region before finally being attacked by a massive government army, who besieged the rebels at a dismantled castle called Hara. The rebels held back a superior army for months before being overrun and exterminated: the shogun had all 37,000 rebel men, women and children butchered, persecution of Christianity was intensified, the few remaining Christians fled and hid their belief for centuries unknown to the authorities, and Japan sealed its borders to outside trade. When the Portuguese sent 61 envoys to remonstrate with the Japanese, every one of them was beheaded and a handful of crew were spared to return the message.

Catholics out, Protestants on a leash
Japan sealed most of its borders, to most trade. Nagasaki alone was still open to the outside world: Nagasaki. Trade was limited to Korea, China and the Netherlands, the latter considered less threatening that the hated Iberians because of their anti-Catholic Protestantism. The Dutch had even sent two ships to shell the Christian rebels during the Shimabara Rebellion.

Still, the Japanese authorities thought the Dutch alien enough that they were forced to quarter on an artificial island called Dejima, carefully segregated from the Japanese lest they contaminate them with foreign ideas. Few Japanese were ever allowed to cross from Nagasaki to Dejima; an exception were the courtesans sent to service Dutch traders.

Until the opening of Japan in the mid-19th century, Nagasaki was the only open port in Japan, and as a result it alone absorbed foreign cultures.

Relics of diversity
Today elements of those historical connections with the outside world still linger. I was in Nagasaki city for the annual Lantern Festival in 2008, a Chinese New Year festival that has become a wider Japanese celebration in the city. A Japanese friend and I performed a kind of pilgrimage, a walk between four Buddhist temples in the old Chinese quarter.

Everything gleamed red and gold, intricate and ornamented. The temples held statues to Buddhist deities, wild and coloured and multi-armed, hinting of India and China, starkly different to the wooden simplicity of Japan's Shinto shrines.

Near the temples were Chinese acrobats performing for a happily gobsmacked Japanese audience.

And during the night we went out to explore the massive Chinese lantern displays and what I understand is a shrine offering a feast of pig heads to the gods.

The foreigners also left their mark in food, like the Portuguese sponge cake called 'bread from Castille' and which would become the Japanese カステラ, castella, still available in Nagasaki today. Or the beloved Japanese tempura which began as another Portuguese style of fried food. One of my favourite foods was ちゃんぽん, champon, a delicious, brothy seafood noodle soup allegedly invented by a Chinese chef in Nagasaki in 1899.

From Turkey with confusion
So this brings me back to トルコライス, toruko rice. This is another weird Nagasaki dish, a collection of curry rice, spaghetti and pork. Its origins are unclear, though it is clearly a hybrid of Eastern and Western tastes. I heard one confusing rumour that this was a combination of European spaghetti, Chinese pork, and Japanese rice. I certainly can't be sure of that and in any case, why Turkish rice? Some mix-up because the curry is Indian (remembering that the first Portuguese visitors were mistaken as Indians too)?

One theory is that toruko rice was thought to bridge European and Asian foods in the way that Turkey bridges the European and Asian continents. For whatever reason, toruko rice was founded in Nagasaki as typically weird and delicious cross between East and West. I have fond memories of cycling down into the town after work on an empty stomach, calling into a quiet restaurant run by a polite and quiet couple, and finally feasting on this steaming carb-rich dinner. And this reinterpretation of Western culture, this unity of Europe and Japan, finally, is why we should remember Nagasaki for more than being nuked once.

Ireland's strangely equal regions

2012-01-12T06:51:00.000-08:00

Reading this summary of OECD's Regions at a Glance 2011 I noticed the graph below, comparing OECD countries by the extent of inequality between the regions of each country in terms of household income, physician density, basic education and mortality rate.

Ireland shows extremely low levels of inequality between its regions for these indicators. My first thought was that Ireland must have low regional inequality, with all regions being roughly similar. Then I remembered something that made me laugh - Ireland actually has only two subnational regions for these statistics! The entire country is split very crudely into the Border, Midlands and Western Region and the Southern and Eastern region.

There are differences between the two regions, but dividing the country so crudely down the middle cannot give very clear indications of these differences. Czech Republic, which in the first graph shows a high degree of regional inequality, is formed of eight regions. The United States is actually split into its states, so no wonder it shows higher levels of diversity between them!

So one wonders how useful the top graph really is. There could be deep regional inequalities in Ireland which our simple division is too crude to measure. If the US was split into two regions it would probably show less diverse or unequal results too.

The gap where a third American party should be

2012-01-09T13:59:00.000-08:00

American polling company Gallup surveyed over 20,000 Americans in 2011 and discovered that, for the first time (their records go back to 1988) the proportion of Americans self-identifying as 'independent' has reached 40%. Those identifying as Democrat reached 31% and Republicans only 27%.

Their graph from 1988 to 2011 is below.

I notice a few things immediately. First, see how poorly Republicans do throughout the period, despite winning occasional elections. They only beat the Democrats in 1991 and briefly in the early 2000s. My guess is that those identifying as Democrat may tend to be less likely to actually vote, may be younger, for example. Perhaps Gallup's survey is not very valid and misses some of the sections of society who tend to vote Republican. Finally the article explains that more of those identifying as independent 'lean Republican' than 'lean Democrat', so presumably some will vote for Republicans come election day.

There is a low for 'independent' identification in 2004. Why? This was one year after the start of the American invasion of Iraq. It was the year of Bush's reelection as president. My guess is that Americans were especially polarised during this period, with fierce anti-war and pro-war tensions, perhaps divided along partisan lines.

Yet the independent identification bounced back and has only risen since President Obama took office. Since Obama's election the wars have mostly rumbled on and economic recovery has been slow, perhaps undermining the view of the Democrats as a sensible alternative to discredited Republicanism. Identification for Democrats has fallen, but Republican support has barely increased. Americans, it seems, have moved away from identification with either party.

40%! This looks to me like a great vacuum into which more political parties should step. At the moment this is especially difficult because the US has a first past the post electoral system, which grossly benefits the largest parties at the expense of smaller ones.

The classic example is Britain in 2005, when Labour 'won' the general election with only 36% of the vote (while 39% of the electorate did not even bother voting). That is, only 22% of the entire electorate voted for Labour, who walked away as the sole party in government. From The Guardian:

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the underlying logic of the current voting system is in the number of votes it takes to elect each party's MPs. On last night's results a Labour MP only needed 26,858 votes to get elected, compared with 44,241 votes for a Tory MP, and a staggering 98,484 for each Liberal Democrat MP.

In other words 353 Labour MPs were elected on 9.48m votes, 196 Conservatives on 8.67m votes and 60 Liberal Democrats with 5.9m votes.

This system squeezes out the smaller parties and makes voting for them largely pointless since voters know that only one of two parties can ever make it into power. The success of the Liberal Democrats in Britain is especially impressive considering the massive electoral disadvantage they faced as the third biggest party.

(The Irish system, by comparison, is based on proportional representation by single transferable vote. This also disproportionately benefits the bigger parties, but by not as much. In 2011 Fine Gael won 31.6% of the total vote and 46% of the parliamentary seats. They formed a coalition government with Labour, and together these made up over 55% of the votes cast, creating a government that was at least voted for by the majority of people. There are now seven parties or groupings represented in the parliament, with new parties popping up every few years. Small parties have a real chance of getting into government coalitions.)

Back to the US, where there seems to be a real place for alternative parties. A majority of surveyed Americans reported unfavourable views of both parties and a majority (52%) feel the US needs a third party. It is itching for a third party alternative but the electoral system is stacked against any such thing. This system, of course, benefits the Republicans and Democrats, which is why they will oppose it and why the Conservatives and Labour opposed electoral reform in the UK. So I doubt we will see the big powers opening up the system to challenges from below any time soon.

Jews and Muslims and Catholics: the traitors within

2012-01-09T03:45:00.000-08:00

I noted with interest the similarities between the 19th century anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement in the United States with modern European anti-Muslim movements. Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher warned that the mass of superstitious Catholics in the US were loyal to Rome, not Washington, and their potential treachery was 'like a train of powder between an enemy's camp and our own magazine'. I was reminded of the modern arguments that segregated Muslim populations in Europe are loyal to Mecca in rejection of the local national identity, are in fact a growing traitorous minority that itches for the overthrow of secular democracy.

Now I am reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes; A Hidden Inheritance, which describes the hatred his wealthy Jewish ancestors faced in 19th century Paris. Again I see some similarities, but also big differences in the kinds of bigotry.

The Muslims and Catholics during their various eras of mass migration ended up in the US or Europe clustered around the bottom of society. They were feared for their numbers and their fertility, for swarming into great ghettos, chattering in their own languages, worshipping their own gods. These were mass movements that felt threatening for their poverty and crime and for the potential they offered corrupt democratic politicians pandering to vote banks. They were seen as the slime at the bottom of society, criminal and backward and always threatening to engulf the natives in riot and chaos and rape.

For the 19th century French, the Jews were alarming for other reasons. These were a tiny minority, but very, very significant because of their extraordinary wealth and their dominance of the finance sector. Writing in 2012 after the collapse of a banking system that saw widespread denunciations of bankers, it is interesting to see the French of 1882 scapegoating the banking elite too. That time much of the elite were especially alien to investors who had lost their savings because they were Jews.

Like the Catholics and Muslims, the Jews were thought to have divided loyalties. With massive financial clout, de Waal's ancestors the Ephrussis were able to threaten distant governments:

Their threat to flood the markets with grain in response to Russian pogroms was taken seriously in an excited report in a newspaper during another crisis. '[The Jews] ... have learned the potency of this weapon when they made Russia hold her hand in the last Jewish persecution... by reducing Russian securities twenty-four points in thirteen days. "Touch another of our people and not another ruble you shall have, to save your empire," said Michel Ephrussi, head of the great house of Odessa, the largest grain dealers in the world.' The Ephrussis were, in short, very rich, very visible and very partisan.

The Jews here seemed to be disconnected from the French nation state, more loyal to Jewish cousins living on the Black Sea than to their French countrymen and women. Their clout, and their danger, came from wealth instead of numbers. The Muslims and Catholics were threatening because of their failures, their consistent poverty and sprawl. The Jews were threatening because of their success.

Curiously the Jews were mocked for integrating too, using their wealth to slip deftly into the highest of European society. They were the nouveau riche who leap-frogged ancient European noble families into respectability and treasure, commissioning coats of arms and living in beautiful old homes that belonged once to the European aristocracy. De Waal's ancestor Charles, who was a renowned art critic and friend of the great Impressionist artists of France, was still dismissed by the anti-Semites as being obsessed only with gold. While Catholics were derided in the US for their flamboyant religiosity in poverty, the Jews were jealously mocked for having a childish magpie instinct to collect and flaunt expensive trinkets. Try as they might to seem European and dignified and tasteful, the intermarried web of stateless Jewish financiers were seen as threatening outsiders, even 'oriental'.

I suppose in all these examples the minority group was seen to be alien, disloyal, dishonest, empowered either with wealth or numbers, and willing to use this power to harm the native majorities. Perhaps it is this power that unsettles the natives. I was astonished to see a note made by Charles Lindbergh, aviator and racist, in his diary that: 'Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur.' How similar to the 21st century chain email that listed the ever-increasing harm an ever-increasing Muslim population does to a country. Yet I'm still a little puzzled by the hatred of the wealthy Jews, since those groups most feared and alienated today seem to be the poorer groups, the Roma, Bangladeshi, Nigerian, and Pakistani. Wealthier minorities like Britain's Jews and Sikhs seem to attract less rage.

That's just a casual observation - am I wrong? I know there are tensions between the wealthy Chinese minority in Malaysia and the poorer Malay majority, but I generally thought that the poorer minority groups tended to be feared more than the rich. Any thoughts, or counter-examples from around the world?

Is it the power of minorities that unnerves the natives, or something else? Share your thoughts below.

Julius Caesar: multiculturalism, social welfare, fraud

2012-01-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

Listening today to Mike Duncan's excellent History of Rome podcasts, I was pleased to hear Julius Caesar struggling to come to terms with issues that still puzzle us today.

Refugee crisis
The Helvetii Gauls in Switzerland were under pressure from raids of Germanic tribes and decided to migrate en masse into Roman territory. Julius Caesar responded by promising to consider their desire to enter, and instead built a defensive wall to block them off. The Gauls hit the wall and Caesar attacked, driving them about France until they were crushed.

Citizenship for ethnic minorities
For a long time citizenship was granted only to Romans, with other Italians finally fighting a war to secure their political rights too. Caesar, despite his brutal rejection of the Helvetii Gaul migrants, extended Roman citizenship to formerly conquered Cisalpine Gauls and other non-Roman peoples. This was Caesar's way of dealing with Rome's increasingly multiethnic and multicultural population. Today people debate the ease with which immigrants should be free to adopt the citizenship of their new countries; Caesar thought civic inclusion was sensible.

The social question
Rome had long been divided between the wealthy ruling patrician class and the poor plebian underclass. Deep conflicts had disrupted the state in early centuries and the plebians had managed to seize some political representation. The poverty of the Roman slums turned to crisis whenever war, slave revolts, or locusts interrupted the grain supply. Gaius Gracchus intervened during one crisis to buy expensive grain and sell it cheap, at a loss, to the plebs. Populist leaders expanded this proto-welfare system into a permanent grain dole for the poor.

When Caesar came to power he found widespread fraud and tried to cut the massive cost by reforming it. Social welfare, income inequality, fraud, and reform - 'Occupy' and 'austerity' might as well have been the buzz words of ancient Latin as today.

Cheap labour
Before the rise of Caesar Rome's drastic expansion into Greece, Africa, and the Middle East swamped Rome with hundreds of thousands of slaves. The poor Roman peasants who had worked the soil for the patrician landlords were rendered unnecessary by the free labour supplied by slaves. Duncan seems to see the comparable situation today, he says the Roman experience was less of "outsourcing" jobs to cheap labour abroad to "insourcing" jobs to slaves. Either way the Roman poor were forced into deeper poverty and underemployment.

Thomas Jefferson began presidency with admission of flaws

2012-01-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled across this brilliant inaugural speech by Thomas Jefferson in 1801 as he became the third President of the United States. There are lots of fascinating points here, like his attitude towards foreign policy:

peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;

And his appreciation of the stabilising effect of democracy, perhaps especially conscious of the violent rejection of monarchism in Frace in the 1780s-90s:

a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism;

He finally observes that men will rarely leave office with the reputation and regard with which they enter it, and admits:

I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts;

I liked this, quite sensible and modest. His point about an unentangled foreign policy is a repeat of something George Washington called for in his farewell address in 1796:

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world;

All very different from the highly engaged and assertive foreign policies followed by modern American governments. It interests me that the US has this heritage of non-interventionism, when its modern leaders seem divided between liberal interventionism and neo-conservatism.

Performing arts ambition leads to dissatisfaction

2012-01-03T05:38:00.000-08:00

Recently I mentioned that an episode of The Graham Norton Show might unintentionally mislead viewers into overrating their chances of achieving highly ambitious goals in life, because the show interviews the tiny elite of celebrities who succeed in acting or music, and not the great mass of people who fail. Quite a pessimistic perspective, perhaps, yet today I read something related on a Byran Caplan blog at Econlog. Caplan is discussing Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which shows that income inequality is partly explained by the diversity of attitudes towards wealth among young people. Those who say, at 17 or 18, that becoming rich is important to them, do tend to eventually earn more than those who say it is not important to them.

The same principle applies to other goals--one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain. Measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was "becoming accomplished in a performing art."

Apart from the dissatisfaction of failing to achieve success in a career where most people will fail to achieve success, I guess there is an opportunity cost to this ambition also. In September the Freakonomics team had an interesting podcast on the merits of quitting. They talked to sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh who looked at the socioeconomic backgrounds and outcomes of young men in a 'baseball draft class', which I gather means that they showed promise to be professional baseball players and sought that career:

The average player probably looks like an upper-middle-class kid who comes out of college or comes out of high school. And when you follow an upper-middle-class kid for about seven to ten years, they’re probably going to make higher than the median average income. They’re probably going to live in a neighborhood that’s relatively safe. They’re going to have a career. Now, when you take the counterpart among the pool that was drafted, that median kid, that kid looks likes he’s making about $20,000 to $24,000 a year, which is not a lot of money. He’s working probably five to seven months playing baseball, and then struggling to find part-time work in the off-season. Might be coaching, might be doing some training, might be working on a construction site. Might be working in fast food.

So those who followed their dream and didn't quite make it seem to have paid an economic penalty, compared with those who had no hope of making it big in baseball to start with.

I got thinking that it might be cool to have an inspirational teen movie where the hero fails miserably, gives up, and knuckles down to some less exciting career, at which he or she is successful.

Then I remembered something else: this sort of thing actually has been covered by The Graham Norton Show. In one recent episode actor Antonio Banderas was demonstrating some sword-fighting skills to Norton when his co-star Salma Hayek remarked that Banderas could have been a professional footballer. Banderas said that this had been a chance, but that he had broken a leg as a teenager, and drifted into acting instead. Hayek then admitted that she had been trained as a gymnast as a youngster, and was even drafted into the Mexican national team before she abandoned it.

Not quite what I'd been thinking of, but good to see at least that early abandoned dreams did not scuttle lives for good!

Carving combs from yew wood

2011-12-31T13:42:00.000-08:00

A friend asked me to make her a wooden comb because she said they don't build the static electrical charges in hair that plastic combs do. I sawed a thin slice of yew wood and began to saw a series of teeth, so thin that the comb promptly snapped in two. Some dismay and rage followed, before I began again, with a larger and stronger chunk of yew.

This time I left a wide section at the base of the comb uncut to add strength. You can see in this picture that I had begun to shape and sharpen the teeth on the right. On my first, abortive project I simply slotted a chunk of sandpaper between two of the teeth and rubbed them back and forth at an angle, slowly wearing down the roughly squared edges. This was very slow and inefficient work. Here I was experimenting with files; later I would use a sharp gouge to cut diagonal chamfers along the sides of the teeth so that they were already well worn down from square by the time I applied sandpaper.

A huge amount of filing, carving, and especially sanding later, I had a pleasingly smooth yew comb. This promptly broke in half. Fighting my dismay and irritation, I glued the project back together along the split, and then reinforced the comb with two slim sections of teak. You should be able to make out the split on the left here, looking at the underside of the comb, and the teak sections sandwiching the yew.

The teak greatly improved the strength of the comb so I could relax a little! At this stage the comb looked quite nice, the natural swirling cream and red of the yew beautifully exposed by the parallel lines of teeth.

One problem was that I had sawed the combs teeth by hand, using a large and rough crosscut saw that left horizontal scars on the insides of the teeth. This meant lots of extra sanding or, as at the bottom of the teeth, eventual abandonment, leaving annoying scars on the wood.

By the time I felt happy enough to cease sanding I was wondering what kind of finish I should apply. I liked the idea of French polish or beeswax polish that would bring out a brilliant natural colour from the wood without creating a heavy or glossy surface. I experimented with beeswax and with linseed oil on the broken remains of my first abandoned project. This looked pretty good but I was conscious that the comb would be dragged through hair, and I worried that oils and polishes might come off and stick to the hair.

I wanted something tough and inert, so I ended up applying two layers of clear satin varnish. Annoyed at first that the paintbrush was leaving streaky lines on the wood, I swapped it in favour of a soft cloth: an old (washed) pair of cotton boxing shorts! This allowed me to control the flow of varnish, rubbing on two thin layers of even consistency and no streaks. The final project:

Encouraged by this, but annoyed by some little mistakes I had made, I decided to have another go, and sawed another sliver of beautiful yew wood. This time I used the electric bandsaw to cut much neater teeth, so there were fewer unsightly scars to sand away. I also decided to include a teak reinforcing bar early in the project to provide extra strength before all the vigorous filing and sanding took place. This time I recessed the teak bar into the yew wood on one side, making the final comb much leaner and very satisfying to hold. A little more elegant than the earlier project.

I wondered for a long time how I should finish this. Finally I gave it without any varnish as a birthday present to my sister, offering to varnish and polish it if she preferred. She was happy with the simple wood surface, so that was that. Another comb in the bag!

It is quite labour-intensive work but I was pretty pleased with these projects. Hope you've enjoyed it too, Happy New Year all, and best of luck in 2012.

Muslims, Islam, Google and Books

2011-12-29T12:51:00.000-08:00

See the occurrence of the words "Muslims" and "Islam" in the millions of English-language books scanned by Google, as a percentage of all published words, between 1960 and 2008:

Straight away we see a spike in 1975 for "Islam". I guessed at first that this must be related to the Islamic Revolution of Iran, but that was in 1978-79. Then I wondered if it might be the Black September's Munich Massacre, but that was 1972. Elijah Muhammad, founder of the US-based Nation of Islam, died in early 1975. Boxer Muhammad Ali converted from the Nation of Islam movement to Sunni Islam in 1975. Lebanon descended into a civil war in 1975, featuring conflict between Christians and Muslims. I'm not sure that any of this explains the 1975 spike, or if there is any real cause at all - perhaps this is just a one-off fluke. Any suggestions?

A second trend is rising results for "Muslims" in the 1980s, seeming to peak in 1983 and 1988. I wonder if this may be related to Anglo-American awareness of the Afghan Muslims fighting the Soviet Union. "Afghanistan" peaks twice in the 1980s also, fairly close to the peak for "Muslims".

When Afghan Muslims were allies to the US, I can imagine that there may have been a down-playing of religious differences (and, therefore, references to Islam) along with an increased sense of Muslims as fellow freedom-lovers struggling against communism. All speculation, of course.

Finally, "Muslims" relatively decreases while "Islam" increases since 1990. "Islam" shoots up in 2002, probably because of the interest in radical Islamism due to the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan.

There might also be a rising sense of cultural discord between Europeans and Muslim immigrant groups. A hint:

So my guess is that there has been a growing consciousness of Islam as a religious and cultural issue. Yet if Islam has been a rising issue it may still be dwarfed by older ideological concerns:
I may be reading too much into these trends. Any other interpretations?

Christmas in Japan: borrowing foreignness

2011-12-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

I heard a brilliant anecdote once about a rural Japanese community who decided to give the Irish man working in the town a nice surprise for Christmas. They pieced together the bits of Christmas they had seen in American films with their own knowledge about Christianity, and when they were finished they thought they had put together a fine treat indeed. So they brought the Irish man into the town square and there was Santa Claus...

...Nailed to a cross.

It tells us a lot about Japan's rapturous yet uneasy adoption of foreign cultures. I have heard commentators argue that when Japan accepts foreign influences Japan stays the same and the foreign thing changes. They took the entire Chinese writing system and turned it into simplified hiragana and katakana. They took European military technology and created kamikaze suicide pilots. They took America's Ford and gave the world Toyota. This ability to transform and reinterpret outside influences has been called the essence of Japan.

Now and then, though, the result of the transformation is a weird mutation, more parody of the foreign import than honest reinterpretation of it. Christmas in Japan is really weird.

A few weeks into December 2007, when I was teaching English in a small town in the south of Japan, an American woman teaching in a neighbouring town asked me to dress up as Santa for a Christmas party she was throwing for her students. The party consisted of scores of hyper children and a handful of foreign English teachers. When the children were brought up to do some carol-singing I, the sole blue-eyed, brown-haired, white-skinned person in the building, was smuggled out to get changed into the Santa suit. And when Santa arrived – what a coincidence! For he too was blue-eyed, brown-haired and white-skinned!

I pulled on the suit. It was massive and I had to jam the pillow in front of my belly just to keep my pants from falling off. The material seemed to be made of some kind of light cotton that would probably tear with a gentle tug. My American friend seemed apologetic and amused when she handed me the beard, which was made of cotton wool. I pulled it on along with the hat and caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the window. My brown hair was sticking out around the back of my hat. I looked less plump and jolly than suffering from severe and unusual malnutrition that had blown my torso and upper thighs into a rectangular paunch, but drained my skinny face and hands back to the bone. Ho. Ho. Ho.

I walked back in towards the main hall. A little girl lingering near the entrance caught a glimpse of me and gasped. For a moment my doubts about the cotton wool beard were allayed as she froze in awe. Here goes.

'HO, HO, HO!' I boomed, trying to wink roguishly. (Months later a Japanese friend asked me what a wink implies. Apparently it doesn’t have the same merry suggestive connotations in Japan as it has in the West. The little girl probably thought I had spasms.)

I reached the door and then all children were staring at me, some breathing awed 'Santa-san's', others shouting and running for me.

'HO, HO, HO! MERRY CHRISTMAS!' I found myself jutting forward my pillow belly and pretending to be tired from the weight. Children gathered in a ring around me, warily at first and then with more and more excited courage. They began touching my clothes and patting my belly.

Then suddenly I was being gestured towards the stage.

'Come up and dance, "Santa", sniggered one of the American teachers, standing now on the stage with a group of students, every one of them wearing traditional Japanese robes. Music started and the foreigners and I tried to mimic the perfectly-choreographed dance the children were performing in the front line, presumably expected to employ our Gaijin Telepathy to already know the moves. Then at the climax of the dance, suddenly the children were gesturing to me, pointing in towards the middle of the group. I walked in to the centre with everyone’s eyes on me and improvised a wild (and uncharacteristically youthful) dance for weary old Santa.

The parents had arranged two sacks of small presents for the children and they were then surreptitiously transferred to me to give out. When the children realised what was happening, all hell broke loose. Children were everywhere, dozens of pleading hands stuck in my face and grasping the presents faster than I could deal them out. The kids at the front were getting squashed from the kids pushing in from the back, everyone shouting, 'SANTA-SAN! SANTA-SAN!' The other teachers, a little alarmed, started pulling out presents and pushing them into hands to take the heat off me.

After the presents were dealt out, I made a merry exit, only to be followed by a bunch of hyper boys who started punching my pillow stomach, tugging my beard and stealing my hat. Brats. In another occasion a mighty bellow would have sent them scampering in fear but I guessed this was out of character for Santa-san so I put up with it for a few minutes until I found a quiet room to quickly get changed. I spat out the bits of cotton wool stuck in my mouth, strolled back into the room in my t-shirt and jeans and looked around like Clark Kent turning up just after Superman saved the day yet again, asking, 'What did I miss?'

If not the perils of cotton wool beards, the experience showed the strange incorporation by Japan of another foreign culture – embraced wholeheartedly but not quite getting it. As Santa I had to forego the traditional black boots since one does not wear shoes indoor in Japan. This Santa went in black socks. The children mobbed me, but on Christmas day their parents would go to work as usual.

In Japan, young couples view Christmas as a romantic occasion for a meal out. Japan's Christmas is the natural conclusion of the process conservative-minded Christians in the West have complained about for centuries, with corporations competing to cash in on a meaningless celebration and, if necessary, totally reinvent it.

The week before my Santa experience I found myself visiting the big Nagasaki Amu Plaza shopping centre to get some winter clothes. Every floor had a glittering fake Christmas tree, decorations hung from the ceiling and tinny Christmas tunes played over the intercom. Near the exit a pretty girl in a skimpy Santa costume was handing out advertisements and outside a vast fake Christmas tree attracted Japanese people to pose with the inevitable two-fingered peace salute for photos. It looked like Christmas, it sounded like Christmas but with absolutely no pretence of it having any cultural or religious significance – it wasn't Christmas.

Strangest of all, Kentucky Fried Chicken has managed to hijack the confusion over Christmas in Japan with a clever marketing campaign which advertised fried chicken as a special Christmas treat. Of course nobody in the West eats KFC at Christmas, but the Japanese weren't to know this and KFC managed to present itself as the natural choice for Christmas dinner. It is so popular now that customers need to order days in advance to be served.

I travelled to Tokyo for Christmas itself, spending my first evening exploring a trendy area called Shibuya, where Tokyo's young and beautiful were lounging around in the December dusk, posing and smoking. Flatscreens the size of houses beamed crystal-clear video advertisements high above our heads. Hundreds of sexy youngsters swaggered about in shiny gold bomber jackets, over-sized white-rimmed glasses, long blonde-dyed hair swept into elaborate halos around their heads.

This is the men I'm talking about. The women were stumbling along in high-heeled boots and skimpy skirts, while I shivered in the cold.

I walked away from the subway station and passed through a pedestrian crossing with hundreds of beautiful young people converging from all four sides at the same time. Everyone who walked did so very fast and it was an adrenaline rush just crossing the road under the vast glowing ads.

I followed my nose down side streets, still ablaze with advertisements and lights. Every form of bar and restaurant was here, along with hundreds of shops doing business late into the evening before Christmas Day. A satellite photograph of Japan at night shows Tokyo as a vast white blot of light pollution, running seamlessly into the smaller cities that make up the east coast of Japan. Cities like Yokohama, which alone has 3.6 million inhabitants, yet fits snugly within the Greater Tokyo Area. Imagine: that is almost the entire population of Ireland squeezed into a city that is just a single part of another city.
The Greater Tokyo Area has about 35.7 million people. That's like cramming the entire populations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland into a single monstrous metropolis. It is endless, and exhausting. I explored Shibuya for hours, thrilled by the stimulation of the place, before returning to the grim little hotel I had booked in Ikebekuro, surrounded by love hotels, stinking of cigarettes and with 12 channels of static snow on the television.

It was a strange way to spend Christmas. The next morning I rose to another business day in Tokyo; shoppers and workers hurried between perfect conical Christmas trees and the shops were ringing with Christmas tunes. In the evening I joined some Japanese friends for dinner and walking around afterwards, passing through a line of red tori gates at a Shinto shrine. One of the Japanese people asked if I was scared.

'Not really.'

'Japanese people think this kind of place has lots of ghosts,' she explained. Japan mimics the red and gold glow of Western Christmas but its enchantment – even in the heart of that giant concrete city – is of another kind.

Historian agrees: 1848 revolutions once more

2011-12-23T05:17:00.000-08:00

Back in February I noticed similarities between the Arab uprisings and the popular revolutions of 1848 Europe. Both were sparked by an economic crisis that briefly united middle class liberals with the underclasses. Both featured tensions between the victorious rebels after their success, pitting liberalism against socialism and nationalism in Europe, and against Islamism in the Arab countries. The European revolutions quickly collapsed under the weight of these contradictions, leading to the restoration of the monarchs, and I wondered if the Arab countries would suffer a similar fate.

Today the historian Eric Hobsbawm is interviewed by BBC, saying the same thing: it's like 1848 all over again.

"Two years after 1848, it looked as if it had all failed. In the long run, it hadn't failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made. So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success - though no longer in the form of a revolution."

However, with the possible exception of Tunisia, he sees little prospect of liberal democracy or European-style representative government in the Arab world.

Not enough notice has been taken, he says, of the differences between Arab countries in the throes of mass protests.

"We are in the middle of a revolution - but it isn't the same revolution."

"What unites them is a common discontent and common mobilisable forces - a modernising middle class, particularly a young, student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much easier to mobilise protests."

How interest in prejudices rise and fall in fashion

2011-12-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

Below is a Google Ngram Viewer graph showing the relative popularity of the words racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia since 1930.

We see that there have been successive waves of interest in forms of bigotry or prejudice. First, racism, which rises unsurprisingly during the late 1930s after Adolf Hitler began to put his explicit racist ideology into practice. A zoomed-in graph shows a rapid increase in mentions of racism over this period:

Mentions of racism peaked in the early 1970s, presumably following the great civil rights anti-racism movements of the 60s, and then rose again during the late 1980s and 1990s. It is on its way down now. Why? Perhaps there is a sense that the worst racism issues have been solved in English-speaking countries already. Or it may just be out of fashion as people have wearied of the angry protests of the past.

The next wave of interest is sexism. The first chart makes it look like nobody was writing about sexism before the 1960s at all. In reality there were periodic bursts of interest in sexism throughout the early 20th century:

But mentions really took off around 1966, peaking, like racism, in the 1990s. Remember that Ngram looks at mentions as a percentage of all words, so the fall after the 1990s could be due to rising interest in some other topics, rather than a real fall of interest in sexism or racism. This is a difficulty for interpretation.

The third form of prejudice is homophobia, which lags sexism by a few years, beginning to increase in mentions in the 1970s, peaking around 1996. In 2008 homophobia made up around the same proportion of all words published in Google's massive book database as it made in 1990.

Finally Islamophobia. It seems to score no mentions at all in the first graph. But if we zoom in a little further we see a consistent rise in the mid-1990s.

As late as 2008 Islamophobia was still rising. Will it peak soon like the others? No idea.

What does all of this mean? Perhaps these waves of interest indicate real public awareness of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Muslimism. Perhaps the eventual decline in mentions indicates a public sense that the discrimination has begun to decline and society is now past its problem. Islamophobia, then, continues to rise because anti-Muslim sentiments may not have been challenged or settled enough for the public to feel the issue is over.

Or it might mean none of that, interpretations are tricky here. Any thoughts?

Google Ngram: Democracy versus Republicanism

2011-12-22T03:28:00.000-08:00

Google Ngram Viewer creates a graph depicting the popularity of words used in a database of 5 million books scanned by the company, dating back to 1500. A paper published in Science this year explains the massive scale of the project:

The resulting corpus contains over 500 billion words, in English (361 billion), French (45 billion), Spanish (45 billion), German (37 billion), Chinese (13 billion), Russian (35 billion), and Hebrew (2 billion). The oldest works were published in the 1500s. The early decades are represented by only a few books per year, comprising several hundred thousand words. By 1800, the corpus grows to 98 million words per year; by 1900, 1.8 billion; and by 2000, 11 billion...

The corpus cannot be read by a human. If you tried to read only English-language entries from the year 2000 alone, at the reasonable pace of 200 words/min,without interruptions for food or sleep, it would take 80 years. The sequence of letters is 1000 times longer than the human genome: If you wrote it out in a straight line, it would reach to the Moon and back 10 times over.

So Ngram can be used to spot very long term trends, across centuries instead of the Google Insights for Search trends that rise and fall over years or weeks. I put the words 'democracy' and 'republic' into Ngram, searching from 1500 to 2008:

An initial observation is that both words peak early in the 1640s. This was the same period as the English Civil War, when the parliament overthrew (and decapitated) King Charles. It was a time of political turmoil and debate, with liberals pushing for democracy, monarchists pushing for absolute rule, and thinkers like Thomas Hobbes trying to reconcile the two.

That republican experiment would peter out with the restoration of the English monarchy. A second wave of interest in republicanism arises in the 1750s, perhaps coinciding with early American anti-British agitation? I'm not sure if there were other important republican movements in this period, but certainly writings over the rest of the 18th century show high levels of interest while Americans, French and Irish republicans put their thoughts into violent action. A third, smaller, peak appears to coincide with the republican revolutions of 1848.

So why do we see republicanism fade from importance as democracy rises? Democracy seems to coincide with the world wars, perhaps as idealists sought to replace the discredited autocratic monarchies and dictatorships with new representative alternatives. Perhaps it is also related to the rise of female suffrage and democracies that finally allowed all adults to vote regardless of sex or race?

Still, I don't see clearly why republicanism fell out of fashion in books while democracy increased. Is it just a shift in language, with the two meaning the same thing? Or does it indicate a more serious change in preferences, perhaps emphasising collective engagement in the political process (democracy) over individual liberty from oppressive government (republicanism)?

A sex-worker embraces sexual objectification

2011-12-21T10:03:00.000-08:00

I wondered on this blog before if there is any real difference between the sexual objectification of women in pornography and the intellectual objectification of writers. I pointed out that readers do not worry themselves about the author as an individual, using the writing only as a way to get information. When I was researching for a social research project recently I barely even registered the sex or nationality of the authors I was referencing, caring only about the knowledge they were giving me. I was objectifying them.

Almost all workers are objectified. It struck me as odd that a woman who is paid to pose for sexual photographs is considered a victim, while a man or woman who enters a boxing ring and risks brain damage by being battered about for the pleasure of an audience is considered a sports star.

So I was fascinated to come across this argument by 'Furry Girl', the pseudonym for a self-described sex-worker who runs the blog Feminisnt. Furry Girl runs four pornographic websites, to which she links on her blog, and stars in some pornographic photography and video. She also bitterly rejects the complaint that pornography objectifies women:

Firstly, as a porn model and cam girl, it's my job description to "be a sex object", (as the anti-sexers would define it), and it's a job with which I'm very happy....

I have never met a sex worker who was unaware of that their job entailed before taking it. When asked why she got started, not one replied, "I became a stripper because I was looking for the true love of an intellectual partner who appreciates my inner beauty and doesn't oggle my body." Those types of people answer romance ads on eHarmony.com, not ads in weekly papers for "B/G anal scene $500 cash". It's not as though this whole thing is sprung upon random unsuspecting victims- it's the definition of the work.

"Being objectified" by customers is not something that sex workers themselves are railing against as an injustice they seek to overcome. It's a half-baked analysis being imposed upon our work from outsiders- outsiders who presume to tell the world what we experience and how we feel about it, without ever having asked us.

She then makes the point I made last year on The Harvest:

Secondly, everyone at their job is "objectified" in their roles. I don't profoundly care for the cashier at the grocery store, but no one's ranting online about how he's being oppressed and "objectified" because, at work, most people see him as "a cashier". I don't care to delve into the inner intellectual passions of the woman who made me tea at a cafe, but I'm not aware of any college courses being taught on the "objectification" of baristas. I have never fallen into deep romantic love with a nurse who's weighed me and taken my blood pressure at the doctor's office, but if there are protesters outside the clinic that day, their signs don't read, "Stop the exploitation of women! Planned Parenthood objectifies nurses as mere one-dimensional healthcare workers!"

We can't have a genuine connection with everyone we encounter in our lives, whether they are strippers or bus drivers or sales clerks at a shoe store. To say that "being objectified" as a sex worker is somehow so vastly different than "being objectified" in any other role is telling about the accuser's personal issues with the sex, not the work.

Some people try to "take a step back" and use this as a part of a broader critique of capitalism, but I disagree with that, too. So, under socialism, anarchism, or what-have-you-ism, every human will express heartfelt interest in the well-being of every single human they come into contact with over the course of a day? I find that quite silly.

I have quoted a large chunk of her words here but she says what I have been thinking well. Her blog is fascinating, this is an insider's view of the porn industry. And she loves it.

One more reason not to tidy my room

2011-12-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

I suffered quite a bad head cold not long ago, and was then cramming to finish some large college assignments, so I didn't get around to tidying my room for ages. My room is small and clutters easily, so within a fortnight the place was in complete chaos.

I was about to leave the house for a short time today and wasn't locking my bedroom door. Wondering for a moment if this would make my room more likely to be burgled, in the case of burglars breaking into our house, I poked my head back into the room before leaving and looked at the anarchy within.

Nah, I thought. Even I can't find anything I want in this mess. It looks burgled already. Surely a burglar would despair on seeing this madness and give up. It made me laugh, and wonder. Would a really messy room deter burglars? Are tidy rooms more easy to burgle since it is presumably easier to find items of value there?

Graham Norton's missing evidence on failing

2011-12-17T15:51:00.000-08:00

Watching The Graham Norton Show moments ago, I saw Jude Law, Eddie Izzard, Robert Downey Jr and Alesha Dixon discussing the extent to which they were encouraged or discouraged, as children, to enter show business. Several of them said that they were very discouraged, or laughed at, or mocked, for wanting to get into show business. Eddie Izzard mentioned that he worked in one restaurant where a colleague said there was no point in trying to be an actor because he'd certainly fail. Izzard left, disgusted with someone with such a closed, pessimistic world view.

I thought, watching this, that there was a message coming out of it. Four successful people, remembering being discouraged in their youths and finally proving the pessimists wrong: so success in show business is possible, and people who want to succeed should keep trying.

But surely many more people try to become film or TV stars than actually succeed. Where are the failures? All those people are working in ordinary, unremarkable jobs, or unemployed, and nobody interviews them.

That is understandable of course, and I don't want Graham Norton to go interviewing ordinary folk (unless they're in his red chair). But the fascination in hearing the lives of only successful people means we miss the evidence of the unsuccessful majority. We never hear: 'They told me I'd never make it as a pop star, so I gave up and just studied hard and got a decent job. Best advice I was ever given.'

Goblin Market and Japan's Yokai spirits

2011-12-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

I was led by a BBC In Our Time podcast to a wonderful poem by 19th century poet Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market. The poem describes two sisters struggling against the temptation to devour luscious fruits offered to them by goblins. I was struck by the description of these 'little men':

One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.

I was reminded of Japan's yokai, monsters of folklore, many of whom are humanoids with animal or monstrous heads. The kitsune, for example, are fox spirits and often tricksters, delighting in fooling humans. In some stories the foxes transform into beautiful women and seduce human men; this 19th century print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi shows that the woman casts a humanoid shadow with the face of a fox:

Below are many more anthropomorphicised animals and demons from Japan. In many cases these are spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, or justifications for social taboos. I wrote here before about how most early human societies seemed to be broadly animist. Perhaps this is why I found Japan's yokai at once alien and familiar: the wild imagination applied to the same kinds of natural and social challenges we face in Europe. As Rossetti's fruit-selling goblins may have represented the risks of disease from lingers in the cooling twilight to feast on wild fruits, or the darker dangers of accepting gifts from malicious strangers, Ireland had its púca who, I was warned as a child, would race about the countryside on Halloween night, spitting on fruit to make it poisonous. Japan, meanwhile, has its kappa water-dwellers that drag careless people in to wrestle and drown in lakes and pools or, as in this image, to rape women beneath the water.

I am charmed by our common humanity here: distant folk at far ends of the earth suspecting mischievous unseen deities of the troubles that nature and society burden us with.

The Islam Issue

2011-12-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

Writing about the anti-Muslim movement that Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik supported, I mentioned that anti-Muslimists and Islamists online tended to agree that Islam is a critical concern:

Islamists needed to feel that Islam was about to swamp the world and establish a magnificent pan-Islamic caliphate. Anti-Muslimists needed to feel that the West was already jammed with traitorous Muslims, ripe for jihad. Both wanted Islam to seem an urgent issue.

So I was interested to see this weird observation from Britain's 2008-09 Citizenship Survey:

People who said that they thought there was more religious prejudice today than there was five years ago were asked which groups they felt there was more prejudice against. The majority (88%) of people who said that religious prejudice had increased said that this was associated with Muslims.

The belief that Muslims were being discriminated against was shared by diverse British groups: white (88%), Indian (89%), black Caribbean (89%) and so on. But there is more. Those respondents who said that there is less religious prejudice today than there was five years ago mentioned the following religions:

Islam again. The best is to come, though. Respondents were asked if they thought the government was giving too much or too little protection to religious groups. Guess which religious group was considered to be given both too much and too little protection?

No matter what, Islam seems to be considered an issue in Britain. Improving, worsening, too much support, too little. I don't have time right now to go through the study to see if Muslims really are unique in some way from the other religions. Perhaps, though, this is all indicative of recent excitement from the extremists, their determination to focus on Islam above all other faiths.

Occupy Monterey meets capitalism

2011-12-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

I suggested before that the Occupy Wall Street movement was a bit of a missed opportunity, releasing a simplistic anti-corporation declaration and not uniting with those on the right who also opposed 'crony capitalism'. Then today I saw this:

On Saturday, December 10, I'll be giving a talk at Occupy Monterey.

Title: Crony Capitalism versus the Free Market

That's by free market economist David Henderson. So it will be interesting to see if Henderson can bridge the right-left divide and establish a common cause.

Mass murder: Islam, Europe, and the Middle Ground

2011-12-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass-murderer who slaughtered 77 civilians in July, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, meaning he will probably be put in psychiatric care rather than prison. Insane he may be, but Breivik shares his stated motivation with a wide European anti-Muslim movement. Violence should surprise nobody, for they have been hinting at carnage for years.

When I first encountered radical anti-Muslim sentiment in online discussion forums in 2006 they were predicting a Europe-wide civil war between the nationalist right and a coalition of Muslims and complicit socialists. The most extreme had language that I would recognise in Breivik’s words: warnings about the ‘cultural Marxists’ who were secretly conspiring to build a Muslim-dominated soviet empire – the EUSSR – out of the European Union.

These anti-Muslimists were not part of an old fashioned far right: racist and religious. Most were educated, secular and liberal. They generally supported homosexual rights and gender equality, often crowing about Western sexual liberty by comparison with the repression and supposed perversion of an Islamic East. They relished stories of rape and sexual injustice among the Muslims. Female and homosexual victims became footnotes to a wider case against Islam.

The anti-Muslimists thrived in the presence of Islamist radicals who were also busy on the discussion forums: some simply nationalist and reactionary Pakistani teenagers, others dedicated fundamentalists. Islamists and anti-Muslimists defined themselves in opposition to one another, giving one another a reason to exist.
Both believed in discrete monolithic civilisations of a secular (or Christian) West and an Islamic East. Shades of grey were ignored, centuries of religious repression and nationalist rupture in Christian Europe forgotten, experiments in Arab nationalism, democracy or socialism among the Muslims unmentioned.

Both believed that the West and Islamic East were traditional and inevitable enemies, locked in combat since Muhammad. The constant medieval wars within each religious civilisation were not discussed.

Writing from Ireland, which spent most of the Crusading era being conquered by its Anglo-Norman neighbours, this idea of a unified European Christendom fighting Islam seemed comical. Some of our most determined anti-Muslim members were from Scandinavian countries which were only in the process of being Christianised when the Crusades were launched, and generations of pagan Viking raids on Christendom tended to be celebrated as a welcome part of European heritage, instead of an assault on it.

Yet a Crusader Narrative, pitting Europe forever against Islam, was pervasive and influential. Agnostics and atheists who were normally revolted by Christian theocracy rallied around Rome as a symbol of Europe under threat from barbaric Islam, forgetting Christian Crusades against Cathar heretics in France, or against Baltic pagans.

Islamists were also happy to focus on the Crusades, shifting attention from the internal divisions of medieval Islam, or the more terrible threat of Mongol conquest, emphasising the West-East conflict above all others. Anti-Muslimists and Islamists rewrote history and reinforced one another’s positions, crowding out the moderates, closing in on the middle ground.

They both were also agreed that there are no moderate Muslims. I would shift from friendly chats on one thread where Hindus, Muslims and Westerners were discussing music or economics to bitter quarrels on another where anti-Muslimists warned that millions of apparently liberal Muslims were either secret Islamists, or were not ‘real’ Muslims at all. Islamists would agree, saying that those who befriend the kafir, support secular democracy, favour liberal politics or listen to music are not true Muslims at all. Our liberal Pakistani members looked in bewilderment while others denied their existence.

This restricted definition of Muslims as devout fanatics would reduce the world Muslim population by hundreds of millions, though neither side would admit it. Islamists needed to feel that Islam was about to swamp the world and establish a magnificent pan-Islamic caliphate. Anti-Muslimists needed to feel that the West was already jammed with traitorous Muslims, ripe for jihad. Both wanted Islam to seem an urgent issue.

They were also both convinced that low fertility Europe was facing imminent conquest by fecund Muslims. Imagined statistics of Muslim fertility rates were spread around, the most ludicrous coming from an apocalyptic Youtube video that argued without evidence that while France has a fertility rate of 1.8 children per woman, ‘Muslims’ have 8.1 children per woman. This would make French Muslims more fertile than any other population anywhere in the world: even the world’s most fertile nation Niger manages only 7.07.

Neither acknowledged the fact that Muslims in countries like Tunisia, Albania and Iran already have fertility rates lower than the replacement rate, that Muslims were following all other religions down the demographic transition towards smaller families and population stagnation. A Pew Forum study earlier this year estimated that the total Muslim population of Europe will rise from 6% to only 8% of Europe’s total population over the next twenty years: this is the Eurabia we are meant to fear.

This debate took place against a backdrop of real social and demographic changes, however. There were real integration problems for Muslim communities in some European countries, sometimes ignored by media and politicians scared of being labelled racist. Shortly before I heard about the Norwegian massacre I was reading a document by Britain’s Muslims Against Crusades organisation, which advises Muslims to segregate, reject secular British rule and form Islamic emirates in the UK. For some Muslims, migration to Europe really was an invasion.

Also true was that some of the Western liberals and far left were blind to these issues, trying to silence debate about immigration with complaints of Islamophobia or fascism. Some forgave oppressive tendencies in Hamas or Hezbollah to score points against the US and Israel. Some were personally attached to multicultural ideals and presumed without reason that Muslims and other immigrant groups would form friendly minority groups even without integrating. Others blamed terrorism on Israeli or American provocation, without exploring the violent heart of Islamist ideologies.

Yet the anti-Muslimists I encountered were not shedding light on a hidden problem, they were confusing it further by spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories that strengthened the hand of the Islamists. Like Breivik with his self-aggrandising nonsense about being a Knight Templar, our anti-Muslimists often used grand historical comparisons to make their struggle seem more impressive and urgent.

In some conversations Islam was given the role of Nazism. Bin Laden or Ahmadinejad were depicted as new Hitlers, hesitant politicians in France or Germany as new Chamberlains seeking appeasement with the enemy, and George W Bush as the decisive Churchill. As with World War II they expected that nothing but total military victory could end the War on Terror and dismissed completely any suggestion that American foreign policies could inspire new terrorism.

In others Europe was a rotting Roman Empire about to be swamped again by the barbarian hordes; the United States was Constantinople, surviving the collapse.

Oddly, those most convinced that Muslims were too barbaric to form functional democracies were often the most enthusiastic supporters of American democracy-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also clamoured for more war in Iran, Palestine and Pakistan, delighting Islamists with their insistence that the War on Terror was in fact a war on Islam.

The bitterest opponents of the Islamists were the liberal Muslims, horrified by terrorist attacks and by the oppressive tendencies of Islamist groups in Pakistan. Some defended Islam to foreigners but complained among themselves about the sexism, intolerance and violence promoted by the mullahs. I saw Muslims agree that liberal Western countries were more in keeping with Islam than any Islamist theocracy, and Muslim denunciations of Islamist terrorism, even in Israel, were quite common.

Similarly the anti-Muslimists spent much time attacking Western moderates. When some of us poked fun at their pompous talk of a new Crusade they called us apologist, appeaser, dhimmi, or ‘halal hippie’. Muslims were presumed to be a lost cause, so barbaric that they were incapable of reform or compromise, but non-Muslim Westerners who rejected the counter-jihad were despised as traitors.

Usually, though, anti-Muslimists did not make explicit their plans for European Muslims, refusing to suggest any final solution to the Muslim question. Perhaps Breivik also noted this tendency, appearing to comment on a Gates of Vienna blog post:

Why havent you or any of the other current authors on the Eurabia related issues/Islamisation of Europe (Fjordman, Spencer, Ye`or, Bostom etc.) brought up the “D” word? I assume because it is considered a fascist method in nature, which would undermine your/their work? Why would it undermine their efforts when it is the only rational conclusion, based on the above argument?

Breivik’s “D” word is deportation, and he references the Soviet Union’s mass-deportation of Muslims from Ukraine after World War II as a useful example. While our online anti-Muslimists tended to make dark, vague insinuations, Breivik had moved on to concrete and traumatic policies.

Despite their enthusiasm for the Crusades, many of the anti-Muslimists I debated were dismissive of Christianity. Lots of them were atheists, glad that the Dark Ages of Christendom were gone and determined to prevent the revival of theocracy under Islam. Only a few were conservative Christians, who blamed the decline of European religiosity for its low fertility rates and abandonment of ethnic nationalism, though debates rarely revolved around scripture, they were not trying to convert Muslims. Neither did their faith preclude alliances with atheists and other non-Muslims.

In Breivik’s manifesto 2083 he discusses struggles with Islam outside Europe, paying particular attention to India, where Hindu nationalists made a stand:

They do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control, usually after the Muslims disrespect and degrade Hinduism too much. This behaviour is nonetheless counterproductive. Because instead of attacking the Muslims they should target the category A and B traitors in India and consolidate military cells and actively seek the overthrow of the cultural Marxist government.

Our online Western anti-Muslimists also allied with radical Indian nationalists, who were eager to confirm Western fears, telling horror stories both about historical Muslim invasions and contemporary power struggles in South Asia.

Yet a few of the most extreme Hindu nationalists also looked at Christianity and Western cultures with contempt. For them, Hinduism was a peaceful and tolerant religion compared with the violent proselytising faiths of Abraham. Western nationalists turned a blind eye while fanatical Hindu nationalists derided European cultures; the consensus that Islam was a terrible priority helped to keep these strange bedfellows together.

With Islamists and anti-Muslimists closing in on either side, the rest of us defended a middle ground, partly by questioning the consensus that Islam is the central world issue. While Islamists and anti-Muslimists obsessed over conflicts in Palestine, rich with wider clashing-civilisation implications, we would shift debate to neglected issues like the repression of Muslims in China or Burma, or the forgotten wars of sub-Saharan Africa. By discussing conflicts which challenged simplistic narratives about East and West we tried to defuse, divide and deflate the bloodthirsty on either side.

We debated for fun but it felt at times that we were right on the front line of a serious ideological struggle. Some apolitical Pakistanis joining the forums for the first time reacted to attacks on their religion by becoming entrenched and reactionary, embracing assertive Islam as a personal identity in defiance. Anti-Muslimists insisting that the only correct interpretation of Islam was that already followed by violent Islamists only pushed them further from conciliation.

Moderate Westerners who could introspect and criticise our governments’ foreign policies helped those apolitical Muslims warm to the West again, and became more willing to question their own societies. For years, my greatest concern with the anti-Muslimists was that their determination to back repressive interpretations of Islam would undermine the efforts of friendly Muslim liberals, and increase the risk from Islamists. I had seen anti-Muslimists build delusions as grand as those of the jihadists, sinking into their own mess of invented monsters of crypto-Marxists, Quislings and useful idiots, but did not expect them to grow into a major threat in their own right. I did not expect a Breivik.

Norway’s mass-murder shows the need for sensible debate about multiethnic Europe, yet in which Islam need not take an obsessively central role. Disproportionate focus by left and right on Palestine also reinforces a kind of Crusader Narrative: discussion of those world conflicts that do not coincide with civilisational or religious borders can undermine that. And nervous commentators hiding behind political correctness for fear of being branded racist only cede the terms of discussion to the radicals.

The world is more complex than the radicals want to believe. We undermine their simplistic ideologies by challenging them with inconvenient facts. The future must belong to a pragmatic centre, anything extreme means conflict.

Income inequality in Ireland: bounces WAY back up

2011-11-30T11:19:00.001-08:00

I wrote here before the surprising observation that income inequality seemed to have been falling in Ireland since 2006. I now see the preliminary results from the Central Statistics Office's Survey on Income and Living Conditions has another surprise:

There was an increase in income inequality between 2009 and 2010 as shown by the quintile share ratio. The ratio showed that the average income of those in the highest income quintile was 5.5 times that of those in the lowest income quintile. The ratio was 4.3 one year earlier.

That seems a stark shift in direction! Further results show that the Gini coefficient, which had fallen year on year until 2009, shot back up in 2010, to its highest level that these results - dating back to 2004 - show. So my talk about falling inequality rates that nobody seemed to be noticing is turned on its head: inequality seems to have bounced back.

The general look in this report is gloomy. The consistent poverty rate was up in 2010 to 6.2%, though oddly this is lower than it was in 2006, at the height of the boom. The deprivation rate (that individuals have experienced two or more types of listed forms of deprivation) is way up to 22.5%, from 17.1% in 2009 and a recent low of 11.8% in 2007.

It's not surprising, perhaps, to see rising poverty rates in a climate of high unemployment. The jump over a single year in inequality is a strange one, though. Any thoughts on explanations? Did the rich mostly get richer, or the poor mostly get poorer?

Some people were amazed, others annoyed, when I pointed to the drift towards greater equality. I suppose many had an instinctive sense that inequality was increasing, and I dismissed that instinct in the face of CSO's data. But maybe the instincts were right, the data simply too dated (back to 2009) to be relevant.

The Fall of the West?

2011-11-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

I often read right-conservative warnings that the Western world is about to collapse. They emphasise the following:

1) Demographic decline
Western countries have low fertility rates and several are already declining in population. Poorer non-Western countries have soaring populations. This means economic disadvantages for the West, as an ever-increasing population of pensioners is supported by an ever-decreasing population of workers. It also means military disadvantage as the West simply runs out of young people for soldiering, while non-Western countries experience youth bulges. Finally it means that the Western population is becoming a shrinking proportion of the world population.

2) Cultural cringe
Westerners are accused of having lost confidence in their traditional cultures and values. This perspective argues that Westerners have become so apologetic for the abuses of colonisation and historical racism that they have become self-loathing, contemptuous of their own cultures yet obsessed with celebrating the cultures of others. This argues that Western multiculturalism is allowing assertive and aggressive cultures (especially jihadist Islamism) to conquer Europe.

3) Pacifism: The strong anti-war sentiment especially of some European countries is presumed to strengthen more aggressive enemies.

4) Immigration: The combination of low fertility rates and mass-immigration from non-Western cultures fills the cities of Europe and North America with non-Western populations, who might eventually outnumber the natives.

Perhaps there are some reasonable concerns here. The bulk of this, though, seems entirely backwards: it is the non-Western cultures that really need to fear. The non-Westerners face a global, growing, utterly dominant wave of culture that has already driven languages and traditions to extinction. The West isn't vanishing, it has already won.

The Fall of the Old West
A thousand years ago Ireland was a cluster of rival kingdoms, speaking forms of early Irish and Viking Norse. The legal system was based on Brehon Laws, with no courts, prisons, executions or juries. Almost the entire population was rural and agricultural, there was no parliament or police, the land was heavily forested.

Today almost everyone speaks English, we have a parliamentary democracy with a justice system inherited from English common law, the population is mostly urban and literate, most people work in services and industry, the land is a patchwork of grassy farms intersected by a huge road network. An Irish peasant from the 11th century would see this modern country as a foreign land.

Two major events caused these changes. First was the expansion of Anglo-Norman and later English power into Ireland, the deliberate subjugation of Irish traditions and replacement with English law, language and culture.

The second was a series of technological, cultural, and economic changes that swept both England and Ireland, destroying traditional cultures and handicrafts, largely alien to both places. This was modernity. Industrialisation, secularism, centralisation of government power, democracy, the welfare state, liberalism, urbanisation: products, and drivers of the shift to modernity experienced sooner or later by all west European states.

These changes sped up after independence: we are only a few generations in Ireland away from arranged marriages and rural rituals to avoid provoking invisible fairies.

When people talk about the West today they're usually talking about modernity, not about the agricultural, religious societies that preceded it. Enemies of Western cultures are usually enemies of these modern cultures, not of traditional cultures. Sayyid Qutb, one of the founders of modern Islamism, saw it that way in 1943, complaining that the West is 'based on science, industry, and materialism . . . is without heart and conscience'.

During the Cold War, the 'West' was used to refer to the liberal, democratic NATO countries. Yet the East then was also following the modern European ideology of industrialised Communism. If we include the authoritarian Western ideologies along with the liberal Western ideologies we see that Euro-American political ideas have swallowed the world.

Political Legitimacy
The modern nation state that exists almost everywhere now is a child of Europe. Superficial evidence comes from the official names for countries:

Republic of Zimbabwe
Republic of Angola
Socialist Republic of Vietnam
People's Republic of Bangladesh
Togolese Republic
Federative Republic of Brazil
Republic of Yemen
Republic of Cuba
Republic of Niger
Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste
Republic of Indonesia

Even (the Islamic Republic of) Iran seeks legitimacy through the language of republican democracy. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently boasted of Iran's superior democratic system:

“Human rights are being violated in Europe. The same situation is in the United States, in Asia and Africa.”

“We have an independent judiciary and we have transparent legal proceedings,” he stated. “We have mass media, we have free press. They criticize the government.”

He also said that Iran is “among the best in the world in this respect.”

Tyrants like Saddam Hussein held mock elections, trying to win support by association with democracy. That his democracy was skin deep was less significant than his attempt to appear democratic, his implied acknowledgement of the moral authority conferred by Western-style elections. Almost all the world's countries today use the language of republican democracy, a sign of the global attractiveness of West European republicanism.

In real terms democracy has boomed over the 20th century. In 1900 almost no independent states had universal suffrage. By 2000 dozens did. In the 1990s and 2000s democracy spread rapidly into eastern Europe and Latin America. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that democracy was widely valued in Muslim-majority countries too:

Democracy is widely seen as the best form of government, especially in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, where more than seven-in-ten hold this view. Moreover, people in the Muslim nations surveyed clearly value specific features of a democratic system, such as freedom of religion, free speech, and competitive elections. And publics in many Muslim countries increasingly believe that a democratic government, rather than a strong leader, is the best way to solve national problems.

Signs of the dominant Western political narratives and symbols are everywhere. An odd one is the measurement of time. Today the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, is internationally recognised. Whenever we fly across world time-zones with Greenwich Mean Time slashing a line down the earth from London, we experience the lingering effects of the British Empire's political and technological world domination.

A final signal is the appearance of world leaders. Here is the Chinese Emperor Guangxu, who reigned until 1908:

And this is the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party today, Hu Jintao:

Nice and neat in his Western suit. Lest any doubts linger, look at the 2000 United Nations Millenium Summit image, showing the world leaders of the day:

None of the Western leaders are wearing traditional Asian or African clothes, most of the Asian and African leaders are wearing European-style suits. Europe's suits have, along with its flags and anthems, become standard for most of the world's political cultures.

Soft Power
British historian David Starkey caused controversy after the London riots by saying that Britain's youth had embraced 'black' culture. No doubt Britain has been influenced by the cultures of the Carribbean and South Asia, but the flow of culture has been mostly in the opposite direction. I checked the most popular recent films in various non-Western countries earlier this year for a clue:

Nigeria, August 12–14: Bad Teacher
China, August 1-7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part Two)
Indonesia, May 27-29: The Tourist
United Arab Emirates, August 11-14: Horrible Bosses
Bolivia, August 11-14: The Smurfs
Venezuela, August 12-14: The Smurfs.

All these countries flocking to the cinema to watch American and British films. The same is not true in reverse. When I turn on the television I see The Simpsons and the BBC News, not some Arab or Bolivian comedy.

One reason for this export of Western cultures is technological: the early domination of Hollywood, advantaged partly because World War I inhibited its European rivals, beamed pictures of American culture into theatres around the world. I grew up watching Batman and Superman, as have children in Asia, Latin America and Africa, anywhere that television has helped speed the flow of American cultural exports.

Likewise the rise of communications technologies in the industrialised West had important impacts on culture there. For example cameras that could perfectly reproduce an image made realistic artists redundant, pushing artists towards less representational art. Before the gramaphone, the only way a consumer could hear music was by paying a musician to perform, or learn to play. After the gramaphone consumers could listen to the recording of some distant musician, pushing their local performers out of business. Technology changed culture, and with time that technology would head east and south, changing the culture of non-Western countries in similar ways.

Hence the number one single in Argentina today sounds like something that would play comfortably on Irish radio. In China the number one single is Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA: so the West is in decline?

Machines
Chinese industrial output has grown, certainly. But industry itself is Western, a product of Western Europe's Industrial Revolution. Far from rejecting Western systems of production, countries like Japan and China have instead become incredibly adept at embracing them. Their old agricultural societies have vanished.

This is what Shanghai looked like around 1891-1900:

And this is Shanghai today:

If China is outpacing the West, it is by being Western.

The Universal West
There is nothing to gloat about here, since the rise and rise of Western industry, culture, politics and economics is hardly a projection of natural European culture. European cultures were the first victims of modernity; the Europeans today boasting about human rights and personal freedoms are descended from witch-burning bigots, serfs, slave-traders, imperialists and the like. From Edward MacLysaght's Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century:

At that period in the upper classes family alliances were often concluded by the marriage of quite young children. After the ceremony the bride and bridegroom were forthwith taken back to their respective nurseries or schoolrooms to await an age more fitting to matrimony.... Thus Mr. Berry, in his article on the Jephson family of Mallow, states that the grandmother of William Jephson, who himself was married at twelve yaers old in 1686, was a bride at twelve and had her first child - his father - at fifteen.

Today traditional cultures are criticised for arranging child marriages, but that was Europe's past.

With the bad has gone the good: traditional agricultural skills, folk medical knowledge, endless songs and poems and arts. Before any Australian Aboriginal languages were threatened by English there vanished the dialects of Europe.

Now the technologies that rendered rural Europe's traditions redundant are sweeping the rest of the world. The political systems that emerged from increased complexity and urbanisation are being adopted - good and bad - in other countries. The very division of countries into discrete tax-collecting states is Western, the result of political reforms which destroyed the old kingdoms and empires of Europe. The symbols of statehood - flags, coats of arms, presidents and embassies - are ubiquitious.

Pessimistic Western conservatives warn about the Islamification of Europe, yet Europe's marital customs are nowhere returning to the early marriage, high fertility patterns of traditional Asian or African societies. Instead the opposite is happening: fertility rates are plunging in the developing countries, once again following the lead of Western Europe:
In wealthy East Asia the changes are most obvious, explained here by The Economist:

Although attitudes to sex and marriage are different from those in the West, the pressures of wealth and modernisation upon family life have been just as relentless. They have simply manifested themselves in different ways. In the West the upshot has been divorce and illegitimacy. In Asia the results include later marriage, less marriage and (to some extent) more divorce....

The first change is that people are getting married later, often much later. In the richest parts—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—the mean age of wedlock is now 29-30 for women, 31-33 for men (see chart right). That is past the point at which women were traditionally required to marry in many Asian societies. It is also older than in the West.... The second change is that, among certain groups, people are not merely marrying later. They are not getting married at all.

The Economist goes on to explain that divorce rates in East Asia are still lower than in the West because 'divorce has been common in the West for decades', but that Asia was catching up. Actually in this sense Ireland, with a divorce rate of only 0.8 per 1,000 population, is more Eastern than the East: Japan has 2.5 per 1,000, 3.5 in South Korea and around 2 in Asia as a whole. Malta, having just legalised divorce, is starting from zero.

The most obvious alternative superpower shows little sign of out-growing the West. China's total fertility rate is 1.8 children per woman. The US has 2.1, UK has 2, France is 2. China's birth rate is 12 per 1,000 population. US is 14, UK is 13, France is 13.

Politics and war
When I make these arguments I meet two criticisms. First, people point out that industrial, modernising China is nonetheless not democratic, and could pose a real challenge to the security and domination of Western powers. If they take some aspects of the Western, modern world, they may be using them to undermine the political power of NATO.

This may be true. Non-Western powers could expand and dominate by being better at Western modernity than the Westerners, especially if they can do so without the liberal stream of Western politics.

The second criticism is that I exaggerate the influence and importance of Western technology and popular culture, and that young Muslims, for example, who wear Western clothes and listen to hip hop, are still wedded to the old, illiberal religious beliefs.

I'm not sure about this. There have been changes in fashion in some Muslim-majority countries in recent decades, with a revival of the hijab for example. I'm not sure if this is indicative of a real Islamic cultural revival of the sort that rejects the Western alternatives. Yet it still seems to be emerging via modern technologies, the same technologies that overturned the traditional cultures of Europe.

So is the West in decline? Culturally it seems ascendent, with rising economic powers quick to mimic at least its materialist, modern aspects. Religiously it is holding its own, the decline of Christianity in Europe countered by growth in Africa. Politically, democracy is probably more widespread than ever before and though the rise of China may offer an alternative, that alternative bears little resemblence to traditional Chinese imperial government, taking its cues partly from European authoritarian experiments like communism.

Demographically most of North America and Europe continue to experience population growth, though at a slower pace than developing countries and heavily affected by immigration. If the West means white-skinned racial groups then its proportion of world population will indeed fall, though few people accept that old racist idea: today an African or Asian immigrant who embraces liberalism and secularism is Western.

Economically the handful of industrialised European and North American countries that led the way in terms of wealth have been joined by Asians like Japan, South Korea and Singapore, with a great raft of middle income countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America rising after them. This means that the centre of balance is shifting east, but not because Eastern economic systems turned out to be superior. Rather Eastern countries became better at Western industry and capitalism than the West. The game is the same, but non-Western countries have learned how to play.

Militarily the rise of China could pose a challenge to American hegemony. But the rising China is industrial, not traditional, and communist, not imperial. The rise of China is the rise of another West, albeit informed by illiberal ideologies.

If I was a conservative Arab or Chinese person or Latin American, I would be despondent about a future that looks likely to be heavily influenced by Euro-American modern cultures. The rest of the world is experiencing the modernising, homogenising wave that destroyed the traditional cultures of Europe long ago. So the future looks Western, no matter whose capital it is governed from.

Irish banking: down for maintenance, check back soon

2011-11-24T08:31:00.001-08:00

My Irish readers will appreciate why I smiled after I came across a website called How Banking Works in Ireland, and found this:

Ireland and the alien West

2011-11-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

I argue often that 'Western' values and norms developed in Western countries at the expense of their own traditional values and norms. There is nothing inevitably or naturally European about religious tolerance, democracy, liberalism and the like, and they replaced traditional cultures which were often oppressive and illiberal.

Likewise the pop music and cinema today so associated with the West were once alien and feared by the national and traditional thinkers of different European countries. I just stumbled upon this remarkable article from the Meath Chronicle, a local newspaper for Ireland's county Meath, from 1930. A quote, with my emphasis:

Irish-Ireland nights are far too few during the past few years, and more is the pity. They are a steadying invigorating influence to the minds of the young, pointing in unmistakeable fashion to the fact that it is not necessary for the country to borrow its amusements from the dens of either Paris or London, that “O’Donnell Abu” is a sweeter air than any of the vulgarities now passing as music, and praised and laughed at in the spirit of exaltation by a number of people in this country, still anxious to ape foreign mannerisms and habits. The year, 1931, must find the Gaelic Athletic Association doubling its efforts in support of its praiseworthy mission. In the fight between an Ireland fostering a native culture and an Ireland whirling in the vortex of a Pagan and corrupt civilisation, it must bear a big share of the battle. Modern conveniences, the radio, the cinema, etc., all are lending their aid to crushing in the hearts of the Irish race a... (text missing) of the beautiful and characteristic traits which without, this country must accept the role of a nation enslaved in mind and thought.

Eighty years later I can confirm that the Pagan and corrupt modernity has won, utterly, the minds that this old nationalist fought for. Were I an anti-Western conservative in Iran or China I would not be hopeful; I suspect people in those places will embrace alluring modern decadence in due course too.

Occupy evictions spark Google searches

2011-11-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

Google searches for "Occupy" and "Occupy Wall Street" had peaked and were falling by the time various authorities started to evict the protestors. On November 15 police evicted protestors at Wall Street. Result?

Google's amazing Ngram, and terrorism trends

2011-11-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

Google has a wonderful and fun project called Ngram, which searches the vast collection of books on Google Books for given words or phrases. For example let's compare the relative likelihood of finding the words "sensual" or "sensuous" in any of the huge literature Google Books covers, from 1800 to 2008:

So what on earth would cause this rise of "sensuous" in the late 19th century? This:

sensuous
1640s, "pertaining to the senses" coined (from L. sensus) by Milton to recover the original meaning of sensual and avoid the lascivious connotation that the older word had acquired by Milton's day, but by 1870 sensuous, too, had begun down the same path. Rare before Coleridge popularized it (1814).

So "sensuous" started heading down the same lascivious path as "sensual" in the Victorian era, and promptly increased its share of mentions in English literature!

One other Ngram image for tonight. This is the frequency of the word "terrorism" since 1970:

I wondered for a moment why the slopes looked familiar. Then I remembered this graph from the Global Terrorism Database, showing the frequency of terrorist attacks around the world between 1970 and 2007:

They don't match perfectly, partly because the Global Terrorism Database shows only the frequency of attacks, not their severity, but we do see a similar rise in the 1970s and 1980s, a decline in the 1990s, and recovery in the 2000s. This makes me wonder if Ngram can indicate other real world trends. Absolutely intriguing.

Hobbes and the global Leviathan

2011-11-16T05:37:00.000-08:00

Listening to an Open University podcast about the realist school of foreign policy, I heard one of the speakers make a remarkable point about 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

First, they explained that from the realist foreign policy perspective, countries exist in a state of anarchy. To understand, let's think about individuals. People in modern nation states have to obey the rule of law; if I attack my neighbour, the state's agents of justice will stop and punish me. The state maintains internal order, justice, and stability.

But outside the state there are not institutions strong enough to police countries, say the realists. While individuals living in states grow relaxed and trusting, knowing that the state will prevent their neighbours from predatory behaviour, countries remain insecure and feel they must doubt the intentions of their neighbours. They need to make sure they can survive if the neighbouring country cuts off trade, or even wages war. The one line I loved, a throw-away remark by the narrator, is this:

In Chapter five the analogy is made with Hobbes's idea of a state of nature. Internationally we have an international state of nature with competing sovereigns.

Hobbes's state of nature is anarchy, his idea formed during the chaos of the English Civil War that without a government all individuals would live in such insecurity and mutual suspicion as to be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short':

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes's solution for ordinary citizens was the state, but the projection of this concept onto a global stage is intriguing.

I have sometimes thought that West European countries have, like individual neighbours in a neighbourhood with high social trust and a sense of community, grown to drop their guards and lose their mutual suspicion and fear. I mean, the West European countries that had spent centuries fighting each other have gone in peaceful cooperation for long enough to greatly increase mutual trust. Just as trusting villagers can relax their guards and cooperate, share and save money that would otherwise be spent on security, these countries have become more comfortable with reducing internal border restrictions and increasing trade. Good.

This did not happen under a superstate (unless the EU counts?) but it did happen under the shadow of American military supremacy, and during a time when the West Europeans were united in fear of the communist East. Perhaps the dominant United States here serves a little like Hobbes's state.

So, back to Hobbes. His solution to the state of nature was government. But can - or should - we apply this to the whole world? I see bitter debates about the idea of a global government. It seems impossible now, with such vigorous cultural and economic divisions between peoples, and complaints about a democratic deficit in such supernational bodies like the EU. So we will probably continue to live in a state of nature, though maybe the overarching power of the US can keep down interstate wars between smaller allies. Perhaps Hobbes is too pessimistic, and countries have grown peaceful towards one another without the threat of justice from some higher superstate Leviathan.

Governments experimenting with people

2011-11-13T08:57:00.001-08:00

The consequences of new government policies and interventions are never obvious or fully understood in advance. I've read a lot recently about 'unintended consequences', even 'the law of unintended consequences' described by Rob Norton at the Library of Economics and Liberty:

...that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended.

Some commentators take this 'law' to a sceptical extreme, arguing that since the full consequences of government policies can never be predicted, it makes sense for governments to do nothing.

So I can think of two ways of looking at that: libertarianism and conservatism. Libertarianism simply keeps the government as small and inactive as possible so that it does not get involved in the market in the first place. Conservatism is possibly even more sceptical: by viewing change as a risk of unknown significance it seeks to simply avoid change. Governments in that view should simply continue doing what they have always done.

But it occurs to me that this determination to retain old government policies unchanged neglects the fact that the environment in which they are functioning does change. So an attempt to avoid experimenting on citizens with new policies is vain. Keeping policies exactly unchanged is also a form of experimentation on the citizens as the social and economic environment keeps shifting about.

(A historical example comes to mind from 19th century Japan. In the 17th century the Tokugawa clan seized power and organised a military dictatorship ruled by the samurai military class. Taxes paid by peasant farmers to the samurai families were set at specific levels of rice - absolute levels, not percentages of total rice production - while samurai were forbidden from farming.

Over the centuries the peasants greatly expanded their rice production with improved agricultural technology, and the merchant class likewise grew and prospered. Low level samurai families were in the strange position of having high social and political status, but relatively falling economic wealth, because they were still living off 17th century-era tax rates.

Simply by staying the same the Tokugawa samurai paved the way for their own relative decline. By failing to modernise their weapons they also rendered Japan vulnerable to the Western imperialists. In the mid-19th century the Tokugawa government was destroyed. Standing still was a failed experiment in the changing world of the 1800s.)

Any thoughts, readers? It seems that some experimentation by the government on its people is inevitable under any kind of political philosophy.

Roger Scruton: why are there so few riots?

2011-11-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

In August I asked why people were surprised by the riots in English cities, arguing that the pleasures of recreational violence and robbery make rioting very profitable and desirable to many young men. I was interested, then, to hear conservative writer Roger Scruton being interviewed on a BBC podcast and making the same claim. Riots are not unusual and baffling, they are the default behaviour for many young men. More from Scruton on The American Spectator:

Rioting is natural to human beings, and is a frequently observed effect of our inherent savagery. Young men are particularly prone to riot: and in the conditions of the hunter-gatherer it is to be assumed that, between sleeping, copulating, and eating, they didn't do much else. Young men lapse into riot as soon as there is something to be gained from doing so, and whenever there is nothing serious to be lost. What needs explaining is not the fact that they riot, but rather the far more extraordinary fact that on the whole they don't. What is it, down the ages, that has contained the energies of our youth, and ensured that they respect the lives and property of others?

The answer is "civilization."

I don't really buy into Scruton's wider argument on that article but I'm glad I was not the only one wondering why people were so surprised by the chaos.

Google and the rise and fall of political movements

2011-11-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

Since 2007, compare Google searches for "tea party" and "occupy wall street":

And over the last 90 days, looking at "occupy wall street" and just "occupy".

Even though the word occupy has much wider applications than the political movement, it's interesting to see it correlating here with the OWS movement, showing how strongly that term has taken off. But we also see a peak, followed by decline. Will it recover, or peter out like the tea party searches seem to have?

Finally, interesting to see how the Occupy rhetoric about being 'the 99%' also caught on to the extent that searches for "99%" and "1%" correlate with searches for "OWS":

Do foreigners share a knowing nod?

2011-11-09T02:38:00.000-08:00

I lived for a year in a small town in the south of Japan, where I appeared to be the only non-Asian. People stared at me as I walked into town. Children gasped and giggled, two little girls saw me once, hesitated, panicked, and fled in terror.

But when I went to the local city, Nagasaki, there was also the chance of seeing other white tourists or workers, and I found this oddly uncomfortable. One reason was because I knew a few of the foreign teachers who worked in Nagasaki so, statistically speaking, there was a pretty good chance that any white person I saw was someone I had already met and should, therefore, greet and chat with. So I ended up double-taking and staring at white people.

But there was another very, very strange sensation. On one occasion while walking down a street in Nagasaki I passed a middle-aged white man walking in the opposite direction. Just before I passed he smiled and gave me a knowing nod! I had no idea who this guy was but I was completely amused and somehow knew what he meant. That nod was a sort of acknowledgement that both of us were clearly outsiders here, and that gave us some tiny thing in common.

Odd! I wondered then do Asians or Africans in Ireland feel like that if they see someone from the same continent? Especially in the smaller towns, still quite monoethnic, do Chinese immigrants share a surprised nod as they pass one another on the street?

Ireland and inequality, back to the 1990s

2011-11-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

TheJournal.ie asked me if they might republish my post on the surprising fall of income inequality in Ireland, and it appears, slightly edited for an Irish readership, here. I am a little amused to see the headline - 'Column: The boom made Ireland a more equal society. Surprised?' - since this is not really what I argued! Actually the figures for 2006-2009 cover only the tail end of the bubble years and the beginning of the recession.

That is an occupational hazard in journalism, though: many readers may not be aware that headlines are coined by editors, not by the journalists, so there can be discrepancies! Anyway I'm flattered TheJournal.ie editors took an interest.

But it did get me wondering what Ireland's income inequality trends look like a little bit further back. From the 2008 Statistical Yearbook and 2006 I can add the Central Statistics Office data for 2003, 2004 and 2005. The combined picture now looks like this:

Gini coefficient
2003: 31.1
2004: 31.8
2005: 32.4
2006: 32.4
2007: 31.7
2008: 30.7
2009: 29.3

Income distribution (income quintile share ratio)
2003: 5.0
2004: 5.0
2005: 4.9
2006: 5.0
2007: 4.9
2008: 4.6
2009: 4.3

Inequality steady or rising slightly until 2006, then falling. I find it difficult to get earlier data, but this ESRI presentation says that Ireland's Gini coefficient remained around 32% from 1994 to 2000, which seems consistent enough with the data I have here. (It concludes that 'Income inequality was not dramatically changed by the economic boom.') Certainly no sign of any strong shift towards income inequality.

Everywhere is going to hell... except here

2011-11-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

People tend to have much more pessimistic views about crime trends for their country as a whole than for their local area, a phenomenon I noted held true for statistics from a survey here in Ireland. Browsing a paper by Alex C. Michalos and Bruno D. Zumbo in Social Indicators Research, called Criminal Victimization and the Quality of Life, I found this remark, observing the same effect in Canada:

Just as people typically report that, for example, there is a deterioration in health care all over the country but the care they get from their own physicians is fine, only 41% of our respondents thought that crime had increased in their own neighbourhoods although almost twice as many (78%) thought it had increased in the whole city, 74% thought it increased in local schools and 64% thought it increased in Canada. In fact, according to the most recent report of the Ministry of the Attorney General for the Province of British Columbia (1997: p. 130), the official crime rate per 1000 residents in Prince George decreased every year from 1993 to 1996, and according to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (1996: Table 3.1) the official crime rate per 100000 inhabitants in Canada decreased every year from 1992 to 1996.

I wonder does this hold true everywhere? In particular, might it break down in regions with high illiteracy or limited access to news media? (I presume that the disproportionate reporting of crime by news media is one of the big reasons that people feel more concerned about their wider communities than about their own localities.)

Income inequality in Canada's provinces

2011-11-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's The Spirit Level compares countries by their Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, and also breaks the United States down into its states to compare those.

So I broke Canada down by its provinces too, using Gini data from Harvard's Center for European Studies, from 2005. The data is listed for the ten provinces, though unfortunately not for the three territories. (NOTE: On rechecking this source I realise it is not as accurate as I had hoped, with the Gini coefficients calculated with data from 1980 to 2003. I hope this will continue to have relevance into the 2000s but I realise this could create a lot of noise. Unfortunately I thought to double-check this only after the rest of the blog post was written - keep reading, but take with a pinch of salt.)

The Harvard data is also split into 'pregini' - income inequality at market level before government taxes and transfers are included - and 'postgini' - income inequality after transfers. Below I will look at both measures, and compare them in scatterplots with other social phenomena.

Remember what we are expecting to see here. If Pickett and Wilkinson are right, we should see correlations between income inequality and a host of social problems. I am reproducing here the same kind of graph they use repeatedly in the book. As far as possible I will aim for 2003 statistics. These graphs will include a regression line calculated by Excel, a statistical device Pickett and Wilkinson also use to show 'the line which best fits the trend through the data points.'

First, obesity, from Statistics Canada, the official statistics office, 2004.

Pregini and Obesity
Postgini and Obesity
This is a curious result. Before wealth transfers like social welfare are taken into account, there seems to be a strong correlation between income inequality and obesity. After transfers, this correlation is much weaker. Why?

Something makes one Canadian province have higher income inequality than another, before the state intervenes to create greater balance. Perhaps that unknown factor is what causes obesity, rather than actual income inequality.

I have suggested before that Pickett and Wilkinson use income and status interchangeably, and wondered if they should. I argued that there have been people with low status and high income, or high status and low income.

If Pickett and Wilkinson are right, that income inequality increases the rate of obesity, maybe it is the low status associated with poorer socioeconomic groups that is the problem, and not the actual amount of money they have after transfers. It seems plausible that one might be living comfortably enough on a council estate, but still be viewed as low-status by those living in private accommodation.

If this is the case then a large welfare state that addresses income inequality without somehow reducing pre-transfer inequality won't make much difference.

This is not an argument of Pickett and Wilkinson, who instead say that a welfare state is one successful way to reduce inequality:

Sweden does it through redistributive taxes and benefits and a large welfare state. As a proportion of national income, public social expenditure in Japan is, in contrast to Sweden, among the lowest of the major developed countries. Japan gets its high degree of equality not so much from redistribution as from a greater equality of market incomes, of earnings before taxes and benefits. Yet despite the differences, both countries do well...

Let's look at a few more results. Next infant mortality, 2005.

Pregini and Infant Mortality
Postgini and Infant MortalityWe see the opposite trend. Before transfers the highly unequal provinces do slightly better, while after transfers they seem to do worse, which challenges my earlier idea. Let's see some more, homicide rate, 2006, next.

Pregini and Homicide
Postgini and Homicide
Another puzzling one! Before transfers, the unequal provinces are safer. After transfers the unequal provinces are more dangerous! I'm really not sure what to make of that. Is there something inherent to those provinces which create initial market inequality that keeps homicides low (but makes people obese)? Next life satisfaction (percentage satisfied or very satisfied) from 2007.

Pregini and Life Satisfaction
Postgini and Life Satisfaction
Again, before transfers the unequal provinces are happier, after transfers the equal provinces are happier. The negative correlation between actual income inequality and life satisfaction is what Pickett and Wilkinson would have predicted. The other correlation - well I'm not sure what that means, if anything. (Any ideas?) Next perceived life stress ('quite a lot') in 2007.

Pregini and Perceived Life Stress
Postgini and Perceived Life Stress
And finally sense of belonging to local community (somewhat strong or very strong) in 2007:

Pregini Sense of Belonging to Community
Postgini Sense of Belonging to Community
Just to toy with us, this time inequality is slightly correlated with a sense of community!

Well at this stage I am sorely confused. For some factors we see the opposite of what The Spirit Level would predict. For most we do see post-transfer income inequality correlating with negative social traits.

Of course there could be unseen causes for all of these phenomena, causes which sometimes correlate with inequality and sometimes do not. Interesting though. Should I be eating a little humble pie since The Spirit Level's predictions hold true for a few of these indicators? Or gloating that they don't for all?

Dissatisfied with this result, I am going for two final graphs. The first compares annual charitable donations per person in 2004 in Canadian dollars with postgini:Different provinces have different levels of wealth and I'm not controlling for that so the result (which shows that people in more unequal provinces give more) may be skewed. Hence this, showing hours volunteered in 2004:

People in more unequal provinces volunteer more? Again independent verification of The Spirit Level's predictions eludes me. If income inequality harms social cohesion, why are people in less equal regions giving more time and money to help others? I remain sceptical.

Born animist

2011-11-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

I sometimes read atheist commentators arguing that all infants are born atheist, and that religious belief exists only because parents socialise or brainwash children into religiosity. In this view religion is artificial, atheism the natural default.

Yet I noticed that I was responding strangely whenever when my computer misbehaved. Misbehaved? I mean, when it malfunctioned for some reason, slowed down or crashed. I became angry and admonished the unthinking machine with foul language. On particularly bad days I would resist throwing it at the wall and sit seething instead, muttering: WHY WON'T YOU FUCKING WORK?

With less sophisticated tools I did the same thing, becoming briefly enraged at a woodcarving gouge if it slipped and scarred the wood. How strange to spit curses at the innocent metal gouge, projecting blame onto the tools. I was responding to inert physical objects as though they were people.

I thought further back, then, to my early childhood when I treated some of my toys as almost sentient individuals. There was an ambiguity about this, since we did have 'teddy fights' in which my brothers and I bombarded one another with teddy bears, but, still, I religiously tucked my favourites in at night! These bears had characteristics in my mind, and there was a right and wrong way of treating them. Again I was casting human traits onto non-human objects.

Was I alone? I didn't think so. Ancient mythologies of several countries describe people interacting with non-living objects as though they had sentience. Joseph Kitagawa's Kitagawa’s On Understanding Japanese Religion quotes the beautiful 8th century AD Japanese poetry collection Man'yōshū, with this section of poetry by a man mourning his dead wife:

Now I know not what to do or say,
Vainly I seek soothing words
From trees and stones...

Over Mount Onu the fog is rising;
Driven by my sighs of grief,
The fog is rising.

Kitagawa argues that this talk of seeking solace from trees and stones is not artistic symbolism, but rather a sign that the poet believed that the trees and stones were kami - Shinto gods. Another ancient Japanese text, the Kojiki, actually says that trees and stones could converse in primitive times before a kami silenced them.

If I, as a young child, seemed to easily see human behavioural traits in objects, and I as an irritated adult threaten unthinking objects with curses, and ancient Japanese thought that the stones and trees were alive and speaking, might the real default setting for humans be a kind of anthropomorphism?

If so, I can imagine that early animist tribes would have explained most or all natural phenomena by reference to the emotions of nature's spirits. The loving sun being friendly on a cold day, the furious tempest taking revenge on disrespectful sailors and so on. Interaction with such natural phenomena might have included sacrifices in a bid to win good terms, or charms to scare and defy them.

Mulling these thoughts, I was surprised to discover that psychology has indeed a concept developed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget saying that children understand the world in animist terms. From GW Oesterdiekhoff in the Croatian Journal of Ethnography and Folklore:

How can we explain the ubiquity of magical-animistic thinking in pre-modern societies and the evolution of mechanical philosophy in the early modern times in Europe? The prevalence of magical-animistic thinking in pre-modern societies is not a result of a lack of knowledge but of prevailing elemental cognitive processes....

Empirical surveys in developing regions have found out that not only children but even illiterate adults remain bound to magical-animistic representations and do not master the transformation to the mechanical-causal understanding of the world and to concomitant formal operations. Throughout their entire life-time they continue to believe that sun, moon, clouds, mountains, woods, and rivers are animate and conscious...

Children in pre-modern and modern societies answer in the same way as illiterate adults in pre-modern societies. This fact gives evidence to the basic idea of developmental psychology that animism is not a result of socialising processes but a part of lower stages of cognition.

I do not know how contentious this concept is in psychology. I have emailed a couple of psychologists for their opinions and I will post any answers I get in due course. In the meantime it seems tempting to conclude that people are born neither atheist nor monotheist, but animist, living as though in a complex community of thinking anthropomorphic spirits, rather than a mindless mechanism.

Is Ireland sexist or not?

2011-11-02T12:31:00.001-07:00

Two interesting reports have come out in recent days that rank the world's countries by their perceived gender gaps.

First the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2011 ranks Ireland as the fifth highest in the world for gender equality, beaten only by Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden. By their reckoning, Ireland's gender gap has closed every consecutive year since 2006, when Ireland was only 10th highest in the world. So Ireland has improved, and improved faster than some other high-ranking countries.

The other report is the United Nation's 2011 Human Development Index. The report actually gives Ireland an excellent overall score: seventh highest in the world for its mix of health, educational and income indicators. Here we see how Ireland started off below the OECD HDI average and leapfrogged it during the boom of the late 1990s.
So far so good. Things become strange, though, when we scroll down to the UN's Gender Inequality Index, which rearranges the world's countries based on their perceived gender inequality. Ireland, ranked 5th in the World Economic Forum's index, drops to 33rd in the UN Gender Inequality Index! By this measure, Ireland has lower gender equality than Greece, South Korea, Spain, Macedonia, Singapore or Poland.

The UN's gender index is based on these subheadings:

Labour force participation rate. The odd thing about this is that it ranks some very poor countries extremely highly. In Burundi and Rwanda, for example, the proportion of working women is higher than working men. The list of countries doing best for this indicator is a list of very poor or developing countries: Ghana, Laos, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea and so on. Perhaps I am showing my prejudices, but I struggle with the idea that mass female participation in the labour markets of Papua New Guinea and Ghana really indicate a narrow gender gap! The highest ranked Western country is Norway, which still comes below Ethiopia and Azerbaijan.

Perhaps it would have been more helpful to compare actual incomes of women and men in these countries. When the OECD do this, they show that Japan and South Korea have far bigger income gaps than the OECD average, with Belgium and New Zealand showing the lowest.

Adolescent fertility rate. Again we see pretty bizarre results. The country with the third lowest adolescent fertility rate, and so the third highest ranking here, is Libya. Tunisia comes 6th. The country with the very best score here is South Korea, which also happens to have a major imbalance in its sex ratio because of sex-selective abortion or infanticide. That is, parents choose to abort or kill potential daughters in favour of sons. Once more I wonder if adolescent fertility is a sensible indicator of gender inequality. By this measure, New Zealand is deemed more unequal than Uzbekistan, Oman and Tunisia.

Population with at least secondary education (ratio of female to male rates). The curious thing here is that many countries have massively greater proportions of girls in school than boys. So first place in 2010 goes to Gabon where 1.553 girls were going to school for every one boy. In Ireland the ratio is almost 1:1, which I presume is healthier, though it shoves the country far down the list!

Shares in parliament. This one seems reasonable.

Maternal mortality ratio. Another more obvious one, with the top countries a more familiar mix of developed countries. Ireland comes second highest with only three maternal deaths per 10,000 live births.

Even here, though, Gapminder graphs show that maternal mortality strongly correlates with life expectancy and infant mortality, suggesting that what the UN is really measuring here is health in general, rather than a specific enlightened emphasis on maternal health.

So I do wonder if the UN's indicators for gender inequality are sensible and indicating any real phenomenon or not.

Update
I realise I have questioned only the UN's methodology. The World Economic Forum's methodology is described here and, at first glance, does seem to be more complex and subtle. For example, the WEF look not only at female participation in the workforce but also their remuneration compared with men. Instead of simply looking at parliamentary presence, the WEF look at the 'ratio of women to men among legislators, senior officials and managers, and the ratio of women to men among technical and professional workers', as well as 'the ratio of women to men in minister-level positions and the ratio of women to men in parliamentary positions'. Unlike the UN they do consider the sex ratio at birth, which shows up the massive 'missing women' phenomenon of south and east Asia.

So the WEF's way of exploring gender inequality seems more thorough than the UN's way.

Local equality, national inequality, and The Spirit Level

2011-11-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone argues that countries with higher levels in income inequality tend to suffer a number of social problems like higher crime, obesity, mental illness and so on. Their book also breaks the United States down into its states and compares these, seeming to show that those states with higher income inequality suffer greater social problems.

But should we stop at state level?

I stumbled across this blog post, which argues that China is unequal mainly between its provinces, not within its provinces. That is, inequality is low in any given local area, but the wealth of each area varies widely, so inequality between regions is very high.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this claim but it did make me think more about the level on which inequality is visible. Pickett and Wilkinson seem to presume that the individual's awareness of inequality is strong at the level of a small to medium-sized country: the level of tens of millions of people.

But is this true?

When I was growing up in rural Ireland I had no sense of belonging to a socio-economic class, no sense of class identity, and no sense of significant income inequality in the area. There were few obvious indicators of wealth or status. There was a local council housing estate but the students who grew up there were, in my school, peers and equals to everyone else. Since the towns were small and spaced many kilometres apart, the vast majority of us simply went to the nearest school; there was no sense of a rich school or 'rough' school that would segregate the classes. I did not know what the parents of most of my classmates did for a living, it was not discussed and nobody seemed to care. We all wore school uniforms so there was little peer pressure over appearance.

If there was a sense of inequality, it was a sort of West of Ireland camaraderie and defiance towards Dublin. For example, when Dublin had major transport infrastructure projects including a light rail system (LUAS), the western counties demanded the reopening of a disused railway along the western seaboard. I remember posters reading something like: DUBLIN GETS LUAS, WHAT DOES WEST GET?

There was a sense in the west of abandonment by a Dublin-centric elite. People complained about the 'D4' media - referencing the upper-middle class Dublin postal district containing the offices of the state broadcast company. People argued that a few flakes of snow in Dublin made national news while blizzards in the west were ignored.

There was some truth to these complaints: I lived in a region with much lower wealth per person than that of Dublin. But is this the kind of income inequality that Pickett and Wilkinson were describing?

Ours was a completely different experience of inequality than that experienced in big cities. Every person I knew seemed to be of roughly equal wealth and economic status as me, so there must have been less of the everyday stress (assuming Pickett and Wilkinson are right about inequality causing stress) of being compared with the wealthy. If there was indignation towards a supposed Dublin elite, I did not notice any particular sense of shame over it.

In cities this experience must be more immediate. In Dublin I can distinguish between individuals by socio-economic class by their accent, clothes and posture. There are known wealthy suburbs and poorer 'rough' council estates. The classes rub shoulders on public transport every day, so they can see the limit of their community's identity and the higher or lower status alternative.

I don't know if Pickett and Wilkinson are correct with their claims about the negative social and health effects of wealth inequality. Supposing it is true, I do not see how it could function in the earlier description I gave, of local equality and national inequality. If the relative poor only deal with their economic equals, will they still feel a sense of insecurity and stress?

And this makes me think differently about indicators of national income inequality like the Gini coefficient. A local boom for one city could push the Gini result up, without exposing most people elsewhere to any first-hand experience of income inequality. It might be useful to keep breaking Gini scores down into smaller regions, where possible.

Halloween: Ireland's weird contribution to globalisation

2011-10-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

As a child in rural Ireland, Halloween was always an exciting time of year. Autumn was drawing in around us, each day darker and colder, often wet and stormy. Far from the streetlights of the town, we country people ceded the land to darkness earlier every night; wild and indifferent Nature was in ascension.

So with Halloween we played on the natural thrilling creepiness of the growing dark, while challenging it with our noisy and bright indoor parties.

Lacking the pumpkins of North America, we carved eyes and gaping mouths into turnips. The dense, heavy root was difficult work; parents watched nervously as we hacked at them with kitchen knives. Like American children we would slip a small candle inside, and carry it, wild with excitement, out into the darkness of the front garden, to flicker and sizzle with the odd stench of burnt turnip. Older siblings might hoot and groan ghostly noises to freak us younger ones out, sending us sprinting back into the comfort of the lighted house. Invisible in the darkness, the trees sighed on their own in the night breeze.

Another game involved a large plastic tub filled with water, in which my parents would place apples, monkey nuts, and a few coins. The children held their hands behind their backs and took turns to try seizing the fruit with their teeth alone. Ambitious older kids learned to hold their breath, duck right under water and nudge the coins between their teeth; any money withdrawn from the water this way could be kept. My face feels clouded and uncomfortable just remembering the pressure of water on nose, the unintended inhalation followed by spluttering and the triumphant spitting of coin into hands.

Chop the Cherry was a less stressful game which my mother started by pouring a small mound of flour, on the tip of which she placed a sweet cherry. We were given blunt knifes to cut and remove sections of the conical flour, trying to destabilise the heap without causing the cherry to fall. Whoever knocked the cherry had to pluck it from the flour from his or her teeth: rendered vulnerable to mischievous siblings who might pat their face into the flour.

For days before Halloween we worked on masks, usually made from the cardboard packaging of breakfast cereals, with eyes cut out and horrible features and scars drawn on. Ambitious children might beg for bits of wool to thread into the top as crude hair.

We ate a kind of cake called barm brack, in which my mother would mix a ring and a coin as a form of fortune-telling: whoever found the ring would soon be married, whoever found the coin would become rich. I forget if there were others, though some traditions include rather dark alternatives.

We never went trick or treating, a tradition that was known to us only from American movies and British comic books. The house was not decorated for Halloween, either, though we often drew creepy pictures of monsters, witches and ghosts. Aware that American and British children were having a different kind of Halloween, I presumed as a child that we were somehow following them, that our turnips were the lesser imitations of American pumpkins.
Far from it. Modern Halloween is the strange descendent of an Irish pre-Christian festival of the dead, Samhain, when the spirit world was believed exceptionally close to our own. Halloween was carried by Irish and Scottish migrants in the 19th century to the US, where they substituted tough turnips for the fat pumpkins of today. The meanings of pagan religious ritual were blurred, first by Christianisation, then by export and commercialisation. The festival of the dead became a festival of fear.

So Halloween today is a weird hybrid tradition indeed. Tonight I have children trick or treating outside my door in Dublin, following the Americanised version of an ancient Irish tradition. When people scattered around the world celebrate Halloween with masks and pumpkins, they are celebrating a little part of ancient Ireland, reinterpreted and altered beyond recognition. This is globalisation and modernity: seizing the tradition of one land, transforming it utterly, and depositing it everywhere.

No smoke on the water

2011-10-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

Eurostat gives statistics for the percentage of people in every EU country living with 'pollution, grime or other environmental problems', in 2009. The worst affected country is Malta, followed by Latvia and Romania. Most of the worst countries are in east Europe, and most of the best are in Scandinavia.

...Except Ireland, which comes last for pollution, with only 5.5% of the population affected, compared with 9% in Sweden, 11.9% in UK, 14.8% in Netherlands, 22.8% in Germany and 38.4% in Malta. It can be easy to take the little things for granted, things like these:

Inequality in Ireland is FALLING

2011-10-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

The idea that Ireland had become more unequal both during the economic boom years and during the subsequent recession, when wealthy banks were rescued by a government who sought to reduce the minimum wage, seems so widespread as to be a given. I was gobsmacked, then, to stumble across the following data tucked into the heart of the Central Statistics Office's Statistical Yearbook of Ireland 2011:

Gini coefficient
2006: 32.4
2007: 31.7
2008: 30.7
2009: 29.3

Income distribution (income quintile share ratio)
2006: 5.0
2007: 4.9
2008: 4.6
2009: 4.3

The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality where 100% is total inequality (one individual has all the income in a population) and 0% is total equality (all individuals earn equal amounts). Between 2006 and 2009, Ireland's Gini coefficient drifted downwards: Ireland's income inequality declined.

The second measure compares the income of the richest 20% with the poorest 20%. This also shows a downward trend, and a relatively steep one over just four years. Ireland became more equal in the late 2000s, both during the boom years and continuing into the austerity years. This covers a period of massive immigration and then net emigration, and happened under the leadership of Fianna Fáil, a centre-right party who were abandoned in the 2011 general election by an electorate who blamed them for the economic problems.

Fianna Fáil had also been criticised for years for failing to address inequality. Just weeks ago general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions David Begg announced that:

During the property and credit boom all the evidence suggests that Ireland became a more unequal place. And the evidence now is that the austerity drive has aggravated that inequality.

Yet the CSO data shows the opposite trend: Ireland grew less unequal towards the end of the boom and during the early austerity stage. Now let's see how Ireland compares with other countries.

Eurostat puts Ireland's Gini coefficient well below the 2009 EU average of 30.4. (Further afield, Ireland also compares very well against the US, with its Gini coefficient in 2007 of 48.3.) The most unequal EU country in 2009 year was Latvia (37.4) while the least unequal was Slovenia (22.7). An EU map looks like this:
Light yellow countries are the most equal, dark green the most unequal.

Ireland by this measure is more equal than Germany, France or Italy, despite spending considerably less on social protection as a percentage of GDP: Ireland (27.9%), Germany (31.4%), France (33.1%) and Italy (29.8%). This may be related to Ireland's unusually young population, however, compared with the aging populations of the other countries.

Also, Ireland's spending on social protection really did rise during this period. I wrote before about Fianna Fáil's populist spending increases, funded by rising revenue from the housing bubble instead of politically-unpopular tax increases. After the recession hit, GDP decline and mass-unemployment sent social protection costs into a relative spike:
It is interesting, though, to see that Irish inequality was falling even when social protection spending was well below the EU average.

If we look at the other measure of income inequality, the income quintile share ratio, we see similar results. A few highlights:

Latvia: 7.3
UK: 5.2
Italy: 5.2
EU (27): 4.9
Denmark: 4.6
Germany: 4.5
France: 4.4
Ireland: 4.2
Norway: 3.5
Slovenia: 3.2

Ireland's result here is the lowest score (meaning, most equal) for Ireland since the beginning of these records in 2001.

I think the fact that Ireland, by this measure, is more equal than the well-respected social democracies of Germany, France and Denmark is remarkable! Fianna Fáil were derided for being neo-liberal, even while steadily increasing social welfare and governing during a period of consistently declining income inequality.

There are plenty of things to take from this. First, the point that income inequality did not rise during the late 2000s bubble economy, a point remarked upon by the Economic and Social Research Institute in 2009, reflecting on the earlier boom of the 1990s:

Within the Irish labour market as a whole, the level of wage inequality fell markedly over the period but most particularly between 1997 and 2001.

This has wider significance for other countries pondering economic growth and inequality: it seems possible to have rising wealth without rising inequality.

The really grating thing for me, however, is that this refutes loud and insistent claims made over the last few years that Ireland's governments abandoned the poor and that inequality grew worse. Why did I keep hearing this, if the truth was precisely the reverse?

It reminds me of complaints in the US between left and right-wing commentators about mainstream media. Both deride the media, both believe it is biased against their side - never in favour of their side. I wondered sometimes if this was because convincing the public that a group (like a newspaper, a government, a political party) is biased, extreme and unreasonable will make their own extreme alternative appear mainstream and natural.

So maybe we hear these denunciations of modern Irish inequality from the left because they want the present situation to seem like an unacceptable extreme, and want to shift the norm leftwards.

No, Google can NOT predict Ireland's next president

2011-10-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

I asked in an earlier post if I might be able to use Google's Insights for Search service to predict the results of Ireland's presidential election, by comparing the candidates in terms of their popularity as search terms on Google. Insights showed Sean Gallagher far in the lead, yet I remarked that recent media questions about Gallagher's alleged connections to an unpopular party might be bloating his results: Gallagher might have been attracting viewers because of enraged curiosity, not support.

There are other issues. I suggested the Google users might misspell candidate names. The graph below shows that several versions of Michael D Higgins were popular over the last few days, suggesting that Higgins-related searches were split, and perhaps artificially made seem smaller:
As I write the votes are still being counted, but Michael D Higgins is 'on course for victory' and Gallagher has phoned him in congratulations.

So my little experiment seems to have failed! I can only blame my own use of Google Insights for Search: perhaps a more thorough and scientific approach would have revealed more telling data. Simply placing candidate names into Insights cannot accurately predict the outcomes of elections.

Can Google predict Ireland's next president?

2011-10-27T03:21:00.000-07:00

Today Ireland is holding its presidential election, so I wondered if I could use Google Insights for Search to predict the results.

Insights for Search shows what terms Google users are searching for, in a given area and over a given period of time, as a proportion of all terms searched. We can use this to compare the popularity of presidential candidates in terms of the number of people searching them on Google. The candidates are:

Mary Davis
Sean Gallagher
Michael D. Higgins
Martin McGuinness
Gay Mitchell
David Norris
Dana Rosemary Scallon

Insights allows us to compare only five terms at a time:
An immediate problem is clear by the peak in searches for Dana Rosemary Scallon in mid-October. On October 12 Scallon made some puzzling comments during a television debate, complaining about allegations of a 'malicious, vile nature' made against a family member. This weird outburst put Scallon into the news for a few days, which we see reflected in the Insights graph. But the searches here do not imply electoral popularity.

Google Insights for Search cannot distinguish between popularity and notoriety.

Nevertheless, let's carry on. The lowest two search terms of the above five in the latest date available (October 25th, two days ago) are Scallon and Gay Mitchell. Replacing them with the other two candidates not mentioned so far, we get this:
Sean Gallagher far out in the lead. Yet here is the same problem as we had with Scallon - Gallagher has been in the news lately because of allegations of corruption and of ties with the deeply unpopular Fianna Fáil party. So is he attracting searches because people like him and want to learn more, or because people are itching to find out about grimy connections in his past?

Let's break it down one more time. Here is Sean Gallagher versus Michael D Higgins:
Gallagher attracts more searches for almost the entire period. Recent opinion polls have put Gallagher in first place, with Higgins some way behind him. Meanwhile bookmakers Paddy Power have Michael D Higgins as favourite at 1/5, compared with Sean Gallagher at 3/1.

So I'm intrigued and tempted by the idea that Google is predicting a win for Gallagher! But he may be merely infamous, not popular. And Google users might be using other terms I have not checked here: 'Higgins' instead of 'Michael D Higgins', 'Dana' instead of 'Dana Rosemary Scallon', 'Martin McGuiness' instead of 'Martin McGuinness'. The two-day lag in Insights data may also be enough to undermine the results.

This is a nice little experiment, albeit a clumsy one, to test Google's predictive abilities. I will come back to this in a few days.

Japan's kamikaze: suicide bombing, fear and loyalty

2011-10-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

The road leading in to Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots is flanked by hundreds of stone lantern posts, each carved with a unique figure of a pilot. They are paid for by donations from around Japan, with an ultimate plan of 1,036 of them – one for every kamikaze pilot who flew out from the base at Chiran.

I went there with a Japanese friend in 2008. Outside the museum building stood two of the planes they had used for attacking or training kamikaze pilots. We walked past them down into a restored barracks, half-buried underground with cedar trees planted around to conceal the roof from Allied bombing raids. Inside the young men had slept on hard futons in the days before flying to their deaths.
The kamikaze missions were started in October 1944, when the Japanese forces were in retreat and the Americans had begun the reconquest of the Philippines. The Japanese First Air Fleet was ordered to attack the Americans, but with only 40 aircraft they knew there was scant chance of victory.

Three years earlier the Japanese had been stuck in a brutal imperial war in China. The Americans had slapped on embargos to block the flow of oil to Japan and, with few natural resources of their own, the Japanese were terrified that their war machine would simply grind to a halt. They eyed the oil and rubber of Indonesia and Malaysia, but knew that any drive south might bring the Americans into the conflict. The attack on Pearl Harbour was an ambitious plan to destroy the short-term ability of the US to project power into the Pacific Ocean, giving Japan enough time to grab South East Asian resources, defeat China, and prepare for eventual American engagement.

Instead the Americans rebounded rapidly and their strength of numbers and vast industrial output put the Japanese at a terrible disadvantage. By 1944 Japan's leaders were dismayed, and looking towards the supposed superiority of Japan's fighting spirit for a final hope: Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi ordered the pilots to deliberately crash into American ships.
Back in Japan, politicians christened the attacks kamikaze – divine wind. In the 13th century Japan was saved from two massive invasions of Mongols by timely typhoons that wrecked their ships at sea; Shinto clerics said that the gods, called kami, had sent this wind to save the country from foreign invasion. Among other things the storms had created the longstanding conviction that Japan could never be conquered, so the wartime politicians wanted to connect their desperate suicide attacks with that medieval confidence.

As 1944 drew on to 1945 the Japanese were becoming surrounded by death as the Americans firebombed their cities in attacks that killed tens of thousands at a go.
Death and destruction were everywhere, and some young men decided to choose a death which seemed noble and perhaps more effective than being burnt alive in Allied bomb raids. The pilots were promised that they would become Shinto gods in paradise after death.

Their bushido antipathy towards surrender (reinforced by an 1872 military code which made surrender punishable by death) meant Japanese troops had already taken hopeless charges against superior American forces in various battles – where they had been killed almost to the last man – or plunged planes into the path of American torpedoes to save their ships.

The Americans had no difficulty in portraying the new kamikaze bombers as fanatical lunatics, crazed berserkers with death wishes. In truth, many were sensitive and well-educated youngsters who wrestled with conflicting nationalist loyalties and their natural desire to live.
Near the barracks there was a stunningly beautiful temple, gleaming in the sunlight with an ornate statue of the Buddhist goddess Kannon placed in the centre. I saw a massive metal Buddhist bell nearby with a shining black marble sign reading:

LAMENTATION, MONUMENT OF PLEDGE
NO MORE TRAGEDY. WE HEREBY VOW ETERNAL PEACE
FOR ALL MANKIND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD,
IRRESPECTIVE OF NATIONS AND RACES

We took a few photos and headed for the museum building. I was the only obvious foreigner among the crowds of browsing Japanese.

Inside the museum doors I stopped in astonishment before a huge painting of a kamikaze pilot in his plane, surrounded by beautiful angelic maidens in gauzy clothes. The implication was obvious: here was a pilot striking his target, dying and being taken by these sexy spirits into the next life. For a moment I cringed as I thought of the Islamist fanatics dreaming of their virgins in paradise after murdering hundreds of civilians with a suicide vest. For a Westerner the painting immediately suggested a crude symmetry between the disciplined self-destruction of the kamikaze pilots and that of the Islamists, both surrendering pleasure in this world in exchange for reward in the next.

In reality little connects the two. The kamikaze pilots were soldiers who died attacking foreign military targets, not civilians in mosques or markets. Many of the kamikaze pilots were conscripts, not volunteers, teenagers plucked early from college by the government and trained specifically for kamikaze flights. The government wanted them to appear to be volunteers, however, so young men were summoned to lectures on patriotism and then sometimes asked to step forward if they refused to become kamikaze pilots. They were left with little choice but to ‘volunteer’. Those who declined sometimes found themselves posted to distant islands where they would almost certainly die by American hands, or even found themselves signed up to kamikaze flights against their wills.

In training they were beaten savagely in an attempt to heighten discipline; instead it filled many with apathy and even contempt towards the people who had brought them to war.

Beyond the jarring painting, the Chiran museum was full of neatly-scripted letters pilots had sent to their families before flying to their deaths. Above the letters were photos of the pilots, and I saw the faces of my teenage students in them. They had the same frowning expressions as my sullen, irreverent boys and the same adolescent features. The youngest were only 17, barely more than children, and inexperienced pilots that the Allies would have little difficulty in shooting down from the sky.

The letters, diaries and notes left behind by the pilots show a wide range of reactions by these young men, from patriotic determination to cynicism and terror. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze Diaries quotes many examples:

I dreaded death so much. And yet, it is already decided for us.... Mother, I still want to be loved and spoiled by you.... I want to be held in your arms and sleep.
- Hayashi Ichizo, April 12 1945

Ohnuki-Tierney also quotes Kasuga Takeo, a draftee assigned to looking after meals, laundry etc of the pilots, describing the scene on the night before they had to die:

At the hall where their farewell parties were held, the young student officers drank cold sake the night before their flight. Some gulped the sake in one swallow; others kept gulping down [a large amount]. The whole place turned to mayhem. Some broke hanging light bulbs with their swords. Some lifted chairs to break the windows and tore white tablecloths. A mixture of military songs and curses filled the air. While some shouted in rage, others cried aloud. It was their last night of life.

They reacted, in other words, like humans, not brainwashed killing machines as depicted in American wartime propaganda.

We saw snapshots taken around the barracks of the boys relaxing. Like my students, sometimes they tried to look tough and macho, but when their guards were down they reverted to laughing and joking about like children. I saw one picture with the smooth-cheeked boys giggling over a puppy: Japan’s ferocious kamikaze warriors.
My friend was absorbed by the displays and tried to translate occasional letters to me. She pointed out a pilot who had broken his arm and so was exempted from flying. Instead he begged his friends to tie him into the plane so that he could fly to his death anyway. A flight instructor who did not have to fly kamikaze nonetheless volunteered, but he had a wife and two children. His wife wrote: ‘Alive I am only in your way, I will go before you and wait’, and drowned herself with their children so that her husband would have nothing keeping him attached to life and could contentedly die as a kamikaze pilot.

God. Not all went to death so willingly, though. This is from Elise K. Tipton’s Modern Japan:

Who do you think I am; a fool who has come to realise how dear this thing life is only three days before my death? A rainy day gives me another day of survival today – a bonanza. How delightful it is to scare my friend that I’d become a ghost tomorrow and will probably wake him in the midst of the night. My co-pilot is sound asleep beside me. Could this silly face of his be the face of a war-god tomorrow? How funny to listen to jazz music on the night before going out to kill the jazzy Americans! How funny, too, is the servant who just came up to me to ask how many beds he should make tomorrow!

One pilot was shot dead for returning to base nine times after claiming he could not find the enemy. It was clear their ‘volunteering’ had become mandatory. Towards the end of the war the government announced that all pilots would be kamikaze pilots, and planes were given only enough fuel to make a one-way trip out to battle. They were more effective on individual attacks against American ships than conventional attacks, but the Americans quickly learned how to neutralise the threat and most planes were shot down before they ever reached their targets. By the end of the war the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost 2,525 kamikaze pilots while the Imperial Japanese Army had lost 1,387. It was the cream of Japan’s youth.

After a while we left the museum and visited another small museum, formerly a restaurant in Chiran town where the young pilots had often eaten at. The owner during the war was a middle aged woman named Tome Torihama, who the pilots referred to as okasan – mother. She grew close to many of the boys, weeping on their deaths and secretly bypassing the military censors to send messages to their families or lovers at home. One pilot, a 20-year-old called Saburo Miyakawa, promised to return to her restaurant after his death as a firefly. Indeed a firefly did enter the restaurant the next night and Torihama exclaimed to the guests that he had returned. My Japanese friend pointed the exact spot where the firefly had landed on a wooden beam to me.
After the war, Chiran was all but forgotten by a nation trying to recreate itself. The kamikaze pilots were written off as failed fanatics. Torihama refused to let the memory die, however, and campaigned to put up some kind of memorial. One over-reaction followed another and now Chiran attracts Japan’s far-right nationalists, blaring nationalist messages from loudspeakers on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender.

***

I WASN’T sure what to make of it all. Too much is made today about the bravery of certain groups, which is meaningless since bravery is morally neutral. The firemen who ran into the World Trade Centre and died saving lives were brave, but so presumably were the hijackers who died destroying them.

Sure the kamikaze pilots were brave men. I pitied them, really, many were good, honest and idealistic boys forced by a brutal system to throw their lives away, for nothing. Had Japan won, however, had they forced the Americans into a final bloody stalemate and ceasefire, the pilots would have become heroes to be celebrated in Japan and around the world as evidence that national spirit can overcome any technological or economic disadvantage. So their deaths are only considered wasteful in the context of Japan losing the war.

For the government to have forced these men into ‘volunteering’ was terrible, though little different in result from the forced conscription of troops in other countries, which sent millions of soldiers to probable death. If I thought their lives were wasted, it was no more than the lives of millions of others who have been forced to build empires.

Months later my friend sent me a DVD called Tokko, a documentary sold in the US as Wings of Defeat, made by a Japanese-American woman who discovered to her astonishment that her late uncle had been trained as a kamikaze pilot. Risa Morimoto decided to go to Japan to interview a few other remaining survivors. It is a calm, straight-forward film, with frank interviews that reveal the very human panic, disillusionment and sadness that filled the men on being given their death sentences.
One chosen kamikaze pilot remarked that when he heard about the catastrophic nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he felt relieved, knowing that this would hasten the end of the war and save him from doom. Another walked through the ruins of Hiroshima days after the explosion. ‘In that place, my warrior spirit simply withered,’ he said. ‘It was as though I was baptised in the deep conviction that I must never engage in warfare again.’

In the documentary they are all old men now, as polite and neat as any I passed on the streets of Japan every day. But in remembering their boyish brush with death they show some bitterness, both at the militant force that had swept them along into war and their subsequent abandonment in peace, when the kamikaze pilots were hushed up and ignored as embarrassing relics of Japan’s disastrous experiment with imperialism.

I love Japan. But that Emperor, that Emperor... because of that Emperor we pilots were tormented and all those men had to die.

Most seemed to realise as the months passed in 1945 that their country was doomed in that war. They were being rushed to the front as trainees with no fighting experience at all and faced certain death with horror, not fanatical joy.

I thought, "Oh, I’m screwed. I have to die too, I have so many things left to do. But if my death will benefit everyone, then I guess I had no choice."

In Tokko, an old American Navy veteran whose ship was destroyed by kamikaze remarked:

We had people who would have done that. We were that patriotic. If we had to protect the west coast against Japan or the east coast against Germany, we would have had suicide missions.

Months earlier I had read Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese Christian who sought to be a ‘bridge over the Pacific’ connecting the rising Japan to the United States. Nitobe's focus was on bushido, the medieval Japanese way of the warrior. Published in 1900, Bushido is written with a kind of excited Victorian energy, an almost boyish conviction in the beauty and nobility of the samurai code. The samurai despised selfish, foolish violence, he said, but the right, courageous use of war was always to be embraced:

A dastard or a braggart was he who brandished his weapon on undeserved occasions. A self-possessed man knows the right time to use it, and such times come but rarely.

In many of these things Nitobe describes what today could be considered mainstream conservative ideals. He eulogises honesty, politeness and honour:

Modesty and complaisance, actuated by respect for others’ feelings, are at the root of that courtesy and urbanity of manners which has been noticed by every foreign tourist as a marked Japanese trait. Politeness is a poor virtue, if it is actuated only by a fear of offending good taste, whereas it should be the outward manifestation of a sympathetic regard for the feelings of others. It also implies a due regard for the fitness of things, therefore due respect to social positions; for these latter express no plutocratic distinctions, but were originally distinctions for actual merit.

Politeness out of regard for the feelings of others, and a special respect due to certain social positions – all this could have sat just as well in the Ireland my parents grew up in. So far we were dealing with ideals that merged comfortably with those of the West. The 1908 book Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship by founder of the Boy Scout movement Robert Baden-Powell said that one aim of the Boy Scouts was to revive some of the rules of medieval knighthood because those rules did so much for the moral tone of the West, just as ‘Bushido of the ancient Samurai Knights has done, and is still doing for Japan.’

Baden-Powell, along with Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, had read Nitobe’s Bushido.

Nitobe was describing an ideal man: brave and gentle, courteous and skilful, a self-controlled warrior with no fear of death. I was attracted to a lot of what he was saying, but his veneration for the soldier – and especially the value with which they held loyalty – disturbed me. He compared the rose of England - that slowly rots on its stalk - with Japan's cherry blossom that was ‘ever ready to depart life at the call of nature’, symbols of Japan's supposed fearlessness in the face of death.

At times it seemed to reek of the excited nationalism and militarism that would be discredited in the trenches of Europe in World War I and the Nazi extermination camps of World War II. He never meant this, no doubt, but I wondered if his conviction in the role of the obedient warrior was indicative of the fanaticism that would send millions of Japanese to die, kill and enslave in World War II.

A century later, watching elderly Japanese men reminisce bitterly about the fanatical nationalist warrior spirit that nearly sent them to certain death, I found Nitobe's stuff about the Japanese spirit and the cherry blossom being ready to die unconvincing. When individuals are called up to die for the cause, even when they step forward and prepare to take their places among the dead, they are still filled with fear, bitterness and regret.

Nostalgia: lots of people miss a horrible, scary past

2011-10-21T11:50:00.001-07:00

I argue a lot on this blog that many people are far too pessimistic about the prevalence of things like crime, terrorism or war. My usual argument is that these are either statistically improbable compared with more mundane threats (drink drivers are more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda) or that the extent of such violence is actually declining, that the past we remember with fondness was worse.

Today I see a really striking example of that, taken from the 2008 Garda Public Attitudes Survey, which asked Irish survey respondents about their attitudes on crime-related issues. There are mountains of data available in this so I will just draw your attention to a few small samples. First, when asked if they feared becoming victims of crime, or if they feared family members or friends becoming victimised, an ever-shrinking proportion of respondents since 2002 have said yes.
These are pretty significant improvements, with only 37% of respondents saying they feared for themselves in 2008, down from 52% six years earlier. Another pair of questions asking how safe respondents feel walking alone after dark or being alone at night both showed falling levels of fear between 2005 and 2008. So the level of fear of crime seems to have fallen.

Yet respondents on another question overwhelmingly claimed that crime rates were increasing.
And further, respondents - every year - are more likely to claim that they feel a greater fear of crime today than they did either one year ago or six years ago.
So even as fewer people feel fear of crime, they remain convinced that there was a safer time in the recent past; they feel nostalgia for a period when people were actually more afraid.

Maybe one clue to understanding this is from the question about falling or rising crime perceptions. Almost half of respondents thought that crime in their own area was the same as ever, while the vast majority thought crime in Ireland as a whole was worsening. Dan Gardner's Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear also makes this observation, pointing out that individuals make their judgements about their own area from personal experience and observation, but judge the wider society through exposure to crime-obsessed and sometimes sensationalist news media.