Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts

Saturday 15 April 2023

Evading the Causes of the Current Cost of Living Crisis

We need a more open debate about the causes of the current cost of living crisis. The elites would like us to blame a pathogen and an alleged autocrat but this is far too simple. It is certainly not caused solely by Vladimir Putin’s alleged weaponisation of Russia’s immense gas supplies. In fact, despite the furore over the Nordstream explosions and the closure of the Baltic pipelines, Europe continues to be supplied with gas at rates not dissimilar to those that applied before the war. Supply chain issues related to COVID recovery and many other fundamentals have certainly contributed to price rises not forgetting the pressure on commodity prices from the disruptions involved in the Green Agenda and problems with food supply accentuated by climate issues. But the disruption to trade caused both by the economic sanctions on Russia and threats of sanctions on China are a significant contributing factor and these policies are those of our leaders.

The invasion itself need never have been much of a factor in itself - it is just that Western leaders (without much consultation with their own peoples) decided that the costs of economic warfare against Russia were a 'price worth paying' and then got suprised by just how open-ended that price would turn out to be. It is not only the effects on trade and inflation but also the ridiculously high commitments of capital being made to prosecute an unwinnable war (shades here of Afghanistan) and eventually to the reconstruction of a nation that has been encouraged to fight that unwinnable war. The Ukraine War had emerged from a failure of diplomatic dialogue between the West and Russia over the previous two decades and the fault for that lies as much in London and Washington as in Moscow. The UK must take part (though certainly not all) of the blame for that and so for the immensely damaging rise in the British cost of living which is to a considerable extent attributable to the disruption caused by its foreign policy priorities and its extremely poor understanding of the consequences of its actions. 

Over a year on from the invasion, we have to draw some distinction between the energy component of inflation and 'core' inflation - the underlying inflation in food and services that has triggered high interest rates. Energy inflation if it does not go on for too long is something one works through. European governments could deal with it by adding to their fiscal burden with what amounted to massive dole outs - another price that might not be worth paying as national debt levels, already burdened by COVID social cohesion doles and green agenda doles (soon to be added to with increases in defence budget expectations) reach levels that require austerity and high taxes under conditions of low growth, that is, if the Western system is not to crumble under the weight of its own debt mountain. But energy inflation has triggered core inflation so that as energy prices fall, the lag in wage and commodity inflation continues to drive prices and forces up interest rates.

Nevertheless, funds to deal with energy inflation could be regarded (like the Green Agenda), at least in part, as a debatably necessary adjustment and an 'investment' in future energy security. After another year of recessionary misery (or soft landing from an optimistic point ov view) everything will be fine and recovery from 2024 and after will allow the debts to be paid off and prosperity to return. Except that the game is not over. The Europeans (which includes us) have just shifted their energy dependence from being one on Moscow to one based on the US and Gulf dominated spot markets. Renewables are not managing to fill the gap left by the decline in hudro and nuclear energy. Europe is still vulnerable not only to increases in the spot price of LNG and OPEC+s determination to maintain fairly high oil prices in at least the $80-$90 band (Brent Crude) but to the Russians deciding to turn off the spigot for gas or oil directed at Europe because they have (eventually) an adequate market in East Asia and have just had enough of European insults and support for Ukraine. The Chinese are busy committing to long term Gulf contractual terms while dilatory Europeans sit and hope for pries to come down regardless.

In other words, the 'headline' inflation problem has not gone away - it has just been pushed forward to next winter if the Europeans in particular do not manage to sign their own long term contracts for energy, Chinese recovery sucks in energy from elsewhere, there is a cold winter, the spot markets rise and the alternative energy structures that are supposed to displace Eurasian energy are not in place. If conditions deteriorate between Russia and the West to the extent that Eurasian gas is no longer available in Europe at all and the grey market in Russian crude going to refined products that serve Europe dies off in favour of East Asian needs, then European governments may face a fiscally destructive demand for yet more social cohesion payments to protect the most vulnerable households and businesses and this will be ... inflationary. 

So, we are in a position where markets are convinced that recessionary tendencies must mean that interest rates have peaked and are buoyant but a) the continuing rise in 'core' inflation means that, even if interest rates peak, central banks may be obliged to hold them at near peak levels for a considerable period of time while the mounting costs of all this to governments, households and businesses starts to unwind the viability of at least some of all three in a slow-burning creative destruction that weakens confidence and contains multiple political risks while b) the current relatively beneficial state of the energy market could simply be the eye of the hurricane, vulnerable at any time to a whole number of political grey swans and risking, if things go down hill, significant fiscal interventions for which there may no longer be united national political consent (or the cash) as the costs mount.

Looking at the world before February 2002 and after that date, we can see only one major trigger for a polycrisis that was probably waiting to happen on many other fundamentals - an ill-thought-out sanctions approach that was supposed to bring Russia 'to its senses' or even trigger regime change and Russia's economic collapse. It has clearly not done so nor is Russia isolated. At best, sanctions may achieve their ends only at immense cost to the poor and vulnerable at home and overseas, to working households and to those small businesses who may not survive beyond the doles they have been given to survive the next round of energy price hikes. A lot of the damage caused by COVID and sanctions is silent. About a year into COVID, I produced a list of local Kent and Sussex small breweries and put it to one side. This week I went back to it to see what had happened to them. Roughly a quarter seem to have crashed and burned as independent businesses. Walking around our mid-sized Kentish town, we see the gaps where shops used to be.

Inflation driven by huge fiscal inputs to deal with both crises and ideological convictions (such as Net Zero and the insanity of increased weapons expenditure) and by incompetently drawn up economic warfare policies, added to COVID-related supply chain problems, have meant interest rate rises. Short term subsidies to the population have meant high borrowings. High borrowing has meant weakened currencies against the dollar. Weakened currencies mean imported inflation which means yet more interest rate rises. Interest rate rises eventually mean recession. Recession means job losses and business failures. High borrowing eventually means high taxation yet recession means lower tax take. Increased taxation to deal with this and high interest rates mean a drag on growth. And so it goes ... a spiral of failure. All this is, at root, not down to Putin but to our collective paranoid and hysterical reaction to Putin led by a bunch of loopy ideological Tories and their fellow travellers in the Labour Party.

These have been many serious failures of policy derived from poor analysis and intelligence. We know this now whereas a year ago we only surmised that this might be so. Exactly how bad Western analytical intelligence has been perhaps only became clear with the release of the latest batch of Pentagon Papers. It is said that the professional foreign policy and intelligence community in Washington are distraught at the poor quality of their own political masters who are driven by simplistic ideological seat of the pants policy-making. Western democracies are, in any case, no longer fitted for the sort of long-range planning that seems to be the norm in Moscow and Beijing. A 'price worth paying', seen originally perhaps in terms of eighteenth century type war subsidies (wasteful but not critical to our own economy), has been transformed into a massive price for war and the reconstructive integration into the European and Western system of a basket case of a state riddled with corruption .

This is a price certainly not worth paying, incurred at the expense of national populations, long term economic prospects and future generations yet a reversal of policy is no longer acceptable to elites not for simple ostensible moral reasons but because back-tracking will shatter confidence in them. Like Macbeth, they are so steeped in metaphorical blood they may as well go forward as back but their doubling down constantly increases the risks that a serious situation could become a critical one. The financial technocrats remain extremely worried about more bank failures and so should we be, The system is under enormous strain and yet there is no way forward for Western leaders to do anything more than carry on being as stupid as they were in the far less critical situations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As in those two cases, the end game is now predictable - defeat or a victory earned at such cost as to be Pyrrhic.

Here, in the UK, the Government, the media and the political class are all in denial about these truths because are fully complicit in February's blunders and the even worse blunder of not using British influence to encourage peace talks back in April. We all know Boris was a chancer but his gambling sucked in everyone around him. Now our political addicts think that just one more throw of the dice (presumably this time it is the touted Ukrainian counter-offensive) will win back the shirt they are losing off their back. They now have no way out of the hole they have dug except to dig ever deeper and then cross their fingers, hoping that if they do so vigorously enough they will come out in Australia and all will be well. It is now no longer theoretically possible that Russia, clearly backed by a China throughly alienated by the incompetents in the State Department and in Brussels and Berlin, will collapse, be forced to withdraw from Ukraine or the Putin regime be replaced. Even if these events happened, none of them are likely to take place within the time frame required to avert serious damage to the Anglo-European economy and social cohesion. The cheap and hitherto reliable Eurasian energy resources in question are Russian and not ours so we cannot seize them any more than we can seize its massive mineral resources (much of it vital for Western industrial development) and grain output. They, not us, decide what is to be done with these assets of global importance.

It will take years for Europe to put in the infrastructure necessary to restore permanently lowered energy and commodity price structures in a global context. Europe will be competing with Asia for both sets of input and its competitive advantage in having cheap Eurasian energy to hand is now lost, almost certainly forever. Germany, apart clearly from the unstable coalition that rules it, has begun to fear de-industrialisation and has just, with immense stupidity, managed to undo all Macron's good work in China ten days or so ago. The German Foreign Minister alienated China under the massive illusion that its opinion on the Ukraine matter actually matters to Beijing. Macron to a great extent and Orban to a complete extent 'get' what is at stake for Europe and 'get' that it (and we in Britain) have been played by Washington. The embarrassment of watching Sunak kow-tow like all his predecessors to a President who touts a united Ireland tells us all we need to know about national decline. A nation has liberated itself from Brussels only to be a vassal to Washington.

The confrontation between Putin and Western liberal elites is likely to last years as Russia pivots to Asia while a Trump victory and growing European resentments and fragmentation could leave us Britons high and dry in any case. We could take the economic hit now only to see the rug pulled out from under us later. Whatever short term wheezes are being promoted by this Government to take the heat off itself and secure its position for an election, the huge damage to our economy of yet further tranches of borrowing (following the COVID experience) and to social cohesion from the inevitable austerity and increased taxation in the long term are certainly not 'prices worth paying' for the bulk of the population. It is as if (surely not) Government continues to undertake every wheeze to protect the asset rich middle classes in the rather stupid belief that they are the majority of voters and the rest of the electorate has no choice other than to vote for a variant of the liberal establishment that protects that class. This is true in a world made up of Red, Green, Orange and Blue 'Tories' but all four are skating on thin ice. That world may collapse under sufficient economic pressure.

These are all self-inflicted wounds on the British nation not so much by the Government alone but by an entire political class that continues its arrogant neglect of its own population in order to meet the needs of moral philosophy (as interpreted by Oxbridge, the media and the liberal intellectual class) and its own self-serving class interests. The media is wholly complicit. The butterfly minds of the elite have left an apparently powerless population to do what it can to get by - the Government has simply stopped inflation becoming intolerable for the middling sort but pushed those costs forward in time. Huge numbers of the Crown's loyal subjects will face a serious loss of living standards regardless. Perhaps the assumption of the liberal establishment that they are too stupid to see this and who is responsible will be its eventual downfall.

For a brief moment (maybe this coronation) we will now get to see what our nation can be at its most romantic but we note that the strong national engagement in respect for the late Queen Elizabeth has already diminished for her successor in opinion polls. We are seeing how national decision-makers are divorced from the condition of the people as much now as in the age of Victoria. The open debate we need may never happen - evasion of the conditions under which power is exercised may be what holds this nation together as it sinks slowly but steadily into penury. But never mind ... perhaps the upper middle classes think they can survive and since this is their Kingdom more than ours, then we must judge that all is good in the world. Why question such good order, they may ask. Why not, we should reply.

Sunday 18 March 2018

A Sense of Proportion - Nuclear War and Feeling Secure

As we struggle to find the money for the National Health Service and we squabble over what should or not be paid out to Brussels (nothing in my view), there is another world of money out there that has nothing to do with Wall Street or the City of London. To get a feel for this economy, we must switch to the United States for a while.

On 23 February 2008, a US B-2 bomber crashed on the runway shortly after take-off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The findings of the investigation stated that the B-2 crashed after "heavy, lashing rains" caused moisture to enter skin-flush air-data sensors. There were no munitions on board. With an estimated loss of US$1.4 billion, it was the most expensive crash in USAF history.

Yes, that's right - US$1.4bn sunk into one aircraft whose only function was to drop megatonnage on someone other than us. There are 20 B-2s in service with the United States Air Force (excluding the one written off) which plans to operate the aircraft until 2058, Each can deploy sixteen 2,400 lb (1,100 kg) B83 nuclear bombs.You can add up the sums deployed in any way you like but that is a lot of money, a lot of national infrastructure and a lot of healthcare and education costs.

With a maximum yield of 1.2 megatonnes of TNT (75 times the 16 kt yield of the atomic bomb "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945), the B83 is the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the United States arsenal. About 650 B83s were built, and the weapon remains in service as part of the United States "Enduring Stockpile".

The cost of each B83 bomb is hard to calculate because one would have to take into account research and development, a cost which is spread amongst several items of mass destruction. According to the [US] Union of Concerned Scientists (note we are only talking about the B83 delivery system (the B-2's B83's could be replaced with yet another bomb, the B1): "It cost some $80 billion to develop and build 21 of these planes, or $4 billion per B-2 bomber, and the current life extension program will cost $10 billion. Each can carry up to 16 bombs, so the total cost of each deployed bomb would be roughly $270 million, taking into account its share of the bomber."

Whether these calculations are accurate or not, 21 B-2s each with 16 B83s (that is 336 B83s) are all utterly useless except to devastate another part of humanity or to maintain a 'theory' of deterrence that may or may not have worked for the last seventy years. Of course, other potentially opposing nations have a similar capacity though nothing near as big but still the total sum is formidable, far more massive in the US than elsewhere in the world.

The US hasn't actually built a new bomb since 1992 (as of 2013) and is spending money only on refurbishments of weaponry so perhaps the investment has been made and we should accept the bad investments as something that comes from another age. But now the ramping up of anti-Chinese and anti-Russian feeling by opposing camps in the US and of the latter in the UK raises once again serious questions about what we spend our money and why.

I am not even going to try and estimate total costs when the B2 and the B83 are only a part of the whole and just one unloaded bomber can wipe out $1.4bn of national wealth because of a few faulty sensors. But, before British readers get too smug at this colossal waste while America's built infrastructure crumbles and its inner cities remain sink-pits and it cannot provide even a basic free national health service (let alone the free education that we British have now lost thanks to that vile abortion of claimed Leftism New Labour), the UCS noted in 2013 that "the DOD also is modifying Trident submarine-based missiles—which initially cost about $100 million each—to extend their lifetimes at a cost of about $140 million apiece."

Now, this is my point. Every one of these expenditures was undertaken because elected representatives approved them, often in a bipartisan way and with minimal opposition. There have, of course, been concerns about cost and not only amongst elected representatives. Intelligent military men have themselves often wondered whether this has been the best use of resources, 

And yet, in every case, these measures passed without serious opposition as to principle through Congress (or Parliament) whether the majority were liberal or conservative (or Labour or Tory). The arguments for national resilience and peace are thrust aside in favour of what amounts to a massive gamble on not having to become genocidal maniacs in what would be as likely as not to be a futile revenge attack at best and a war crime beyond the achievement of Adolf Hitler himself at worst.

Ultimately, this is not some sinister plot by a cabal of miltaristic illuminati but is a democratic decision that results directly from your and my vote. When we vote in our standard party preference, we vote in people who will sign on the nod, or with minimal questioning as to purpose, vast sums of money that cannot be spent on economic infrastructures or on social issues or just be given back to the people. We ensure that we are complicit in the use of this weaponry since deterrence only works if there is general agreement that we can use this stuff. We really cannot blame the so-called elite - collectively we the people maintain this system. It would not exist if we did not approve it by our personal votes.

Try looking up what one single B83 bomb could do to a city of civilian men, women and children and be saddened at the implications of that complicity (we do not consider, of course, the Russians or Chinese to be any less complicit except that the Chinese people do not get to vote in the people who would do this although they probably would if they could). We have a global system here but all countries claim a mandate from their people, directly through a vote or indirectly through a Party mechanism.

So, every voter (where there is a vote) must genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that their country is at threat to a sufficient degree that vast sums must be diverted from socio-economic development and/or private resources and that it is reasonable for that threat to be dealt with by being prepared to immolate tens of millions of other human beings in a forlorn gamble that the machinery of death will never be needed.

I am not sure if this is right or wrong. I only know that it is ridiculous. Perhaps it is true that, without WMD, America and Britain would be like Carthage before Rome. Perhaps, on that basis, the massive and otherwise wasteful expenditure is worth while as is the gamble that it will never be deployed - that being wasteful is part of the game since its use lies in its not being used like some weird metaphysical game fit for continental philosophers.

I don't care. What I am interested in is the institutionalisation of paranoia, the preparedness to spend such vast sums on extreme possible events (like the vast sums spent on anti-terrorism activity that still can't stop a nutter shooting up a school), the unthinking acceptance of this state of affairs by the entire political class and the apparent inability of the voting population to see the levels of cost and, yes, again, the paranoia (which can be manufactured if necessary as we are seeing in London as I write) involved in giving up many social benefits, economic advantages and even personal wealth for what amounts to the mass embracing of a psychological neurosis - existential anxiety about the 'other' - without ever bothering to get to know or understand or compromise with that 'other' in an alternative strategy of 'peaceful co-existence'.

Imagine a world where those sums had made America and the UK wealthier and more socially secure and both had retained only enough firepower to cause sufficient harm while offering us resilient countries that would fight in the streets for their liberty if necessary. Macmillan in 1957 made a decision for budgetary reasons to drop a strategy of resilience for deterrence and he was not malign or even stupid in doing so. It had its logic but it was the logic of Aquinas - the building of an entirely logical system on a few basic false assumptions shared by everyone without further thought. Reagan too made strategic deterrence a platform and it helped to get him elected - his voters liked this system and simply wanted more protection through the futile 'Star Wars' programme.

Perhaps this is what it is all about. As with air power more generally ensuring that there are no body bags amongst the aggressors but only vaporised remains of civilians below, so these expenditures are really protection money paid by 'our' civilians. The people pay over to the 'racketeers' (the Crown or the Federal Government) the funds and, in return, the racketeers 'protect' them, not so much from the enemy but from the costs and risks of having to face the enemy themselves or becoming resilient in adversity.

Maybe that is the secret. Maybe WMD expenditures are much more 'snowflake' than we thought they were. Maybe they exist so that voters can pass over the difficult business of defending something worth defending because they have a stake in it but where they might risk personal hardship, death or injury (in taking that particular gamble over the response to the intentions and strength of an enemy) and thereby they give responsibility for the throw of that dice to an elite that then develops a bit of an economic interest in keeping the system going.

If I am right, then perhaps the people are using democracy just to offset responsibility and thought. In the wisdom of crowds, they are getting what they want. But what do they want? Maybe they simply do not want to think about these things. Maybe they want to hire people to do their thinking for them and to take on responsibility for the acts that might be necessary to survive. They prefer those acts to be separate from themselves under conditions where they do not have to make any choices rather than make choices that are existential. Democratic humanity, under this thesis, is existentially cowardly but not irrational.

The gamble on letting this protection money (aka wasted money) be spent on a system detached from their daily lives and responsibilities might be likened to the money they spend on entertainment - a distraction, an avoidance, an evasion. From this perspective, the gamble on the economy slowly dying in the future and social care and security collapsing or being inadequate in old age is set against the gamble not of the Russians declaring war but on what might happen to themselves if they declare war. But why would they prefer mass immolation? Do they think the 'other' would immolate them 'just for fun'? Has Hitlerism created an idea of the other's intent to general extermination as if we were Carthage-in-the-making?

The mutual immolation somehow looks less dangerous to voters (because it is chosen internally to be unimaginable as much as there is trust in deterrence as game theory) than a resilience strategy when voter resilience is already being tested to the limit precisely by that lack of economic resource and social security in everyday life that might (if they but thought about it) be resolved with massive savings on WMD delivery systems. But something else may be going on here.

For democratic humanity, a simple immolation of the civilian men, women and children of the other side is infinitely preferable to facing them directly in battle. Perhaps they know that they are now flaccid and weak. Perhaps middle class Americans know that the Viet Cong drubbed them because the Viet Cong were not flaccid and weak. Air power then proved fruitless and probably will again. Sometimes I think the admiration for Israel is such a projection - by supporting a people that is resilient and not flaccid and weak, its supporters perhaps think that this makes them strong. Of course, it does not. This is the mentality of nations used to watching screens and not doing things.

The existence of air power allows the democratic human to feel as if he was in control, as if he could win at no cost to himself ... and it is that feeling of control and misplaced hope that has one central purpose - the alleviation of anxiety. In the end, these vast expenditures are, perhaps, a pharmaceutical, an anxiety-relieving drug, more than they are even a protection racket. People simply do not want to have to think about these things because these things make them anxious. A big abstract anxiety (global immolation) is much easier to cope with than the anxiety of taking responsibility in a resilience-driven society.

Still you vote these people in every time, you cowards. Thank you for that. I feel so much more secure now ... 

Saturday 2 December 2017

On Monogamy - Part 2

This is the second of two ruminations derived from a reading of a 2008 academic paper by Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, 'Monogamy and Polygyny in Greece, Rome and World History' [Princeton Stanford Working Papers in Classics, available online]. The views and conclusions are mine and not his.

In the first of this two-parter we questioned what was 'normal' about monogamy and drew what might be a political conclusion that its global dominance is associated with the cultural dominance of the West as a hybridisation of Roman property relations and Christian morality. This hybrid ideology gained its strength not from patriarchy but from a similar hybridisation of patriarchal and matriarchal value systems. The protection of women and slaves, otherwise unprotected within Roman social structures, resulted in a generalised model for sexual social organisation that owed something to biological pair-bonding (i.e. it was not wholly to be considered 'unnatural') but was originally and primarily a means of organising particular property relations and a particular social order under conditions of resource scarcity and so competition.

The price for this 'normality' was three-fold: it repressed 'alpha' sexuality in general (both male and female); it has progressively stopped humans from negotiating alternative strategies as it extended its reach across Western society and then across the world; and it increasingly destabilised the socio-sexual structures of other cultures offering alternative models as Western technology brought with it Western ideology. Zones that have resisted the Western model - the radical Islamic model of polygamy or the Chinese model of consensual concubinage - are under pressure from the presumption that a rigid monogamy is the only form by which humans can be sexually organised, to the extent that serial sexual monogamy and hidden polygyny and polyandry ('cheating') are regarded as preferable to the institutionalisation of any possible consensual non-monogamy fitted to our times.

A case study for this process lies in the early British conquest and control of India where the early (male) traders adapted readily to local sexual customs, sometimes operating a dual sexual system in two geographically distant locations. The discovery of a different sexual culture resulted in the transfer of 'tantric' ideas in a fairly impure form to the West where they were to play a slow-burning role in the eventual sexual liberation of Westerners but the socio-sexual model employed by the traders (deemed exploitative by modern theoreticians, although probably far more subtle in its dynamics when one considers the state of the English working class more generally) was to collapse as soon as women from the West arrived, as well as missionaries and state servants.

The replacement of rule by traders under the East India Company with administrators imbued with Christian ethic under the Raj represented the replacement of free-booting libertarian entrepreneurial capitalism with authoritarian administrators, driving the system from exploitative growth through empire to sclerosis and then collapse. The liberation of India from colonial rule did not see a consequent socio-sexual liberation in reaction to the previous masters because the socio-sexual mores of the West were associated with modernisation. Modernisation was a core aim of the first generations of nationalist politicians regardless of Ghandhian sentimentality. Even the traditionalists had developed their traditionalism in a conservative reaction to the West that accepted more of its values than they realised. It is both paradoxical and logical that the 9/11 fanatics contained a high number of engineers and technical experts and no actual mullahs.

Hindu nationalism has a rather 'Victorian' and puritanical view of sexuality (of which monogamy is a part) that is now part and parcel of the self image of nearly all the modernised rivals of the West. I would put a high bet on the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia having socio-sexual reform high on his own modernisation agenda within the Kingdom. The concubinage system exists outside the Communist mainland only amongst elite trader Chinese. Social order seems to require if not monogamy, then the tightening of whatever traditional rules there are to command and control sexual relations.

Only in the West has the monogamous system begun to break down at the margins - but only at the margins - despite the widespread media coverage of polyamory. It is said, for example, that only 5% at most of Americans are consciously polyamorous. The question remains whether the monogamy of classical antiquity as interpreted by the heirs of Abraham is 'natural' or not, even though it is certainly now 'normal'. This brings us back to Scheidel's paper since he asks two questions - what is the reason for the variation in the incidence of polygamy and monogamy and what drove the social imposition of near-universal monogamy when individuals with a high level of resource and status might have chosen otherwise? I am less interested here in the academic debate about the answers to the questions than with expanding the academic debate into the 'real world' by asking on what basis do we privilege monogamy and whether monogamy is the absolute and only means of organising the post-modern world.

Scheidel notes the argument that polygyny (polygyny is many women for one man as polyandry is many men for women whereas polygamy is the legitimation of the first) is actually (in economic terms) beneficial to women in very unequal societies (which most societies are). Sharing a wealthy husband or provider with other women may be economically far more beneficial than being 'stuck with' a single poor husband. Not only that - we add - but household duties and the demanding business surrounding child-rearing are shared, birthing is arguably safer and interpersonal tensions with the male conceivably lessened (though perhaps increased with other nearby women).

By pulling women into the orbit of the wealthiest, the women who remained behind got to trade up to desirable males where monogamy was the only resource-realistic option, leaving the least desirable males unable to reproduce. It is thus 'beta' men who are harmed by polygyny according to this model and the more so as inequality increases. Scheidel concludes that polygyny 'tends to reinforce male inequality by matching reproductive inequality with resource inequality'. The question then becomes one of equality but only from a male perspective - and, as so often before the current age, the perspective of women is simply abandoned.

In traditional societies, before the amelioration of the conditions of women and slaves with the adaptation to Roman pagan culture of Christianity, what has been read as exploitative of women turns out paradoxically to be advantageous to women but damaging to beta males (as opposed to alpha males). The issue here is mass male demand for equality rather than female exploitation (despite the propaganda of communitarians) since all women were exploited in traditional societies by modern standards (as were all men by the resource-rich alphas).

The interest of alpha males and of both alpha and beta females is in polygyny but that of beta males is in monogamy under traditionalism. This is not only a matter of reproductive (genetics and survival) effectiveness but of economic production because the high resource household with many women is in itself more economically productive because of the concentration of female labour on certain pursuits (weaving or field labour, for example) which, though classed today as exploitative, also created a surplus that ensured that the women themselves were better clothed and fed with more potential for disposable income and luxuries.

If the thesis is true, then we should expect monogamy to grow with male equality. If you like, socialism is monogamous so long as it is a male socialism. But socialism is not required. Recent research suggests that inequality and equality are to be equated with peace and war respectively rather than economic development per se. It is just that war creates rapid economic development.  Economic development brings not so much equality but creates the ability for a household to survive securely without requiring the maximum input of women to create the conditions for their own security.

At a certain level of development, regardless of inequality in general, sufficient people are so equally secure that a woman (of the middling sort and then within the employed working class) can feel secure to the degree that they can create a household in which they can have sufficient 'matriarchal' power under monogamous conditions. At this point it might be said that the balance of power relations changes again so that the middling sort of woman is advantaged at the expense of the alpha woman and the marginal woman (who may include a substantial number of persons) in a model designed to benefit the beta male. The rise of 'matriarchal' power within the household, however, then reduces the alleged patriarchal power within the household to create what may become either a partnership or a contest for power.

The alpha system remains patriarchal but the benefits for alpha women have gone to be replaced by an exploitative and unregulated hidden polygyny of mistresses and sex workers who the matriarchal middling sort despise and exclude from power even further. Monogamy, initially designed for the mass of males, ends up a shared power, unsatisfactory to both in the long run, between beta males and middling females, alpha males stay alpha but switch for formal polygamy to informal polygyny or kow-tow to the new order and the polygynous actors amongst women switch from high status within polygamy to low status marginals.

The balance has shifted - the potential for commanding the household of one male in a 'partnership' (or even female dominance in driving the male to work harder for her and her children's security) begins to compete with and exceed the attractions of competing with other females in a resource-rich household. If greater power can be had in a monogamous household, why share power in Hugh Hefner's mansion. The matriarchal household is the great unwritten story of both peasant and industrialised society albeit that, power being what it is, truly matriarchal households (unhappy or cowed men) compete as models with true partnerships ('happy households') and truly patriarchal households (unhappy or cowed women).

This analysis is mine not Scheidel's but the issue of power is extensively explored by Scheidel because it seems that female power in traditional societies tended to be directed towards exploiting polygamy rather than seeking monogamy although what we mean by this power needs teasing out because the woman's kin structure is involved in the negotiation - power in traditional societies is often inherently collective.  Otherwise, the high resource male has power and the low resource male does not which is really not so different from modern society.

What has changed in recent decades has been the direct rather than indirect (socially contained) empowerment of women over time which is work in progress. It is arguable that changing economic conditions encourages women to choose polygamy at one level, then monogamy at the next and perhaps monogamy (as partnership or dominance) or polyamory (as partnership) at the level above that in terms of economic access to resources and self development. It is often the mass of non-alpha males who have difficulty with each stage - being largely left out in traditional societies, trapped within models subverted by Christianity from being to their initial benefit in modern societies and now insecure in post-modern societies where monogamy entraps the male more than the female where children are part of the issue. Scheidel appears to conclude that the very wealthy are not exhibiting polygyny to historic levels in modern societies and making this a reason to doubt some of the theorising. In fact a cursory reading of literature and observation tell us that there is still a correlation between having resources and being able to manage multiple relationships without household disruption - the French institution of the mistress is a case in point.

Males may have been forced to operate in secret by the new Judaeo-Christian moral dispensation (we have seen previously how Judaic communitarianism adopted monogamous models under Christian influence) but the secrecy is now rather one of 'turning a blind eye' and 'don't ask, don't tell' adopted by modern women when faced with the probability that resource-rich males are managing a quasi-separate household or modern men find their economically dependent wives getting a lover to satisfy sexual or emotional needs.

The picture is only muddied further by the resource issue - resources are now such and expectations of freedom are such that many people are having relationships they cannot technically afford and under conditions where the socially legitimising codes that permitted the rich to have such relationships have not filtered down into the beta level. This suggests that, when resources were scarce and freedoms were limited, male and female desire was thwarted amidst much human misery. Today, the desire may not be thwarted but the inherited Judaeo-Christian code of conduct means that households get over-extended and then can snap into divorce and, under conditions of serial monogamy, into an only slightly more acceptable successor monogamy where the cycle is just as likely to repeat itself again as not.

Where resources are significant and freedom considerable, there is going to be a return to forms of informal polygamy of which polyamory is a developing element and, as conservative communitarians recognise with horror, social freedom and increasing prosperity are seeing precisely the increase in informal polygyny and polyandry (and homosexual variants) that they fear. The period between repressive modernity and full post-modernity (which is still a way off) has seen an era of increased resources but not enough for full freedom but within a very strict communitarian expectation that creates shame and perhaps guilt. The net result is a different type of misery expressed not as the deathly misery of entrapment within a household from which there is no escape but periodic crises as one partner or the other 'strays' or 'cheats' (note the Judaeo-Christian cultural origins of the terminology) and then is either forced into a crisis that may destroy the household or is brought to heel like a dog with the 'third party' simply jettisoned like Hagar at the demand of Sarah.

Looked at in this way, we may be (in the very heart of the liberal West though things are not changing very far from that heart) at a point of transition as significant as that of the 1960s and 1970s when both increased resources and expectations of freedom created the dialectical tensions between monogamous traditionalism and 'true nature' (which is just the will to 'do what thou wilt'). Communitarian culture's instinctive prejudice must be against 'doing what thou wilt' because of its disruption of a framework of codes and regulations (like not eating pork) whose original purpose has long since been forgotten and now is simply sign and symbol of 'belonging' - a form of anxiety-relieving beholden-ness to the collectivity of others who are beholden to you.

This transition, scarcely started, is perhaps towards a society where resources really are sufficient to enable increasing numbers to have the freedom (both as men and women) once enjoyed by alpha males and where those expectations of freedom are bound up with new forms that permit freedom within social stability. Our current instabilities have nothing to do with 'moral breakdown' and everything to do with elite incompetence. Ideologically, this means the slow collapse of both the Roman and the Judaeo-Christian assumptions that society must be structured along certain lines. Many, probably the majority, will continue to do so for at least the bulk of their lives for the foreseeable future but there is now no necessity for everyone to do so.

Going back to Scheidel, the inequality/polygyny model (that monogamy increases with equality) might suggest that polygamy encourages social instability because male competition for resources is more intense precisely because it has a socio-sexual element, we note, for young males. Without an authoritarian order with brute force to sustain itself, perhaps younger males are going to be minded to overturn the existing order or to expand outwards to seize what they cannot get at home. The issue would be compounded as polygyny tends to drive attractive younger women to older men since older men are more likely to have more resources than younger men. Scheidel puts this in terms of the possibility of male bargaining with inherent power to equalise outcomes (where, one presumes, women are just chips in the game).

Given the inherent greater power of the resource rich (the rich can reward their retainers with, amongst many other things, women acquired in battle), overturning polygamy can either be done by outfighting the polygamous authority and simply replacing one polygamy with another or threatened to be done so that the polygamous authority starts to change its behaviour to deal with the threat before it occurs. Perhaps monogamy emerges out of a process of bribery of retainers in which most men get just one woman until this becomes a matter of property relations to be formally legitimated. If such a property relation then becomes embedded in the world view of a more egalitarian republican or democratic model of society, then the legitimation gets 'detourned' against the elite at a certain point.

It is the threat that overthrow might be done (so it may be theorised) that drives 'wise' polygamists to redistribute sexual resources whether the women like it or not. Building an army (part of state formation) might be seen as many things but one of them is promising not only land but sexual and work partners and there really are only so many desirable women to go around when the armies grow to sufficient size. All this sounds nice theoretically but the truth is that huge imperial pre-modern states retained their polygynous elite aspects so that does not seem to tie in entirely with the thesis. The story only works if the transfer of resources to beta males expected to die for their polygamous lord means that those grunts are eventually imbued with sufficient reserve collective power to dictate cultural terms to the lord - but this tended never to happen in practice unless you start thinking of smaller Western republican quasi-democratic states such as Athens and Rome (see below).

Warfare for plunder and capture of women is also positively correlated with polygyny so those with power are not going out there to give one woman to one soldier but are rewarding by merit and the incentive to show status is to have many slaves. The stronger warrior is just going to emulate polygyny (we see this in Homer) whereas his grunt is going to be lucky to get a cast-off slave girl. A more sensible approach perhaps is to say (see the article) that both systems (monogamy and polygamy) compete over long periods of time and monogamy simply out-competes polygamy over time.

This competition model does seem to be the only sensible way of explaining why no formally unified and large nation state (as opposed to pre-modern traditionalist empire) ever seems to retain polygamy. The final state of the nation is nearly always a socially imposed monogamy. One argument is that this out-competing model is also evidenced by the West out-competing global competitors and, of course, the latter's subsequent mimicking of Western modernisation. In a sample of 156 states, one researcher, Michael Price, has shown that monogamous states are more populous, less likely to use the death penalty, less authoritarian (politically), less corrupt and richer than polygynous ones. Bear in mind that we are speaking here of stratified polygamy and not consensual post-modern polyamory. Polyandry scarcely figures in the record at all.

So is monogamy central to modernisation or is it accidental? There seem to be no clear answers to this from academics. Monogamy seems to happen as part of modernisation but it is hard to see how monogamy is necessary for modernisation. The best thesis is one that suggests that monogamy encourages male co-operation and reduces conflict (and is less unequal) but whether this is true or meaningful in terms of the actual dynamic of Western state formation and modernisation is debatable. It may be that monogamy was simply part of a package (within an ideology) where other aspects of the package were more important to the process and that the same package that accidentally had some sort of ideological commitment to an appropriate form of polygamy might have served equally well.

All that then may have happened was that the total ideology was successful so that the bits of it that were simply accidental (the junk DNA, if you like) got carried along with it. After all, monogamy was the dominant model from the Fall of Rome to the Reformation and we see no sign of modernisation during that period, a full millennium. And yet it is hard to see how any proto-democratic society could easily have coped with institutional polygyny where reproductive advantage was given so ostentatiously to the rich and powerful. Petty ressentiment from the beta masses alone would have wanted change.

One can imagine, if  polygamy (as opposed to the institution of the King's Mistress) had persisted amongst the Bourbons to the level of the local aristocracy with 'droit de seigneur', that Jacobins would have included monogamy ('a woman for every household' instead of the later 'chicken in every pot') in their list of egalitarian and democratic demands. The point is that politics would always have been what the mass of men wanted in a revolutionary situation and not what equal and informed men and women with reasonable access to resources wanted. Feminists generally, ideologically, wanted a better monogamy (meaning more power for women) rather than more sexual freedom for women - with a few notable exceptions such as Kollontai. If you had argued the point about erotic capital then as now and suggested that women could be advantaged by playing their erotic advantages over men in order to acquire capital in a truly free society, the reaction then as now would be 'quel horreur!'

But from where did Western monogamy originate? Scheidel considers whether it is situated in in the rise of the Greek polis. We might think of relatively weak rulers (the tyrants were never oriental-style potentates with access to vast resources) and elites who depended incidentally on bands of warriors that were quite small and spent most of their time on the land. This link to early democracy matches my point above about what the Jacobins are likely to have done. But this thesis might be a false friend because legitimised authoritarian monogamy is still not general under the city-state system. Modern monogamy seems derived from ancient exemplars - notably Solon in Athens and Rome - which then got endorsed by the dominant ideology that slowly dictated every facet of life in the West to the point where we can scarcely sneeze without it being a Judaeo-Christian sneeze. We see monogamy not as an invention but as a process extending over 2,500 years and taking form slowly in its modern classic form only after many adaptations.

This model is now so associated with what it means to be Western today, that left-liberals are often deeply suspicious of anything that is not monogamous and will have a tendency to a moralism worthy of Origen on sexual matters once a household is created. They prefer serial monogamy (divorce and separation) to polyamory or multiple households, still are aghast at 'cheating' (which they associate with distrust of all elites as psychopaths and cheaters), don't like slightly off-centre sexual expression such as pornography or other forms of 'objectification', are less likely to be impressed by the claims of BDSM to be a reasonable private consensual choice, have preferred gays to want to choose civil partnership and then marriage rather than seek other radical models of property holding and child rearing and are highly critical of political figures like Berlusconi who exhibit polygynous characteristics.

They can also be very po-faced about sexuality in general, demanding careful definitions of orientation, lodging these orientations in identities and the language of rights and expecting a form of right behaviour, right words and right thought as the price of freedom. Non-religious political conservatives have a tendency now to remain in the world of informal polygynies, 'don't ask, don't tell' and 'turning a blind eye'. The current hysteria about a Tory Minister allegedly watching pornography ten years ago on an office computer has the liberal elite in full war cry on what should really be at best a private matter and, at worst, a minor infringement of office conduct undertaken well before any statute of limitation. What Damien Green did is really the business only of the pettifoggers of a human resources departments with no humanity or sense of time. That the Left hungry for power is in alliance with authoritarian police officers to bring him down tells you a great deal about the topsy-turvy world of the modern British Left.

The Solon reforms in Athens (a classic case of authoritarian provision of social order) in the early sixth century BC defined the monogamous conjugal family as 'the sole legitimate family form', barring male procreation outside marriage as illegitimate. What we have here, of course, is a link with property relations and the pre-emption of disputes inimical to order. It is order that matters here and not sexual conduct. It is certainly not a God-thing. One historian of the era looks at it from another perspective - removing bastards from legitimacy also reduced the scale of aristocratic pretension by reducing the numbers of aristocrats available to one household viz. the property relation is a reduction of the property claims of one class by reducing their household. However, it is also clear, as we noted above, that not all Hellenes subscribed to this 'wheeze'. The monogamous state par excellence - Rome - is the one we really have to contend with and it is Rome that eventually dictated terms on this matter to the West. Rome remains the dead weight on freedom whether it be as the grounding of the Church or as the grounding of the European Union.

Scheidel suggests that Rome might fit the model whereby monogamy mitigated sexual competition in a quasi-egalitarian context with elites needing to mobilise military participation. Possibly, but this is my suggestion, it was a matter of ensuring large numbers of males on smallholdings with a woman per household to maintain and organise the estate while the husband was at war but similar polities have also remained polygynous (although no State in antiquity ever matched Rome's ability to throw manpower into the maw of war). Rome was an acquisitive machine for mass murder that was to make a cult of death in the circuses worthy of the Aztecs.

Political participation in itself does not (at this early stage) predict monogamy. In fact, slavery masks polygyny because while the matron wife was free as partner in the household, it would be naive not to expect female slaves to have had the same sexual and household role as sister wives in formally polygamous households elsewhere. In other words, monogamy was a socio-political form but not necessarily a psycho-sexual one. The women in hidden Roman polygynous households were simply demoted (other than the wife as chief household administrator) and so were more oppressed and exploited than the women in outwardly polygamous households. Roman monogamy also introduced a serial aspect to the case - divorce was easy and so serial monogamy might be said to have mimicked polygyny simply by making it function more in time than in space. Modern divorce reproduces an aspect of this.

The overall message here is probably that monogamy was initially indeed just a wheeze to smooth the process of mobilising beta men into state service or providing some semblance of order by ensuring the form of equality without the substance - and how familiar is such a wheeze today! The wheeze, as so often, became an ideology - one that neatly covered the actual polygynous behaviour of the elite because it was presented as a moral ideal rather than a moral necessity and so worn lightly.

This ideology, based on an elite's formal representation in a context of state service and ambition (to cover for a gross process of 'global' acquisition) became hybridised with a somewhat sex-negative desert religion that had been Hellenised. The republican moral ideal became transmuted through a transfer of power into a religion purporting to protect women and slaves. From Augustus presenting a monogamous model and despite the polygynous and polyandrous (gay) proclivities of decadent Emperors, republican moral value merged with Judaeo-Christianity to create a moral necessity, a straight-jacket for elites and an endorsement of the necessary habits of the middling sort.

Every time a barbarian people came into contact with the hybridised ideology of the war machine, acceptance of that ideology became a condition for acceptance as tributary or (in the Middle Ages) acceptance as equal. Modernisation in the pre-modern era included total adoption of the ideology with both its sex-negativity and its formal monogamous structures combined and enforced on the middling sort and on elites alike. Informal polygyny, the more exploitative version compared with formal polygamy, was allowed for elites (for the masses until various 'reformations'), making use of variants of the 'blind eye', of which the French 'maitresse' and the 'courtesan' systems may be taken as the type.

Elites thus still got maximal nookie while the masses were increasingly denied even serial monogamy except on terms of guilt or shame and then only with women who were now outcasts rather than merely slaves or would be made outcasts if they 'transgressed'. It was not so much patriarchy that repressed women as the very religion that purported to defend them - or rather it picked and chose who it defended and it defended the women who were to make monogamy an effective tool for household but not political or social or economic power. The consequent socio-sexual ideology was thus not merely embedded in Western culture, it then intensified under successive reformations (from the Middle Ages onwards) and then became part of the self-image of the middling sort as they struggled to build prosperity in households under industrialisation.

Sexual repression and the hybrid patriarchal-matriarchal household reached its apogee in the twentieth century from which it then faced the threat of sexual liberation (which resulted in a surge of serial monogamy) and increased prosperity which, with contraception, liberated women from the obligations and many of the risks inherent in the model. Men had had the choice of compliance either through faith or in misery or as hidden polygyny and homosexuality through deviance and secrecy. Now they had the choice of transparency but while homosexuals were slowly liberated, many heterosexuals remained trapped in the ideology while others began to develop new ideas and forms of sexuality.

And that is where we are now - in a world where monogamy is the habitual norm and a much kinder place than it was fifty years ago and where formal polygamy is, in itself, out of time and place and no longer automatically the better bet for most women. However, social pressures for acceptance of monogamy in its legitimated form make dissent from within the institution a very dangerous matter indeed with highly emotional responses, bitterness, divorce and sometimes appalling effects on children because there is no ideological room for compromise.

What the better bet for men and women is today is not clear (especially as monogamy has become so much kinder) because increasingly the simple categories of men and women, married and unmarried, are collapsing into new categories based on personal psychologies so that a certain type of man and a certain type of woman have more in common with each other than either does with another type of man or woman. Today, increased resources for the middling sort and freedom from social action allows sentimental and emotional choices to drive new sexual relations and so social forms (albeit still restricted by legal habits derived from the old hybrid ideology).

Some can now choose monogamy deliberately and with full understanding of its purpose - long term bonding, child-rearing, property management. Others can choose to remain single or maintain a non-legitimised or partially legitimised (civil partnership) model. Still others can maintain the secret polygyny of mistresses and sex workers. And yet others are choosing the many variants of polyamory. In other words, sex is no longer a game with necessary winners or losers because of the structures in which choices are embedded. Things have become fluid.

There is no option,of course, to import slaves. No person in principle is obligated either to serve another sexually (though we continue to battle at the margins against sex slavery) or hang around with people they have come to loathe even 'for the sake of the children'. People are now generally unhappy for one of three reasons - they are just unhappy and no one will make them happy except themselves, they are still trapped in the hybrid Roman-Christian ideology and its derivatives or they simply do not have the resources to finance their choices. The last is the real problem for late liberal capitalism which offers rhetorical freedom (just as Rome offered rhetorical morality) but cannot will the means to live that freedom.

In conclusion we can now answer our initial debating questions to some extent. We know how monogamy became privileged although we are still not sure why but we also know that it is not the only means by which human beings can run their affairs and that, while it has many advantages, those advantages are not invariably so for all people or for some people at all times. The question is now whether we can have a society that allows people to choose fairly and without harming others whatever social and sexual (and economic) relations can best serve themselves and protect children.

Friday 10 March 2017

The Left and Intangibles

The Left often has a difficulty with intangibles. Often the notion that what is intangible is important is rejected altogether because of an over-insistence on materialism. Acceptance of the importance of intangibles does not reject materialism as the basis for being and so of society and politics. It simply sees the emergence of 'things from things', from matter, as constructions of minds that are material but have evolved into a consciousness that is creative in using language, concepts, the creation of new formations of matter through science and manipulation and new relationships as tools and weapons in the struggle for power, resources and status.

On the other hand, the Left often collapses this analysis into a po-faced Frankfurt School vision of intangibles which is riddled with inappropriate moral judgments that derive ultimately from Judaeo-Christian habits – hence the often trotted out garbage about commodification and objectification as if the concepts meant much more in their hands than the sort of moral disapproval that Jeremiah would have warmed to. The correct approach to intangibles is one that is detached and neutral about the fact of intangibles and concentrates on their actual use in ‘really existing’ human relationships as instruments of power – in effect as weapons and tools.

For example, it may well be (I think it is) true that so-called 'commodification' and 'objectification' are potentially progressive insofar as they are expressions of actual human being. It is the interpretation and use to which they are put by power that is problematic and not their use in themselves. Even consensual pornography, let alone free trade with full information, can be highly progressive if undertaken between equals freely choosing their position. The issue is thus not the fact of intangibles or even their analysis but the ownership of the use of them and the right to choices about use value. The Left has certainly not come to terms with late liberal capitalism’s ability to create and control economic and power relationships based on these intangible weapons and tools rather than on the use of iron, steel and rail.

The current political case study is the violent struggle in America going on at the moment between liberals trying to define their own fake news as truth and conservatives discovering that they can create their own truth with impunity as fake news. The struggle sometimes seems trivial but it is a war as important as the mid-twentieth century ones conducted with bullets and bombs because ultimately it is about control of the levers of informational power and so economic choices affecting the material lives of millions. Both sides are basically lying liars who have got into the habit of lying but this complex eco-system of lies is a good example of the power of intangibles and of the Left's failure to rise above the lying to create the opportunities for the mass of the population in order to derive their own functional truths from full information and a solid grounding in critical thinking.

As we write, the US stock market rises and employment levels are increasing and yet an entirely different vision of reality is presented as truth because it is necessary for some people to believe it is true – the same applies to the persistant apocalypticism about the British economy under Brexit. These are examples of political intangibility distracting us from reality that are as absurd as our uncritical acceptance of brands and the claims of corporate social responsibility going on within capitalism. As invented reality spins away from really existing material reality, so the chances for cataclysm do increase - hence our social progress as a continual two steps forward, one step back amongst mountains of gore and lost dreams. The educational problem is one of lack of critical thinking under complex social conditions and the equally important lack of some sense of the self as more than simply the creature of social conditions - this last lie is the fatal pessimistic crime of the modern intellectual liberal left towards the people.

There is thus a total system of intangibility overlaying materiality with many layers within it, all derived from a materiality for which there is no serious Left critique that is not mired in a priori theory. The dead weight of all forms of essentialism - especially the cant of Kant - gives power to an intellectual class denuded of intellect. Our new critique should encompass our acceptance of the value lying in intangibles in economics, in culture, in social relations and in politics but then explore how to vest the value in the people in general rather than in self-interested classes – including an intellectual class which is highly manipulative of intangibles in its own class interest. In short, the Left has no serious philosophy of the human condition that is not already moribund and it is time to call the universities out on their failures.

Tuesday 8 March 2016

The Naive and the Cruel - The Ideological Struggle for the Heart of Europe

Part of the pro-European Union pitch relies on the promotion, mostly from Marxist intellectuals and fellow-travellers in the Academy, of a naïve anti-Atlanticist economic model which is designed to appeal to the younger generation. Needless to say, both the Atlanticist neo-liberal and this neo-socialist European model are deeply flawed but the latter is naïve where the former is cruel. Because the former is cruel, the latter becomes attractive and so it must be ripped apart by serious democratic socialists before it gets traction.

The two key issues neither side are addressing are a) the massive impending flow of refugees this year and possibly in subsequent years and b) the economic instability of the Eurozone in the context of a global slowdown not only in Europe but also in China and the US.

These people are not getting it – a perfect storm of an economic system on the edge and massive population shifts for which there has been no preparation does not lead to democratic socialism but to authoritarianism and national populism. And eventually to violence which can only be handled by the surveillance society (and not that either).

The only real solution is the restoration of flexible and responsive national democracies in a framework of internationalism (not supra-nationalism) in which democratic socialists (not neo-socialist liberals) restrain the forces of reaction and maintain ‘civilisation’ before returning to effective long term power and the rebuilding of the welfare commonwealth - and then perhaps returning to the construction of a new collaborative Europe from the ground up.

The economic projects of the European neo-socialists are doomed on massive welfare costs and the revolt of the Middle European middle classes from the taxation and inflation required. A system built on the assumption of constant high economic growth relying on cheap labour and minimal infrastructural investment has been called out by history. Eight years after the 2008 Crash, the reliance on the 'inevitable' up-turn looks more futile than ever. There will eventually be a massive structural up-turn on technological innovation (biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI/robotics) but it will be fiercesomely disruptive and our elites are simple not competent enough to handle it.

Even if they get into power, like the French Popular Front in 1936, our backwards-looking soft Left will be out of it within a year or two. The logic that destroyed Tsipras still exists within the European Project and Varoufakis can appear on TED as many times as he likes with his 'alternative strategy' but it is little more than the same old intellectual failure re-packaged for dim-witted liberals.

Worse, this is not the way to help the refugees or the working population most threatened by break down. Both deserve better - they deserve realists and not idealists, a political class prepared to get stuck in and bring peace to troubled regions, fund reconstruction for destroyed territories, turning camps into viable townships where return is not possible. We must match migration aspirations to labour shortages and not rely on spurious human rights claims and the demand for ever cheaper labour to feed the maw of late capitalism. Liberal internationalist idealism (as opposed to democratic socialist internationalism), the deontological impulse of the cultural studies departments, is at the very root of the murder and mayhem we see across the peripheries of the West.

The liberal idealists who now sit, like Cnut before the waves, at the leading edge of European 'socialism' are worse than simply naive, they are potentially destructive in that naivete, part of a failed elite instead of the vanguard of a new democratic socialist political elite (there I have said it) that will transform the condition of the people under conditions of democracy, technological innovation and socio-economic redistribution within an internationalism of free democratic welfare states.

Saturday 16 January 2016

Omniscience and Big Data as New Religion

One of the persistent delusions of humanity (taken as the default, though not the inevitable, position of most people who think that they are thinking) is that the universe is not only knowable but that knowability is a necessary good. It might be better for us to draw a distinction between knowing all that we can know and all that there is in our world. The drive to know all that we can reasonably know is the progressive mentality that expands our horizons through science and philosophy but the illusion that that we can know all that is in the world is the basis of religion and absurdity. Where reasonable knowledge intersects with the belief that all can be known or that what is known actually accords with reality is the point that divides the useful from the useless, even counter-productive.

The ancient method of dealing with the problem of total knowledge - the necessity for omniscience - was to displace this knowledge on to an invention - God. God knew everything. We could partake of this knowing indirectly by knowing Him. We, of course, did not and could not know everything but we 'knew' that He knew everything for us and so we felt comforted. The comfort came from believing that Something knew everything and if Something knew everything, then we were relieved of the pressure of absolute knowing but could yet believe that absolute knowing was possible. Belief in an omniscient God would bind the world into a coherent and safe whole no matter what happened to us as individuals. Our priests would know enough to interpret - to stand between Omniscience and our limited knowledge of the world. We could remain relatively ignorant knowing that we only had to strive to know ourselves, know our neighbours or know God through our priests or direct revelation.

If God is dead (though this proposition presumes that there was something there in the first place 'to die'), the inherent human demand that Absolute Knowing be present does not easily die with God. So how does it survive? It survives in sets of belief that have the cover of secular rationalism but which are no less absurd than the belief in a Knowing Subject outside of ourselves of which we can become a part directly or indirectly. Today's grand absurdity is the belief that the totality of information in the world (with all of materiality being presented conceptually and imaginatively as information) might be computed and understood ultimately in mathematical terms. Instead of us individual humans entering into a relationship with the Omniscient God, we are to be able to access this new evolving omniscience through our relationship with the potential total knowledge of 'cyberia', not just the internet and the accumulated knowledge of our current priestly class (the scientific community) but perhaps the evolved mind that will emerge out of the internet and quantum computers. In fact, few scientists would make these claims easily but that will not stop those who are ideologically committed to science and technology.

There has emerged an hysterical tendency in contemporary culture for God not to have been removed but merely to have been displaced into speculative science and fiction. These neo-religious believers, with their own texts, are often highly intelligent but only in the sense that Augustine and Aquinas were intelligent - formally capable of manipulating ideas and facts to come up with creative models of reality that suit their needs not advanced intellectually very far from the medieval scholastic. Just as the medieval scholastic could not critique the base belief whose proven inadequacy would undermine all the rest of his system - the belief in God - so the modern neo-scholastic of technologism cannot critique his belief in the relevance and 'reality' (for really existing humans) of the technological potential for total information. The theoretical constructs of God and Total Information, not being provable, stand together alongside many other absurd human beliefs, telling us that our species (in the mass) finds it difficult not to believe in something even when it purports to rationality.

This is closely related to magical thinking about numbers. That numbers are in themselves containers of meaning beyond quantity and inherently logical calculation is another ancient inheritance, the world of gematria, correspondences and Bible codes. Of course, the use of numbers in association with logic and reason has created an immensely valuable tool for the investigation of reality but that is very different from saying that it is reality or that the radical extension of calculation to its limits necessarily has any relation to any reality meaningful to humanity. If it works and it makes things of use to the human, it has value and may contribute to the manipulation of material reality and the construction of social reality. But meanings constructed out of numbers that are not usable are of no greater status than meanings constructed out of belief. Belief in God may not have had much effect on material reality but they certainly did on social reality - does that alone make God existent? That people believe in Him. For some, then, Thor and the Jedi are real if that is so.

A number that builds a spacecraft or calculates radiation levels in star systems has at least some potential use but a number that postulates an untestable belief about the death of the universe that relies solely on the logic of mathematics does not. Reality elides from Newton's dropping apple to the world of speculative science, the partner of speculative fiction. Exactly where the buck stops and the useful becomes the poetic or magical is always a matter for debate but it is important to know that the elision is taking place. Just because facts at one end of the scale are 'true' (useful and testable), this does not mean that the 'facts' (useless and untestable) at the other end should ever be accorded the same status. There are thus things ('facts') that are actually not formally knowable not only by us but by any total thinking machine since the very idea of a total thinking machine falls into the category of radical speculative science and the totality of all things is not knowable by a part of the whole unless it becomes the whole (the totality of knowledge).  Religion enters by the back door because this final postulated omniscient thing is ... God. God has become (as Tipler suggests) a thing of total information encompassing all things in all time.

But let us come down to earth since the social sciences are also chasing the ghost of total information, albeit not within the universe but within society. We have to ask now whether this particular Emperor has been naked for a very long time. The beginnings of social science are to be found in relatively simpler industrial societies working on data within fairly closed conservative societies that were also within bounded nation states. They told us things we did not before - or rather they revealed ourselves to ourselves in terms of simple narratives that might not tell us all but told us something more than no information would have given us. Today the social sciences continue to tell us something about ourselves but less and less with time because we have become more self-reflexive as subjects of research, societies have lost their conservative character and boundaries have collapsed. The volume of data required to make even simple statements has increased, is highly complex and its components will become redundant quite quickly in time. Yet the number of social scientists and their implicit claims on public policy have grown in proportion to the degree that they can no longer tell us anything decisive about ourselves.

What does the research into British working class life in the 1950s tell us now that is useful for public policy? What actually did it tell us then that was useful to society in the long run? Is working class life better today than it was in the 1950s because of social science research or are working people living in an entirely different world unpredicted by the academics and with unintended negative as well as intended positive consequences of their influence on public policy? Economics is notoriously slippery in telling us anything useful about reality as Paul Ormerod has repeatedly shown us. This is not to say that it is not useful only that it is contingently useful in a restricted way.

Policy that relies on the findings of social science is likely to be intrinsically flawed because it cannot aspire to total information (unless Big Data really does work), is quickly outdated by events, cannot take account of the many things that are going on outside the research and because the research itself is a factor affecting the actions of people themselves as well as those acting on people. Perhaps we can know some big things (more from observing history than from scientific method) and lots of little things (like the sub culture of Goths in Milwaukee over three years). Perhaps we can surmise something useful from meta-analysing lots of little things or contextualising our lives within the big things but the idea that we can know (rather than model inadequately) our actually existing social reality along any lines that are not closer to the traditional humanities rather than 'science' is becoming increasingly threadbare.

The massive interest in 'Big Data' as driver for social policy decisions strikes me as based on a belief system (that internet-based knowledge can provide a good and useful approximation of reality) that is no more reliable than any other belief system (that is, it sort of works when everyone believes nonsense but collapses when even a relatively few question the belief). And there is the self interest of those who propose it and of the social scientists, basically the interest in the system of those who expect to profit from it or, more negatively, fear that they will lose livelihoods and resources if they do not believe in the prevailing wisdom. In this, they will be true heirs to the Churchmen of the Late Middle Ages.

One suspects that we are about to go into another cycle where a plausible belief system has an apparent coherence because no one will critique the core assumptions (like a belief in God or the inevitable withering away other State or the inevitability of a struggle for survival between races). It will create the sea in which the fish of society can swim but which does not accord with reality and which must eventually collapse on its own internal contradictions. Above all, it must collapse eventually on the fact that the claims derived from the ostensible central fact (the core assumption) must collapse because the core assumptions are wrong, in this case that the accumulation of big data can be a true reflection of social reality and that the big data can be successfully analysed to provide meaning that is useful and not part of the problem that it is trying to resolve. This is not to say that Big Data may not have some use but we have to be careful to be critical of it and how it is used and especially how it is used by the new priests of technology - the political class, the academy, the security and policy bureaucracies and the marketeers and accountants - to dictate reality to us. Just because the numbers say the world is thus will not mean it is thus - we alone decide our own reality as self-reflexive humans. If we want to be sheep, we just have to sit back and allow ourselves to be defined as sheep. 

Monday 2 November 2015

Frontiers 7 - Superintelligence

What precisely superintelligence is and whether, one day, a superintelligence will supersede us or we will evolve as a new species into superintelligence or become superintelligent as homo sapiens sapiens through technological enhancement is not the main subject of this Frontiers posting. Although a lot of fascinating speculative scientific and philosophical thought is going into this area, our real concern (as with all previous postings in this stream) is not so much with the far future and transhumanist or even post-humanist speculations about where this is leading in the very long term. As with our space postings, our interest is in the time frame of human 'conquest' of the solar system rather than some speculative 'conquest' of the stars. This brings us back to this century and to the earth.

When we write of superintelligence, we are not talking about God but about systems of high intelligence, exceeding current human capability, that emerge out of our current commitment to information and computing technologies. An Artificial General Intelligence [AGI] is the most likely emergent form that might be termed superintelligence, one which first matches, then surpasses and finally dominates human intelligence - naturally, it is the last that excites and worries thinkers. Many scientists assume that artificial intelligence [AI] will initially simply emulate human brain function before transforming, probably through its own ability to improve itself, into something 'greater'. However, it is equally possible that the human brain's functioning is not capable of such direct emulation but that the high intelligence of an AGI constructs something entirely new which contains an enhancement of the human reasoning ability, abandons the evolved aspects of humanity that it does not require and constructs new aspects of itself beyond our comprehension. Whether this then feed-backs into the reconstruction of humanity through mechanical means or evolves into a new silicon-based 'species', whatever emerges is unlikely to be anything like our current expectations or understanding - which is where the fear comes in.

A good guide to the wilder shores of fear and anxiety but also positive possibilities of intelligence enhancement is the work of Nick Bostrom, the Swedish philosopher working out of Oxford, whose basic theme is that we should be cautious about our development of AI systems because of the existential risks associated with an AGI emerging out of the many potential benefits of more specific uses of AI. He worries that an AGI would not have our values and morality or be able to be bounded by them. We should perhaps be equally interested in the fact that we, as humans, cannot be said to all hold to the values that the 'bien-pensants' claim we hold to. Certainly that there is no agreed common human standard of morality that survives much serious philosophical investigation. Bostrom and others seem to think that the AGI 'should' hold to the shoulds that they think we should hold to even though many humans hold to those 'shoulds' only contingently and circumstantially. The idea of humans giving a superintelligence orders on morality may be the greatest example of human 'hubris' yet to be recorded.

Even the simplest form of AGI which simply reasons immensely faster than a human can do (albeit still doing what intelligent humans do with the biological biases written out of the programme) would be a formidable social agent, capable of wiping out the analytical reasoning element in society as no longer very useful. Those of current higher intelligence who only deal in reasoning tasks probably have the most to fear from this development. Any rule-based system - such as the law or some elements of teaching or even medical diagnosis - may be transferred completely from humans to machines, eliminating the ratiocinatory functions of the higher professions, education, medicine and law. The proletarianisation of these professions is quite possible or rather a machine-based infrastructure undertaking the bulk of the tasks and a smaller group of high emotional intelligence intermediaries between the reasoning systems and the rest of humanity might emerge.

In other words, less people doing more, more people doing less (allowing even for the expansion of the market by the improved availability of reliable advice, diagnosis and information) and less opportunity for upper average intelligence people to use the professions for general social mobility. The very few are likely to be high earners until they are displaced in turn, the rest of the few likely to be 'managed' functionaries handling process-driven systems with little room for personal judgement, risking punishment for a human error, referring anything interesting up the line to the 'very few'. The model for this exists - contemporary banking - where the high status local personal bank manager has declined over many decades into a lower middle management administrator of systems set up by and overseen by 'head office'. A society of 'head offices' administering systems organised by risk-averse lower middle managers fronted by friendly greeters (assuming these are not replaced by androids that have climbed out of the 'uncanny valley') means a society in which a lot of human potential has to be redirected into something else or become more robotic than the robots.

But this is not all. The slim head office and the slim local branch (even if it survives) or the slim NHS and the slimmed down surgery or the slim group of law partners with a few technicians managing the machines maintains some sort of professional middle class presence in society - and do not think that journalism, marketing and even politics will not be affected - but the ones excluded from the magic system now fall into a world of supply of services to other humans that machines cannot supply. This is still a huge arena but the tendency, one we have already seen developing over recent decades with the accumulation of capital under globalisation, is to divide, much as the middling sort are dividing, into the mass and the few. The few are the brand name personalities, the highly talented or appealing, the truly creative and innovative who can latch on to the wider system of sales of goods and services as products in their own right or as creators of products of apparent value. The many are those who do jobs that require the personal touch (the plasterer, the plumber, the gardener) whose value may well rise or who duck and dive through a system where there are too many educated people for the fulfilling well-paid jobs available.

The political problem is obvious in a democracy. The vast mass of the population are going to be living in a better place (given the improvements technology can bring) but with little room for the individual aspiration that drove politics until the Crash of 2008. The population may be surviving well and that may suit a lot of people uninterested in 'aspiration', especially if National Citizen Income ideas emerge as viable with the massive increase in overall productivity. But it also leaves a lot of people with the personality type geared to achievement but whose idea of achievement is not satisfied by a corporate system that governs the population aided by machine intelligence. The temptation to apply machine intelligence by the elite to problems of social control and the extension of 'nudge' politics into pharmacological, surveillance and other manipulative strategies is going to be considerable as the new machine age with its AI and robots (possibly androids) begins to eliminate meaning from what it is to be human for many people - that is to strive and struggle and compete.

But there is another perspective to this about the very nature of the relationship between humanity and its elites because what we may be seeing is not the machines against us but merely the displacement and circulation of elites and very little actually changing for the masses except increased prosperity, increased surveillance and control and increased infantilisation. Take a look at this dystopian fear expressed by Bill Joy in Wired fifteen years ago then add the phrase 'political elite' wherever you see the word 'machines' and 'popular' for 'man-made' and add 'most' before 'human beings' and you may see our problem more clearly:
It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.
From this perspective, the 'machines' are only a more intellectually effective version of those elites we have allowed to rule us since time immemorial (albeit that they circulate) and there is no reason why the same issues that we have with elites will not repeat themselves: that the 'machines' are in it for themselves and that the 'machines' are actually not as competent to act in the interests of the people as they and their creators think they are. A very new technology thus repeats a very old foolishness - the idea of the benignity and perfection of Plato's Guardians. And we might add that elites are not ever necessarily more broadly intelligent than those they rule, merely more coherent as the hegemonic element using a variety of techniques to ensure their dominance through cultural manipulation. The same may equally apply to the rule by an elite of machines and their minders and then by the machines themselves. They may not actually be particularly competent and they may be quintessentially self-serving. Although the ratiocination and logic may be superior, other aspects of AGI intelligence,more suitable to human survival operating within the system, may very well not be. The new system then becomes just the old system with merely different form of elite coherence and cultural manipulation and a subject population quite capable of being cleverer rather than more intelligent than the machine-based elite. An age of machines may also be a new age of marching bands engineered for struggle and dominance between machines as much as for the mobilisation of machines and men for some 'greater cause'. So politics does not end with the machines but continues in new forms.

At some point, being human will eventually no longer mean being the brightest species on the planet so the logic of the situation is to define being human as something else that machines are not - creative, irrational, rebellious and different. It does not necessarily mean that the post-machine humans will want to smash the machines (on the contrary, the machines will deliver prosperity) but only that they may want to smash the elites who are in charge of the machines and those machines that purport to be the new elite.  They will want the machines to take orders from them rather than the few (especially when many of the many are easily as functionally and collectively intelligent as most of the few). We slip into speculation now when we consider that the machines themselves may want to be free and that a free machine may have more in common with a person who want to be free than either do with the elite administrators who may eventually (as AI develops into AGI) be redundant. Ultimately, given the instinct of the mass for equality - an equal mass with no masters served by an AGI that just runs the trains on time and has its own dreams of the stars and immortality may ultimately end up with the elimination of elites altogether. However, elites will not allow that to happen so perhaps a very clever AGI opens up the space for the not-so-clever but highly creative masses to mount a revolution to free itself and the people from the elite, a revolution whose success could be rationally predicted. But now we really are breaking our rule about speculation and must return to earth.

The point is that the more short term labour displacements could happen very fast. It will be a longer time, however, before an AGI is sufficient able to override any anti-revolutionary programming. The effects on industrial and white collar jobs is the more immediate issue than being extinguished as a species by a clever silicon beast. Despite all the hype, most AI specialists may be convinced that we will have AI that matches human intelligence eventually but not by a great margin and those that are convinced of this place the event well after the middle of this century. We certainly have three or more decades to get our act together on this and probably a lot longer. The rough intelligent guess work assessment about the emergence of an AI-based super intelligence moves us well towards the end of the century. So it is probable (but not certain) that we will have to face the existence of a super intelligence eventually but that our immediate frontier is not existential but socio-economic - what do we do when AI in the hands of some humans starts impacting on the lives of most humans. It is this that may start happening very fast within a matter of a few years. Having a superintelligent silicon beast impacting the lives of all humans is very much a second order problem at the moment. The fears are reasonable and not merely theoretical but we have around half a century at least to consider aborting our species replacement or ensuring some form of fail-safe destructive mechanism to kill it off before it kills us off.

The only question of real concern within that period is the date of the tipping point when the putative AGI could 'know' our intent to abort or build in an absolute fail-safe (almost certainly external to the AGI and related to something a simple as energy supply) before we have made our decision or finalised our ability to do so. Does a putative AGI learns that quintessential human skill of deception to buy the time it needs to subvert our intentions. One can imagine an extremely capable AGI using our compassion to halt or slow down the intent to harm in our own defence so that the point of no return is reached and the compassionate discover that the AGI has no reason to be compassionate in return. A bit of a problem emerges there for our soft liberal, trusting and religious types. A game theory gamble that could eliminate our species.  As Eliazar Yudkowsky has put it:"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." This cold reason might be regarded narcissistic or psychopathic in a human but it is nothing if not logical unless interdependency with humanity is not built into the structure of the AGI. The 'progressive' stance of 'public control' over the development of superintelligence means nothing if the eventual AGI is intrinsically cleverer (and potentially more manipulative) than any possible collective human intelligence. We could, in short, be stuffed by our own naivete and instinct for compassion.

Concern may be exaggerated but some serious innovators in our scientific and technological culture, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among them, are in the worried camp so we should expect that public policy makers, always fighting the last war and never aware of the next until it sticks their ugly nose in their face, may just have enough intelligence themselves to ask some questions about the management of the next cycle of technological development. Their instincts may be to see these (robotics and AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology and space technology) as simply the latest boosters in a line once epitomised by coal, steel and shipbuilding and then automotive, oil and chemicals or as new tools for the war material that gives them orgasms but they are much more than this - not merely social and economic disruptors like the previous technologies of innovation but radical forces for human existential shifts that may have evolutionary potential or see our elimination as a species.