The Filter^

Simon Jordan

This post has nothing to do about the Birmingham match, but I wanted to mention Simon Davies - a class act, who's currently stuggling to exert influence. He strikes me as the type of player that requires the team around him to be playing well, and won't take the game by the scruff of the neck and up the tempo himself. Hopefully, the corner's been turned, and we can have top half players in a top half team.

I just wanted to poke attention toward Simon Jordan's Observer column. Jordan is the Chairman of Crystal Palace, and speaks about the game with a rare flash of reality. In this article he talks about young Southampton star Theo Walcott:

Theo told the media he's 'ignoring' the transfer talk for now because 'my parents will help me out with that - and so will my agent.' And what does his agent reckon? 'He's an ambitious lad... he'd be very flattered to speak to clubs like Arsenal and Liverpool.'

The worst thing about this boringly familiar pattern is that the pushiness, the kudos-chasing, the desire for an instant move almost never starts with the player.

And who's the agent? Yes, you've guessed it, Mr Paul Stretford.

Jordan speaks no nonsense, and also takes on the media:

I'm always surprised by Selhurst's reputation. Where's worse? The boardroom at Withdean is a scout hut. And if you want to build a stadium out of pop rivets and MDF, go and look at the Den. At least 60 grounds should be in that list below us. So why do the media relish slagging off Selhurst so much? There's one big reason: the media facilities aren't that great. And why's that? Because the media have consistently had a go at me for the last five years, so I took their biscuits away.

He even provides a wake up call for us fans:

Why has none of the blanket press analysis this month pointed out that ticket pricing is actually so low in top-level football that it's economically unrealistic?

Here's the key accusation: clubs are charging high prices for a laboured product because they're run by greedy, short-sighted morons. OK, there are a few of those in football, but the majority are doing an impossible job well. I keep hearing the phrase 'fans pay the players' wages', but fans need to know gate receipts don't come anywhere near doing that.

In football, as ever, reality is not optional.

The Rise and Decline of Nations

This summer Faith and I went on a beach holiday in France with my mother and father; my brother and sister-in-law (and their daughter); and my sister and her boyfriend.

I noticed that the younger the couple, the nicer their towels were, even though the older the couple, the wealthier they were.

How can the wealthiest couple, have the scankiest towels?

Towels are fairly durable goods, and I presume that most people won't replace them anually. Indeed we've been using the same ones for years, but there's a certain time at which it makes sense for the children to all buy their own. The youngest will buy theirs later, and so they will have the newer towels.

One of the greatest books in the field of Public Choice - or Political Science itself - is The Rise and Decline of Nations, by Mancur Olson. The book is a grand narrative,  and covers a history of the c20th century through the lens of his interest group theory. The basic idea is that over time special interests obstruct the functioning of an economy , and become embedded within the system. He claims that Germany and Japan enjoyed post WWII growth because their sclerotic institutions had been wiped out, and they could start from scratch.

In other words, there's more to politics than what is immediately visible. Underneath the surface of a mature democracy will lie a complex web of lobby groups and hindrence. This is important, because it tells us why revolutions are almost always exaggerated. Single moments can produce monumental alterations in the direction of government, but we overestimate the lethargy of the system within. One year after the Orange Revolution, there is frustration. It is to be expected.

There are two types of policy: quantitative, or structural. The former will take the existing system as given, and manipulates economic variables toward a specific target. The latter sees the economy as a complex ecosystem, and try to alter the dynamics of the underlying institutions. Mainstream macroeconomics is typically the former.

Notice how the Flat Tax debate in the UK is usually grounded in projections of taxation incidence, based on current income levels. In Estonia, it was seen as a part of a broader alteration of the relationship between citizen and state. This is because if policy is to stick, it must be compatable with the foundational institutions.

Olson offers us hope that a country can have a fresh start, but it's easy to simplistically assume that a new President is all that's required.  A revolution may start with a flash, but it's ultimate success rests in the gradual and arduous task of structural policy.

The BT (or Post Office) Tower

The BT Tower recently celebrated its 40th birthday.  There is perhaps no more potent symbol in the whole of London of the values of public service and technological innovation that so characterised the 1960s in Britain than this building. In the bluish heat of our own communications revolution it becomes all to easy to ignore the achievements and utter pluck of another age, of a time in which Harold Wilson’s Labour government believed in public investment in such buildings and faced the future with a determined, steely gaze. Today’s Labour government, facing the present with a furtive, duplicitous sneer, has derived no small amount of fame from its own interest in the uses of communications, in all senses of that overused word.  Pagers, of course, were the devices so beloved in the heroic age of the spin-doctor, used to spectacular effect by the Labour Party machine both before and after the 1997 election victory to ensure that all players on the Westminster stage were kept ‘on message’ so as not to perturb unduly the already-petrified horses of Middle England.  Emails have rapidly replaced personal diaries and papers as a source of the kind of explosive revelations that can destroy careers and keep the tabloids fed for days, most famously in the case of Jo Moore and Stephen Byers at the Department of Transport whose leaked electronic notes proffered the opinion that September 11th 2001 was an unmissable opportunity to ‘bury bad news’.  All sorts of government services can now be accessed and used in some way online, from asking NHS Direct if your headache is actually a brain tumour to paying for your tax disc.

The change in the 40 years since the then Post Office Tower was erected goes a little deeper than the rapid evolution of communication technologies and the swapping of names and fascias on the side of the building.  Aside from the fact that the present Labour government isn’t now at all the same sort of institution that would use political capital and taxpayers’ money to invest in such a major piece of public infrastructure (or at least one with such an evident, worthwhile utility - something fatuous would be just fine), a more fundamental shift has occurred.    Government has changed from a provider of telecommunications (and its attendant structures) to a user.  The privatisation in the mid-80s of the General Post Office’s telephony offshoot, British Telecommunications, began the process of liberalisation and competition in the sector that is finally beginning to justify itself with rival companies being granted control over the most important telecoms wires – those that stretch between your home and the local exchange – to provide a genuine alternative to the former monopoly provider, BT. I welcome this competition with gusto, especially as it has enabled me to see that doing business with anyone other than BT is a stressful waste of time and a lesson in incompetence and stupidity yet to be rivalled by any other provider of a private service I have encountered.  Wanadoo and Bulldog take note.

In the new world order of privatisation, deregulation and competition, I am, however, moved to ask the very unfashionable question of ‘who is in control?’  The BT Tower was built because of a pressing need to process telephone data, terrestrial television and satellite broadcasts through a nodal point in Britain’s telecommunications network.  BT still owns the tower, obviously, and large swathes of the fixed-line network are still owned and managed by BT whether or not the data being carried on it is destined for one of its customers.  So the network, largely, remains in monopoly hands with regulation from the ever light-of-touch Ofcom.  But it is not in public hands, and the broader question remains at large.  If no single party can lay claim to the ownership and management of the telecommunications network and there is no commercially disinterested public body involved in the decisions regarding major infrastructure, can telephony ever achieve such beauty again?

The architecture of telecoms certainly reached its aesthetic apotheosis with the building of the Post Office Tower.  Where now mobile phone masts are placed, sheepishly and unattractively, on the tops of tall buildings, or else disguised as monkey puzzle trees in more sensitive rural locations, the Labour government of 1965, under the auspices of the GPO, took an unapologetic stride into the future with its sleek, modern mast in the heart of central London.  There was, presumably, no reason at all why the functional need for such a tower couldn’t be fulfilled by a structure in an outer suburb of no repute, or perhaps in some forgotten stretch of Essex along the Thames estuary where only some forlorn marsh birds would have noticed its arrival.  Instead, there was a self-evident and noble attempt to make flesh in the most prominent position imaginable a vision of a modern Britain, communicating efficiently and with contemporary flair both within its own borders and with the rest of the world. 

The architects (Eric Bedford and his team at the Ministry of Public Building and Works) were exceptionally bold in their usage of motifs now closely associated with a particular brand of 1960s modernism; most memorably, perhaps, the circular shape of the plan, but also the materials of gleaming steel, opaque glass, roughly-textured mosaic and, not least, the integration of functional elements of the structure into the overall aesthetic result.  Indeed, it is the satellite dishes clustered in their white and dove grey colonies of various sizes that strike one most vividly, for there can be no denial of utility in this building.  On the contrary, it is in the modernity and cultural ambition explicit in a telecoms-mast-made-skyscraper that gives the BT Tower its authenticity, its integrity and its aesthetic value.  So honestly is this a functional structure, and so honestly a statement of public confidence in modern architecture, modern communications and a modern society, that it must stand in value alongside the finest examples of 19th Century engineering in the capital – the railway termini, the sewerage system, the Underground, the public baths, gasometers, glasshouses and innumerable other innovations that were conceived in the public good and remain for our admiration to this day.

The tower retains its role as a reminder of a more culturally ambitious time, perhaps even more ambitious than the Victorian epoch that spawned so much of the technological innovation that laid the foundation for our continuing progress.  There remains, in both the form and continuing use of the building, a loud echo of the zeitgeist that was imbued into its very construction.  The Space Race that was such a driving force in scientific inquiry may not have included Britain directly, but 1965 was the very heart of an era in which all developed societies were intent on exploring both the theoretical boundaries and cultural impact of new technologies. The architectural historian Reyner Banham, writing in the late 1950s, writes how western society evolved from the effects of the Industrial Revolution into what he describes as the ‘First Machine Age’ when, at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, every strata of society began to be affected in their everyday lives by the practical, physical applications that earlier industrial innovation had wrought – cars, telephones and electric lighting being in the vanguard of this ‘new’ revolution.  The Second Machine Age was, by the 1960s, gathering its own momentum as computing and communications pointed towards an almost invisible technological future, one in which wealth generation depended on the networks and machines we could not see rather than the fossil-fuelled brutes we could; belching road traffic and gargantuan factory machines being merely a legacy of old technology.  Microwave communications were an exciting strand of these new technologies – but what form can be fashioned from invisibility?  In the fine tradition of Modernist thinking, a practical need was translated into positive action so that the physical demands of high frequency radio – that the waves had a transmitter and receiver – were met in a sublime fusion of function and form. 

Here is a building that proclaims its usefulness by its slender, tall, dish-studded form, and yet in being so confidently a mast becomes also an evocative symbol, more powerful than a mere tool.  Symbolic of a socialism rooted firmly in contemporary thought, of a political ambition for the public good, the tower is monumental in very many ways of a dormant political philosophy and now distant cultural milieu.  Built in its cylindrical form because it was noted that the buildings which survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb explosions were mostly circular (able to deflect the force of the blast by their aerodynamic shape), there was an intention of permanence in the building, a hope that a nuclear atrocity need not disrupt government communication and the furtherance of British interests and values in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  The hoped-for permanence has lasted 40 years to date, and an English Heritage Grade II listing order on the building two years ago will no doubt aid its future survival (at least in the face of non-nuclear threats), but the physical legacy of the tower is but a mausoleum for the ideas that fashioned it. 

In the economy of the future, indicated today by the phenomenal success of companies such as Google, eBay, Yahoo! and all the other dotcom miracles that create jobs, wealth, technological innovation and a sense of progress, what place does architecture have?  The real architecture of the future is in the software that powers my writing and electronic publishing of this piece, and in the microchips that help run it all.  There are, of course, labyrinthine layers of physical infrastructure that underlay the electronic shop window of the web-based commerce and technology, but I doubt there is a will to make any of this beautiful.  A warehouse, a building to house a computer server, a low-rise office block in Silicon Valley – none of these structures need to be well designed because they don’t have a public, they need communicate no message.  The ultimate products of our own machine age are screen-based, and so long as customers respond well to their web experiences then the companies that provide them will surely make money.  The desire of the public sector to contribute positively to the built environment appears to have dwindled alongside its abandonment of technological innovation to those parties who prioritise commercial success over the public good.  It is certainly in the public good that the world around us all, the reality beyond the screen, is beautiful in a way that does not deny our needs but neither denies our humanity.  Useful technology made beautiful for all is what the BT Tower achieves, and its example should be followed.

Halloween 2005

(L-R) Gavin Ekins, Matt Mitchell, aje, Nick Schandler, Colleen Berndt

I am in America, and Halloween is something more than local scallies throwing eggs at your windows. In less then 48 hours there's a party brewing, and I need costume ideas. The criteria are as follows:

• Sheer terror (spoken with the intonation of Ret. Sheriff John Bunnell)
• For a couple
• Simple enough to create in one evening, using current possessions

Last year (pictured) I was Arthur Kipps, and Faith was the Woman in Black. We performed an adlib rendition of the play late into the night - alcohol somewhat diminishing from the acting - to an audience of three.

Simon, Arc, Melua: A triptych

Recently I gave up listening to music on short journeys, particularly while walking to places. I read an article in The Guardian about i-pods, and in it a professor claimed that the current trend of filling every moment with music  was distracting us from from what we should be engaged in: deep reflective thought. I agreed, partly, though I enjoy listening to music enormously, and time spent on buses and trains seems like the perfect place to do it. I gave up. I made my regular walk from my flat through the leafy streets of south Manchester to the University Campus deeply entrenched in thought, occasionally tripping over a squirrel or slipping on wet leaves. I enjoyed myself, I chatted amiably with me, I concocted and lived many fantasy lives in my head. I learned not to walk underneath horse-chestnut trees in late September without a hard-hat, found puddles immensely engaging.

I gave up. This time I gave up not listening to music whilst walking, and my brief spell of abstention left me refreshed and eager for new listenings. I popped 'The Best of Simon and Garfunkel' into my tragically archaic "mini-disc" Walkman and walked, ignorant of squirrels and puddles alike.

I heard again:

All my songs come back to me

In shades of mediocrity,

Like emptiness and harmony.

I need someone to comfort me.

Now, previously I had heard this punctuated as above, with a full stop after harmony, the last line being on its own. Thus the meaning being that his songs are mediocre and consist of emptiness and harmony; because of this he needs someone to comfort him. This is of course rather critical of the song lyric itself, the song has melodic harmony but is empty, it has no meaning or soul, perhaps the words are just superficial. It becomes cleverly self-critical, the lyrics say that lyrics have no meaning, but of course these lyrics do have meaning, they convey their own meaninglessness. Crikey. Harmony, music, is no comfort either, it has no value without meaningful words and the only escape is the thought of another person, some human contact. The last line alone sounds desperate and disillusioned.

This time though, the break came after mediocrity, and the quatrain was split into equal halves. This time he clearly said "Like emptiness and harmony, i need someone to comfort me". The implication is very different now. There is no reference to the emptiness of lyrics, harmony is someting that comforts just like a person can. It now suggests the benevolent, soothing power of music that can quell the despondent spirit.  I think i like it better this way, thanks professor.

The point is that listening can be an active process that induces a deep, reflective thought process. It's not just a lazy, passive pastime akin to playing 'I-spy' on long car journeys. The lyrics in pop music often present us with dazzling layers of meaning, word-play, humour, imagery and the like, they're not all emptiness. Sometimes they can relate, playfully to the music. Take these lines from a song by Chicago band Joan of Arc:

we fall into patterns quickly

we fall in patterns too quickly

The syntax alters slightly, retaining the same word sounds but altering the literal meaning; just as the rhythm shifts slightly and forms a new pattern using the same melody. The meaning of the sentences reflects this process too, the lines and music become a pattern as they are repeated several times. Sentence structure and musical structure reflect literal meaning of words and vice-versa. Its very playful, very modern, and I think provocative of much thought. I like it a lot.

Unfortunately this playfulness and imaginative word use has not fully permeated the ultra-mainstream yet, as is clearly illustrated by Katie Melua's recent song "9 Million Bicycles". I believe that this song has already provoked a backlash from academia, claiming certain vague estimates to be "facts" when they are arguably not. i guess this is poetic licence though. i can't stand the song myself, i find its lyrical content rather trite and superficial. But, there might be something going on below the surface that we don't at first notice. Let's take the following lines:

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing, that's a fact

Like the fact that i will love you till i die

Now, the bicycle image is of course indicative of mass poverty in china's capital. The equation of 'love' with the notion of 'fact' seems to suggest a poverty of spirit or of soul, and the whole enterprise itself is steeped in an ingrained poverty of imagination. Good so far. These 'facts' are of course very wittily played off against the 'fact' that Katie will never have to go anywhere near real poverty due to the fortune she makes from the hit song. She's bloody brainy for a girl.

Hong Kong and China Photos

Have a look at some of the pictures we took in Hong Kong, Yangshuo, and Shanghai this summer here:

http://thefilter.blogs.com/photos/hong_kong_china/

The Minimum Wage

Economics has generated various laws - a priori truths - that are unarguable. Demand curves slope downwards, always, everywhere. People act purposefully, without exception.

A curious case of economists' wisdom arises when people talk about a minimum wage. We know, as a matter of theoretical truth, that minimum wages increase unemployment. Depending on how you measure it, this can become obscured, but it is unarguable. There will be less working after a minimum wage then before.

That's not to say that some people don't benefit - those lucky enough to keep their jobs will - but it's a bad policy. Hence politicians need to abuse the ignorant with rhetorical gimmicks, for example referring to it as a living wage. I mean, who can argue against that! It implied we're advocating a "non-living" wage, or a "dead" wage...

I don't mind non-economists' being ignorant of economic arguments, but surely politicians should know the facts? Well, maybe they do know the effects of a minimum wage. Alex Tabarrok reveals that:

It's no surprise that progressives at the turn of the twentieth century supported minimum wages and restrictions on working hours and conditions.  Isn't this what it means to be a progressive?  Indeed, but what is more surprising is why the progressives advocated these laws.  A first clue is that many advocated labor legislation "for women and for women only."

Progressives,..., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race.   Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.

Unlike today's progressives, the originals understood that minimum wages for women would put women out of work - that was the point and the more unemployment of women the better! 

 

And this is the interesting thing: pretty much every economist - the experts on this issue - knows that minimum wages are bad.

However, in 1996, in a study by Card and Krueger, an empirical claim was made that the introduction of a minimum wage in New Jersey did not reduce unemployment. Since that massive finding, the study was replicated and it's become known that the orginal survey asked the wrong question (they asked how many jobs had been lost, rather than how many hours had been reduced).

Isaac DiIanni has sent me the original responses from two exemplory economist's, following Card and Krueger's article. It's from the Wall Street Journal, 25th April 1996:

The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that "water runs uphill," no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.
James M. Buchanan, a 1986 Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor at George Mason University.
---

Years ago, economists used to believe there was no such thing as a free lunch. Some now seem to have found one, however, in the proposed increase in the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage by law above its market determined equilibrium, they argue, actually costs nobody anything. (Or at worst, costs nobody very much because it's only a small, marginal increment, after all.) Is all this too good to be true? Damn right. But it sure plays well in the opinion polls. I tremble for my profession.
Merton H. Miller, a 1990 Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.

House of Lords

What's the point of the House of Lords?

Well, it's to provide a constitutional constraint on the House of Commons. It's to ensure that popular will isn't meekly bowed to by unprincipled politicians, or that popular will isn't neglected by overly-zealous ones. In short, it's to slow things down a little, and that's a good thing.

Some people object to the anachronistic class system that it reflects, but my question to them is this: who else will perform the function of holding Parliament to account? Democracy should be a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

From The Telegraph:

Charles Clarke is expected to amend his plans for a law banning incitement to religious hatred after peers inflicted a huge defeat on the Government last night.

Peers voted by a majority of 149 in favour of an opposition amendment that would drastically change the contents of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.

Tim Worstall says it best:

It’s because at times both the popular will and those elected to implement it are completely and totally foolish. That’s why we have the second House, to stop such nonsense.

No, democracy is not the be all and end all of the political system. Freedom and liberty are, and often need to be defended from the former.

Riga Images

LSC's Riga Tour wasn't so much about images but sounds - though some of these shots reflect something of the time we spent in the Latvian capital. They're generously being hosted by The Filter^, which was our official Media Partner for the tour. If you're interested you can view them here http://thefilter.blogs.com/photos/riga_2005/.

Private Property

The issue of private property is a classic example of the schism between left and right. As ever, I think the political argument is governed by the economic one, and that when discussed in these terms it becomes pretty conclusive: private property is indespensable.

The actual debate is between Rationalist Utilitarians and Austrian economists. The former believe in a "social welfare function", and take a static snapshot of a country to view the income inequality. If they conclude that the poor value an increase in wealth by more than the rich would hurt by a decrease, then Total Utility will rise if we redistribute. Consequently private property rights are a tool to create a more optimium society.

There are many reasons why Austrian economists, or classical liberal Political Scientists reject the notion of a social welfare. Mainly, it's because a society doesn't act - only individuals do - so analysis should be methodologically individualist (i.e  the methods of analysis focus on the individual). The main difference is that private property is not seen a a current condition susceptable to arbitrary reallocation, but an institution that has evolved to enable peaceful existence. They solve the tragedy of the commons, provide an incentive to make secure investments, and facilitate exchange. Trade can only occur with defined private property (since I'd only buy a car if I know it's going to actually be mine), and therefore they're a foundation for economic growth and prosperity.

It annoys me when people associate private property with the rich, and ignore the immense importance they have for developing countries to develop. I urge those people to think of an economy not as a machine that produces an output that must be divided by some Planner, but a rainforest - a dynamic ecology of creativity.

In this debate at S&M, I'm trying to make a similar point, and explain the bedrock of a free society:

Chris: "What if someone who was a planner were to say that the gains from re-allocating property were to outweigh the losses from disturbed expectations?"

AJE: I'd ask what his unit of measurement was. How the hell can you discover and compare this information? Without private property there's no prices, without prices there's no method of profit/loss and hence no basis for calculation.

What is your unit of analysis to compare people's expectations?

Instead of assuming that all information is given to the planner, Hayek showed that information is dispersed and often tacit. Prices are the means to generate and convey this information - without private property, it doesn't exist.

Another comment suggested a book: Property and Freedom, by Richard Pipes. Also make sure to read the works of Hernando De Soto.

Since I do believe that liberty is engrained within us all, aren't the egalitarians just as appalled as I am that Washington DC Mayor Anthony Williams has confiscated land to build a baseball stadium?

The District government filed court papers yesterday to seize $84 million worth of property from 16 owners in Southeast, giving them 90 days to leave and make way for a baseball stadium.

Under law, the property owners and their tenants must vacate the land within three months unless a judge declares the seizure unconstitutional.
(Washington Post)

Isn't such an act unegalitarian? Isn't it an abuse of political power to seize people's property? I'm not saying that land redistribution is always wrong, but the left have two choices. They can admit and advocate the principle of private property, and within that view make cautious cases for the violation of property under certain cicumtances, or they carry on with an unscientific Utilitarian socialism. If it's going to be the latter, please be honest to admit that your politics is driven by envy, you have no care for the poor and weak, and you reject economic wisdom.

Ignorance isn't a crime, but persistant ignorance - from intelligent people - is deplorable.