The Filter^

Protect and Survive

Or if Ricky Gervais isn’t enough, why not kick of your shoes, relax and listen to Peter Donaldson advising you to “stay in your own house” should Britain have received a Nuclear attack in 1975? Click the Audio link here.

Ricky Gervais

If Little Britain isn't enough, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/rickygervais and download the podcasts. Genius, as are the bears.

Little Britain

Enjoy three hours of Little Britian from BBC Radio 7 at the Filter^.  Download all 62 megabytes' worth of MP3, here.

Happy New Year!

Motorcycle Diaries

 

We watched the Motorcycle Diaries the other night (take a look at the Film trailer, have a read of the diaries, and check out Steve's previous post). As i'm sure you know it charts the formative journey that a young Che Guevara (Time 100, Wikipedia) took throughout Latin America.

The scenery, cinematography, and acting were all breathtakingly good, and it'd take a dogmatic pedant to fail to be enthralled by the film. But I know you all expect me to offer a "neo-liberal" critique, so here goes....

I don't have to point out the less savoury elements of Che's later exploits, but if he is your hero then take a look at Alvaro Llosa and Randall McElroy for starters. The iconic image of Che is a powerful (and wonderfully ironic) brand that has been paradied by Red Molotov (Thatcher), the Mises Institute (Austrian Economists) and myself at The Orange Path (Mises), my favourite being the Mickey Mouse ears one. Anyway....

My point is this: the entire film is a presentation of poverty, and the portrayal of injustice. It is marvellous, in that it impressionably documents harshness and destitution, and human conditions that should rightly be condoned, confronted, and rectified.

Throughout the film I was waiting for the presentaiton of communist theory, or some articulation as to just how Che intended to to solve this problem. It never came, and it never really does.

The left (broadly speaking) think that simply depicting hardship is enough to win the battle of ideas. It isn't - no-one really disagrees that prosperity isn't widespread enough, but the argument should be about the economic consequences of prospective solutions. Che and John Lennon are equally woshipped legends, who paved the way for the modern celebrity approach to poverty: presenting it within a frame of slogans.

My hope is that The Filter^ contributes, in some small way, to an approach that judges arguments on their intellectual and logical merit as well as their emotional content. And hopefully one day the left will have to do something more than just present a problem, without offering a systematic solution.

Youth, idealism, beauty: good
automatic communism: bad

Match Reaction

In response to this post where I put our recent poor results down to refereeing errors

I can't wait to see how you blame the ref for losing the derby

Well, we did lose the derby, and without Duncan Ferguson participating our chances were pretty bleak. They won the second ball, and were the better team. Regardless, how about this:

• Liverpool 2-0 up within 20 minutes. Both goals are scored by players who shouldn't have been on the pitch. Crouch pushed Lee Bowyer over in their last match, textbook red card. Gerrard then pushed Shearer, and threw a punch at Bowyer, the ref did nothing. In exactly the same situation in our game against Newcastle, Tim Cahill was charged by the FA and missed our next 3. (I'm blaming their previous ref for this).
• James Beattie had a goal disallowed. It was no further across the line than Crouch's goal against Newcastle. The linesman flagged wrongly.
• Phil Neville gets sent off for a tackle that was nowhere close to being a bookable offense - Sissoko jumped into the air of his own accord, it wasn't a bad foul.
• Mikel Arteta, another overly harsh second booking, but by this stage it was all over.

And this is solely looking at errors, rather than "bad luck" such as Gerrard's deflected goal. As soon as we lose of our own accord, i'll take a look at Moyes. Whilst our defeats are so clearly the conseqneces of referee mistakes, i've got faith in the present team to turn things around.

Illarionov Out

Andrei Illarionov, the maverick (and objectivist) economic advisor to Vladimir Putin has resigned (Interfax, WP). He cites frustrations of the corporate state as undermining his attempts to stimulate geniune reforms. It's a sad day for Russia.

Means, Ends, Enron and Stilton Cheese

All of our beliefs and expectations depend on our assumptions and values. If you think that society is complex, and that human freedom matters, you'll be (broadly speaking) classically liberal. If you think that society is pretty straightforward, and that human equality is important, then you'll be more swayed by state intervention.

This post isn't designed to convince people that society of more complex than politicians appreciate, or human freedom is a more moral goal than human equality. (There's plenty of that elsewhere!)

Rather, consider the responsibility of both sides of the debate in arguing for their favoured system despite widely acknowledged failures. I'd like to argue that the collapse of Enron, pails into insignificance when compared to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) deciding that "we're"* eating too much salt.

If society is thought to be complex, then it's impossible to centrally plan and coordinate what's going on. Therefore we need a system ("capitalism") that allows decentralized decision making (by individuals) and the aggregation of information (via a price mechanism). There are no "goals" to this system, since the goals depend on the individual participants: society is a means.

If society is thought to be simple - i.e. we can identify that certain people lack resources, and can redistribute from rich to poor at low cost without creating unintended consequences now or in the future - then we need a system that can maximise the goals that we desire: society is an end.

Consider the problem of "too much salt in the diet". The "means" approach is to declare that we can't know each individuals dietary requirements, therefore they're in the best position to decide how much to intake. I might currently be eating too little salt, in which case I need to eat more. This may or may not be the same as the national average. Hence the social system is seen as the human body is - self regulating. Drink some water, and piss it out.
The alternative is to take the problem of "too much salt in the diet" and jump to an end "reduce the salt intake". We then see bureaucrats constructing elaborate guidelines, targets, action plans etc to ensure that the end is met. Ultimately, some foodstuffs that have high salt content - such as Stilton cheese - faces possible mandatory regulation, that would effectively ban the product.

Now, compare the following arguments:

1. Statist to Liberal: Look at Enron, you bastards!
2. Liberal to Statist: Look at Stilton, you bastards!

I would answer 1 by saying something along the following lines:

A1: (liberals response)
Firstly, I'm not sure the ins and outs but with any company of this size I expect they had some form of political power that disrupts analysis somewhat. Regardless, the general point is that Enron's collapsed cost a lot of people a lot of money, but they went out of business. This is a good thing. The whole point of the market economy is that good behaviour is rewarded, and bad behavior's punished. Despite the unfortunate consequences of this case, it demonstrates the positive role of competitive forces, and will ultimately improve corporate governance.

I imagine that a statist would answer 2 as follows (all i can do here is imagine. By all means help me out)

A2: (statists response)
OK, this is a little silly. Stilton will survive, and the right-wing press are just grabbing headlines to the detriment of the real public health issue: that too much salt is a bad thing, and many people are eating too much salt. For example school children have especially high salt content in their food, and all this policy is doing is increasing awareness and improving health.

I think these two examples demonstrate the points about means and ends. The (classical) liberal shows how bad outcomes are to be expected in a complex world, and so the issue is how they're treated. Rather than just sack the Minister, but let the Department remain, the entire corporation has gone under, taking it's accountants with it. This is an almighty lesson, and the very case that is supposed to undermine the market economy shows how important learning is. As a system of means, utopia is not expected, nor advocated.

Compare to the statist, who accepts that this particular scenario is nonsense, but because the greater end is so very important it's worth it. The actual case of Stilton cheese is therefore ignored, as the argument turns to the core issue of slat intake. It's accepted that these issues will arise, and few attempts are made to curtail them. The end of lowering salt intake trumps all. Notice also the rhetorical ploy of referring to children. The statist is using their own organizations (public schools) as examples are problems, never getting the irony that they themselves could well be the cause of high salt intake (if you've got a monopoly why not make a shitty product - that way you can sell the fixers as well). And remember, Stilton is a fair cost for the sake of the children. How can those "right-wingers" be against children!

By all means, contend my characterisations.

This issue pisses me off especially since one of the chief reasons I'm looking forward to coming home is to have access to affordable, quality cheeses. But I do think it points to a big difference in the foundations of left vs right debate. A means system won't create perfect outcomes, and doesn't try to since there's no way to judge what "perfection" is. But bad outcomes serve an important purpose to improve the chances of good outcomes emerging. An ends system will create disasters (such as the loss of stilton) for the sake of the bigger ends. And it's very hard to pin down a statist and discuss these bad outcomes, without them trying to turn the debate back to their larger point.

 

 

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* "We" as in English people. As with all government departments, the action is localised to within national boundaries. The implicit assumption is that "we" matter more. see here.

What History Should be Taught?

I'm with Tim: economic history.

Kerry Packer (1937-2005)

"There is a little bit of the whore in all of us, gentlemen. What is your price?"

The story of Kerry Packer, (who died yesterday), is fascinating. He was Australia's richest man, and an avowd cricket lover. When he realised that top players weren't receiving a full salary, he created World Series Cricket - a rival cartel that enticed the world's best players with huge salaries. It spawned limited overs, televised matches, innovative camera angles, brightly coloured uniforms, and massive popularity for the game as a whole.

How apt that his beloved Australia has since reinvented Test Cricket with aggressive, attacking play, and the legacy of WSC has been the resurgence of both forms of the game, and a very happy balance between the two. If Twenty20 continues to become successful, it too will owe it's vision to Packer.

It's only natural to compare Packer's actions with the influence that Rupert Murdoch had on Premeirship football, when 20 English clubs broke away from the Football League to create a new division for the sake of TV rights, and higher pay. The move came under the banner of excitement and novelty, and has seen an increase in popularity (at home and abroad), but most people acknowledge the detriment to lower league clubs. As an active participant in the lower levels of English football's pyramid, my judgement of Mr Murdoch isn't kind.

(An aside: When the "Big 5"  - Man Utd, Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal & Tottenham - were negotiating the television rights of the soon to be formed Premier League, ITV were hot favourites. Under Greg Dyke they'd already had the rights to top flight football, and all the Chairmen expected them to continue. A surprise occurred, when Mr Murdoch at newly formed Sky managed to deliver a last minute bid that beat ITV. I believe it was a sealed auction, and several attendees were suspicious of how Sky knew what ITV's bid was. During the final stages of the bidding, the Tottenham Chairman - Alan Sugar - had left the room. He was the CEO of Amstrad, a firm that had an exclusive agreement to supply the satellite dishes required for Sky TV. If Sky didn't win the bid, Amstrad would have gone under. The suggestion that Mr Sugar phoned Mr Murdoch to reveal the ITV bid, merging his roles as Tottenham Chairman and Amstrad CEO, is pretty convincing. For more, see this book.)

As the aside shows, there's a clear difference between the Premiership and WSC. Kerry Packer was a dominant actor able to break through the existing system and create his own. It then acted as competitive pressure to turn around both forms, for the benefit of all. A breakaway league in football would be very different. Chiefly, this is because it's hard to envisage an alternative form (in terms of rules etc) that would get a crowd going. I don't think 5-a-side is a solution. 90 minutes of 11-a-side is sporting perfection - there's no scope for an entrepreneur to improve, regardless of the audience. Consquently football will evolve gradually, with technologies and traditions implemented slowly, and power and control seeping to media over the course of many years. 1992 saw English football breakaway, and we're still to see a European Champions League that truly dominates domestic football.

Kerry Packer was an Australian, and stirred things up a little. His legacy to the game of cricket can never be rescinded, and everytime you see Adam Gilchrist (or, I suppose, Mr Flintoff) slug a magnificent six the leather ball will apear destined for the man in the clouds who made it all possible.

p.s. Yes, their websites are an accurate indicator in the gulf in class between Gilly and Freddy.

Indifference

What's the opposite of love? No, not hate - it's indifference

Pain is good, because it makes us realise that we're still alive, albeit barely. (Probably from here). That thumping heart may now hurt, pounding away, but it shows that we care. We were there last week, we'll be there next week. If it didn't hurt, we'd pack up and go home. Sadness and happiness are much the same, and result from our participation. The opposite would be absence and an altogether different phenomena: indifference.

We can only act out of joy or misery, and they come together. Without the highs, there'd be no lows. And without either, there'd be no action.