Curious

Thursday, 23 January 2003 (Day 41)

The first time I learnt about experimental economics was back in the days when I was vainly striving to turn myself into some kind of economist. The prescribed text for second year microeconomics was Heilbroner's Hirshleifer's Price Theory and Applications. The first micro lecture for the year was interesting. The lecturer was a new arrival and was taking over the course for the first time. He hadn't had any say in the selection of the text and apologised for the fact that it was so bad. As it was too late for the text to be changed, with it being listed in the faculty handbook and all, the best he could do was to assure us that there would be a new text the following year. As I struggled with Heilbroner Hirshleifer, I at least had the consolation of knowing that other students who came after me would be spared the same struggle.

In most of the book's chapters there were those little coloured boxes where authors of texts like to present interesting information which is outside the main argument of the chapter, but nonetheless relevant. Heilbroner Hirshleifer had an especial penchant for presenting animal behaviour studies which supported the economic theory he was presenting. There was a remarkable amount of it, drawn either from laboratory work using the techniques of the famous psychologist B F Skinner or material drawn from zoologists' field studies of animal behaviour. The classic experiment in this field at the time was a study of microeconomic consumer price theory, using Skinner's rats and stats experimental methods: in more mainstream economic texts it was treated fairly dismissively, but not in Heilbroner Hirshleifer. I was inspired to pull the economics journal where the article first appeared and read it. It was the most woeful scientific article I've ever come across, at least from the point of view of someone educated in the biological sciences. If it ever appears on-line I might indulge myself in the luxury of fisking it but don't hold your breath.

Reading this article, with all its deficiencies, led me to develop an interest in their other publications most of which I managed to track down. One was a study of wage theory, using (much to my surprise) the same experimental set up that was used for the study of consumer price theory. It's amazing the insights you can get into human nature by putting rats into confined spaces where they receive a reward for pressing buttons.

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Equally amazing are some of the insights you can get into human social behaviour, by putting people into artificial situations and observing their behaviour. The classic examples of this approach are two experiments in social psychology from the US. In one, the subjects were told by the researchers that they were participating in an experiment on human learning. A rigged draw was conducted to divide the experimental subjects into instructors and students. The students (who were all actors) were to be trained in some simple task using the technique of negative reinforcement: each time a mistake was made the instructor was to administer an electric shock. The more mistakes the higher the voltage. None of this was real: what was being tested was just how far people would go in obeying authority or exercising power over someone else. The second experiment involved setting up a simulated prison in the basement of a campus building: it had to be stopped after 24 hours because the warders were getting a little too enthusiastic and the prisoners a little too oppressed.

Neither of these experiments would get past a university ethics committee these days: they're used, in the teaching of research ethics, as classic examples of what not to do (at least they are according to my social researcher pals). But that hasn't stopped this idea being used by television producers - it's the whole basis of reality TV shows, such as the egregious Temptation Island which pretty convincingly demonstrated that when you take people out of their normal social environment, with the unrecognised supports and constraints which make their relationship work, most men will start thinking with their dicks and most women will start thinking with the female equivalent. Especially if they have the encouragement of a sleazy presenter showing them carefully selected video footage intended to convey the impression that their partner's brain has already flown south into their underwear.

All of which makes me skeptically curious about this article (link via John Ray) based on an experimental study with results which suggest that people will accept impoverishment themselves if they are given the chance to impoverish others. Here's the first paragraph:

The countless individuals who are at the receiving end of irrational malice from their lessers will agree with me that an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature. [my emphasis]

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From this auspicious beginning, the very comely Ilana Mercer launches into an attack on income tax as an expression of this desire of the socially inferior to tear down their betters. After a brief resume of the experimental protocol (participants were given random amounts of cash: by sacrificing a little of their own, they were able to purchase the "right" to force someone else to sacrifice theirs). In her final paragraph, Mercer proposes her idea of a fair solution to the tax problem:

... the least toxic tax is probably a poll or head tax, where all are taxed equally. Let the poor set the rate. This will sever the blood supply to the metastasizing state like nothing else.

Less for the "federal Frankenstein" is also less with which it can facilitate human wickedness.

Of course there's something resembling argument in the middle but as the resemblance is purely accidental I hope you'll excuse me if I ignore it.

What I'm curious about is the experimental study itself and if anyone can provide information on it I'd appreciate it if you'd drop a comment or an e-mail. I'm also interested in whether anyone has studied the opposite hypothesis: that most people might be prepared to accept others getting richer as long as they genuinely stand to get richer themselves in the process. No, that's a stupid idea - forget I brought it up.

Afterthought: Mercer's home page has this quote from Proudhon:

Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order

I wonder if she knows that he's also the "Property is theft" guy.

- *** -

No Bag Limit

Wednesday, 22 January 2003 (Day 40)

Today brings the welcome return of hero-columnist Janet Albrechtesen to the opinion pages of the Australian, with a piece on John Howard, the feminist hero. Here's the first paragraph:

ANOTHER black armband unravels. Long depicted as the Antichrist on women's issues, John Howard has once again proved to be the quiet achiever on behalf of women.

There's plenty more where that came from, so it looks like this year's Janetism season is off to a fine start.

Fool for Love?

Tuesday, 21 January 2003 (Day 39)

Living in Melbourne, I haven't been personally affected by the Canberra fires and offhand I can't think of anyone in Canberra that I dislike intensely enough to wish their homes had burnt down. Even if there were, there's something a little tacky in finding that sort of consolation in major catastrophes and people tend to be unimpressed when you make such sentiments public (link via Tim Dunlop).

So I spent this morning trolling the news sites looking for something else to write about and, two days behind the times, I found this report from the Sunday Herald Sun at News.com. It's about Jack Thomas, the Al-Qaeda "suspect" and loser who was arrested recently in Pakistan. Thomas has been helping the Pakistani authorities with their enquiries: under Pakistani law he can be held without trial for up to a year so he may be doing so for some time yet.

The report provides a lot of background on Thomas that's been missing from most of the coverage so far, including the fact that he was arrested while boarding a plane for Melbourne. Once there no doubt he planned to give our lads in trenchcoats the slip once again just as he did when he left Australia in 2001. According to family friends, he first converted to Islam for much the same reason that some people convert to Catholicism: so that the love of his life would consent to marry him. Perhaps now he is feeling that this was about as wise as it would be to make scurrilous allegations about the character and behaviour of dingoes while camped at Uluru.

Today's good news, for Thomas anyway, is that the Australian High Commission in Pakistan has been granted consular access to Thomas so he might not end taking the magical mystery tour to Guantanamo Bay, unlike Mamdouh Habib. This isn't going to please anybody who believes that this is the best place for Australian converts to Islam but I say stuff 'em: it's the only way to make a good straw man.

Opinion Piece of the Day

Monday, 20 January 2003 (Day 38)

Jocelynne Scutt reveals the most offensive aspect of our most recent sad day for cricket in today's Australian. Much against my will (it's going to cost me my new position in the Ozblogistan Thought Police), I'm forced to say that this is a sad day for commentary.

A Brief Note on the Blog Roll

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

I've made a few overdue additions to the Blog Roll: Rob Schaap's blogorrhoea, William Burrough's Baboon (where I am described, quite gratifyingly, as "an unassuming assassin of the neo-comfortable") and, by way of penance for past sins, (The very real) mieka von samorzewski. The inevitable link to Aussie Blogs is also there too albeit in a form which is not quite the official Aussie Blogs HTML.

More on Dynamism

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

Here are a couple of new ideas for you: I'd like to claim that they're totally original but humility and intellectual rigour dictate otherwise. Change is the only constant or, if you prefer a more metaphorical expression, you cannot step into the same river twice. The future is inevitable, so we might as well learn to get along with it. Don't worry, it's not the historically inevitable crisis of capitalism and the ensuing dictatorship of the proletariat that's inevitable: that future clearly hasn't happened and we can safely say that it has been indefinitely postponed. The future is definitely a capitalist, free market future and probably democratic as well, and it's already here. Or it will be once those boring stasists have been pushed aside and the way is open for the full flowering of the dynamist vision.

As I indicated that I might, I'm revisiting Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies. On reflection, I think that the least fatuous thing to be said about this tomelet is that the title would more properly read Virginia Postrel's Preferred Future and Its Enemies (that's a dangerous petard to leave lying around and no doubt I shall be hoist by it in due course). As Postrel herself admits:

There is in fact no single future; "the" future encompasses the many microfutures of individuals and their associations. It includes all the things we learn about ourselves and the world, all the incremental improvements we discover, all our new ideas, and all the new ways we express and recombine them. As a system, the future is natural, out of anyone's control, though it is driven by the artificial: by individual attempts ... to fashion realms of personal control.

Anyone read A J Ayer on Marx? Ayer notes that just because a particular future is historically inevitable, it does not follow that it is morally right and suggests that faced with an inevitable but morally appalling future, the best thing to do might be to oppose it. By the way, this comes from a philosopher who believed that voting for the (British) Labour Party was something that was worthwhile although he wasn't able to give a logically positivist justification of why this was so. Postrel manages to go one better than Marx:

The dynamist camp has the opposite problem [to the stasist camp], and the opposite strength. Although fewer in number, dynamists permit many visions and accept competing dreams. To work together, they do not have to agree on what the future should look like. Their "central organizing principle" is not a specific outcome but an open-ended process. A dynamic future tolerates diversity, evolves through trial and error, and contains a rich ecology of human choices. Dynamists are the party of life.

Well, that's alright then, but you begin to wonder why it should be necessary to write a book about it: especially a polemical work which argues that the technocratic left and the reactionary right should leave the future the hell alone. Still, Postrel's statement of the dynamist position, means that I can, in good conscience, declare myself a dynamist even if in working out my own version of an acceptable dynamist future I end up with a preferred microfuture which requires political and social measures which are diametrically opposed to those supported by other dynamists. As long as I'm in the party of life, rather than the other party, I can't see that it really matters.

This Week's Reading and Other Matters

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

This week the Potemkin is moored in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, where I'm baby-sitting a dog. She's a Jack Russell Terrier - the archetypal small nervous dog. This week's Age colour supplement has a profile of Jeffrey Masson, author of The Truth About Dogs, who has been roundly criticised for wildly anthropomorhising and sentimentalising evolution's most successful grovellers. In any event, I'm keeping an eye open for any signs of dominance behaviour: It's hard to think of anything sillier than letting a Jack Russell think that it can run your life.

I have a couple of books here to fill in the idle hours - Manning Clark of course (another chapter or two and I might be ready for the next installment of the Tugboat History of Australia) and one other, where the author poses this question (among others):

How is it then that we have fallen into taking seriously someone like the economist Milton Friedman who walks about equating, in a silly, indeed an immature manner, democracy with capitalism?

Apart from that the bookshelves are full of old "boys' books" from the 1960s, full of stories in the Magnet and Boy's Own Paper tradition where no dialogue is complete without at least one ejaculation, you know the sort of thing:

"You filthy Hun!" ejaculated Biggles.

Of course word order is critical here, otherwise the literary effect can be spoiled by an unintended double meaning which is quite ludicrous. Especially if Biggles happens to be giving his joystick the usual heavy workout.

Around the blogging traps, I notice that Scott Wickstein has blogged on Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in Left vs Right, or Statist vs Dynamist? If this is a sign of movement in the BlogGeist, I'm weeks in front, for once, but not entirely averse to revisiting this topic. But first I have a small, nervous and slightly overweight dog to walk.

Counting the Days

Thursday, 16 January 2003 (Day 34)

According to my quick calculations, it's now 34 days since the Howard Government pulled the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 because Parliament wouldn't pass the bill in its original form. I've decided to adopt a new dateline (as above), to keep track of the number of days that have passed since this event without a major terrorist attack within Australia. I'm hopeful that I won't have to reset it to zero before Parliament resumes.

A Word from the Pot

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Jack Thomas shot to prominence yesterday, 11 days after he was arrested by police in Pakistan. He's already caught the attention of Tim Blair, who speculates on what sort of loser Thomas will turn out to be, and Wogblog, where this article by Daryl Melham gets a serve.

Now clearly the subbies at the Daily Telegraph, Tim and the Wog are privy to facts that I haven't been able to get hold of: get past the Tele's headline "AUSSIE TRAINED WITH AL-QAEDA", and you'll find the word "alleged" occurs throughout the report. Granted, allegations from the Pakistani police have to be given more weight than allegations from the New South Wales Vice Squad, but at this stage, they're just allegations: not proven fact. Thomas hasn't even been charged with anything yet: he's just been helping the Pakistani police with their enquiries. For 11 days. It wasn't until last Thursday (5 days after he was arrested) that the Government learnt that he was in custody.

The wog's gripe with Daryl Melham is that Melham thinks the Government should do more than just wash its hands of Thomas, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib (Habib's circuitous journey to Guantanamo Bay is described here). According to the Wog, insisting that, as Australian citizens, Hicks, Habib and Thomas are entitled to consular representation and a little more effort from the Government to protect their rights is

So stupid. Guys who end up giving themselves names like "Jihad", or go a-fighting in Afghanistan, or live comfortably in Oz with their families but do not mind leaving wife and kids behind to go back and forth over the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, at a profoundly lousy time in those nations' histories, are not common criminals.

Uncommon criminals is what these folks are.

Very uncommon criminals who can be convicted of a crime by the press and public opinion, without the inconvenience of a trial.

Like it or not, Hicks, Habib and Thomas are Australian citizens and whether the government likes it or not, it has obligations to all of its citizens, not just the ones it approves of. It has a duty to respect all of our rights, not just the ones we need to retain to preserve the belief that we are more civilised than our enemies. As a famous Australian once remarked, you can't cherry-pick the Australian way of life. That goes for governments as well as immigrants.

More Broken News

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Man dies from mishandling cock.

Now, this is a heirloom.

New Blog

Monday, 13 January 2002

To my renewed embarassment meika von samorzewski has started a blog. One of meika's links is to this piece on dumb blondes which I would be pleased to have written myself. As I didn't I shall have to be content with the nit-picking observation that meika has overlooked the famous Wella Effect which accounts for the rarity of dumb brunettes.

Draggy Bits of Australian History: 1788 to 1795

Monday, 13 January 2002

[This post is the second part of the relaxed and comfortable Tugboat History of Australia (thanks to Gareth Parker for the title). The first part is here. It's another multi-part post, so feel free to add comments wherever you feel they will be most relevant].

The past is like a foreign country: between the highspots and major landmarks there's a lot of sometimes picturesque, but mostly boring, countryside to cover dozing uncomfortably in a cramped seat on a tourist bus. To cover this terrain the hero-historian may be forced to resort to the resources of his local library. There I found Volume I of Manning Clark's A History of Australia, which I'll be using to get through the years from 1788 to 1806, when not a lot happened, give or take the odd spot of malnutrition and debauchery.

I admit that Clark is probably not the most reliable source: he's known to have been one of those lefty "fellow traveller" types that BA Santamaria used to excoriate in his weekly sermon on Channel 9, Point of View, during the 60s and 70s and there were allegations that he was awarded the Order of Lenin. So we shall have to take much of Clark's description of the early years of the new nation of Australia (or New South Wales as it was called then) with a grain of salt. Sea salt obviously, as rock salt may be a little suspect under the circumstances.

From 1788 to 1792 the growing nation was governed by Arthur Phillip, a Keatingesque visionary who believed his mission was to lay a foundation for a prosperous free society. In this he was at odds with the convict mainstream, but like Keating he had the support of the nation's intellectual elite, the officers of the garrison. To be fair to Phillip the convicts' notion of relaxation and comfort was some distance from our modern notion: despite the efforts of the Rev Richard Johnson, they remained largely untouched by the pneuma of the Graeco-Christian tradition and preferred the Secular Humanist theft ethic to the the much more productive Calvinist work ethic. Any notion that comfort and relaxation were the evening rewards of a day's hard work, rather than a natural right, was alien to them.

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It is hardly surprising then that the new nation did not prosper as it should under Phillip. Due to bureaucratic bungling in the purchase of supplies for the First Fleet, the agricultural tools provided for the first settlers were totally unsuited to the environment. Government farms were set up to provide food for the first citizens of Australia but there were, unsurprisingly, numerous crop failures and petty malfeasances which impeded efficient food production. Relations with the natives were strained and not improved by Phillip's attempts to demonstrate the clear superiority of European culture and British justice: despite being invited to two public floggings, the native pre-Australians remained unimpressed. However as many of the natives were carried off by a smallpox epidemic in 1789, the issue of race relations was a relatively minor problem.

Faced with numerous difficulties, Phillip realised early that the nation building enterprise was doomed from the outset, unless an aspirational class could be encouraged to develop. He therefore wrote to Lord Sydney in 1788, proposing that free settlers be allowed to emigrate to the new settlement. This suggestion was, quite wisely, adopted, however the parlous situation was not relieved until Phillip returned to England in December 1792 and Major Francis Grose took over as Acting Governor. On his departure, Phillip took with him two natives Bennilong and Yem-mer-ra-wan-nie and two unnamed convicts who, according to Clark had "conducted themselves to his satisfaction", although it would be unwise to read too much into this statement.

Grose realised that the growing economic demands of the new nation could not be met by a Soviet style command economy based on the government farms and moved to outsource food production. Since land was plentiful, Grose made land grants to the officers of the garrison and the more respectable free settlers. He also encouraged the development of a free market economy by allowing the officers to engage in trade, buying up the cargoes of incoming vessels for resale to settlers and convicts.

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These years saw some significant arrivals: John MacArthur in 1789, Samuel Marsden in 1794 and the Irish. Transportation of Irish convicts began in Cork in 1791. As the (unofficial) relaxed and comfortable preamble to the Australian Constitution says:

The Australian nation is woven together of people from many ancestries and arrivals. ... In every generation immigrants have brought great enrichment to our nation's life.

Of course that enrichment has not always been initially welcome and so it was with the Irish, whose Catholicism was regarded with suspicion by the, largely Protestant, educated elite of the new nation. However, the Protestant work ethic was as alien to them as it was to the rest of the convict mainstream, and there is plenty of evidence that in this case, the new arrivals had little difficulty assimilating.

February 1794 saw the transportation of the first Lefties to Australia, with four of the five "Scottish Martyrs": Thomas Muir, the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Maurice Margarot and William Skirving. The fifth, Joseph Gerrald was transported the following year. Their removal to Port jackson may have benefited the social order in England but whether their influence would be beneficial for Australia remains to be seen.

Grose resigned as Acting Governor in May 1794 and returned to England in December of that year, leaving Captain Paterson in temporary charge of the settlement under the title of Administrator. He was replaced in September 1795 by John Hunter of whom I shall have more to say in the next installment. Right now it's time to find a convenient roadhouse where the passengers can stretch their legs while the bus driver takes a much-needed leak.

- *** -

End of Week Blog

Friday, 10 January 2003

With two blog-free days coming up - although I'll be working on new posts, they're unlikely to go up before Monday - I'm just going to note a couple of interesting news items from yesterday.

The first is that Britain has joined the world's roster of alert but not alarmed nations with the discovery of a home laboratory producing ricin, one of the world's deadliest posions:

While it is 6000 times more toxic than cyanide, ricin is not an effective poison for mass weapons because it has been proved to kill people only when injected or ingested rather than just being sprayed into the open air.

The most famous victim of ricin poisoning was

Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was killed on a London street in 1978 by Bulgarian government agents who apparently jabbed him in the leg with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed for people to be (you guessed it) "alert but not alarmed". No doubt the British police are now on the look-out for suspicious umbrella-wielding islamic types.

The Pacific island nation of Nauru is in the middle of a political crisis with the ousting of President Rene Harris after losing a no-confidence vote in the Nauruan parliament. The Australian Government maintains that this has nothing to do with Mr harris' decision to accept thousands of asylum seekers who were originally bound for Australia. They're probably right: Nauru is a caring compassionate nation, much like Australia and there's no reason to suppose that asylum seekers would be any less welcome in Nauru than they are here.

And now, since Gareth Parker at least has noted that the relaxed and comfortable Tugboat History of Australia is going to be a series, it's time to get off-line for a couple of days and work up the next installment. Thanks Gareth. And there's still that John Howard piece that I sort of promised Ken Parish to research.

Bunk is History

Wednesday, 8 January 2002

One of the issues that has arisen in the dispute over hero-historian Keith Windschuttle's assault on the orthodox account of Australian history as a continuing massacre, is the need for a history which emphasises nation-building. Such a history would not be a bad thing: a relaxed, comfortable history may be just what an alert but not alarmed nation needs. It has one other major recommendation: just as Sellars and Yeatman (authors of 1066 And All That) were able to declare an end to English history once the US assumed the mantle of "top nation", Australia's history of nation building has its own logical end, sometime in the 1980s with the widespread acceptance of the idea that the best use for a nation is to get rid of the archaic bits that interfere with the operation of the free market and either sell off or rent out the rest.

Such a history shouldn't be too difficult to write, either. Most of the basic facts are available on the web in one form or another, easily found through the web scholar's favourite tool, the Google search. For the rest, the hero-historian can call on the same intellectual resources as the hero-columnists and hero-bloggers who will argue the truth of his (or her) account of history against the deliberate falsehoods of his more "scholarly" adversaries. So I see no reason why I shouldn't undertake the important task of filling this cultural vacuum, however presumptuous it may seem.

Key Events in Australian History: the Sailing of the First Fleet

May 13, 1787: First Fleet sets sail from Portsmouth.

July 1, 1787: Convict George Michael [no relation] on The Prince of Wales, former pickpocket and amateur accordionist, begins composition of a new ballad to commemorate the voyage, under the working title Tooralie, Ooralie, Addity.

July 3, 1787: After complaints from fellow convicts and members of the ship's crew, Michael's accordion is confiscated and thrown overboard.

July 7, 1787: Midshipman David Beckham [no relation], of The Prince of Wales, reports the possible theft of his comb which he alleges was in the pocket of his pea-jacket when he went below to inspect the convict quarters.

July 8, 1787: After a search of The Prince of Wales' convict quarters, Midshipman Beckham's comb is found in the possession of George Michael, along with several sheets of tissue paper which were not itemised in the ship's manifest.

July 9, 1787: Convict Michael sentenced to 20 lashes at the ship's mashead, sentence to be carried out on the following day.

July 10, 1787: After receiving 20 lashes at the ship's masthead, Convict Michael sentenced to 10 more after calling the officers of The Prince of Wales "a bunch of bleeding philistines". The sentence is carried out immediately.

26 January, 1788: Fleet arrives at Port Jackson. Convict Michael is among the first convicts put ashore, to rousing cheers from his fellow convicts and the ship's crew of The Prince of Wales.

27 January, 1788: At the direction of Captain Arthur Phillip, Master-at-Arms William Hague [no relation] of the Royal Marines makes the following speech to the assembled convicts of the First Fleet:

Right you lazy buggers, there's supposed to be a nation here in 200 years and it's your job to build it. So get off your lazy arses and get cracking.

The great task of building the Australian nation was officially begun.

A Random Thought

Monday, 6 January 2002

Preaching to the choir may not be very effective but it's preferable to pleading with the firing squad.