There is, so to say, good news and bad news for democratic European Unionists. The good news is that, for the first time, voter turnout actually increased from the previous election to the European Parliament. Just over 43 percent of the eligible bothered to vote, up 1/10th of 1 percent. The bad news is that so many of these voters selected parties devoted to the destruction of as much of the European Union as possible.
We are laughing, up here in the High Doganate. Or rather, no, we are not laughing, it is all a pose. Still, there is a glint of recognition, gleeful in its own way. The voters, especially in England and France — the pioneer “Nation States” from the later Middle Ages — appear to have been motivated by something akin to the feist that came over the municipal electorate in the Greater Parkdale Area, the last time we voted. That was when we chose the notorious drunkard and drug addict, Rob Ford, to be our mayor. As polls since have repeatedly confirmed, we knew what we were doing. We had a task for him. It was to destroy as much of the vast municipal bureaucracy as possible. Our instruction was: “Keep smashing everything you see until they take you away.” Finesse would not be required, and the licker and crack might be an advantage.
One may love “the people,” without being especially impressed by them. They are stupid, but as the stopped clock, there are moments when they are stupidly correct. These are very brief moments, but let us enjoy them while we can.
David Warren, “Hapless Voters”, Essays in Idleness, 2014-05-26.
May 28, 2014
QotD: The voters
May 27, 2014
QotD: What capitalism should do now
Just as democracy can be corrupted by repressive populism, so can capitalism be perverted by “rent-seeking” — when people seek to gain more than the goods and services they produce are worth to others.
Sometimes they use political influence to sustain monopolies or to prevent new entrants and innovators from competing for custom. Sometimes they use governments to provide subsidies from taxpayers, or to prohibit cheaper imports.
Sometimes they do deals with governments that provide taxpayer funds to cushion losses derived from incompetence or recklessness. These forms of crony capitalism detract from capitalism’s real benefits and achievements.
What capitalism should now do is to free itself from these rent-seeking perversions and spread its benefits as widely as possible.
It should act against anti-competitive practices to give people instead the power of free choices between competing goods and services. It should spread ownership of capital and investment as widely as possible through such things as personal pensions and individual savings accounts.
It should lower the barriers to entry so that everyone can aspire to start up a business to bring goods and services to others. It should seek a tax system that rewards success rather than punishing it.
Capitalism should become inclusive, making it as easy and as attractive as possible for as many as possible to set aside some part of present consumption in order to invest some of their resources and their time in providing goods and services that others will want. It should become true capitalism.
Dr. Madsen Pirie, contributing to “Viewpoints: What should capitalism do?”, BBC News, 2014-05-26.
May 26, 2014
QotD: The “inevitability” of Austro-Hungarian collapse
These spectacular symptoms of dysfunctionality might appear to support the view that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a moribund polity whose disappearance from the political map was merely a matter of time: an argument deployed by hostile contemporaries to suggest that the empire’s efforts to defend its integrity during the last years before the outbreak of war were in some sense illegitimate. In reality, the roots of Austria-Hungary’s political turbulence went less deep than appearances suggested. […]
The Habsburg lands passed during the last pre-war decade through a phase of strong economic growth with a corresponding rise in general prosperity — an important point of contrast with the contemporary Ottoman Empire, but also with another classic collapsing polity, the Soviet Union of the 1980s. Free markets and competition across the empire’s vast customs union stimulated technical progress and the introduction of new products. The sheer size and diversity of the double monarchy meant that new industrial plants benefited from sophisticated networks of cooperating industries underpinned by an effective transport infrastructure and a high-quality service and support sector. The salutary economic effects were particularly evident in the Kingdom of Hungary. In the 1840s. Hungary really had been the larder of the Austrian Empire — 90 per cent of its exports to Austria consisted of agricultural products. But by the years 1909-13, Hungarian industrial exports had risen to 44 per cent, while the constantly growing demand for cheap foodstuffs of the Austro-Bohemian industrial region ensured the Hungarian agricultural sector survived in the best of health, protected by the Habsburg common market from Romanian, Russian and American competition. For the monarchy as a whole, most economic historians agree that the period 1887-1913 saw an ‘industrial revolution’, or a take-off into self-sustaining growth, with the usual indices of expansion: pig-iron consumption increased fourfold between 1881 and 1911, railroad coverage did the same between 1870 and 1900 and infant mortality decreased, while elementary schooling figures surpassed those in Germany, France, Italy and Russia. In the last years before the war, Austria-Hungary and Hungary in particular (with an average annual growth of 4.8 per cent) was one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914, 2012.
May 25, 2014
QotD: Free markets and quality
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
A tender medallion of steak, a foaming pint of bitter and a crusty roll still hot from the oven — no wonder that Adam Smith chose an alliterative trio of artisanal food providers to make his point about the benefits of capitalism. If he had chosen a junk bond salesman, a fund manager, and a quantitative analyst, wielding a Gaussian copula in an effort to price a synthetic credit derivative, his defence of the market mechanism might not have resonated down the centuries in quite the same way.
Smith’s point was a good one. We are unlikely to give our custom to butchers who poison us, brewers who serve foul beer or bakers who overcharge; food sellers find it profitable to serve decent food at reasonable prices. The system needs some oversight — hygiene inspectors, trading standards officers, the Competition Commission — but the main engine of quality is the market mechanism. People prefer cheap and delicious food to food that is pricey and tastes horrid — and that fact alone delivers more than regulators ever could.
Tim Harford, “Why can’t banking be more like baking?”, TimHarford.com, 2013-11-05
May 23, 2014
QotD: Futurologists
Futurologists are almost always wrong. Indeed, Clive James invented a word – “Hermie” – to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions – mobile phones and the like – that it was inevitable quite a few would be right.
Even poppier was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 book Future Shock, which suggested that the pace of technological change would cause psychological breakdown and social paralysis, not an obvious feature of the Facebook generation. Most inaccurate of all was Paul R Ehrlich who, in The Population Bomb, predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s. Hunger, in fact, has since declined quite rapidly.
Perhaps the most significant inaccuracy concerned artificial intelligence (AI). In 1956 the polymath Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do” and in 1967 the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky announced that “within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”. Yet, in spite of all the hype and the dizzying increases in the power and speed of computers, we are nowhere near creating a thinking machine.
Bryan Appleyard, “Why futurologists are always wrong – and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians: From predicting AI within 20 years to mass-starvation in the 1970s, those who foretell the future often come close to doomsday preachers”, New Statesman, 2014-04-10.
May 21, 2014
QotD: February in Minneapolis
It’s not surprising that the Wilfs, the Vikings and downtown Minneapolis business leaders want the Super Bowl in Minneapolis. Their pockets will be lined, and with more than fur.
The question is why the average Minnesotan would want the Super Bowl here in February.
We don’t invite friends and relatives to Minnesota in February. Why would we invite the world?
Especially the portion of the world that wields laptops and cameras?
You remember February, unless your therapist has helped you block it out. February is when we suffer from cabin fever and cold sores, when we lock ourselves indoors with a fire (whether we have a fireplace or not) and stare at screens until our skin matches the blue fluorescent glow emanating from the TV.
And those are the good days.
I’ve spoken to visitors who are forced to travel here during winter. They ask why we live here. They laugh at us. When Jerry Seinfeld did a show in downtown Minneapolis this winter, he referred to our skyways as “Habitrails.”
The rest of the country cannot fathom why we put ourselves through this, and let’s be honest: We can’t either when we’re in the throes of winter. We all just pile on layers and pray that, this year, summer will fall on a Saturday.
Jim Souhan, “We’re back on center stage, with frozen warts and all”, Star Tribune, 2014-05-21.
May 19, 2014
QotD: Communism and language
It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.
The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation…” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.
Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.
Doris Lessing, “Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer”, New York Times, 1992-06-26 (reprinted 2007-10-13)
May 18, 2014
QotD: Liqueurs
The story of liqueurs continues with a few more of the herbal type. In this context the word herb needs to be interpreted pretty broadly. Wherever drink is made, enterprising chaps will take some of the local spirit — distilled from grain, grapes, other fruit, rice or whatever it may be — and flavour it with almost anything they find growing near by. Many of these concoctions never travel from their home village, and no wonder. In the Dordogne area they produce a beverage called Salers, flavoured with the root of the yellow or mountain gentian, of which they have plenty. Well, there may be nastier drinks but I don’t care to imagine them.
Other agents used in liqueurs of this general type include tea, aloes, hazelnuts, thistles, cocoa, snake root, bison grass, lavender, soya beans and nutmeg, not to speak of tangy stuff like pyrethrum and rhizomal galangae — actually the last two help to produce the pleasantly burning or “warm” taste most liqueurs have.
The distinctively clean and fresh flavour of peppermint is at the heart of one of the most popular of all liqueurs, crème de menthe, of which there are numerous brands. It comes in two versions, the white or transparent and the more familiar artificially coloured bright green. Either is best served with crushed ice and drunk through a straw. If you find it too sweet, try cutting it with an equal part of cognac. When made with the white kind this is knows as the Stinger, once called for by no loss a drinks pundit than James Bond.
Peppermint is supposed to help digestion; so is aniseed, used to flavour all manner of anise liqueurs and anisettes. Marie Brizard is the most famous of them. The firm recommded it as part of a long drink with ice and fresh lemon juice, topped up with plenty of soda water. There’s no accounting for taste is what I always say.
Fans of Italian food, and others, will know about Sambuca, which is flavoured with a herb giving an effect very similar to aniseed. There’s rather a shy-making ritual that involves floating a few coffee beans on the top of your glass and putting a match In the surface to the drink, thus singeing them slightly.
Another Italian liqueur, Galliano, has gained a good deal of ground over the last few years, not as a drink on its own but as a constituent of the famous or infamous cocktail the Harvey Wallbanger, named after some reeling idiot in California. It’s basically a Screwdriver with trimmings, in other words you stir three or four parts fresh orange juice with one part vodka and some ice, then drop a teaspoonful or so of the liqueur on top.
My own favourite in this group is kümmel, flavoured with caraway seed, smooth, and best drunk slightly chilled and straight — as a liqueur, in fact.
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
May 11, 2014
QotD: Longevity
It is not, naturally and generally, the happy who are most anxious either for prolongation of the present life or for a life hereafter; it is those who never have been happy. Those who have had their happiness can bear to part with existence, but it is hard to die without ever having lived.
John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 1874
May 10, 2014
QotD: Ideal government
The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, is one which lets the individual alone — one which barely escapes being no government at all. This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes and taken up my home in Hell.
H.L. Mencken, “Le Contrat Social”, Prejudices, Third Series, 1922
May 9, 2014
QotD: Real history and economic modelling
I am not an economist. I am an economic historian. The economist seeks to simplify the world into mathematical models — in Krugman’s case models erected upon the intellectual foundations laid by John Maynard Keynes. But to the historian, who is trained to study the world “as it actually is”, the economist’s model, with its smooth curves on two axes, looks like an oversimplification. The historian’s world is a complex system, full of non-linear relationships, feedback loops and tipping points. There is more chaos than simple causation. There is more uncertainty than calculable risk. For that reason, there is simply no way that anyone — even Paul Krugman — can consistently make accurate predictions about the future. There is, indeed, no such thing as the future, just plausible futures, to which we can only attach rough probabilities. This is a caveat I would like ideally to attach to all forward-looking conjectural statements that I make. It is the reason I do not expect always to be right. Indeed, I expect often to be wrong. Success is about having the judgment and luck to be right more often than you are wrong.
Niall Ferguson, “Why Paul Krugman should never be taken seriously again”, The Spectator, 2013-10-13
May 8, 2014
May 3, 2014
QotD: The educational machinery that produces the modern twenty-something
When conservatives complain that children are not being taught anything in public schools, they’re half right: They’re not being taught anything useful. They’re taught how to conform. That’s really the point of so many of the stupid rules in modern schooling, people learn to obey the irrational.
This translates into the corporate world in two ways. Those leaving the educational system are outwardly rebellious and undisciplined, even slovenly. Inwardly they’re perfect conformists. They haven’t the slightest notion of principles or integrity, it’s been beaten out of them by the public schools. They are desperate to fit in and conform in a way that is common among teenagers, but used to fade away as people entered their twenties and thirties. As a cranky old executive once observed to me, the young people aren’t so much soft as weak. Passionate about trivia and indifferent toward the fundamentals of life and work.
Richard Anderson, “In Praise of Grumpy Men”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2014-05-01
May 2, 2014
QotD: Toxic feminism
Feminism, as of late, is too often a terribly toxic thing, as it demands not equality and sense but special treatment and a world that works as the real world does not. This sends a message to women that they are impervious to dangers and challenges (or “should” be). And this ultimately endangers women and hurts men as well. This needs to change but I’m not sure how that can be accomplished.
Amy Alkon, “Denouncing Binge Drinking Is Not Victim-Blaming”, Advice Goddess Blog, 2013-12-24
May 1, 2014
QotD: Leadership
I’m a little slow on the uptake from time to time. Occasionally people mistake this form of aphasia for things right in front of my face as a kind of aplomb — it isn’t. To coin an aphorism by butchering Kipling quotes: If you seem to be keeping your head because you’re a little dimwitted, while everyone else is smart enough to be losing theirs, they’ll often put you in charge of that pack of panicking headless men, for all the wrong reasons, and then you’ll be a man in a world of trouble, my son.
Sippican Cottage, “Real Estate, Red In Tooth And Claw “, Sippican Cottage, 2013-11-12
