Quotulatiousness

January 21, 2011

Alfred Kahn, godfather of deregulation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

An obituary at The Economist for one of the key players in the deregulation of American business that was critical to solving the economic malaise of the 1970s:

WHEN everyone else at the airline counter for the flight from Hicksville to Washington was sighing, checking their watches and using their elbows on their neighbours, Alfred Kahn would be smiling. And later, cramped in his seat between some 20-stone wrestler and a passenger whose “sartorial, hirsute and ablutional state” all offended him, snacking from a tiny packet of peanuts that had cost him a dollar, he would sometimes allow the smile to spread under his Groucho Marx moustache into a big, wide, gloating grin.

For Mr Kahn had made this crowd and packed this aircraft. His deregulation of America’s airlines in the 1970s opened up the skies to the people, for better and worse. And though, being an economist, he could not help muttering about the imperfection of societies and systems and the absurdity of predictions—and though, being an inveterate puncturer of himself, he would demand a paternity test if anyone called him the father of the deregulated world—his adventures with airlines led on to the freeing of the trucking, telecoms and power industries, and heralded the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions.

When he took over the Civil Aeronautics Board for President Jimmy Carter in 1977 air travel was regulated to the hilt, with prices, routes and returns all fixed and aircraft, which could compete only on the number of flights and the meals they served, flying half-full. Mr Khan, furiously resisted by companies, pilots and unions, removed the rules. As an academic, author of “The Economics of Regulation” in two stout volumes, he was eager to see those elusive and fascinating things, marginal costs, brought into play: to let prices follow the constantly shifting value of an aircraft seat as demand changed or departure time loomed, or indeed as shiny new jet planes depreciated above him, just “marginal costs with wings”.

December 14, 2010

Christopher Hitchens on the real Henry Kissinger

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I must admit that I never understood the adulation Henry Kissinger has attracted. I started paying attention to politics in the early 1970s, and Kissinger was one of the main players on the world political stage at that point. His connection to the deeply repugnant Richard Nixon should have been enough to keep him out of the limelight after his boss was forced out of the presidency. Yet he somehow managed not only to stay in the public eye, but to increase his popularity.

Christopher Hitchens thinks that the latest revelations from that era will finally bring Kissinger the odium he so richly deserves:

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last.

Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

(One has to love that uneasy afterthought….)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger — normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing — going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

November 22, 2010

David Nolan, co-founder of the US Libertarian Party

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:33

Dave Weigel has an appreciation of the late David Nolan:

The 66-year-old libertarian activist David Nolan died on Saturday; he had a stroke while driving, then crashed his car.

Some of the vital history of anti-statist politics dies with him. In the 1960s, Nolan was a YAF and Students for Goldwater activist. 1971, Nolan was watching Richard Nixon on TV with some like-minded friends when the president announced that he’d be introducing wage controls and price controls. The Libertarian Party was born in his living room; its first national convention was held months later, in Nolan’s Denver. He built it, according to Brian Doherty’s essential history Radicals for Capitalism, by tapping a list of disgruntled libertarian-minded YAFers for funds, and then relentlessly promoting the party with cast-aside libertarians around the country.

[. . .]

It’s unusually difficult to say what Nolan’s legacy will be. He leaves behind a small “l” libertarian movement that is more powerful, with greater control over the levers of the GOP and more footing in popular culture, than at any time in living memory. (Witness the current, libertarian-driven backlash against the TSA if you want proof.) He also leaves behind a Libertarian Party that, like almost every third party in American history, struggles for relevance and has its best ideas co-opted by major party politicians who go on to disappoint their supporters. But if the measure of an activist’s success is bringing attention to his ideas, and bringing them from the fringe of respectability to the center, David Nolan was a success. After all, in 1971, the “crazy” guy was the one who thought price controls were a bad idea.

September 28, 2010

Britain in the 70’s

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:38

A review of Dominic Sandbrook’s State of Emergency: The Way We Were. Britain, 1970–1974 sounds interesting:

As prime ministers, Edward Heath and Gordon Brown had quite a lot in common. Both were monstrously self-centred, permanently grumpy and capable of astonishing rudeness. Both of their relatively short-lived premierships ended in humiliating failure. In a recent poll of academics on Britain’s best and worst prime ministers since the second world war, Heath came ninth out of twelve and Mr Brown tenth. But that is where the similarities end. Whereas Mr Brown was largely the author of his own misfortunes (the banking crash apart), Heath, as Dominic Sandbrook reminds us in his splendidly readable new history of Britain during the four years from 1970, was faced with a set of problems whose intractability and nastiness would have overwhelmed even a far more gifted politician.

Heath both appals Mr Sandbrook and elicits his sympathy. Tory mythology still insists that many of Heath’s difficulties arose from his U-turn when he abandoned the free-market ideas with which he entered office and embraced an already discredited and peculiarly British form of corporatism the moment the going got rough. The truth is that although Heath had tried to present himself as the champion of ruthless neoliberalism, he was always at heart a “one nation” Tory with little appetite for the kind of confrontation his successor as Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher, relished. His burning desire was to modernise Britain and to arrest its economic decline through efficiency, pragmatic problem-solving and, above all, by joining the European Community.

My family left Britain in 1967, which was a good time to go: the economy was still in post-war recovery, but opportunities abroad were still open to British workers. My first visit back was in 1979, which was a terrible shock to my system. I’d left, as a child, before the strikes-every-day era began, and my memories of the place were still golden-hued and happy. Going back to grey, dismal, cold, smelly, strike-bound Britain left me with a case of depression that lasted a long time. It didn’t help that the occasion of the visit was to attend my grandfather’s funeral: it was rather like the land itself had died and the only remaining activity was a form of national decomposition.

Some readers will find the way the author flits about tiresome, but given that he was born only in 1974 his almost pitch-perfect ability to recreate the mood and atmospherics of the time is remarkable. He does not lose sight of the fact that although the 1970s are now seen as a nadir in Britain’s post-war fortunes, for the majority of people it was nonetheless a time of growing affluence, widening horizons and personal liberation. Many of the positive developments that are associated with the supposedly wonderful 1960s did not gain traction until a decade later. Viewed from a distance, Britain in the 1970s looks ghastly — angry, decaying, on the skids. But that is not the whole story.

Mr Sandbrook compares this turbulent period with the four years between 1910 and 1914 described by George Dangerfield in “The Strange Death of Liberal England”. As he says: “Dangerfield’s story was one of political ferment and economic turmoil, of challenges to the moral order and rebellions against traditional gender roles, of Utopian socialism and Irish sectarianism — all rooted, like the challenges of the early 1970s, in profound historical trends that no government could possibly control.” Thankfully, the discontent of the 1970s did not end in world war, but continued, mostly unresolved, until the arrival of Lady Thatcher in 1979. That may pose a problem for Mr Sandbrook’s next book, which will be an account of the second half of the decade. In many ways it was more of the same, but without a central character as oddly compelling and sad as Heath.

I’m even more interested — in a grim sort of way — in the next book. It’ll be interesting to read an account of that time from a different perspective than my brief mid-winter visit provided.

May 13, 2010

A “secret weapon” from WW2 updated for the 21st century

Filed under: History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Strategy Page looks at Operations Research in its modern guise:

It all began back in the 1970s, when some CIA analysts discovered a new way to analyze the mountains of information they were receiving. The new tool was predictive analysis. What does this do for intelligence analysts? Predictive analysis was the result of a fortuitous combination of OR (Operations Research), large amounts of data and more powerful computers. OR is one the major (and generally unheralded) scientific developments of the early 20th century. OR is basically applying mathematical analysis to problems. OR turned out to be a major “weapon” for the Allies during World War II. OR, like radar, was developed in the 1930s, just in time for a major war, when whatever was available was put to work to win the conflict. OR is also, half jokingly, called a merger of math and common sense. It is widely used today in science, industry and, especially, in business (it’s the primary tool of MBAs, where it’s called “management science”.) With predictive analysis, the most important OR tool was the ability to “backtest” (see if the simulation of a situation could accurately predict the outcome of something that had already happened, if the same historical decisions are made). For predictive analysis of contemporary situations, the backtest is, instead, a predictive tool that reveals likely outcomes.

Predictive analysis, like OR in general, creates a framework that points you towards the right questions, and often provides the best answers as well. Like many OR problems, especially in the business world, the simulation framework is often quite rough. But in war, as in commerce, anything that will give you an edge can lead to success over your opponents. A predictive analysis is similar to what engineers call “a 60 percent solution” that can be calculated on the back of an envelope.

The one form of predictive analysis that the general public is aware of is wargames, and these have been increasingly useful in predicting the outbreak, and outcomes, of wars. There have even been commercial manual (like chess) wargames that have successfully applied predictive analysis. The commercial manual wargames produced some impressive results when it came to actual wars.

In late 1972 a game (“Year of the Rat”) was published covering the recent (earlier in the year) North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. This game didn’t predict the outcome of the war, but it got the attention of people in the intelligence community, especially those who knew something about wargames, for it was a convincing demonstration of what a manual wargame, using unclassified data, could do in representing a very recently fought campaign. There was even talk that these games could actually predict the outcome, and details, of a future war. The next year, wargames did just that, accurately portraying the outcome of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The game (“Sinai”) was about to be published when the war broke out, but some people in the intelligence community knew about it. A member of the Israeli UN delegation had watched the game in development (he was a wargamer), and was assigned to camp out at the publishers offices, while the war raged, and report what the game was predicting.

May 3, 2010

“Remember when reporters had guts?”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” sent this interesting link, suggesting:

This is sort of related to your “White House threatens to yank the ovaries out of those who would criticize The One” post [. . .] same tactics, really. And considering how reporters have become such wusses — perhaps they’ve all been hit with the German girlification spray — I believe it is accurate to say that all of them, especially the “males”, fear for their ovaries.

The White House post is here and the “girlification” post is here, in case you didn’t see them before.

Michael Malone is wondering where all the real reporters went, and remembers what it was like when he started in the field:

Remember when reporters had guts?

In the late Seventies, when I was just out of college, and even before I began my career as a journalist, I worked in public relations at Hewlett-Packard Co.

[. . .]

Simon broke insider stories, published internal strategy memos and pre-introduced secret projects, all with seeming abandon . . . leaving corporate PR departments, like us at HP, scrambling to do damage control and plug the leaks.

As the kid in HP corporate PR department, I both feared Simon for the damage he could do with his breaking stories — my turf was a hugely successful calculator business — and was in awe of his reporting skills. I also wasn’t allowed to talk much with him when he came into our offices for fear I would slip up and accidentally give my counterpart another news hook.It wasn’t until years later, when I was a reporter myself (and talked with Mark) that I came to realize that all Simon was doing was just good hard reporting.

So, what does this trip down memory lane have to do with modern reporters?

This week, Chen’s house was raided by officers from California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT), a special task force of police officers and federal agents created to combat computer-related crimes — and which just happens to have Apple on its steering committee. The cops took all of Chen’s computer equipment. Meanwhile, the San Mateo County District Attorney is considering whether to bring charges against Chen. It all hinges around whether California’s journalist shield law covers bloggers. Well, speaking as someone who was an investigative reporter for one of the nation’s top ten newspapers: of course it does.

This is appalling. As Instapundit uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds has rightly noted, this is basically “gangland politics” with one side getting to use to the police as its muscle. He’s also correct in noting that neither the police nor Apple would never have tried this against, say, the San Jose Mercury-News (I know because I worked there).

I’m still not clear if Apple played the role of Mafia don and ordered up a hit on Chen (to be performed by their soldiers in the REACT mob), or if someone with authority over REACT used them to attempt to curry favour with “Don” Jobs. Either way, it’s a very disturbing development.

Either way, it will function to continue and even accellerate the subservience of the media to (certain) corporate and political interests, which is not good for the public, the media, or even the temporarily favoured entities.

February 24, 2010

Roleplaying games, back-in-the-day

Filed under: Gaming, History, Personal — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

Jon, my former virtual landlord (and still host for my original blog archives), sent along a link to this article. Knowing Jon’s distaste for such things, he must have been grimacing when he clicked Send:

I was initiated into the mysteries of gaming via a grade school classmate’s copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. A mysterious artifact, this red box contained a set of waxy, dull-edged dice and a couple of thin rulebooks. Designed to be played on its own or as an introduction to the complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the Basic Set-or “Red Box” as it came to be known by gamers-became the key to an entire universe of adventure and magic. Little did I know at the time this would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with gaming and fantasy in general.

With the news that D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast intends to release a new edition of the introductory rule set-in a red box no less-I thought it might be fun to ask a few writers about their own early experiences with the world’s best known fantasy role-playing game.

My first experience with the game was in high school, where a classmate found out that I was into wargames and wanted to “help me” by diverting me away from such evil warmongering stuff. His gaming methadone involved mass slaughter of beings and beasts in a “dungeon” he’d created. About a dozen of us were introduced to the game in the same session . . . let’s just say that it didn’t go terribly well. With no experienced players in the pack, we specialized in aggravating the Dungeon Master (the person running the game for us). After about an hour, the DM was deliberately killing us off as fast as he could.

I played several other role playing game systems after that, but never found one I was comfortable with. I ended up “rolling my own” by basing it on Metagaming’s Melee and Wizard games (both designs originally by the great Steve Jackson) for the combat and magic systems. I found this worked best for my occasional RPG sessions, as I hate-with-a-passion being in games with rules lawyers (the archetypical one has memorized all the rulebooks, tables, supplements, and so on). If I don’t explain why something is happening, they have to concentrate on what to do about it instead of getting into heated arguments about die roll modifiers and such.

In the early 1980’s, I ended up working at Mr. Gameway’s Ark in Toronto (which appears to be Google-proof . . . or doesn’t have more than occasional mentions in mailing list conversations), which was the largest independent game store in town. I got to read the rules of dozens of RPG systems, but perhaps I was spoiled for choice . . . I never did end up playing any.

December 18, 2009

Why this is the best Christmas ever

Filed under: Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:38

October 1, 2009

Back to the ’70s . . . it’s the return of the Population Bomb!

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Ronald Bailey addresses the most recent outbreak of Globally Terminal Malthusianism from the Wall Street Journal‘s Paul B. Farrell:

Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell.

Farrell asserts that overpopulation is “the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world.” Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond’s 12-factor equation of population doom.

It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Let’s take them one by one.

But, in the same way that bad news always crowds out good news for headline space or television minutes, looming disaster stories will always attract attention . . . especially when they’re wrong.

September 15, 2009

QotD: Generational obsolescence

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

What I find amusing is how some believe that the death of civility is a new development. It started with Joe Wilson and was compounded by Serena Williams. Civility has been chained to a rock getting its liver picked out by buzzards since the golden children of the Greatest Generation were encouraged to let their freak flag fly, to use a horrid phrase.

[. . .]

I’ve always thought it’s imperative to stay engaged with your times until your time, singular, is up. Otherwise your sense of the world calcifies, and your worst impressions become your default opinion. The glories of the imagined past become a means of self-admiration, because you were not only lucky enough to be there but smart enough to get it. Kids today, they don’t. Perhaps growing up in the 70s kept me from idealizing my own past; the culture was all gimcrack glitz and second-hand hippie shite before the jams were well and truly kicked out by the anti-sloth movements of the late seventies and early 80s. They were musical and political; the former was all over the road and the latter emotional and naive, but I think they were the first attempts to wrest control of the social narrative from the early boomers, and as such were derided with the smooth weary conceits you’d expect from the generation that remade the world and expected the rest of us to line up and lay laurel wreaths at their sandaled feet.

Then the rise of internet culture saved the late boomers and Gen Xers from cultural obsolescence, because it was no longer necessarily to participate in any of the usual events to be up to the moment. On the internet anyone can be about 26 years old.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-15

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