Here as a treat is the answer to those who wail about Greed and Inequality.
Not because Inequality is OK. Or because Greed is OK.
Rather because any of the usually proposed solutions for reducingh such distortions trend towards prioritising other forms of Greed and Inequality, in which collectivists take decisions they are unfit to make and try to use state-sponsored violence to get their way.
Craig Murray and I have a fleeting moment of agreement, rather like ships sailing in opposite directions who pass and exchange friendly waves.
He commented on my earlier piece about Libya and MI6, responding to another reader:
Your second point rests on the premiss that if government ministers approved something, then it was legal. That is simply not true. A previous government may have done something, and may even have briefed their successors about it. if it were illegal, nothing in that means it should not subsequently be the subject of criminal investigation. Theoretically, the current government has no role in either encouraging or stopping the criminal investigation - it is quite rightly a matter for the police and CPS.
However, a new development arises. Two Libyans are launching civil actions in the English courts against my old colleague and good friend Sir Mark Allen, over the circumstances under which they were subject to 'rendition' to Tripoli and subsequent abuse by the Gaddafi regime. The Guardian:
Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 allegedly mounted in co-operation with Koussa, who was Gaddafi's intelligence chief at the time. Saadi says he suffered years of torture.
Belhaj was detained in Bangkok along with his pregnant wife after an MI6 tipoff and was allegedly tortured by American agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he says he was tortured and detained for several years. His wife was detained for several months.
The issue here is not any claim that MI6/HMG engaged in torture. Rather it is that MI6/HMG are said to have been 'complicit' in torture in Libya of certain Libyans by certain other Libyans. Which raises the question: what does complicity mean?
Back in March 2010 in an earlier exchange with Craig I looked at precisely this question. Craig and other maximalists insist that even to possess information which is suspected as having come from torture amounts to 'complicity'. That position, as the House of Lords found in 2005, is incorrect as a matter of law (and common sense):
Very (very) broadly speaking, I conclude from this judgment that the the top legal body in the UK drew at least three important conclusions:
That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives)
But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals
If seemingly well-founded allegations are made that evidence has been or may have been produced by torture, the court/tribunal has to consider most carefully how to deal with that evidence, but is not bound to conduct an exhaustive investigation of the origin of the evidence to reach a final view as that would just not be possible
These conclusions do not apply directly to the current emerging case, namely where HMG allegedly took action leading to Libyans being returned to Libya where they say they ended up being mistreated.
The problem here is that any secret 'rendition' by us or even a contribution to secret rendition by others is likely to have been endorsed by Ministers, either specifically or as a general rule. So to single out one civil servant for litigation is mischievous if not malevolent.
Second, the whole case turns on the idea that 'complicity' can be stretched far beyond any immediate link to maltreatment. Any abuse or torture was not committed by HMG or its officials. Is it really fair to make us legally responsible for horrors committed by others far away?
Even if you think that it is reasonable to do so on the moral level, you need to draw a line somewhere and say that the actions alleged were too 'remote' to amount to complicity. Under what principle should the line be drawn in specific cases? What balancing factors should be taken into account?
What if our attempts to bring under control Gaddafi's WMD have hit the rocks and it looks like we need to make some 'minor' concessions to Gaddafi's entourage to get things restarted? How do we even begin to weigh up the possibility of abuse of two individuals with the possible dangers to millions if the WMD are not secured asap?
Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.
So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?
Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.
Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...
This nasty, bleak, lonely policy and moral frontier was where Mark Allen and his colleagues were operating. If the way is opened to sue them for outcomes which were far from ideal if not awful, who is going to be ready to do this sort of fundamentally important work?
The issue here is simple. Not what the 'right' choice is when you are dealing with a regime like Gaddafi's. There isn't one.
Rather it is 'who decides?'.
We seem to be ending up in the absurd position that sanctimonious lawyers and unelected judges far from the operational and policy realities of such questions are seen as more 'responsible' than elected politicians and civil servants who are elected to do our dirty work while operating to arguably the highest standards of public probity in human history.
Yes, judges have the benefit of detachment. And yes, Ministers and officials can get so wrapped up in what they are doing that serious errors get made. But this is one where the best people to judge are voters, not lawyers.
The other day we had the pleasure of meeting senior colleagues at Edelman London, part of the global team who prepare the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The online survey aims explicitly at educated people round the world who follow current affairs.
This year's survey concluded that trust in governments had suffered a sharp erosion in the past year, a finding that is both unsurprising and (as far as it goes) welcome. Yet it also suggested (perversely) that people wanted more government action in the regulatory field. Here's a snapshot of the results as recorded by the BBC.
Trust in government stayed high in several countries including China (perhaps because people there 'trust' the authorities to watch the replies in online surveys like this one?) yet in China trust in NGOs had leaped - NGOs there seen as an emerging force for alternative views?
Trust in business had also declined. Not surprisingly perhaps, given what is going on.
Such surveys are more interesting and indicative than strictly scientific. Yet this one coincides with what we might expect. Basically, as people round the world get access to new cheap IT, the emerging energy of networks is disrupting the established power and effectiveness (and legitimacy) of hierarchies. The rate at which government is unable to cope is accelerating: new laws and policies can be out of date or rendered irrelevant before they are promulgated.
Plus the Tower of Babelisation represented by 'social media' makes it all worse - facts, rumours and complaints all appear and circulate at startling speed, creating strange echo chambers in which truth, sense or nonsense alike are amplified to a meaningless crescendo. Governments are unnerved by this clamour and start to look for instant results. See the latest shameful row over RBS bonuses in the UK, where the government seem to have bowed to 'public opinion' and pressed a private citizen not to enjoy the bonus he is entitled to under his contract.
People in all countries sense this confusion and look to other ways to get things done, while hankering after greater certainty or order which (they still think) only government can provide. Examples in all directions: mainly incoherent, such as the creepy collectivist demands of assorted 'Occupy' tendencies.
One of the ideas which the survey throws up is the proposition that we need to move away from (rigid) Rules towards (more flexible) Principles or Standards. But how?
Look at the Eurozone drama unfolding once again today, as I type. The EU leaders are scrambling to come up with even more rules, in the shape of a brand new treaty which is intended to impose strict requirements on errant member states. Yet we all know that the new rules are unlikely to be enforceable, and new standards are unlikely to be respected when things get difficult. No-one in power dares suggest that the EU structure as currently configured is itself the main problem. Instead they press their leaking euro-canoe on towards the deeper faster rapids, proclaiming that that is the only sensible thing to do.
Trust in fact is what is wrong with the Eurozone. The Germans conclude that (say) the Greek government can not be trusted to do what is right and so must give way to EU-imposed technocrats. The Greeks (not unreasonably) think that they'll get stiffed by such a procedure which is designed to prop up German, French and other over-stretched banks.
Meanwhile the world peruses this unseemly flailing around and concludes that a bickering and demographically declining Europe can not wholly be trusted to repay money it has borrowed, hence imposes higher interest rates to help cover the risk.
Trust, in short, is simply another way of looking at Confidence. And as the Edelman 2012 survey suggests, it is unsurprising that global popular confidence in 'government' is declining - but not easy to work out what sensibly might be done about it.
The core question of politics and economics is Trust. More specifically, under what circumstances can and should one trust strangers?
The greater the ambient level of trust in any given social space, the easier it is to do things quickly and well. People who scarcely know each other or who have never even met can strike sophisticated deals, knowing (a) that other partners are likely to be reliable, and (b) that if things go wrong the local state institutions will honestly help sort out the problem.
Without Trust of this sort, personal and organizational horizons shrink. Extended family networks and associated corruption thrive as the best way of dealing with the trust problem.
Or one trusts primarily members of one's own group/clan/religion/community. And assumes that members of other groups/clans/religions/communities are doing the same, so they are not to be trusted too far since their primary loyalty (like one's own) is not to a fair, neutral process.
All this is massively obvious across the former Yugoslavia space. Political leaders must represent 'their' national communities first and foremost if they are to get elected; voters distrust other communities and make a mainly ethnic/national choice as a form of political fire insurance.
Even in the UK where there is no serious complaint about the intrinsic fairness of the legal system and Trust is at civilizationally high levels, many Scots want a different political structure, viz some sort of independence from England. Likewise Quebec, Kurds, Chechens and countless other examples. The Israeli/Palestinian problem seems capable of being settled only on an ethno-national basis.
Thus the so-called 'nation-state' turns out to be a sophisticated device for enabling trust to operate, often at much higher levels of population. This has created conditions for the surge of economic growth and creativity seen around much of the globe over the past couple of centuries. Greater attention to this fundamental trust issue would pay huge dividends in the international development industry.
Our success here in Europe (and the ruinous experience of the two World Wars where certain national ambitions ran amok ) has brought us to think that there is a new 'higher' stage of development.
The European Union is a unique example of an attempt to create a wider context of trust at a supra-national level. But it too risks making a fundamental blunder by trying to insist on, or sneakily nudge people towards, a new 'European' uber-identity which supersedes supposedly drearily parochial 'national' identities...
Long time no write. Somewhere between Writer's Block and despair at the surging stupidity seen in all directions. Plus nursing my aching ankle and visiting Liechtenstein on a new ADRg Ambassadors training expedition.
The roleplays in Liechtenstein included a couple of exercises where chairing a meeting was part of the skill. The great thing about delivering training is that you think - perhaps for the first time ever - about why you do what you do, and what works (or not).
Thus chairing a meeting.
The smart way to get results is to define the issues in a positive, light-touch style right at the start, thereby (in effect) ruling various options in, but also implicitly ruling some out. If this is done well, the chair can shape the way the participants themselves look at what is happening.
A good way to start is to say in a very few words what the meeting needs to achieve - and why that achievement matters (obliquely flattering the others present). Then you try to sum up in literally a few words what the key issues are:
Can we agree up front that we need to sort out three things today?
First, Money - how much are we all prepared to put in to the new projects?
Second, Balance - how to divide the available resources between the different priorities. The tricky problem here is the fact that it is much easier to get anything done in country X, but the needs in country Y are much greater.
And third, Leadership. Who will be the figurehead of the project as a whole, and who will have the lead operational responsibility?
Some of the participants may want to add another element (say Urgency, or Security, or Other Partners). Fine. The advantage of the chair spelling out in such simple terms the core questions is that it makes it easier for others to frame/articulate their own concerns in a similarly direct way.
Another skill of a good chair is 'pocketing progress'. If someone makes a concession, go out of the way to say that that move is welcome/helpful. Having done that, be careful about seeking clarification on points of detail: that may give the person concerned the opportunity to backtrack.
Don't ignore 'good listening' skills. Copious notes should not be taken by the chair. The chair should be adept at 'reframing' what a participant has said, again subtly steering the conversation in a helpful and constructive/consensual direction and recalling the key words used at the start:
I think what I'm hearing from you is a willingness to be flexible on Money in return for a greater share in the Leadership. Is that a fair summary?
Also reflect back their 'intensity'. If someone is getting agitated, a good chair should not sit back and smirk but rather show by body language and tone of voice that that person's opinions are being heard:
It's clear that you're very unhappy with how we are tackling Balance. Has anyone any suggestions for how those concerns might be met?
The plan, in other words, is to build a momentum of general goodwill and cooperation, then - having got everyone in some sort of positive frame of mind - start to nail down more controversial details.
All much easier said than done. See eg the skills needed to chair an EU Summit meeting on a new Eurozone Treaty when things get really difficult.
In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.
This one even has added Literature:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.
This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.
But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...
... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.
No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?
It's in Polish. But the opening passage caught my beady eye.
In it Mr Szczerski notes the sharp tone of criticism directed in that speech towards the UK and claims that Mr Sikorski has confirmed that I "as a private Labour Party supporter" had been a collaborator on the speech.
My latest book review for LSE books was sent in the other day. A review of a compilation of blog writings by successful ex-blogger and junior Minister (under Labour) Tom Harris MP.
Here's the review. I was none too charitable, alas. The whole thing looked like a rather poor rushed job and just did not hang together in any sensible way.
I sometimes muse about publishing in book form some of my own blog writings. But it's not easy to make this work well, as the blog and book genres are quite different:
Nevertheless, these are blog pieces made public as events happened, not brutal senior private diary entries revealed to an amazed world several years later. As Tom Harris puts it in the Introduction,”the blog became an exercise in self-restraint and discipline in how to write in an interesting and even loyal away about politics … What you want is gossip”.
Which is mainly what we get. Tom Harris’ rich but inchoate views on Doctor Who, Genesis and X-Factor are shared with folksy observations on the Westminster world as seen by a busy junior Minister and diligent MP. The book is organised not by date but by themes, which themselves cast light on Tom Harris’ tabloidly parochial instincts: “How do you solve a problem like Gordon?”; “Government: better than the alternative”;“In defence of politics”;“Telly”; and so on. If the European Union was mentioned in any serious way, I certainly missed it.
There may be no better way of presenting such previously blogged material, but the themes scarcely hang together. Effective political blogging delivers what the writer hopes are insightful thoughts on the emerging issues of the day, if not the hour. Detached from the flow of events, individual pieces lose impact and context.
Anyway, no sooner had the review gone up than Tom Harris' vivid political career hit another iceberg. He was forced to step down today from his position as Labour's 'Social Media Tsar' (sic) after producing what was actually (as such things go) quite a good Downfall spoof on Alex Salmond. Which you can see here:
The squawks of synthetic indignation from the SNP might have led a Labour Party with backbone to start producing new Salmond Downfall spoofs every week for the next few years. But no. They caved. It was 'offensive'. And Tom Harris resigned.
Of course the really idiotic thing about all this is that Labour thinks it needs a 'Social Media Tsar' at all. The whole point, Labour, of social media is that it is a spontaneous crowd-sourcing Towers of Babel chaotic phenomenon in which order emerges as it does. It's utterly unsuited to any sort of political busy-body Tsardom. See?
My review led to a funny Twitter-spat out there in the social media cyberspace between me and one @RetiringViolet who may or may not be Violet but is certainly not Retiring in her efforts to portray Mr Harris as someone capable of the profound thought so firmly absent in the book I reviewed:
@CharlesCrawford@TomHarrisMP The last sentence in your review implies u think he had had no profound thought to offer in his blog/remarks
And plenty more of the same. It passed the time on the train as I came back from London after my lunch there was cancelled.
Well. When you review books, you need to call 'em as you see 'em. Otherwise what's the point? I look forward to reviewing in due course Mr Harris' major definitive tome on Political Philosophy. He has time on his hands now to write it.
Part of the problem facing the Eurozoners as they struggle to convince global markets that all is under control so DON'T PANIC is identifying what exactly is the issue which needs solving. After all, they might make a bad situation worse by misdiagnosing what needs to be done.
Views on this differ. In the interests of fair play, here is a studious article (pdf) by C Fred Bergsten and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard which argues that the Eurozone is heading for the right outcome (ie 'comprehensive economic and monetary union') by the crafty ploy of (in effect) eliminating all the wrong ones:
It is imperative to understand that it is not the primary purpose of the ECB, as a political actor, to end market anxieties and thus the euro area crisis as soon as possible. It is instead focused on achieving its priority goals of getting government leaders to fundamentally reform the euro area institutions and structurally overhaul many euro area economies.
Frankfurt cannot directly compel democratically elected European leaders to comply with its wishes but it can refuse to implement a “crisis bazooka” and thereby permit the euro area crisis to continue to put pressure on them to act. A famous American politician has said that “no crisis should be wasted” and the ECB is implementing such a strategy resolutely.
The authors point out that because there is no willingness to allow centralised EU-wide taxation, other arrangements are needed and are edging towards being created, albeit by different EU leaders playing dangerous games of bluff to help get the best deal for their corner:
The reality in the euro area is that, for the foreseeable future and unlike in the United States, the overwhelming majority of government taxation and spending will continue to reside at the member state level for reasons of political legitimacy. Only a minor part will be pooled at the supra-national level. Restricting this spending via a new fiscal compact is consequently the only pragmatic route for now, leaving other aspects of euro area fiscal integration to the future...
The Eurozoners are having to look to the IMF for huge support. But that's OK:
Euro area governments will have successfully shifted part of the costs of any future financial rescues onto the rest of the world. The rest of the world will of course extract a suitable price from the euro area for this service in the form of European political concessions in other policy areas. This could, for instance, be a good time to demand that the euro area consolidate its representation on the IMF board to a single seat and accelerate the transfer of its quota shares to the financially contributing emerging markets...
Basically, their argument goes, they'll have to do what it takes to keep the Eurozone afloat as all the alternatives are far worse. And the record so far shows that despite all the uncertainty and some poor decisions along the way, the trend is in that direction.
Read the piece as a whole. If you are a non-expert, it makes an impressive case.
So far so optimistic.
Then there's John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline, whose wonderful economics newsletters are free. Here are some of his latest observations:
For most of the past two years, European leaders have tried to deal with the problems as though they were short-term liquidity problems: "If we just find the money to buy some more Greek bonds, then Greece can figure out how to solve its problems and then pay us back. Given enough time, the problem can get solved."
They have now arrived at the understanding that it this not a short-term problem. Rather, it's a solvency problem of the various governments, which of course creates a solvency problem for their banks. They are now addressing the problem of solvency and providing capital until such time as certain countries can get their budgets under control and the bond market sees fit to provide the capital they need.
But they are completely ignoring the third and largest problem, and that is massive trade imbalances. Germany exports products to the peripheral European countries, which run trade deficits. As I have shown in several letters, a country cannot reduce private-sector leverage, reduce public-sector leverage and deficits (balance its budget), and run a trade deficit all at the same time. That is simple, unavoidable math, based on 400 years of accounting understanding. Ultimately, there must be a trade surplus if leverage and debt are to be reduced...
Greece cannot print its own money, so unless it leaves the Eurozone, it's stuck. They can default on their debt, but that means they are shut out of the bond market for some period of time. That would force them to make the spending cuts they are now resisting, as they would simply not have enough money to pay their bills.
Even with a 100% haircut they're looking at a shorter but very real depression. And because no one will sell them products they need, like energy and food and medicine, unless they can sell or trade something in return (that trade-deficit problem), they will be forced to change their lifestyles. Wages must drop or productivity rise to be competitive with northern Europe. And that differential is about 30%. I am not certain, as I have not been to Greece in a long time, but my bet is, you won't find many Greeks who think they are overpaid by 30%.
But that is what the market is going to say. And that is the third problem, which Europe is not addressing. Germany and the northern tier are simply more productive than the Southern periphery. (With the possible exception of Northern Italy, but Italy all gets lumped together, which is why many Northern Italians want to be their own country and not have to pay taxes that go to Southern Italy. I am not taking sides, just observing what we read in the papers.) Until Germany consumes more from the peripheral countries or the peripheral countries become more productive, the imbalance will not allow a positive solution...
Sign up to his work to get regular bracing top-ups.
So there it is. Two contrasting styles of beautiful writing, and two very different and clever/informed views on what is happening.
The two views of course may be compatible. A stronger and even coherent Eurozone may emerge from this fiasco - if some countries whose debts are simply unmanageable are paid off to leave it?
Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.
Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.
In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.
Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly...
... In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.
It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states...
I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:
Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.
There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.
Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis' fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.
As you all know, I happen to be a fan of what the Blair government and MI6 did to help bring Gaddafi back towards what passes for the mainstream of civilisation in that part of the world, by helping negotiate the end of his elaborate MWD programmes in return for 'normalisation'.
But did MI6 go beyond some sort of unspoken and perhaps not obvious line by getting a bit too close to the Gaddafi regime thereafter? To the point of helping hand over to Libya some regime opponents, either suspecting that they might be mistreated back in Tripoli, or not bothering to think about that too much?
I have no idea. But a new wearying police investigation begins.
Something about all this is not quite right. Above all, I find it hard to imagine a pretty far-reaching step like that being taken without some sort of explicit political clearance. So when are the police going to start rummaging through the papers submitted to T Blair, J Straw and other Labour politicians leading or close to the policy at the time?
As readers know, assorted Crawfs went to a Turkish resort for a short holiday last year. The signs of feverish economic activity were there to be seen on the way from the airport - all sorts of buildings and other structures popping up in a madcap way.
Turkey is booming! Or is it?
I have not linked to the ever-gloomy Spengler for a while, but here he is with some unnerving graphs and accompanying analysis indicating that Turkey too has borrowed too much, too unwisely:
Erdogan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero.
"We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate."
Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto. In order words, Turkey provided nearly free money to bank customers. Erdogan's program set in motion a series of perverse effects. One is a sharp fall in the exchange rate...
... The result is a vicious cycle: excess credit creation weakens the currency, forcing the central bank to put up interest rates; higher interest rates push up the cost of debt service for Turkish borrowers; Turkish banks lend more money to their customers to finance the higher interest costs, so that credit keeps expanding and the currency keeps weakening.
Turkish banks continue to increase lending at a 40% annual rate, but most of the new lending will finance interest payments on the old loans. Fine. Then what?
.
So, the same old story. Political leaders believing they can defy reality and gravity, combining with banks keen to cash in. Result? A fast emerging mess.
The notable feature of the apparently looming Turkish mess - as Spengler points out - is that the booming 'Turkish model' (ie a dynamic, modernising economy with strong Muslim features) was hailed for a while as the best outcome of the Arab Spring tendency. What if that model flops too?
Spengler's view of what this means:
Now I predict that Turkey's economic crisis will undermine the stability of the Turkish state as well, leaving the Muslim world without a single enclave of stability from the Libyan-Algerian border to China's Xinjiang province...
Here at Commentator are my vivid thoughts on the way The Rules drive out common sense discretion in public services in general, and at Leeds Crown Court in particular:
Stop right there, Mr Ambassador! What would happen if the Embassy in Warsaw went out of its way at a senior level to help this one hapless citizen? That would set a precedent for the whole network -- word would get around that one person in Poland had had a lot of active support from the Embassy and the Ambassador personally, and everyone else would expect the same! Worse, it could even be a breach of their Human Rights if they did not get it!
... So there it is. After years if not decades of Citizen's Charters and all sorts of official Mission Statements, Objectives, Targets and goodness knows what other noisily proclaimed expensive initiatives intended to make public servants helpful and responsive to the public, this forlorn group of public servants were bent on driving a few taxpayers and citizens out into a howling rainstorm for no reason other than the fact that The Rules appeared to require it.
The point?
The standardisation of public service needed to deliver what, as far as possible, counts as equality of treatment for all can be achieved only by deliberately excluding competition and any serious incentives to improve services.
Those people at any level of public service finding a clear case for common sense and discretion which somehow goes against The Rules risk getting into trouble (or think they do).
And in such an uncompetitive, neurotic context The Rules breed like crazy, as we see in English education where the state's instructions to schools now run into hundreds of pages and have catastrophic results.
Outcomes deteriorate. Dumbed down stupidity and officiousness result. Confidence in the state erodes.
But as the Leeds episode shows, the public can fight back. When confronted with an obviously insane decision, politely insist that those concerned use their discretion or demand to see where The Rules say that no such discretion exists.
The officials concerned are visibly rattled by the thought that maybe, just maybe, The Rules in fact allow them to think.
Civil servants! If you have any examples of this working against good practice, just send them in. Key thing: do you think your hierarchy will support you if you do the smart thing, even if it goes against established procedure?
One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.
In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have 'smarter' policies. Which doesn't work because our policies are too slow anyway, often out of date before they begin.
All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).
Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:
The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't.
Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.
However, just as we realise that we can't work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.
Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.
In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the 'Western Social Model' is over-complex. But under-robust. It's science, see?.
We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.
But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?
Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?
I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.
The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.
This really matters.
Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.
Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?
Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?
Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:
But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...
Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.
So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?
The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.
Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..
And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.
This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.
The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.
Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.
So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:
A reader sent me this email message on New Year's Eve:
I just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed reading your sane and authoritative commentaries over the last year. "Spark of hope" indeed! More power to you!
What a kind thought. Sane. Authoritative. Hopeful. Powerful. Yup - that's this website!
Much appreciated.
I have looked at the numbers for readers here in 2011. According to one way of crunching them, I peaked in August with 11,500 unique visitors (ie people, not Google spiders) and hit a low in July (5200 visitors). Over the year as a whole 86,600 unique visitors swung by (some more than once, I suspect), giving 258,000 visits for the year looking at 700,000 pages.
That's just over 7000 unique visitors per month, which given the esoteric, eccentric, annoying and often rather specialist subject-matter of most posts here is OK by me.
It was again especially gratifying that some 30,000 visits lasted for 30 minutes to an hour, or even longer. Some of you really like rummaging around and spending time here. This in fact is why I decided to write a blog and not a book* about my life and times in diplomacy. With the blog I get more readers, and more interaction - a relationship.
My main problem is that I am spreading my declining intellectual jam a bit thinly these days. As well as keeping up some sort of flow of work here (latterly noticeably reduced, but there you are), I emit Tweets at @charlescrawford, write a monthly column for DIPLOMAT magazine, do book reviews for the LSE website and contribute assorted rants to The Commentator. In the last weeks of 2011 I was signed up as a Daily Telegraph blogger too. Not to forget a number of other articles for business and foreign policy websites.
That's a lot of material to create almost every day. And while I am mulling over what if anything to say next on one or other of these outlets, I have to try to earn a living by writing speeches or training or consulting or whatever comes along.
This site has not been any special money-spinner - more a money-loser in terms of the opportunity cost of generating all these words for free. The ads I added to the site this year bring in nothing much so far(!), but I have had a couple of approaches via the site for fee-paying work, including an invitation to give a keynote speech at an event in Romania later this year.
Anyway, many thanks to you all for your support and unobtrusive but wise thoughts. I hop into 2012 still nursing my gammy ankle which I twisted observing the Russian elections in early December. I'll try to be a bit more productive here this year, but don't count on my succeeding. If you don't fine me here I'll be over at one of the other places mentioned above. Or not.
Happy New Year to all
* A reader asks via Twitter - have I written enough words for a book?
Hmm - let's see.
It turns out that a normal book contains anything up to 120,000 words. If we take this one post as average, it has some 500 words. I have written 2400 posts here. Which makes something like 1,250,000 words roughly ten books. That's not counting over 30 DIPLOMAT articles at 1500 words each (three more books!). And all the other website pieces.
So that's something like 15 or more respectably long books. All written just for you. For free!
The wonders of the Internet. Maybe I should make a compendium and try to self-publish via Amazon or something. The perfect gift for next Christmas?
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