When tourists roamed the earth

Quote of the Day

”Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

• Sophia Loren

Hmmm… I wonder.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues | 1965

Link

My favourite version of this song.

Long Read of the Day

 Monopoly Versus Democracy in the New Gilded Age

Terrific Foreign Affairs essay by Zephyr Teachout about lessons from previous progressive, anti-monopoly movements.

The parallels with the present day are obvious, and it has become commonplace to hear the current era described as a new Gilded Age. As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book Liberty From All Masters, the robber barons shared with today’s high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for a fair and democratic society. On the other hand, today’s antimonopoly movements are intentionally interracial and thus avoid a massive failure of the populists and progressives of the late Gilded Age, who abandoned Black Americans even though they had played a crucial role in fostering both movements.

Worth a read. The obvious takeaway is that you can have democracy or you can have powerful monopolies, but you can’t have both. Another historical lesson is that in order to deal with corporate power, we have to tackle it in a wider framework — for example, it’s necessary to clean up the mess of private funding of political campaigns. And in the UK we’d also need to make the electoral system more fairly representative. Nearly 4m people voted for UKIP in the 2015 general election and got… precisely one MP.

All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court

This morning’s Observer column. The tech giants’ law-free bonanza is coming to an end on both sides of the Atlantic, but let’s speed up the process.

Interestingly, Stoller suggests that another approach (inspired by the way trust-busters in the US acted in the 1930s) could have useful leverage on corporate behaviour from now on. Monopolisation isn’t just illegal, he points out, “it is in fact a crime, an appropriation of the rights and property of others by a dominant actor. The lengthy trial is essentially akin to saying that bank robbers getting to keep robbing banks until they are convicted and can probably keep the additional loot.”

Since a basic principle of the rule of law is that crime shouldn’t pay, an addition of the possibility of criminal charges to the antitrust actions might, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning (pace Dr Johnson), concentrate minds in Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. As an eternal optimist, I cannot think of a nicer prospect for 2021 than the sight of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai in the dock – with Nick Clegg in attendance, taking notes. Happy new year!

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How to read 50 books in 2021. Some useful tips from James Crabtree. Link
• 21 Things That Kept Me Going In 2020. Some lovely discoveries from Jason Kottke (Whom God Preserve). Link
• Adobe Flash rides off into the sunset. Adobe terminated support for its Flash software on Christmas eve. It won’t start blocking Flash content until January 12th but major browsers seem to have shut it down already and Microsoft will block it in most versions of Windows. It’s over. Link.

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The lake in Winter

Quote of the Day

”I distrust camels and anyone else who can go a week without a drink.”

• Joe Lewis, American comedian, 1971

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Corelli Christmas Concerto 2nd movement

Link

On Brexit, grief and moving on

One of my strongest memories of the day after the Brexit vote in 2016 was the number of people who said to me that it felt to them like a bereavement. (Remember that I live and work in a bubble which voted heavily for Remain, and many of my friends and colleagues are, like me, Europhiles.) The word they chose for how they were feeling was interesting and, I think, significant, so over the succeeding four years I often found myself returning to it.

An obvious source to consult was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book, On Death & Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy & Their Own Families in which she set out her famous ‘five stages of grief’ model, which postulates that those experiencing grief go through a series of five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

In the four years since the Brexit vote, I’ve seen my fellow-Remainers going through some or all of these stages. But since 11pm last Thursday evening, it seems to me that the only one that now makes sense if the fifth: acceptance.

In that context, a reader pointed me to an interesting Guardian column by the paper’s Economics editor, Larry Elliott, under the headline “The left must stop mourning Brexit – and start seeing its huge potential .”

The lefties who voted for Brexit see it differently. For them (us, actually, because I am one of them), the vote to leave was historically progressive. It marked the rejection of a status quo that was only delivering for the better off by those who demanded their voice was heard. Far from being a reactionary spasm, Brexit was democracy in action.

Now the UK has a choice. It can continue to mourn or it can take advantage of the opportunities that Brexit has provided. For a number of reasons, it makes sense to adopt the latter course.

For a start, it is clear that the UK has deep, structural economic problems despite – and in some cases because of – almost half a century of EU membership. Since 1973, the manufacturing base has shrivelled, the trade balance has been in permanent deficit, and the north-south divide has widened. Free movement of labour has helped entrench Britain’s reputation as a low-investment, low-productivity economy. Brexit means that those farmers who want their fruit harvested will now have to do things that the left ought to want: pay higher wages or invest in new machinery.

I can see where he’s coming from. During the Referendum campaign two things puzzled me. One was the feebleness of the Remain campaign — it was as if nobody was interested in making a passionate argument for continuing to participate in the greatest geopolitical experiment in European history. As a result, the Remain campaign was essentially negative — as the Europhobes dismissively labelled it — ‘Project Fear’.

The other puzzle was the failure to make a reasonable case against the European experiment. The truth about the EU is that it has always been an elitist, technocratic experiment. It would never have happened as a democratic project — it had to be driven by political elites from the moment the European Coal and Steel Community was established in the early 1950s as a (laudable) attempt to ensure that the nations of Europe could never go to war against one another again. But as it developed into the EEC — and, later, the EU — the project always had a yawning democratic deficit (as Jurgen Habermas lamented in his book The Lure of Technocracy) — a deficit that was only partially filled by the creation of the European Parliament.

In that sense, there never was much in the way of democratic legitimacy for the EU project. And in a number of crises, notably the 2008 banking catastrophe, that lack of legitimacy was painfully obvious. Similarly the creation of the Eurozone was an elite project — it had to be — because its internal contradictions would never have withstood proper democratic scrutiny. (Indeed, one of the really good things Gordon Brown did was to keep the UK out of the Euro, despite Tony Blair’s anxiety to join it.) And then there was the crazily-accelerated post-1989 drive to incorporate the Eastern European states liberated by the implosion of the Soviet empire. And, finally, there’s the fact that all these initiatives and policies were driven or inspired by a Commission staffed by a technocratic elite that had been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid from the time they’d been in kindergarten.

So in 2016 there were plenty of reasons to debate the wisdom of continuing to belong to such a flawed institution. But mostly those arguments were never made — or if they were they were drowned out by the crude xenophobia of the two Leave campaigns. Worse still, the corollary was never explored — the idea that a Britain governed by a radically reformist regime could forge an interesting future for itself outside of the EU.

But we are where we are: out. So it makes sense to think about the future as one that could have real possibilities for radical improvement — if Britain had a radical reforming government that was competent. It doesn’t have that at the moment, so the question is: where could such an administration come from?

The Johnson administration is incapable — for social, ideological and capacity reasons — of measuring up to the task. All that vapouring about “levelling up” is just sloganeering. They don’t have a clue about even where to start. (Dominic Cummings’s fantasies about the revolutionary possibilities of a British DARPA were the ravings of an elitist technocrat on steroids.) There’s no strategy, or indeed no real understanding of what would need to be done to transform a ‘liberated’ UK into a progressive, successful, fairer, more dynamic society.

So the odds are that the slogans will fizzle out and the decay set out by ‘Project Fear’ will come to pass. The United Kingdom will fracture, with Scotland eventually going its own way; Ireland slowly re-uniting, de facto if not de jure; and a Westminster parliament with just one pocket borough left — England. Or, as Philip Stephens put it in the FT the other day, “Forget the guff about embarking on a new Elizabethan age. ‘Global Britain’ is at present heading towards the rocks of constitutional break-up.”

So what could be done to move on creatively from Brexit? The only answer I can see is a radically revitalised Labour Party that comes to power four years from now. The question then becomes: could Keir Starmer build such a party? And where would its ideas come from?

Long Read of the day

 Where loneliness can lead

Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism.

Nice essay by by Samantha Rose Hill

The companies that have done best in the pandemic year

The FT has a list of the companies that did best last year. I was interested in the nationalities of the winners.

Here are the top 6:

• USA: 33 companies

• China: 32

• S. Korea: 6

• Japan: 4

• Denmark: 3

• Germany: 3

And, just for completeness:

• UK: 1

Could this be the same “Global Britain” about which we have been hearing so much lately?

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A dog’s life

Quote of the Day

”I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.”

• Bernard Malamud, playwright, 1975 in a Paris Review interview.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Grateful Dead | I Fought The Law | Live

Link

Like many of my student generation, I was a fan of the Grateful Dead — the first band to really understand the power of bootlegged music and (later) the Internet. I once shared a (speaking) platform with their lyricist, John Perry Barlow (who was one of the founders of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and author of the famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace). This particular number has a fascinating and extensive discography. There’s an excessively clean-cut early version of it by the Bobby Fuller Four, and an impressively noisy and aggressive rendition by The Clash. Green Day also recorded it, and doubtless many others. But as a Deadhead I still prefer Gerry Jarcia and his crew.

Long Read of the Day

The Master and the Prodigy — Bill Janeway on biographies of John Maynard Keynes and Frank Ramsey

This is a masterful review essay on two fascinating and impressive biographies — Zachary Carter’s  Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes and Cheryl Misak’s  Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers. I devoured both during the first lockdown and talked about them in my audio diary, and felt that I’d got a lot from them. Reading Bill Janeway’s long essay, however, made me realise that I had only scratched the surface. So it’s really worth making an appointment with yourself to read it.

The Beatles: 60 years on

Yesterday’s post about the poster for the Fab Four’s Litherland gig after their return from Hamburg prompted a small stream of interested reflections.

Hugh Taylor (Whom God Preserve) wrote:

Interesting to compare the price of that Liverpool gig in 1960 with the Beatles’ appearances in Cambridge. In March 1963 they were playing support (even though they’d released two singles by then – one of them rather successful) for a date in which prices were between 5/6 and 8/6. But by November, it looks as though the cheapest Rear Stalls had increased to 6/6. But they were headliners by then, with two number ones to their name.

Source

There’s an entertaining description of their November visit on singer and activist Tom Robinson’s blog – his brother worked for Varsity (didn’t we all!), and was sent to interview them…

The brother was allocated three minutes for an interview in a dressing room after the show. His report of the encounter is a hoot (or, if you’re of a pedantic turn of mind) an hoot. Here’s a sample:

Local journalists queued outside the dressing room door. There were grumbles as I was led to the front. “He’s only a student!” said PR. “He’s only got three minutes. You’ve all got five!” The grumbles subsided, but only a bit.

PR knocked. “Enter at your peril!” shouted a Liverpudlian voice that could have been John, Paul, George or Ringo. PR pulled a face and gingerly opened the door. I edged in behind, pulling out my compact notebook and pencil stub.

The Beatles sat perched like parrots on a line of cane chairs, clutching cigarettes and wine glasses, glistening with perspiration.

“Who’s this fine figure of a young man?” said John Lennon pretending to screw up his eyes as he peered at me while drawing heavily on his fag.

“Varsity, University newspaper,” said PR. “He’s only got three minutes.”

“Ringo! Stopwatch!” said Paul McCartney.

“Haven’t got one,” said Ringo Starr. “But I’ll count the seconds.”

“One hundred and eighty,” said George Harrison. Ringo started counting down aloud.

“He’s clever!” said John pointing at George. “He does MATHS!”

“Aren’t YOU supposed to be clever?” said Paul pointing at me. “Being a student!”

I nodded.

“He’s NOT a student,’ said John. “He’s an UNDERGRADUATE. Under-Grad-U-Ate! Students call themselves that at Cambridge Uni-Ver-Si-Ty. Right, Mister Undergraduate?”

“We’re in Cambridge?” asked Paul. “I thought it was Oxford.”

“Ordinary universities have students,” said George. “Posh places like Oxford and Cambridge have UNDERGRADUATES.”

The interview wasn’t heading in the direction I’d planned…

Wonderful. Do follow the link.

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Who said robots can’t dance?

Link

Quote of the Day

”If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

• Motto embroidered on one of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s settee cushions.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tommy Emmanuel, Richard Smith and friends

Link

“The best jam I’ve ever witnessed.” Recommended by Andrew Ingram, Whom God Preserve, who writes :

“Tommy is famous (and I think this is why I just love the guy) for jamming with other people – helping them to improve their technique, learning from youngsters with good ideas etc. Apparently if he stays in a hotel after a gig, there’s usually a session in the bar / back room, and usually with amateurs. This is him with Richard Smith (who is a pro) and two others who I think are just getting a shot at jamming with the master. No notes, no music sheets, just bring your brain, memory and fingers. And ears.”

Long Read of the Day

How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher

Terrific story in Wired UK

In 1995, Katalin Karikó was at her lowest ebb. A biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Karikó had dedicated much of the previous two decades to finding a way to turn one of the most fundamental building blocks of life, mRNA, into a whole new category of therapeutics.

More often than not, Karikó found herself hitting dead ends. Numerous grant applications were rejected, and an attempt to raise funding from venture capitalists in New York to form a spin-off company had proved to be a fruitless endeavour. ”They initially promised to give us money, but then they never returned my phone calls,” she says.

By the mid 1990s, Karikó’s bosses at UPenn had run out of patience. Frustrated with the lack of funding she was generating for her research, they offered the scientist a bleak choice: leave or be demoted. It was a demeaning prospect for someone who had once been on the path to a full professorship. For Karikó’s dreams of using mRNA to create new vaccines and drugs for many chronic illnesses, it seemed to be the end of the road…

Read on. It all comes good in the end.

Christmas in an alternate 2020

Lovely blog post by Tim Harford.

Perhaps there is no wrong way to exchange Christmas gifts, but in a hurried rendezvous just off junction six of the M40 must come close. My sister was furious; we had planned to go for a walk in the woods together the day before Christmas Eve, one of the safest activities imaginable. No longer: true to form, the prime minister had promised far more than seemed possible, realised it wasn’t possible after all, and then snatched it all away in a tumble of confusion. If the present-swap was to be legal, we had just hours to get it done.

As I drove to the rendezvous, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. For 15 years I’ve been writing columns discussing the problem with Christmas gifts, and now we were testing the idea to destruction. If nothing remained of Christmas except the presents, what would I do? The situation revealed the answer: at almost any cost, I’d hand over the damn presents.

We economists have a troubled relationship with gift exchange…

They do. That’s because they think people are very bad at choosing gifts.

To a brother-in-law who likes cricket, we give a cricket-themed tchotchke whose sole purpose is to symbolise the fact that we know he likes cricket. To a music-lover, we give CDs, not realising that she threw out the CD player years ago and listens only to vinyl. The shirt is lovely but does not fit; the toys would have been cool three years ago; the book is so perfectly chosen that in fact the recipient read it over the summer. Many pitfalls lie in wait even for a gift-giver who has empathy, imagination and patience — and by mid December many of us are running low on all three.

But because gift-giving remotely is one of the few things we have been able to do this Christmas, Harford comes up with an interesting thought-experiment. “The pandemic”, he writes,

has operated like a neutron bomb, destroying the hugs and the feasting and carol services and the visiting of elderly relatives, while allowing the flow of gift-wrapped plastic to continue unabated. What a shame that things aren’t the other way around. Imagine an alternate universe in which Christmas carols and pantomimes and parties and feasts with family and friends were all possible, but because of a strange virus that lived on wrapping paper, it was unsafe, illegal and deeply antisocial to offer Christmas gifts.

Might be worth a try.

On the other hand…

On Sunday, December 20, my phone buzzed with a news alert. From midnight, the government was going to put London and lots of other places into Tier 4. This caused alarm in our household because my son lives in London and is currently renovating his place, and a special new sink that he had ordered had been delivered to us. He had been planning to collect it on a day trip around Christmas, but that would now be out of the question. Since it was on the critical path for the renovation, the work might be delayed for weeks or even months.

So we hit on a plan. We would meet him half-way at an open air venue and hand over the sink so that we could all be back in our respective bases before midnight. The meeting place we arranged as the car park of a large motorway service station.

We got there early and sat in the car waiting for him to turn up. And then a strange thing began to happen. Cars were arriving in large numbers, parking at a slight remove from one another. And we watched as people got out, opened the boots, extracted gift-wrapped boxes and bags and brought them to other cars, where people were doing the same thing. Over half an hour, the entire parking lot was briefly transformed into one massive gift-exchange venue. Families and friends stood outside in the cold under street-lights, mostly observing social distancing, talking and laughing and taking photographs.

It was a lovely, moving scene — of friends and families whose plans to spend Christmas together had been abruptly squashed by the government’s abrupt decision, but who were determined to mark the season somehow. A profound reminder of human resourcefulness and of how cruelly a basic human need — to touch, to embrace, to kiss — has been denied by the virus.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

•  Swan song: German firefighters remove ‘mourning’ bird blocking railway line. Its mate had been killed by flying into an overhead high-voltage line, and it had settled at the point of his/her death. Swans apparently do that sometimes. Link.
• Some modellers think that by February 1 over 90% of Covid infections in the UK will be of the new variant. Link.
•  How My Record Player Helped Me Feel the Music.. Analogue nostalgia rules OK. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Antibes, August 2010

How to do data visualisation well

Global Energy Production by Source 1860 – 2019

Link

My Quarantine Diary

I kept an audio diary for the first 100 days of lockdown. You can find it in the online version of this blog for March-July 2019.

Alternatively, the text is now available as a Kindle book.

You can get it here

Quote of the Day

”Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

• Norman Mailer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tubas in the Moonlight | Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band

Link

Long Read of the Day

 “If it Hadn’t Been for the Prompt Work of the Medics”: FSB Officer Inadvertently Confesses Murder Plot to Navalny

Wonderful investigative reporting, with a neat twist. Bellingcat, like Wikipedia, is one of the wonders of the online world. Note the trick question about the colour of his underpants!

Link

The perverse political effects of Covid-19

Gideon Rachman has a column in today’s FT (probably paywalled) on the geopolitics of Covid.

Nothing, it seems, can get in the way of geopolitical rivalry. Not a pandemic, not the collapse of international travel or a worldwide recession. In different ways China, the US and the EU have all treated Covid-19 as a very public test of their rival approaches to governance — and as part of an international contest for prestige and influence.

The obvious preliminary conclusion is that the pandemic will turn out to be an overall geopolitical win for the People’s Republic of China. The PRC’s success in largely suppressing the disease stands in marked contrast with the terrible toll that Covid-19 has taken on the west.

But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19….

Wishful thinking, methinks.

WHO warns Covid-19 pandemic is ‘not necessarily the big one’

According to the Guardian, the organisation’s end of year media briefing warned that the virus is likely to become endemic and that the world will have to learn to live with it.

The head of the WHO emergencies program, Dr Mark Ryan, said: “The likely scenario is the virus will become another endemic virus that will remain somewhat of a threat, but a very low-level threat in the context of an effective global vaccination program.

“It remains to be seen how well the vaccines are taken up, how close we get to a coverage level that might allow us the opportunity to go for elimination,” he said. “The existence of a vaccine, even at high efficacy, is no guarantee of eliminating or eradicating an infectious disease. That is a very high bar for us to be able to get over.”

That was why the first goal of the vaccine was to save lives and protect the vulnerable, Ryan said. “And then we will deal with the moonshot of potentially being able to eliminate or eradicate this virus.”

Ryan warned that the next pandemic may be more severe. “This pandemic has been very severe … it has affected every corner of this planet. But this is not necessarily the big one,” he said.

“This is a wake-up call. We are learning, now, how to do things better: science, logistics, training and governance, how to communicate better. But the planet is fragile.

I’m sorry to say that I’m not surprised.

The Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator

But here’s an antidote to gloom.

Go on — try it here!

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