Category Archives: Politics

Rantings of an Ex-Maestro

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Paul Krugman was asked for his reaction to a piece by Alan Greenspan opining that Obama’s ‘activism’ was preventing economic recovery. He replied as follows:

I could go through the weak reasoning, the shoddy econometrics that ignores a large literature on business investment and ignores simultaneity problems, etc., etc..

But never mind; just consider the tone.

Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he’s the wise oracle who knows the deep mysteries of human behavior, who can discern patterns based on his ineffable knowledge of economic psychology and history.

Sorry, but he doesn’t get to do that any more. 2011 is not 2006. Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it’s gone to meet its maker, it’s joined the choir invisible.

He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible.

If he wants to redeem himself through hard and serious reflection about how he got it so wrong, fine — and I’d be interested in listening. If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time.

Al Franken on net neutrality

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From today’s Guardian.

Democratic senator Al Franken has has issued a rallying cry to “innovators and entrepreneurs” at SXSW to fight back against Comcast and other companies lobbying to pave the way for a two-speed internet.

[…]

“The one thing that big corporations have that we don’t is the ability to purchase favourable political outcomes,” he said.

“Big corporations like the telecoms firms have lots of lobbyists – and good ones too. Every policy-maker in Washington is hearing much more from the anti-net neutrality side than the side without lobbyists. But everyone has more to fear from these big corporations than from us. [Their proposals] would benefit no one but them.”

In the US, where the net neutrality debate rages on despite a conciliatory bill by the Federal Communications Commission in December, telecoms giant Verizon is fighting the rules in a bid to allow internet providers to choose which content they can charge for. Net neutrality advocates fear that internet providers, most pertinently Comcast which controls a large stake in both TV and internet provision, could downgrade rivals’ content and boost delivery of their own.

“[On today’s internet] you don’t need a record deal to make a song and have people hear it, or a major film studio for people to see your film, or a fancy R&D job. But the party may almost be over,” Franken said.

“There is nothing more motivated than a corporation that thinks it is leaving money on the table. They are coming on the internet and wanting to destroy its freedom and openness. All of this is bad for consumers but an outright disaster for the independent creative community.”

Big corporations like Verizon and Comcast are not “inherently evil,” he added, but their duty to shareholders “to make as much money as they can” could change the internet for every American as they know it.

Comcast was last month accused of effectively erecting a tollbooth that puts competitive video streaming service, namely Netflix, at a competitive disadvantage. Franken on Monday accused Comcast of thinly disguising its “real endgame,” which he argued was “to put Netflix out of business”.

Yep.

See also Rory Cellan-Jones’s blog post about tomorrow’s ‘Ministerial Summit’.

Net Neutrality and Mr Vaizey

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s a tale of two societies. The South Korean communications commission is planning to boost broadband speeds in that country tenfold by the end of 2012. That means Koreans will get one gigabit per second (Gbps) connections by next year, which is 200 times as fast as the 5Mbps ADSL connection which is common in the UK. Meanwhile, back in the middle ages (aka Whitehall next Wednesday), a ministerial summit on “net neutrality” convened by the culture secretary Ed Vaizey will hear how Britain’s internet service providers (ISPs) plan to throttle still further the measly internet access they provide to the citizens of the UK in order to boost their bottom lines and reduce competition.

Now it has to be said that the principle of net neutrality is not exactly a staple of saloon-bar conversation, so most citizens will assume that next Wednesday’s discussions have nothing to do with them. In this, they are sadly mistaken – as they will discover if Ed Vaizey does indeed agree to let the ISPs violate or erode the principle…

The Internet and freedom: understanding the context

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Very thoughtful piece in Technology Review by John Palfrey. One of his contentions is that

the technology matters far less than the context of the politics, culture, and history of the place and people involved in using the technologies. In Tunisia and Egypt, it was crucial that a minimal number of people, commonly both young and elite, had high literacy rates, access to the technologies, and skill in using them. These states have very large youth populations and growing levels of sophistication, at least among the children of the wealthy, in their access to and use of digital technologies. One organizer of the Egyptian uprisings is now known to have been 30-year-old Google executive Wael Ghonim. He had created a Facebook page to commemorate 28-year-old Khaled Said, a businessman beaten by police the previous June. The sophistication of the activists and the corresponding lack of sophistication of the autocrats matters enormously.

The regional context matters in another way. It is plausible that the domino effect that we are witnessing in the Middle East and North Africa has something to do with the network as well. In some respects, common language and use of the same Internet-based tools is more important in a digitally mediated world than geopolitical boundaries are. The fact that the uprising in Tunisia prompted sympathetic protests in the region, and as far away as Turkey, may have something to do with the extent to which digital networks carried news of the uprisings very quickly, through social media and formal news outlets, in Arabic, English, French, and other languages. This is not to say that the governments in Libya and Bahrain will necessarily experience what the governments in Tunisia and Egypt have. It is instead to say that linguistic and regional affinities may be strengthened through digital networks, and may in turn lead to tinderbox-like conditions in certain regional settings.

He also has a useful categorisation of the four phases of governmental interactions with the Internet:

1. Open Internet: 1983-2000
2. Access denied: 2000-2005
3. Access controlled: 2005-2010
4. Access contested: 2011-

Democratic revenge: a dish best eaten cold

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As I write this at 22:46 GMT, it’s clear that the Irish electorate has handed out a really severe thrashing to Fianna Fail, the party which has dominated Irish politics since the 1930s and which was the architect of the country’s current economic predicament. And what a thrashing: the Deputy Prime Minister, for example, has just lost her seat in Donegal — something that nobody believed would happen.

What’s going through my mind is all the prior journalistic speculation about why the Irish people seemed so passive in the face of what was happening to them as they were forced to pay up for the stupidity, venality and criminality of the people who ran their banks and their politics. Why were there no riots in the streets, like there were in Greece? Why were people apparently taking it lying down?

Well, now we know: my countrymen were biding their time, waiting to hand out the punishment in an impeccably democratic way — through the ballot box.

It’s an awesome moment. Though not perfect: Gerry Adams has just been elected to a seat in the Dáil.

Scarecrows out!

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Scarecrows out!, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I’m in Ireland and it’s Election week. There’s a palpable sense of anger with politicians of all stripes, neatly expressed in this farmer’s field. He’s a supporter of one of the many ‘Independent’ (i.e. non-party) candidates running in this campaign.

The Middle East and our addiction to oil

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Terrific OpEd column by Tom Friedman in the NYT.

For the last 50 years, America (and Europe and Asia) have treated the Middle East as if it were just a collection of big gas stations: Saudi station, Iran station, Kuwait station, Bahrain station, Egypt station, Libya station, Iraq station, United Arab Emirates station, etc. Our message to the region has been very consistent: “Guys (it was only guys we spoke with), here’s the deal. Keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don’t bother the Israelis too much and, as far as we’re concerned, you can do whatever you want out back. You can deprive your people of whatever civil rights you like. You can engage in however much corruption you like. You can preach whatever intolerance from your mosques that you like. You can print whatever conspiracy theories about us in your newspapers that you like. You can keep your women as illiterate as you like. You can create whatever vast welfare-state economies, without any innovative capacity, that you like. You can undereducate your youth as much as you like. Just keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don’t hassle the Jews too much — and you can do whatever you want out back.”

It was that attitude that enabled the Arab world to be insulated from history for the last 50 years — to be ruled for decades by the same kings and dictators. Well, history is back. The combination of rising food prices, huge bulges of unemployed youth and social networks that are enabling those youths to organize against their leaders is breaking down all the barriers of fear that kept these kleptocracies in power….

Friedman thinks that the first thing the Obama administration should do is

to impose a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax, to be phased in at 5 cents a month beginning in 2012, with all the money going to pay down the deficit. Legislating a higher energy price today that takes effect in the future, notes the Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would trigger a shift in buying and investment well before the tax kicks in. With one little gasoline tax, we can make ourselves more economically and strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts and free ourselves to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying anymore that it will harm our oil interests. Yes, it will mean higher gas prices, but prices are going up anyway, folks. Let’s capture some it for ourselves.

It’s a good idea, but can you imagine the current US Congress passing that?