Monthly Archives: June 2020

Saturday 20 June, 2020

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Quote of the Day

Another sign of Mr Trump’s interest in books came during the Black Lives Matter protests, when he appeared outside a Washington DC church holding a Bible. It was a deeply sinister move. And also a reminder to rewatch the interview where he claims the Bible is his favourite book but can’t seem to recall any verses. Asked whether he’s an “Old Testament guy or a News Testament guy”, he hesitates before replying “probably equal”. Evangelical Christians, you don’t have to vote for him.

  • Henry Mance, Financial Times, 20/21 June, 2020

A Coronavirus Quiz

Below is a statement made by Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health, the House of Commons.

We have a clear four-part plan to respond to the outbreak of this disease: contain, delay, research and mitigate. We are taking all necessary measures to minimise the risk to the public. We have put in place enhanced monitoring measures at UK airports, and health information is available at all international airports, ports and international train stations. We have established a supported isolation facility at Heathrow to cater for international passengers who are tested, and to maximise infection control and free up NHS resources.

We are working closely with the World Health Organisation, the G7 and the wider international community to ensure that we are ready for all eventualities. We are co-ordinating research efforts with international partners. Our approach has at all times been guided by ​the chief medical officer, working on the basis of the best possible scientific evidence. The public can be assured that we have a clear plan to contain, delay, research and mitigate, and that we are working methodically through each step to keep the public safe.

Question: On what date was this statement made?

Answer: At the end of this day’s post.

The Covid-19 pandemic has offered advance sight of post-Brexit Britain.

Lovely FT column by Philip Stephens the other day.

“The mantra of Boris Johnson’s government”, he writes, “is that”,

unshackled from the EU, the nation will be “world-beating”. Free to make national choices and set its own scenery on the international stage, it will champion free trade from its own seat at the World Trade Organization and decide its own policies for global challenges such as climate change.

For Mr Johnson the pandemic was a chance for the UK to show its strengths and demonstrate what it could do in its new guise as a truly “sovereign” nation reborn as “Global Britain”. This explains perhaps his confidence when the outbreak began to take hold in early March. Back then, remember, Mr Johnson boasted of shaking hands with doctors during a hospital visit.

The bullish message from Downing Street recalled that Britain is home to some of the very best epidemiological scientists and research institutes: Johnson called them “world-leading”, in a variation on the his usual “world-beating” theme.

No government was better prepared. Britain had rehearsed for such an emergency in 2016 and stockpiled supplies. Exercise Cygnus, it was called. Of course, there also was the “fantastic” NHS. Britain would show the world how it was done.

Unhappily, Covid-19 does not pay attention to theoretical notions of sovereignty or to national borders. Far from the best, Britain’s performance fighting the virus has been dismal, leaving it at the bottom of the league of comparable European states.

The problem is, says Stephens,

the yawning gap between assumed superiority and actual performance. Mr Johnson and his colleagues promote an image of Britain’s capabilities that is steeped in nostalgia for past greatness rather than shaped by contemporary appraisal. As one British diplomat puts it: “There is just an assumption that we do these things so much better than our European neighbours.”

The other lesson has been that sovereignty may provide the notional freedom to act, but that is not the same as the capacity to achieve national goals. Working outside the EU did not take Britain to the front of the queue in the scramble to secure medical supplies from China and India. So it will prove with post-Brexit trade deals.

Yep. The lack of UK state capacity revealed by the crisis is one of its most salutary lessons.

Deaths of despair

Atul Gawande has a long and absorbing essay in the New Yorker about Anne Case’s and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, a landmark investigation into why working-age white men and women without college degrees were dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease at such rates that, for three consecutive years, life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole had fallen.

The surprise (for me anyway) is that this isn’t all about opioid addiction, though that plays a role. A key part of the answer, they maintain, is education — or, more accurately, the absence of it. Case and Deaton argue that the rise in deaths of despair is the consequence of the cumulative effect of a long economic stagnation and the way the US as a nation has dealt with it.

In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees—the majority of the working-age population—have seen themselves become ever less valued in our economy. Their effort and experience provide smaller rewards than before, and they encounter longer periods between employment. It should come as no surprise that fewer continue to seek employment, and that more succumb to despair.

The problem isn’t that people are not the way they used to be. It’s that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be. This has had devastating effects on the family and on community life. In 1980, rates of marriage by middle age were about eighty per cent for white people with and without bachelor’s degrees alike. As the economic prospects of those two groups have diverged, however, so have their marriage prospects. Today, about seventy-five per cent of college graduates are married by age forty-five, but only sixty per cent of non-college graduates are. Nonmarital childbearing has reached forty per cent among less educated white women. Parents without bachelor’s degrees are also now dramatically less likely to have a stable partner for rearing and financially supporting their children.

Unsurprisingly, one of the big factors they identify is the American healthcare system. The focus of their indictment is on the way that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance. “As they show”, writes Gawande,

the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent. “For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,” Case and Deaton write. “For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.” Even as workers’ wages have stagnated or declined, then, the cost to their employers has risen sharply. One recent study shows that, between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income. At the same time, the system practically begs employers to reduce the number of less skilled workers they hire, by outsourcing or automating their positions. In Case and Deaton’s analysis, this makes American health care itself a prime cause of our rising death rates.

Their overall conclusion is that

capitalism, having failed America’s less educated workers for decades, must change, as it has in the past. “There have been previous periods when capitalism failed most people, as the Industrial Revolution got under way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and again after the Great Depression,” they write. “But the beast was tamed, not slain.”

So the question from their work turns out to be the same question that is now everywhere: are we capable of again taming the beast?

Quarantine diary — Day 91

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Quiz Answer: Tuesday February 26, 2020 Hansard link

Friday 18 June, 2020

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Good news?

Road rage lunacy: do not try this on the M25

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Finish your muesli before watching. The good news is that nobody gets killed. Which is a miracle. I’ve never seen anything like this.

Wonder what happened to the culprit. At first I wondered if he might have been a conspiracy theorist. (See below for an explanation.)

What conspiracy-theories can do to people

Astonishing story from the New Hampshire Union Leader:

A Massachusetts man arrested after leading police on a chase with his five children in the vehicle live-streamed some of the incident on Facebook before allegedly ramming a cruiser and crashing into a tree in North Hampton.

“We don’t want to die,” one of his daughters screamed at one point as she pleaded with him to stop during Thursday’s frightening ordeal.

Alpalus Slyman, 29, of Dorchester, faces three counts of felony reckless conduct, conduct after an accident, and disobeying an officer.

The arrest followed a pursuit that began when police in Haverhill, Mass., notified New Hampshire authorities to be on the lookout for a blue Honda Odyssey minivan.

Police had received a report that a woman was thrown from the vehicle in Massachusetts, which prompted the chase, but Rockingham County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Al Brackett said they later learned that the woman was Slyman’s wife and that it appeared she jumped out while it was moving because she was concerned about the way he was acting.

Slyman posted several videos from inside the minivan on his Facebook page, some of which were taken before his wife fled and he continued on into New Hampshire with the children — ages 13, 5, 2, 1 and 8 months.

Brackett said the 13-year-old child also posted about the incident on social media.

Screams could be heard several times during Slyman’s livestream as he refused to pull over while listening to WROR, a classic hits radio station.

“Don’t you understand? The cops aren’t your friend,” he tells the children before claiming that he’s trying to protect them.

At one point he turned the camera toward his speedometer, which showed him traveling at 110 mph.

He also asked for help from the president: “Donald Trump, I need a miracle,” he said.

Slyman later told the children, “All they’re going to do is drug me and then say I’m crazy.”

In earlier videos before his wife got out and the chase began, she could be heard begging him to stop.

“Slow down, honey, before you kill us!” she says after telling him that he’s “not right.”

Slyman is being held without bail at the Rockingham County jail after he was found to be a danger to himself and his family. Brackett said a mental health evaluation was requested.

On his blog, Alex Hern did some digging, drawing on excavations by Marc-André Argentino, that revealed that Slyman was a conspiracy theorist, with a line in anti-vaxx, 9/11 trutherism and illuminati theories.

But…

things really went off the rails on June 6th – less than a week before he got in his car and nearly killed his family. That’s when, according to Argentino’s analysis, Slyman was first introduced to QAnon.

(A brief précis for those not versed in this particular branch of internet insanity: QAnon is, narrowly construed, a conspiracy theory, holding that there is a great conspiracy to keep Donald Trump from ridding the world of the illuminati-esque cabal of paedophiles and murders who currently pull the strings as part of the Deep State).

Argentino believes that Slyman first watched a video from the QAnon community on June 6th. Then, “very likely he was red-pilled into QAnon in the early hours of June 8 when he binge watched ‘Fall of the Cabal’ until 4am,” Argentino writes. From there, he descends further, latching on to one particularly niche theory that Hilary Clinton skinned and ate a child on camera for the illicit high gained from consuming a young person’s adrenaline.

Five days after he watches his first Q video, he is live-streaming his belief that the local radio station is sending him coded messages from Q. Later that day, the song You Spin Me Round by Dead Or Alive convinces him the Deep State is coming to kill him, and he gets in the car with his wife and kids and begins his drive.

The old belief that conspiracy theories were mostly harmless, or even socially useful in keeping nutters off the street may or may not have been accurate. But it’s clear that for at least a minority of Internet users, they are definitely toxic. (Just think of PizzaGate, for example.) Sounds to me as though Slyman may have had mental health issues before he got sucked down the Qanon wormhole.

Sobering stuff, Ne c’est pas? I suppose the only good news from this incident is that the kids survived their terrifying ordeal.

Between-centre differences for COVID-19 ICU mortality from early data in England

This is the title of a startling piece of research conducted by four researchers, three from Cambridge and one from UCLA, who looked at the data for outcomes for Covid-19 patients admitted to ICU departments in NHS hospitals over the period from 8th February to 22nd May.

The Abstract reads:

The high numbers of COVID-19 patients developing severe respiratory failure has placed exceptional demands on ICU capacity around the world. Understanding the determinants of ICU mortality is important for surge planning and shared decision making. We used early data from the COVID-19 Hospitalisation in England Surveillance System (from the start of data collection 8th February -22nd May 2020) to look for factors associated with ICU outcome in the hope that information from such timely analysis may be actionable before the outbreak peak. Immunosuppressive disease, chronic cardiorespiratory/renal disease and age were key determinants of ICU mortality in a proportional hazards mixed effects model. However variation in site-stratified random effects were comparable in magnitude suggesting substantial between-centre variability in mortality. Notwithstanding possible ascertainment and lead-time effects, these early results motivate comparative effectiveness research to understand the origin of such differences and optimise surge ICU provision.

The bottom line, summarised in a University bulletin is that:

the NHS trust in which a COVID-19 patient ended up in intensive care is as important, in terms of the risk of death, as the strongest patient-specific risk factors such as older age, immunosuppression or chronic heart/kidney disease. In the worst case, COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a particular NHS trust were over four times as likely to die in a given time period than COVID-19 patients in an average trust’s ICU.

[Emphasis added] As with many other aspects of this pandemic, postcode lotteries apply.

Quarantine diary — Day 90

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Thursday 18 June, 2020

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Quote of the day

“Our bodies process so much context, so much information, in encounters, that meeting on video is being a weird kind of blindfolded. We sense too little and can’t imagine enough.”

  • Gianpiero Petriglieri, INSEAD

Which is one reason why video-conferencing is so tiring.

John Bolton tells all… maybe

Bolton’s book about his time as Trump’s sidekick is out. (Well, publication date is next week but it’s already #1 on Amazon.com). Various newspapers have had a copy, and are all busily extracting juicy bits from it. Here for example, is a chunk from the New York Times.

While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials. It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain was a nuclear power and asked if Finland was a part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. The president never tired of assailing allied leaders and came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. He said it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela.

At times, Mr. Trump seemed to almost mimic the authoritarian leaders he appeared to admire. “These people should be executed,” Mr. Trump once said of journalists. “They are scumbags.” When Mr. Xi explained why he was building concentration camps in China, the book says, Mr. Trump “said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.” He repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to prosecute former Secretary of State John F. Kerry for talking with Iran in what he insisted was a violation of the Logan Act.

In the face of such behavior, even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock Mr. Trump behind his back. During the president’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of shit.” A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”

Three observations about this…

  1. So what’s new here? The number of people who didn’t know that Trump was a pig-ignorant, narcissistic, authoritarian creep must by now be vanishingly small. So Bolton’s USP (expressed in the title of his tome) is that he “Was There” — right there in the room with the crybaby-in-chief.

  2. On the scumbag scale, Bolton ranks pretty high. Even Trump thought so — although, according to Michael Wolf (I think) that was initially because he didn’t like Bolton’s moustache. This may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with Trump. He was, as Daniel Lazare observed, “a hawk’s hawk, a militarist who never saw a U.S. war of aggression he didn’t like”.

  3. As Anne Applebaum observed on Twitter:

“He could have spoken to Robert Mueller. He could have given evidence in the House. >He could have convened Republican Senators — they would have listened to him — to tell them how dangerous the president is. Instead he stayed silent…”

“All of his life he thought he was pushing America’s interests around the world. But when he had the opportunity to do something truly important for America — to torpedo this disastrous presidency — he failed.”

I’m not sure that if Bolton had testified it would have made that much difference. After the House of Representatives voted to impeach him, he was apparently willing to testify to the Senate if subpoenaed. But Republican senators blocked that. Bolton may have been relieved by that, given that not testifying would guarantee bigger sales for his book.

Does Trump Want to Fight for a Second Term? His Self-Sabotage Worries Aides

This NYT story might just be an outbreak of wishful thinking.

In a recent meeting with his top political advisers, President Trump was impatient as they warned him that he was on a path to defeat in November if he continued his incendiary behavior in public and on Twitter.

Days earlier, Mr. Trump had sparked alarm by responding to protests over police brutality with a threat that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Mr. Trump pushed back against his aides. “I have to be myself,” he replied, according to three people familiar with the meeting. A few hours later, he posted on Twitter a letter from his former personal lawyer describing some of the protesters as “terrorists.”

In those moments, and in repeated ones since then, the president’s customary defiance has been suffused with a heightened sense of agitation as he confronts a series of external crises he has failed to contain, or has exacerbated, according to people close to him. They say his repeated acts of political self-sabotage — a widely denounced photo-op at a church for which peaceful protesters were forcibly removed, a threat to use the American military to quell protests — have significantly damaged his re-election prospects, and yet he appears mostly unable, or unwilling, to curtail them.

Personally, I wouldn’t count any of those chickens.

Zoom decided to extend end-to-end encryption to non-paying users

From the Verge:

Zoom says it will begin allowing users of its videoconferencing software to enable end-to-end encryption of calls starting with a beta next month, the company announced on Wednesday. The feature won’t be restricted to paid enterprise users, either. It’s coming to both free and paid users, Zoom says, and it will be a toggle switch any call admin can turn on or disable, in the event they want to allow traditional phone lines or older conference room phones to join.

The company said as recently as early June that it might not be able to enable end-to-end encryption for free users out of concern that the app could be used for unlawful activity. Strong encryption would make it difficult for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to access the data on free calls.

And this from the Zoom blog:

Today, Zoom released an updated E2EE design on GitHub. We are also pleased to share that we have identified a path forward that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users on our platform. This will enable us to offer E2EE as an advanced add-on feature for all of our users around the globe – free and paid – while maintaining the ability to prevent and fight abuse on our platform.

To make this possible, Free/Basic users seeking access to E2EE will participate in a one-time process that will prompt the user for additional pieces of information, such as verifying a phone number via a text message. Many leading companies perform similar steps on account creation to reduce the mass creation of abusive accounts. We are confident that by implementing risk-based authentication, in combination with our current mix of tools — including our Report a User function — we can continue to prevent and fight abuse.

Smart move. Interesting to see how the company responds to pressure from users. Unlike some tech giants.

When/if the current crisis is over, Zoom will have a commanding position in the online-conferencing space. Which means that one of the tech giants will try to acquire them. At which point we will see if governments are serious in reining in tech monopolies.

Quarantine diary — Day 89

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Wednesday 17 June, 2020

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Why America’s institutions are failing

(And it’s not just because of Trump, though he hasn’t helped.)

Thoughtful essay by Derek Thompson

The pandemic and the police protests, the twin crises of this horrendous year, might initially seem to have nothing to do with each other. In some ways, they are totally opposite cataclysms.

The COVID-19 outbreak, which demanded a swift and efficient response, revealed a discombobulated country painfully slow to deploy its arsenal of health interventions. The killing of George Floyd—like the attacks on peaceful protesters—demonstrated a rush to violence by American law enforcement, whose military arsenal is too often deployed with tragic efficiency.

Beneath these differences, however, lies a unifying failure. “The government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police—have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity,” Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote on Twitter.

Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020? In part because they are choking on the dust of a dead century. In too many quarters of American leadership, our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s. We are prepared for wars against states and militant groups, but not against stateless forces such as pandemics and climate change. We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.

The failures of our law-enforcement agencies and public-health systems are not one and the same. But our orientation toward militarized overpolicing and our slow-footed response to fast-moving pandemics both stem from an inability to adapt our safekeeping institutions to the realities of the 21st century. Lost in the anxieties and illusions of the past, United States institutions have forgotten the art of change in a changing world.

Always fighting the last war, in other words. In this case, the last century’s wars.

Worth reading in full.

Techlash? America’s growing concern with technology companies

Findings (pdf) of an interesting survey conducted by the Knight Foundation.

Even as technology has brought considerable benefits to people’s lives, there has been increasing dialogue about the possible downsides of online technology, particularly relating to the practices of the largest internet and technology companies, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon.

Americans’ concerns about these companies appear to be deepening. Gallup’s tracking of public sentiment toward the internet industry shows a decline from a high of 60% of Americans with positive views of such companies in 2015 to 43% of Americans viewing them positively and 30% viewing them negatively in 2019 — up 14 percentage points from 2015.1 When asked specifically about such technology giants as Google, Facebook and Amazon, 46% of Americans view these companies positively, and one-third (33%) view them negatively.

Knight Foundation and Gallup endeavored to better understand how Americans view the roles these companies play in their lives and society as a whole. With the exception of their influence on democratic participation, this report finds widespread concern about the effects of internet and technology companies on society and democracy and their ability to self-regulate. Still, Americans continue to use these platforms despite their unease about misinformation and privacy, perhaps because there are few other options for similar services given the dominance of the major companies in the field.

Alongside the decline in how Americans regard major internet and technology companies, a variety of measures have been introduced and debated, including data privacy legislation and antitrust measures to break up some of these companies and curb some of their legal protections. However, Americans are ambivalent about major governmental involvement in regulating the practices of these companies, either because they are philosophically opposed to government intervention or, as this study suggests, because they do not believe government officials have the necessary knowledge to craft effective legislation.

So… people don’t like or trust the companies. But they continue to use their services. Why? Is it because there’s really no alternative?

Martin Wolf on what lies ahead

Characteristically thoughtful column in today’s FT. Probably behind the paywall. But here are his main conclusions about the post-Coronavirus world.

  1. A first shift away from the globalisation of things, in favour of more (though also contested) virtual globalisation. The integration of supply chains was declining before the pandemic. Now policy is moving more strongly in that direction.
  2. The accelerated adoption of technologies that promise enhanced safety along with opportunities for greater social control. China is taking the lead. But other states are likely to feel entitled, perhaps even expected, to follow suit.
  3. More polarised politics. The already established conflict between a more nationalist and protectionist right and a more socialist and “progressive” left seems likely to be exacerbated, at least in high-income democracies. These sides will fight over what a more assertive state should be doing.
  4. Public debt and deficits will be far greater. There will also be little tolerance for another round of “austerity” or reductions in the level or growth of public spending. A greater likelihood is higher taxes, especially on the more prosperous, and persistent deficits, financed, either explicitly or implicitly, by central banks.
  5. Dreadful international relations. China has had a surprisingly good crisis, given that this is where the virus emerged. But China is also openly autocratic and internationally assertive. Friction with a divided and enfeebled US seems set to become worse, for the indefinite future.

Interestingly, he also wonders about

what will be done about the role and influence of the tech giants. My guess is that Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like will be brought under political control: states do not like such concentrations of private power.”

I hope he’s right.

Quarantine diary — Day 88

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Tuesday 16 June, 2020 – Bloomsday

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Happy Bloomsday!

June 16, 1904 is the day in which all the action in Joyce’s great modernist novel, Ulysses, takes place. Since the 1950s the day has been celebrated by Joyce enthusiasts all over the world, usually by meetings, readings, lunches, talks, performances — all events that involve people meeting in groups, and therefore difficult or impossible in many locations today.

Hopefully, next year will be different. And 2022 will mark the centenary of the publication of the novel, so that should be fun.

But that doesn’t mean one can’t read from it today. There’s a good annotated version of the text on Wikisource if you don’t possess a copy or if the novel is new to you.

Permanent secretaries ‘not aware of any economic planning for a pandemic’

From today’s Guardian:

Two of the government’s most powerful civil servants have said they were not aware of any attempt to make economic preparations for a possible global pandemic in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.

Sir Tom Scholar and Alex Chisholm, the permanent secretaries in the Treasury and the Cabinet Office respectively, confirmed that although the government simulated an international flu outbreak in 2016, Whitehall did not devise a plan for dealing with the consequences for the economy.

Instead, Scholar told MPs, civil servants devised schemes to help businesses “as they went along”. The disclosure, made before the public accounts committee, prompted its chair, Labour’s Meg Hillier, to say she was “dumbstruck”.

Scholar and Chisholm appeared before the committee on Monday to answer questions about the government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak. The Conservative MP James Wild asked them whether they were aware of an economic plan equivalent to Exercise Cygnus, the 2016 simulation that involved 950 emergency planning officials.

Scholar, who joined the Treasury in 1992, replied: “We developed our economic response in the weeks leading up to the budget. I don’t know to what extent the Treasury was involved in that exercise.”

Referring to the schemes devised to help businesses during the pandemic, Scholar added: “We didn’t have these schemes ready and designed and ready to go. We have been designing them as we have gone along.”

Why are we not surprised? In one way, the whole Coronavirus shambles is a story of the loss of state capacity.

America’s democratic unravelling

From an essay by Daron Acemomoglu of MIT in Foreign Affairs:

Institutional collapse often resembles bankruptcy, at least the way Mike Campbell experienced it in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “gradually and then suddenly.” As James Robinson and I argue in our recent book, The Narrow Corridor, democratic institutions restrain elected leaders by enabling a delicate balance of oversight by different branches of government (legislature and the judiciary) and political action by regular people, whether in the form of voting in elections or exerting pressure via protest. But democratic institutions rest on norms—compromise, cooperation, respect for the truth—and are bolstered by an active, self-confident citizenry and a free press. When democratic values come under attack and the press and civil society are neutralized, the institutional safeguards lose their power. Under such conditions, the transgressions of those in power go unpunished or become normalized. The gradual erosion of checks and balances thus gives way to sudden institutional collapse.

By refusing to disclose his tax returns, openly pursuing policies that serve his family’s financial interests, vilifying Hispanic and Muslim Americans, propagating conspiracy theories, and relentlessly lying to the press, the president has left practically no norm of democratic governance unviolated.

The United States is currently working through the later chapters of this same authoritarian playbook, which Trump adopted early in his presidency. By dismissing concerns about Russian interference in the U.S. election, refusing to disclose his tax returns, openly pursuing policies that serve his family’s financial interests, vilifying Hispanic and Muslim Americans, propagating conspiracy theories, and relentlessly lying to the press, the president has left practically no norm of democratic governance unviolated. These actions not only weakened the institutions that are supposed to restrain the president but also further polarized the U.S. electorate, creating a constituency that unconditionally supports Trump out of fear that the Democrats will take power. Having destroyed many Americans’ trust in their country’s democratic institutions, Trump has set about destroying the institutions themselves, one oversight mechanism at a time.

That’s why the November election is so important. If Trump is defeated, then there’s a chance that American institutions will recover. If he wins then I think the game’s over.

Quarantine diary — Day 87

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Monday 15 June, 2020

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Quote of the Day

I keep wondering about this too.

Termite capitalism: the menace of private equity

Terrific essay in open Democracy on one of the most pernicious manifestations of capitalism.

The problem is that the private equity model of takeover and ownership is akin to inviting termites into your house. The basic model is as follows: private equity acquires a company using loans, usually from banks but also increasingly from pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds etc. The old management is replaced, the workforce cut, and assets such as land and buildings are sold, often to an entity registered in an offshore tax haven. The new company must pay interest on the debt, repay the debt over time, pay rent for the premises, management fees to the private equity owners.

Costs will also include payment to linked third-party suppliers, at prices which are not arm’s length. The taxable capacity of the new company is thereby reduced, and tax liabilities are shifted towards capital gains tax away from corporation tax. The company can only be financially viable in a booming market or where revenue streams continue to rise.

In general, private equity does not actually create anything – it engages instead in extracting resources from previously existing assets. Eventually, by excessive extraction of revenue flows, the companies are bound to fail. The termites eat away at the foundations until the house falls down.

If ever one wanted a demonstration of the extent to which neoliberal ideology is suffused through our ruling elites, then tolerance of private equity provides it. The argument that it’s really a way of ensuring the survival of the fittest in corporate life is specious — at least in its present manifestations.

The Long Shadow Of The Future

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the death of Max Weber, the patron saint of the administrative state. Wolfgang Drechsler has a nice essay to mark the occasion.

“Weberian public administration in the wider sense”, he writes,

has been, and is, much maligned; bureaucracy is an easy target, and whining about it is a steady feature of complex human societies which always need and automatically generate it. And Weberian public administration has its systemic faults — slowness, process-orientation, a slippery slope to authoritarian, mindless hierarchization and shirking. However, this bureaucracy is in its optimal form ethics-based, high-capacity, and motivation-driven. It is meant to be both responsible — to a state that is above and beyond particular interests — as well as responsive — to groups and citizens, but not at the cost of the commonweal.

However we decide to manage the transition to a CO2-neutral world — via Green Growth or Post-Growth — that process will have to be implemented by competent, motivated, and yes, Weberian civil servants.

Yep. And the problem was that neoliberal ideology never believed that this kind of civil service was valuable. (One of its more fanatical American devotees used to say that his ambition was “to shrink the state until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub”.) So its devotees (including Margaret Thatcher) imported economic principles and management theories into the administrative state without recognizing the crucial, fundamental differences between public and private, not least as regards value creation.

As a result, writes Drechsler, “We still stand in front of the smoldering ruins of a capable, responsible state … and we are still paying a high price for it.”

And how! The pandemic has vividly demonstrated this — especially in the cases of the US and the UK. We have discovered that these states lacked the capacity to deal with the crisis because, over preceding decades, that capacity had been eroded or (in the case of the US) actively destroyed, especially during the Trump presidency — as Michael Lewis described in his sobering book, The Fifth Risk.

Which brings us to a remarkable long essay by Nils Gilman and Steven Weber on how different kinds of states have responded to the challenge of the virus. They focus particularly on Taiwan (which did well) but draw some really interesting general conclusions from their survey.

Poor policy reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t the result of a failure of imagination; the pandemic was not a black swan event, and it was not unpredictable. It was entirely foreseeable — and foreseen — by a wide variety of government, business, medical and other foresight professionals. For years, the World Economic Forum hosted pandemic preparedness planning events. Even if we didn’t know when and precisely how, we knew something like COVID-19 was coming.

The real challenge is not foresight itself but how to turn foresight into action — specifically, into operational readiness supported by competent operators. The inability to contain the COVID-19 outbreak signals a failure to take seriously the outputs of our own foresight models by acting to create contingency arrangements, manage risks and secure back-up plans in advance, in a sustained manner and without a precise target date or endpoint.

This failure has taken place in Italy, Iran, Spain, England, Sweden, the U.S. and elsewhere; authoritarian, conservative and social democratic governments alike have been overwhelmed. And because we live in a time of rapid and intensive global flows of people and products, multiple national failures compound inexorably into a global failure. In the words of President Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

And why have a small number of countries, like Taiwan, been able to manage the crisis better than others?

Nils and Weber identify a “distinctive mix of governance attributes” —

at once vigorously participatory, highly trustworthy, competent and with careful plans. In 2004, the year after the SARS epidemic, which was widely seen to have been mishandled, the Taiwanese government established the National Health Command Center as “a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak response and acts as the operational command point for direct communications among central, regional and local authorities.” Five years later, Taiwanese health officials staged simulated drills as a capability exercise. Simulations revealed the tensions and miscommunications between different levels of government and agencies during a crisis, allowing officials to develop heuristics for overcoming such problems in advance.

One of the most intriguing ideas in this marvellous essay is the way it highlights the difference between ideas and delivery. “One of the less-positive effects of digital social media over the last decade”, they write,

has been to contribute to a set of mythologies about the special value of ideas. Ideas are of course powerful and ultimately the source of innovation and social change, but the pandemic is revealing a sharp difference between power and value. In a landscape where there are plenty of ideas — good and bad and mixed in terms of quality, and often hard to distinguish — value tends to migrate toward what is relatively scarce. And what’s been shown to be relatively scarce right now is competent operational expertise.

Put simply, ideas are cheap and easy to create and distribute — never more so than on social media platforms. But really knowing how to get things done effectively requires a set of capabilities that are difficult to create, expensive to maintain and improve, and not something you describe in 280 characters. Pandemics and other mass emergencies and mobilizations like wars demonstrate the difference in sharp relief. The ability to execute becomes visibly more important than the ability to ideate. What’s more, the best ideas are rarely discovered in isolation from practical implementation. Improvement depends on concrete feedback from what happens when ideas are put into practice in the world. What works and what doesn’t reveals itself to operators before (and often more clearly than) it reveals itself to idea generators.

Wow! This summary has just scratched the surface of an extraordinary essay. Which is why it’s worth reading in full.

29-hour reading of Ulysses to air on RTÉ radio tomorrow!

If you’re an admirer of James Joyce (like me), tomorrow — June 16 (Bloomsday) — is the most important day of the year.

For over 20 years I’ve hosted a lunch to celebrate the writer and his wonderful novel. We gather, drink burgundy and eat gorgonzola sandwiches — just as Leopold Bloom did in Davy Byrne’s pub — at lunchtime in the novel. And read from the book.

Sadly, this year the virus has put paid to that event. I had pondered trying to do a virtual Bloomsday lunch over Zoom, but decided it was too ridiculous and depressing to contemplate.

But — here’s some good news. RTE, the Irish national broadcasting station, is going to broadcast a marathon reading of the novel, starting at 8am tomorrow, the moment when the novel opens in the Martello Tower in Sandycove, south of Dublin.

Here’s the link. Use it wisely. Hope you enjoy the day.

Quarantine diary — Day 86

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Sunday 14 June, 2020

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Silicon Valley has admitted facial recognition technology is toxic – about time

This morning’s Observer column.

In his letter, Mr Krishna said that “IBM no longer offers general-purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software” and “firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and principles of trust and transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”

Amen to that. No sooner had the letter been released than cynics and sceptics were poring over it for the get-out clause. IBM was never a big player in the facial recognition game, said some, and so it’s no sacrifice to exit it: to them, Krishna’s letter was just “virtue- signalling”. Yet two days later Amazon heard the signal and announced a one-year suspension of police force use of its Rekognition facial recognition software – they say they’d like Congress to pass stronger regulation around it.

The IBM announcement and now Amazon’s are a big deal. Just ponder their significance for a moment…

Read on

And now Microsoft has joined the rush to paint a line between the company and the toxic tech. To be fair, their lawyer Brad Smith has been calling for regulation of the technology for quite a while.

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My soundtrack

I’m working in the garden today (writing and reading, not gardening!)

Here’s the soundtrack

Link

With time on his hands, the Observer‘s restaurant critic turns chef

Hilarious, beautifully-written piece. I loved this bit in particular…

I decided I needed something more challenging, because I am stupid, and don’t know when to quit. The soufflé suissesse has been on the menu at Le Gavroche since about 1968. According to Michel Roux Jr, who took over from his father Albert in 1993, it’s been lightened over the years. This is shocking, because, to make four servings, the current recipe (in Le Gavroche Cookbook) calls for six eggs, 600ml of double cream, 500ml of milk, 200g of gruyère, a slab of butter, a defibrillator and a priest standing by to administer last rites.

My devout mother would have held that the last was the essential ingredient.

Worth reading in full.

Signal Downloads Are Way Up Since the Protests Began

I’m not surprised. This NYT story explains:

The week before George Floyd died on May 25, about 51,000 first-time users downloaded Signal, according to data from the analytics firm Sensor Tower. The following week, as protests grew nationwide, there were 78,000 new downloads. In the first week of June, there were 183,000. (Rani Molla at Recode noted that downloads of Citizen, the community safety app, are also way up.)

Organizers have relied on Signal to devise action plans and develop strategies for handling possible arrests for several years. But as awareness of police monitoring continues to grow, protest attendees are using Signal to communicate with friends while out on the streets. The app uses end-to-end encryption, which means each message is scrambled so that it can only be deciphered by the sender and the intended recipient.

Signal has also already been tested. In 2016, the chat service withstood a subpoena request for its data. The only information it could provide was the date the accounts in question were created and when they had last used Signal. Signal does not store messages or contacts on its servers, so it cannot be forced to give copies of that information to the government.

It’s a terrific app, which has got a lot better over time. Think of it as WhatsApp for serious people who don’t trust Facebook.

Quarantine diary — Day 85

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Saturday 13 June, 2020

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Saturday 13 June

Quote of the Day

Some on the left drew a strange consolation from Trump’s hostility to foreign wars, as if it meant he could be a tactical ally against American imperialism. They failed to see that he wanted to wage war at home: his furious inauguration speech with its talk of ‘American carnage’ was a declaration of war on urban racial liberalism, especially as represented by New York, the city that had rejected him.

 

The West’s ‘China problem’

I started the day reading Peter Oborne’s piece on whether China will replace Islam as the West’s new enemy — and then got sucked into the rabbit-hole of whether we are sliding into a new Cold War, with China playing the role that the Soviet Union played in the old days. This is all about geopolitics, of course, about which I know little. But if you write about digital technology, as I do, this emerging Cold War is a perennial puzzle that pops up everywhere. For example, in:

  • the discussions about whether Huawei kit should be allowed in Western 5G networks;
  • whether we should be concerned about becoming addicted to Zoom, a company with a sizeable chunk of its workforce and infrastructure based in China;
  • what to make of China’s increasing technological assertiveness at the ITU over changing the centrals protocols of the TCP/IP-based Internet we use today
  • anxieties in (mostly-US companies and the US government) about the inbuilt advantages an authoritarian regime has in fostering the development of ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) technology, the essential feedstock for which is unlimited volumes of user data — as compared with the way our liberal reservations about privacy and civil rights hobbles our tech giants.
  • the strange and enduring legacy of old Cold War attitudes in the Western military-industrial complex which continually obsesses about Russia rather than China.

This last factor is particularly weird. In the immediate post-war period, we lived in a genuinely bi-polar world, with competition between two different economic and ideological systems — the Soviet, centrally-planned one, and the Western liberal capitalist one.

As it happens, we in the West greatly over-estimated the capacity of the Soviet system, perhaps because it seemed to be very good at some things — nuclear weapons development and space science in particular. In part we owe the Internet to the fright the US received when in 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite. This, among other things, led to the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Pentagon, which was the organisation that conceived and funded Arpanet, the precursor of today’s Internet.

Nevertheless, it remained true that the bi-polar world into which I was born was based on an ongoing contest between two socio-economic systems which could be — and were often — seen as genuine alternatives.

This bi-polar world evaporated in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and two years later the USSR imploded, leaving the Western model apparently triumphant. This was the moment that coincided with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ essay, which argued that the post-1917 ideological competition about the best way to organise society had been decisively resolved with liberal democracy as the winning candidate. This was an overly-simplistic reading of Fukuyama, but what was indisputable was that, post-1989, we moved into a uni-polar world, with the US as the reigning hyper power, able to do exactly as it pleased. Which it did, including launching a disastrous war in Iraq on a pretext, and further destabilising the Middle East as a consequence.

But even before 1989, things were beginning to change elsewhere in the world. In 1978, in particular, as Laurie Macfarlane points out,

Deng Xiaoping became China’s new paramount leader, after outmanoeuvring Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. Deng oversaw the country’s historic ‘Reform and Opening-up’ process, which increased the role of market incentives and opened up the Chinese economy to global trade. In the decades since, China’s economic transformation has been nothing short of astonishing.

In 1981, 88% of the Chinese population lived in extreme poverty. In the four decades since, nearly a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, leaving the figure at less than 2%. Over the same time period, the size of China’s economy increased from $195 billion – around the same size as the Spanish economy – to nearly $14 trillion today. By some measures, China’s economy has overtaken the US and is now the largest in the world. China is also home to the second largest number of Fortune 500 companies in the world, and more billionaires than Europe.

So even as the old bi-polar world was dying, a new alternative system was being born. I don’t think that Deng had many geopolitical ambitions, but his successors certainly had. And have.

China’s astonishing economic transformation has been engineered by a distinctive economic model which they call “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, combining strategic state ownership and planning with market-oriented incentives and a one-party political system to create a unique economic model that while poorly understood in the West is found interesting and perhaps attractive by a significant number of non-aligned countries.

It doesn’t look much like ’socialism’ to anyone who studies the tech sector, because the private sector accounts for the overwhelming majority of output, employment and investment in China; and there is — as Macfarlane points out, little sign of democratic workers’ control. But it’s a powerful and effective system, and — to date — it appears to be working. Which is more than could ever be said for the Soviet system.

So here we are in a bi-polar world again. But it’s nothing like its predecessor. In the old Cold War, for example, European democracies were resolutely anti-Soviet (even if they didn’t always pay their mandatory 2% of GDP into the NATO budget). But now, with China as the opposite ‘pole’ to the US, they’re much more ambivalent. As are many global companies. China’s role as the workshop of the world, and also as the fastest growing and potentially most profitable market, means that outright hostility to the new superpower looks like a self-defeating policy.

This doesn’t bother Trump, whose most desperate need is to find an enemy he can blame for the unfolding disaster of the pandemic that has occurred on his watch. And it isn’t just Trump, as Peter Oborne says:

China is being presented as the new existential enemy, just as Islam was 20 years ago. And by the very same people. The same newspaper columnists, the same think tanks, the same political parties and the same intelligence agencies.

After Huntington’s famous essay that led the charge against Muslims – or what they often call radical Islam – now they have turned their attention to the Far East.

US President Donald Trump, the world’s Muslim-basher-in-chief, has now started to attack China, rather as Bush, his Republican predecessor, attacked Iraq in 2003 and the “axis of evil” 20 years ago. During his campaign in 2016 he accused China of “raping” the US economy.

However, since the outbreak of Covid-19, Trump’s attacks have gained speed and traction. He has accused China of covering up the virus and lying about its death toll.

Leaving aside Trump, who thinks only in transactional terms and doesn’t seem to have any strategic sense, the impression one gets from the US foreign policy establishment is of hegemonic unease. The feeling that it would be disastrous if the US lost its position as the global leader in digital technology is palpable. And it’s ruthlessly exploited by the tech companies — as we saw when the Facebook boss ‘testified’ to Congress and hinted that not hampering (i.e. regulating) the tech giants is a way of ensuring the continuance of US technological hegemony.

So is American hegemony really in doubt? Writing in 2018, Adam Tooze was sceptical:

As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

If America’s president mounted on a golf buggy is a suitably ludicrous emblem of our current moment, the danger is that it suggests far too pastoral a scenario: American power trundling to retirement across manicured lawns. That is not our reality. Imagine instead the president and his buggy careening around the five-acre flight deck of a $13 billion, Ford-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier engaged in ‘dynamic force deployment’ to the South China Sea. That better captures the surreal revival of great-power politics that hangs over the present. Whether this turns out to be a violent and futile rearguard action, or a new chapter in the age of American world power, remains to be seen.

And if you felt that this post was TL;DR. (Too long, don’t read) I perfectly understand. E.M. Forster once observed that there are two kinds of writer: those who know what they think and write it; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it. I belong mostly in the latter category.

Quarantine diary — Day 84

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Friday 12 June, 2020

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Edward Hopper

Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning.

There’s a marvellous piece, “Edward Hopper and American Solitude”, by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker , based on an exhibition of Edward Hopper’s landscape painting currently on show in the Beyeler Foundation, Switzerland’s premier museum of modern art, outside Basel. “Though termed a realist”, Schjeldahl writes,

Hopper is more properly a Symbolist, investing objective appearance with clenched, melancholy subjectivity. He was an able draftsman and masterly as a painter of light and shadow, but he ruthlessly subordinated aesthetic pleasure to the compacted description—as dense as uranium—of things that answered to his feelings without exposing them. Nearly every house that he painted strikes me as a self-portrait, with brooding windows and almost never a visible or, should one be indicated, inviting door. If his pictures sometimes seem awkwardly forced, that’s not a flaw; it’s a guarantee that he has pushed the communicative capacities of painting to their limits, then a little bit beyond. He leaves us alone with our own solitude, taking our breath away and not giving it back. Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but—look!—they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice.

Lovely. I wish I could see the exhibition. The Gallery website has a few of the pictures online

Imagine hearing this in your living room

Link

Norah Jones has been giving concerts from her living room on YouTube. This is an excerpt from one of them. They’re absolutely entrancing, and I only learned about them by chance from a piece by Paul Elie in the New Yorker.

She has been writing new songs in response to the present. “My six-year-old has been waking up in the middle of the night for three months now, and I walk him back to his room and sit and wait for him to fall back asleep,” she told me. “I try not to look at my phone in the dead of night, but I was reading about all the things that are happening. A song will come to you, sometimes, and one came to me.” She played it right after the Ellington piece in last week’s show. It’s a cross between a street scene and a lullaby, focussed on the need to “love, listen, and learn.” Unidentified on YouTube, it sounded like a standard that Nina Simone might have sung — the sound of an artist trying to keep it together in a time of protest.

Unmissable. This is the kind of discovery that can makes one’s day.

Footnote for ageing hippies She is the daughter of Sue Jones and Ravi Shankar, who had a big influence on George Harrison and, through him, the other members of the Beatles.

The worst worst case

As some countries are beginning to ‘re-open’ their economies because they seem to have the pandemic under some kind of control, I can understand the ubiquitous longing to get back to normal. Sadly, I don’t think that’s realistic for the time being. In fact it may be that we are only the beginning of the crisis. That’s because we’re in a cascade of inter-related crises: one is a health, which is what has been grabbing most of the attention up to now; then there’s a looming economic crisis; and thirdly there’s political upheaval and culture warfare sparked by the murder of George Floyd. And, of course, for the UK there’s the added crisis attendant upon crashing out of the EU without a deal.

Now the economic impact of the pandemic is beginning to surface.

This is a picture of a particular economy falling off a cliff.

But actually, there’s a worse global scenario — that the banking system implodes again. This is the scenario outlined by Frank Portnoy from UC Berkeley in a long essay in The Atlantic. At the root of it is the addiction of the banks to a new kind of pernicious derivative product — collateralised loan obligations (CLOs).

“The financial crisis of 2008 was about home mortgages”, he writes.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to home buyers were repackaged into securities called collateralized debt obligations, known as CDOs. In theory, CDOs were intended to shift risk away from banks, which lend money to home buyers. In practice, the same banks that issued home loans also bet heavily on CDOs, often using complex techniques hidden from investors and regulators. When the housing market took a hit, these banks were doubly affected. In late 2007, banks began disclosing tens of billions of dollars of subprime-CDO losses. The next year, Lehman Brothers went under, taking the economy with it.

The post-2008 reforms were well intentioned, says Portnoy, but…

They haven’t kept the banks from falling back into old, bad habits. After the housing crisis, subprime CDOs naturally fell out of favor. Demand shifted to a similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to businesses—specifically, troubled businesses. CLOs bundle together so-called leveraged loans, the subprime mortgages of the corporate world. These are loans made to companies that have maxed out their borrowing and can no longer sell bonds directly to investors or qualify for a traditional bank loan. There are more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The majority are held in CLOs.

It’s a long story, but the analogy with CDOs ie helpful. At the bottom of every CDO were sub-prime mortgages which had a high probability of default. At the bottom of every CLO are loans to companies which are in dire straits — and which were always in danger of failing even before Covid struck. But now many of them are terminally affected by the lockdown and are unlikely to return. So the CLOs for which they represented a manageable risk might suddenly start to look dodgy. And you can guess what would happen then.

The difference from 2008 is that national economies and central banks will not have the financial muscle to do another bailout.

Not a cheery read, but I think it’s important to get a perspective on the crisis we’re in.

US ‘policing’ is indeed disgraceful, but the UK has its problems too

Remember the Stephen Lawrence case — the inquiry into which confirmed that there was systemic institutional racism in the Metropolitan police.

People in glasshouses…

Europe resurfaces to find an odd mix of the familiar and the alien

This is wonderful. The New York Times sent a writer (Patrick Kingsley) and a photographer (Laetitia Vancon) to drive through Europe recording what they found. The result is an unmissable photo-essay, a reminder of the heyday of Life and the other mid-century news-magazines.

It also reminds me of the trip that Walker Evans and James Agee made in 1936 to report on the lives of poor sharecroppers in the Deep South which resulted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

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The peer-reviewing crisis widens and deepens

Long and thoughtful essay by Milton Packer on the looming crisis in scientific publication processes.

Packer has been vocal for a long time on the deficiencies of peer-review. Long before the pandemic he has been criticising its capriciousness (as Rodney Brooks did in his essay that I blogged about yesterday), its biases towards supporting accepted dogma, the lack of consistent quality in the review process, and perverse incentives in editorial decision making.

He thinks — rightly IMHO — that these weaknesses of the peer-review process have been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. To put it crudely, here’s been a kind of academic feeding frenzy. But Packer sees the recent scandal of the retraction of two papers published in leading journals as

a real opportunity for us to reinvent peer review. We needed to do so before the pandemic; we desperately need to do so now. We must implement changes that will provide confidence in the validity of published work, and we need to revamp and strengthen the peer-review and editorial decision-making processes. The FDA imposes severe penalties on site investigators who submit fabricated data; many journal editors follow a similar policy. Fear of a potentially career-ending ban on publications in leading journals will certainly motivate most corresponding authors to perform the exceptionally high level of due diligence that is needed to restore the trust that the review process desperately depends on.

If academic medicine does not make these changes, then we only have ourselves to blame when the credibility of medical research in the public’s view crumbles.

Yep.

Quarantine diary Day 83

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Thursday 11 June, 2020

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Quote of the Day

If blogging didn’t exist we’d have to invent it. “People writing what they know, fluidly, publicly, with an archive for the future.” That’s it.

Walker Evans’s M2

(Apologies in advance to non-photographers)

Now there’s a properly used Leica. It belonged to the renowned American photographer Walker Evans, who bought it in 1962 and used it for as long as he used the 35mm format, i.e. until 1973 (when he began to use a Polaroid SX-70 almost exclusively). He gave the M2 as a gift to a personal and professional assistant, who has now put it up for auction. Starting bid €20,000. Auctioneer’s estimate: €40k-€50k.

Crazy prices, really. Wonder if it’ll make anywhere near that.

On the other hand, there are a lot of photographs made with that camera in museums and galleries worldwide — though they’re not from the period when Walker worked for the Farm Security Administration. For those assignments he used a range of bigger cameras including a heavy large-format 10×8 camera. Later on I think he used Rolleiflexes.

This is probably his most famous photograph, a portrait of the 27-year-old Allie Mae Burroughs, taken in 1936, when he was reporting for Fortune magazine on sharecroppers in the Deep South alongside the writer James Agee. This work was published in 1941 as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The photograph is in the public domain. I think the original print is in the Library of Congress.

On the face of it, it’s such a simple picture. But you can see the stress of Depression-era farm life etched on this young woman’s face. So it speaks volumes.

I don’t think Evans ever saw himself as an artist. In his view he just pointed his camera and recorded things, as this video records:

Link

My first Leica was also an M2 (chrome, not black) which I bought in the year that Evans stopped using his; I bought it from an antiquarian bookseller and financed it partly by selling a couple of rare books that I had picked up in a house clearance.

More on ‘Sabbath mode’…

Yesterday’s post about the challenges posed by the Coronavirus for elevator manufacturers mentioned the idea of ‘Sabbath mode’, where the elevator stops at every floor automatically.

This sparked a lovely email from Dave Hill, an esteemed former colleague of mine, who pointed me to a post by a commenter on Richard Dawkin’s blog.

I just bought my second refrigerator. The first one lasted 28 years. I think they forgot the redundancy. The new one has something called Sabbath Mode. Someone on the internet suggested that means it plays Black Sabbath when you open the doors. Alas no. It means special settings to accommodate Orthodox Jewish superstitions about not being able to turn electricity off and on during the Sabbath.

Some immediate questions spring to mind: Will my refrigerator keep bacon OK ? Can it be opened by a menstruating women or will it just go into auto clean mode ? Is there a Pope setting so that it won’t keep treats during Lent ? Is there an Islamic fridge that doesn’t cool beer ?

More serious questions. Am I right to be vaguely annoyed by this ? It’s clearly not the most pressing issue in the world. But like finding I’m in a building with no 13th floor it irritates me.

Maybe I should just chill.

My recommendation: chill.

Rodney Brooks on peer-review

As someone who believes that peer-review is useful but over-rated and often wrongly fetishised by both the academy and journalism, I was much cheered by this wonderful essay by Rodney Books, the great MIT roboticist. His three most influential academic papers, he recalls, were all rejected by reviewers and remained unpublished until journal editors eventually saw the light.

The piece has a lovely reproduction of the handwritten excoriation of his “However, I was worried at a deeper intellectual level, and so almost simultaneously started writing about the philosophical underpinnings of research in AI, and how my approach differed. There the reviews were more brutal.

This was a a review of lab memo AIM-899, Achieving Artificial Intelligence through Building Robots”.

And just in case readers find it difficult to decipher, he provides a print version:

This paper is an extended, wandering complaint that the world does not view the author’s work as the salvation of mankind.

There is no scientific content here; little in the way of reasoned argument, as opposed to petulant assertions and non-sequiturs; and ample evidence of ignorance of the literature on these questions. The only philosopher cited is Dreyfus–but many of the issues raised have been treated more intelligibly by others (the chair definition problem etc. by Wittgenstein and many successors; the interpreted toy proscription by Searle; the modularity question by Fodor; the multiple behaviors ideas by Tinbergen; and the constructivist approach by Glymour (who calls it computational positivism). The argument about evolution leaks all over, and the discussion on abstraction indicates the author has little understand of analytic thought and scientific investigation.

Ages afterwards the paper was published unchanged but with a new title, “Intelligence without representation” in Artificial Intelligence Journal [vol 47, 1991, pp. 139–159], the mainstream journal of the field, and it now has 6,900 citations.

Brooks’s response to those initial reverses were typical: he pasted copies of the negative reviews to his office door in MIT!

As well as his experiences of peer-review as an author, he also reflects on his experience as an editor of a scholarly journal. In 1987 he co-founded the International Journal of Computer Vision, which is now in its 128th volume, and has had many hundreds of issues. The journal has a very strong reputation and consistently ranks in the top handful of places to publish in computer vision. Brooks co-edited the first seven volumes — a total of twenty eight issues.

Here’s what he learned:

1 Purely theoretical papers with lots of equations and no experiments involving processing an image were much more likely to get accepted than a paper which did have experimental results. “I attributed this”, says Brooks, “to people being unduly impressed by mathematics (I had a degree in pure mathematics and was not as easily impressed by equations and complex notation). I suspected that many times the reviewers did not fully read and understand the mathematics as many of them had very few comments about the contents of such papers”.

2 “One particular reviewer would always read the mathematics in detail, and would always find things to critique about the more mathematical papers. This seemed good. Real peer review. But soon I realized that he would always recommend rejection. No paper was ever up to his standard”.

3 Certain reviewers would always say accept. So, “it was just a matter of me picking the right three referees for almost any paper and I could know whether the majority of reviewers would recommend acceptance or rejection before I had even sent the paper off to be reviewed”.

4 “I came to realize”,he writes, “that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply understand the topic of the paper, and the biases of the reviewers, and not to treat the referees as having the right to determine the fate of the paper themselves. As an editor I had to add judgement to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new”.

I wish more journalists reading (or mis-reading) Covid-19 papers understood this. And that they they realised that science is, at its best, organised scepticism. Which of course is why it’s so infuriating for politicians who want to claim that they are “following” it.

Brooks’s essay is terrific from beginning to end. Well worth a read.

Quarantine diary — Day 82

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