“In politics, promises are binding only on those to whom they are made.”
Alan Clark, in his final diary.
On re-reading C.P. Snow
I’ve been reading Stefan Collini’s edition of Leavis’s Richmond Lecture
Given that at the time Snow was regarded as a serious novelist by the chattering classes, this full-on assault shocked people. It led me to dig out my copy of Snow’s novel, The Masters
Well, it’s terrible – wooden and stodgy. None of the characters really live – I was reminded of the jibe that someone once made about Snow: that he did not so much create characters as take facsimiles of them out to lunch in his club.
So as a work of fiction, The Masters, fails to make the grade. Where it does succeed, however, is as a piece of amateur anthropology because it presents what I guess is a pretty accurate picture of what Christ’s — and Cambridge — was like in the 1930s. The college then was rather small, and the Fellowship was tiny – 13 fellows and a Master. And dons (i.e. academics) were so much better paid then: in the novel one of the Fellows owns a house on Chaucer Road; and another has a substantial pile on the Madingley Road, near the Observatory. No academic nowadays could afford a house in either location. That privilege is reserved for hedge-fund managers, corporate lawyers and CEOs of tech companies.
Interestingly, after concluding his story, Snow adds a factual appendix which provides a rather good – and very interesting – history of the evolution of the Oxbridge college system. It would provide a usefully concise answer to the tourist’s legendary question (addressed to a Cambridge academic): “Excuse me sir, but where exactly is the University?” (To which the time-honoured answer is: “You know, that’s a very good question.”)
LATER: Sean French emails to say: “That anecdote about the tourist in Cambridge is used (about Oxford) by Gilbert Ryle in ‘The Concept of Mind’ to demonstrate the concept of a category error. There is something very, very donnish about the idea that to understand the mind, you need to have a grasp of the Oxbridge college system. Redbrick philosophers need not apply!”
Time zones
Lovely cartoon in the current New Yorker. Shows the reception desk of the Flat Earth Society. Behind the receptionist are clocks labelled New York, London, Paris, Beijing and Tokyo — all showing the time as 10:10!
The American Dream is now just that: a dream
Interesting piece by Michael Cohen. Extract:
The US swaggers along on the world stage with a certainty and sense of moral purpose that no other country can match. Blessed with practically limitless national resources, a dynamic and diverse population, a relatively stable political system and innovative technological capabilities that other nations can only dream of, how can so many Americans be falling behind – and how can the nation’s leaders allow it to happen?
The answer is disconcertingly simple: we chose this path.
Granted, no one actively set out to attack the middle class in America. There wasn’t some evil plan hatched behind closed doors to wreak socio-economic havoc. But the decline of the American middle class, the ostentatious wealth of the so-called 1% and the crushing economic anxiety of the growing number of poor Americans have happened in plain sight.
It is the direct result of a political system that has for more than four decades abdicated its responsibilities – and tilted the economic scales toward the most affluent and well-connected in American society. The idea that government has an obligation to create jobs, grow the economy, construct a social safety net or even put the interests of the most vulnerable in society above the most successful has gone the way of transistor radios, fax machines and VCRs. Today, America is paying the price for that indifference to this slow-motion economic collapse.
All true. The question is: what will happen when — and if — this penny drops? Will anything happen?
The unowned public corporation
Good column by Will Hutton on why the notion of “shareholder control” is a myth. Sample:
Banks have grown this large, complex and profitable because, like all plcs in our times, they are not owned by a mass of responsible, long-term shareholders who care for their purpose, sustainability of business model or wider economic obligations. Their overriding concern is high returns on equity. Long-term investors such as Standard Life, which voted against Barclays bonus hikes, are now a tiny minority. The majority of shareholders are hedge funds or multitrillion global asset management groups. They don’t own companies: they either trade them like casino chips or use them as temporary ports of call for their money. A bank CEO such as Antony Jenkins at Barclays has to tread a path between appeasing these non-owners and creating a bank that builds long-term value: if he falls, be sure Barclays will be under enormous pressure to replace him with another Bob Diamond, who will go all out for short-term profits and sky-high bonuses come what may.
The emergence of the ownerless corporation seeking to maximise short-term profits is now the key feature of modern capitalism. But “unowned” banks, unlike other PLCs, engage in the unique business of creating money and credit, knowing that governments must ultimately stand behind them if anything goes wrong. This guarantee always meant there would be a bias to increase credit as a share of GDP: between 1950 and 2000, it doubled in the major industrialised countries.
But between 2000 and 2010, as short-term profit maximising banks became the norm, credit doubled again in scale. By the time of the banking crisis, returns on equity had more than doubled as all this lending had been supported with ever less capital – bankers trading on the implicit government guarantee but delivering the returns their shareholders wanted. Moreover, much of this credit has been directed to lend to property in every country, rather than risky new investment.
Modern banking, as Adair Turner pointed out in an important lecture at the Cass Business School last month, has become an engine for credit, leverage and property price inflation. Britain, with its companies uniquely “unowned”, uniquely focused on the share price and its economy uniquely organised to favour finance over industry, was inevitably going to be the most acute example of the trend.
Q: Is Nigel Farage (a) a phoney or (b) a hypocrite?
Answer: both — as Nick Cohen argues in a terrific column about the Ukip leader.
When considering Ukip, we should remember the advice of Lord Renwick, a Foreign Office mandarin and Labour peer. He told young diplomats from good families that their background made them suckers for “the Wykehamist fallacy”. When they went abroad, they were in danger of believing that foreign potentates merely struck blood-curdling poses for effect. For all the bombast, they would think that, underneath, these must be civilised men with an ironic sensibility who might have been educated at Winchester. “They haven’t,” said Renwick. “Actually, they’re a bunch of thugs.”
The same should be said of Ukip.
Yep. I’ve seen Farage in action in the flesh. Nick calls him “England’s greatest living hypocrite”, and that seems about right (though there is fierce competition for that title).
He courts popularity by warning that tens of millions from the dole queues of Europe are coming to take British jobs, while employing his German wife as his secretary. He denounces “the political class” for living like princes at the taxpayers’ expense while pocketing every taxpayer-funded allowance he can claim for himself, his wife and his colleagues.
He says he represents “ordinary people”. But he is a public school-educated former banker, whose policies will help him and his kind. He claims he is the voice of “common sense”, while allying with every variety of gay-hater, conspiracy crackpot, racist, chauvinist and pillock. The only sense he and his followers have in common is a fear of anyone who is not like them.
So the question is: why have Britain’s famously aggressive mass media not torn this phoney to shreds? Could it be that he voices many of their proprietors’ (and editors’) own views?
Inflection points and advanced robotics
This morning’s Observer column.
Not often do you hear a Newsnight presenter using an arcane mathematical term, but last week was an exception. The culprit was David Grossman, who made an excellent film for Newsnight about the threat to employment from advanced robotics. In the course of this, he made the standard pilgrimage to MIT to interview Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who have made much of the running in this area with a number of books, of which the most recent is The Second Machine Age. Their argument, said Grossman, was that our society has reached an “inflection point”, a concept beloved of those who studied differential calculus in their youth, but probably unfamiliar to the average viewer.
Still, that’s what Wikipedia is for. A point of inflection, it explains, is a point on a curve at which the curvature or concavity changes sign from plus to minus (or vice versa). Since this sounds like a smaller deal than the wholesale upheaval prophesied by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Grossman might have got more mileage out of “tipping point”, which, though different to inflection, seems to me to get closer to the nub of the question.
Guess what? US ‘democracy’ won’t cure rising inequality
Well, well. Hot on the heels of the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus
Money buys power.
That’s the bottom line of a new study from Princeton University political scientist Martin Gilens, who looked at 1,779 U.S. government policy decisions between 1981 and 2002. Gilens found that the preferences of the median earner had no impact on whether policies are adopted — but that politicians march in lockstep with what the top earners wanted.
You may think you’ve heard that conclusion before, but Gilens’s approach is unique, and that makes his findings all the more important. Gilens didn’t take one theory of who has political influence and test it with data, as does almost all of the research on this topic. He tested the power of the rich, middle class, and interest groups simultaneously, allowing for any theory to win or lose. That is new.
And here’s the real danger of what Gilens finds: It means that the U.S. political system is set to transform the dramatic rise of income inequality into entrenched differences in political power — and there’s very little the middle class can do to stop it from happening.
There is, in other words, an inequality feedback loop built into the U.S. political system — and America may be spiraling into it. A policy that enriches what Gilens calls the “economic elite” will command its support. Their support, Gilens shows, means that the political system is likely to make it happen. And the ever wealthier become the ever-more powerful. Policies that undermine the elite become ever more difficult to pass as economic inequality buys political obedience.
Book Review: ‘The People’s Platform’
My Observer review of Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform: And Other Digital Delusions
The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 transformed the internet into a mainstream medium and brought the corporate world online, so from then on the die was cast. What happened is that the two universes effectively merged, so we now live in a strange amalgam of meat- and cyberspace in which the elements of each run riot. A virtual space that once had no crime and no surveillance has become one with an abundance of each; and the “real” world has been destabilised by the astonishing power and properties of networks.
Yet public understanding of the implications of this convergence lags some way behind the emerging reality, which is why we need books like this. Astra Taylor is a talented documentary-maker who was dismayed by the way her work was appropriated and pirated online. But instead of fuming silently in her studio, she set out to seek an understanding of the paradoxical world that the merging of cyberspace and meatspace has produced. What she finds is a world which is, on the one hand, hooked on an evangelical narrative about the liberating, empowering, enlightening, democratising power of information technology while, on the other, being increasingly dominated and controlled by the corporations that have effectively captured the technology.
The big question about the net was always whether it would be as revolutionary as its early evangelists believed. Would it really lead to the overthrow of the old, established order? We are now beginning to see that the answer is: no. We were intoxicated by the exuberance of our own evangelism. “From a certain angle,” writes Taylor, “the emerging order looks suspiciously like the old one.” In fact, she concludes, “Wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world – monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.”
Innocents abroad
“An Ambassador”, says the old joke, “is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country”. The only US Ambassador I’ve met was a Californian automobile salesman. (Well, he owned a whole string of dealerships, and I guessed owed his position not to mastery of statecraft but to the size of his campaign contributions.) It was during the Iraq war and he gave a public lecture which never once mentioned the war. And then I forgot all about him, until I came on this piece in Politico by James Bruno arguing that one reason the Kremlin is running rings round the US in Europe is the relative incompetence of American ambassadors compared to their Russian counterparts.
Bruno examines the diplomatic representation of the two countries in three critical European capitals: Berlin, Oslo and Budapest.
Berlin
The Russian ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Grinin, who joined the diplomatic service in 1971, has served in Germany in multiple tours totaling 17 years, in addition to four years in Austria as ambassador. He is fluent in German and English. He has held a variety of posts in the Russian Foreign Ministry concentrating on European affairs. Berlin is his fourth ambassadorship.
The U.S. ambassador to Germany, John B. Emerson, has seven months of diplomatic service (since his arrival in Berlin) and speaks no German. A business and entertainment lawyer, Emerson has campaigned for Democrats ranging from Gary Hart to Bill Clinton. He bundled $2,961,800 for Barack Obama’s campaigns.
Oslo
Vyacheslav Pavlovskiy has been Moscow’s envoy in Oslo since 2010. A MGIMO graduate and 36-year diplomatic veteran, he speaks three foreign languages.
President Obama’s nominee as ambassador to Norway, hotel magnate George Tsunis, bundled $988,550 for Obama’s 2012 campaign. He so botched his Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in February with displays of ignorance about the country to which he is to be posted that Norway’s media went ballistic and he became a laughingstock domestically. He is yet to be confirmed.
Budapest
Russian envoy Alexander Tolkach, a 39-year Foreign Ministry veteran and MGIMO alumnus, is on his second ambassadorship; he speaks three foreign languages.
Colleen Bell, a producer of a popular TV soap opera with no professional foreign affairs background, snagged the nomination of U.S. ambassador to Hungary with $2,191,835 in bundled donations to President Obama. She stumbled nearly as badly as Tsunis before her Senate hearing with her incoherent, rambling responses to basic questions on U.S.-Hungarian relations. She also awaits Senate confirmation.