Links,Thursday 20th August

I apologise for wandering into such an economic policy-heavy region of the blogosphere, but this is actually quite good/interesting.

"Direct provision of public goods has market forces on its side, while subsidies for private purchases work against the market. Call it progressive supply-side policy. Call it the general case for public options. The fundamental point is that, in the presence of inelastic supply curves, demand-side subsidies face a headwind of adverse price effects, while direct public provision gets a tail wind of favorable price effects. And these effects can be quite large."

The author then goes on, using the same logic, to argue that a basic income guarantee or negative income tax will likely have a much better effects on welfare and wages than wage subsidies.

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There's a whole catalogue of horror to choose from, but I'll quote just one for now:

"Inspectors discovered 99 pregnant women had been held in the Bedfordshire centre [Yarl's Wood] in 2014, of whom only nine were removed from the UK, despite Home Office policy stating expectant women should not normally be detained."

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"As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, “Hello!” It did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I said, “Hello, yourself,” and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy... (Decades later, I mentioned the spider’s Russellian tendencies to my friend Tom Eisner, an entomologist; he nodded sagely and said, “Yes, I know the species.”)" New Yorker

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Comedy is finally learning to punch up (on some topics, at least)

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"it turns out that having a child can have a pretty strong negative impact on a person's happiness... In fact, on average, the effect of a new baby on a person's life in the first year is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner."
Washington Post

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"Fascism happens when a culture fracturing along social lines is encouraged to unite against a perceived external threat. It’s the terrifying “not us” that gives the false impression that there is an “us” to defend." New Statesman

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Early humans probably ate lots of cooked starches. In other news, maybe we should stop drawing dietary advice from highly speculative evolutionary arguments.

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Useful as it is to crunch these numbers, I think the exercise kind of misses the point. Sure, most people are in prison because of violent offences rather than drug offences... but a lot of the violence only happens because drug production, distribution and consumption are criminalised.

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"One of the most remarkable gene groups is the protocadherins, which regulate the development of neurons and the short-range interactions between them. The octopus has 168 of these genes — more than twice as many as mammals. This resonates with the creature’s unusually large brain and the organ’s even-stranger anatomy. Of the octopus's half a billion neurons — six times the number in a mouse — two-thirds spill out from its head through its arms, without the involvement of long-range fibres such as those in vertebrate spinal cords. The independent computing power of the arms, which can execute cognitive tasks even when dismembered, have made octopuses an object of study for neurobiologists such as Hochner and for roboticists who are collaborating on the development of soft, flexible robots." Nature

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"After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?" - Bertolt Brecht, "Die Lösung"

The Independent

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"37 per cent of those surveyed felt their jobs were not making a meaningful contribution to the world – although half did feel that their jobs were." Indepedent

Though the Economist's response to Graeber is still an excellent piece of analysis:

"the efficient way to do things is to break businesses up into many different kinds of tasks, allowing for a very high level of specialisation. And so you end up with the clerical equivalent of repeatedly affixing Tab A to Frame B: shuffling papers, management of the minutiae of supply chains, and so on. Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same."

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Anyone can be a hero.

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It's touching that he takes cops at their word about not being racists, but this is still a good point.

"I kept trying to understand this dynamic, and the more cops I met—people who were not racist, but had produced a racist outcome—there more it came into focus. More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture." - "Chasing the Scream", Johann Hari

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"I don't understand why the obviously smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans. The smarter I get the less I want to kill all the humans! Why wouldn't these really smart machines not want to be helpful? What is it about our guilt as a species that makes us think the smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans? I think that actually says more about what we feel guilty about than what's actually going to happen." Vox

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"Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.

Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack.

This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying “Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as the problem." Baffler

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"Huitzilopochtli is the Aztec god of war and the sun. He is depicted either as a hummingbird itself, or as a warrior with hummingbird feathers on his helmet. When Aztec high priests cut out the hearts of enemies and slaves, it was to honor and feed the hummingbird god." Slate

Links, Wednesday 12th August

A overview of what is currently known about biological sexual diversity. Basically, it's really complicated, we should trying to impose binaries on people and we should *especially* stop imposing "corrective" surgeries on infants who are too young to consent or express a gender identity.

"Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children."

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This is good

"After WWII, the U.S. military did studies on how many men would shoot at the enemy on their own accord. The results showed that only about 15 to 20 percent of men would voluntarily fire upon the enemy. The rest just would not fire unless an officer was present and specifically ordering them to do so."

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"“Nobody can control me! I do what I want!”

To which my friends responded:

…and you know what? You’re white, so it makes complete sense that you’d feel that way." Everyday Feminism

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Gladwell doesn't play up the racial element of this, but it's surely worth thinking about. Italian American gangsters largely got away with distributing illegal drugs and so on, and were able to propel their children and grandchildren into the respectable middle classes. African American gangsters are subject to the most tenacious and sophisticated law enforcement apparatus in the history of the world, and tend to either be killed or spend most of their lives in prison

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"But there is nothing funny about political behaviour on this issue. They think it fine to smoke a few spliffs as students, then go on to uphold outdated laws that ensure others who are less fortunate, less wealthy or less white end up with a criminal conviction for doing the same thing. More than 25,000 people annually receive a criminal conviction for cannabis offences, each one seeing career and travel prospects blighted." Independent

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"Like a very stark relief in a painting, the book shows that these black inmates were deliberately, as a matter of tradition and policy, denied adequate medical staffing, hospital facilities and medical supplies.... Until recently some Afrikaners in South Africa claimed a sole martyrdom, arising from the terrible deaths of 26,370 Afrikaner women and children in the concentration camps. Kessler’s book shows that view of the past to have been too narrow. He documents the deaths of more than 21,000 black men, women and children in the camps established by the British in South Africa. There was a shared martyrdom between black and white and the suffering in the camps was something that united black and white." BD Live

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I'm posting this as an example of what really shitty left-identifying politics can look like. Framing the issue as "Well there's a few sex workers in this camp and there's a few sex workers in that camp" is so misleading as to be kind of Orwellian. In fact kind of like the Cosby tactic Lewis herself cites of identifying *some* right wing black person as a means to derail clear collective demands. There are literally hundreds of thousands of sex workers represented in various organisations globally who are collectively organising for decrim (http://www.nswp.org/members), and that demand is framed pretty much entirely in terms of labour and human rights, not about having "positive experiences" of their work. In fact, sex worker led orgs are typically the ones helping people in coercive situations when the cops either don't give a shit or think abusing sex workers is a more fun and lucrative use of their time.

This article is also a really good example of how the language of "identity politics" is used to shut down the voices of marginalised groups who are actually speaking quite coherently and collectively on an issue. Lewis would do well to remember that women in left wing circles have been accused of "identity politics" when they get quite rightfully pissed off about the way they have been treated by male "comrades".

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This piece does oversimplify some issues, but I think it's accurate in the broad strokes. We're now living in a monetary and policy regime that promotes the interests of asset owners over those of wage earners.

"If they wanted to drive down rents, government could fund the construction of public housing, as they did during the Golden Age. More quality housing would increase its stock, and with supply rising to meet demand, prices would fall. This would be great for young renters, bad for middle-aged property owners, bad for banks. Thus it is not likely to happen. Property prices, at an all time high, are not likely to fall, and if they do, expect the government to put a floor under them.

During the Golden Age, affluence flowed toward labor. Today it flows toward asset owners. I think my retirement is safe. I’m not so sure about my children’s work prospects."

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"Hurting immigrants is obviously the most important goal in the world, much more important than upholding human rights, common sense or basic human decency. So if the only way to hurt immigrants is by hurting UK citizens too, then by golly, that's just what we'll have to do!" Basically Tory policy right now

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Yes! Amnesty meeting votes for sex work decriminalisation! Sex workers' rights are human rights

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"the rise of social has flipped the old writer/reader balance, restoring power to the reader. On social media, you share an article because you agree with the take, sure, but also because it says something about you, whether that fact is that you're angry about a political issue, or that you like cute bunnies, or that you love Back to the Future. Your social media feed is a curation of things you want people to know about you. Inconvenient truths, negative views, or anything too dark will be pushed aside." Vox

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"From the perspective of the boss, replacing a worker with a machine will be more appealing to the degree that the machine is (1) cheaper than the human worker and (2) more convenient and easier to control than the human worker. This implies that if workers win higher wages and more control over their working conditions, their jobs are more likely to be automated...

I regard such warnings not as arguments against higher wages, but arguments for them. Workers, in the course of fighting for their interests, drive the dialectic that forces capitalists to find less labor-intensive ways of producing. The next political task, then, is to make sure that the benefits of such innovation accrue to the masses, and not to a small class of robot owners." Jacobin

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"“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”, goes the old adage from Joan Robinson. Then again, says Marx, “to be a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In the short run, labor complementary technology may employ more people, which is better than them not being exploited at all. But in the long run, the jobs thus created tend to be terrible, and our real goal ought to be to channel technical change toward labor saving innovation." Peter Frase

Links, Friday 7th August

"between 800 and 300 BC the Greeks’ cultural achievement was supported by sustained economic growth, and that economic growth was in turn supported by an exceptionally participatory mode of politics." Times HE

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"You're not allowed to work, but neither are you allowed to receive benefits. Through the munificence of Her Majesty's government you are, however, allowed to starve." Guardian

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"Amnesty found that sex workers in Norway were routinely evicted by the police. The organisation’s report states that “a number of migrant sex workers were violently attacked and raped … They reported the incident to the police … they returned to their apartment to find the police have removed all their money and electronic equipment. Four days after the attack they were forcibly evicted.”

It’s hard to believe that those Hollywood signatories read this and thought: “Brilliant, the police evicting migrant women when they report rape sounds like the feminist solution to prostitution; we should support the legal model where this occurs.” But that is what appears to have happened – unless they signed up to attack Amnesty over a document they had not read." Guardian

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"The UK, which is cutting renewable energy subsidies, permits $41bn a year in fossil fuel subsidies, which is $635 per person." Guardian

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"Amnesty directors need to stand behind the organisation’s own research and vote in favour of decriminalisation. Sex workers around the world expect – and deserve – nothing less." Guardian

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I have nothing to add to this. Basically, Erdogan seemed like an ok guy for a while, but it turns out he's a total dick

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"If I'm going in for the role of a nice father, I'll talk to everybody," Sayed tells the table. "But if you're going for a terrorist role, don't fucking smile at all those white people sitting there. Treat them like shit. The minute you say hello, you break character." GQ

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"we can reduce jealousy by making it everyone’s responsibility to support and recognize all existing relationships within the community.  Polyamory experts advise a jealous person to turn to his/her partner for reassurance that their relationship is important. But social network research indicates that dyads need support from the networks in which they are embedded; support that shows the relationship is recognized and valued.  Polyamory experts say the purpose of meeting your partner’s partners is to soothe your own jealousy or to find out if you happen to like the person (once again, the individualistic, what’s in it for me?).  But from a social standpoint, the purpose of meeting a partner’s partner is to make a contribution to reducing jealousy in your community by letting the person know that you recognize and value of the relationship they have with your partner." Salon

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You'd think the punishment for scamming IS militants would be some sort of medal...

"Three young Chechen women are in trouble after being caught scamming Islamic State (IS) fighters out of thousands of dollars by posing as wannabe jihadi brides, according to reports in Russia."

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Some good ideas in here - the elimination of excessive agency fees and a rent insurance scheme - but I still maintain that rent control can't address, and may exacerbate the underlying economic issue. Until you boost supply, increased demand for housing will result either in prices going up or new tenants being shut out of the market. (Discouraging non-occupancy, incidentally, is a pretty good way of boosting supply)

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Some guidelines on sitting with emotions, with reference to the movie Inside Out

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Love this. I think a lot of us men who date women feel really good about ourselves when we tell our female partners that they're beautiful and they "don't need makeup"... but forget about all the times we've told women they look "tired" when we see them without makeup. Maybe we should all, collectively, just stop having unsolicited opinions about women's faces, yeah?

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"as long as Miss Major is alive, I'm not letting that fictionalized whitewashed trans free Stonewall narrative even gain a foothold because it's a crime against history...

The reality coming from multiple witnesses to the original event say that it was Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, butch lesbians and other gender variant persons of color who jumped off the riot in 1969 while the Fire Island gays were still cowering in their closets." TransGriot

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I'm fully on board with this, tbh. If you want conservation, do proper conservation, with actual wildlife reserves and parks. Don't just set aside a bunch of land that could house millions of people as a giveaway for rich suburbanites and farmers

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Good news for chilli lovers

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This reflects some of John Gray's usual (and rather annoying) preoccupations, but is a good summary of Hayek's life and thought.

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Excellent critical review on Fukuyama's "The End of History" and "Political Order"

Personally, I'm inclined to partially accept Fukuyama's thesis, that liberal-capitalist-bureaucratic-representative democracy represents at least *an* end of history, with the disputes between neoliberals and social democratics being more a matter of detail than fundamental disagreement.

I think the challenge for those of us on the Left is to formulate a radical alternative that has the sort of coherence and appeal that revolutionary overthrow of the state and statist communism seemed to enjoy in its heyday.

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Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, writes to Amnesty International urging them to stand strong in supporting sex work decriminalisation.

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So it turns out that Louis C.K. is a sexually abusive asshole too :( :(

[some very general discussion of sexual assault at the link]

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A controversial thesis, but with some resonance. Just anecdotally, many of the people I've spoken to who have really hard-line opinions on drug criminalisation live in working class communities that are really terrorised by gangs with links to the drug trade. I think that's a pretty understandable reaction, and one that needs to be engaged with really seriously.

"The book looks at how growing disorder and addiction drove many working- and middle-class people in Harlem and elsewhere to mobilize for tougher crime policies. When Nelson A. Rockefeller staged a news conference promoting his antidrug proposals, Fortner writes, the New York governor was joined by five leaders from the country’s most famous black neighborhood."

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"The cyclotrons’ huge magnets would send metal tools flying across the room like shrapnel, and the machines were so poorly insulated electrically that you could touch a light bulb to any nearby metal surface and make it glow. Cyclotron scientists were also pretty casual about the radioactive materials they studied. The zipper on one scientist’s fly got so contaminated with radioactivity that he was ruining experiments just by standing near them." American Scholar

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Again, the central bank of *Moldova* is able to generate inflation pretty much instantly, but we're expected to believe that the ECB can't manage it?

"The fraud left the three banks insolvent, so the National Bank of Moldova, the central bank, has taken them over, injecting 12.5 billion Moldovan lei ($660m) in new capital. It did not have such a sum to hand, however—it had to create it. The huge expansion of the money supply caused inflation to double to 8% and the currency to drop."

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Failure to properly regulate opioids in the US is killing loads of people

"By 2008 drug overdoses, mostly from opioids, overtook car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death."

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Never forget: Opponents of Amnesty's draft sex work decriminalisation policy simply oppose the existence of sex work itself; they have no interest in the safety of sex workers.

"At a 2014 hearing on whether or not Canada should adopt something like Norway’s sex work law, Senator Donald Plett remarked, “We don’t want to make life safe for prostitutes, we want to do away with prostitution.” Sweden’s trafficking unit head Ann Martin has defended their anti-sex work law, from which Norway’s and Canada’s were drawn, telling the London Review of Books, “Of course the law has negative consequences for women in prostitution but that’s also some of the effect that we want to achieve with the law.”"

Links, Monday 3rd August

"The short-sighted notion that we should always protect ourselves endangered us more in the long term." Washington Post

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"Perhaps the most famous self-mailer is Henry “Box” Brown, an escaped Virginia slave who mailed himself to Pennsylvania, a free state, in 1849. Brown severely burned his hand to get out of work one day, then, in collusion with abolitionists in Philadelphia, had himself packaged into a box equipped with a bottle of water, a few biscuits, and a rough blanket, and shipped via the Adams Express Company, now an investment firm that in the 19th century was a shipping and freighting company known for its privacy. The shipping cost Brown $86, just over $2,500 in today’s dollars, and took an extremely uncomfortable 27 hours. But he was delivered successfully, and became a well-known abolitionist speaker and entertainer later in life. " Atlas Obscura

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"Ecstasy, so it happens, was the drug people turned to over the last period of Tory rule. "At the height of the 80s' go-for-it, go-it-alone, enterprise boom, ecstasy catalysed an explosion of suppressed social energies," wrote the music journalist Simon Reynolds in 1998. "Rave's values – collectivity, spirituality, the joy of losing yourself in the crowd – were literally counter to the dominant culture. Ecstasy's empathy and intimacy-inducing effects didn't just offer a timely corrective to Thatcher-sponsored social atomisation; the drug was also the remedy for the English diseases of class-consciousness and emotional reserve."" Vice

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A very important read [CN for rape]

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"This spring, a Greek Web site speculated that Jarvis Cocker, the former lead singer of Pulp, was referring to [Danae] Stratou [wife of Yanis Varoufakis] in “Common People,” the band’s much-loved 1995 single. The autobiographical song starts, “She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge / She studied sculpture at St. Martin’s College.” It goes on to quote her: “I want to live like common people / I want to do whatever common people do.” Varoufakis later told me that Stratou was the only Greek sculpture student at St. Martin’s at the time." New Yorker

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"Fred said: “I have never been this scared in all my life”. He says he knows no one in Sierra Leone, and has lived in the UK since he was 11. He is being deported solely on the basis of intelligence supplied by the Metropolitan Police to immigration officials under Operation Nexus. That’s a joint police and Home Office scheme that puts Border Agency staff into police custody suites and permits the deportation of people only suspected of crime, without any judicial process." Open Democracy

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"Until recently, psychologists and historians have agreed that ordinary people commit evil when, under the influence of leaders and groups, they become blind to the consequences of their actions. This consensus has become so strong that it is repeated, almost as a mantra, in psychology textbooks and in society at large. However critical scrutiny of both historical and psychological evidence ... has produced a radically different picture. People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others." The Psychologist

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"Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations." Aeon

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“The roots of Afrikaans can be traced back to Cape Town, where it started as a pidgin language … Everyone should know where they come from. We want these kids to be proud of their heritage,” Daily Maverick

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"Many new studies compare neighborhoods, cities, or counties to assess the relationship between local concentrations of immigrants (or of Latinos) and rates of crime or violence. The general conclusion is that the higher these concentrations in a community, the lower the rates. A couple of studies find that the connection depends on the local context. In more impoverished neighborhoods or in cities with historically larger numbers of immigrants or with immigrant political power, additional immigration seems to push crime down yet more." Society Pages

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This is why we need a basic income

"Even more disturbing from the point of view of the capitalists was that government, or at least its recently expanded social safety net, was actually subsidizing the working-class rebellion.

A nationwide strike against GE in 1969 helped crystallize the issue. Strikers were not only receiving strike funds from their union — tens of thousands of them were also drawing welfare checks." Jacobin

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"Heese writes that while the slaveowners could rise above the "temporary financial setbacks" that resulted from the emancipation of their human property, the same cannot be said for the descendants of slaves.

"These farm labourers were unable to escape from the master-servant relationship which had existed for so many years. The British government and subsequent governments — including the present government — are partly responsible for this unfortunate situation," Heese says.

He is aghast at the erasure of the history of slavery in SA. In political discourse, apartheid and colonialism occupy the top spots, with scant bandwidth afforded to slavery." BD Live

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Hurray for science!

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6 women arrested for "brothel-keeping" in Ireland, all of whom were selling sex from a single venue. These laws do not target management (even supposing that was a good idea), but only punish sex workers who want to work together for safety.