Club Troppo

HT 3 Quarks: Perhaps rather apposite in view of some recent controversies and debates.

Bhikhu Parekh in The Philosopher’s Magazine:

Western thought has long been dominated by the view that while error is plural, truth is singular. We can be wrong in many different ways but can be right in only one way. According to this view, which we might call monism or singularism, there is only one correct way of understanding the world, only one true system of morality, only one true way of leading the good life, only one true religion, only one correct way of organising society, and so on. We are supposed to arrive at truth, be it cognitive, moral or religious, by means of reason, which is understood as a transcendental and quasi-divine faculty rising above the psychological, social, cultural and other constraints. This view has had both good and bad consequences. It has inspired most rigorous intellectual inquiries, rules of rational debate, and a determination to expose and fight errors. It has also however led to arrogance, intolerance, failure to appreciate differences, tendency to equate diversity with deviation, and much violence.

Cultural pluralism challenges this view of truth and goodness. It sees reason as a human rather than a quasi-divine or transcendental with all that it implies. Since it takes the view that human beings are culturally embedded, it argues that reason is shaped and structured by culture. This does not mean that they cannot criticise and revise their culture, but rather that they cannot transcend all its subtle and deepest influences and view it from a nonexistent Archimedean standpoint. They may replace one culture with another but cannot stand outside the realm of culture altogether. For cultural pluralism the world can be understood in several different ways depending on our conceptual apparatus, language, interests, purposes, the questions we ask and the kind of knowledge we seek and value. Like truth in general, moral truth or good too is also plural. Human capacities and moral values conflict and cannot all be integrated into a harmonious system without loss. Different cultural communities organise themselves on the basis of different visions of the good life, and foster different human capacities, dispositions and virtues. Every cultural community represents a particular form of human excellence with all its characteristic strengths and limitations. No culture is perfect or exhaustively embodies goodness, and none is wholly devoid of at least some degree of goodness.

Part I is here

As an analogy, lets think about Modernity as a virus. By “Modernity” I mean society in which consistent growth in material living standards can occur, and where more than a small minority live above subsistence. The kind of society that was unprecedented before the industrial revolution, but is now the kind of society in which a majority of people now live to some extent.

In our world the modernity virus first arose in England and the Netherlands. Every other society who is now experiencing modernity has in some way contracted it from those societies, sometimes by way of others.

Due to our lack of ability to view the multiverse, unfortunately our sample is n=1. We cannot be sure if this place of origin actually tells us anything about the virus at all. WE can’t even be sure whether our world is just one of few where the exceptionally improbable virus occured at all. We cannot be sure that the virus would not likely have appeared somewhere else had random factors played out differently. Given how quick the virus spreads any point of origin may well become the unique point of origin, despite it only being randomness that lead to it being the point of precipitation.

It may well be no more important that the virus occurred in North West Europe than the first factories occurred in Leeds before Manchester – or vice versa, we don’t make a large point of the priority here. Maybe in time we won’t make a point of NW European priority.

But lets imagine how this priority may mean something, using the analogy of modernity and virus. We then have to imagine two different sets of necessary factors. What are the factors that affect the creation of a virus, and what are those that lead to its spread? (Continued)

Attached is a post by James Kwak. It strongly rejects a comment by Caplan and Beaulier that Behavioral Economics will Undermine the welfare state by expanding the set of choices.

Caplan and Beaulier believe that poor people are more inclined to make irrational judgments because their judgment biases are more extreme and their self-control problems more severe than those of the rest of the population. Giving them more choice will simply give them more opportunity to hurt themselves.

They argue that poor people are more likely to exhibit heavy alcohol use, to suffer from obesity, more inclined to smoke, commit crimes and use illegal drugs and to have earlier children while in their teens.

The issue, as Kwak sees it, is simple: is the so-called bad judgment of the poor “causing” obesity, crime, drug-taking etc. or is it the result of poor education, the high cost of eating healthy food, limited care options, worse health care options etc.? In other words, are poor education and health the product of inequality and won’t a reduction in inequality (e.g. via social security) improve poor people’s welfare? (This is apart from the fact that things like unemployment insurance and EITC increase the incentive to work).

It is a well argued piece but perhaps taken a little too far. For example, are education levels entirely a product of poverty or are they more gender-based?

It’s easy to miss the point in the debate about Online Opinion‘s loss of advertising revenue. As Kim at Larvatus Prodeo points out, the debate isn’t really about free speech — it’s not as if publishers have a right to corporate funding. The important point is about how online communities deal with differences of opinion over moral and political issues.

According to publisher Graham Young, the Online Opinion model was shaped by the the Pauline Hanson controversy of the 1990s. Rather than engaging with Hanson many commentators made it clear that they believed her opinions were unacceptable, that she was a bad or stupid person for holding them, and that she should shut up. In a December 2010 post Graham Young wrote:

I saw Hanson as a symptom of a problem in society, not the cause of it. And the problem was that people refused to engage with people with whom they disagreed, and worse, denigrated them and denied them the right to hold their opinions … On Line Opinion was an attempt to level the playing field, at least in one corner. Our underlying proposition has always been that no matter how wrong it might be, you are entitled to hold a particular opinion, and to personal respect, even if the opinion might be seen by many as objectionable.

For Graham, this approach implies a set of norms for dealing with disagreement. One of the most basic is that you should not attempt to step out of the debate and try to silence your opponents rather than engaging them in argument. If someone argues for view you find objectionable you should not call their employer and try to have them sacked, mau mau their advertisers into withdrawing support or try to have them arrested.

It’s the norms of debate that we ought to be arguing about. It seems to me that Graham’s norm of respect for opponents is similar to an attitude I once labeled ‘deep civility‘. We’re not treating someone with respect when we act in a way that says that who they are or what they believe makes them worthless or contemptible as human beings. But as a norm for debate civility of any kind can only work if it’s reciprocated.

If so, this raises a number of problems. One is how to treat people who make it clear they do not respect their opponents or believe that they have a right to their opinions. With these disputants the debate constantly returns to claims about the bad character of opponents and their hidden agenda. Where this is combined with crude stereotyping, it’s impossible to have a civil debate.

Another problem is when deliberately hurtful attacks are smuggled into debate as if they were sincerely held opinions. It’s common to use words vindictively to arouse shame, guilt or anxiety. For example, a person might make exaggerated claims about being worried for the safety of their children if left unattended in the presence of their opponent. They might say that people who believe (or disbelieve) certain things shouldn’t be allowed to be teachers or child care workers.

The need for reciprocity in civil debate raises questions about what to do with people who refuse to respect the norms. On blogs this often surfaces as the problem of moderation — deciding which comments to delete and which commenters to ban. And this is where critics like Gregory Storey say that Graham failed.

Both parties in this dispute — Graham and his critics — believe the other failed to do what the norms required. But perhaps there’s no shared understanding about what the norms are.

* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional.  Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin “storm chaser” enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy.  It’s a keen amateur perspective on a frightening weather event but well worth reading in my opinion.

Cyclone Yasi was a big and scarey storm system.  Media and politicians continue to refer to it as a Category 5 cyclone with winds nearing 300 kmh near its centre, the largest cyclone ever to hit a populated area in Australia.  But is that really true?  A fairly obscure story on Australian Geographic website points out that “the full force may never be known because there are no gauges where the monster storm made landfall” and an engineer interviewed on last Friday’s 7:30 Report suggested that available data indicated Yasi was probably a small to medium Category 4 system with winds a bit over 200 kmh.  But that’s just about the full extent of any questioning of Yasi’s actual strength and destructive force.  What does the evidence actually tell us?

Don’t get me wrong; it did seem like it was going to be a very large event and government authorities were well justified in taking the steps they did to encourage residents to take it very seriously.  Looking at the Bureau of Meteorology site and at the radar images you could see this was a very nasty storm that was going to hit the coast.  Moreover, even if it WAS “only” a small-medium Category 4 cyclone that’s still a very large storm with frightening and lethal destructive force.

(Continued)

Christopher Pearson writes in the Weekend Australian about a current situation involving Club Troppo and other prominent oz political blogs:

GRAHAM Young is the founding editor of a well-regarded e-journal called On Line Opinion, and is a regular contributor to The Australian. I’d describe him as belonging in the centre of the political spectrum, perhaps tending to mild conservatism.

In December he published a piece arguing the case against gay marriage by the pro-family campaigner, Bill Muehlenberg, and then a series of spirited exchanges on the merits of the argument. It was not the first article he’d run on the subject ; that honour had gone to Rodney Croome, a gay activist. Nor were most of the essays run opposed to gay marriage.

Young commented on the blog in mid-December. “The On Line Opinion approach is one that many find difficult to accept, and we are currently under attack from a number of gay activists because we dared to publish [Muehlenberg's essay] which is mostly a pastiche of comments by gay activists, even though the majority of articles I can find on the site support gay marriage. And by attack I mean attempting to intimidate me, sponsors or advertisers. How ironic . . . when we are sponsoring the Human Rights Awards.” …

On account of the Muehlenberg piece, Young told me two major advertisers had just pulled out: the ANZ Bank and IBM. Comparing this year’s January gross ad sales with last year’s, he calculated that revenue from his main category of advertising had fallen by 96 per cent. Young is worried that these bizarre decisions will adversely affect other websites as well as his own and could even lead to some of them closing down.

Courts might construe that as the result of an indiscriminate secondary boycott, in contravention of the Trade Practices Act.

That’s because Young and a group of other political sites have formed a network called The Domain, to bundle up their readers as a more attractive package for advertisers. The sites are very diverse in terms of ideology, from the ultra-leftist John Passant, to the more mainstream centre-Left Larvatus Prodeo, Club Troppo, Andrew Bartlett, skepticlawyer and the likes of Henry Thornton and Jennifer Marohasy. …

I’m not that fussed about the loss of income flowing from the actions of these corporate thugs.  I don’t even know how much it is except that in broad terms it’s piddling money at least for us: Troppo has never chased a mass audience.  It’s the issue of principle than concerns me deeply.

I should make clear that I also find Muehlenberg’s article offensive.  Not because it opposes gay marriage; plenty of gay and lesbian people do too, or at least don’t regard it as an objective that should be pushed aggressively.  Erstwhile Troppo contributor Geoff Honnor is an example.  It’s Muehlenberg’s assumption that gay people generally are by nature promiscuous, and that they collectively harbour a hidden agenda to redefine marriage as not involving sexual fidelity that I and no doubt many gay people will rightly find deeply offensive.  It seems to have escaped Muehlenberg’s attention that promiscuity is hardly confined to homosexuals, or that lots of prominent heterosexuals have advocated and practised open marriage and no doubt still do.  It’s a classic example of the sort of discrimination community abhorrence for which underpins federal and state equal opportunity legislation.  It is no more fair or accurate to assert that gays generally are promiscuous than to suggest that gypsies are habitual thieves, all men potential rapists or that New Zealanders harbour carnal desires for sheep.

(Continued)

A few days ago I started writing an idle thought into a short post. It turned into a long post. So I split it in two. Then I realised it was reliant on ideas I had but hadn’t written down, which might confuse others. So I wrote posts on them. Then they required another post. Eventually I ended up with a series – later entries somewhat reliant on former ones – although they’re not really built on top of each other and they don’t form a thesis. Maybe I’ll tie the ideas together into a more detailed and too large for blog piece later, but this is a chance to get the thoughts together roughly. I’m tagging each one with “modernity virus” and I’ll post each every 3 or so days so they don’t clog up the front page.

Lets take a very materialistic view of history. In this view we are concerned mainly with material human welfare. We are concerned with how many humans there are, and we are concerned with their material level of well being. We treat one human life as equal to another in our evaluations. Kings, dates, battles, ideas and technology may all figure, but only for how they effect the most important elements of the human existence – life and material comfort (if effect, food).

If we do this, we find there are essentially only two important events in all human history. Everything else is details. These are the Agrarian Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The first allowed humanity to break the population limits set by food availability in nature, by allowing us to increase our own food supply, and thus population. The latter allowed, for the first time, large populations to rise above subsistence.

The latter point is striking, and it’s what really took me when I read Gregory Clarke’s “A Farewell to Alms”. The first half of the book is a rigourous empirical look at living standards throughout history in the form of caloric intake. In short, whether they were hunter gatherers, roman citizens or dark age peasants, or whether they lived under Chinese Emperors, Mughals, Caliphs, kings, republics or in anarchy, average caloric intake remained constant.

Think about the implications of this compared to the history we’re used to. As far as long terms effects on how much you, as an average person, ate, the decline and fall of Rome meant nothing. The cultured Song were no better than the barbaric Yuan. The Dark Ages were not famine followed by feat in the Renaissance. Changes and advances still occured of course, but they were not what we celebrate. A nameless soul in the dark ages inventing the horse drawn plough allowed a population to expand. Plutarch and Gutenberg are worth celebrating, but we can see no legacy of their deeds in either population nor sustenance – the most intrinsic interests of humanity. The chaos of the War of the Roses or the black death saw caloric intake rise as the population dropped and more food was around for those who were left, but the Tudor golden age saw the population expand again, driving the average intake back down to sustenance.

It’s no wonder that when Malthus wrote, he could not anticipate any sustained increase in human welfare. Population would just expand to eat up any gains, just like it had always done for all of human history. It is just unfortunate for Malthus that he was writing right as history was breaking. The modern age, the age of growth had broken this iron rule, but there is no reason on earth why Malthus should have anticipated it. It really was a Black Swan, and the greatest we’ve ever seen.

For the vast vast vast vast vast majority of human history, it was unimaginable that a society could have more obesity than hunger. The modern world takes alot of explaining. (Continued)

In Part I of this post I explored factors that might account for the massive proliferation in the volume of legislation and subordinate regulation in Australia over the last 30 years or so.  The post was prompted by an article by the IPA’s Chris Berg.  In the previous part I suggested some possible reasons for the regulatory expansion phenomenon, one of which I argued was the contest between courts and Parliament.  I outlined the recent history of migration law as a paradigm example.  In this part I’ll outline some aspects of taxation law and then suggest a couple of possible responses that might inhibit the expansion of unnecessary regulation.

The 1970s witnessed a series of High Court decisions in the income tax area which had the effect of igniting an explosion of tax avoidance schemes for high income earners.  Entrepreneurial accountants waxed fat, promoting “bottom of the the harbour” or dividend-stripping schemes, trust stripping schemes and schemes based on highly artificial primary production or Australian feature film investment devices.  The High Court’s most famous pro-tax avoidance decisions were Mullens v FCT, Slutzkin v FCT and Cridland v FCT all handed down in 1976-77 during the Chief Justiceship of former Menzies government Attorney-General Sir Garfield Barwick.  Barwick is traduced by some as the “father” of the Australian tax avoidance industry.  Journalist David Marr’s polemical biography of Barwick is typical:

Section 260 was a provision for which he had no sympathy. It was designed to put an end to ingenious and artificial schemes of taxation avoidance, yet to Barwick’s mind the ingenuity of a scheme was always a positive attraction. He believed that citizens had the right to profit to the maximum from their enterprise. He found section 260 vague in its sweep and, to a lawyer’s mind like his, such vagueness tends to end up as everything or nothing: the mind that reads section 92 to mean a great deal is likely, as in Barwick’s case, to see section 260 as virtually meaningless.  … The process of reading down the limits of section 260, and the feats of construction and reinterpretation that involved, have proved the foundation of the tax avoidance industry. …

Tax was Barwick’s only triumph. The tax avoidance industry boomed in Australia in the late 1970’s as a direct result of the work of the Barwick High Court. Under Barwick’s guidance the court approached tax schemes with great precision and learning, dissecting them and taking little interest in their overall shape and the purposes for which they were put into operation. … Much of what was left of the power of the “catch-all” provision of section 260 of Income Tax Assessment Act was wrung out of it by Barwick and the court in 1976 in Mullens’ case. It was a peculiar personal triumph for Barwick for he established there a principle which had been rejected when he put it first to the Privy Council 18 years before in Newton’s case: that section 260 only struck down tax avoidance schemes set up to deal with previously accrued tax liabilities, that it only worked in the past tense.

Barwick’s own description of his approach to interpreting the Tax Act, in his autobiography “A Radical Tory”, is eerily similar to Kerry “Goanna” Packer’s attitude:

(Continued)

Salma Hayek, who is apparently unrelated to Friedrich and may well be totally uninterested in either rule of law or regulatory reform … That isn’t gratuitous, is it?

Chris Berg of the conservative thinktank Institute of Public Affairs takes aim at the proliferation of regulation of Australia’s economy and society over the last couple of decades:

Another year, another 6,369 pages of law. Spread over 150 acts, that was the Commonwealth’s total new legislation in 2010. …

The received wisdom about Australia’s political and economic history over the last few decades is wrong.

Think we’ve been living in an era of deregulation? In an era of small, timid, “neo-liberal” government?

The data suggests otherwise.

The Australian Government has been massively, overwhelmingly, and comprehensively expanding its intervention into all aspects of the economy.

Compare 2010’s 6,369 pages to the 1980s, when the parliament only passed around 2,000 pages of law every year. Twenty years before that parliament would pass even less: just 500.

Graphs from the Rule of Law Institute confirm Berg’s argument.  Berg also stresses that the Howard government was just as guilty as Labor in terms of expanding the volume of regulation, so there are obviously factors at work here that aren’t just ideological.  Moreover, it isn’t obvious that either society or the economy have become drastically more inherently complex than they were in the late 1980s.  That this is the case is confirmed by the Rule of Law Institute graphs, which show that the actual number of Acts and sets of rules and regulations hasn’t increased, but their average length has more than doubled.

Regulatory reform is a topic about which Troppo colleague Nicholas Gruen writes from time to time.  Nicholas has tended to focus on the noteworthy lack of success of “regulatory impact statements” as a red tape-busting mechanism, including suggesting other ways of addressing the phenomenon to which I’ll return below.

It seems that reducing the volume and complexity of regulation, as opposed to progressively increasing it over time, mustn’t be all that simple.  I want to explore in this post some of the forces that conspire to produce this ever-increasing web of suffocating regulation.

Of course, the first question to ask is: does a given area of activity actually need regulating at all?  It might be a sector where market forces will solve any apparent problem, perhaps with some light-handed government action to ensure that potential consumers of the goods or services in question have enough reliable information to make a rational choice for themselves.  However, one obvious problem with that solution is the deficiencies of the rational/efficient markets hypothesis, shortcomings that became all too evident in the wake of the GFC (albeit that, as Berg stresses, defective regulation also played a prominent part in the genesis of the GFC).

(Continued)

This week’s Missing Link features reactions to John Birmingham’s column: Why is fat such a fractious issue? Then there’s a miscellaneous collection of links on topics like the flood levy, the property market, inequality and race.

The F word

John Birmingham sees himself as a tough guy. Tough enough to fat-proof his kids by letting them watch the "grotesque obesity on display in Biggest Loser" and then write about it in his column. So if he is so tough, why is he worrying about flying into "a bloodswarm of hatred"? I’ll let Birmingham explain:

Obesity is an intensely politicised topic. Especially online. The Fat Acceptance and Health At Any Size movements can be swift and terrible to behold when they turn on someone ignorant or simply ill-mannered enough to frame a discussion of obesity in any way that belittles the obese.

He insists he doesn’t want to insult people who are overweight or obese. After all, "Traducing someone’s character, or mocking them for their weight, isn’t far removed from doing the same things on the basis of their skin color or ethnic background." But at the same time he insists that the fat acceptance crowd "need smashing flat when they try to redefine obesity as normal. They’re killing people as surely as the shareholders of Benson and Hedges."

Elizabeth at Spilt Milk isn’t impressed. She doesn’t see herself as an angry bully or a menace to public health. And she doesn’t want to be a cautionary tale for other people’s children. She responds by criticising Birmingham’s parenting:

(Continued)