Edward Broughton: Mensch

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

I’ve mentioned Edward Broughton numerous times on this blog, a man of great humanity who responded to the plight of the Jewish internees who were at his command. A quick snippet from one of the grateful internees. So far I’ve read it on each occasion at the three dinners I’ve held to raise money for refugees like a kind of prayer. I love this passage:

Keenly intelligent, well-read, endowed with a superb sense of humour, completely untainted by any racial prejudice… deeply interested in human beings, he did not only gain immediate respect and obedience, but also the love and affection of the unit. He enjoyed hugely being at its head, learned and meticulously respected Jewish customs, and was immensely proud of the unit because of the splendid work it did, humbly unaware of the fact that it was only he who could have turned these people into willing manual labourers. … He engaged in incessant publicity war on our behalf and fought hard to have our status changed, only to be booted out by the Army eventually. After being shoved around as flotsam and jetsam for many years he managed… to make us feel like human beings again. He restored our faith in man, as something more than 92 per cent water and a few chemicals. He was a scholar and a gentleman.

So when I bought my copy of Dunera Lives Volume II with profiles of numerous Dunera Boys in it, I raced to the front of the book and read Broughton’s entry. I asked the publishers of the two volumes, Monash University Press, for permission to publish the profile of Broughton and they agreed and provided me with this pdf file for you pdf file for your delectation. I commend it to you and the book which can be purchased from this link.

Posted in History | 1 Comment

Covid and the lessons of the Dreyfus affair

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Paul Frijters

One can tell many stories of how current times resemble some earlier historical period. The conflict between nationalism and internationalism, as personified by the controversies surrounding Brexit and Trump, has been seen as somewhat of a re-run of the conflict between fascism and socialism in the 1930s. The conflict between the West and radical Islam made many think of the crusades. The covid pandemic and its effects has been likened to the Plague, the Spanish Flu and the Asian Flu.

Though they are never perfect, I like looking for such analogies because they give some idea as to the outcomes and the dynamics that are possible. They tell us what humans have been capable of believing and of doing in similar situations as we have now. So I have looked for the historical analogy that best fits the “narrative” aspect of the current covid controversies.

Ask yourself: which historical event had the same combination of an official narrative that had great popular support but was just an ossified mistake versus a small minority narrative that gradually became more and more dominant? The clearest case I can think of is the Dreyfus Affair from 1894-1906. If we are witnessing a repeat of the dynamics of the Dreyfus Affair, there are sobering lessons for both sides of the covid debate. Consider the parallels from my point of view, ie as an avowed “lockdown skeptic”.

Albert Dreyfus was a proud captain in the French army at a time when France was very divided and its army command was very worried about German spies, still smarting from the German invasion of 1871. When it was discovered in 1894 that details of French armament were sold to the Germans, the secret police more or less randomly arrested Dreyfus who was promptly convicted by a tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment on “Devil’s Island”, a notorious prison camp with conditions few survived for long.

Albert’s brother Matthieu was a man with very powerful connections and could call upon Jewish solidarity with an accused member. For instance, the Rothschild’s of London took up Dreyfus’ case. So a lot of money lined up to fight Albert’s cause. The evidence in the case was so pitiful that intellectuals with all kinds of ideologies (socialist, anarchist, pacifist, etc.) got organised as ‘Dreyfusards’. They wrote petitions, held rallies, lobbied politicians, encouraged high-ranking officials to start new investigations, etc. Continue reading →

Posted in Coronavirus crisis, Education, Films and TV, History, Humour, Information, Life, Social | 29 Comments

Constant distractions are leading to major declines in top-level reasoning. What to do?

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Paul Frijters

Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved nutrition, and the increased demands of the workplace. In recent decades that steady increase has turned into a sharp decrease. I want to discuss the evidence for this, the role of constant distractions, and what can be done.

The evidence.

Since about 1995, IQ scores have started to decline in the West, first in places that by then had optimised education systems wherein the vast majority of the population were stimulated to reach their cognitive potential. A good example of the data that shows this decline is in the graph below, taken from a 2018 PNAS study.

These graphs all show IQ scores derived from a test given in the period 1980-2009 to Norwegian boys aged 18-19 when they were considered for the military. Since Norway had a conscription army in this period, we are looking at the IQ scores of most of the male population. The graphs show that the cohorts born in 1961, who took the test around 1980, had lower IQs than those born in 1975 (the peak), after which there was a large drop.

The three graphs show you the differences in these trends if you look at different bits of the data. The middle graph uses only data on brothers within the same family, thus holding family circumstances relatively constant. The third graph is the one favoured by the authors of the piece because it corrects for selection problems over time, namely that over time those with cognitive problems became less likely to be given the test in the first place. The estimated decline from the cohort born in 1975 till 1990 is then about 5 points, or 0.35 IQ point decline per year.

A 2018 survey by Flynn himself (and others) surveys the results across many Western countries. The average IQ decline since 1995 turns out to be a phenomenon seen nearly everywhere, with the exception of the US where improvements in schooling meant the reversal was observed later in the general population, although already clear to see for the top. Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Employment, Gender, History, Inequality, IT and Internet, Media, Parenting, Public and Private Goods, Science, Social, Uncategorized | 16 Comments

The descent into Darkness of the UK and Victoria. Quo Vadis?

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Paul Frijters

[Bottom line: the conflicting forces now being created in the UK and Australia are truly frightening.]

The UK government has just announced a nationwide return of one of the most destructive elements of lock downs: mandatory social isolation. Gatherings of more than 6 people are banned from next week onwards, not just outdoors but also in private homes. So no family X-mas, the one social outing the locked-away elderly had to look forward to. Also no outdoor raves, no dance events, no normal student life, no fun. An extreme form of puritanism is now with us in the UK, even with advice on how to take the fun out of casual sex: we are told to keep a mask on at all times!

The state of Victoria in Australia, which has almost an identical bureaucratic system to that in the UK, has had even worse restrictions for months now. People in Melbourne are only allowed out of their own home for an hour per day. Group gatherings of any kind, unless they are by the police or “essential services”, are subject to police brutality and a state premier who boldly states that protests are unlawful. To be fair, new lovers are allowed to go shag each other, but presumably only with masks on.

This ban on being human is but the latest in a creeping totalitarianism that, in the West, is seeing its worst expressions in the UK and Victoria. One is now fined and potentially locked away in both places for organising open protests, one of the most basic civil liberties in our political systems. Governments in both places rule by decree, with very little parliamentary oversight and almost no realistic chance of judicial review.

Its been a descent into darkness in both places. There are no other places in the West quite as bad, creating underlying forces quite as sinister. Continue reading →

Posted in bubble, Coronavirus crisis, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Health, History, Inequality, Journalism, Law, Libertarian Musings, Politics - international, Politics - national, Science, Social, Social Policy, Society | 101 Comments

Knowing your arse from your Albo: how political parties might access the ‘blind break’ to get better leaders

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

A lottery is a defensible way of making a decision when, and to the extent that, it is important that bad reasons be kept out of the decision. 

Peter Stone

Left of centre parties have been serving up seriously, obviously bad candidates for years now. That happened at the last election in the US and will happen at the next one. It’s happened at the last two elections in Australia and looks like happening at the next one. This nearly happened to the Liberal Government in Australia when they nearly acquired Peter Dutton as leader.

Why?

Though they are structured very differently, in each case, the battle to lead the party favours candidates who are good at gaining and wielding power within their party. And those who acquire the most power within parties are increasingly often, poorly equipped to acquire power for it.

Put in another way, the party is an oligarchy. And the Athenians knew a thing or two about oligarchy. Their democracy was the only one I know that understood itself as existing in the teeth of the ever-present menace of oligarchy. This was an important merit of sortition or selection by lot. Whenever sortition takes place it places a discontinuity – a ‘blind break’ – in the process by which a community gets from recognising a problem to coming up with a solution.

As Peter Stone puts it, the point about selection by lot is its arationality. It makes no sense to ask why someone was selected for a jury, for what reason they were selected. They were selected mechanically. And machines don’t give reasons – they just do what they were programmed to do.

Usually, the blind break is just that – a discontinuity in decision making, not the imposition of a mechanical decision. We don’t determine whether an accused is guilty or not guilty randomly. We determine the group that will determine that randomly. That way there’s no reason-giving, no accountability for who is selected. And it seems that this is a better way of making some kinds of decisions.

So here’s a ‘hack’ – something you can do yourself. Continue reading →

Posted in Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries | 2 Comments

Will busy offices return eventually? Of course they will.

Posted on September 7, 2020 by Paul Frijters

[message: the “stay at home” firms will see their bored and lonely good young staff jump ship to the hip, drunk, snorting, and cavorting hard-work hard-play offices everyone loves to complain about.]

The Office revives small town Scranton, but it wasn't taped there – SkiftThe estimate from Transport for London is that 72% of workers are still not back at their office this week, which is why the coffee clubs, eateries, bars, and restaurants are still empty and central London feels like a ghost town.

Its the same all over the large cities in the UK: 50% of workers of all industries were still working remotely first week of August and public transport remains shunned like the plague.

Its slightly more “back to normal” in other European countries that ended lock downs sooner than the UK, with around 80% of all workers back to their previous place of work in France, Germany and Italy by August.

Still, nowhere has office life yet returned to the previous levels. More than half of office workers have indicated they would like to work more from home than before and many major employers have indicated they do not expect office life to return to pre-covid levels any time soon. This is fueling widespread speculation around the world of how work is going to change forever and that the nature of inner cities will adapt. You get plenty of visions of workers dialing into virtual offices from their forest homes whilst big cities become terrace-filled pedestrian zones dominated by tourists.

I think its too soon to expect the old office life to be gone forever. Its demise has been prophesised before and quite a few tech companies with the know-how have tried to do away with the office in previous years and failed. Whilst it is true that there has never been such a massive shock to office life as we’ve seen the last 6 months, and so the “new normal” might feel to many like it is sustainable, one can only understand whether one should really expect the “old office life” to be gone forever if we understand what the economic and social reasons were behind the old office life. Why did companies fork out hundreds of billions of dollars per year for decades to afford very expensive places in the middle of cities, forcing their employees into highly wasteful commutes? What made that expense and effort worthwhile in the first place?

There are strong economic forces that made regular office life an equilibrium, with firms that did not comply losing out. Firms that have a regular office life have three things going for them that “from home offices” lack: they offer the staff a venue where they have to socialise; they lead to a rat-race culture that encourages over-working; and they offer a place where clients/suppliers come to visit, come to see up close whom they are dealing with, come to be impressed, and come to be entertained.

So firms with a regular office will pinch the more ambitious, more fun-loving, more socialising workers and clients of firms without a regular office. These disadvantages do not hold if all offices are forced to work from home, which is why they were not so relevant the last 6 months and a different culture seemed sustainable, but they will re-emerge as soon as some offices go back to regular functioning. The “stay at home” firms will see their bored and lonely good young staff jump ship to the hip, drunk, snorting, and cavorting hard-work hard-play offices everyone loves to complain about. Ditto for their richest and most dynamic clients. To put it as simply as possible: you don’t make real friends on zoom.  Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Critique, Dance, Geeky Musings, Innovation, Libertarian Musings, Life, Philosophy, Society | 3 Comments

Orwell that ends well: Can evaluation save us from ourselves?

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

I really love this design by Casey Finley, who was kind enough to allow me to publish it here. He has a very distinctive style which is really coming into its own as he works on it. For instance, see here and here.

When I first saw the Productivity Commission’s Draft Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, my heart sank. I’d had had several quite extensive meetings with Romlie Mokak, the Indigenous Commissioner at the PC who struck me as a person of great intelligence, straightforwardness and practical commonsense. He and his team at the PC had also seemed interested in my own thoughts about evaluation and the contradictions involved in the way it is being embraced as a panacea, as something that can save the system from itself. But though that interest turned up in the report, it did so as reportage – including a box on my Evaluator General model – rather than real engagement on the ideas.

Often at times like this, it’s best to just keep one’s mouth shut and not make enemies but, without much hope of being understood within officialdom, I thought I really should bear witness to the travesty that it seemed to me was unfolding. And I’m glad I did. As I wrote, lots of things I’d been pondering for a good while started falling into place. For instance, you’ll see my reference to Lord Acton’s faultline introduced in Section 3 as integral to the analysis rather than a throw-away line. But there are plenty of other examples.

These things enabled me to clarify what I think the challenge is. At bottom, it’s a challenge of bona fides. Are we prepared to face up to uncomfortable truths? I’ve always thought in my own life it’s the only route to self-betterment. And it’s all I have to offer officialdom. It seems to me what Orwell was about.

It turned into a long piece so I’m grateful to Peter Browne who runs the excellent Inside Story for publishing the piece. Like the themeatisation of so many things, publishers seem increasingly preoccupied with the form of a piece, specifying length, subject areas and so on. Of course, targeting is the essence of publishing, but so too is quality, so I’ve always appreciated publishers who vary their guidelines somewhat to accommodate what matters most to authors. Anyway, Peter did that for me here, for which I’m grateful.

I’ve had a very good reaction from those who’ve read the piece – including Romlie Mokak who was interested in its arguments and its suggested changes to the draft (though of course made no promises) – so I look forward to getting feedback from the Tropposphere!

The essay begins below the fold. Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Critique, Economics and public policy, Ethics, History, Innovation, Political theory, Politics - national, Politics - Northern Territory, regulation | 11 Comments